(AUTHOR’S NOTE: For all intents and purposes this is where the journal ends, which surprises me somewhat. I was there for at least another week or so I think, but perhaps I was too busy studying my lectures and so forth. I apparently found time to jot down a haiku, though:
Sliding off sea-back,
washing over us, night-soaked:
rolling waves of wind.
This also seems a good place to bring up an event that I deliberately chose not to describe in my journal, feeling at the time that it was something that shouldn’t be talked about because (a) it had to do with the special techniques that Maharishi was giving out for people with sleep and other problems and (b) the event was pretty traumatic for my entire group.
Fortunately, almost exactly three years later I wrote a story about this same event for a journalism class that I was taking in college. And being the sort of person who is still hanging on to poems I wrote when I was in kindergarten, it’s not too surprising that I was able to dig it out of my closet to add to this journal transcription.
I believe that since the class was entitled “New Journalism” I was trying for a Tom Wolfe-ish sort of tone with maybe a dab of Hunter S. Thompson. In addition to describing the event I’ve been referring to it also provides a pretty good overview of day-to-day life on the course.)
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Winding down… The end is in sight after almost five months of manic stillness. Winding down from what must be the most intensive state of conscious hyper-non-activity known to the mobile life-forms of this planet. Maybe trees would understand that part of it; the word ‘vegetable’ also suggests itself.
The maids don’t know what to do with us; every week it’s the same problem: how to change the sheets unobtrusively when these cross-legged crazies never leave their rooms? Five months they’ve been here on the golden shores of the Mediterranean, five months on Majorca, one of the most beautiful resort spots in the world -- even now during the off-season there’s plenty of sun -- and these crazy ‘med-ee-tay-tors’ never go out of their rooms. And the maids are tired of surprising them in their underwear or whatever, sitting with eyes closed in a chair in the middle of the room or cross-legged on the bed or even on the floor. How can they sit there like that, doing nothing, day after day?
And it’s not a rhetorical question, either; they have never seen anyone do nothing, really totally nothing, not sleeping or just loafing and lounging around -- they see plenty of that during tourist season, Lord knows -- but actually doing nothing… And it’s a cause for wonder. But Jesu, five thousand rooms in three hotels, all in need of clean linen and these crazies never leave.
Oh well. Knock, knock.
“Wha…”
“Uno momento, por favor, uno momento…”
********************
Of course the real mania wasn’t in the stillness it was in the effect. Maharishi described the process of normal, twenty-minutes-twice-a-day meditation as, “...gently dissolving the stresses and strains. But here...” he went on, making a slow, sweeping gesture with a brown arm to include the three videotape cameras, the five thousand of us sweating in our suits or long dresses, the slapdash grandeur of the ballroom in which we were seated and the entire three-hotel area, “Here, we are blasting.”
From the time we arrived at the course we began to ‘round’, which means meditating for a specific period of time (at the beginning of the course around twenty minutes), followed by ten minutes of ‘asanas’ (yoga exercises) and five minutes of ‘pranayama’ (a breathing exercise). The cycle was then repeated (hence ‘rounding’), the length and number of rounds gradually increasing each week.
By the middle of the second month of the course rounding began when we woke up in the morning, say, about nine o’clock, and continued until dinnertime at about seven. At that point a round consisted of a full hour of meditation plus fifteen minutes for asanas and pranayama. “Blasting,” indeed. Not that there’s anyone telling you how much you should do; in fact the only recommendation is that you don’t do much more than that.
Breakfast and lunch are offered but only about a quarter of the people at the course are eating even one of those meals because it cuts into rounding time too much; not only the eating but the fact that you have to wait an hour afterwards before meditating again because otherwise, with your body processes slowed down to almost nothing the food just sits in a lump in your stomach for most of the day.
But ‘slowing down’, that’s the key to the whole thing, really. In normal meditation the body is plunged into a state of test that is nothing short of incredible: in regular sleep the body processes, metabolic rate, etc., drop about 4-5% over a period of several hours; during Transcendental Meditation the drop is between 15-20% over a period of about five minutes. But that’s what it is, a plunge, like a quick dip in the pool.
But when the amount of meditation is jacked up to as much as eight hours a day for the better part of five months the body tends to remain at a much lower level of activity even out of meditation. (We course participants didn’t realize how low until around the middle of the course when a chartered bus full of French tourists unloaded at our hotel for a rest stop. Their gestures, the quality of their voices, everything seemed so exaggerated, so hectic; it was like watching a movie being projected just slightly faster than it should have been. The air seemed stirred up for two days afterward.) But with all this deep rest the body, which already has the general idea of what to do from the regular day-to-day practice, begins throwing off deep-rooted stresses and strains. In chunks. This is known as ‘unstresssing’, and it manifests itself in many ways:
During meditation very intense, absorbing thoughts will appear, usually with a definite accompanying emotion, although the actual content of the thought will as often as not have nothing to do with that emotion and in fact will often be totally nonsensical. That thought and emotion can dominate an entire day’s meditations or, as is more common, vary every few seconds, with each accompanying emotion as intense as the one preceding it.
Of course, this is not constant; most often the experience is simply drifting out of meditation and into thoughts, then noticing the drift and returning to meditation, drifting out again...back and forth, in and out, totally undramatic. Trivial events ten years forgotten pop out of nowhere. My big distraction was music; everybody has experienced having a tune stuck in their minds but I had ten or twenty revolving around in mine. I particularly remember three endless days at an earlier course being unable to escape countless repetitions of the theme music from The Captain Kangaroo Show. It seems funny now but when you’re almost constantly in a state of near-complete sensory deprivation, living with nothing but your thoughts for hours on end, combined with the emotional flux described above, it seemed to border on torture.
Also, occasionally the body will bypass the thought process altogether and release a stress by means of a sudden twitch or jerk in whatever part of the body is unstressing. It was not considered unusual to be sitting in a chair, deep in meditation, and suddenly have your leg shoot straight out in front of you and then just as suddenly relax again. Fortunately these twitches were usually on a much smaller scale than that and usually few and far between. “Blasting”?
It was when we were out of meditation, though, that the strangeness really began to crop up. One meditator going through his rollercoaster ride alone in his room with his eyes closed is one thing, but several dozen of these same people in the dining room after a day cut off from their senses is another. I recall one Spanish bus-boy getting literally swarmed by meditators attempting to reach the dessert tray he was attempting to place in the serving area. (The next time he simply opened the kitchen door, slid the tray out on the floor and quickly closed the door again.)
Dinner was always the big event of the day: people would talk themselves hoarse in half an hour after a day of total silence. Talking and eating were paradise regained every day.
Ah, but what strangeness attended these meals… Everybody was in a fairly constant state of emotional flux, not quite as sudden as it is during rounding but usually just as drastic, from depression to giggles to absent-minded spaciness to bitchiness to (best of all) those shining moments of deep-seeing clarity when everything is seen as a part of a wholeness and a balance. But otherwise the only thing that allowed us to deal with these incredible shifts in mood was the simple fact that there was no real cause for any of them; one would be replaced by another and it didn’t matter which because that too would pass. So if we knew that our foggy thought processes were unreliable and out moods unfounded...whew.
Life took on an extremely unreal aspect during those months and each individual just had to flow with whatever state his or her mind was in at the moment - within, uh, reason. There was never any fighting although there were many heated arguments; there were no suicides although there was a lot of depression.
After dinner, the evening lecture from Maharishi. Even though most of us were much too spaced-out to follow anything but the simplest train of thought this was usually an enjoyable close to the day. First, people who had had unusual experiences during their day’s rounding would step up to one of the audience mics and describe them for Maharishi and the videotape cameras, and Maharishi would interpret them - either dismissing them as brought on by unstressing or finding in them symptoms of consciousness expansion. These were more varied than you might think: from hallucinations to extra-sensory perceptions to sudden blossomings of consciousness itself.
After all the questions were settled Maharishi would address himself to the evening’s subject which usually had something to do with TM and its effects or else with the proper methods of teaching meditation, that particular training being the fundamental purpose of the course. Maharishi wants one teacher of TM for every hundred thousand people by 1980.
Four, going on five months of this like clockwork: rounding/dinner/lecture/sleep/rounding/dinner/lecture/sleep; no newspapers or music or even days of the week for the most part. Everyone was getting more and more peaced-out, the big chunks seem to have been taken care of.
