Esquire
July 7, 2021
This article originally appeared in the June 1968 issue of Esquire. Titled, Yes, We Have No Nirvanas, it contains outdated and potentially offensive descriptions of spirituality, race, and class. You can find every Esquire story ever published at Esquire Classic.
A Unitarian minister heard that I had been to see Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, guru to The Beatles and Donovan and Mia Farrow, and he asked me, "Is he a fake?” His name is Charley. Unitarians don’t believe anything. I am a Unitarian.
“No,” I said. “It made me happy just to see him. His vibrations are lovely and profound. He teaches that man was not born to suffer and will not suffer if he practices Transcendental Meditation, which is easy as pie.”
“I can’t tell whether you’re kidding or not.”
“I better not be kidding, Charley.”
“Why do you say that so grimly?”
“Because my wife and eighteen-year-old daughter are hooked. They’ve both been initiated. They meditate several times a day. Nothing pisses them off anymore. They glow like bass drums with lights inside.”
I saw Maharishi in Cambridge, Massachusetts, after my daughter got hooked, before my wife got hooked, and on the very day that Mia Farrow got hooked. This was last January. Miss Farrow had been suggesting for about a year that she was a Transcendental Meditator, but that was the bunk. She had merely been hankering to be one. You can’t be the real thing without an initiation.
And not just any Transcendental Meditator can turn you on. Maharishi has to do it, which would be a great honor, or one of the few teachers he has trained. Miss Farrow got the great honor in Maharishi’s hotel room in Cambridge. My wife and daughter had to make do with a teacher in the apartment of a Boston painter and jazz musician who meditates.
Maharishi says that his thing is not a religion but a technique.
There is private stuff, but no secret stuff in the initiation. You go to several public lectures first, which are cheerful and encouraging. You are told lovingly that this thing is easy, never fails to make a person more blissful and virtuous and effective, if it is done correctly. The lecturer does not explain what meditation feels like because he cannot. It must be experienced, he says.
So you ask for an interview with the teacher, and during that he asks you a little about yourself. He will want to know if you are on drugs or drunk or under psychiatric treatment or plain crazy. You have to be clean and sober and sane, or you won’t be initiated. If you’re under treatment for mental kinks, you will be told to come back when the treatment is complete.
If the teacher thinks you’re okay, you’re told to go to a certain address at such and such a time, and to bring as gifts a handkerchief, some fresh fruit, some flowers, and $75. If you are a student or a housewife, you bring $35.
So I have $70 in this new religion so far. Maharishi says that his thing is not a religion but a technique. Still, at cocktail parties every so often, I can be heard to say sulkily, often within earshot of my wife or daughter, “I’ve got seventy goddamn simoleons in this new religion so far.”
The money goes into traveling expenses for the Master and his teachers, and they don’t live very high, and a decent set of books is kept, and the books are open. This is not Southern California religion. Sergeant Friday is not about to appear.
Only you and your teacher are present at your initiation into this thing that, to its followers, is so definitely not a religion. And there is candlelight and incense, and there are small pictures of Maharishi and his deceased Master, who was His Divinity Swami Brahmananda Saraswati, Jagadguru Bhagwan Shankaracharya of Jyotir Math.
Your teacher, most likely a fellow American in a business suit, will give you your own private mantra, a sound which, when contemplated, will begin your descent into your own mind. This giving of sounds, usually Sanskrit words, is the teacher’s especial art, or, I beg your pardon, science.
My wife asked a teacher how he knew what sound to give to each person, and he said it was a complex thing to explain. “But, believe me,” he said, “it is a science.”
That science sure worked for her. The instant she heard her mantra for the first time, down, down, down she went, free diving in her mind. There is rapture in those depths. Everybody who has been down there says so. And many of Maharishi’s mind divers speak as experts when they say the rapture is infinitely more beautiful and revealing than any jag.
And the fuzz can’t bust you.
This new religion (which-is-not-a-religion-but-a-technique) offers tremendous pleasure, opposes no existing institutions or attitudes, demands no sacrifices or outward demonstrations of virtue, and is absolutely risk free. It will sweep the middle classes of the world as the planet dies—as the planet is surely dying—of poisoned air and water.
