Ron and His Life in Transcendental Meditation

Ron and His Life in Transcendental Meditation

I’ve known Ron for more than 70 years. His family came to our neighborhood in the 1950s. His father was an accountant and worked for one of two lumber yards in the small town where we lived in central Rhode Island. Despite being extremely conservative, his family helped family members in need and gave my family a substantial check when their coffee/lunch shop burned to the ground at the beginning of the decade of the 1960s. I was never close to Ron. He was friends with my brother because they were close in age.

Ron developed a reputation as an individualist. He was asked to leave the high school in a neighboring city, a Catholic school, for refusing to wear sneakers which were part of the rule structure of that school. My parents took Ron on as a surrogate child because he was seen by them as largely not wanted, which was an unsubstantiated rumor.

By the early part of the decade of the 1970s, Ron became an adherent of the Transcendental Meditation movement and traveled to Europe where he attended formal education in the program. The TM program was part of the societal transition from somewhat selfless endeavors of the youth movement to the me view of life. That paralleled, in some ways, the movement of youth from idealism in some cases to careerism.

When Ron returned from Europe, he seemed to be so immersed in the movement that almost everyone he encountered was seen as a potential convert to the movement and his proselytizing appeared endless to me. I saw him sporadically over the following decades, and despite the fall from fame of the TM movement, Ron kept up his strict adherence to the program and eventually lived in Iowa adjacent to the university that the founder Maharishi Mahesh Yogi established there. He also founded a successful art business.

Communication with Ron became very sporadic. He seemed to gravitate toward me when my brother stopped interacting with him, using the excuse that they needed to view their childhood relationship in the context of the past and go on with their lives. I think that I became a kind of surrogate friend for Ron in the absence of my brother’s friendship with him.

When I communicate with Ron now, his proselytizing seems more cultish than ever despite the fall in numbers of adherents to the TM movement. Recently, Ron told me that he had been given the task of scientifically proving that members of TM’s Sidhi movement experienced what some have labelled “yogic flying,” or levitation. There is no scientific evidence for the existence of such feats beyond the pale of human experience. Indeed, expanded consciousness, which TM holds is a result of their meditation program of education and practice, is equally impossible to prove. I think that relaxation and possible health benefits of meditating are perhaps the best that can be expected. The latter is not inconsequential, but there are free programs of meditation that teach similar practices and compare to the $1,500 for initiation in TM.

At one point in the Transcendental Meditation movement, an event called the Maharishi effect was championed. The practice held that if enough adherents of TM gathered in one place, then the result of peacefulness would expand to that area. Looking out from my study window this morning, I can see where that view is going.

Over time, I could not, in my opinion, have a conversation with Ron that focused on much more than tired nostalgia and constant references to his view of the TM movement, a persistent object of his interactions that seemed childish and cultish to me. In the early 1970s, my mother observed that Ron had traded one form of orthodox religion for another. During that time, he spent lots of time at my childhood home rather than at his own house across the street from ours. Ron claimed to have successfully instructed my father in the practice of TM, although I did not see any benefit accruing to my father from that instruction.

Over the decades following the explosion of TM with famous adherents during the 1960s and early 1970s, TM transitioned from its roots in a kind of counterculture practice to a fairly expensive program tied to economic success. The TM organization was worth several millions of dollars to several billions at Maharishi’s death in 2008. Some critics have said that his program, which originated in India with roots in Hinduism, left extreme poverty and masses of people behind.