And all of a sudden it’s time for the rounding to wind down.
Boom! Not only is everybody unstressing like mad again but our bodies are so shook up that a flu epidemic seemed only logical. Three weeks of winding down: eight hours of meditation per day...then six hours...four hours...two hours...half an hour morning and evening (as if it was really possible to meditate with your nose running).
That was the madness at its height: nobody could think straight, everybody was feverish and everybody had to start thinking about what they were going to do back in the real world. The Real World! Isolationism bordering on paranoia all but took over. We’d forgotten all about that part of it.
And in the middle of all this was Maharishi, reminding us that we were all still unstressing and that it really wasn’t so bad as all that Out There (heckuva lot a Hindu monk would know about it).
But a lot of people were having special trouble ‘coming down’. Sleep, or the lack of it, was the main complaint; a lot of people were unstressing so heavily that they couldn’t sleep. There were also troubles with headaches, sudden bursts of overeating or not eating, even one poor kid who couldn’t for the life of him stop laughing - but sleep was the main trouble.
Maharishi thought about this for a while and said he would give “special techniques” to the afflicted. One of my friends at the course was among them and I remember him telling me afterwards that all of them had been cautioned not to discuss their techniques, even with each other, because people with the same problem might have been given slightly different techniques and discussing them would lead to confusion.
As we came down from rounding, of course, we had an increasing amount of free time. This was to be used, according to Maharishi, “...for returning to a life of activity.” To us that meant long walks along the beach, more socializing in the evening and the like. To our course-leaders that meant we should be practicing our introductory teaching lectures, memorizing our ‘Checking Notes’ (a forty-point, cross-referenced series of yes-no questions used for ‘automatic’ checking of another person’s meditation -- for example, ‘...if he answers ‘yes’ go to question #20; if he answers ‘no’ go back to question #17 -- and polishing our teaching procedures because the final tests were not far away.
We were having three group meetings a day by the last weeks of the course. By this time the meditators were spread out all over Majorca so that we could work in groups of two or three hundred. (Hotels on Majorca are mostly closed during the off-season but it didn’t cost much to have them re-opened for the course, and Maharishi spares no expense when it comes to teacher-trainees. The course, in fact, cost the meditator nothing beyond transportation and the original hotel and meal fee: five months in a private hotel room overlooking the Mediterranean, plus meals, plus chartered transportation to and from Majorca from the U.S. cost $1800.00 in 1971.) And of course with so many little groups scattered around the island Maharishi could only see each group every third day or so.
This was the most boring time. Ninety per cent of the ‘teacher-training’ is pure memorization and so the ‘studying’ would consist of sitting in a circle of about ten people, listening to each other picking our tedious way down the foggy paths of memory: “If he says ‘yes’... If he says ‘no’... Over. And over. And over.
Nobody failed the tests. A couple of the men weren’t allowed to take them until they shaved off their beards (moustaches were permissible) and/or cut their hair in order to conform to the official TM-Teacher Image.
Maharishi seemed particularly concerned with our group. “How many here still feel they are heavily unstressing?” he asked in his high, cracking voice. It was shortly before we were to leave for home. More than half of us raised our hands. “Oh, this will not do,” he said, and went on to other matters.
The next day I woke up at about 10:30, did a few half-hearted stretches, meditated for half an hour and sat in the sun on my balcony for a while, then drifted slowly downstairs for lunch, wishing I didn’t feel so spacey and half burned-out still.
When I entered the dining room I noticed a peculiar stirring among the usually placid diners. There was something alien to the atmosphere in there, something familiar but forgotten: everybody looked...anxious. Nervous! What the hell…?
I quickly joined some friends and the bomb was dropped all over again for my benefit: Maharishi was coming that afternoon - and Maharishi was...angry.
This was a side of ‘the giggling guru’, as the media depicted him, that nobody wanted to deal with. For one thing nobody could even imagine what this apparent contradiction in terms - an angry Maharishi - could be like. It was like asking someone who’d never heard of such a thing to imagine an earthquake: things like that don’t happen.
When Maharishi walked calmly into the meeting room at two o’clock every one of the hundred and eighty or so students in the hotel had been perched on the end of his or her metal folding chair there for almost half an hour. There was nothing unusual about his walk, or the way he sat on the sheet-covered couch or the way he looked us over before speaking. But when he spoke, although his voice remained even as always there was something, a slight edge to the words perhaps, that confirmed our fear long before we had the sense of exactly what he was saying.
He told us that, in complete disregard for his specific wishes, people in our group had been openly discussing their special techniques’. He couldn’t believe that we had so little respect for him that we could do this thing. He continued, “...and if I can’t trust you to keep even these little things to yourselves, how am I to trust you to keep the teaching of TM pure? Maybe you are not yet ready for becoming teachers. Maybe I should not make you teachers… I should let you go home without being teachers and then when you have learned respect for what I teach you I will make you teachers. Maybe at the next course at Humboldt this summer… Yes, I think that is what we do: you come see me in five, six months and I make you teachers.”
He stopped. There was silence in the room; a stifling smothering tension that built up, second by second, intolerably. Everyone was thinking the same fragmented thoughts over a swelling, overwhelming grief: ...sent home in shame...I can’t go to California..I’ll never be a teacher, after all this work…
Ten seconds crawled by. I clamped down on a sob that was making my chest ache. My eyes watered and I couldn’t breathe. Fifteen seconds.
A girl in one of the middle rows of the semicircle of chairs burst into tears. Almost simultaneously there was a sound of shattering glass from just outside the room. Two of the students were suddenly on their feet. “Maharishi…” “Maharishi…” They faltered, looked at each other and sat down again. The tears had spread; almost everybody was sobbing or red-faced and watery-eyed. The air was full of grief.
Someone else stood up, one of the course leaders. He was shaken too, and he started to plead our case for us. Maharishi waved him down and said that we should all go back to our rooms and meditate. He would stay there in the meeting room for a while and anyone who wanted to talk to him could do so. We were to meet with him as a group again that evening.
Most of us wandered out, snuffling. As we went out the door I noticed someone I knew, one of the American kitchen helpers, picking up the fragments of what was once a huge bottle from a puddle of water on the floor. He looked up as I was passing and said, “That’s the strangest thing I ever saw.
“What?”
“I was standing here by the table...and the bottle didn’t fall, or anything. It just suddenly...shattered.”
I went back up to my room for the rest of the afternoon, still feeling terribly, terribly choked up. I meditated twice but if failed to alleviate the heaviness that seemed bunched in the middle of my chest. I brooded, trying to make some kind of plans for the future.
Jesus - what would I tell everybody at home?
It was raining.
At five o’clock I couldn’t stand it anymore and trudged down to the dining room. Again something peculiar here: as I walked in the door I felt the huge weight lifted from my chest and my eyes cleared, all in the space of a few seconds. I felt happier than I’d felt in a month, almost silly. It was silly because there was no reason for it. To my conscious knowledge nothing had changed; we were still being sent home in shame. But it was in the air, everybody seemed to feeling clear-minded and slightly giddy all of a sudden.
...And chocolate-covered ice cream on a stick for dessert!
It came out in conversation that a lot of people had gone to Maharishi and “confessed” or had written him a note along the same lines. And Maharishi hadn’t said anything about changing his mind but...everybody knew!
We all tumbled back into the meeting room, laughing and chattering, and when Maharishi came in we were all smiles.
(AUTHOR’S NOTE: Maharishi had also sent his troubadors, The Natural Tendency, to cheer us up while we waited. They played us a song about Maharishi and has us singing the chorus - “Ma-ha-rishi, Ma-ha-rishi, Ma-ha-rishi Ma-hesh Yo-gi” - just as he was entering the hall.)
And he knew we knew, and he smiled back as arranged himself on the couch. He explained off-handedly that people who are unstressing can’t be held entirely responsible for their actions, and how people had to talked to him and given him notes...and of course I am going to make you all teachers.
“Now,” he said, “we must see about this heavy unstressing so many were feeling yesterday. How many still are feeling this way?”
Not a single hand was raised.
“So, we have cleared out much stress since yesterday, hm?”
Maharishi laughed and laughed.
