What is Invincible Ireland and why is it advertising an end to our problems, asks Arminta Wallace
Ads - luckily for us newspaper folk - come in all shapes and sizes. But the ad that nestled in the corner of page 7 of Wednesday's Irish Times ranks alongside the more unusual. Mostly composed of small print in a downbeat shade of blue, its content was - to say the least - startling. "It is resolved," it began, "to crown Ireland with Invincibility . . . so that . . . no one in our dear Ireland has to face problems and failures." Which, let's face it, puts promises to lower cholesterol, banish wrinkles or whisk you to Beijing for €500 into the ha'penny place. No problems? Not even traffic problems on Pearse Street at 5pm on a Friday? No failures - what, not even of football prowess or political will? Read on, Macduff . . .
Irish invincibility, the ad declared confidently, can be achieved by employing 250 full-time "peace-creating experts" to keep an eye on our integrated state of national consciousness. There followed a series of pronouncements to do with unified field theory, a "flag raising ceremony" planned for "the full moon of September 7th", world peace - and money. Interestingly for something which was headlined "Financial Capital of Ireland", confusion appeared to reign on the financial front. On the one hand, the ad noted the presence of "eight billionaire families of Ireland", providing funding a-plenty for instant invincibility. On the other, it pointed out somewhat tetchily that if the project wasn't fully subscribed within a week, "it will not behoove the dignity of the high level custodians of wealth in the country".
Behoove and begorrah. Who uses such language in this day and age? The answer was buried in a box near the bottom. Who else but the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, leader of the Transcendental Meditation Movement, one-time spiritual guru to the Beatles and tireless campaigner for Vedic values in the wider world. The 89-year-old sage (who, for some reason, is now resident in the Netherlands) has even built his own university in the US. The golden-domed Maharishi University of Management has helped to transform the struggling mid-west town of Fairfield, Iowa into a thriving cosmopolitan pocket of hi-tech New Age prosperity, all vegan restaurants and crystal outlet shops.
Devotees of transcendental meditation (TM) claim that just 20 minutes' practice of the technique twice a day can change the world for the better. They include film director David Twin Peaks Lynch, who is involved in an effort to raise $7 billion to teach TM to every student in the US; physicist and three-times would-be US presidential candidate John Hagelin; and Irish engineer Joe Hayden, who seems to be the driving force behind the ad campaign, but who could not be contacted for comment.
Critics of the movement include scientists, who resent what they see as its simplistic misappropriation of the terminology of quantum physics; evangelical Christians, who regard its holistic view of God as part of his own Creation as idolatrous; and meditators-turned-mutineers who allege that regular indulgence in TM and associated practices can lead to just about everything from psychotic delusion to large-scale fraud.
"The whole TM experience was an early part of my spiritual journey," one former practitioner, a Dubliner, told The Irish Times, "and although the TM technique on its own is fine, the organisation behind it was too controlling and too conservative for my taste. They present TM as a simple technique - and it is." The trouble starts, he says, when people are encouraged into deeper involvement and higher aspirations. "I did the whole TM thing and yogic flying - which is really yogic hopping, because nobody has ever flown. But as you progress, there's a question of toeing the party line. They don't want you to hang out with any other movement or even read any other books except theirs; so you end up buying into a whole lot of concepts which may or may not be true. Borrowing conceptual ideas, and believing them to be true for you when they're not, is one of the biggest dangers of the spiritual game."
For all his misgivings, he insists the majority of TM teachers and practitioners are "very sincere people who really want to help" - especially in Ireland where, he says, the grass-roots TM movement is sensible and well grounded. The rhetoric of the ad, on the other hand, represents "the same old thing the higher echelons have been going on about for years and years. After all, the world has been going downhill ever since he started going on about world peace and perfection half a century ago."