Koulajian works out and does yoga, but he later told me that TM is the most important piece of his wellness regime: "I do it every day, no matter what. I feel like if I don’t do it, then something in my actions that day will not be of the same quality."

He said that he’s come, over two decades of working in finance, to see that most people are afraid to think independently, and follow their instincts. Instead, their decisions are based too much on external influences. "When you do that, you don’t have your own sense and convictions," he said. "TM has given me some sense of what my real inner feeling is about something.... If I wasn’t practicing, I’d just be going along with the crowd."

I learned to meditate on an overstuffed lounge chair in an otherwise bare interior office that might also have been an old closet in its previous life. I’d imagined my TM lessons would be held someplace better smelling and more womblike, the kind of place that would encourage peaceful inward thinking. But one of the primary selling points of TM is that it’s easy to learn and practice. Once you’ve learned, Roth says, you can do it in a taxi. (And he has.)

Aside from a slightly hokey ceremony that precedes the first lesson—which involved incense and Sanskrit and an apple that Roth shyly apologized for with the explanation that it’s an ancient tradition meant to honor the teachers of the past—what transpired was, as promised, simple and lacking in bullshit.

The mechanics beyond the mantra are not complicated, but like that magical sound, they’re not to be shared. Students of TM actually sign a paper stating that what transpires between teacher and student is to be kept secret. In other words, I can’t tell you exactly what my lessons—part of a lifetime membership with TM that costs working adults between $1,000 and $1,500—taught me. This sounds way shadier than it really is; it’s meant to protect TM from hucksters and charlatans barking lessons from mall kiosks, and to be sure that students are taught correctly. TM isn’t terribly complicated, but it’s very much analogous to yoga in that you could, technically, pick it up on your own, but you’re going to end up doing it wrong, and you’ll suffer for it. Thus, proper instruction is critical.

"In TM, we learn how to give the attention of the mind an inward direction rather than out there," Roth said. "It’s like teaching a child how to dive: Take the correct angle and the rest is automatic. You don’t have to say, ’Don’t stop.’ It’s just gravity."

If TM is the one form of meditation that has successfully gone mainstream, the reason is that it seems to work. And the science backs that up. To date, there have been more than 340 research studies into the benefits, and one of the David Lynch Foundation’s primary goals is taking those benefits to people who need them most—prisoners, victims of abuse, war veterans, underprivileged children.

The most tangible result of practicing TM is the way it reduces stress. If the only thing it did was cause you to sit quietly with your eyes closed, this would reduce stress in your life, providing a forced break from the furious fire hose of data and stimulation blasting you on a second-by-second basis. But TM’s effect appears to be far more powerful than that. Some psychologists have taken to calling stress the "Black Plague of the twenty-first century," because it is a runaway condition with no obvious cure. Stress causes inflammation, weakens the immune system, and is a risk factor for all kinds of serious health problems, from heart disease to depression. TM has, over many studies, helped cut stress and lower blood pressure. It has been shown to ease depression, curb violent impulses, and lessen symptoms of ADD and ADHD. It has even, as the TM adherent Dr. Mehmet Oz pointed out, been found to reduce skin lesions in some patients.