The publicity has been spectacular. Last January, when I asked to interview His Holiness, which is the proper term of address for Maharishi, I was told by an aide to come to his hotel in Cambridge “at once.” He didn’t care who I was, not that I am anybody. I was simply more publicity. Transcendental Meditators want all the publicity they can get, because they honestly believe that the technique can save the world.
How?
“Unless one is happy, one cannot be at peace,” says Maharishi in The Science of Being and Art of Living (International Spiritual Regeneration Movement Publications, 1966). “All the praiseworthy aims of the United Nations only scratch the surface of the problem of world peace. If the minds and resources of statesmen in all countries could be used to popularize and effectively bring to individuals the practice of Transcendental Meditation, the face of the world would be changed overnight. . . . As long as statesmen remain ignorant of the possibility of improving the lives of individuals from within and thereby bringing them abundant peace, happiness, and creative intelligence, the problem of world peace will always be dealt with only on the surface, and the world will continue to suffer its cold and hot wars.”
Maharishi came out of his room, having meditated, and so many reporters had been promised personal interviews that he had to hold a monster press conference in the hotel ball room.
“What do you do about somebody like Lyndon Johnson or George Wallace?” I asked a follower at Maharishi’s hotel. We were in a mostly young, all-white crowd milling outside the Master’s locked door. The boy I asked was a Boston University student and guitar player. “You expect to get them to meditate?”
“Even if they don’t,” he said, “they will still change for the better because people all around them will be changing for the better through Transcendental Meditation.”
So there is another attractive feature of the new religion: Every time you dive into your own mind, you are actually dealing effectively with the issues of the day.
There was a middle-aged lady outside the door who wanted to talk to the Master in order to find out if she was meditating correctly. She didn’t think so. Diving into her mind, I gathered, was about as much fun as diving into Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River.
“Is it dangerous not to do it right?” I asked her. “Could people get sick or go crazy?”
“No, no,” she said. “The worst that can happen is that you might be disappointed.”
That’s a long way from being hung up on a cross or thrown to the lions. And an aide came up to me with an armload of newspapers and magazines, which he said I could have. There were big articles about Maharishi in all of them—Look, Life, Time, Newsweek, The National Observer, the Boston Herald Traveler, The Boston Globe, The New York Times Magazine. There were three big news stories that week: heart transplants, the capture of the Pueblo, and Maharishi. Maharishi had also made enchanting appearances on The Today Show, Johnny Carson's Tonight Show, and National Educational Television.
I said to the aide, “With all this publicity, thousands of people are going to want to do this thing right away. Is there some book or pamphlet they can get?”
“No,” he said, “and there never will be. A teacher has to show you how to experience the subtle states of thinking, and then he has to check your experiences as you proceed down the path.”
“Look,” I said, “can't I go to a meditator and say, ‘Come on, tell me how you do it, and then I'll do it the same way’?”
“You'll be disappointed,” he said.
The boy from Boston University chimed in. He said he knew a girl who gave her boyfriend her mantra. You're not supposed to tell anybody what your mantra is, but this girl did.
“Is that a terrible thing to do?” I asked.
The boy and the aide shrugged. “There are no terrible things you can do. It was an unwise thing to do,” said the aide.
I was still curious. “What happened to the boyfriend when he used his girl's mantra?”
“He was disappointed.”
Maharishi came out of his room, having meditated, and so many reporters had been promised personal interviews that he had to hold a monster press conference in the hotel ball room. So we went down there, and his deerskin was put on a stage, and he sat on that, played with a bouquet of yellow chrysanthemums, and invited people to ask him anything they liked.
He is a darling man—small, golden-brown, a giggler with a grey beard and broad shoulders and a thick chest. You might guess from his muscular arms and thick wrists that he had done hard labor during most of his fifty-six years, which would be wrong. Maharishi started out to be a physicist, took a Bachelor of Science degree at Allahabad University, Cyril Dunn says in the London Observer. Maharishi gives out no information about himself. A monk isn't supposed to.
