Maharishi, TM, Mallory & Me: The Memoir of a Once TM Superstar

By Jon Michael Miller

Jerry Seinfeld, The Beatles, Clint Eastwood, Mary Tyler Moore, The Beach Boys, Joe Namath, Barbara DeAngelis, John Gray, Doug Henning, Merv Griffin, Larry Bowa, Mia Farrow, Andy Kaufman, Jim Henson--What do they all have in common?

They are, or were, part of the worldwide Transcendental Meditation movement. There are millions of others. Jon Michael Miller was one of them--a TM superstar.

What led him to the TM movement?
What role did meditation play in his life?
What were the organization's politics?
What was it like working with Maharishi?
What impelled Miller to leave the movement?

Miller's evolution was deeply entwined with that of a beautiful, enigmatic woman. Their passionate love story has a surprising beginning, an anguished ending, and a final coming to terms. The writing is frank, often witty, and always honest.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jon Michael Miller
• Release date: Sep 14, 2011
• ISBN: 9781466060678

Jon Michael Miller

Born and raised in the farmland of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, Jon Michael Miller received a teaching degree from Penn State University. After teaching high school English a number of years in his home area, he attended graduate school at Ohio State during the turbulent 60’s when he was introduced to Transcendental Meditation as taught by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. He then spent twelve years in the TM movement, rising to work directly under the spiritual master himself and later for the movement’s television station in Los Angeles. To activate his writing career he returned to Penn State where he earned two advanced degrees, taught English, and administered a liberal arts major in which students were able to design individualized courses of study. After fifteen years in Happy Valley, during which he became a regular visitor to Jamaica, he relocated to Saint Petersburg, Florida, where he now teaches and writes.

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MAHARISHI, TM, MALLORY & ME

The Memoir of a Once TM Superstar

Jon Michael Miller

Copyright 2011 by Jon Michael Miller

Smashwords Edition

Comments from Readers

An open and honest account of his life as a TM teacher and his longing for his soul mate, Mallory.

Mr. Miller shares an honest, heartwarming, and heartbreaking story of reaching the ultimate goal of not only the ecstasy and agony of a deep love for another but also in achieving the higher levels of consciousness.

A great read for anyone interested in Maharishi and his movement. I enjoyed every page.

~

For the students I taught

and

the friends I made

in the Transcendental Meditation movement.

In reverence for

The Holy Tradition.

~

… Be without the three gunas,

O Arjuna, freed from duality, ever

Firm in purity, independent of possessions,

Possessed of the Self.

--Bhagavad-Gita, Verse 45

~

Introduction

How does a shy farm boy from the Amish country of Pennsylvania become a disciple of a diminutive Hindu monk from the foothills of the Himalayas?

In the Bhagavad-Gita, a central scripture in Hinduism, we meet young Prince Arjuna, who is paralyzed by a dilemma he cannot solve. Arjuna is the epitome of a successful human being—strong, good-looking, skilled, popular, intelligent, educated, and highly moral. In spite of all these virtues he reaches a point at which he cannot act. His family is divided in a civil war. As a military leader his duty is to lead his troops into battle. Across the line in the opposing army he envisions his beloved cousins, brothers, uncles. He cannot kill them. They, however, threaten the clan he leads. If he does not fight, his side of the family will die. In his confusion he opens himself to the voice of Lord Krishna, who visits him with some answers.

The Western counterpart to Prince Arjuna is Prince Hamlet. He, too, is in the top echelon of his society. He also faces a family dilemma beyond his ken. He languishes in perplexity and inaction. Unfortunately for Hamlet, no Lord Krishna visits him. Hamlet has only his father’s ghost, whom he is hesitant to trust, fearing the apparition may be Satan in disguise. The young prince must rely on his own limited abilities, and we soon see where they lead.

What both classics suggest is that even at the level of highest human development, a point sometimes arrives that forces us to search for answers. My irresolvable dilemma was neither a civil war nor the death of a father. Her name was Mallory, the love of my life.

What follows is a true story, in three sections. Part One, Before the Search Began, recounts my relationship with Mallory, the springboard for my later conscious quest. It also describes my personal history as I revealed it to her in conversations presented here in the form of journal entries.

Part Two, Seeking Answers, explains the role Transcendental Meditation and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi played in my coming to terms with the baffling issues ignited by my love for Mallory. Part Three, Four Friends, Four Letters, is a series of four longish poems that encapsulate my Mallory dilemma.

This book is not written to praise Maharishi, though I greatly admire him. Nor is it written to endorse TM, though I would recommend it to anyone. I don’t try to teach meditation or the philosophy behind it. Official courses and publications do that. The principles I write about are the ones I found relevant in grappling with the central mystery of my life.