------------------------------------------------
(AUTHOR’S NOTE: To this day I have no idea whether Maharishi was actually angry at us or whether he had just created that entire scenario to cause a mass clearing out of stress. I suspect the latter.)
I did pass all my tests with varying degrees of difficulty. But I can’t believe I didn’t write anything about meeting one-on-one with Maharishi when he officially made me an Initiator.
I definitely remember being extremely nervous and sweaty as I was led in to sit with him. He asked me how old I was and when I told him I was twenty he said something to the effect that maybe I was too young to be a full Initiator and that he would make me a Junior Initiator (only able to initiate teens and children) for now and I could come to another course after I turned twenty-one and be made a full Initiator then.
Terrified, I babbled something about needing to teach my parents and other relatives and friends. He looked at me dubiously for a long moment then smiled and said, “You will teach all the people,” before sending me on my way. I was later given a Puja set with the words “Jia Guru Dev” stamped into the tray. Yep, “Jia”, not ”Jai”. How auspicious.
That’s all I remember.
One other memory that sticks in my mind: on the bus to the airport for the journey home, passing through all that beautiful Majorcan countryside. I’d never had the chance to see much of it in all the time I’d been there. At one point we a passed a sunlit green pasture filled with white sheep and I remember my heart sort of catching at the sight of a young lamb who was jumping into the air and kicking out his hind legs, apparently for the sheer joy of being alive.
*** T H E E N D ***
____________________________________________________________________________
SPECIAL BONUS TRACK:
Livingston Manor Journal
June-July 1977
Unfortunately I didn’t keep a journal after arriving back home from Majorca but I think I can summarize the next few years fairly quickly.
I had left for Majorca as a hippie, more or less, and returned five months later, beardless and short-haired, thirty pounds lighter (down from around 180, I believe) and, most unnerving to my friends who came by to welcome me home the next day, wearing a tie - although I did redeem myself somewhat by wearing it with a workshirt.
I taught a few of them how to meditate and annoyed all of them with my more-spiritual-than-thou airs. A number of them avoided me for several weeks until I came to my senses and apologized. I gave exactly one extremely shaky public introductory TM lecture (assisting Fred Ponneman, by the way, for you Fairfield folks) before deciding that I wasn’t cut out to be a full-time TM teacher and giving it up.
I worked at the local shopping mall that summer selling, ironically enough, men’s suits, so I was forced to wear one every day even though I wasn’t teaching. In the fall I attended the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, fell in with a bunch of music fanatics and began broadcasting on the UMass radio station as well as writing about music for the campus arts & entertainment paper. I also occasionally attended classes.
Needless to say the ‘Initiator Look’ had long since fallen by the wayside:
I graduated in three years by attending the summer semesters, went home and waited for an expected music-industry job offer that never materialized, worked at the mall again - selling records this time, a big step up - and finally wandered back to Amherst to work with a friend of mine who owned a record shop in town.
Although I had kept up with my meditation practice all this time I had more or less drifted away from the TM organization and hadn’t kept up with recent events. But I still had a few acquaintances who were in contact and it was through them that I heard the first rumors about a new, more advanced TM program being offered: something called sidhis (SID-hees). These were allegedly the type of special powers that I’d been so fascinated by back in my sci-fi/Rosicrucian days, including abilities such as invisibility, finding lost objects and best of all levitation.
I was very skeptical of these rumors at first. Even if such things were possible they seemed much too flashy for a hyper-conservative organization like Maharishi’s. With the Movement it was all about science and charts and graphs and deep rest and the mind-body relationship and technical stuff like that. I would have expected them to avoid magical-sounding stuff like that completely.
Still, I was intrigued and contacted the TM Center in Amherst, and the director there confirmed the story. Needless to say I was ready to learn immediately...until I heard what was being charged for the course. I don’t remember what the price was then but it was way out of my reach, so I asked about work-study programs and because of my radio and audio-production experience was told to contact the directors of the Academy for the Science of Creative Intelligence in Livingston Manor, New York, which was where a great deal of the audio, video and printing work for the Movement was done at the time.
As a result I joined the staff there in June of 1977 and once again I kept a journal. As you can see I made a vague and slightly sarcastic attempt to regain the Initiator look:
(I looked more than a little like fellow-meditator and Majorca Course participant Andy Kaufman, didn’t I?)
And for some reason, maybe because Livingston Manor was home to a bunch of artsy/technical types who weren’t going to be making public appearances anyway, this was thought to be acceptable when I arrived, though I had a haircut forced upon me soon afterwards. Even so, I’m pretty sure I was the only staff member receiving Creem magazine in the mail.
My attitude towards the restrictions of the Movement lifestyle had certainly become even snarkier after three years of freedom at UMass, as you’ll see, and my writing style had become even more imitative of Wolfe and Thompson. I thought of myself as a rock ‘n’ roll rebel going undercover and it certainly shows. It’s fascinating to rediscover how much roughness I was carrying around compared to my relative peaceableness during the Majorca course.
In many ways this journal is just a record of what it was like to work at a Movement facility during this particular time - an experience that I’ve sometimes compared to being stranded at a Baptist church-supper for all eternity, except that the food wasn’t as good. But this was also the time when the sidhis program was first being introduced not only to the Movement but to the world at large so there’s some history that may be of interest.
Again, some names have been changed, just because.
June 14th, 1977
Livingston Manor - sounds like the sort of place you stumble upon in the boggy moors and get eaten by the Hound of the Baskervilles for your trouble. In actuality it’s an aging holiday retreat in the backwoods near the Catskills of New York. Sort of a Howard Johnson’s Motor Lodge going to seed on Mount Ararat or wherever the boat landed when the floods went back.
Memories of the Majorca course are starting to come back as I look around. The people seem basically similar to those I would expect to find at a small-to-medium college of twenty years ago: men in short hair, suits and ties, women all in dresses, everyone preserving decorum. No one speaks or laughs loudly, and of course no one smokes, drinks or dopes here. Do love and/or sex happen here? We’ll see. I’d feel more at home if someone would yell “FUCK!” out a window once in a while as so often happened at UMass.
It’s going to be tough psychologically, not only because of the dress code, etc., that I thought I’d escaped forever on graduation from high school, but because of my attitude. I expect most of the staff are True Believers who are really into this kind of lifestyle, who are convinced that if they follow the straight and narrow for x number of years they will achieve enlightenment, whereas I’m something of a berserker who is locking himself into this pattern as the only means of verifying the claims of the Movement.
I’m into loud and crazy music and creative mind-spew - I feel like a spy, like Hunter Thompson infiltrating the narc convention in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I must find out if I have any - excuse the expression - spiritual brothers or sisters here. There must be some kind of hell to raise.
Boy, do I miss my stereo already. And there’s really no escape; no sneaking into town to smuggle in a stash of Oreos ‘cause it’s too far to walk and the only other modes of transport are official vehicles or a taxi. Is this the biggest drug of all?
Gack! The tap-water is milky white. And it fizzes! Safe to drink?
And now for my first subversive act since arriving at the Academy.
Close the curtains: Shhh… I’m going to consult I Ching.
Shocker, huh? We’re not suppose to have anything to do with any thing, place or body which might smack of religious/spiritual ties elsewhere. I don’t think I could eat the whole book in time if the authorities start breaking down my door, but here goes:
Amazing. #45: Ts’ui - Gathering Together.
What odd souvenirs I’m finding as I unpack my shaving kit: a pendant with Maharishi on one side and Guru Dev on the other, still gift-wrapped from Christmas of ‘72 when I decided the recipient wouldn’t appreciate it; a stub of black crayon from my days working in a warehouse many years ago, and about seven contraceptives.
What do people do for munchies around here anyway? I missed dinner and haven’t eaten all day. Oh well, a symbolic purification fast for one day won’t hurt, I guess. They really ought to put in a granola bar dispenser or something.
For the sake of my sanity I’m glad I have so many obscure t-shirts, even if I’ll be the only one who knows I’ve got them on for a while. Maybe I’ll become a flasher...
June 15th, 1977
I don’t believe it - I’ve been here just less than twenty-four hours and already I am bored shitless. What do people do around here besides go to staff meetings or lectures or videotapes of Maharishi rehashing the same old stuff? Does anyone have a stereo, a tape player, a guitar? A comb and tissue maybe?
