Spirituality and Sadism
One evening in the late 1970's I got invited to go to a lecture by a Tibetan Buddhist Dharma Holder, an American who had been initiated by one of the Tibetan lamas. The woman who invited me was a graduate student who had the office next to mine at the University of California at Irvine. We had passed in the hallways for a year and she repeatedly was asking me to come to one of her Buddhist events, and I happened to be free that night and I said sure. The location was near John Wayne Airport, just a few miles from UCI, and conveniently, the lecture room was right next to a bar. The man giving the talk droned on and on about Buddhist theology for a long time, and then the woman asked me if I would like to join her and the teacher in the bar.
We found a table and the teacher ordered a tall drink – Long Island Iced Tea, which I remembered because it was such a weird thing to order. The woman ordered a martini, and I got a beer. They settled in and the man drank for awhile, thirstily. Then he gave me a meaningful look.
"So," he said, "Are you just a spiritual vampire that goes from group to group?"
For a fraction of a second, I thought about protesting, saying something like, your girlfriend here has been pestering me to come to one of your events, so I came. Then I realized this would be lame, and would also play into whatever game they were setting up. So I rode that little impulse and turned it into something else. I went completely, utterly still, and just watched the two of them. I let time slow down a little, and glanced at her. She snuggled closer to the guy, and spread her legs a little, and her nostrils flared. She was getting ready to enjoy watching someone get roasted and devoured. I looked at him, and he was waiting for me to have a response. I kept on being silent, not moving, just studying, decoding their racket.
I realized that I was supposed to be shocked by what he said and by his scrutiny. Then the two of them would gloat as they tore me apart, and after it was over, walk away laughing then go to his hotel room and have sex. This was clearly a well-practiced routine they had developed. The reason the woman had been so persistent in inviting me was not just to be another body in the lecture room – she wanted to see me being beaten up by her man, and then maybe become a submissive member of their cult. So I kept on being still and silent and watching as they tried to discern the moment when they could strike. In that moment, they were both predators ready to pounce. He was very cool and she was almost salivating. They were enjoying the fact that I seemed to be shocked into silence by the "penetrating insight" of what they guy had just said to me.
So I just gazed at the guy and then started laughing.
"Any vampire that tried to feed on you two would stave to death," I said. "Look at you two. LOOK AT YOU. You are what, 40, and already you're a couple of dried-up old alcoholics, playing sadistic drinking games that you dare to call spirituality. There is not an ounce of vitality in your body or your teaching. Any blood you may have had in your body has been long ago drained away by the debased understanding you have of what the dharma is."
I put some money on the table and walked away from my tiny victory. The man was slightly shocked and bemused, thinking about what I said. The woman was mad and was trying to generate some venom for a next attack. I am not street smart enough to stay in such a fight. I'm not mean enough. And I do not believe in the process in the first place, the forced breakdown of someone's identity. This breakdown process does have a role in Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous, in which it is essential to more or less murder the person's addictive ego so they can be reborn as a new person who has a chance at recovery.
Walk Away
If you ever find yourself in such a situation, you might consider just walking away without saying a word. You can't win. The only reason I had the speed and responsiveness to catch what they were doing was because of a decade of intense and painful training, the emotional equivalent of martial arts training. I had been attacked by therapists and workshop leaders much smarter than these two, and with deadlier tools.
If I had kept on talking to those Tibet-oholics, I would eventually have given them something to beat me up with. I was in their arena, this was a well-practiced con game. They had an entire tradition behind them – they were not just going to break me down and get sexually turned on by it, but they felt the inner applause of their Tibetan teacher, who had done this kind of thing to them. I could tell that their teacher had to be an alcoholic, and later I found out that he was, and he was also totally brilliant and gave many wonderful insights. He died young of alcoholism, before he evolved much of a balance for his teachings. The successor he appointed, who was advertised widely as THE FIRST ENLIGHTENED WESTERNER, gave AIDS to many students before he too died.
There are many variations on the sadism game, and it has many names, for example "Rip your face off," "Bust the ego," or "Break through the character armor." Versions of the game are adapted for each type of workshop, self-improvement seminar, spiritual training program, ashram, and even some yoga and meditation schools. This is immensely successful because if a person stays there and takes it, they become weakened and are more susceptible to the next con, which is to give your credit card number and sign up for more groups.
