Transcendental Meditation in America: How a New Age Movement Remade a Small Town in Iowa

2. Going for Baroque

16 ° chapter 2 To get a sense ofwheretheTMMovementisandwhereit’sheaded, it helps to know where it’s been. Fairfielders such as a movement veteran we’ll call Dale offer a special window on TM’s past and likely future. (I have withheld Dale’s real name because he feared his comments would appear out of context and was uncomfortable about appearing in this book.) Dale took up TM-style meditation in 1971, trained in Europe to teach the technique, and studied its philosophy further at the movement’s nascent university in Goleta, California, in 1973. Today, Dale lives in a modest, environmentally sensitive home in an area near the Abundance EcoVillage, a small development of homes about three miles from the center of Fairfield. Residents rely on the sun for heating and cooling, are careful to use renewable resources, and recycle. Their homes are built in accordance with architectural principles laid down by Maharishi. In 2006 Dale broke with the movement and abandoned TM-style meditation after thirty-five years. For years, he says, TM gave him “better health and dynamism” in his life. But over time, he grew troubled by the message— which he and other TM instructors gave initiates from the outset—that all other meditation techniques were either a “waste of time or dangerous.” He now says the approach “set me up to become a narrow-minded true believer.” “Can the TM Movement share this excellent meditation technique and the theoretic knowledge that Maharishi brought out without promising perfection and putting down other self-development programs?” Dale asks. “I hope so. I hope that current TM promoters realize the world is getting tired 2 Going for Baroque going for baroque ° 17 of partisanship. We see it daily in politics and religion. If TM is promoted as the only way, it will be rejected.” The movement began simply, offering followers a powerful and simple daily meditative technique. Devotees had only to close their eyes, ponder a mantra for twenty minutes, twice each day, and they would feel better. In time, the movement promised much more. It promised to provide the key to solving all problems—mental, physical, even economic—for faithful practitioners . Great life-altering things would flow from TM, teachers told new followers. As the years passed, the movement expanded into offering natural medicines, elixirs, and teas to heal the body and soothe the spirit. Later, it provided an architectural style that claimed to promote good fortune and even good health. It moved far beyond the no-muss, no-fuss, mantra-based meditation one could do alone at home into Yogic Flying, where meditators hopped about on mattresses, aspiring to get to the point when they could defy gravity and levitate. TM, it was said, could give practitioners the power to become invisible and to move through walls. Leaders claimed that if enough meditators practiced in groups regularly, they could move stock markets, reduce crime rates, and spawn world peace. Movement officials even created a political party, running candidates for high office around the country, including the presidency of the United States. In sheer numbers, the movement’s high-water mark came and went in the 1970s. Recruitments swelled in the opening half of the decade as Maharishi became a media darling and the toast of wealthy and influential people. Later, though, as the group’s practices and offerings grew more closely tied to their ancient Indian roots, the tide turned. Early on, TM was easy, seemingly nonreligious, and inexpensive. Some devotees, especially those who had begun following the guru in the 1960s, saw meditation and the guru’s teachings as spiritual. But for tens of thousands of casual practitioners, TM amounted to little more than a relaxing daily mini-vacation, a psychic timeout from the American rat race. It was also a handy way for rebellious Baby Boomers to set themselves apart from their elders, to blaze a new path of their own. Many turned away, however, as TM’s baroque period unfolded. The period began in the mid-1970s as the group’s activities in Fairfield expanded. 18 ° chapter 2 It deepened as the town became a center for thousands of devotees who believed they could change history—an estimated seven thousand visited for a “Taste of Utopia” course in 1983–84. Much as a painter might move from splashingsimpleimageryonacanvastocreatingelaborateanddetailedworks, themovementbuilton its modestfirstofferings.Asitgrewmoreornate,however ,itsannualinitiationratesbegantodwindle.Itsonce-thrivingchapterson collegecampusesshrankanddisappeared.Mockedbysomebefore,itbecame even more a...