Kogics Foundation organised an initiation into Transcendental Meditation (TM) for around 115 children and 20 teachers at Shivalik Anusuchit Janjati Adarsh Vidhyalay (शिवालिक अनुसूचित जनजाति आदर्श विद्यालय) and Mother Dreams School in the Herbertpur area near Dehradun. We are grateful to Sh. Chanchal Pandey from Haldwani for conducting the TM sessions over a period of five days. Sh. Pandey has been teaching TM for the past 30+ years.
The TM sessions were sponsored by Sh. James Kevin Egan, a long-time TM meditator who was closely associated with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the founder of the TM movement.

We think that teaching TM to children is an important step to empower and enable them for the future. The following are some of the reasons for this line of thought:

  1. TM provides many proven (with many peer review papers and case studies) benefits – improved brain functioning, increased energy, enhanced creativity, and more. See footnotes 1 2 3 for additional details.

  2. TM supports an urgent need of education in the current times, where attention spans and the ability to focus are decreasing sharply in children. In this context, it is important for children to learn how to Be – Be in the present moment, Be without distractions, Be without (compulsive) actions. TM provides great practice for this. Other core areas of education – like learning how to Know and learning how to Do are already well covered by us with our work with Kojo.

  3. Times of rapid change are fast approaching, with recent advancements in AI and other digital technologies rushing at us at increasingly rapid rates. Our work with children with Kojo is meant to make children literate and empowered citizens of this upcoming world. In this context, TM provides a foundation for navigating through the change with reduced anxiety and increased calmness.

  4. At a very broad level, discussions around something like TM are important to highlight the role of consciousness (as opposed to intelligence) in our world. This is especially important in the upcoming age of AI, where it seems very likely that super-human intelligence will be available on tap (or over the wire) in the not too distant future. A grounding in consciousness can play an important in steering the world towards a better future.

On a related note, the word Kogics in our name was conceptualized as something that represented both the logic based and the yogic streams of Knowledge, with the Foundation meant to be a vehicle to put both forms of knowledge into action. Until now, we have focused more on the logic part of things with our work with Kojo. We are now starting our journey into the yogic aspect…

  1. TM benefits overview ↩

  2. TM research overview ↩

  3. TM research links ↩