So far I’m completely satisfied with one thing: my room. Which I will be moving out of within the week, probably to one shared with another Initiator. If this is the case I may quit before I even get underway. Lack of privacy alone would get me edgy but sharing a room with some hard-core bliss-ninny who just wants to babble the latest TM small-talk would drive me to kill in short order.
I went to all three meals today for the first and probably last time as most work-days begin at 8:30 AM or so and breakfast doesn’t start until nine or so. Sound financial management. The food was pretty good, with all the usual vegetarian esoteria like tofu patties but with a disturbing absence of cheese from all meals - surely it hasn’t become that expensive. In Majorca we used to eat it by the pound.
Work - boy, talk about getting off on the wrong foot. Somebody new is running Personnel and all he knew was that I was supposed to work for M.I.U. Press* so he sent me over to the guy who runs the printing department and the next thing I know I’m in work clothes and being shown the many, many intricacies of the noisy, stinky printing presses, as if I would know one from a Sherman tank.
*(AUTHOR’S NOTE: Maharishi International University - M.I.U. - was founded by Maharishi in 1973. It’s now known as Maharishi University of Management and has been located in Fairfield, Iowa since 1974. You can read more about it here:
Bright and early tomorrow I’m heading back to the Personnel office and see if I can get in with the videots or if I gotta stay with the press department at least get something a little more in my line, like editing or paste-up.
And lest I forget why I’m here - and it could happen - let me tell you that this morning while moping around after breakfast, waiting for the Personnel director to show up, I was scanning the bulletin boards to see what people were buying and selling when I spotted a picture. In the middle of the “Press” board, where TM-related articles in the major papers are posted, a black and white 8x10 glossy photo was thumbtacked. No caption, no names or location: just a picture of two women and a baby in a room.
The floor was a mattress of some kind. Woman #1 was seated at left in a half-lotus on the floor, looking down at the baby on her lap, who is smiling towards the camera. Woman #2 was wearing loose pants, a sweater and a kerchief around her neck. She was also in the half-lotus position: eye closed, hands folded in her lap, back not particularly straight. She was apparently seated about a foot in the air above the mattress.
June 16th, 1977
Well, well. ‘Give it up and have it all,’ to coin a phrase. I thought it over some while falling asleep last night and some more while working at the press this morning - or rather, watching John work, he being the only one thoroughly acquainted with the nature of the cantankerous beast - and figured I’d check with the guy at Personnel again and see if he’d made a mistake since he’d been here only a few day longer than myself. If it turned out that he hadn’t then what the hell, working the press wouldn’t be too bad for a few months - might even be kind of fun - and then maybe after some rounding I could transfer to video or something.
Basically I was in a much more receptive frame of mind than when I arrived.
At work a rather interesting occurrence: one of the higher-ups (that phrase gets more literal all the time around here) in the TM organization arrived with a letter, of which we in the press were directed to make four hundred and fifty copies - without reading it, due to its top-secret content. Reminds me of the father of a high school friend of mine who worked for a computer firm with several hush-hush government contracts; due to some bureaucratic snafu his security rating was only, say, Sixth Level while the material he was writing for them was, say, Third Level. He used to fantasize about creating a device which would gradually cover each sheet as he wrote it so he wouldn’t have access to the “secret” information he had just written.
Anyway, of course I took a glance at one of the scraps after the guy left. He had told us it had to do with the sidhis courses which were beginning in the U.S. today. The phrase I caught was simply, “...agrees to keep private…” Probably similar to the form I signed when I became a TM teacher in ‘72. Just a matter of keeping the company secrets.
After that I was carrying a load of soiled work uniforms (and where else, I ask you, are ties worn with work uniforms?) from the Press building to the laundry when a fellow stopped me in the lobby and asked me if I was Andy MacKenzie. Uh-oh, I thought, they’ve got the Brain Police after me for reading that scrap of paper.
But it turned out he was from the Video Department and he invited me to drop by the studio this evening to see a presentation on the Academy itself that they’d made. I said sure, thanked him, shouldered my laundry and made off towards the basement where the washing machines were kept.
On my way to the stairs I passed a knot of people and overheard phrases like, “light crew” and “sound crew”. Just as I started down the stairs I heard one of them say something about a new audio engineer who’d been here for two days whom nobody had seen yet. This, I reflected, was probably me. So I turned around, went back to the group and said, “Excuse me, did you mention something about a new audio engineer?” They nodded. “Well, it might be me.”
They were understandably a little perturbed to find that their audio man had been assigned to work on the presses. Michael Barnard is head of the video project here and one of the group ran off to tell him I”d been found. They told me to visit his office after dropping off the laundry.
This I did and discovered him hollering at the Personnel Director over the phone. Politely, of course. Then he hung up and told me to get over to personnel and get my forms changed so I’d be officially listed as a Video Department person. I did this while shrugging off the profuse apologies from the Personnel Director, telling him I’d kind of enjoyed it.
I went over to the Print building, turned in my uniform, bid a cheery farewell to my former co-workers and headed back to Barnard’s office.
Nobody home. I scouted around a little and found some people from the original group engaged in moving some books and things out of a room in order to clear the area for an incoming weekend course member*. They told me not to hassle with it and that they’d see me tonight at the presentation.
*(AUTHOR’S NOTE: Livingston Manor was also used as a retreat. Meditators would come in to round for a weekend or more, watch videotapes of Maharishi, take advanced courses, etc.)
They didn’t have to twist my arm. I headed back to my room and read and wrote for a while then went for my first swim in the Academy pool. This is indoors and has a sauna which I’ll have to figure out how to use one of these days.
I was the first one in. The lifeguard, fellow by the name of Mike, appears to be one of the subversives I’ve been looking for: He had a copy of Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi with him (which is almost as high on the burn list as I Ching) and that’s how we started talking. He’s not much into music, seemingly, but he’ll be a good source of inside info as to who the other ‘troublemakers around campus’ are, having been here for seven months, and he’ll know pretty much what can be gotten away with.
He told me the name of the guy in charge of deciding which advanced courses would be taught: Tom Duffy. He’s the guy I’ll have to see about my alleged Music and Consciousness* course once I see how the land lies.
*(AUTHOR’S NOTE: I had done a couple of audio ‘term papers’ on this theme for a couple of my media classes at college, and had the idea that somehow this qualified me to teach a class on the subject there at the Academy. Fortunately nothing ever came of this.)
Being on ‘faculty’ could be the key, so to speak, to a room of my own, something which Mike assures me I will not have for long, and won’t have again for a long time to come otherwise.
June 17th, 1977
Jesus. Walking out of the press room and into the video studio was like walking out of Gutenberg’s workshop and onto the set of Star Trek. The contrast between the two areas made the presses, which are actually quite modern and sophisticated, not to mention huge, seem totally out-moded, relics of a time when communication was a painstaking and clumsy process at best. Whereas in the video studio it’s fast and clumsy. But seriously, folks…
Eep. I just now got a roommate. Here I’ve been scanning the bulletin board every 3-4 hours for notice that I’ll be moving out and they move someone in on me instead like the sneaks that they are. He says they told him it’s only temporary. I told him I’d heard that one already. Maybe next week.
Anyway, to return to last night, there I was walking around with my eyes bugging out somewhere past my nose, totally boggled. I became more that a little worried when I couldn’t recognize anything in that room which seemed to relate to my area of specialty. God, what if I was obsolete already?
Fortunately for my state of mind I wandered into the next room and found equipment that was similar to what I’d worked with at the radio station - to about the same extent that a factory-new Rolls Royce with all the trimmings resembles a ‘57 Chevy. More about that later.
I also met my ‘teacher’, Lawrence, who showed me the mixing board. There’s also an 8-track reel-to-reel, a half-track reel-to-reel, four monster monitors and two synthesizers. He gave me an extremely fast rundown on the mixing board’s functions in as technical a manner as he could possibly muster then took me into the video studio proper.
If I hadn’t run out of flabbergas before (in fact just finding out that there was all this space and equipment behind an innocent-looking door off the main lobby - like walking through the grandfather clock and finding yourself in the Bat-Cave - was more than sufficiently unhinging) the studio would have completely depleted the supply.
