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Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 1978 Implications of the Transcendental Meditation Program for Counseling: The Possibility of a Paradigm Shift Peter Vincent Lourdes Loyola University Chicago Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss Part of the Education Commons Recommended Citation Lourdes, Peter Vincent, "Implications of the Transcendental Meditation Program for Counseling: The Possibility of a Paradigm Shift" (1978). Dissertations. 1765. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/1765 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Copyright © 1978 Peter Vincent Lourdes IMPLICATIONS OF THE TRl>.NSCENDENTAL HEDITATION PRCGRAM FOR COUNSELING: THE POSSIBILITY Of A PARADIGM SHIFT by Peter V. Lourdes .A Dissertation Submitted to the Fa.eulty of the Graduate School of Loyola University of Chicnga in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy April 1978 It is not the actions and behavior of the good man that should be matched but his point of view - Paul Twitchell in Far Country - An understanding of psi phenomena makes necessary a new idea of the origin and development of human beings, and also of the universe itself - Morton Kelsey in The Christian and the Supernatural, 1976 - ·----- As a Christian, I recognize in the various oriental traditions a cosmology and an anthropology in many ways much more profound and sophisticated than my own, and this must lead me to a rethinking of how I understand my tra­ dition -Francis Hartin 1n "The Humanity of Christian Mysticism," Cross Currents, Summer-Fall 1974 - -- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am indebted to many people for this study. To some I owe thanks and to others, apologies. I thank Dr. Manuel Silverman, the director of the dissertation, for his openness to a "way out" topic which made this dissertation possible. He often expressed more confidence in what I was doing that I was always able to maintain. I thank Dr. Gloria Lewis for her faith in my ability to write this, her perceptive criticisms and her generous appreciation of my work. I am grateful to Dr. Marilyn Sugar for her comments on the general drift of this study iV"hich brought that drift into better focus. And I express gratitude to Dr. Gerald Gutek whose demands for linguistic precision deepened my insights into my topic. Joe Pardo, Chairman of the Chicago World Plan Center, his pred­ ecessor Charlie Bowden, and the men and \-mmen at the Center gave me access and privileges ~ plus ultra. I thank them and apologize for wha.t may seem to them inaocuracies or understatements about TM, sometimes resulting from the need to say so much in so little. Sister Hary Ellen Moore of the Society of Helpers read each chap­ t ..... as it was created with the perceptive eye of the psychologist that shl:'} is. She and Sist.;r Margaret Nimbly later organized a team ii - of such dedicated volunteers as Sister Mary O'Farrell, Sister Tecesa_ Cole, and Sister Ethne Kennedy whose determined and intelligent efforts with the manuscripts turned a serious emergency into a successful adven­ ture. Sister Joan Utman spent some valuable novitiate time helping me sort out a jumble of cards and resource material. Sister Theresa Perney did some "quiet" but crucial public relations work for me. Sister Patricia Hottinger made all our efforts possible by just being always available. The community of Helpers followed my "diving and surfacing" in this TM project with prayerful interest: losing heart when I dived, standing tall when I surfaced. Mr. Bruce Balfe graciously lent me the services of his very efficient secretary, Claire Simmons, who did an outstanding job with the material I gave her. She not only sacrificed her weekends for this, but took pains to apprise me gently of errors and inaccuracies. Her pains­ taking considerably improved the originals. Ms. Greta Hopkins' willingness to prepare the Readers' Copy at such short notice was not only timely. but relieved me of what could have become a major problem. She did a difficult job with excellence and grace. Rev. Englebert Zeitler, Rev. Francis Kamp, Rev. Harry Felski of iii the Society of the Divine Word, and the Director and Staff of the National Vocation Service Centre in India made this study possible financially and in some other more valuable ways. To all those I have mentioned, my thanks. And to those I have failed to mention, my apologies. iv FOREWORD MY ENCOUNTER WITH TM TRANSCENDENTAL MEDITATION (TM) has evoked mixed reactions from different quarters. It has been both endorsed and condemned on different occasions by various people. It sometimes