To understand why and how "spiritual" groups fall into using such tools, it helps to understand gang initiation rituals and kinky sex. You can look them both up on the internet.
The Ritual Beat-Down
In some gangs, it is traditional to give a newcomer a beating. Ten guys or girls will circle the new member, and beat and kick them to a pulp. This is the price of admission. Military training does it differently – you are broken down by lack of sleep and intense workouts. Milder forms of this are in fraternity hazing. The general pattern is, dominant members of the group inflict humiliation and emotional and/or physical pain on the plebe. This forms a certain type of bond. Human beings are social animals, and for better or worse, we have an instinct to bond with the abuser. We also have an instinct to try to establish our place in the pecking order. When you submit to a beating, physical or emotional, you are at least PART of the pecking order. You may be at the bottom now, but eventually, if you survive, you will be able to inflict beatings on other people. In gangs, the beatings are physical. In workshops and spiritual training, the beatings are mental and emotional. You attack the person's basic identity.
Dominance and Submission Games
Type dominance submission guru into a search engine. Look at what you get. This is another essential element to appreciate when encountering any spiritual group or self-improvement seminar. You will find people who become sexually aroused by mental or emotional spanking. They require someone to be humiliated in order to get lubricated to have sex. It's a form of foreplay, and someone has to be the Master, and someone else, or a group, has to be the Slaves. In the back of free newspapers, and probably in many places online, you will see ads for people wanting to match up – a dominant seeking a submissive, or a slave seeking a master. There are many codes, indicating what type of foreplay, what type of sexual position, what kind of a theme is being sought. If you ever are around organized spirituality, you should develop your own "field guide" to the types of predators and prey in the church, ashram, yoga center, seminar, or meditation school.
Probably all spiritual groups, meditation schools, and seminar businesses are run by cartels of dominants and submissives, who use the pretext of teaching to have an endless supply of fresh blood. People who enjoy their work can be good at it. Just because the teacher or the teacher's assistant get off on humiliating someone or busting them, does not mean they are not good at what they do. The problem is that whatever the group is called – this workshop series, that guru, something something meditation, that is just the name of the nightclub. The theme of the party. The words are bait to get people to come, and a kind of camouflage so that society does not catch on. This is great for people who are matched, sexually and emotionally, to the type of abuse and sexual slavery that the group specializes in and seeks to train you for. But if you actually just want to learn some skills, learn how to meditate, you are in trouble.
The problem is that many people actually want the teaching that is advertised, as opposed to what is delivered. Most people who come to take a workshop have a job, a life, friends, ambitions, a love life, bills, relatives, a spouse, children. They don't need to be spanked. The last thing they need is their ego reduced or broken. They don't need to run up huge credit card debt in the name of "Success!" Life is spanking them enough as it is. Anyone who loves, anyone whose heart is open, gets plenty of pain just by witnessing the world.
The Dominatrix
A friend of mine had been going to a workshop series for a year, the kind that has free introductory evenings, then an expensive weekend intensive, then really expensive week-long seminars in gorgeous locations in Hawaii and the Bahamas. He had racked up $55,000 in credit card debt and was about to declare bankruptcy, because the cult's promise that his "investment" in these workshops would soon pay off in extra business was not working out. So I went to one of their free seminars, held at a local hotel. It was really good. They had devised a series of nifty exercises based on hypnosis, NLP (Neuro-linguistic Programming), and the general format developed by Mind Dynamics in the 60's, EST and LifeSpring in the 70's, and The Forum in the 80's. Their timing was superb and the trainers were funny.
Toward the end of the day, one of the good-looking women assistants came over to me and started trying to seduce me into signing up for their intensive. She ran game after game on me, in a very charming way. I kept having a curious image in my mind when I was looking at her, and especially when I would look away.
Finally, I said, "I have this image of you with a whip. Maybe wearing high heels. And something about black leather."
"That's me. You got me," she said.
"What?" I said, genuinely puzzled. I had no idea what my image meant.
"I am a dominatrix. Or I used to be. I worked as one," she said, cheerfully.
"What is a dominatrix?" I asked. Still clueless. I had never heard the term.
