Transcendental meditation’s tipping point: the allure of celebrity on the American spiritual marketplace

ABSTRACT

Since 2005, the film director David Lynch has been the most visible and vocal proponent for the spread of Transcendental Meditation (TM), a practice brought to the United States by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in the late 1950s. This paper analyzes the public-facing operations: website, books, and celebrity benefit concerts, through which the David Lynch Foundation interacts with its American audience and charts two moves that the David Lynch Foundation has made in order to market TM. First, I assert that they have positioned TM as a technique rather than a spiritual practice and I understand this through Foucault’s theory of techné. Second, I argue that they have leveraged the auracular quality of celebrity as a modality through which to brand TM for the spiritual consumer. Ultimately, I made claims on how these moves represent a shift in how American spiritual seekers are understood and marketed to in popular culture.

KEYWORDS:

• Transcendental meditation
• spirituality
• religion
• celebrity
• marketing
• branding

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For a detailed account of Mahesh’s life and travels see Mason (1994).

2. See Iwamura, 2011, pp. 63–110 for her analysis of how the Western media covered Mahesh and his movement through an Orientalist lens.

3. See Hoffman (2016) for a first-person account of growing up in the Maharishi Vedic City in Iowa.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Corrina Laughlin

Corrina Laughlin is an Instructor in the Department of Communication Studies at Loyola Marymount University. She holds a Ph.D. from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.