This memoir will not be regarded highly by the current advocates of the TM program. For them a personal tale has no more value than an individual wave has to the entire ocean. Nevertheless, as it arises, rolls toward shore, breaks, and then recedes, here is one such wave.

~

Initiation

Saturday, November 15, 1969

Columbus, Ohio

By then Mallory’s beauty had in my mind been superseded by her craziness. She stood by the door in a camel hair coat, her dark brown hair touching her shoulders. She held a bouquet of daisies and a paper bag containing an apple and a new white handkerchief.

I don’t think I’ll go, I said.

It’s your choice, she replied, but I will, anyway.

She was out the door. I grabbed my jacket, flowers, and paper bag. Her willingness to go ahead without me was a new twist.

A hand-written sign on the front door of a row house told guests to enter around back. At a screened-in porch, another sign instructed us to take off our shoes. We lined them up with some other pairs. In the living room a few student/hippie types waited in silence. At 9:50 a.m., we were ten minutes early.

A bright-eyed, college-aged hostess with a nametag Rebecca smiled and took our items. She gave us each a form and wrote receipts for our fifteen-dollar fees. The questions on the form were innocuous—address, age, gender, occupation, health. An unfamiliar but soothing odor filled the dim room. On an end table, a stick of incense burned in a brass holder. Rebecca arranged our offerings in straw baskets. We waited silently with several other people.

Occasionally someone came down from upstairs, carrying a single flower. The first was a barefoot girl in hip-hugger bell-bottoms. She was smiling. The next was a guy in pressed jeans and pin-striped shirt. He appeared dazed. Each time someone came down, Rebecca escorted another person up. By noon it was Mallory’s turn. I waited. The only reading material was a TM pamphlet from SIMS, the Students’ International Meditation Society. I read it at least twenty times. Sometimes Rebecca spoke in whispers to a participant. Half an hour later Mallory came down, grinning, radiant. After handing me my basket, Rebecca led me up.

Inside a bedroom waited a clean-cut young man in suit and tie, stocking feet—Stan Crowe, a surfer from Santa Barbara and the lecturer from several days earlier. His blond hair drooped over his forehead. His eyes appeared sleepy. He gestured for me to sit on one of two chairs in front of a makeshift altar. The centerpiece was a framed picture of an intense-looking Hindu monk, bearded, long-haired, wearing an orange wrap. It was not Maharishi, whom I’d seen on late night TV and whose photograph appeared on posters and in the brochure I’d just committed to memory.

A candle flickered. Vases of flowers stood about, the scent mixing with that of incense. Stan asked me a few questions about the form.

Have you used recreational drugs within the last fourteen days?

Not this time, I answered flippantly. Our having done so the time before had delayed our initiations.

Stan explained that the man in the picture was Guru Dev, Maharishi’s teacher, and the technique of meditation I was about to learn came from an ancient tradition. He told me to stand, handed me one of my daisies, held the others, dipped one of them in a small brass bowl of water, and flicked it behind his head. In a foreign language I assumed to be Sanskrit, he chanted.

During the rite he placed flowers, the apple, and the handkerchief on a brass tray in front of the guru’s image. With a stick of burning incense he lit something in a small container. It flared and burned out. Several times he sprinkled rice and water on the offerings. The chant went on. I watched, understanding nothing.

Suddenly he took the flower I was holding and placed it with the others on the altar. He knelt and bowed. He looked up and gestured for me to do likewise. I obeyed. He began repeating a one-syllable sound. I soon realized he meant for me to say it too. I followed his lead. He gestured for me to sit in the chair again. He sat also. I repeated the sound.

Softer.

I softened my voice.

Softer.

I whispered the sound.

Softer.

I made it barely audible.

Just think it, mentally.

I did so.

Close your eyes, think the mantra easily. If it seems to go away, let it. When you realize you’re not thinking it, easily come back to it.

I was at peace. The chatter of sparrows outside the window added somehow to the silence. Time passed. Sometimes I forgot the mantra. As told, I started thinking it again.

Okay, Stan said softly, take half a minute and slowly open your eyes.

I didn’t want to stop.

It is easy? Stan asked.

Yes.

This was how to meditate, he explained; the mantra was mine, private, not to be spoken again. He ushered me to another bedroom where I sat alone. I closed my eyes, started thinking the mantra, repeating it mentally. After a while, I realized I was thinking about Mallory, our problems. That was all I’d been thinking about recently, all I could think about. I came back to the mantra. The peace I felt was expansive. I heard a voice, Rebecca’s.

