Spiritual and Literary Movements: The Best and Worst,
With a Confusing Reenactment of My TM Puja Ceremony
Here is a re-post for new readers who signed up six months ago and for free subscribers, both of whom couldn’t read it because it was originally for paid subscribers only. Next week I will begin offering new posts, and I hope to have my home page redesigned by March. Enjoy this playful piece.
The Exclusionists
I started a group called the Exclusionists, and then began disinviting people. I do things like that—all for the sake of logic, and can you blame me? By the time I was done, there were four of us left. We were having lunch, arguing about whether Frankenstein the monster would survive the pandemic, while a bee with a belly full of poison struggled on my faux hardwood floor. A member of the group, a vegan, called me a “piece of low-hanging fruit”—an unapologetic reference to one’s appendix. The bee continued to struggle, and we debated whether to put it out of its misery. “That would be consistent with our mission,” the vegan said, which was her blatant attempt at a coup. “What are you going to do next,” I said, “short-change me on the shrimp?” We quarreled, back and forth, like two befuddled fencers, while the bee made a final failed attempt at flight, and our last remaining members snuck out the back door.
Eventually, I turned on the TV where an attractive woman was flipping letters to great applause from the audience—admittedly, a pointless distraction, yet the woman seemed so happy we allowed her to stay.
I have the same love/hate relationship with spiritual movements that I do with self-help groups and with literary manifestos and writers conferences, where aspiring writers are falsely promised previously unheard of revelatory experiences and instead wind up munching on stale pastries while overpaid ideologues boast about themselves. Of course, like everyone, I too am attracted to any group or organization aiming to improve our spiritual and/or intellectual selves, or to offer hope and guidance in a world that is even more flawed than we are. But I’ve also learned that those lofty aspirations are often overshadowed by fake philosophers, who often speak in psycho- or literary babble that is as meaningless and cliched as a political stump speech.
Worse than the above, sometimes the best-intentioned movements end up excluding more people than they invite, expecting one to drink every drop of the Kool-Aid or be kicked out.
Which is what my opening prose poem, “The Exclusionists,” pokes fun of.
This type of nonsense can even filter down to the masses. Just yesterday, I decided to write this essay at a coffee shop where college kids, the unemployed, and lonely Substack authors like myself hang out. Within minutes a couple sat down at a table no more than two feet from me. The guy seemed to be a professorial type, with light brown tortoise shell glasses and a pretty good head of gray hair, tastefully gelled back. The woman was about twenty years younger, fit, with long, blondish long fashioned into a perm.
Normally I can shut out conversation and noise, but this guy wasn’t going to let that happen. So I thought, what the hell, Peter, this loud-mouth is giving you permission to listen in. What I noticed was that for every sentence the woman spoke, the guy spoke about fifty. In fact, it became clear that this was their first date, and that he had decided to hold court, in order to impress her or just because he felt an uncontrollable urge toward verbal masturbation. Probably the latter, because I couldn’t see what purpose she served except to periodically provide a new topic he could riff on in a torrent of philosophical mumbo-jumbo that sounded profound but made little sense.
At one point, when she mentioned her divorce, her violent ex-husband, and her troubled teenage son, this guy, let’s call him the Professor, started in: “What you don’t realize, my friend, is that most conflicts between human beings come from one’s inability to self-inject oneself into the mind of the person pushing against you. That is, a variation of Heraclitus’s statement that you can’t step into the same river twice. Let’s ground that, if we must. Your ex is like that boulder that seems unmovable in a mass of mud but, in reality, is just waiting for the right pair of celestial soft hands to dislodge it from its permanence into the realm of the transcendental.…” And he went on from there until it was revealed that he had never been married or had kids. “But I love cats,” he said, making an attempt at humor. I also learned that he was a hypnotist, who ran group therapy sessions for troubled souls (and aren’t we all), even though he wasn’t trained to do so. He was self-taught, he said, pointing out that Jesus and Buddha never got a degree from Yale.
This goofiness went on for quite some time, until he fortunately had to go to the bathroom.
“I hope you won’t run away while I’m doing my business,” he said.
She paused just long enough for me, almost involuntarily, to blurt out, “If she doesn’t, I certainly will.”
He was taken aback, while she laughed, which made things a bit uncomfortable, until I lied that I hadn’t been eavesdropping the whole time, even though he and I both knew he had wanted me to or he wouldn’t have been speaking so loudly.
After he left, the woman looked my way. “How can I get out of this?” she said.
“First date?”
She nodded.
“Just say your teenage son needs someone to accompany him to the father-son breakfast at your church next week. In fact, just about anything you say about him spending time with your teenage son will scare him off.”
Which is what she did, and the conversation ended shortly afterwards, with him smirking at me as he put on his leather Aviator jacket and headed off to his fashionable apartment where he’d search the dating sites for his next victim, or maybe just take advantage of the troubled people he “counseled.”.
I relate this scene because the Professor represents the worst of what popular “enlightenment” movements can do, that is, pervert very authentic advice on how we can improve our interactions with other human and find happiness for ourselves.
In short, the problem is never with the movement. The problem rests with the people who see themselves as front men for a movement, whose motives are driven by narcissism, not altruism. I remember going to an SDS meeting when I was nineteen and ready to kick some ass. I wanted to stick it to “The Man” and to stop the Vietnam War. After a week or two of very silly meetings, I realized that the head radicals (all guys) couldn’t have cared less about changing the world. They just wanted to smoke some good weed and get laid.
