The instructor comes to our house for the initial session. Her hair, parted in the middle, falls in long dark curls. She wears a beaded tunic, hoop earrings, and faded jeans. It is 1975, and my father wants to learn about the cosmic consciousness. Half a decade after the Beatles break up, their former guru, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, returns to public view and announces what he calls the Dawn of the Age of Enlightenment by touring the world to promote Transcendental Meditation, or TM. “I go around the country and give a gentle whisper to the population,” he tells reporters at a press conference. His long gray hair and white beard, his giggling voice, his Rolls-Royce limousine, and his famous devotees—the Rolling Stones, Marianne Faithfull, the Beach Boys, Jefferson Airplane, and Mia Farrow all take up TM around the time of the Beatles’ 1968 visit to his Rishikesh ashram—ensure coverage wherever he travels. If only one per cent of a local population practices TM, the Maharishi claims, those meditators will “create balance in nature” and the entire region will see rewards: crime rates will shrink, traffic accidents dwindle. Employment, innovation, and well-being will accelerate. Everyone will enjoy better health. His followers soon name these benefits the Maharishi Effect. “A good time for the world is coming,” he informs Time magazine.
My father is curious. “It will help us relax,” he tells my mother. “Be healthy.”
My mother looks at him and says nothing. For years he has scoffed at anything spiritual. He quit attending Catholic mass in his teens. The priest with his back to the congregation, the incense and votive candles and organ music, the crucifix, communion—none of these rituals made sense to him. Years later, in our home, he places on his desk an IBM placard reading think. The word faces out, an imperative to anyone who enters his office. He considers himself rational and reveres logic, science, verifiable facts, though when Ron and Linda Williams come over he’ll debate textual nuances of The Lord of the Rings with Ron until long after their wives have taken their wine back to the kitchen table. He studied engineering at MIT as part of an accelerated Navy officer training program before dropping out. My mother hesitates further when he tells her the TM course will cost them $125 each. He earns good money managing Thunderbird Bowl, the candlepin bowling alley his father owns, but the cellar contains the darkroom setup he hasn’t used for a few years, and expensive stained-glass kits he plans to make but has not yet unwrapped. The mortgage payment on the home they bought two years earlier is, including taxes and insurance, $256 a month. Still, she thinks, it will be something they can do together out of the house.
She left her position teaching high school English not long after I was conceived—per her district’s tacit policies, she understood that she wouldn’t be able to continue teaching while visibly pregnant. Now I am four; my twin sisters are barely a year old. She spends most days alone with us, changing diapers, picking up stray Cheerios, reading me stories, bathing my sisters—one in each side of the kitchen sink, where she can rinse them with the sprayer. She packs them into the double stroller and walks us around the neighborhood to feel air on her face. Some afternoons, she and her friends Linda and Jane sit around the kitchen table, drinking coffee out of blue and white Corelle cups. Others, she makes homemade play dough and sits on the floor while I mash it in my small fists and my sisters nap in their cribs. In her women’s group, she and other women who’ve all worked until having children talk about their dismay at their husbands’ new expectations, their difficulties adjusting to being in the house all day. She hates ironing my father’s clothes. Hates that her mother-in-law has bought my sisters tiny ruffled dresses that require still more ironing. If my father’s out, she hires a babysitter so she can go to these meetings. She refuses to pay for a sitter when he’s home, but he asks her how he’s supposed to watch all three of us unless we’ve been put to bed—so on nights when my sisters refuse to fall asleep in time for her to leave, she rocks them upstairs in the dark, murmuring into their wispy hair while downstairs he clicks on the tv.
My father works late, pours himself a bourbon as soon as he takes off his coat, then hides behind the Evening Gazette in the living room. He puts classical LPs on the stereo, turns the volume up too loud to talk, and sits on the couch with his eyes closed. When they do talk—as he sips that first bourbon, or during commercials on The Bob Newhart Show—he mentions, too often, a young divorcée he’s just hired for day shifts at the bowling alley’s snack bar, and this is another reason she wants to go out of the house with him.
