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Mindfulness/VIpassana comes from the Buddhist tradition, and long-term practice is supposed to facilitate growth towards enlightenment.The enlightenment tradition promoted by mindfulness practice holds that sense-of-self is an illusion. This is supported by the scientific finding that mindfulness reduces/disrupts activity in the main resting network of the brain, the mind-wandering default mode network (DMN), where sense-of-self emerges.TM comes from the Advaita Vedanta tradition, and long-term practice is supposed to facility growth towards enlightenment.TM defines enlightenment as first appreciating that sense-of-self becomes lower-noise — a simple I am rather than I am doing — and eventually permanent — present at all times, regardless of task, whether one is awake, dreaming or in deep sleep. Further maturation leads to eventually appreciating that all conscious brain acitivity — perceptual and mental/emotional — emerges out of (or even is identical to) that silent I am.On that level, the two traditions are completely incompatible:TM increases EEG coherence (specifically alpha1 coherence in the frontal lobes); mindfulness and concentration decrease EEG coherence.TM does NOT decrease the activity of the brain's main resting network, the mind-wandering "default modenetwork" and in fact, the explanation for how TM works is in terms of allowing the mind to wander († A study on ACEM — derived from TM — also shows this property); mindfulness and concentration decrease the activity of the DMN. Activity in the DMN is where we get our sense-of-self (see point below).TM is the only practice with numerous published studies on breath suspension during samadhi (‡ the exception is a single case study on a single cha'n adept, cha'n being the Chinese ancestor of Zen, and both traditionally claiming that an enlightened teacher is important); there is no such research for mindfulness and concentration practices. The fact that samadhi during TM is characterized by higher EEG coherence levels than TM, while mindfulness and concentration reduce coherence, suggests why this is the case.TM is the only form of meditation and relaxation recognized by the American Heart Association as having a consistent effect on hypertension, receiving a [barely] passing grade as a secondary therapy that doctors may recommend; mindfulness and concentration practices get a not-passing grade from the AHA.the only fMRI study on TM shows that like mindfulness, it increases activity in areas of the brain related to alertness; however, unlike mindfulness, it decreases activity in arousal areas of the brain.fMRI on pain and TM shows that TM reduces the stress response to pain; mindfulness reduces sensitivity to pain.The definition of enlightenment in the tradition TM comes from is that first, the meditator starts to notice a pure sense-of-self that eventually becomes permanent and eventually notices that all aspects of perceptual (sensory and mental) reality emerge out of this silent, pure sense-of-self (atman); the definition of enlightenment in traditions that embrace mindfulness is that there IS no "pure self" — that the Buddha's observation about anatta(no self) means that atman is an illusion.Citations list, points 1-6.Discussion of point 7:A list of many of the studies that have been done on the topics of TM, samadhi/pure consciousness and enlightenment can be found here..As part of the studies on enlightenment via TM, researchers found 17 subjects (average meditation, etc experience 16,000 hours) who were reporting at least having a pure sense-of-self continuously for at least a year, and asked them to "describe yourself" (see table 3 of psychological correlates study), and these were some of the responses:We ordinarily think my self as this age; this color of hair; these hobbies . . . my experience is that my Self is a lot larger than that. It's immeasurably vast. . . on a physical level. It is not just restricted to this physical environmentIt's the ‘‘I am-ness.’’ It's my Being. There's just a channel underneath that's just underlying everything. It's my essence there and it just doesn't stop where I stop. . . by ‘‘I,’’ I mean this 5 ft. 2 person that moves around here and thereI look out and see this beautiful divine Intelligence. . . you could say in the sky, in the tree, but really being expressed through these things. . . and these are my SelfI experience myself as being without edges or content. . . beyond the universe. . . all-pervading, and being absolutely thrilled, absolutely delighted with every motion that my body makes. With everything that my eyes see, my ears hear, my nose smells. There's a delight in the sense that I am able to penetrate that. My consciousness, my intelligence pervades everything I see, feel and thinkWhen I say ’’I’’ that's the Self. There's a quality that is so pervasive about the Self that I'm quite sure that the ‘‘I’’ is the same ‘‘I’’ as everyone else's ‘‘I.’’ Not in terms of what follows right after. I am tall, I am short, I am fat, I am this, I am that. But the ‘‘I’’ part. The ‘‘I am’’ part is the same ‘‘I am’’ for you and meWhen the moderators of r/Buddhism read the above, one publicly commented (without contradiction by any other) that the above was the “ultimate illusion” and that “no real Buddhist” (actual, non-ironic quote) would ever knowingly practice something that led to the above as it was obviously anti-Buddhist.Since the two meditation approaches are radically different in physical effect on the brain, it shouldn’t be surprising that each has strengths and weaknesses when used as therapy for any specific thing.THis study was done by researcher-advocates into various practices (note that “mindfulness” practice is not MBSR, but something one of the researchers had devised):Transcendental meditation, mindfulness, and longevity: an experimental study with the elderly.Full Text pdfTHere is far more research available these days on mindfulness (25–50x as many studies are publisehd every year, possibly more):mindfulness meditation OR vipassana (pubmed search: 1871 hits since 1982, most since 2006; 232 last year)"Transcendental Meditation" (pubmed search: 352, with an average of 5–19 since 2001; 13 last year)Mindfulness can be learned from a book or video.Traditionally, TM was only passed on from enlightened teacher to student, which makes it far less accessible (though this is changing rapidly as governments and large corporations are now contracting to have their own employees trained as TM teachers).Taught by an inferior man this Self cannot be easily known,even though reflected upon. Unless taught by onewho knows him as none other than his own Self,there is no way to him, for he is subtler than subtle,beyond the range of reasoning.Not by logic can this realization be won. Only when taughtby another, [an enlightened teacher], is it easily known,dearest friend.-Katha Upanishad, I.2.8-9.Maharishi Mahesh Yogi attempted to get around that requirement by devising a teaching play which the TM teacher rehearses for 5 months, in residence (learning the words, gestures, body language and tone of voice MMY used when teaching, as well as how to modify the above, based on the experience-level, age, and comprehension-level of the students), so that they can "play the part" of Maharishi. He called it "duplicating myself," and spent the next 45 years of his life revising that teaching play based on feedback from thousands of TM teachers who taught millions of people TM.In a very real sense, there is only one TM teacher — Maharishi Mahesh Yogi — and thousands of his clones..Since mindfulness is more accessible, there are far more studies on every possible situation than on TM, but even so, in certain areas, mindfulness doesn’t live up to hype, or so I believe. Since it is a matter of training attention, and as a reasult, disrupting the normal resting mode of the brain, certain benefits found early on due to relaxation, simply start to go away:Effects of stress reduction on cardiovascular risk factors in type 2 diabetes patients with early kidney disease“…Parallel to the reduction of stress levels after 1 year, the intervention-group additionally showed reduced catecholamine levels (p < 0.05), improved 24 h-mean arterial (p < 0.05) and maximum systolic blood pressure (p < 0.01), as well as a reduction in IMT (p < 0.01). However, these effects were lost after 2 and 3 years of follow-up.”So you have to do long-term followup to make sure that any benefit noticed early on perists, simply because the brain becomes less and less restful as one becomes better at always being mindful.TM, on the other hand, starts out as a simple enhancement to mind-wandering rest, and the long-term benefits emerge at least partly becomes this lower-noise form of rest starts to appear outside of meditation, at first mostly during eyes-closed rest, and then more and more during task. Long-long-long-term studies show that this trend persists as long as a person continues TM practice regularly. 50-year TMers show measures of the bottom part of the chart than 5 year TMers, etc, which researchers take as showing that TM’s more efficient, lower-noise rest continues to become a stronger trait outside of meditation, the longer you practice it regularly, and this trend continues indefinitely:On the topic of blood pressure, the American Heart Association reviewed the scientific literature, and not surprising, concluded that TM was the only meditation or relaxation practice that had sufficiently robust research showing sufficiently consistent results that they could say that doctors might consider recommending TM to their patients as a secondary therapy for high blood pressure, though it was a strong recommendation:Beyond Medications and Diet: Alternative Approaches to Lowering Blood Pressure A Scientific Statement From the American Heart AssociationSummary and Clinical RecommendationsThe overall evidence supports that TM modestly lowers BP. It is not certain whether it is truly superior to other meditation techniques in terms of BP lowering because there are few head-to-head studies. As a result of the paucity of data, we are unable to recommend a specific method of practice when TM is used for the treatment of high BP. However, TM (or meditation techniques in general) does not appear to pose significant health risks. Additional and higher-quality studies are required to provide conclusions on the BP-lowering efficacy of meditation forms other than TM.The writing group conferred to TM a Class IIB, Level of Evidence B recommendation in regard to BP-lowering efficacy. TM may be considered in clinical practice to lower BP. Because of many negative studies or mixed results and a pau- city of available trials, all other meditation techniques (including MBSR) received a Class III, no benefit, Level of Evidence Crecommendation. Thus, other meditation techniques are not recommended in clinical practice to lower BP at this time.This more recent