Monday, March 23, 2009

Why Meditators Love To Tell You There's Science Behind Meditating (But Never Show It To You)

Our criticisms may be divided into those directed against the MT [Master Thesis] and those disputing interpretations of their data. As to the first, the main points were that the MT has serious problems regarding the clarity and integrity of its arguments, and it does not cohere well with other strongly confirmed theories, hence conflicting with the evidence supporting those theories. MT is under-articulated, often vague or enigmatic, reliant upon specious analyses, and silent about key processes that link causes to their alleged effects. These defects are not uncommon in novel theories, but in this case they allow nothing better than crude plausibility arguments for its extraordinary predictions.

The theory receives low marks for meaningfulness.


The methods of TM Peace Project researchers are dismissed as unscientific, and their claims of positive results,...are deemed unconvincing, anecdotal, and based on a conceptual error.

The transcendental meditation, which has been initiated in Occident for twenty years, is being more and more popular with the general public. So, its more and more numerous devotees may bear witness to that fact. In this article, the authors are looking over the diverse publications which have been done about that mental technique up to now. In spite of many demands of the transcendental meditation movement, the authors, with their own analysis, are induced to formulate a few reserves on the scientific credit to be given to that movement; for, in a way, it may look like an 'organized magic' within humane agony.

Theoretical relationships between the experience of TM and physics are not only without any reasonable basis, but are in fact in many ways fraudulent.

The 'scientific research' is without objectivity and is at times simply untrue,...I found then and I continue to find now such claims preposterous. This is what is normally called 'crackpot science.'

...The early attempts to relate the experience of TM to the physical nature of reality were by fuzzy analogies. Analogous reasoning may be useful to clarify ideas, but never to establish connecting relationships. Subsequent attempts to produce some sort of physical theory involving TM merely carry the analogies further into the realm of obscure thinking that can perhaps fool the person not conversant with the language of physics but will be usually quickly described as crackpot by the expert physicist.


This is not science.

-- Various peer-peviewed papers, showing conclusions reached after scientific analysis of transcendental meditation and "The Maharishi Effect," from a site called Behind The Facade.


1 comment:

  1. This won't have effect in fact, that's exactly what I believe.

    ReplyDelete

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