The instructor, trained and certified in the Maharishi’s methods, explains the seven steps to learn to meditate. My father asks many questions, all of which she’s prepared to answer. “It’s not a religion,” she tells him, “not a philosophy. Only a technique.” Maybe he appreciates the statistics she can cite from studies on the health benefits of meditation, her talk of alpha waves and decreased oxygen intake and what she calls the Science of Creative Intelligence. Maybe he knows that the Maharishi—who has a degree in physics—has recently purchased a failed college in Iowa and renamed it Maharishi International University, with a curriculum, the New York Times reports, “created . . . out of a belief that a school incorporating the philosophy and techniques of transcendental meditation could make an unusual contribution to higher education.” Maybe he’s read Dr. Herbert Benson’s The Relaxation Response, a current bestseller prompted by a medical study examining whether meditation reduces high blood pressure. Or another 1975 bestseller, TM*: Discovering Inner Energy and Overcoming Stress, which asserts, “Every day before breakfast and again before dinner a half a million Americans of all ages and walks of life sit in a comfortable chair and close their eyes. Effortlessly they settle into deeper and deeper states of relaxation while their minds remain alert with enjoyment.” Maybe he’s read an announcement for an upcoming TM session in the newspaper. Or maybe he just seeks a way to quiet his restless mind, to subdue his building resentments, even if he can’t yet admit these things to anyone.
“How long will it take?” my father wants to know. “To experience cosmic consciousness?”
“It’s a process.” The instructor smiles. She does not touch the cup of coffee my mother has poured her. “Everyone’s journey is different. Sometimes, after years of practice.”
Soon my parents drive to the local Transcendental Meditation center just outside the city. The building, beside a pond, feels almost like a summer camp: bare wood floors, cheap couches pushed against pine plank walls. But mirror-work tapestries in red and purple and green hang around the room—one with an elephant, one with a mandala. Folding chairs, arranged in rows, seat other aspirants.
Tens of thousands of new practitioners join the movement each month. The Maharishi appears on The Merv Griffin Show, where Griffin tells him, “I’ve waited a long time to meet you. I admire you, I admire what you’re doing, and, uh, I think I’ll make everybody comfortable and just start off by saying I’m a meditator.” The Maharishi’s claims that TM improves business productivity inspire corporate seminars nationwide, Time reports in a cover story on the “TM Craze.” Cosmopolitan endorses the benefits of TM for working women; a writer for Ladies’ Home Journal recounts “How Transcendental Meditation changed our family’s life.” Even Seventeen asks its readers “Can TM Work for You?” and details several teens who’ve tried it. Billy Graham, writing in his syndicated newspaper column, offers a dissenting opinion: “I believe this movement is dangerous because it may provide a temporary sense of satisfaction, while keeping a person from seeking the true answer to life as found in Jesus Christ.”
But my father imagines even the briefest satisfaction preferable to the endless sounds of balls rolling and clobbering pins, the chimes and dings of pinball machines, the jeers and yawps of men who’ve been drinking Michelob for hours. Sometimes he steps out from his windowless office and leans on the orange Formica counter beneath which floppy leather rental shoes have been shoved sideways into cubbies. At his elbow, a bowl of paper matchbooks: 46 lanes / thunderbird bowl / “candlepin bowling at its finest” / dial 755-4304. A tray of 11˝ × 17˝ scoresheets, penciled names and numbers and shaded-in triangles for spares. Teens walk from the snack bar holding fizzing cups of soda and ice. The sweet reek of deodorizer spray mingles with cigarette smoke. Days pass with sunlight only a bright square at the plate glass doors. He needs to figure out who will handle the Saturday morning taping of Bowling for Dollars. Needs to fix the pinsetting machine on 18. Needs to schedule league nights for the upcoming season. Instead he walks to the snack bar for a pizza burger, then takes it back into his office because there’s nowhere else quiet to eat. “I should’ve known I couldn’t work for my father,” he tells my mother when he gets home. “He won’t let me change anything.” But even to her, he almost never confesses his doubts anymore. Just a few years ago, he rode his motorcycle on warm fall days to his classes at MIT. His wife was pregnant but he had no children. On weekends, he paddled his canoe around the edges of quiet ponds and smoked his pipe. He believed he would soon earn both B.S. and M.S. degrees, as well as the rank of ensign—though he has earned none of these. Now he often feels little desire to speak to anyone he knows.