statement by the AHA about cardiovascular disease and meditation looks specifically at meditation practices and nothing else. TM seems to come out ahead in a less-than-certain way, on most measures, compared to mindfulness, though you’ll need to read it for yourself, given I am biased, and the authors themselves provide no such conclusion:Meditation and Cardiovascular Risk ReductionSummaryStudies of meditation to date suggest a possible, though not definitively established, benefit of meditation on cardiovascular risk reduction. A 2008 review of >400 trials of meditation and health care rated the methodological quality of clinical trials as poor, but noted that the quality of these trials had significantly improved over time. 80Methodological issues in research to date include modest study size, limited and often incomplete follow‐up, high dropout rates, lack of randomization and/or appropriate control group, and unavoidable patient nonblinded study design. As with many other novel interventions, there is the possibility of publication bias toward positive studies of the beneficial effects of meditation. 37Many investigators who conducted studies of meditation may have a strong belief in the benefits of meditation and may be enthusiastic meditators themselves, 37 thereby introducing the possibility of unintended bias. Many studies of meditation techniques are performed by the same groups of researchers, so there is a need for independent verification of reported positive findings. Whereas these studies are important in that they serve to suggest that meditation may reduce cardiovascular risk, these limitations prevent definitive conclusions regarding efficacy of meditation on cardiovascular risk reduction.There are certainly situations where mindfulness practices have a superior therapeutic effect , and Bob Roth, CEO of the David Lynch Foundation, and a TM teacher for over 45 years, admits that on occasion, as a coping mechanism (say in preparation for speaking in public), he’ll use brief mindfulness practices to reduce immediate levels of anxiety such as “a deep cleansing breath” etc, though his only regular meditation practices are TM and related practices.TM is a long-term practice. Mindfulness’ effects seem to be mixed in the long-term.Disclaimer: I’ve been practicing TM for nearly 46 years, TM-Sidhis for nearly 35 years.

It depends on who you talk to.Maharishi Mahesh Yogi seems to be the modern source of the belief (or at least gave a solid number to the general idea) starting roughly 60 years ago when he insisted that if a number as small as 1% of the world started meditating, the world would be a better place.This was based on his interpretation of verse 35, chapter 2 of the Yoga Sutras:TM & the effect of “ahimsa” in the Yoga Sutraahiṁsā –pratishthāyāṁ tat-sannidhau vaira-tyāgaḥ.“Where non-injury is established, in the vicinity of that, hostile tendencies are eliminated.” - Yoga Sutras II.35By the early 1970’s, at the height of the TM fad, 1% of the population of several US cities and 1% of the state of Rhode Island had actually learned TM over a period of 6 months, and researchers reasoned that this was a short enough time that at least for a while most of them would be meditating regularly, so they did a “before/after” comparison study and discovered that indeed, crime rate was lower in those cities and Rhode Island and that this was different than what researchers found when looking at similar-sized cities where TM wasn’t as popular (don’t recall how comparisons with Rhode Island were done, if they were — it’s been 45 years).Starting in 1976, Maharishi started teaching the TM-Sidhis and based on a principle found in physics where a number of elements acting in a coherent way have an N^2 effect on a system compared to the same elements acting individually, he predicted that group meditation, due to reinforcement of the effect between individual meditators, would be N^2 times as strong. This meant that if it took 10,000 meditators meditating at random in a city of a million people to have a measurable effect (1% of a million is 10,000), the square-root of 10,000 meditating at the same time would have the same effect. The square-root of 10,000 is 100, so this would be a HUGE increase in influence if they meditated in a group (assuming the effect worked, of course).The square-root of the world’s population at that time worked out to roughly 7,000 people, so he started devoting the focus of the TM organization to establishing a permanent place where 7,000 people would mediate twice-daily in a single group, and that has been the goal of the TM organization for the past 40 years.The TM-sidhis are important because, unlike with TM, the brain is not merely resting but in a state where intentional activity is taking place, even as the brain is moving towards samadhi. This means that, unlike TM, people can practice the techniques for a longer period because there is a point of diminishing returns from merely resting: the brain and body need activity as well. The levitation technique, Yogic Flying, is especially useful, as in the beginning stages, according to tradition, one “hops like a frog,” and this turns out to be vigorous physical activity, so not only does this particular siddhi act as a way of accustoming the brain to remain in a near-samadhi state while engaging in intent, it accustoms the brain to remain in a near-samadhi state while the body is rather vigorously active (some people actually seem to enter samadhi