The "Etic" Approach to TM
Doug Hamilton
An "etic" approach, on the other hand, is an outsider's perspective, which looks at a culture from the perspective of an outside observer or researcher.
Opposite the "emic" approach is an insider's perspective, from the perspective of the people who live within a culture.
An Etic approach to TM is written in Dana Sawyer's published paper,
"Whatever happened to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the Beatles' guru, and the “TM” movement?"
Dana writing: "..This division between insider TMers and outsider TMers is key for understanding investigations into whether or
not the TM movement is religious in nature, and to make this clear, we employed in our analysis categories suggested
by Bainbridge and Stark (2003, p. 64). Bainbridge and Stark argue that NRMs commonly fall into one of three types
depending upon the relationship of individuals to the group: audience cults, client cults, and cult movements. The vast
majority of folks who ever learned TM—the outsiders—fall into the first two groups, in that they were either in the
audience of people who received their mantras and simply went home to practice by themselves, having no further
contact with the TMO, or they held onto a weak connection with the TMO, preferring to seek advice now and then
as clients. But the insiders, numbering only a few thousand, who had embraced Maharishi's teachings as their personal
worldview, and who hoped to reach “Cosmic Consciousness” and create an “Age of Enlightenment,” fit Bainbridge
and Stark's descriptors of a cult movement (referencing the word cult in terms of its lexical definition, while today—in
consideration of the negative connotations for “cult”—the preferred academic term is NRM). This latter group adopted
Maharishi's philosophy (a slightly modified form of Advaita Vedanta) with all the phenomenological characteristics of
a religion. Once settled in Iowa, where they were free to interact only with other insiders, this division between those
on the inside and other TMers grew wider. Consequently, the outsider TMers can mainly be assessed as non-religious,
while the insiders—who accepted Maharishi's offerings as both a lifestyle and ideology—meet Bainbridge and Stark's
descriptors of a cult movement.
.. continuing..
Peter McWilliams, a former TMer, has offered a contrary but plausible rationale for why Maharishi turned his
movement's attention inward, suggesting that the guru created the Sidhis program “to turn off the casual meditator
while drawing the devout believers closer to him” (McWilliams, 1994, p. 410). Outsider TMers practiced their TM at
home, with little to no knowledge of what was happening on the inside, while insiders in Fairfield were increasingly
moving toward Bainbridge and Stark's cult movement profile.
..
a further division in the ranks, with some insiders less “inside” than others. Those who were most inside, the true believers, who
accepted any message from the guru and all directives from the TMO that came down to them, increasingly fell into
disagreement with those who questioned authority or framed themselves as the loyal opposition. This gap grew so
wide that eventually those in the latter group were sometimes excommunicated from TMO programs (including daily
participation in the super radiance program at the golden domes) for challenging the TMO's authority.
Those who were most inside, whether they lived in Fairfield or obeyed all movement directives from afar, fell not
only into Bainbridge and Stark's cult movement category but more accurately into a variety of it sometimes termed
Neo-Hinduism—given that the main characteristics of their views and practices were derived from Hinduism. 2
..
But the fact remains that insiders—especially of the most
“inside” variety—fit the majority of descriptors related to NRMs, including such other Hinduism-inspired movements
as the Hare Krishnas and Rajneeshis. “Maharishi began with a universalist stance,... and has moved to an ever more
particularist stance, gradually embedding the Hindu/Vedic religion year by year as successive unveilings of the most
accurate vision of true religion” (Humes, 2005, p. 72).
..
Back in the 1960s and early 1970s, the TM movement held—as its prime directive—teaching TM to as many
people as possible. They called it the “World Plan,” and that project fits well with Roy Wallis' category of NRMs
that believe in the perfectible nature of human beings (2003, pp. 48–49). Rather than changing society via new
institutions, the TMO hoped to enlighten society by transforming the individuals who made it up, one person at
a time. “A forest is only as green as the individual trees in the forest are green,” Maharishi often commented in
lectures to his teachers. But after 1979, the focus shifted away from public programs toward changing society via
super radiance, broadcast from the golden domes in Iowa. This shift made physical a separation between insider
TMers and outsider TMers that continues today, and where the TM movement will go in the future remains unclear.
Several trends are reported in our book, including that the success of the TMO has greatly waned—with reports
of daily practitioners in the domes having been reduced to three hundred or less—while breakaway organizations
are on the rise.
Link to the published paper..
http://tinyurl.com/25cs6vnp..