She explained the concept to me a bit, and I was amazed again that I had gotten to be 40 without ever knowing that there was a whole profession, a type of prostitute who specialize in dominating, inflicting pain and humiliation. And furthermore, that dominatrixes are especially popular in Washington, D.C. The politicians go to these prostitutes to be spanked and whipped for being such bad boys, taking bribes and selling out the country. Then they lick the boots of the dominatrix and get to come.
Without the dominatrix, she said, America would be run by corrupt, lying men who are also sexually frustrated. A dangerous combination. When the politician grovels at the feet of his Mistress and confesses, "YES, I am nothing but a lying whore, taking money from corporations," this is the ONLY time he ever is telling the truth.
Anyway, that workshop business was very successful for a few years, mainly because the teacher had a dozen really good-looking women, most of them lesbians, all of them shameless about using their skills and attractiveness to recruit people of both sexes to come and play with them. It slowly faded away because the founder made enough millions to go into real estate investing and he retired. This was a relatively benevolent cult because the people running it were happily rejoicing in their power, money and sex. They weren't mean, at heart. Consequently, after a year of being involved with this cult, the typical member would be broke and somewhat tired, but well-fucked, and by damn, they had a wild year of adventures. Now it is time to declare bankruptcy and get back to work.
This also shows the value of hiring a professional. At least one of the girls had actually worked as a dominatrix, and she enjoyed it and knew how to do it right. In the workshops, she would abuse someone just the right amount to get an effect, then stop. She knew how to observe. If you go to one of the many workshops that proliferate across the United States in which the group leader attacks the students or "busts" them, you will often see what amounts to an unskilled person practicing medicine. The leader does not have the observational skills and training to criticize the person accurately, and in any case, a large group situation is rarely a good context for humiliating someone.
The only lasting damage from this workshop cult was probably their transmission of eating disorders. The founder of the group seemed to have a Doctor Strangelove - type food fanaticism, in which he was obsessed with colonics and food purity. Food purity is a weird name for the set of ideas which basically says that all food is disgusting and toxic except for these, approved ones. Whatever they are – green algae and sushi, or zucchini and wheat grass juice that has been put in a blender. These ideas are addictive and the practices are damaging to the body. Once you start messing with your digestion, the main result is often bad digestion, with all that implies. You lose the ability to eat what you like and not be troubled by it. And the weaker your digestion gets, the more you feel that food actually IS toxic because you can't digest it. A certain percentage of people who are exposed to the ideas of food purity will develop lasting borderline eating disorders. By the way, a very funny movie about food fanaticism is The Road To Wellville, which you can get on DVD. Starring Dana Carvey, Bridget Fonda, Matthew Broderick, John Cusak and Anthony Hopkins. The story is based loosely on the life of John Kellogg, the guy who invented corn flakes.
One great thing about the movie is that it is basically true, and it takes some of the guilt off of California for being the center of health food wackiness. When you learn about Kellogg, you realize that people were being insane about colonics and fantasizing about "magic foods" such as graham crackers way back in the late 1800's and early 1900's, in Michigan. California, and especially Los Angeles, is not to blame. At least not alone.
The movie is based on the very funny book by T. Coraghessan Boyle.
I only learned about all this because I became friendly with several of the girls. There is no such thing as real friendship in such groups, because all relationships exist to be exploited in service to the cult. And everything is subject to change depending on each person's rise and fall in terms of status, money, and the favor of the leader. For example, the group leader would break up some of the lesbian couples by inviting one of them to travel with him for a year and be his special assistant. But the girls liked to be seen by me and we would run into each other at the same dance clubs. I was just seeing them on the various dimensions they lived on, not judging.
Every cult is different, and each person taking their workshop or training has different weaknesses and strengths and responds to the manipulations in unique ways. That being said, some organizations do really deep damage to people, leaving them emotionally scarred for life and deeply depleted.
Los Angeles, where I live, is full of people who have had the emotional/spiritual equivalent of a bad facelift. Have you ever talked to someone who has had a face lift, and can't make any expressions? Their face looks smooth because the nerves have been cut or injected with Botox. An analogous process happens to people who have had their "ego" operated on by the workshop leader or guru. When they "rip the person's face off" they also rip all the connective tissue and millions of nerve connections, that never really grow back.
An opposite, but equally damaging, result is the spiritual equivalent of a chemical face peel. The pink skin underneath is unprotected, vulnerable to infection, and easily burned by the sun. Some people have both: they are numb and unable to express themselves properly, and also oversensitive. This is actually a very common result of being involved in mind/body workshops, especially ones in which the doctrine involves ego-busting. Women in particular are vulnerable to this.
