Bogus Research

TM makes lots of false claims…

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TM’S UNCHALLENGED CLAIMS

TM’s claims go mostly unchallenged, in part because TM pretends to offer a secular relaxation practice while concealing the Hinduism that lies at its core. Also, TM has groomed a vast network of celebrities who endorse it. Perhaps some will reconsider their support once they understand that the relaxation derived from meditation, the main component of meditation that can help many people, is available elsewhere and virtually free.

TM promotes the endorsements of famous physicians like Dr. Oz, but Maharishi had no use for allopathic medicine. In a Resolution dated February 11, 1997, the Maharishi Vedic Medical Council resolved to ban allopathic medicine and replace it with Maharishi’s Vedic health care system.1

REDUCE CRIME & BRING WORLD PEACE

The centerpiece of TM’s claims to reduce crime and bring world peace is a fatally flawed crime reduction study conducted in Washington, D.C., in the summer of 1993. Proof would come from an experiment to reduce violent crime in the city by 20 percent. The reduction would result from the coherence created when roughly 4,000 advanced TM practitioners meditated together for about eight weeks, from June 7 to July 30, 1993.2 TM described this as “The Maharishi Effect.”

CRIME REDUCTION & VOODOO SCIENCE

In his book Voodoo Science, Robert Park described a press conference held before the experiment began in which lead researcher John Hagelin explained how the crime reduction project would be a scientific demonstration that provided proof of a unified superstring field, an abstract and highly speculative physical theory that attempts to connect all the forces in nature. According to Hagelin, large numbers of advanced TM practitioners meditating together in the same location would access this force, which he referred to as "collective consciousness."3

According to Park, “The murder rate for those two months reached a level unmatched before or since.” At a press conference held when the study concluded, Hagelin acknowledged that the murder rate had increased, but emphasized that “brutal crime” was down. Park’s response: “One could only imagine that the murders were being committed more humanely—perhaps a clean shot between the eyes rather than a bludgeoning.”3

The following year, in October 1994, Hagelin returned with a 55-page report on the experiment. At a press conference, he claimed violent crime had dropped 18 percent from predicted levels.4 One reporter from the Washington Post queried, “An 18% reduction compared to what?” Hagelin said the actual crime rate compared to the crime that would have occurred without the meditators meditating. How did he know what the rate would have been? Hagelin answered that by using a “scientifically rigorous time-series analysis that included not only crime data but such factors as weather and fluctuations in Earth’s magnetic field.”3 By the time the final paper appeared in 1999, the claimed maximum reduction had grown to 23.3 percent.2

THE NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES REFUTES TM’S CLAIMS

In 1986, Heinz Pagels, then executive director of the New York Academy of Sciences, wrote a letter in support of Robert Kropinski, a longtime TM teacher who had sued the TM organization for physical, psychological, and financial damage he attributed to his TM practice. In the letter, submitted to the court, Pagels made clear that the physics claims behind the Maharishi Effect were false and could be explained only as deception:

My summary opinion, as a theoretical physicist specializing in the area of quantum field theory, is that the views expressed in the literature issued by the Maharishi International University, and appearing in the ‘World Government News’ and other publications associated with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi that purport to find a connection between the recent ideas of theoretical physics—unified field theory, the vacuum state and collective phenomena—and states of consciousness attained by transcendental meditation are false and profoundly misleading. No qualified physicist that I know would claim to find such a connection without knowingly committing fraud. While I am not an expert on the meditation techniques advocated by the Maharishi, I have experienced and studied meditation methods in the Buddhist and Hindu traditions. There is no known connection between meditation states and states of matter in physics. Individuals not trained professionally in modern physics could easily come to believe, on the basis of the presentations in the Maharishi literature, that a large number of qualified scientists agree with the purported connection between modern physics and meditation methods. Nothing could be further from the truth. The notion that what physicists call ‘the vacuum state’ has anything to do with consciousness is nonsense. The claim that large numbers of people meditating helps reduce crime and war by creating a unified field of consciousness is foolishness of a high order. The presentation of the ideas of modern physics side by side, and apparently supportive of, the ideas of the Maharishi about pure consciousness can only be intended to deceive those who might not know any better. Reading these materials authorized by the Maharishi causes me distress because I am a man who values the truth. To see the beautiful and profound ideas of modern physics, the labor of generations of scientists, so willfully perverted provokes a feeling of compassion for those who might be taken in by these distortions.5

THE ONE PERCENT SCAM & CRIME AT TM’S U.S. HEADQUARTERS

Undeterred by the almost universal rejection by scientists of the Maharishi effect, Maharishi doubled down. He claimed that if 8,000 advanced meditators, roughly the square root of 1% of the world’s population, meditated together, there would be world peace. The TM organization raised millions of dollars to fund the project.