Take about half a minute and then open the eyes.

When I did so, she was there, smiling.

It is easy? She used the same unusual phrasing as Stan had.

Yes.

She told me to do it twice a day, morning and evening, for twenty minutes, before eating. She gave me a daisy, my apple and my handkerchief, and escorted me downstairs. I was pleasantly dazed. Mallory smiled at me. After putting on our shoes, we went out into the clear autumn chill. We strolled several blocks in silence.

I wonder, said Mallory, what we’re supposed to do with our stuff.

Irreverently, I bit a chunk out of my apple. Mallory abstained.

~

PART ONE

BEFORE THE SEARCH BEGAN

1

Meeting Mallory

In the autumn of 1968, at the age of twenty-six, I enrolled as a graduate student in English at Ohio State University. As a teaching assistant I instructed two freshman writing classes for which I received tuition and a stipend to cover my living expenses, barely. I had some savings from several years of high school teaching. The Viet Nam War was raging. The Tet Offensive had shown that even with half a million troops in country, the U.S. had little control of the place. In addition to participating in two massive peace marches in D.C., I’d stood in silence against the war each Saturday morning with a group of Quakers in downtown Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were in their graves. Cities had burned. Riots had marred the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. My dear friend Jennifer from Lancaster had been there. George Wallace was spewing racist hate. Richard Nixon was about to defeat both Wallace and Hubert Humphrey to become president. With Eugene McCarthy out of the race and Bobby gone, I didn’t intend to vote. Hippies were beginning to populate the campus landscape. Dylan was their idol. The Sergeant Pepper album had shown that the Beatles had tuned in and turned on.

A religious agnostic, I was a weekend pot smoker unconcerned with issues of sexual morality. I looked typical for those times, dressing into the hippie/professional curve—khakis, navy surplus denim shirts with sleeves rolled up, desert boots, a plaid hunting shirt for a jacket, and hair ragged over my ears. Having had some success with my studies as well as with women, I felt confident. I projected positivism and amused my colleagues and students with a so-called wry wit.

In the orientation meetings for new teaching assistants I made a completely unintended impression upon Lisa Mann, a willowy, edgy, first-term grad student. Though she was married to a reportedly brilliant Ph.D. candidate, she started following me around.

In the English Department’s first intramural football game I separated my right shoulder in a clumsy attempt to block a pass. I was hauled off to the emergency room and had to engage my new life with my arm in a sling. Sensing she could be of service to this injured character from the east, Lisa invited me to her apartment for a haircut. Trimming and snipping, she furtively caressed my shoulders while I attempted to discuss the literary philosophy of Stanley Fish with her erudite husband. He no doubt rightly pegged me for an ignoramus.

Lisa later told me her unobservant spouse was so absorbed in his dissertation on John Donne’s sermons he didn't have time for his marital duties. She and I had a brief affair. My sparsely furnished efficiency apartment on High Street was just two blocks from Denny Hall, home of the English Department, so our get-togethers were convenient and effortless. Although I tried to impress upon her the non-committal nature of my interest, she became aggressively attached to me. She was a serious annoyance. Her constant presence by my side not only caused rumors but limited my access to more desirable prospects.

For Lisa, the end of our relationship was actually tear-filled and frantic. Melodramatically she threatened suicide. But I convinced her that even without sleeping with a paragon like me, life might be worth living. Though I insisted our involvement had been a mistake, my efforts to console her through rational argument made little impression. She forced me to take refuge in the fact that Alison Carpenter, whom I described as my girlfriend, would be joining me over Thanksgiving break. I told Lisa I felt guilty for having cheated, which really wasn’t true but made sense to her. My agreeing to her proposal of remaining friends in case things didn’t work out between Alison and me was the final step of getting her out of my romantic life. From then on I avoided her. It wasn’t easy.

She left her husband and moved into a house with a tall, sarcastic redhead, another grad student in the Department. One night the redhead and I were the only ones working in the library’s literature room. She came over to my apartment. We discussed Lisa's continuing crush and got into bed where I enjoyed her long, languid body. This affair ended a week or so later. Whereas the redhead moved on to another fling, Lisa continued to lament.

That’s where I was in those early Ohio days—living in a moral wilderness. I had finally realized my long-time dream of being attractive to women but was bungling it. Still lingering behind my newfound appeal was the belief I was a skinny, rural lad of dubious value to the human race. But after my last year in Lancaster, I had learned to walk and speak with outward self-assurance. Despite the misery of Lisa Mann, who stared at me teary-eyed from across classrooms and down corridors, I was happy. I was, really, at the top of my unsophisticated game. Women saw the outer swagger, and some actually fell for it.

