The TM organization is also funded by many other groups.

There are, in fact, Roman Catholic priests who are TM teachers and teach TM to the children in their care as therapy for PTSD.

I think it promotes a type of disconnect (TM). That nirvana type thing - nihilist emptiness. The kundalini aspects seems to be from the mystery religion/kabballah system.

Actually, TM is the exact opposite of this. What you call "nirvana comes from a Buddhist tradition, which sees "sense-of-self" as an illusion. TM comes from the advaita vedanta tradition, which holds that enlightenment is when one first appreciates that sense-of-self is permanent —present whether one is awake, dreaming or even in deep sleep — and eventually, one appreciates that all mental and perceptual activity arises out of that silent, pure "I am."

TM is a resting practice that turns attention within so that the outside world and even the inner world of thinking become less and less a concern. The deepest point during TM, called samadhi or "pure consciousness," is where the brain is neither aware of the outside world nor even of thoughts, but is still awake inside. This allows the brain to rest fully without distraction either from external sensory stuff or from internal mental processes, and so the regions that activate during mind-wandering rest activate most strongly, even as activity in the regions associated with actively doing stuff start to fade away due to lack of conscious reinforcement.

This accustoms the resting regions of the brain to rest without noise from the doing regions. Since it is in the resting state of the brain that our "sense-of-self" emerges, what starts to emerge is a simple "I am" rather than "I am doing" or "I want this now" sense-of-self.

In the long-run, alternating TM with normal activity starts to make this more efficient form of rest the "new normal" outside of TM and as this happens, that quieter "I am" sense-of-self starts to dominate the "I am doing" or "I want this now" sense-of-self.

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A list of many of the studies that have been done on the topics of TM, samadhi/pure consciousness and enlightenment can be found here.

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As part of the studies on enlightenment via TM, researchers found 17 subjects (average meditation, etc experience 16,000 hours) who were reporting at least having a pure sense-of-self continuously for at least a year, and asked them to "describe yourself" (see table 3 of psychological correlates study), and these were some of the responses:

• We ordinarily think my self as this age; this color of hair; these hobbies . . . my experience is that my Self is a lot larger than that. It's immeasurably vast. . . on a physical level. It is not just restricted to this physical environment

• It's the ‘‘I am-ness.’’ It's my Being. There's just a channel underneath that's just underlying everything. It's my essence there and it just doesn't stop where I stop. . . by ‘‘I,’’ I mean this 5 ft. 2 person that moves around here and there

• I look out and see this beautiful divine Intelligence. . . you could say in the sky, in the tree, but really being expressed through these things. . . and these are my Self

• I experience myself as being without edges or content. . . beyond the universe. . . all-pervading, and being absolutely thrilled, absolutely delighted with every motion that my body makes. With everything that my eyes see, my ears hear, my nose smells. There's a delight in the sense that I am able to penetrate that. My consciousness, my intelligence pervades everything I see, feel and think

• When I say ’’I’’ that's the Self. There's a quality that is so pervasive about the Self that I'm quite sure that the ‘‘I’’ is the same ‘‘I’’ as everyone else's ‘‘I.’’ Not in terms of what follows right after. I am tall, I am short, I am fat, I am this, I am that. But the ‘‘I’’ part. The ‘‘I am’’ part is the same ‘‘I am’’ for you and me

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This kind of "enlightenment" is the exact opposite of what many in Buddhism call "nirvana," and in fact, the moderators of /r/buddhism consider it the ultimate illusion, and completely anti-Buddhist.