Fairfield, Iowa, home of TM’s U.S. headquarters, has about 9,500 residents.6 Applying the square-root-of-one-percent formula, the coherence produced by just ten of TM’s advanced coherence producers should have made Fairfield a strikingly safe town. For well over three decades, not ten, but hundreds of yogic flyers (TM’s most advanced meditators) have conducted their coherence-generating practices in the two (male and female) Golden Dome flying centers on the campus of Maharishi International University (formerly Maharishi University of Management). In addition, for years TM has housed Vedic chanters from India known as “pundits,” at times more than 1,000 of them, in a fenced compound in Maharishi Vedic City, a few miles north of the campus.7

Based on the massive level of coherence generated, one might reasonably expect Fairfield to be crime-free. In fact, the entire Midwestern US should be crime-free. FBI crime statistics tell a different story. NeighborhoodScout, a real estate platform that analyzes FBI crime data for every community in the US, reported in 2016 that Fairfield’s crime rate was considerably higher than the national average and higher than 94% of Iowa’s cities and towns. Fairfield’s numbers have since improved, but the most recent figures (2024 FBI data) still show nothing remarkable: an overall crime rate near the national average, higher than roughly two-thirds of Iowa communities, with 13 violent crimes and 45 property crimes in a single year.6 After decades of the most concentrated “coherence” on earth, Fairfield is an ordinary small town.

WHY YOU SHOULD IGNORE THE TM RESEARCH

Psychologist David Orme-Johnson is the most prolific TM researcher. Orme-Johnson created a website, TruthAboutTM.org, that rebuts negative TM studies and their authors. He dismisses one peer-reviewed critique as “a highly emotional diatribe,” casts opponents as “would-be censors” and “entrenched self-interest groups,” and sums up a book by three Laurentian University scientists as “if people do not agree with me, they must not be capable of critical thinking.”8

The site’s "Societal Effects" section claims 51 empirical studies demonstrate the Maharishi Effect.8 The site also claims this research is of the highest quality. A cursory examination of these studies reveals that faculty and students at TM’s own university have written almost all of them, and the vast majority have found a home in TM-owned publications. One doesn't need a complicated analysis to figure out these studies are worthless; one only needs to look at Fairfield.

TM’S BENEFITS ARE NOT UNIQUE TO TM

TM claims it produces unique benefits; it doesn’t. The Relaxation Response, developed more than fifty years ago by Harvard Professor Herbert Benson, produces an identical set of physiological changes as TM. Benson should know; he conducted some of the earliest research on TM.

Dr. Benson’s book, The Relaxation Response (1975), was a New York Times bestseller that has sold more than five million copies in multiple languages.9 Dr. Benson is regarded as a pioneer in the field of mind-body medicine. He founded the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and was a professor at Harvard Medical School. He and his colleagues published more than 190 scientific papers.9

The Institute works closely with Home Base, a Red Sox Foundation and Massachusetts General Hospital program that treats veterans with PTSD and traumatic brain injury free of charge. Home Base’s resilience programs are adapted from the Benson-Henry Institute’s relaxation response curriculum,10 and Home Base has supported more than 60,000 veterans, service members, and family members.11 In 2018, Wounded Warrior Project gave Home Base a $65 million grant, the second largest gift in Mass General’s history.12

BREAKTHROUGH RESEARCH OR JUST PLAIN LIES?

In his 2018 book, Strength in Stillness: The Power of Transcendental Meditation, Bob Roth, CEO of the David Lynch Foundation, writes that he wants “to talk in some detail about some of the truly breakthrough research documenting the unique and profound benefits TM has on health and stress.” [Emphasis A. Siegel.]13

Roth’s “breakthrough” refers to a study led by Dr. Robert Schneider, then Dean of the College of Maharishi Consciousness-Based Health Care at Maharishi University of Management: “Stress reduction in the secondary prevention of cardiovascular disease: randomized, controlled trial of transcendental meditation and health education in blacks.”14

Regarding the study, Schneider said, "These findings are the strongest documented effects yet produced by a mind-body intervention on cardiovascular disease. The effect is as large or larger than major categories of drug treatment for cardiovascular disease."15

Why then, on June 27, 2011, only 12 minutes before Dr. Schneider’s article was to publish in the Archives of Internal Medicine, did the editors pull it?16 (A revised version appeared more than a year later in a different journal, Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes.)17

Larry Husten, PhD, a veteran cardiology journalist who wrote the CardioBrief blog, contributed to the New England Journal of Medicine’s CardioExchange, and formerly edited theheart.org, looked into the matter and said the study’s authors were "clearly guilty of gross scientific exaggeration and misstatement."15 Further referencing an independent analysis of Schneider's study by Sanjay Kaul, MD, a cardiologist and expert in clinical trials, Husten concluded:

A trial with barely 200 patients can not be expected to provide broad answers about the health benefits of a novel intervention. As Kaul and others have stated on many other occasions, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” and it is quite clear that the evidence in this trial is not extraordinary, at least in any positive sense.18

Moreover, even though no studies had compared the effects of meditation to that of statins, the most widely used pharmacological treatment for elevated cholesterol, Schneider told WebMD, “What this is saying is that mind-body interventions can have an effect as big as conventional medications, such as statins.”18

And, although the study was limited to an exclusively African-American population with heart disease, Schneider generalized his study, stating, “This study builds on previous research findings showing that the Transcendental Meditation program reduces high blood pressure, high cholesterol, insulin resistance, psychological stress, and atherosclerosis, and takes it to the next step — lower rates of death, heart attack, and stroke.”15

The following statement appeared on another TM website (tmhome.com): To see the long-term effects of TM’s ability to lower blood pressure, we studied a group of patients with heart disease. Half of them learned TM and half of them served as the control group. We followed them for five years. Those doing TM had a 48% lower rate of heart attack, stroke and death than men and women with similar physical conditions. [Emphasis A. Siegel.]19

If that statement were valid, other medical researchers would have eagerly lined up to replicate the study. Husten offered why that was not the case:

[T]he results are at best hypothesis generating and tell us absolutely nothing about the actual value of TM. Only about 200 people were randomized in the study– most studies with hard clinical endpoints require thousands of patients. And a cursory examination of the actual paper raises all sorts of red flags….

But my biggest concern is with the analysis of the primary endpoint, which was the composite of all-cause mortality, MI [heart attack], or stroke. This occurred in 17 patients in the TM group compared with 23 patients in the control group, a difference that the authors claim achieved significance (p=0.03) after adjusting for differences in the age, sex, and use of lipid-lowering drugs between the groups. However, there was no significant difference between the groups in any of these factors. Even worse, there were very significant differences in the amount of education (11.3 years in the TM group versus 9.9 years in the control group, p=0.003) and the CES-D clinical depression scale (13.8 versus 17.7) for which the authors did not make an adjustment, although in both cases the imbalance would appear to favor the TM group. In other words, to use the old cliché, they tortured the data until they made it talk.15

Husten later corrected his event count: the withdrawn manuscript reported 20 events in the TM group and 31 in the control group. In the version finally published in 2012, the numbers were 20 versus 32, and the difference was not statistically significant (p=0.12) until the authors adjusted for age, sex, and use of lipid-lowering drugs (p=0.025).17

David Lynch Foundation’s CEO, Bob Roth, also overstated the findings of a scientific statement by the American Heart Association (AHA):

In 2013, the American Heart Association looked at years of research on TM and concluded in its journal Hypertension that TM is the only meditation technique shown to lower blood pressure. [Emphasis A. Siegel.]20

The truth came from Robert D. Brook, MD, of the University of Michigan, who chaired the panel of 12 scientists who wrote the statement. They concluded:

Numerous alternative approaches for lowering BP have been evaluated during the past few decades. The strongest evidence supports the effectiveness of using aerobic and/or dynamic resistance exercise for the adjuvant treatment of high BP. Biofeedback techniques, isometric handgrip, and device-guided breathing methods are also likely effective treatments.21

TM did not make that list. The panel gave TM a mediocre rating, Class IIb, Level of Evidence B, meaning it “may be considered” but its usefulness and efficacy are not well established. The panel judged the evidence too thin to say whether TM was any better than other forms of meditation:

The overall evidence supports that TM modestly lowers BP, although it is not clear whether it is truly superior to other meditation techniques in terms of BP lowering because there are few head-to-head studies. [Emphasis A. Siegel]21

Other meditation techniques received a “no benefit” rating because of a shortage of trials and mixed results, which is the narrow fact Roth turns into a claim that TM alone has been “shown” to work. The authors made clear that more and better studies were needed.

Another assessment of Dr. Schneider’s study appears in a HealthDay article, carried by US News, in which Gregg Fonarow, MD, professor of cardiology at UCLA and director of the Ahmanson-UCLA Cardiomyopathy Center, said that even though the findings were statistically significant, the study was too small to be conclusive. "In addition, since this study was conducted at a single center and the primary [change in heart attack, stroke and death] was not statistically significant without adjustment for other factors, more studies and replication of these findings are needed."22

In the same HealthDay article, Schneider revealed, “One of the reasons we did the study is because insurance and Medicare calls for citing evidence for what's to be reimbursed. This study will lead toward reimbursement. That’s the whole idea.”22

"For true believers like Schneider," Husten surmised, "fighting heart disease is important only insofar as it can be employed to further the interests of TM. Scientific standards and medical progress are unimportant in the larger scheme of promoting TM."18

When the TM organization exaggerates the findings from their internal research and mischaracterizes research by other scientists, they pose a real danger to the public.

