From Lewis Lapham’s With the Beatles, about their 1968 pilgrimage to the ashram of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi:
“On Friday evening the Maharishi spoke to the entire student body in the lecture hall, charcoal fires burning in braziers set in rows against the whitewashed walls, candles flickering on the armrests of the wicker chairs, the night air softened with the scent of incense. Behind a bank of flowers and a battery of microphones, the Maharishi perched on his platform-sofa at the end of the hall nearest the river. A coquettish smile strayed across his face when he clapped his hands in joyous exclamation and announced the presence of the Beatles, ‘the blessed leaders of the world’s youth,’ seated in the front row just below the portrait of the Guru Dev. The announcement was both superfluous and late. The Beatles had arrived a few minutes before the Maharishi began to speak, and their entrance hadn’t gone unnoticed –– the four most famous musicians in the world vividly costumed in purple velvet and gold braid, their feminine accompaniment trailing behind them in white and orange silk, drifting into the candlelight at the slow and solemn pace of figures maybe once seen in a Christmas pageant or a psychedelic dream. Nobody needed to be told that the ashram had been blessed with a visitation of divine celebrity.
Satisfied with the omens, the Maharishi set about the task of conducting what I was told was his regular evening broadcast. He first asked how long everybody had managed to meditate since he’d last seen them, and when a Swedish woman eagerly raised her hand, he nodded in the manner of a proud and doting schoolmaster.
‘Yes?’ he said. ‘How long, please?’
‘Forty-two hours, Maharishi.’
‘Was the meditation harmonious?’
‘Oh yes, Maharishi, very harmonious.’
‘And do you remember anything of it?’
The Swedish woman looked down at her hands in an attitude of sheepish apology. ‘No, Maharishi.’
The yogi assured her that she had made no mistake, and then, directing his voice to the company at large, he asked if anybody could report forty-one hours. Hearing no response, he proceeded to count down the hours from forty, to thirty-nine, to thirty-eight, to thirty-seven. At thirty hours, a Canadian woman tentatively raised her hand to say she had accomplished three ten-hour segments interrupted by fifteen-minute breaks for warm milk and honey sandwiches.
‘And you felt what, please?’
The woman replied in the matter-of-fact voice of voice of a nurse reading a patients blood or urine test. ‘The usual disassociation from my body in the first segment’ she said, followed, in the second segment, ‘by a sensation of intense and pleasurable warmth.’ During the third segment she’d begun to sing old music-hall songs, the words to which she thought she’d forgotten.
The Maharishi continued his counting. At twenty-three hours, Gunther, the Lufthansa pilot, stood up to say that his friend, George, who didn’t understand English, had experience a feeling much like fainting, which had alarmed him. The Maharishi pronounced the difficulty irrelevant. ‘In hospitals they call it fainting, ‘ he said, ‘In Rishikesh we call it transcending.’ Meditations of less than seven hours didn’t warrant discussion, and the Maharishi asked only for a few show of hands. When he completed his review, he accepted more subtle questions from people curious about the distinction between ‘God-consciousness’ and ‘supreme knowledge,’ wanting to know whether ‘rapturous joy’ always accompanied ‘the descent into pure being.’ The answers were discursive and abstract, taking place in what Geoffrey later identified as the two dimensions of primary meaning, at the level of the root and the level of the leaf.
Before bringing the lesson to an end, the Maharishi cast his soft, almost feminine glance upon Prudence Farrow, Mia’s sistser, seated in the front row.
‘And Prudence?’
“Twelve hours, Maharishi.’
The answer was barely audible, but it so pleased the Maharishi that he pressed his hands together in praise of the Guru Dev, and then, turning toward a small altar decorated with ferns and palm fronds, he performed a ceremony involving the burning of sandalwood, the chanting of a Vedic scripture, and the ringing of tiny bells. The ritual inspired a good many of the older students in the hall to prostrate themselves at full length upon the cow dung floor.”
My next field trip, I’ve decided, is to visit Prudence Farrow (now Bruns?) and take a TM lesson from her in northwest Florida.
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