becomes difficult to tell what exactly is being endorsed or condemned. When I was asked what I thought about it I surprised not a few of my friends by candidly confessing that I knew nothing about it. They assumed that because I came from India I certainly knew more about it than anyone else. Although I knew nothing about it 1 I was not altogether indifferent to it. My reactions to Transcendental Meditation, in fact, have gone from mild curiosity to personal interest to serious professional concern. My attention was first drawn to TM in the early 1960's by a tongue-in-cheek piece of journalism in India reporting that the Beatles were now sitting at the feet of a certain Maharishi Mahesh Yog;l.... ....;n the H"~rna 1ayas. There was much about the Beatles in that report, next to nothing about Transcendental Meditation. A mild curiosity surfaced and sank within me. I just wondered what 1see Appendix. v --- Transcendental Meditation might be. That was as far as my first contact went. In 1973, while waiting for class to begin at Loyola Univer­ sity at Lewis Towers, my eyes fell on a chart of "scientific" findings on TM. Attached was the announcement of a free lecture at Loyola itself. The findings were about academic achievement, reduction of stress and anxiety, and other psychological benefits. Coming back to school in 1973 was not exactly a bed of roses for me. The experi­ ence was stressful; my early days at Loyola were anxiety-laden. The announcement caught my interest. The old curiosity, min&led with my personal interest, found me listening to a first free lecture. What impressed me at the lecture were the bits and pieces about the philos­ sophy behind the practice of TM known as the Science of Creative Intelligence (SCI). During the private interview with the speaker, after a second free lecture, I asked what it would entail to register for the four-day TM course. He suggested that I take the whole SCI course. Maharishi, he told me, prefers "recluses" (monks?) like me to take the whole course. After the initiation, the SCI course and the one-year checking period, I lost all contact with the movement, alt.ho:.~gh I kept up the practice. That was as far as personal interest w.ould go. While all this was going on, my interest in the psychology of consciousness grew apace. An introductory subscription to Scien­ tific American brought me a free copy of readings on altered states of awareness. The same kind of subscription to the Psychology Toda~ vi ... Book Club brought me Ornstein's The Nature of Human Consciousness. That, of course, brought me an almost daily flow of "junk" mail from organizations and publishers on higher consciousness, or anything remotely connected with it, including the American Astrological Association for one of whose experiments I was a volunteer subject. But I was too "left-brained" to take any of them seriously. I did write a term paper on Total Consciousness as a philosophy of counseling, but gave it no serious notice because I lacked a tech­ nique to actualize it. I kept to standard counseling theories and techniques. For some time the Rational-Emotive Therapy of Albert Ellis appealed to me more than the others. I even wrote two papers on it for a course in interpersonal skills. In the meantime I read as extensively as I could and thought all I needed to do was to make a synthesis of my own. That was a time when nearly everyone in courses with me was talking eclectic. But at the synthesis stage, grave doubts arose about how effectively any of the counseling modes I had learnt could be carried over to another culture. I looked into it and wrote a paper about the difficulties involved in counseling across cultures even in the same country, America. "There are many marginal cultures on either bank of the mainstream," I wrote in that paper, "whose basic assump­ tions do not vibrate with those on which our known counseling processes stand." I planned to write my dissertation on cross­ cultural counseling, and did some reading on it. Some of the book­ sellers in whose stores I inquired about literature had never heard vii .. of cross-cultural counseling, and asked me to spell it! The litera- ture I did read gave me the impression that efforts were being made to adapt the conventional co~~seling modalities to different cultures, but all those efforts were either at an exploratory stage or yielding contradictory results. 2 I wanted to know whether something original was being done outside adapting pre-existing models. "Cross-cultural" clients, I was discovering, had ambivalent or negative attitudes to some of the conventional counseling modes.

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