Right after he graduated, he became a monk, learned from his masters the easy way to meditate. The easy technique, incidentally, wasn't much respected by many other gurus, who were trying to achieve bliss by methods notoriously arduous and often grotesque. Maharishi's master, on his deathbed, told Maharishi to go out into the world and teach the easy thing. This Maharishi has been doing for ten years. At the end of this year, he will go back into seclusion in India as a simple monk, never again to be a public man. He is said to have gathered a quarter of a million followers throughout the world. The teachers among them will continue to turn people on.
So I sat there on a folding chair in the ballroom, with a couple of hundred Transcendental Meditators behind me. I closed my eyes, waited to be wafted to mysterious India by the poetry of this holy man.
“Maharishi,” said a reporter, “don't you feel a terrible sense of urgency about the state of the world? Don't you think things are getting awfully black awfully fast?”
“You cannot call a room truly black,” said His Holiness, “if you know where the light switch is, and you know how to turn it on.”
“You say that the mind naturally seeks its own happiness. What’s your evidence for this?”
“If a man sits between two radios tuned to different stations,” said Maharishi, “he will naturally turn his attention to the program which pleases him most.”
“What are your feelings about civil rights?”
“What are they?” he asked.
Civil rights were explained to him in terms of black people who, because they were black, couldn’t get nice houses or good educations or jobs.
Maharishi replied that any oppressed person could rise by practicing Transcendental Meditation. He would automatically do his job better, and the economy would pay him more, and then he could buy anything he wanted. He wouldn’t be oppressed anymore. In other words, he should quit bitching, begin to meditate, grasp his garters, and float into a commanding position in the marketplace, where transactions are always fair.
And I opened my eyes, and I took a hard look at Maharishi. He hadn’t wafted me to India. He had sent me back to Schenectady, New York, where I used to be a public-relations man—years and years ago. That was where I had heard other euphoric men talk of the human condition in terms of switches and radios and the fairness of the marketplace. They, too, thought it was ridiculous for people to be unhappy, when there were so many simple things they could do to improve their lot. They, too, had Bachelor of Science degrees. Maharishi had come all the way from India to speak to the American people like a General Electric engineer.
Maharishi was asked his opinions of Jesus Christ. He had some. He prefaced them with this dependent clause: “From what people have told me about Him—” Here was a man who had unselfishly spent years of his life in American and northern European hotel rooms, teaching Christians how to save the world. There had to be Gideon Bibles in most of those rooms. Yet, Maharishi had never opened one to find out what Jesus said, exactly.
“Unless one is happy, one cannot be at peace,” says Maharishi in The Science of Being and Art of Living (International Spiritual Regeneration Movement Publications, 1966). “All the praiseworthy aims of the United Nations only scratch the surface of the problem of world peace. If the minds and resources of statesmen in all countries could be used to popularize and effectively bring to individuals the practice of Transcendental Meditation, the face of the world would be changed overnight. . . . As long as statesmen remain ignorant of the possibility of improving the lives of individuals from within and thereby bringing them abundant peace, happiness, and creative intelligence, the problem of world peace will always be dealt with only on the surface, and the world will continue to suffer its cold and hot wars.”
Maharishi came out of his room, having meditated, and so many reporters had been promised personal interviews that he had to hold a monster press conference in the hotel ball room.
“What do you do about somebody like Lyndon Johnson or George Wallace?” I asked a follower at Maharishi’s hotel. We were in a mostly young, all-white crowd milling outside the Master’s locked door. The boy I asked was a Boston University student and guitar player. “You expect to get them to meditate?”
“Even if they don’t,” he said, “they will still change for the better because people all around them will be changing for the better through Transcendental Meditation.”
So there is another attractive feature of the new religion: Every time you dive into your own mind, you are actually dealing effectively with the issues of the day.
There was a middle-aged lady outside the door who wanted to talk to the Master in order to find out if she was meditating correctly. She didn’t think so. Diving into her mind, I gathered, was about as much fun as diving into Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River.
“Is it dangerous not to do it right?” I asked her. “Could people get sick or go crazy?”
“No, no,” she said. “The worst that can happen is that you might be disappointed.”
That’s a long way from being hung up on a cross or thrown to the lions. And an aide came up to me with an armload of newspapers and magazines, which he said I could have. There were big articles about Maharishi in all of them—Look, Life, Time, Newsweek, The National Observer, the Boston Herald Traveler, The Boston Globe, The New York Times Magazine. There were three big news stories that week: heart transplants, the capture of the Pueblo, and Maharishi. Maharishi had also made enchanting appearances on The Today Show, Johnny Carson's Tonight Show, and National Educational Television.