Almost all groups are beneficial to a certain extent. Just know when to leave. And remember the story about the frog in water. If you drop a frog in boiling water, he will jump out. But if you gradually increase the heat, he will stay there and adapt, until by the time he is alarmed and wants to jump out, he is too weak to move. I would say about half the people I started meditating with in the 60's, who have joined various guru cults, are now too weak to leave. It has been too long, and they have done too much that undermines their ability to live independently.
This is why I am really grateful to Maharishi for giving us advance notice in 1974, saying basically, "It's been nice, having all you free spirits running around teaching Transcendental Meditation. But the party's over. I want the movement to be an army, marching in step. I want people to be able to walk into a TM center anywhere in the world and the same words, exactly, are being spoken." Because he had said this so blatantly, and turned the TM movement so quickly from a lively creative institution to a militaristic one, I was able to jump out.
Yoga is the Survivor of the Culture Wars
A fascinating series of articles on yogaThe Columbia Journalism Review has an article, Fear of Yoga, by Robert Love.
"Yoga is the Survivor of the culture wars: unbloodied, unmuddied, unbothered by the media’s slings and arrows, its leotard still as pristine as its reputation. Everybody loves yoga; sixteen and a half million Americans practice it regularly, and twenty-five million more say they will try it this year. If you’ve been awake and breathing air in the twenty-first century, you already know that this Hindu practice of health and spirituality has long ago moved on from the toe-ring set. Yoga is American; it has graced the cover of Time twice, acquired the approval of A-list celebrities like Madonna, Sting, and Jennifer Aniston, and is still the go-to trend story for editors and reporters, who produce an average of eight yoga stories a day in the English-speaking world.
Journalists love yoga because it fits perfectly into the narratives of everyday life. "Yoga Joins the Treatments for Kids with Disabilities," reported the Evansville Courier & Press this summer. "Yoga Helps Pregnant Women Prepare for Delivery," according to WNCN in North Carolina, an NBC affiliate, which recently broadcast a report about a prenatal yoga class offered by Healthy Moms in Raleigh. "Soldiers Shape up with Peaceful Yoga," an AP-bylined piece about how they are using yoga to both prepare for and recover from combat, ran in the Bradenton [Florida] Herald about the same time.
But wait, there’s more: Tribune Media syndicates a strip called Gangsta Yoga with DJ Dog, which appears in newspapers all over the nation from the Detroit Free Press to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Then there’s yoga to relax sex workers! from the Hindustan Times; and the revelation from Fort Worth, Texas, that yoga is replacing kickball in the city’s high school gym classes. Still not convinced? How about yoga skin care, Christian yoga, iPod yoga, golf yoga, tennis yoga . . . well, you get the picture."
BBC News has an article in their archives from 2005, about a prison in Norway that stopped having yoga classes because doing asanas brought up intense emotions in the prisoners.
"High-security Ringerike jail near Oslo offered the classes to eight inmates on a trial basis earlier this year. Prison warden Sigbjoern Hagen said some of the inmates became more irritable and agitated and had trouble sleeping. He said the prison did not have the resources to treat emotions unleashed by the deep breathing exercises." Link.
Cory Doctorow, one of the super-smart and funny geeks at Boing Boing, has his own take on yoga and emotion:
"A Norwegian prison has suspended yoga classes for prisoners because the intense emotions evoked by the exercises caused the inmates to become restive and violent. I kinda get this: when I started doing yoga, I would sometimes get into a pose and experience a great upwelling of sadness or anger and have a vivid flash of some past unpleasant experience. The yogic explanation is that the memory is "stored in your muscle," something I treat as allegorical (along with all the business about chakras, prana, etc). I practice yoga every day now, and credit it with keeping me sane and supple.
'The reactions we received from the prisoners who participated in the classes were very varied, ranging from completely positive to completely negative,' Mr Hagen reportedly wrote in a letter to the group.
On the negative side, the yoga had provoked 'strong reactions: agitation, aggression, irritability, trouble sleeping and mental confusion', he said." Link.