Lisa shared an office with Mrs. Mallory Johnson, the ideal of feminine beauty for 1968, in the mold of Jackie Kennedy. Like every other heterosexual male in the Department, I couldn't help noticing her; she was indisputably the best-looking, best-dressed woman there. Before I broke off with Lisa, I’d stopped by their office several times, engaging in the usual grad school chit-chat with the added sense that Lisa’s elegant officemate may have been listening in.

Mallory was in the one class required of all new graduate assistants, Professor Edward P. J. Corbett’s Introduction to Classical Rhetoric. Like an honor student she sat in front, erect and quiet, taking copious notes. When we passed in the hallway, we exchanged the ordinary greetings. We never crossed paths on campus, in the Student Union, or at the lectures and parties frequented by the main crowd of the Department. In addition to her exceptional beauty and her sparks of office humor, I noticed the portrait of her husband on her tidy desk. She was someone, it appeared, who had her life in perfect order. What use would she have for the likes of me?

One day in late October something happened to change my perspective regarding Mrs. Johnson. Here’s the scene …

I’m grading papers in my office, midday, my three officemates off somewhere, when the door creaks open and I turn to see Mallory’s gorgeous face peering into the dim room. She flashes a cheerleader’s smile.

Is Fred here?

Fred Schladen, a short, stocky, morose, non-communicative devotee of Old English. He occupied the desk in the far corner of the office and was obviously absent.

Uh, no, he isn’t.

Oh . . . do you expect him soon?

I think he’s in the Beowulf class right now.

Oh . . . I know him from undergrad. I was just looking for someone to have lunch with.

She lingers, then says, Well, all right, I guess I’ll just have to eat alone. Thanks.

The door creaks. The latch clicks. I turn back to the student composition I’ve been mutilating with red ink.

Later Fred comes in and drops his books on his desk without speaking—not unusual. We seldom spoke. In this case, however, I inform him of his an intriguing visitor seeking company for lunch.

Interesting, he says, since she knew damn well I was in class. We talked just before it started.

2

Getting to Know Her

In my being-just-friends-with-Lisa stage, Mallory began occasionally to join our developing literary clique at lunches in the Pomerene Cafeteria by Mirror Lake. Somehow, I was becoming the centerpiece of these gatherings perhaps because I was several years older than most of the other new grad students, with some professional teaching and a divorce behind me, a would-be man of the world. I was intensely engaged in and articulate about my course-work and my teaching. Besides our discussions about William Butler Yeats and methods of motivating freshman writers to avoid comma splices, I sparked good-natured repartee among the group. My colleagues looking up to me was another sign I’d arrived in Columbus on a strong footing. My leadership role in these lunchtime get-togethers might have made a further impression upon Mallory.

One time she and I had lunch together without the others. I don’t know how it happened, but when I arrived at our usual cafeteria table Mallory was the only one there. Thinking our cohorts would soon wander in, I sat down. They didn’t. So Mallory and I had our lasagna and garden salads, just we two. It was okay with me.

More a listener than a talker, she asked me about my home town, and I told her about Lancaster where I’d just spent a wonderful summer. Being near Mallory always brought me a little more to life. The presence of sheer beauty does that to a guy. I must have spoken with extra zeal for there was a delighted expression in her entrancing dark eyes.

You talk like a writer, she said. Are you one?

I’ve written some not very good poetry. Imitations of the early poems of William Carlos Williams. And you?

I’m a reader. I don’t have anything worth writing about.

I had a great composition teacher my freshman year. Every life is a story, he said. None of us thought we had a story. He made us start with our childhoods.

Would you show me what you wrote? Maybe it will inspire me to start something.

Out of false humility, I resisted at first. Actually I was proud of the piece I’d written for Groff. He’d made me proud of it, the way my high school English teacher made me feel about my writing assignments. But with Mallory’s persistence and her irresistible smile, I couldn’t have denied her anything.

I’ll show you. But only in a fair exchange.

I told you I’m not a writer.

Tell me your story, then. I’ll listen.

She looked at her watch. Lunch had flown by.

I will, sometime, for what it’s worth.

I foraged through old notebooks, found the following account, and left it in her mail slot in the English Department office.

3

Boyhood: A Glimpse

Dear Mallory, I enjoyed having lunch with you. I hope we can do it again sometime. This is an essay I wrote my freshman year for the best teacher I’ve ever had, Dr. Edwin Groff, at Millersville State Teachers College. I’m nervous about sharing it with you. For some reason, I want to be my best when you’re around.

