| Sri Rama Michael Tamm | |
| Birth Name: | Mihkel Tamm |
| Birth Date: | 1911 2, df=yes |
| Birth Place: | Elistvere, Estonia |
| Death Place: | Boston, MA, USA |
| Nationality: | Estonian |
| Education: | Technische Universität Berlin |
| Known For: | Philosophy, mysticism, nullism[1] |
| Notable Works: | Theory-Hypothesis-Null,[2] The Philosophy of Null[3] |
Sri Rama Michael Tamm (born Mihkel Tamm; 9 February 191122 November 2002), also known as Sri Rāma Michael Tamm, Ramatamananda, and Romanadvoratrelundar, was an Estonian philosopher and mystic.[4] Tamm sought to re-unite all religions, not in institutional forms, but in terms of unifying mystical experiences. For this purpose, he developed the so-called Theory-Hypothesis-Null philosophy (THN), which sought a comprehensive synthesis of Eastern and Western philosophy. In the 1940s, Tamm traveled to Europe and studied nuclear physics in Germany. In 1956, he planned to walk through the Soviet Union to India. In Estonia, the Soviet authorities took his UN passport and did not let him out of Estonia as a stateless person. After 25 years of forced exile, he was allowed to leave the Soviet Union in 1981.[1]
Mihkel Tamm was born on February 9, 1911 in Elistvere municipality, Tartu County, Estonia. He was one of thirteen children in a poor shoemaker's family.[1] After graduating from Tartu High School, Tamm went to Sweden in 1940 as a shipwright. He stayed in England, France, Ireland, Portugal and Spain until he arrived in Germany during the World War II. He was successful in the jewelry business and became a millionaire.[5] At that time, Tamm became interested in nuclear physics, which was at a high level in Germany, and he entered the Technische Hochschule in Charlottenburg (now Technische Universität Berlin), where he studied until the end of World War II.[1]
In West Germany in 1947, Tamm met several theosophists and astrologers, delving deeply into Eastern philosophy, yoga and Buddhism, became interested in hypnosis and psychoanalysis. The name Ram was short for Ramatamananda, given to him by the Master of Theosophy in Berlin. In November 1948, Tamm had a "religious rebirth" and he realized how everything is connected - "the psyche opened to the condensed ether of thought fields and gravity fields, parafields and anti-information".[5] In 1952, he served in the US Army Labor Service Company and at that time came into contact with the Vedanta movement, a lama Anagarika Govinda of the Ramakrishna Mission. In 1955, he published two issues of Advaita-Vedanta magazine and was the editor of the multi-religious magazine Die Friede, which was the forerunner of the new age magazines of the 1970s and 1980s.[5]
In 1956, Ram planned to move from West Germany to India and visit his parents in Estonia on the way.[6] The Soviet authorities gave him a forced repatriation and refused to recognize his legal status and UN stateless passport. He was detained and pressured to take Soviet citizenship, which he refused. As a stateless person, he was no longer allowed to leave Estonia. He was accused of violating the ideological peace and threatened to be sent to the Kohtla-Järve mines as a laborer. His freedom of action and movement was restricted - he was not allowed to live in Tallinn, so he lived for a while in Tartu and later in Langerma and finally at the Kaasiksaare farm in Põikva, a village near Türi, working as a private teacher, yoga teacher and philosopher. Without rights, work and money, he lived on the support of friends.[7]
Tamm was in active communication with many local mystics in the Soviet Union, through correspondence with Western parapsychology specialists and researchers, and through telepathic meditation with many Yogis. His home was a meeting point first for local mystics and alternative people from all over the Soviet Union, who came to him to learn meditation, ask for advice or find answers to big, spiritual questions.[8]
In the 1960s, he moved around the University of Tartu. He taught yoga, initiated discussions on Indian philosophy, conducted parapsychological experiments and tried to create a universal mathematical-religious-philosophical level of expression for the teachings of Yoga-Advaita-Vedanta. He communicated with philologists, mathematicians and physicists, trying to find a mathematical-logical model to explain what happens in meditation and intuition.
For this purpose, he developed the so-called Theory-Hypothesis-Null philosophy (THN), which is based on "metaphysical-dialectical nullism". It sought a comprehensive synthesis of Eastern and Western philosophy and integrated the metaphysical and dialectical foundations of scientific theories, systems, and methods, deriving many geneses from various philosophical entities. Its background was the teaching of Indian philosophy about the four levels of consciousness. The null hypothesis theory dealt with the yogic process of cognition, where the null meant superconsciousness, the hypothesis meant sleep and dream state, and the theory meant the awake state. The main questions were how the world emerges from cosmic emptiness and fullness and how knowledge emerges from pure, superconscious intuition. As intuition comes from deep sleep to the awake state, meditation leads from the awake state to superconsciousness. A mathematical analogue would be the derivation from a zero-element set to another set consisting of arbitrary elements, and conversely from a set with many elements, i.e., from the world of sensory experience, moving step by step to the zero-element global universe.[5]