Margrethe Løøv

Acem: Disenchanted Meditation

Oslo, February 2008: we are in a fin de siècle apartment building in one of Oslo’s more affluent areas. In the salon of what appears to have been an impressive residence, rows of simple chairs and a projector screen have been set up, giving the rather grandiose room a low-key, informal ambiance. Eight people have found their way to the Acem1 house this evening. Most of them appear to have come alone, and together we make up a demographically disparate audience. A glance around reveals a pair of juvenile Converse shoes, two or three grey heads and at least one exclusive designer handbag. The majority of these people are in their forties or fifties, although a few people in the audience look like students. There are slightly more women than men. Discrete chatter is heard from a side room where the course instructors catch up while we wait for the clock to turn six. As the first event in Acem’s introductory meditation course, the evening starts with a lecture on the basic principles of Acem meditation, Acem’s history, its organisational structure and the benefits of meditation. Great care is taken to portray Acem as a Western and scientific meditation technique. Within five minutes the instructors “assure” the audience that Acem has nothing to do with religion or mysticism of any kind. The bulk of the lecture is about research results on Acem meditation by audiovisually presenting charts and graphs on how meditation can reduce stress hormones, blood pressure, improve the ability to concentrate et cetera. There is no mention of Acem’s historical background as a part of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s Transcendental Meditation (tm) movement. By and large, my first encounter with Acem gives the impression of a radically transformed remnant of the spiritual counter cultural wave of the 1960s. By looking further back into the past, this chapter seeks to shed light on the early emergence of Acem as the Norwegian branch of the Academic Meditation Society within Maharishi’s Spiritual Regeneration Movement. How did what originated as a New Religious Movement come to vehemently oppose any association with religion? What were the tensions that caused the original ams