A table at the far end of the room holds a shrine below a portrait of Guru Dev, the Maharishi’s teacher. Other photos show the beaming Maharishi. The instructors describe the technique, answer questions, and wheel out a tv cart to show a short videotape in which the Maharishi sits on a divan amid heaped flowers, wearing a white silk dhoti and mala beads, and lectures about “weak thought force” leading to weak achievements and a lack of fulfillment no matter how intelligent one is. “There was no way until now to directly improve creative intelligence,” he says.
“Perhaps the most significant fact about the TM craze,” Time magazine notes, “is that, in the words of Krister Stendahl, dean of the Harvard Divinity School, it suggests a ‘genuine hunger for mystical and religious experiences.’ It is the most visible manifestation of the industrialized nations looking for relief from the pressures of modern life . . .” According to the TM organization’s own records, my parents are two of 292,517 new initiates who seek such relief in 1975, the movement’s peak.
My parents return a week later for a puja—an initiation ceremony during which each of them will receive a sacred mantra: a word so personal they must never share it, not even with each other, their children, or their closest friends. Each mantra, they are told, triggers sound vibrations that match an individual’s unique nervous system. The instructors ask them to bring fruit and flowers as an offering, and white handkerchiefs as a symbol of a clean spirit, as well as the fees for their program. My mother carries a supermarket bouquet of daisies and carnations, and pears from our backyard trees. My father writes a check. Then they remove their shoes. Other novices sit on the floor, and my parents join them. A recording of a sitar plays. My mother’s instructor leads her into a small side room with another shrine. A candle burns. Sandalwood incense softly smokes. The woman places the pears on the shrine, passes my mother one of the carnations she’s brought, invites her to kneel, and begins chanting. It is a recitation of passages from the Rig Veda. She ignores my mother’s hesitant questions. She does not break eye contact. Instead, still chanting, she takes my mother’s hands, and starts repeating a word my mother soon understands is her mantra. She draws out the mantra’s two syllables and motions for my mother to join in. The word the instructor speaks is “Sssshhhhhiiirrriiiinnnggggg.” Together, they say the word, again and again.
“Now close the eyes and continue,” the instructor says.
“Now, quietly,” she says after a moment.
In another minute: “More quietly.” Then: “Still more quietly.” And then: “Now, mentally. Without moving tongue or lips.”
My parents return to the center often those months: first, they must fill out forms about their experiences meditating so that their instructors can check on their progress. They attend evening potlucks of vegetarian dishes my father complains about afterward: “Too many lentils.” But they never socialize with any of the other disciples outside the center. My mother practices at home. Though she’s been reminded to meditate away from children and animals to avoid disturbance, I wander into the living room while she’s sitting on the couch breathing softly with her eyes closed. Frodo, our Irish setter, follows me, his tail sweeping magazines off the coffee table.
“What are you doing?”
“Meditating.”
“Why?”
“Because.”
“How much longer?”
“A while.”
She barely parts her lips to speak, and doesn’t open her eyes. I watch her, then leave. Sometimes my father meditates at home, too, but most of the time he goes to the center alone to participate in group sessions—or to escape the noise of three young children and a dog. He signs up for additional courses, pays additional fees. My mother usually feels too busy taking care of my sisters and me to go with him. Or she has to run to Whitman’s supermarket, or try to tidy the house before cooking dinner, or finish the reading for the night classes in counseling she’s begun taking, hoping to go back to work in the public schools as a therapist. Or maybe, since by now my father’s quit his job at Thunderbird Bowl to open a collectible coin shop, she’s beginning to worry more about money.