One outlier when it comes to spiritual self-help experiences, was the experience I had with Transcendental Meditation in 1973. Yes, TM can be easily satirized and parodied. Recently, I watched The Beatles documentary “Get Back.” While the group was laughing, chain smoking, periodically bickering, and trying to ignore Yoko Ono (who when not making diabolical noises, attached herself to Lennon like a leech), two of George Harrison’s friends sat in the lotus position, in full Maharishi garb, meditating. On what, on what? I thought. It was almost as if they had volunteered to be human props.
But. in a way, TM saved me. At twenty-three, I decided to stop drinking and getting high, and that withdrawal came with serious anxiety. Physically, I could burn it off with exercise, but mentally the inside of my head sometimes felt like the Stones were rehearsing in it. So I signed up for TM, even though I had been skeptical of its founder, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Being cynical by nature, I felt his motives were more monetary than altruistic, especially when he began hanging out with celebrities.
But I needed something to quiet the “inner” Peter. TM was cheap and non-religious, and I thought I might meet some “quiet” people and stop hanging around with, to be polite, “un-quiet” people. Also, even back then, it was apparent that TM could do everything it said it could: slow down the world, and reduce stress, heart disease, and high blood pressure.
Unfortunately, my “class” ended up being only three people, two who never showed up after the first session. So there I was getting a one-on-one tutorial from a very sweet woman with a red dot on her forehead. She looked very frail, almost angelic, and her voice could have put a raging chimpanzee to sleep. The only problem with her was that when we meditated together, she would sometimes cry. She assured me this response was okay, because sometimes the pain from old wounds might surface once the mind lets down its defenses and relaxes.
I didn’t know what to say that, so just made sure I cried a few times to make her feel better.
Boy, was it hard to quiet one’s mind for twenty minutes, but, fortunately, my instructor was a very patient person. Even today, it’s often hard to have a good meditation twice a day, though that comes with the territory, and I’ve learned that if you can’t find twenty minutes twice a day to meditate, then your life is probably out of control.
So there I was, I very anxious talkative Irish Catholic white guy who could now add meditation to other lifetime achievements, like learning to say the rosary when I was eight, or memorizing the first twenty lines of The Odyssey in Greek in high school. All seemed perfect until my puja ceremony, which is one’s graduation from TM. I was asked to bring a white handkerchief, flowers and some fruit. None of that made sense to me, but, what the hell. It was better than a Satanic puja where people probably offered the severed head of a bat and a Mason jar of a virgin’s blood to Beelzebub.
I entered our little meditation room and noticed my instructor was dressed in a long white robe. I gave her my gifts and then we assumed the position in front of a little altar, flanked by flowers and a few lighted candles. Again, all perfectly fine, until I noticed an oversize picture of the Maharishi. It appeared, at least to me, that I was being asked to offer something I couldn’t give to the old guy. Reverence? Fealty? I don’t know.
That’s when I told her I appreciated everything she’d done for me, but it was time for this Catholic boy to scat. She looked sadly at me and began to softly cry.
“It’s okay,” I said, sitting next her.
“But you have to do it,” she said. “No one has never not done it.”
“Are you saying it won’t work if I leave now?”
There was no response, so it was clear my refusal was not covered in her instructor’s guide, “Teaching a Dummy How to Meditate.”
Before I left, I kissed her softly on the forehead careful not to smudge her red dot. “You’ve been great,” I said. “But I just can’t make an offering to that guy.” And then I pointed to the picture of the Maharishi.
She seemed to accept that, so I said my good-byes and stumbled out the front door into the bright sunlight of summer. I thought about stopping for an ice cream cone or a beer but decided to go home and meditate, my mantra playing over and over in my head.
It’s a cool mantra, really.
But I promised her I’d never share it with anyone.
And this Catholic boy always keeps his promises.
You can find Peter Johnson’s books, along with interviews with him, appearances, and other information at peterjohnsonauthor.com
His most recent book of prose poems is While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems
His most recent book of fiction is Shot: A Novel in Stories
Find out why he is giving away his new book of prose poem/fragments, even though he has a publisher for it, by downloading the PDF from the below link or going to OLD MAN’S homepage. His “Note to the Reader” and “Introduction” at the beginning of the PDF explains it all: Observations from the Edge of the Abyss+
Don, you really need to start your own Substack. You are both intelligent and funny. I actually have been listening to Gregorian chants lately. They take me away from the Mundane insanity of our current culture, transporting me into a world of mystery and symbolism.
TM sounds great. As a good seminarian, I was taught to meditate on various Catholic topics, but there were always too many distractions. The dolorous mysteries, for example, when reciting the rosary always filled me with sadness and made me feel even more guilty and less worthy than usual. Images of Christ’s suffering, of Mary’s sorrow, of all the horrible things we do to one another, unlike TM, filled me with dread. On the other hand, trying to focus on the Monstrance at Benediction, clouds of incense billowing and Gregorian chant ringing in the air, kept me precisely from achieving otherworldliness. Later in life, passing around a bong while listening to Mountains of the Moon captured those medieval days pretty well. And like you, when it came time to offer my life to the priesthood, I bolted. But there are still times when the strains of Tantum ergo Sacramentum flow through my mind, like the misremembered remnant of a troubled dream.