The online magazine Soul Jerky has an interesting review of Robert Love's essay. Link, which includes this interesting note: "My personal favorite nugget? In 1966, Rudolf Hess, the lone surviving Nazi in Spandau Prison, who was serving a life sentence for crimes against humanity, told a reporter that “his chief occupation now is practicing yoga on his cell floor.” It just goes to show you that Germany was way ahead of the USA in its popular fascination with the Indo-Tibetan religious diaspora. Yet while this is all well and good, it doesn't even touch the deeper issues surrounding the personal encounter of the yogic mindset with the individual in the west. What was it that attracted us despite all the bad press? What is it about these practices that are simultaneously so appealing, helpful, and potentially volatile? Lots of celebrity names are dropped: Cole Porter, Greta Garbo, Mae West, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Woodrow Wilson, Marilyn Monroe, Mia Farrow, Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithful, Donovan."
Maharishi Maha-Samadhi
One of my teachers from the 1960's and 70's, just died. Although when someone like Maharishi makes their exit, it is more like they merge with the ocean of light. Free at last from having to run a huge multinational corporation!
I learned Transcendental Meditation in 1968, at the TM center in Westwood, right next to the UCLA campus (University of California Los Angeles). During my TM instruction, I noticed that my instructor, Beulah Smith, said almost nothing. At the beginning, she sat with me, asked a few questions and listened. Then she gave me a couple of sentences of instructions, then we closed our eyes. Every few minutes, we would open our eyes and she asked me what I was experiencing. Then she gave me one sentence of instruction, and we closed our eyes again. Over the next few days, I realized that TM just worked, reliably. It was a beautiful and elegant approach to the technique of meditating.
I had been around inept meditation instruction before – mainly my own. I had been playing around with meditation for half a year, in early 1968, and people sometimes asked me to share with them what I was up to. My guidance was probably terrible, as there is an art to teaching, and I had no clue. Several years later, in 1970, I was trained as a teacher of Transcendental Meditation, and learned a system of how to instruct people – I learned how to guide people in the way Beulah had guided me. It turns out that Maharishi had evolved a beautiful and elegant system for mass-production meditation instruction.
It turns out that TM is based on a series of brilliant observations about the nature of the mind and body.
One of these insights was that someone learning to meditate needs to know, in the first minute, how to deal with thoughts and distractions. If they do not get this instruction right then, they will start to develop bad habits that may persist for a lifetime. TM developed a system to unobtrusively give the right instruction during that first minute, and as needed during the next twenty minutes, then first few days. About half an hour of one-to-one instruction, then six hours of group instruction over the next three days. If a new meditator gets this, they have a good shot at becoming able to meditate every day and thrive.
The second observation is that you can only learn the skills of meditation while you are meditating, or in the few seconds before or after doing a technique. You can talk about technique all you want, but it does not carry over into the meditative state. You have to be there to learn.
The third observation is that meditation happens spontaneously. The body and mind want to do it, and crave it as part of the natural rhythm of a day. If you know how, meditation can fit right in with your basic rhythm of life. In a 24-hour cycle, we are awake part of the time, then asleep, then dreaming. Meditation glides naturallly into that three-part rhythm, as a way of enhancing the transitions.
The fourth observation is that meditation is itself a rhythm, an alternation of activity and silence, a continual movement among levels of awareness.
TM teachers would not use the words I employ above – every word a TM teacher says is scripted. Memorized and scripted, and it's a good script. Deepak Chopra's books seem to be about 90% TM-speak. But TM contains all these insights, and more, in their system.
Put together, these observations make for a remarkably effective system of teaching meditation. One day in 1973 I was conducting a group meditation at the University of California at Irvine. The people in it had been meditating for a month to several years. At the break, a man came up to me and said,
“I started meditating a year ago and about half the people from my introductory course are here! I started TM with a group of 14 or 15 people, and I recognize 7 of them.”
I said, “Yeah.” I was feeling bad about the other 7 or 8 people who weren’t there.
“What do you think the follow-through rate is?” he asked.
“Maybe half, after a year. About half the people are still meditating every day,” I replied.
He said, “You are not getting what I am saying here. I’m an educator, I teach workshops, and having a 50% followthrough rate is unheard-of. If you are talking something you actually do every day, like meditate, the follow-through is perhaps 3% to 7%. With a lot of support, it might rise to 15%. But 50%? Nobody has a 50% follow-through rate."