On a cool spring night in 1977, my parents return to the center together one last time. Their instructors have been promising a big announcement they can hear only there, what the Maharishi calls “a new breakthrough in human potential.” After a group meditation, one instructor tells the assembly about new courses in which they can learn the siddhis, a set of advanced TM techniques that will grant “supernormal powers”: invisibility, levitation, walking through walls, omniscience. The Maharishi International University course catalog notes that “Students entering MIU in the fall of 1977 will be among the first to qualify for these historic new courses and raise their capabilities to the level of the sidda (superman): command over material nature by mere intention of the mind.” A study co-authored by the Vice Chancellor of the Maharishi European Research University in Switzerland that same year claims that the siddhis can reverse the effects of aging.
“I’ve been taking these courses myself,” the instructor continues, “and they’re very exciting. My life has never felt more wonderful.” He wears a ponytail, wire-rimmed glasses, canvas sneakers. He goes on to tell them that the course on levitation will require them to meditate indoors, so that they don’t float off into the night. My mother looks down, bites her lip. She imagines people rising like helium balloons, drifting in a breeze, catching in branches, disappearing into the distance, all while lost in their serene states. Some of these new courses cost thousands of dollars. She shifts on the metal folding chair. On the drive home, she tells my father that she’s done going to the TM center. But he’s already decided he’s had enough, too. His life does not feel wonderful, nor exciting, and he no longer believes meditation will make it so.
If my parents feel duped, they don’t reveal it to each other, but they’ll soon laugh when they tell this story to friends. Their friends laugh with them, but by 1977 they all know people who’ve done past-life regression, endured Werner Erhard’s Est seminars, or read Jane Roberts’s Seth books. Flying meditators hardly seem outlandish. No one from the TM center contacts my parents to find out why they don’t return: “Even TM officials admit that 20% to 25% of the people who try TM give it up after a while,” Time claims. Whether out of superstition or stubbornness, my father still refuses to tell my mother his mantra, and she decides not to tell him hers. Later they will learn that TM instructors provide mantras—from a list of only sixteen—based on a practitioner’s age and gender, not out of any mystical link.
In June, John Konhaus, acting director of the Maharishi’s “World Plan Executive Council” for TM in the United States, tells the Washington Post that the siddhi courses are “directed at meditators. But the press and public should know also. If people are going to be flying and disappearing, this is going to be a breakthrough in human potential to say the least.” The press links the movement’s declining membership and price increases with the siddhi program, and asks to see proof of levitation. “We don’t want to get into a circus, demonstration type environment,” a TM instructor at Konhaus’s press conference protests. In England, similar comments prompt the Daily Mirror headline “Maharishi’s Flying Circus.” In November, the Atlanta Constitution runs an article titled “Flying with Mind-Power?” An accompanying photograph—“Provided by TM,” the caption notes—shows a woman sitting cross-legged, a baby in her lap. Next to them, another woman, also cross-legged and with eyes closed, hovers some eight inches off the floor. The levitating woman, Christiana Quarton, seems to smile faintly above a white scarf knotted at her neck. The other woman and child don’t even look at her: with practice, the supernormal becomes mundane. The article describes a demonstration: “No pictures were allowed, although the TM people are ready to hand out pictures of levitators,” it concludes. “The press generally has taken these with the seriousness reserved for the latest photo of the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, and similar mysteries.”
