Meditation group’s plans

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 32879, 30 March 1972, Page 12

Meditation group’s plans

Interest in the practice of transcendental meditation in New Zealand in the last two years has been quite dramatic, says Mr M. Tyne-Corbold, director of the International Meditation Society in New Zealand. Mr Tyne-Corbold is in Christchurch at the end of a nine-week tour of the country making preparations for establishing schools of meditation in 13 different centres. In the first 12 months of the society’s activity in New Zealand in 1970, 200 persons learned the technique; in the last 12 months, more than 1000 persons had become transcendental meditators, he said.

By the end of 1972 the society hoped to have centres in the four main centres. It already had seven teachers waiting to take up the posh

tions full time, on a salary of $4O a week, he said. Four of these were New Zealanders.

The society also had a long-term object to have the study of meditation introduced into university courses throughout the country as a credit to work to a degree. This was the trend in overseas universities such as Harvard and Yale, he said. Educationalists overseas had begun to approve the technique as a means to obtaining better grades, and establishing better relationships between students and parents, and students and teachers; students appeared to be less involved in drug misuse. The Canadian Government had made funds available for the propagation of transcendental meditation as a counter to drug use, said Mr Tyne-Corbold.

In New Zealand, 75 per cent of those who practised

meditation were graduates and undergraduates of uni-.

: versifies. Between five to six ' times more men practised . meditation than women.

He said that there was no conflict between the mission of the church and the aims of transcendental meditation? they were complementary. “I have had quite good communication with clergy on the subject, and I am surprised that they could be alarmed at anything about it Transcendental meditation is not a religious thing, neither is it irreligious—it’s ‘areligious.* It is not a substitute for devotion; it is an aid to it," Mr Tyne-Corbold said that he had been invited to speak at New Zealand convents and had found no antagonism. Throughout the world the greatest number of supporters who claimed church affiliations were Roman Catholic. In the South Island they were mainly Presbyterian, but this was a result of a “Presbyterian dominance in the population.”