San Francisco: Plans for a high school meditation club funded by filmmaker David Lynch were canceled after parents found out that students would be taught a controversial meditation method that some claim is a kind of religious practice.
Amid protests that Transcendental Meditation (TM) - a method developed by a one-time spiritual teacher to The Beatles, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi - was a form of religious practice and therefore inappropriate for a public school, the David Lynch Foundation on Tuesday withdrew the $175,000 it had pledged to Terra Linda High School in San Rafael, California.
The grant would have provided funds for 250 students and 25 staffers to practice TM, a meditation style past adherents claimed allowed them to levitate.
Lynch, best known as the director of dark, surreal films like Eraserhead and Blue Velvet, has meditated for more than 30 years and credits TM with nourishing his creativity.
But an information meeting for Terra Linda parents about the program last week turned chaotic, with one parent rushing the stage to denounce TM as a cult.
Others said they felt TM was too close to a religion and therefore should not be promoted as a student activity, leading a conservative legal organisation to consider suing the school for violating the separation of church and state.
Alternative forms of spiritual expression are nothing new in Marin County, California, just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. Flower children of the 1960s flocked to the county's coastal bluffs and rolling hills after they decided to settle down and raise families.
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