I said to the aide, “With all this publicity, thousands of people are going to want to do this thing right away. Is there some book or pamphlet they can get?”
“No,” he said, “and there never will be. A teacher has to show you how to experience the subtle states of thinking, and then he has to check your experiences as you proceed down the path.”
“Look,” I said, “can't I go to a meditator and say, ‘Come on, tell me how you do it, and then I'll do it the same way’?”
“You'll be disappointed,” he said.
The boy from Boston University chimed in. He said he knew a girl who gave her boyfriend her mantra. You're not supposed to tell anybody what your mantra is, but this girl did.
“Is that a terrible thing to do?” I asked.
The boy and the aide shrugged. “There are no terrible things you can do. It was an unwise thing to do,” said the aide.
I was still curious. “What happened to the boyfriend when he used his girl's mantra?”
“He was disappointed.”
Maharishi came out of his room, having meditated, and so many reporters had been promised personal interviews that he had to hold a monster press conference in the hotel ball room. So we went down there, and his deerskin was put on a stage, and he sat on that, played with a bouquet of yellow chrysanthemums, and invited people to ask him anything they liked.
He is a darling man—small, golden-brown, a giggler with a grey beard and broad shoulders and a thick chest. You might guess from his muscular arms and thick wrists that he had done hard labor during most of his fifty-six years, which would be wrong. Maharishi started out to be a physicist, took a Bachelor of Science degree at Allahabad University, Cyril Dunn says in the London Observer. Maharishi gives out no information about himself. A monk isn't supposed to.
Right after he graduated, he became a monk, learned from his masters the easy way to meditate. The easy technique, incidentally, wasn't much respected by many other gurus, who were trying to achieve bliss by methods notoriously arduous and often grotesque. Maharishi's master, on his deathbed, told Maharishi to go out into the world and teach the easy thing. This Maharishi has been doing for ten years. At the end of this year, he will go back into seclusion in India as a simple monk, never again to be a public man. He is said to have gathered a quarter of a million followers throughout the world. The teachers among them will continue to turn people on.
So I sat there on a folding chair in the ballroom, with a couple of hundred Transcendental Meditators behind me. I closed my eyes, waited to be wafted to mysterious India by the poetry of this holy man.
“Maharishi,” said a reporter, “don't you feel a terrible sense of urgency about the state of the world? Don't you think things are getting awfully black awfully fast?”
“You cannot call a room truly black,” said His Holiness, “if you know where the light switch is, and you know how to turn it on.”
“You say that the mind naturally seeks its own happiness. What’s your evidence for this?”
“If a man sits between two radios tuned to different stations,” said Maharishi, “he will naturally turn his attention to the program which pleases him most.”
“What are your feelings about civil rights?”
“What are they?” he asked.
Civil rights were explained to him in terms of black people who, because they were black, couldn’t get nice houses or good educations or jobs.
Maharishi replied that any oppressed person could rise by practicing Transcendental Meditation. He would automatically do his job better, and the economy would pay him more, and then he could buy anything he wanted. He wouldn’t be oppressed anymore. In other words, he should quit bitching, begin to meditate, grasp his garters, and float into a commanding position in the marketplace, where transactions are always fair.
And I opened my eyes, and I took a hard look at Maharishi. He hadn’t wafted me to India. He had sent me back to Schenectady, New York, where I used to be a public-relations man—years and years ago. That was where I had heard other euphoric men talk of the human condition in terms of switches and radios and the fairness of the marketplace. They, too, thought it was ridiculous for people to be unhappy, when there were so many simple things they could do to improve their lot. They, too, had Bachelor of Science degrees. Maharishi had come all the way from India to speak to the American people like a General Electric engineer.
Maharishi was asked his opinions of Jesus Christ. He had some. He prefaced them with this dependent clause: “From what people have told me about Him—” Here was a man who had unselfishly spent years of his life in American and northern European hotel rooms, teaching Christians how to save the world. There had to be Gideon Bibles in most of those rooms. Yet, Maharishi had never opened one to find out what Jesus said, exactly.
