Leaving TM

In 1975, the TM movement, which had been my love, my life, my work, my circle of friends, my passion, my teacher, and all of my dreams, changed into something strange. All of a sudden there were people running around quoting Maharishi, saying “Maharishi says…” and then quoting something bureaucratic, tinged with fear, and sort of stupid in practice. It was as if Maharishi had become afraid of the worldwide organization he had created, and was giving orders from his lair in Switzerland to the circle of Germans surrounding him, orders that when passed down through the layers and layers of bureaucracy were just deadening. There was a Dr. Strangelove quality to the bureaucracy, as if everyone were reading from manuals.

I would send students of mine to Europe or Switzerland for teacher training, and starting in around 1973 they would come back 3 or 4 months later slightly crazy, filled with contempt for everyone back in the United States, as if they were all doing it wrong. They spent a lot of their energy in vicious turf wars and for a little while, the numbers of people starting TM continued, then declined severely as the hostile, robotic mood took over the whole organization.

The fear-driven people took over the administration of the TM organization and set about remaking it in their image, that of a cold bureaucracy. Pretty much everyone who had a molecule of free spirit in them left the TM organization in the middle 70’s. My heart ached for several years, I missed the whole thing. But the TM movement was now the TM stagnation.

On the other hand, this gave me time to explore what I was really interested – in which was how to customize the classic meditation practice to suit the individual nature of the people coming for instruction. Each person is so different.

As soon as I left the TM movement in 1975, I somehow got the reputation as someone you could go talk to if you were having issues with your meditation practice. In Los Angeles in 1975, there were probably over a thousand trained TM teachers and quite a few thousand meditators with many years of practice. And they were going to chiropractors, astrologers, health consultants, naturopaths, nutritionists, and psychics with odd problems that resisted treatment. For example, when talking to a TM teacher, the nutritionist or chiropractor would run into a TM-specific wall of denial and set of beliefs that made healing impossible. So they would send them to talk to me. Since I didn’t know anything, I would just listen to them, usually for two hours, and they would sort themselves out and heal themselves. All they needed was to be listened to.

Advanced meditators and TM teachers are extremely easy to work with as long as you allow lots of time. These are people who are utterly sincere, practice asana and meditation every day for more than an hour, have years of practice, and have amazing attention spans. The general problem was that they were not listening to their intuition, their inner guidance, their instinctive guidance. The quiet inner voice was being overwhelmed, shouted down by the authoritarian voice of the guru tradition, the huge mass of thought forms that is Hindu + meditation + yoga. All I did was listen and listen and listen and listen until they totally ran out of breath. They would just say, “Whew,” after 90 to 120 minutes, and fall into silence. Often, this silence became powerful, like Shaktipat. They were receiving a transmission from their own individual soul. They would open their eyes after half an hour and just know what they needed to do. It was different for each person - start eating meat and give up their weird diet, give up being a meditation teacher and go start that design business they were dreaming of, marry the person they loved and build a life, move to the place they wanted, meditate less, go back to Christianity and stop this dabbling in Hindu guru-worship. It was always personal, just for that individual, something they really needed to do.

No one had ever taken a “spiritual history” of these individuals, all the things they had done before starting meditation, what led them here, what setbacks they had, how they managed to keep going, what their hunches were. How did they feel when waking in the morning. I simply listened and asked leading questions, and made notes, and was able to listen with great interest for two hours or more, if needed. it was wonderful training for me, and after several years of doing this full-time, I wrote a book, The Dangers of Meditation, about what can go wrong with a meditation practice. I never got it published, although I tried hard to get it out there. But I did lecture on the topic for years and almost did my Ph.D. on the topic.

For me, this was familiar - I had started “teaching” meditation in 1968 as part of the scientific research. I would interview people about their experiences and take notes. Now I was back to this basic inquiry, hearing amazing first-person accounts from these explorers and adventurers in the field of consciousness.