It is surprising that no one has "cloned" TM's technology here. It is quite replicable. No one seems to be paying attention to the real skills involved in learning to meditate.
To give an example. I often find myself in the position of doing group meditations with assorted people – some have no training, some have taken many meditation courses, some do yoga, others have taken Buddhist month-long meditations. Say there are 25 people in the group. There are almost always three or four who close their eyes and look like they are at the beach, relaxing in the sun. Those are the people who were initiated into TM – often 25 years ago. When they close their eyes, there is no sign of strain on their faces, they are just glowing with quiet bliss. I always make a point of talking to those people afterwards, to find out what previous experience they have with meditation, and so often, they were initiated into TM in the early 70's, did it for a year or two, but the foundation of the training is still there with them. The other people in the group tend to show various signs of "trying" to meditate. Furrowed brows as they sit there "trying" to block out thoughts. "Trying" to concentrate.
From a training standpoint, this is really significant – that Maharishi made it possible for millions of people worldwide to learn something about ease in meditation. And further, that the training is permanent, in the sense that even decades later, people are able to meditate with ease – just close their eyes and rest blissfully. The skills of TM are in the muscle memory, and when you get it, you just know how to meditate. Like knowing how to ride a bicycle. You never really forget, even if you don't do it for years.
Leaving TM
I left the TM organization in 1975, because there was a war going on within the organization. During the middle 70's, robotic yet vicious cult members seized control of "The Movement" as we called it. Maharishi made it clear that he did not want any creativity in the organization. None. Only rote repetition. Memorize the script and stay on the message. "I want human gramophones," he said at a meeting in the middle 70's. (In case you don't know, a gramophone is the British term for phonograph – a record player.) Maharishi made his rationale for this very clear – he wanted the TM organization to be a living archive of his teachings, and keep it intact without any variation for centuries. He wanted someone to be able to walk into a TM center in the year 2208 and hear the exact same message that he had spent so much time developing.
An incident happened in 1975 that kind of says it all. I was then 25, and a somewhat "senior" TM teacher, having been an initiator since 1970, and I was giving the regular Wednesday evening introductory lecture at the center in Westwood. There were about two dozen people in the audience, and I arrived early, as always, and had chatted with everyone. Half the crowd, maybe 12 people, were already doing TM, and each was bringing one or two friends, who had already decided to learn TM. They weren't window-shopping, they were excited about starting. They were about the warmest audience I had ever seen.
So I gave a very breezy, fun lecture, in which I interacted with the audience a lot, answering their questions and putting everyone at ease. Afterwards all of the 12 people signed up to learn TM, because they had already decided to and I did not do anything to chase them away.
About 15 minutes after the lecture began, two young women walked in late, and sat in back. Over the course of the next half an hour, one of them became more and more restless, and started frowning. She was just scowling and trying to hit me with eye-lightning as she sat there simmering with what looked like rage and resentment. Finally at the end of the talk she raised her hand and screeched, "Aren't you going to TALK ABOUT THE SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH?" I said, "Well, no. We already discussed it briefly, before you got here." I glanced at the audience. They were DONE. They had gotten what they came for, were ready to make an appointment for personal instruction, and it would have been weird to start blathering on about physiology studies.
It turns out that the young woman had just come from being trained as a TM teacher, and Maharishi had emphasized very strongly that in every lecture, every TM teacher MUST talk about the scientific research on the physiology of meditation. So she filed a complaint against me, witnessed by her friend, that Lorin violated Maharishi's orders. And it was totally true, I had not followed the instructions that she had been given. There was a little meeting of bureaucrats in the center. They were a little embarrassed about it – the role of being thought police was sort of new to everyone – but they went ahead and made their ruling, which I only found out about later.
A week later when I arrived to give the Wednesday night lecture, a young man stood in the door and blocked my entrance. "For the sake of the Purity of the Teaching, I am going to give the lecture tonight," he said. And that was that. It turns out that there was an entire wave of people who could screech, "Maharishi says . . . " and then give some mind-numbingly stupid directive. They won the war, and drove everyone else out of the movement. No one is to blame for this – it's just what an ashram is. Resistance is futile.
There was a procedure they expected me to submit to – you were supposed to go before a board, and grovel, and be put on probation for a year, and sign documents pledging your obedience to the purity of the TM teaching. I knew, because friends had already submitted. I had no interest in all that, it did not resemble in any way the tone of my relationship with TM and Maharishi.
