Spiritual Materialism on Steroids

Greetings from Utopia Park: Surviving a Transcendent Childhood by Claire Hoffman.  Harper Collins.  304 pp. ****

Until recently, I knew little about Transcendental Meditation and didn’t care much.  I’d heard about it in the old days along with everyone else.  I had several friends who did trained in it, including my old friend Allen Parker from Cambridge, who was a walking encyclopedia about spiritual movements and who had done the training when he was younger.  At the time they said they were giving him a mantra exclusively designed for him, but later there was an expose in Rolling Stone which said, among other things, that everyone in a certain age range had the same password, and listed them; sure enough, Allen had the password for his age group.  Eventually he substituted his own mantra, but kept meditating as long as I knew him.  I was trained in vipassana and Zen, and never used a mantra.  But it sounded okay to me.

I tuned in more recently when I re-united with an old friend from high school who had given his life to TM, working for the organization.  We hadn’t seen each other for fifty years, so we had a lot to catch up on.  He knew I meditated and had a million questions about my experience, but I noticed that, for whatever reason, he didn’t say much about his experience when I questioned him.  He did say that various studies insisted that TM was the one and only valid method of meditation, which I thought was idiotic, but he didn’t push that on me and wasn’t obnoxious about it.  We had great conversations in general, and I thought he was a sweet compassionate person.

It came up in various ways that he was low on funds.  That puzzled me, because I knew that TM charged a lot, and he’d worked for them for years.  He lived in the TM community in Fairfield, Iowa.  A little later he called and told me he’d gotten a job as director of the TM office in a major city, so I figured his problems were over.  But not long after that I heard from classmates that his car had broken down and he had no money to get a new one.  An extraordinarily generous member of my class gave him $5,000 for a used car, and he made do with that.  Later I heard he was having some health issues and was low on funds again.

My question for him when we got together for dinner was, Where does all the money go?  He said something vague about, well, we offer a lot of scholarships, which explained exactly nothing (if it didn’t cost so much they wouldn’t need scholarships).  One of my friends told me that a couple of years ago he had looked into signing up for the course, and there was a sliding scale; they wanted $950 from him.  He’s not a wealthy person.  He may not even have been at the top of the scale.[1]

In general, I don’t judge spiritual movements or various techniques.  But when the money gets extravagant, that’s a red flag for me.

Claire Hoffman is the child of that original group of TM practitioners.  Her parents met at a TM retreat, and Claire, as a child of five, got her mantra from a center in Manhattan for $35 (those were the days).  Children were told just to repeat the mantra to themselves for five minutes while they were doing other things, but having one made Claire feel part of the community.  Her older brother also got his mantra early on.  Their father, though taken with the practice, had ambitions as a writer, and went through the Iowa Writers Workshop.  He dragged the family to various places while he looked for work, and before long started having problems with alcohol.  The parents split up, and Claire’s mother, floundering without much money, decided to move to the TM community in Iowa, where she could at least be around like-minded people.

I still think there was something brilliant about the original mission of TM, suggesting that people meditate twice a day for twenty minutes at a pop.  The self-serving studies (conducted by their own scientists) showing that their method is the best one are preposterous, and the idea of a secret mantra is hokey, but I believe that if vast numbers of people meditated any old way twice a day, the world would be a better place.  Meditation is a profound practice that develops over time.  All of the supposed techniques lead eventually to a practice of just sitting in openness.

But Maharishi couldn’t leave it at that.  He had all kinds of ambitions both spiritual and financial—he apparently said that he charged so much for instruction just because Americans only valued something they paid substantial sums for—and he eventually assembled a group of 7,000 people to meditate together in Iowa for a month and bring about world peace.  Claire’s mother, though she didn’t have the entry fee (a secret admirer paid it for her), participated.  I’ve been to retreats with a hundred people, and I can imagine that 7,000 people meditating together might be exhilarating (how many bathrooms, I immediately want to ask), but did anyone notice, at the end of a month, that they hadn’t actually brought about World Peace?  Nobody mentions that fact.

Maharishi eventually said that if your practice was really sincere, you would be blessed not just with spiritual benefits, but with financial ones.  He thereby became the Reverend Ike of the Eastern world (“God will bless you financially”).  Claire’s poor mother, who was completely sincere, was not blessed financially, and they lived in one crummy house after another, using food stamps and going to the local public school (where kids mocked anyone from the TM community, calling them “gurus”); you would think the wealthy people in a religious community would help out those less fortunate, but that didn’t seem to happen.

Claire inherited her father’s bookish nature and is an excellent and entertaining writer.  She eventually rebelled against the TM community the way any teenager would.  Her father wandered back into the picture, sobered up and in recovery, and encouraged her rebellion.  He was, in many ways, a lot more fun than her mother.  And though Claire—who was a real beauty, and very attractive to the local boys—experimented with alcohol and drugs, she managed to pull up short of cocaine and not go entirely haywire, as some of her friends were doing.  She got away to California with her father and went to college, eventually to divinity school and a journalism program, found various good jobs and established herself as a writer.  This book was her first (her second, which came out recently, was about Amy Semple Mcpherson).

As people will do when they get older and have a family, she began to wonder if there wasn’t something helpful in the religion she had left, returned to Fairfield and began to participate again.  By that time Maharishi had died, but his movement, and that community, continued.  She finds something worthwhile in meditation, and has continued the practice.  But she definitely sees the flaws in a movement that had made so many outrageous claims and became what I can’t help seeing as a cult.

There are, of course, many celebrity TM practitioners, including David Lynch, Clint Eastwood, Jerry Seinfeld (what a trio).  Lynch in particular was taken with the practice, instrumental in spreading it, and eventually established a foundation to offer scholarships to those who wanted to take it up.  He spoke of it as being an aid to his creativity, and I’m sure that’s true.  Any practice that takes you into that vast spacious part of your mind will spark creativity.

I was left with the feeling that, if people like Lynch could promote TM, it could settle back into its original function of encouraging lots of people to meditate, and give up on goals like financial blessing and world peace (we seem further away from that than ever).  Maharishi should have quit while he was ahead.  He had an opportunity to do enormous good.  But he got ambitious.

[1] We charge nothing for meditation instruction at my Zen Center, and I sometimes teach a six week class that costs $60.