Not only was it huge, it looked totally professional: a slick “talk show” set, thousands of dollars worth of lights and two of the most beautiful pieces of machinery I’ve ever laid eyes or hands on: the cameras. Full color, of course, but what made them so exquisite was that despite their size and bulk - bigger than I was - they responded with ease and precision to the lightest pressure, not just on the lens controls but even to raising, lowering or moving the entire camera.
They go for about $130,000. Each. Whereas the stipend for Academy staff, regardless of position, is about $25. Per month. Not that there’s much use for pocket money around here anyway, of course.
I sat and watched Lawrence at work while a program was taped. It was a presentation about the services available at the Academy for TM Centers across the country: what’s available from M.I.U. Press, which video lessons are most effective, stuff like that. I noticed that Lawrence didn’t use much of the board, just two faders for the mics, one for the show’s theme music and one for the soundtracks of a couple of films being shown during the program.
There wasn’t much for him to do so we talked a lot and found we hit if off pretty well. Firesign Theatre nuts are hard to come by in this neck of the woods - or even anyone with a properly twisted sense of humor and not given to spouting the ‘party line’, as Lawrence puts it. So we ought to get along all right.
After the program was completed we went to the audio production room while he was doing his laundry. This room is a totally separate entity from the video department, being downstairs and used primarily for radio production. I felt more at home there, it being all sort of cramped and claustrophobic like the production room back at the UMass radio station, even though the board here was a great deal more complex than I was used to, being designed to mix ten inputs down to four channels for starters. The one in video mixes I don’t know how many inputs - a lot - down to eight channels.
Again he gave me a totally incomprehensible rundown on the board, then he played some music by a local bluegrass band, ostensibly because he liked them - and they were pretty good - but actually because he’d recorded them. He said he’s leaving for the weekend today and to just play with the board for a while, which I’ve done, a little. It doesn’t seem nearly as complicated as I thought. I’m going to go play with it some more now.
June 18th, 1977
I almost got that board talking to me - managed to make the tape deck feed through as far as the headphone jack on the board, but couldn’t find the missing link to turn on the monitors. As I said, it doesn’t look nearly as intimidating as I thought but I’ve still got a lot to learn.
My roommate Steve had to return the car he came in so he just dumped his stuff off and left again, not to return until later today, so I had the room to myself. After giving up on noodling with the board downstairs I read and wrote for a while before evening meditation and dinner.
After dinner came the first installment of the Summer Celebration, which will run through Sunday night. First there was a little ceremony in which various members of the community - meditating members, that is - were given Maharishi Awards for their aid in “creating an ideal society”. It’s a good seed of an idea; it will have a lot more clout when and if the Movement gets to be a real power in the world. As it is they seemed to be scraping the bottom of the barrel for enough people to give awards to: retired fire chiefs, dedicated social workers, etc. One meditating mayor.
After that a tedious cake-lighting and cutting ceremony with the community members reading their part of the ritual off of cards and taking turns sharing a cake-knife with one of the “Ministers of the World Government” while they tried to cut and intone at the same time. The highlight, of course, was the cake itself - nothing like a good sugar binge - and three kinds of ice cream.
After that, entertainment from one of the Movement’s wandering troubadours, Rick Stanley. He sings and plays very well and has a real gift for melody but I must admit to having little patience with academic-sounding ‘Movement’ songs, full of in-house jargon and catch-phrases like “Science of Creative Intelligence” and “Dawn of the Age of Enlightenment”. They remind me of those musical ads for the Army ROTC program that get created for rock stations - trying to be hip and still be the Army.
June 19th, 1977
Day Two of the celebration was a literal wash-out due to rain. The day’s scheduled activities were a picnic, which we had indoors (there is cheese in great abundance after all, by the way). various sporting events and an evening bonfire and sing-along. Summer camp for the ‘upwardly-mobile’, you might say.
This morning was the movie marathon. There’s a fairly sizable video library here, taped right off the television so you get the first and last few seconds of the commercial breaks as well. About ten of us watched Help! in the Silent Dining Room, a sneaky place hidden off of the main dining room. Next on the bill was The Seventh Seal, which I’ve seen once too often to bother watching on a little TV screen in an undarkened room so I left.
There’s a softball game this afternoon and a talent show(!) tonight, on which I may wreak a little Firesign havoc, depending on the vibes and my nerves.
June 20th, 1977
Nope. Watched another movie in the afternoon - Gene Hackman and Al Pacino in The Scarecrow - in the video studio with Dennis, a guy on the crew I’ve been talking with. Everyone seems to treat me sympathetically because I’m working with Lawrence. They all either come right out and say they can’t stand him or just say he’s very difficult to work with. I haven’t had any trouble with him but I’m new here.
The talent show was cancelled due to the fact that only one person entered and the previously rained-out bonfire was substituted. I watched a tape of a special Downbeat Magazine Poll Winners show with Sonny Fortune, Jean-Luc Ponty, Ron Carter, Billy Cobham, Stanley Clarke, Chick Corea and lots of other cool guys, then toddled over to the bonfire: apple cider, sing-alongs, the usual schtick. But almost everyone was wearing - and I gasped - bluejeans! I didn’t know they did anything informally around here.
Today was my first real day on the job. Last night Lawrence told me to meet him in the downstairs studio at “8:30 sharp” this morning. I finally routed him out of his room a little after nine. We spent the day on the mixing board, with some side trips. Lawrence gave me a copy of the Sound Studio Manual he’d written and surprisingly it’s not over-detailed or unnecessarily technical. Should be a real help.
As I understand the scuttlebut, when (and if) I master the boards Lawrence will be phased into mainly doing film soundtracks - the most complicated procedures of the bunch - and equipment maintenance while I, ostensibly an easier person to get along with, will be handling both World Plan Radio and audio engineering for the video crew. Michael Barnard seemed interested in the possibility of a real radio station here as well so who knows?
Roommate Steve and I got very spaced out on our evening meditation. I’ve started following his example and doing asanas, pranyama, etc. before morning and evening meditation. We showed up at dinner ten minutes before the doors opened at 6:30 and didn’t leave until 8:15. We were on a real talking binge (especially me) set off mainly by the meditation spaciness and largely by the fact that we were sitting at a table full of women for the first time since arriving.
When we got back to our room we - again especially me - kept right on talking, about music this time. He’s a lot smarter and more musically aware than I would have suspected at first impression. He was the first to mention Philip Glass and John Cage though he hadn’t actually heard anything by them. We talked and enthused ourselves hoarse until 11:00.
June 21st, 1977
I’m starting to settle in somewhat. I don’t think I’ll be totally comfortable until I’ve proved myself on the main board in the video studio though. Mentally my goal is to handle the entire audio portion of a video production - from, say, picking the music and doing the miking to the actual live handling of the sound - by myself. Then I’ll worry about the more subtle aspects, like the miking for live music.
The main board, by the way, is a lot less intimidating than I’d thought now that I know that aside from handling more inputs and outputs the only major difference between it and the downstairs board is that the elements which have to be patched into the downstairs board (that is, which exist separately from it, such as the reverb unit, the equalizer, etc.) are just built right into the main board. It’s a custom-made Neve and goes for about $24,000.
Very strange. Steve, who’s on the Housing & Maintenance crew, told me that he and some of the other crew members were sent to clean out the room of a person who was here for the Phase I Teacher Training Course* being given here.
*(AUTHOR’S NOTE: Sometime after my months in Majorca the structure of Teacher Training courses was changed so that different aspects were completed separately as it was decided that intellectual work such as memorization did not mix well with rounding.)
Seems the guy had been taken away to a hospital somewhere. Previous mental trouble, psychiatric help, etc., were given as the cause. Steve said he was putting the guy’s papers in his briefcase when he glance at a line on one of the pages - probably a journal like this one. In what Steve said was incredibly twisted handwriting were the words, “I think the worst is over.” Hmm.
One thing I’ll say for this place - though maybe I’m just getting psyched - is that my meditations seem to be 100% deeper and clearer here.
Also, rumor has it that Lillian - one of the main people entrusted by Maharishi with giving out advanced techniques - may be coming here, which would be great as I’m long overdue for the third technique.