“Enlightenment implies the ability to act without making mistakes,” the Maharishi claims in 1977, “to be successful in our undertakings without making problems for ourselves.” By this impossible definition, my father never achieves the enlightenment he hopes to find. At times all his actions seem to him like mistakes; every choice feels like the wrong one; nothing happens as he imagines it will. After he dropped out of MIT and was demoted back to an E-3 seaman, my mother had to pull the brass buttons he was no longer entitled to wear off his peacoat and sew on the plastic ones stamped with a rope-entwined anchor. His superior officers berated him; the other enlisted men mocked him; his father would not stop reminding him of the favor he’d called in to Congressman Morse to help get him into the program. “You’ve embarrassed me,” his father said, “and you’ve embarrassed him.” But soon he was discharged from the Navy, as well. Some nights when he comes home from work he descends the creaky stairs to his workbench in the cellar and sits under the hanging fluorescent light he’s installed there. Sawdust in unswept piles, spiderwebs, old fieldstone and mortar. Maybe he rattles a jar of screws and runs a few pieces of wood through the table saw so that we hear him upstairs, think he’s busy, and leave him alone, which is, at that moment, what he wants most.
After my parents’ dalliance with Transcendental Meditation, no equipment remains to mildew in the cellar and remind my mother of the money they’ve spent. My father does not pay to learn the siddhis: he pays to learn to grade coins and to become certified by the American Numismatic Association. Then he pays the local chapter of Mensa to take their IQ test, scores in the top 2 percent as required to join, and sends in his membership dues. The group holds weekly meetings at the Holiday Inn near Lincoln Plaza. He sticks the member pin through the lapel of his coat, joins everyone there for drinks and dinner. Maybe he has ceased meditating, but others continue—and as the Maharishi has promised, all those civic benefits must accrue to him, as well. He still has not graduated college, though he commemorates his semesters in Cambridge with a black ceramic tankard, the words massachusetts institute of technology and the school seal in gold enamel. He fills it with pens and positions it on his desk. Every dollar he spends seems an investment in a future he can imagine: in a future he will create.
And, as my father invests more of our family’s funds into his coin shop, and we fall farther behind on our bills, my mother can still sit on the living room couch and close her eyes. It costs her nothing but the twenty minutes. Morning sunlight through the double windows warms her face. Maybe, for a few moments, my sisters and I do not whine, the telephone does not ring, the dog sleeps, her shoulders relax. He can do his own ironing. The kitchen can go unscrubbed another day. She repeats her mantra in her head while other thoughts come and go. But if she doesn’t wipe down the kitchen counters, she knows no one else will. Her mother-in-law has told her how, when she was a young wife, she would shave her husband’s face in bed before work, so that he could sleep a few more minutes—“I’m sure Bobby would appreciate that, too,” her mother-in-law added. Shirrring, she wills herself to think. Shhhirrrringgg. She inhales through her nose, breathes out through narrowed lips. Slowly. Again. She does not feel her body lift from the couch. She does not float away. She cannot. She is bound inescapably to this house and this family.
My father has other ideas. “Let’s go,” he says one mild evening later that spring, and we all climb into our green Jeep. He drives us to the hilltop municipal airport just west of the city: he’s always found something soothing in seeing planes take off and touch down, and on unquiet afternoons he often comes here alone. A few years earlier, modeling his new leather briefcase, he asked my mother if he looked like a junior executive. His path forward had then seemed obvious, inevitable. But he’s barely left the small city where we live except for Sunday dinners at his parents’ home an hour’s drive away, hasn’t taken a vacation beyond brief camping trips. Sometimes in summer and fall he brings a blanket to sit on in the fields beside the X-shaped runways, or a book to read in the car. In winter, he sits with a sandwich and a thermos of coffee, and watches until the windows are glazed with his breath. Tonight, he brings all of us.
Chain link fencing topped with three strands of barbed wire surrounds the terminal and control tower. We stand in the unmown fields beyond. My mother takes my sisters’ hands in each of hers. My father shades his eyes and scans the sky. I bend to inspect blobs of spittlebug foam on bent grass blades. The rotating beacon flashes, spinning a beam of light it’s not yet dark enough for us to notice. My father drops his hand from his brow. “Look,” he says, pointing where a jet’s silvery shape approaches, getting larger and larger until we can make out the logo on its fuselage, spot its dropped wing flaps almost overhead. Then the huge ringing squall of turbines blasts us and its tires scuff the landing strip on the other side of the fence we lean against, our fingers laced into the wire diamonds, watching.
