Stupid things religious people say

[Fake Messiah]

I recently watched a 2010 documentary about the Transcendental Meditation and I had no idea what a huge money grift that is. I'm talking about billions of dollars, golden castles, golden limousines, and people wearing golden crowns shaped like those king's crowns from Disney cartoons—all from telling people their mantra word and to repeat it every day for 20 minutes.

The title of the documentary is David Wants to Fly (2010) and it starts innocently enough with David, a young graduate film school student in Germany, is out of work and out of ideas, so he wants to meet his idol David Lynch to learn how to get ideas and make movies.

He goes to America, where he meets David Lynch. If you know anything about David Lynch you know that he's all into transcendental meditation, so Lynch tells him to start meditating. So he gets into transcendental meditation ( TM), and suddenly the movie unravels the grift. For example, he goes to the German branch of transcendental meditation, where, to enter, he has to pay 2,380 euros. Yes, 2,380 euros to hear your mantra word and "learn" to repeat it every day for 20 minutes.

And the grift goes on and on. We see that the famous Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (of The Beatles fame), with whom Lynch is tied, lives in a golden palace and drives around in a golden Mercedes limousine, and what his people do is go around the world wearing golden crowns and driving in limousines to ask for money: hundreds of millions of dollars to supposedly build "invincibility universities" where groups of people will meditate and thus bring peace—for example, it needs one thousand special people to meditate together in order to make Germany invincible.

There is also a camp in the US surrounded by wired fence where yogis are praying for world peace that also funnels millions of dollars.

Then we meet people who lost their life savings to TM and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who financially drained them and then threw them away when they were broke. One guy even gave $150 million to build a TM praying center in India in which a 10 thousand "group" would meditate to finally bring world peace, but since world peace hasn't arrived I guess it didn't work.

So you start to wonder if this is TM or Scientology or the Vatican. To become one of those who wears a golden crown, you have to pay one million dollars to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi or his successor (since he died in 2008).

But Lynch tells us this is all fine because just like when you need to buy a vitamin pill there needs to be a business behind it, is same with the transcendental meditation.

Being part of the religious racket, Lynch even turns into an active villain who threatens young David with his lawyers about the movie's final cut and what he can film.


Now, that movie is 15 years old and I don't know what the state of TM is anymore. It was already cracking up after Maharishi Mahesh Yogi died, and now that Lynch is dead too, who was their face (at least in the West), I don't see who is keeping it afloat.