Eric Schwartz, the eventual founder and chief executive of Cambridge Investment Research, headed to Amherst College in 1971 during the throes of the counterculture movement. He enrolled in an assortment of courses at the liberal arts college, with notions of ultimately earning a degree in either psychology, philosophy or some related subject. He was surrounded by fellow students bent on “finding themselves.”

“We were trying to figure out what really matters. I had no focus on getting a job or being in business,” he says. “I think there were a hundred men in my dorm and there was only one Republican. Nobody was thinking about going into business. Everybody was becoming lawyers or doctors — or they didn’t know what they wanted to be.”

But two years into his time at Amherst, Schwartz caught wind of something called transcendental meditation (more often abbreviated as TM) being taught by a guru from India named Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The Maharishi’s presc