during this time and so all awareness of their surroundings or even that there body is vigorusly hopping around — this may be how legends of floating started):The practice of these techniques is such that while TM is optimally only done for 20 minutes at a time, the other techniques can be done for longer with no downside (at least in many people). The levitation technique can be done for an hour at a time, and actually serves as vigorous physical exercise as well as a meditation technique, with excellent physical health benefits for many people (the person at 0:55 has been doing the technique for 40+ years and is roughly 60 years old).The EEG signature of TM is EEG coherence (which is not something you find in most other forms of meditation) and the EEG coherence during samadhi is even higher than during the rest of a TM session. With regular practice of TM and even more so when the TM-Siddhis are added to a meditation session, this same coherence starts to show up more and more in daily activity.While you cannot measure EEG reliably when someone is hopping, it turns out that the EEG coherence between hops, especially the last few seconds before muscular activity makes it impossible to measure, is higher than it is at any other period of time in a TM + TM-Sidhis session — even during samadhi during meditation. This seems important and in fact, as this video shows, EEG coherence during meditation seems to increase when people practice in a group, even though the person being measured is not aware when the group meditation starts:Even the narrator agrees that the presentation is not suitable for writeup as a scientific study (though at least one or two have already been published), but that he’s working on it.Which gets to the answer to your question:apparently (if this last video is to be trusted and the phenomenon is real, rather than merely showing that the meditator had some clue when other started meditating), there is a measurable effect on other people when a group of meditators start meditating. While the effect would be found most strongly in people who are also meditating, it seems plausible that if such an effect is real, it might be detectable in everyone by tracking their behavior.Merely by a large group meditating together, and so enhancing their own EEG coherence (a marker of the brain becoming more samadhi-like) a similar effect would be found in everyone around them to a tiny extent, but with enough people meditating together, than tiny extent might still be measurable by seeing if their collective behavior improved when group meditation was regular in their community.Published research claims that this is indeed the case: during periods when group meditation is large enough, the surrounding city/state/country/world shows statistically significant improvement on measures like crime rate, accident rate, hospitalization rate, and other factors that are known to improve in people when they meditate regularly. It’s not a huge effect, but the research claims it is measurable.In Peru and Ecuador, the TM organization just finished teaching 1,000 public school teachers in the largest province in each country to be TM teachers. Their full-time job, working for the government, is to teach all children in the largest province in each country. That’s 2 million children in Ecuador and another 1.5 million in Peru who will be taught TM over the next 2–3 years and who will be meditating in their home rooms twice-daily. As the school teachers receive further training and the children meet the age and meditation experience requirements, all 3.5 million will also learn levitation and the rest of the TM-Sidhis.So by 2025, 2 million children in Ecuador will be practicing group meditation & levitation in their home rooms simultaneously throughout the province, and likewise with 1.5 million children in Peru. Since the goal of the TM organization for 40 years has to been to create a single group of 7,000 (these days, 10,000 allowing for population growth) doing these practices tougher, no-one has even the slightest idea what twice-daily group meditation/levitation by 2 million children will do.This sounds very insane, but the David Lynch Foundation has trained about 200,000 children TM in Latin America with about half also learning the TM-Sidhis. In Oaxaca, Mexico, where half of the non-Spanish-speaking people of Mexico live, it turns out that the tribes are very advaita vedanta in their perspective, seeing the entire world as a single spirit, and were very receptive to the idea that meditation and levitation are practices that can enable us to more fully appreciate the essential unity in life.The David Lynch Foundation taught the children of an entire tribe TM and levitation and that tribe put on public demos of levitation for all the other tribes in the state during the “end of Mayan calendar” celebration some years ago on Mount Alban and eventually the DLF taught about 50,000 tribal children TM with 25,000 of them also learning levitation and related practices.Restructuring Apocalypse: 8,000 Mayan, Zapotec, Mixtec Students Meditate for world peace to create End of the [War-torn] WorldThe David Lynch Foundation even built a “levitation hall”/multi-purpose classroom for one school, to great fanfare by the governor’s office:Inauguran primera aula de meditación trascendental en Oaxaca[they are doing building example Yogic Flying halls in most countries in Latin America to show the governments the utility of such buildings: Construcción