How do you learn transcendental meditation without paying thousands of dollars to a teacher?
I encourage you to learn Transcendental Meditation from a properly trained and certified teacher. It is worth far more than the initiation fee. Since Maharishi introduced TM to the West in the late 1950s, there have been a great many knock-offs and appropriations of some elements of the technique. But even if what you learn is 95% on target, you are still off by 5%. Imagine you are trying to reach the Moon — if your angle is just 5% off, you’ll miss the goal by 20,000 miles. The “goal” of Transcendental Meditation is unbounded, pure consciousness. When TM is practiced correctly, the mind settles down into increasingly refined states of awareness until one “transcends” or goes beyond all mental activity and experiences pure consciousness. If the practice is off by just a little bit, one may experience some subtler states of mental activity — a feeling of relaxation, a pleasant mood, some inspiring thoughts — but one will not regularly transcend. For an excellent comparison of differe