June 22nd, 1977
I definitely think that most of the video crew are just dying for me to master the board up there so I can start doing the sound for productions. It’s not so much that I’m such a great guy - true though that is - but that Lawrence makes himself so hard to work with, telling other people how to do their jobs, not letting people finish what they want to tell him and generally carrying on like a spoiled brat. As I said, I get along with him pretty well, partially because of our teacher-pupil relationship. which gives him a chance to show off what he knows - and he does know a lot; the people here may not like him but they sure enough come to him when they need to know how something functions - and partially because I treat him with the friendly respect he seems to think he deserves.
Haircut hassles begin again, through no fault of my own. The guy from Personnel stopped me at lunch today and asked me to come by his office afterwards. At first I didn’t think it was my hair as when I got here a week ago he told me it was all right, but sure enough. Actually I’ve been trying to get it cut since I arrived but the guy who did most of the haircutting here had to leave because his mother had a stroke or something. One of the women I’d met at dinner the other night, name of Ronnie, said she’d do it for me. If I don’t find her tomorrow I may try to do it myself with the old electric clippers that gave me and my brothers so many crewcuts in our youth and more recently kept my dear departed beard in trim.
Scuttlebut has it that not only sex but even ‘public displays of affection’, such as holding hands, are semi-officially verboten.
Steve has been given notice to move to another room; seems we Initiators (such as ‘we’ are) have high priority for private rooms. We played frisbee after dinner and it was beautiful. We were both exhilarated by our evening meditations - mine was about as deep as it’s ever been and Steve, who’s only supposed to be meditating for twenty minutes, came out at forty-five. The air was cool and just a little breezy and the sun was going down over the forest and a huge green field that we had all to ourselves.
He in his jeans and flannel shirt and I in my jeans and rather shrunken Alfred E. Neuman “What, Me Worry?” t-shirt were running around doing fancy throws and catches that neither of us could do and laughing like mad-men. It felt so good to be running free and working up a sweat after all these days of being straitjacketed and half-choked by neckties.
When we got back to our room we both had an incredible desire for rock & roll, we were so worked up. There being, of course, none available we did the next best thing and talked about it for hours. He’s really into Mahavishnu John McLaughlin. We talked about getting some other staff musicians together and starting a band. A pipe-dream, of course, but it would be fun to try.
We really get along well together, it seems. I think I’ll be sorry to see him move out, which, coming from a privacy fiend like me, is saying something. Hope we don’t drift apart.
A little ditty that’s been making the rounds, sung to the tune of the Mickey Mouse Club theme*:
M-I-U, S-C-I, M-O-N-E-Y.
*(AUTHOR’S NOTE: The chorus of which was: “M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E”.)
June 23rd, 1977
I was dead tired this morning - seven and a half hours of sleep just doesn’t make it - so just a quick entry in the journal tonight.
There was a staff meeting this morning in which it was revealed that if a certain grant goes through the Video/Radio/Film Department will have four - count ’em, four - million bucks to play with. A lot of this would go for decent salaries in order to keep the turnover rate down.
Today I discovered, after about seventy takes of one sixty-second spot, that my voice may be professional but has little straight commercial use, being somewhat too nasal. Thank heavens; it gets very hard to fake any enthusiasm for those incredibly straight and wimpy TM ads anyway - they sound like McDonald’s commercials. However I’ve at least mastered, more or less, the technique of producing the little suckers using someone else’s voice.
There was a power failure after dinner tonight. Steve and I spent two hours walking around the ‘campus’ grounds, bored beyond belief. We wound up by the lake, talking about music, drugs women and other non-monastic subjects.
“Oh, little town of S.C.I., how still we see thee lie…”
The lights were only out for about half an hour.
Gotta get my stereo soon - we need the music. I keep telling myself that I’ll get into the rhythm of this place and won’t miss it so much, which is what happened in Majorca, but I was rounding then.
June 24th, 1977
To coin a phrase: Thank god it’s Friday. I am going to sleep until I can’t sleep anymore.
So ends my first full week on the job. I feel as though I’ve come a long way as far as learning the equipment - downstairs anyway. My friend Dennis says he’s got a booklet on the Neve board which I can study with.
The power failure last night screwed up some of the film equipment so Lawrence was busy all day. I just noodled around on the equipment and sneakily re-read part of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test - which I feel reasonably sure is not on the Recommended List around here.
I talked briefly with Michael Barnard, who told me that he’d recently visited RCA’s main studios in New York City, where they have electronically movable walls and ceilings in order to change the acoustics of the room to suit their needs. And when he told the engineers there that we had a sixteen-track Neve board and a Studer eight-track reel-to-reel their jaws dropped. They said they’d had a similar Neve board on order for months and were really looking forward to it because it was so much better than what they had. We’re better equipped than RCA?
I’ve got to get a haircut soon - Personnel is really getting on my case. I’d be more than happy to, really; I just can’t get a barber lined up.
Big square dance tonight, complete with professional caller. That was about the closest contact I’ve seen between men and women since arriving. Men outnumbered the women considerably so, as I didn’t feel like taking on a male partner as some did, I watched for a while then split down to the lake. And it’s weird: when Steve and I were down there last night there was nothing particular to see; tonight there were millions of fireflies! Summer’s here I guess.
Audio production is really backed up due to lack of a good announcer voice so I put up a weird sign for the “World Plan Radio Talent Hunt” outside the dining room:
(AUTHOR’S NOTE: The unsightly patch after the word “around” is there because the word was originally “around(ing)” but I was informed afterwards that people who were at the Academy for rounding shouldn’t be encouraged to do any sort of work, so I had to cover up my clever phraseology.)
I was told about an alleged new sidhi today: “Knowing the future”.
June 25th, 1977
Except for some last-minute excitement of real value this would have been a totally forgettable day, another rainy Saturday.
Slept late (9:00!), stayed in bed reading Acid Test for a while, did my morning routine, started a letter, had lunch, took a shower, spent the rest of the afternoon working on the letter and reading. Steve and I did our evening routines - and again I must admit that my meditations are really something else around here - then got dressed and started off towards the dining room.
This is where the excitement comes in. As I may have written earlier, Steve and I are apparently the only non-course people on the “Age of Enlightenment Course” corridor. Well, as we were heading down the corridor towards the fire escape, which is more convenient to the dining room than the main stairs, we saw Henry, probably the oldest guy on the staff, standing outside the door to the room of one of the “A of E” teachers.
He gestured at us to come closer. As we got nearer we heard the most amazing sounds coming from the room: Boom, Boom! Boom! Boom, Boom! He looked at us, wide-eyed, and said, “They’re flying in there!” Not in shock or even surprise really, just awed. And then it hit me and I remembered what I’d heard about people who hadn’t quite perfected their ‘flying’ technique and who tended to come down suddenly. Boom!
On any other day the fact of pizza for dinner would have been occasion for much hooraw but tonight we hardly noticed. Boom!
June 26th, 1977
After I finished writing last night I went down to check out musical performances by a guy called Geezy and two other locals. It was “Cafe Night” in the Silent Dining Room, everyone seated around little tables with candles on them.
The other two, a woman singer and a keyboard player, seemed pretty dispensable, although I only showed up for the last two numbers, but Geezy was pretty good when he wasn’t falling into the horrible habit most of the performers here have of sticking Movement catch-phrases into their material. I mean really, turning the chorus of “Sea Cruise” into “Oh baby, let me take you on a residence course”? Jee-sus. But Geezy’s last number was done solo, a nice personal love song to God, sort of a Donovan melody with George Harrison-ish touches. Had it in my head a lot today.
After that Steve, Dennis and I went into the Video Department sound room and played some tapes, during which Lawrence came in and looked pissed because someone else was using his beloved Neve. We watched a tape of the Frank Zappa performances on Saturday Night Live.
Today Steve and I were going absolutely bughouse looking for things to do - we even got the cards out at one point and played Spit and Crazy Eights. We went for a long walk in the woods after breakfast, following whatever paths we came across. The Academy had been there before us though, posting “No Snowmobiling” signs on every third tree, just about.
One path led to a sort of dump for old machinery, including a completely intact, as near as we could tell, mobile home. Nothing inside but rugs on the floor, a few plastic cushions and a spilled box of detergent. Good place for the First Annual Academy Sex Orgy.