de Escuelas]This video gives a feel for what levitation in children looks like and why dedicated buildings for the practice are vital in the long run:These days, there are native-language teachers of TM and the TM-Sidhis in each of of the 14 major indigenous languages of Oaxaca, teaching TM and levitation by invitation of the tribal elders, and the state government evaluated the effect in 44 public schools and mandated that TM and levitation be taught in 360 high schools throughout the state.Here's an article about the contract with COBAO — the college preparatory high schools of Oaxaca: COBAO and the David Lynch Foundation sign collaboration agreementHere's an article about teaching levitation in one specific COBAO highs school: Students from the 46th COBAO campus participate in the meditation program (note the green foam rubber to cushion the children during the "hopping like a frog" stage of levitation).Here's an article about teachers and administrators in the COBAO schools being trained by the DLF to run the program: The David Lynch Foundation teaches education diploma based on consciousness (note that the long-term goal is to train school teachers to be TM teachers and teachers of the TM-Sidhis (levitation etc)).This video is from 2016. Note the foam rubber in some schools for levitation while others are still meditating in chairs. As of January 2019, all 360 schools practice at least TM, while 200 practice TM + TM-Sidhis (including levitation). Another 7,000 children are learning the practices each month. Each school mandates the practices twice-daily by the entire student population for 45-minutes twice-daily. This is NOT a trivial change in the school day, but the schools and the state apparently consider the inconvenience a small price to pay given the benefits of the practices in children (see below about the effects on children):These more recent videos give a feel for the state of projects in many different countries as of last year:Transforming Lives and Changing NationsNote the participation by police and military. The TM organization offers to teach up to 10,000 police and military in a single country for free or a drastically reduced price if the government agrees that that group will practice group meditation twice-daily as part of their official duties.And now comes the really fun stuff.The most famous Roman Catholic priest in Latin America is a TM teacher who teaches TM and levitation to children as therapy for PTSD. He’s been nominated for the Nobel Prize and the World's Children's Prize for his work. He has 52 orphanages with 800 staff and 4,000 children and is quite busy so the David Lynch Foundation sends TM and levitation teachers to help him. They also did a documentary about his work: Saving the Disposable OnesThe “disposable ones” are the homeless, drug-addicted child prostitutes of Medellin, Colombia. To get an idea of what their lives are like “in the wild,” watch the documentary starting at 15:30 and contrast with what they are like after months of hard work when the priest deems them ready to learn to meditate, starting after 45:30. For maximum contrast, compare that poor child just after 17:30 with a child from similar circumstances, just after a TM session.You’ve never seen a transformation like that in your life, and quite literally, neither has anyone else in the world.The “after” picture is this video. Every child was a gang-member, required to murder someone as an initiation rite; or a child-rebel, forced at gunpoint to slaughter people; or a homeless, drug-addicted child prostitute… only 6–18 months earlier. The Colombian government has placed him in charge of all under-21 prisoners in Colombia, and is now negotiating to have all federal inmates of all ages learn the practices while in prison.The Roman Catholic Church is well aware that this priest does crazy stuff like teach levitation to children (note group meditation and group levitation session starting at 1:45 in the above video). However, the results are so remarkable that rather than condemn him, the Church invited the head of the David Lynch Foundation to make a 30 minute presentation at the Vatican (starts at 3:50):Impacting Children’s Health Through Meditation GloballyNote the group meditation in the Church-run school in Peru in the slide at 15:12. All one thousand children now also practice group levitation each day.The Church even put up a rather non-hostile article about TM on their official health-oriented website.Medical students learn meditation to counter stress, promote physician wellnessNo-one knows where this will all lead, but the priest is an old friend of this guy (you probably recognize him) and recently explained to various well-known people (hint hint) at the Vatican how meditation and levitation helps children overcome addiction and PTSD:Hogares Claret Founder at the “DRUGS AND ADDICTIONS: AN OBSTACLE TO INTEGRAL HUMAN DEVELOPMENT”When the largest religious organization in the world refuses to condemn your work, people in Latin America take notice. The TM organization just finished the training of the 2,000 public school teachers as TM teachers and now says that demand is roughly 10x (!) higher than what they projected last year. Many governments and major companies are now negotiating to have counselors, doctors, nurses, military chaplains, etc, trained as TM teachers and eventually as levitation teachers. The organization projects that by 2030, about 100,000 government employees will be trained as TM teachers and their day job will be to teach 100 million people to meditate.No word as to how organized the group meditation/levitation will be as that happens but there’s ongoing work to create Olympic training camps that incorporate group meditation and levitation as a regular part of a country’s preparation for the Olympics and at least one major company pays non-employees to participate in group meditation and levitation at their main company headquarters to build up the group effect...