Some searching mind.
He suggested that Jesus might have been onto something like Transcendental Meditation, but that it was garbled and lost by his followers. A few moments later he said that Jesus and the early Christian saints had mistakenly allowed their minds to wander. “You must have control,” he said. The wandering minds of Jesus and the saints had led to what Maharishi called “an absurdity,” an emphasis on faith.
“Faith, at best,” he declared, “can let a man live and die in hope. The churches are driving people away because that is all they have to offer.” We were back in the marketplace again: churches were offering sugar pills, whereas Maharishi had a nonprescription drug that packed the kick of a siege howitzer. Which will you choose?
I went outside the hotel after that, liking Jesus better than I had ever liked Him before. I wanted to see a crucifix, so I could say to it, “You know why You’re up there? It’s Your own fault. You should have practiced Transcendental Meditation, which is easy as pie. You would also have been a better carpenter.”
And I ran into a Harvard dean I knew. I only know one Harvard dean, and that’s the one I ran into. Maharishi had packed Sanders Theatre the night before, so Harvard knew all about the Master, and I asked the dean if Transcendental Meditation would be the next student craze.
All that keeps me from becoming a meditator myself is laziness.
He suggested that Jesus might have been onto something like Transcendental Meditation, but that it was garbled and lost by his followers. A few moments later he said that Jesus and the early Christian saints had mistakenly allowed their minds to wander. “You must have control,” he said. The wandering minds of Jesus and the saints had led to what Maharishi called “an absurdity,” an emphasis on faith.
“Faith, at best,” he declared, “can let a man live and die in hope. The churches are driving people away because that is all they have to offer.” We were back in the marketplace again: churches were offering sugar pills, whereas Maharishi had a nonprescription drug that packed the kick of a siege howitzer. Which will you choose?
I went outside the hotel after that, liking Jesus better than I had ever liked Him before. I wanted to see a crucifix, so I could say to it, “You know why You’re up there? It’s Your own fault. You should have practiced Transcendental Meditation, which is easy as pie. You would also have been a better carpenter.”
And I ran into a Harvard dean I knew. I only know one Harvard dean, and that’s the one I ran into. Maharishi had packed Sanders Theatre the night before, so Harvard knew all about the Master, and I asked the dean if Transcendental Meditation would be the next student craze.
All that keeps me from becoming a meditator myself is laziness.
“A lot of students walked out last night, as you may have noticed,” he said.
“That burned up my wife and daughter,” I said.
“The students I’ve heard talking about Maharishi seem to consider his teachings at least slightly beneath them,” he went on. “The people who really go for this thing are The Boston Tea Party crowd.” The Boston Tea Party is a rhythm-and-blues joint in a red brick church in Boston’s south end. The patrons and musicians are mainly college kids and mainly white. The joint is the home of the so-called “Bosstown Sound,” which Newsweek says is “anti-hippie and anti-drugs.”
“It seems like a very good religion for people who, in troubled times, don’t want any trouble,” I said.
“There’s a Harvard pole-vaulter who claims he is jumping higher and higher all the time, thanks to Maharishi,” said the dean.
“And the crowd cheers.”
My daughter, who has always been a good artist, says that she is a much better artist now, thanks to Maharishi. My wife, who was a good writer in college, is going to take up writing again. They tell me that I would write much better and be more cheerful about it if I went skin diving into my own mind twice a day. And I drag myself around the house like a gutshot bear.
All that keeps me from becoming a meditator myself is laziness. I would have to get out of the house and go to Boston, and spend several nights there. Also: I doubt that I have the courage and the humorlessness to present myself at somebody’s apartment door with fruit, flowers, a clean handkerchief, and a gift of seventy-five dollars.
“If this thing is so good,” I say, “why doesn’t Maharishi take it right into the slums, where people are really suffering?”
So I say mean things to my wife like, “What kind of a holy man is it that talks economics like a traveling secretary of the National Association of Manufacturers?”
“People make him talk economics. He doesn’t want to talk about them. They aren’t his field.” Ah, how definite was each sentence.