Most paths wound up running into the Academy golf course, a very strange sight in itself as it’s kept trimmed but in a very rough way, with no difference at all between the fairway and the green. The flags are all still there in their holes. What used to be the clubhouse is now a combination school and nursery - they use a nearby trap as a sandbox…
Made reckless with boredom we climbed the Academy water tower. Scary business, that - I almost gave up halfway ‘cause my heart was beating so fast - but what a view: layer on layer of the Catskills’ purple mountain majesty, our big blue lake, our sloppy-crewcut golf course, the beautiful girl with blonde hair down to her thighs walking and sort of dancing by herself (or so she thought) and big white clouds we could almost grab with our hands.
Getting down was a lot easier.
After lunch Steve said he wanted us to outside and do some acapella rock & roll. So we went out and sort of sang under our breaths, the way people sometimes do when walking somewhere, while we looked for a good spot. When we found the spot, however - where the golf course breaks up into humpy green hills that slope gently down to the lake - we just got plain hypnotized by the setting, pastoral as it was, and without a word hunkered down in the grass and grokked on it in total silence for more than hour.
Steve fell asleep but I began to feel very restless after a while, as if there was something missing. I think I felt - as I often do when I am moved by something, be it scenery, a book, a performance or whatever - the need to express that feeling of being emotionally stirred, with someone (Oh yes, always an imaginary ideal Someone who is sent in from Stage Right exactly on cue) who is similarly moved to that same need: to hold someone close and in doing that express the feeling: God, isn’t this a fantastic, beautiful moment we have here and isn’t it wonderful that we have it.
Argh. Hell of a monk I’d make. I had vague thoughts about leaving the Academy and going back to Boston, but I knew, or at least half-believed, that these are just growing pains; the dues, and I’m getting off pretty easy, considering. Bear with it, pops, you’re getting there.
June 27th, 1977
It’s really starting to hit the fan around here. The orders for radio Public Service Announcements are backed up due to the lack of voice talent to read them, though with luck we’ll get those cleared up tomorrow. Tom Duffy, who is Age of Enlightenment Productions’ distributor, called and told me that Trans-World Airlines wasn’t particularly interested in showing our TM promotional films during their flights but wanted a few 15-20 minute “documentaries in sound” - one emphasizing the benefits of TM in business, one for sports and one for TM in general. So I gotta put them together, right?
This means going through miles of tapes to extract the relevant bits of various interviews and writing most of the copy myself! I asked Michael Barnard for some standard sort of filler copy the department uses for categories like business and sports and he told me there wasn’t any. Fortunately it looks as though some people in the Business Department are going to write that one for me and maybe someone in the “TM and Athletics Division”, or whatever, will write that one and with those two I can probably B.S. the last one. I hope.
Meanwhile I got three replies to my voice-talent ad - one male, two females. I ran into the guy in the hall and just gave him a quick run-through in the studio, but I think he’s going to be too nasal. But I had a great time writing absurd replies to the other two. A Kitty Todd in the Press Department had written, “I’d be happy to do some radio spots if you can use my voice,” and I wrote this Monty Pythonesque response:
“Dear Kitty,
That’s the spirit! Break away from the humdrum, workaday Press world of two dimensions and explore the exciting, monophonic one dimension of Radio! The neighbors will simply turn green with envy when they hear your voice crackling crisply out of the cheap transistor unites they keep hidden behind their much-displayed but totally non-functional antique cathedral radio in the foyer.
Let me know when you’re available - days, nights or both - and we’ll set up the audio equivalent of a screen test for you. This’ll show those people down the street who always complained to your parents and tried to blame the things that happened to their lawn on your lovable - and totally innocent, of course - St. Bernard. They’ll be nowhere and you’ll be a star...
Andy”
Steve and I have informally founded the Water Tower Club, membership consisting of those who have climbed the water tower. One guy was telling us about how he had to help paint that sucker last summer.
June 28th, 1977
Just returned from getting my neck sliced open by the only “barber” at the Academy - who, fortunately for his health, is leaving for an A of E course on Friday. He spent over an hour on me, soaking my hair, sprooshing it, cutting it this way, trimming it that way, shaving it another way. And it still came out looking like I leaned too far over the garbage disposal while it was on. Brushing what’s left of it behind my ears helps somewhat. Oh well, the thing about hair is that it grows back. (Except maybe around here.)
Boy, I was on the go today. Learned how to operate the 16mm soundtrack machines today so I could transfer the sound from the existing ‘Business’ and ‘Sports’ films onto a reel-to-reel machine for editing. Turns out what Duffy wants is just that, the soundtrack of the films - specifically the interviews - with the narration re-done to include the names and occupations of those people for whom that info is only given on-screen.
Ann, our new ‘official’ voice, is still complaining of slight laryngitis, so manana for that.
Very strange experience this morning, I’m not sure I can put it into words, but…
I was walking through the video room when I spotted a couple of people watching the intro to one of our umpteen Maharishi tapes. I stopped to make some snide comment about the music being used - some rather sticky violins. The title of the video was something about Higher Consciousness so I stayed to watch a little, thinking it might have something to do with the sidhis.
Maharishi came on-screen and I suddenly realized in hindsight, from the credits, that the tape was copyrighted 1973 and so couldn’t possibly have anything to do with such a new program. I started to move away but noticed that Maharishi had been ‘on’ for ten seconds or so and still hadn’t said anything - he was just sitting silently, eyes closed. After a few more seconds passed he opened his eyes, looked around and began to speak - some S.C.I. material, not really of interest to me.
But - and this is the hard part - for the first time, despite all those nights in Spain where Maharishi lectured us personally, despite all the countless S.C.I. and other videotapes of Maharishi I’ve been exposed to, I’ve never before sensed this thing I sensed just then. It was as if, though speaking, he was still totally embraced in silence, as if he were filled with it, as if he saw it everywhere he looked. It was even as if - and I know this sounds crazy - it was silence itself speaking somehow.
The words themselves went right past me without a trace of meaning sinking in, the meanings of words being an irrelevancy at that moment. But the way the words came out of him, as if they were part - but only a part - of the soundtrack to a film he was totally absorbed in… Ach, words can’t express it.
Someone in the room made an adjustment to the video player that stopped the tape for a second and broke the spell. Back to work I went, wondering vaguely why I hadn’t seen it before.
I saw Carl Stone of the Amherst TM Center today. He said you have to be able to get into the full-lotus position for the flying sidhi at first, though he’d heard tell of one guy who does it standing straight up…
I heard tell that at the time our Video Department opened some two years ago it was the best equipped - bar none - in the world. Scary.
June 29th, 1977
This haircut has got to go - in jacket and tie I look as though I ought to be out recruiting pledges for my fraternity.
What a day. Finished recording a bunch of PSA demo cassettes and making labels for them, spent some time in my office (!) looking busy but actually working on some fairly twisted song lyrics which grew out of a line that came to me: “Oh, the cops? They just came to dance.”
Noodled around some more on the downstairs board and finally got the reverb unit to work for me - sounds like a dungeon. Promised a couple of the film staff guys I’d help them record some music in there some night.
I got the transcripts of the Sports and Business films, now I have to add some narration after I edit the soundtracks down to just the interviews.
So many appointments. Had to meet with Ann, our “voice” at 5:00, and we got a couple of spots recorded by 6:00 - we’ll start again at 9:00 tomorrow morning. At 11:30 AM I have notice to appear “for a brief interview” with the Staff Programs Coordinator - I hope this is just, “Well, ya been here two weeks now, how ya doin?” I’m supposed to meet my two other prospective voices at 8:00 and 8:30 PM respectively.
And some time or other I gotta move to my new quarters in a little sort of cottage which is connected by a hallway to the main building. I can’t believe it, though: they put me right upstairs from Lawrence. I think I’d better see how long I can go without him finding out I’m there. I don’t think I’ll be able to move until Friday night at the earliest. The place has a funny name - I think it’s The Bari or something like that.
The Rumor Mill Grinds On: (1) the eighth and highest state of consciousness, Brahman Consciousness* is in turn divided up into sixteen substates, if you will, and - ready? - you can only reach the, uh, upper sixteenth if you have been a life-long celibate.
(AUTHOR’S NOTE: Yes, somewhere along the line the Seven States of Consciousness became Eight. Brahman Consciousness, as near as I can figure, is kind of a super-sized or souped-up version of Unity Consciousness, the Seventh State.)