Written in October, 1960

My Home Town

I can’t imagine a better place to have grown up than East Petersburg, Pennsylvania. Just a village, it lies sixty miles due west of Philadelphia, not far from Route 30, the historic Lincoln Highway, an artery which spans the state and stretches onward to points west. Across the street from our gray-shingled, two-story, double house was a large cemetery. There were gravestones to race between, leap over, and stand upon like the Lord of All Creation. Imitating an Apache prepared to ambush, a kid could hide behind the stones and spy on funeral ceremonies, pretending the mourners were white invaders. Later, when they’d gone, the kid could sit on the edge of the hole and listen to Mr. Kaufman’s tales of World War II as he shoveled the red clay and dark loam over the casket. He tamped the soil tightly down with an iron weight and rolled green sod back over the grave like a rug. Then, that kid could take some gladiolas home to his mother.

I’ve never been the least afraid of graveyards.

One house down from ours, where East Broad Street took a ninety degree turn and became North Pine Street, there was a carnival grounds that contained a log Boy Scout cabin, a baseball diamond, a performance stage, and some white concession buildings with their windows bolted except during the summer events. Then you could get chicken corn soup, homemade ice cream, and cold watermelon. In Stetson hats, sequined vests and shiny boots, cowboys in country bands played pink slide guitars, stand-up bass fiddles and glittering drums. Golden-haired cowgirls with fringes on their skirts swayed and crooned.

The next morning you could get up early and find treasures left behind—coin wrappers, souvenir cane handles, singed wrappings from fireworks, ticket stubs, ping pong balls used to win gold fish, nickels, dimes, and an occasional dollar bill. When there weren’t carnivals, you had gunfights around the locked up buildings. You balanced in spontaneous contests on the thin fence rails, spun on a miniature merry-go-round, climbed on the jungle gym, flew high on the swings, and jolted your partner on the other end of the see-saw by hitting the ground hard on your side.

At the end of our back yard, you could charge across the grass field to the elementary school, big and square and yellow brick with a flapping flag and a gravel playground for a tag-type game called Cross the Bridge. You could lie on the roof of your grandfather’s chicken shed under the branches of a peach tree and spy on the children playing softball, jump-rope and four squares.

Later, finally old enough, you could be inside the school two minutes after breakfast. Before classes, you could watch Mr. Hess, the janitor, heave coal into the big furnace in the eerie basement.

You could climb the wooden stairs and hurry across creaky floorboards, smelling blackboard chalk and pencil-sharpener sawdust. You could read presidents’ biographies in orange covers with black silhouetted drawings, and try to peer down Mrs. Eichelberger’s dress at her huge, loose breasts.

After school, there was racing on your bicycle down the steep alley between the Eshelmans’ and the Baileys’ houses and skidding to a stop by the school’s cinder pile. In winter you could speed down the same alley on your sled all the way to the end of the school grounds two blocks away, snow down your neck and laughter in your throat.

In five minutes you could walk to the town square, just an intersection, Main Street and State Street, not even a traffic light until I was in junior high school and then the only one in town. On one corner was the National Bank, on the other Hayden Zug’s combination bar and grocery where out in front the town elders chewed tobacco, played checkers and kept their eye on things. On another corner was Elsie’s Restaurant, run by Elsie and her limping husband Hank. There were booths, a soda counter and a magazine rack with risqué magazines on the side away from the cash register. You could sneak looks at sexy-eyed girls in low-cut blouses.

Near the other corner was Glatfelter’s Barber Shop, a white frame home with a wrap-around porch, where you got a waxed flattop haircut for twenty-five cents and could choose a free lime or grape lollipop. The sign above the shop said, I Need Your Head in My Business. East on State Street half a block was Dr. Weist’s office and home, where butterfly hunters took their killing jars. Always with a warning, Doc Weist poured in a few drops of carbon tetrachloride to render helpless one’s captured swallowtails and fritillaries.

Half a block north on Main Street was Cake’s Candy Store where you could buy a double-decker Breyers ice cream cone for a dime and a Topp’s baseball card with a square of bubble gum for a penny. Maybe you’d hit the jackpot and get a picture of Stan Musial swinging a bat or Roy Campanella in his catcher’s gear. That’s where you spent the money you found after the carnivals or earned from chasing foul balls at the baseball games or from helping Mr. Hess collect trash from the classrooms.

Directly across from Cake’s was a gas station and garage where you went for nickel vending-machine Cokes after you played pick-up baseball all day, swigging them down in the dim light with your pals, cars up on racks, and the aroma of axle