“How come he bombed in India, the home of meditators, and then had great success with middle-class people in Scandinavia and West Germany and Great Britain and America?”
“For many complicated reasons, no doubt.”
“Maybe it’s because he talks economics like a traveling secretary of the National Association of Manufacturers.”
“Think what you like,” she says, loving me, loving me, loving me. She smiles.
“If this thing is so good,” I say, “why doesn’t Maharishi take it right into the slums, where people are really suffering?”
“Because he wants to spread the word as fast as possible, and the best way to do that is to start with influential people,” says my wife.
“Like The Beatles.”
“Among others.”
“I can see where influential people would like Maharishi better than Jesus. My God, if The Beatles and Mia Farrow went to Jesus, He’d tell ’em to give all their money away.” And my wife smiles.
“Listen,” I say to my daughter, “everybody who meditates correctly automatically does his job better. Right?”
“Right.” She is at that mij.
Kurt Vonnegut, 1969
“So, if a guy from the Mafia meditates, the rackets and killings are going to be better than ever. Right?”
“No. He’ll learn through meditation that he is serving evil, and he’ll stop doing it.”
There is a silence.
“Well,” I say at last, “I’m glad you’ve got this thing going for you. Hell, I never gave you any religion at all, and everybody’s got to have some. Especially now.”
“That burned up my wife and daughter,” I said.
“The students I’ve heard talking about Maharishi seem to consider his teachings at least slightly beneath them,” he went on. “The people who really go for this thing are The Boston Tea Party crowd.” The Boston Tea Party is a rhythm-and-blues joint in a red brick church in Boston’s south end. The patrons and musicians are mainly college kids and mainly white. The joint is the home of the so-called “Bosstown Sound,” which Newsweek says is “anti-hippie and anti-drugs.”
“It seems like a very good religion for people who, in troubled times, don’t want any trouble,” I said.
“There’s a Harvard pole-vaulter who claims he is jumping higher and higher all the time, thanks to Maharishi,” said the dean.
“And the crowd cheers.”
My daughter, who has always been a good artist, says that she is a much better artist now, thanks to Maharishi. My wife, who was a good writer in college, is going to take up writing again. They tell me that I would write much better and be more cheerful about it if I went skin diving into my own mind twice a day. And I drag myself around the house like a gutshot bear.
All that keeps me from becoming a meditator myself is laziness. I would have to get out of the house and go to Boston, and spend several nights there. Also: I doubt that I have the courage and the humorlessness to present myself at somebody’s apartment door with fruit, flowers, a clean handkerchief, and a gift of seventy-five dollars.
“If this thing is so good,” I say, “why doesn’t Maharishi take it right into the slums, where people are really suffering?”
So I say mean things to my wife like, “What kind of a holy man is it that talks economics like a traveling secretary of the National Association of Manufacturers?”
“People make him talk economics. He doesn’t want to talk about them. They aren’t his field.” Ah, how definite was each sentence.
“How come he bombed in India, the home of meditators, and then had great success with middle-class people in Scandinavia and West Germany and Great Britain and America?”
“For many complicated reasons, no doubt.”
“Maybe it’s because he talks economics like a traveling secretary of the National Association of Manufacturers.”
“Think what you like,” she says, loving me, loving me, loving me. She smiles.
“If this thing is so good,” I say, “why doesn’t Maharishi take it right into the slums, where people are really suffering?”
“Because he wants to spread the word as fast as possible, and the best way to do that is to start with influential people,” says my wife.
“Like The Beatles.”
“Among others.”
“I can see where influential people would like Maharishi better than Jesus. My God, if The Beatles and Mia Farrow went to Jesus, He’d tell ’em to give all their money away.” And my wife smiles.
“Listen,” I say to my daughter, “everybody who meditates correctly automatically does his job better. Right?”
“Right.” She is at that mij.
Kurt Vonnegut, 1969
“So, if a guy from the Mafia meditates, the rackets and killings are going to be better than ever. Right?”
“No. He’ll learn through meditation that he is serving evil, and he’ll stop doing it.”
There is a silence.
“Well,” I say at last, “I’m glad you’ve got this thing going for you. Hell, I never gave you any religion at all, and everybody’s got to have some. Especially now.”
No comments:
Post a Comment