I’ve been practicing Transcendental Meditation for 46 years. I’ve been practicing the TM-Sidhis for 35 years.There’s no issue with “staying focused” with either type of practice, and in fact, since both practices are combined in the “TM-Sidhis program,” my shortest meditation session is generally 45 minutes, while, in the context of an organized group session, double or even triple that time per session.Many people practice the TM-Sidhis for 6 hours a day, including an hour of the TM-Sidhi for “levitation” (as the Yoga Sutras defines the term, at least), per session.TM is meant to be the quasi-official outreach program of the Jyotirmath — the main advaita vedanta monastery of the Himalayas — and was brought out of hte monastery with full support of the monks of that monastery to honor the memory and teachings of Swami Brahmananda Saraswati, first Shankaracharya (abbott) of Jyotirmath in 165 years, by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.MMY was recently honored by the Prime Minister of India as one of 12 master healers of India in the modern era (last 150 years) with a commemorative postage stamp:MASTER HEALERS OF AYUSHAYUSH Systems of healthcare form the foundation of India’s Medical Heritage. These systems are not merely sciences of Disease and Drug, but have their own conceptual frameworks touching at every aspect of health. Path-finding visionaries have appeared in each of different streams of AYUSH at different times in history and made notable contributions to the growth and the development of respective streams.The Ministry of AYUSH is privileged to bring out Commemorative Stamps as its humble homage of the nation to 12 such Master Healers of AYUSH systems from the modern era.Maharishi Mahesh Yogi: Known for original contributions to Yoga and Meditation, he is remembered most for developing the Transcendental Meditation technique. The Shankaracharya of JyotirMath,Swami Brahmananda Saraswati, was his guru. From 1955 Maharishi travelled around India and the world to spread his message of peace and spirituality, and inspired thousands of followers. His legacy lives on through the numerous books that he authored, and the many institutions that he set up, including the Maharishi International University (later renamed Maharishi University of Management).Excerpts of Prime Minster’s MOdi’s introduction of the stamps (I don’t speak Hindi but I assume they’re being complementary). He’s the guy in the red vest below:Before Maharishi, no-one even tried to teach this form of meditation “to the masses” as it was held to be something that only an enlightened teacher could teach:Taught by an inferior man this Self cannot be easily known,even though reflected upon. Unless taught by onewho knows him as none other than his own Self,there is no way to him, for he is subtler than subtle,beyond the range of reasoning.Not by logic can this realization be won. Only when taughtby another, [an enlightened teacher], is it easily known,dearest friend.-Katha Upanishad, I.2.8-9.Maharishi Mahesh Yogi attempted to get around that requirement by devising a teaching play which the TM teacher rehearses for 5 months, in residence (learning the words, gestures, body language and tone of voice MMY used when teaching, as well as how to modify the above, based on the experience-level, age, and comprehension-level of the students), so that they can "play the part" of Maharishi. He called it "duplicating myself," and spent the next 45 years of his life revising that teaching play based on feedback from thousands of TM teachers who taught millions of people TM.In a very real sense, there is only one TM teacher — Maharishi Mahesh Yogi — and thousands of his clones..All TM centers worldwide are expected to provide an equally carefully designed and choreographed, (also free-for-life, at least in the USA) followup program for all people who learned TM through official channels, regardless of when and where they learned, or how much they paid..So if you want questions answered about TM, you’ll need to find someone trained to “play the part” of an enlightened teacher, or go to the monastery where he trained for 12 years. Be warned that they’ll likely ask “Why did you travel so far when there’s a TM center close by?”Note that there are various splinter groups that claim to teach TM under different names. Perhaps they do and perhaps they’ve managed to improve in some way on what Maharishi accomplished. Let me know when Prime Minister Modi introduces a commemorative stamp in their honor.In the meantime, no-one with any real understanding (if that is the right word to use) of meditation will attempt to answer your question directly online. It’s just not possible, as the Katha Upanishad points out:Unless taught by onewho knows him as none other than his own Self,there is no way to him, for he is subtler than subtle,beyond the range of reasoning.Not by logic can this realization be won. Only when taughtby another, [an enlightened teacher], is it easily known,dearest friend.