The "Residence Course": your first experience of headache and lingering dissociation
There is a rather grisly analogy about "how to boil a frog." Supposedly, if you throw a live frog in boiling water, the scalded frog will quickly hop out. If you really want to boil the frog to death, you must put it in cold water and then gradually turn up the heat. The frog won't notice that things have gotten too hot until it is too late.
Well, they've been turning up the heat on you since you walked into the first introductory lecture. And if you are one of the people who are susceptible to trance induction and post-trance suggestion, the water may have gotten a little warm for you already. But they are going to keep turning up the heat if you let them.
The usual next stop down the TM rabbit hole is to go to a weekend "residence course." You will have been told that at the residence course you will meditate more than twice a day (something that you are instructed not to do at home), which supposedly greatly multiplies the benefits.
Welcome to "rounding"
You go off to a retreat facility where, at the first meeting, you learn about "rounding." "Rounding" is a very important practice in TM. "Rounding" involves alternating periods of "meditation" with periods of doing the stretching exercises (called "asanas") that most of us think of as "yoga." For example, in the morning you may induce trance ("meditate"), then do some "yoga asanas", and then induce trance again. That would be "two rounds." Then you would go to a lecture which introduces TM dogma that is a bit more advanced then what you have been taught already. Then you go to lunch, and then to another dogma lecture. Then perhaps you do two more "rounds" in the afternoon. Then another lecture, then dinner, then another lecture, and then off to bed.
You're told you aren't competent to make decisions -- and there's a good reason for this!
At the first lecture of the residence course where you are taught how to "round", you will also be told rather emphatically that "we don't make important decisions on this course -- we wait until we get home again before making important decisions." This is good advice, and there actually is a very important psychological reason for it: the extra periods of trance, which involve acting out your TM teacher's suggestions about thought reduction and relaxation, on the residence course can produce a state of continuous dissociation that persists even when not meditating . Among TMers this state of chronic dissociation is very well known state and is usually called being "spacey" or being "fried."
Turning up the dogmatic heat
But another important thing that is happening to you is that you are undergoing a period of intense dogmatic indoctrination. For example, my first residence course was where I learned that regular practice of TM for twenty minutes twice a day would produce states that go far beyond mere CC. These states are called "God Consciousness" and "Unity Consciousness"!
"God Consciousness" (called "GC") is the state where you directly perceive the "Personal God"! And Unity Consciousness ("UC") is even better; it is the state where you directly perceive that you are one with all of Creation.
Yes, all from a mere twenty minutes twice a day. (Actually this is another mental reservation. You'll eventually find out that TM dogma teaches that it takes much much more than that.)
Dogmatic indoctrination is performed at every one of those many lectures that you attend at the residence course, all while you are in a post-trance dissociated state. And since you have already fallen down the TM rabbit hole enough to attend one of these residence courses, then you are indeed one of the people who accepts indoctrination uncritically while in such a state
After you've been to a few residence courses you're past the point of no return
in your fall down the rabbit hole!