FOOTNOTES

[1] Maharishi Vedic Medical Council, Resolution, February 11, 1997 (copy in the author’s files).

[2] John S. Hagelin et al., “Effects of Group Practice of the Transcendental Meditation Program on Preventing Violent Crime in Washington, D.C.: Results of the National Demonstration Project, June–July 1993,” Social Indicators Research 47 (1999): 153–201.

[3] Robert L. Park, Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 28–31.

[4] Eva Emerson, “Meditation reduces crime, group claims,” UPI, October 6, 1994. https://www.upi.com/Archives/1994/10/06/Meditation-reduces-crime-groupclaims/9997781416000/

[5] “Pagels Letter,” TranceNet, last modified October 9, 1997, http://minet.org/www.trancenet.net/research/pagels.shtml. See also Aryeh Siegel, Transcendental Deception, pp. 104–105, 208.

[6] NeighborhoodScout, “Fairfield, IA Crime Rates and Crime Statistics” (2024 FBI data, released October 2025). https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/ia/fairfield/crime

[7] Rekha Basu, “Maharishi Vedic City: Inside the compound,” Des Moines Register, March 22, 2014; IANS, “Vedic Pandits go ‘missing’ in US,” Business Standard, January 26, 2014. https://www.business-standard.com/article/news-ians/vedic-pandits-go-missing-in-us-114012600392_1.html

[8] David Orme-Johnson, TruthAboutTM, https://www.truthabouttm.org.

[9] Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine, “The Passing of Herbert Benson, MD,” February 2022. https://bensonhenryinstitute.org/the-passing-of-herbert-benson-md/

[10] Rachel Millstein and April Hirschberg, “Resilience at Home Base and the Broader Military Community,” MGH Psychiatry Academy, September 12, 2024. https://mghcme.org/app/uploads/2024/09/9.12.2024-Hirschberg-UPDATED.pdf

[11] “Giving Back: Home Base,” Military Embedded Systems, 2026. https://militaryembedded.com/from-the-editor/giving-back-home-base

[12] Massachusetts General Hospital, “Home Base Receives $65 Million from Wounded Warrior Project,” June 28, 2018. https://giving.massgeneral.org/stories/home-base-wounded-warrior-gift

[13] Bob Roth, Strength in Stillness: The Power of Transcendental Meditation (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2018), p. 81.

[14] Ibid., pp. 82–84.

[15] Larry Husten, “New Concerns Raised About Withdrawn Archives Meditation Paper,” CardioBrief, June 28, 2011. http://www.cardiobrief.org/2011/06/28/new-concerns-raised-about-withdrawn-archives-meditation-paper/

[16] “Unprecedented? Journal yanks transcendental meditation paper 12 minutes before it’s scheduled to publish,” Retraction Watch, June 29, 2011. https://retractionwatch.com/2011/06/29/unprecedented-journal-yanks-transcendental-meditation-paper-12-minutes-before-its-scheduled-to-publish/

[17] Larry Husten, “Mysterious Disappearing Paper Finally Crops Up in Journal,” CardioExchange (NEJM), November 15, 2012, updated November 18, 2012. https://blogs.nejm.org/cardioexchange/2012/11/15/mysterious-disappearing-paper-finally-crops-up-in-journal/

[18] Larry Husten, “Yet Another Look At The Transcendental Meditation Paper,” CardioBrief, November 25, 2012. http://www.cardiobrief.org/2012/11/25/yet-another-look-at-the-transcendental-meditation-paper/

[19] “Dr. Robert Schneider explains the new approach to tackling heart disease,” Transcendental Meditation News & More, June 14, 2017. https://tmhome.com/benefits/dr-robert-schneider-md-heart-health-transcendental-meditation/

[20] Roth, Strength in Stillness, p. 84.

[21] Robert D. Brook et al., “Beyond Medications and Diet: Alternative Approaches to Lowering Blood Pressure: A Scientific Statement From the American Heart Association,” Hypertension 61, no. 6 (2013): 1360–1383. https://doi.org/10.1161/HYP.0b013e318293645f

[22] “Meditation Might Cut Risk of Heart Attack, Stroke in Blacks,” HealthDay News, November 13, 2012 (reprinted by US News & World Report). https://health.usnews.com/health-news/news/articles/2012/11/13/meditation-might-cut-risk-of-heart-attack-stroke-in-blacks