But the screechers were obeying Maharishi, who had made it very clear that everyone with an ounce of creativity should get OUT of his movement. He wanted ONLY people who would memorize the lines, march in step, and comply with each new directive. There was a mass exodus of most of the teachers like me – people who would give an evening lecture and then go dancing.
People have written books about this era of TM – how there were these petty tyrants running around, and every once in a while they would stop in front of you and say, "Maharishi says . . . " and then complete the sentence with something that gave them the power to abusive and dominate.
Most spiritual groups are less spiritual than your basic phone company – the pay is less, the stakes are higher, and the guru cannot ever be questioned, even in jest. There is no jest. Just ask anyone who has spent time in an ashram. The politics are amazingly vicious. Your immortal soul and your Enlightenment are at stake. All the TM teachers who were not interested in spending their lives playing dominance/submission games, left. The dominatrix types had a field day – Wow, an entire worldwide organization made up of people who, by staying, have agreed to be spanked!
Coincidentally, around that time, the middle to late 70's, the number of people starting TM in the United States dropped from thousands a month, to hundreds, then dozens. This was very strange because by that time, there were thousands of trained TM teachers in the US. So this meant that each TM teacher was not getting even one person to start, each year. And well over half a million people in the country had learned TM by then, so those people stopped bringing their friends to the TM centers to learn. Basically, people just stopped going to the TM centers to learn to meditate. And the TM "movement" did not seem to care. Their attention was on something else completely.
I think what may have happened is that Maharishi lost interest in teaching TM on a mass scale – "been there, done that," and got interested in running experiments in consciousness. Maharishi studied physics in college, and I think he wanted to run a huge "physics of consciousness" lab, with tens of thousands of volunteers. And to run those experiments, he needed to turn the TM movement into a kind of army, of people who march in step and are ruthless. They kind of people who if he says, "Jump" they jump. If he says, "I want a thousand people to go to Beirut, rent a couple of hotels, and practice levitation all day," they go.
Around 1977 or so, the TM movement embarked on a mass program to try to levitate. In the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, there is a series of sutras that talk about super-powers, the kind cartoon heros have: levitation, invisibility, the strength of an elephant, knowledge of previous incarnations, telepathy, and seeing the future. The whole focus of TM in the United States became to get all the teachers and all the half-million or more people who had learned TM, to go take expensive advanced courses and learn to levitate. Soon there were tens of thousands of Siddhas trying, but failing, to levitate, all across the United States and around the world.
A few years later, when Deepak Chopra became Maharishi's heir-apparent, there was a brief revival of new people starting TM. Then Maharishi drove Deepak out of the movement.
I have no idea of what would be like to run a huge, multinational organization with thousands of bureaucrats devoted to "preserving the purity of the teaching" and levitating. As far as I was concerned, Maharishi had his own deep and ineffable reasons for running his movement his way. I only benefitted from knowing him. When I left the TM movement, my heart ached for years at the loss of the community. TM is so cult-like that all my best friends, people I had been meditating and teaching with for 5 years, totally shunned me from then on. I often have clients or students who have been in the Transcendental Meditation community, over the past 30 years, and there is such a sense of deep fear. Fear of life. Fear of being polluted by thoughts different than TM-think. Fear of being led astray from the "purity of the teaching." Fear of being shunned by the community.
I am very grateful that Maharishi made it so clear that he did not want people like me in his movement. I am loyal to a flaw – way too loyal – and he had asked, I would have stayed and put up with all the creepiness.
During the time of my TM teacher training, Maharishi was very available. We could just go over to his room and talk to him. A few of us would sit on the floor for hours, while he conducted meetings and ran the TM organization. He was incredibly funny and could turn on a dime. I was usually the youngest and least important person in the room – I was 20 when I met him – but on the few occasions I said something, Maharishi listened intently and instantly incorporated what I said into his approach to the meeting.
Anyway, thank you Maharishi for a lifetime of amazing work. Your brilliant insights into the mind and body have guided me every day of the last 40 years, and blessed me immeasurably. I have taken the teachings you gave me and improved on them and created a good system for working with individuals and small groups, and every day I am grateful for the genius and ingenious teachings you gave me.