(2) The Phase I teacher-trainees were having a group meditation today and two of them began to “hop” - that is, exhibit the beginning symptoms of flying - without having been taught the sidhis. It’s happened before, rumor has it.
Steve says the Academy got twenty or thirty mattress-size chunks of foam rubber today for the flyers. Also heard there were two very supportive letters in Newsweek this week in reaction to the article they printed about the “new breakthroughs” here in TM-ville.
June 30th, 1977
So many things happened today - I hope I can remember them all.
Ann and I did some more work on PSA’s but it’s going to take a while as she only has an hour in the mornings and evenings. After she left I noodled with the scripts of the movies until it was time for my appointment.
Which turned out to be pretty much as expected: “How are your meditations, do you get enough exercise, do you know about the programs available here?” And so forth. Reasonably painless.
At 2:30 there was the - and this was new to me - monthly all-staff meeting, two days early. The two Directors of the Academy opened the meeting with “...a new tradition. Let’s close our eyes…”
A group meditation, oh boy. In retrospect it seems that this “tradition” was a ploy to get us spaced out so we wouldn’t object when they sprang such delights as a proposed six-day work week on us. It worked all too well; we laughed at them but we took it.
They gave all kinds of crap metaphysical reasons for it; something about “enlivening the atmosphere” even more and also said that some staff members had told them that two days of inactivity made them fuzzy on Monday and oh please, pretty please, can we work on Saturdays too? Sure. It looks like that program starts next weekend.
Other meeting news is that the Today show and the NBC evening news are supposed to have segments on the sidhis program tomorrow. Whew! Possibly with demonstrations but I doubt it. Otherwise it was a pretty standard meeting, I guess, with reports from all the department heads on what they’ve been doing. KSCI, the Movement’s first television station, equipped with a brand new transmitter of the most powerful signal allowed by the FCC, is supposed to be on the air for the first time tonight.
Experience Night and Guru Purnima this evening - only it isn’t Guru Purnima until this time next month, they found out. It was just like old times, with people talking about things they’d experienced in meditation and the administrators attempting to explain them. And another group meditation - I’m getting buzzed…
July 1st, 1977
A day of ups and downs, or more accurately downs and ups, for sure. The Today show got the day off to a real bummer with the reporter more or less implying that the levitation seemed like a fake to him and that the Movement was just money-hungry. Well, we thought, there goes the Movement, at least for the summer. We cheered ourselves up by saying that at least people will be thinking about it, “...so they’ll be ready when the real demonstration comes.”
A continual thorn is the fact that the demonstration had been performed by levitators who couldn’t sustain: they hopped*.
*(AUTHOR’S NOTE: And some than thirty-seven years later hopping is still how it’s done. Sidhas are hopping higher and farther and for longer but to the best of my knowledge no one has yet managed to remain off the ground.
Here are some video demonstrations of the flying technique: http://wn.com/yogic_flying__meditation_and_yoga)
The reporter who attended the demonstration then high-tailed it to a nearby college, where they got some of the local gymnasts to try and duplicate the feat of hopping while in full-lotus or cross-legged. This footage was shown and the reporter said it was a “fair approximation” of what he’d witnessed except that the TM’ers went higher and farther and could do it longer without becoming exhausted, while the gymnasts couldn’t keep it up for more than two or three minutes, which the reporter said might simply be due to the fact that the TM’ers had had more practice.
So everybody was at least somewhat bummed out during the day and I myself was really tired - those extra meditations yesterday kept me awake.
Lawrence and I had a short meeting in the morning with Michael Barnard to give him a progress report then I finished, more or less, splicing out the narration from the Sports and Business films. Lunch...then payday! Yay! I’ve been here two weeks so I got half a month’s salary: $12.50. What in the world am I going to do with money around here besides my laundry?
Coming out from receiving my stipend I ran into Steve, who was rather agitated. He burst out with, “I saw somebody levitate!” It seems he - Steve - was sitting outside the dining room checking people’s I.D.’s, this being his week for it. One of the people from the Phase I teacher-training course, instead of going right into the dining room went into a sort of alcove nearby, sat down and closed his eyes.
Almost immediately, Steve said, he began breathing very heavily...and hopping. He was sitting on an unused radiator so his feet weren’t on the ground and his hands were in his lap so he had no apparent means of moving in the way he did. The scary thing, besides the fact that this was a teacher-training student and therefore had not received the sidhis instruction - although this seems to have been happening more and more over the last few weeks - was that he seemed unable to stop...until he was rescued by some of the Age of Enlightenment course people, who told the few bystanders that they had just witnessed the primary stage of levitation. Must be rough on someone who hasn’t had the preparation course.
Steve said that the kid was grinning, “...like he just got the last piece of cake,” as he left.
Well, levitation or no, I was just too tired to go onto the next phase of preparing the Trans-World Airlines audio, which is rewriting and adding on to the narration, so I just noodled around on the board some more and sneak-read Ray Bradbury’s The October Country .
Ann and I have agreed to spend a whole evening in the studio this weekend and get those PSA’s out of the way, so we didn’t meet as usual at 5:00.
There was another NBC News spot on the sidhis in the evening and even though it was done by the same reporter and used a lot of the same footage as the morning spot it was for some reason a lot more objective and even a shade on the positive side. Boom! We’re back in business! Ten minutes of prime-time, yay!
After that a special “Advanced Meeting” for all the Initiators on staff, which turned out to be about fifteen of us. The idea was that Maharishi wanted all the Initiators to meet at least once a week for a group meditation and an “inspirational” tape.
July 2nd, 1977
Well, here I am in my new quarters, #10 Bari. Very strange little place, the Bari. It’s a small house or cottage, two stories tall and connected to the main building by a long hallway instead of having a front door. I’m in one of the three upstairs rooms and they too are strange, or at least mine is. Setting aside for the moment the quirk of having an extension cord strung up the wall, across the ceiling and into a socket adapted from half of an overhead light fixture as my only source of electricity, the strange thing about the room is that all the angles and planes are way off. The room is decidedly tilted in one direction and at the same time seems to curve downward toward the center slightly. I had a hell of a time getting my posters* hung because of this - couldn’t seem to get them lined up. And red, red rug everywhere.
*(AUTHOR”S NOTE: Yes, I brought rock posters to my “spiritual’ retreat, though I don’t recall now which ones they were.)
I guess I was supposed to make do with the bulb in the other half of the light fixture, but as this meant I would have to unscrew it every time I wanted to turn the light out because using the toggle switch would also cut the power to the extension cord and therefore my electric clock, I decided to “borrow” the standard hotel lamp that was in the radio office.
Michael Barnard was in his office across the hall and due to the way a mirror is placed there saw what I was doing just as I saw him in the mirror. No hassle, though I felt embarrassed to be caught looting the office. I just told him where I’d been moved to and he said, “Well, that’s life in the tenements.”
Had a long talk with an Initiator who recently came back from Switzerland, which is where the real action is in the Movement right now, and where Maharishi is. He told me all about the courses in Switzerland and how fifty to sixty per cent of the people just in Teacher Training were starting to hop. And that eighty to ninety per cent of the people doing A.T.R. - “Advanced Training Resource”; it just means rest & rounding for Initiators - are hopping as well, without even having been taught the sidhis!
He also told me about the “catalysts” they’re using in Switzerland: when a group of people are learning the sidhis Maharishi will send in someone who is already well-practiced in them to just sort of hang around with them and meditate with them as a group once in a while, and this sets the group off - sort of a popcorn effect.
Speaking of the sidhis, things are getting so, uh, hopped up in the Phase I course that group meditations are going to be conducted on foam rubber henceforth.
Speaking further of the sidhis, all of our “levitation” promotional posters are being recalled at the request of the International Meditation Society. They’ll be replaced with more “scientific” ones. The word is out that we’ve got legal hassles, probably due to the sidhis spots on TV yesterday in which the conclusion was reached that the “levitators” were in fact just hoppers - that is, not levitating by the strict definition of the word.
Here at the Academy, where it’s pretty much taken for granted, as I’m starting to, that there are many people now, particularly in Switzerland, who can actually “fly”, disappear, walk through walls, etc.*, the possibility of being taken to court was greeted with excitement, glee almost.
*(AUTHOR’S NOTE: Again, as far as I know none of the powers referred to above have ever been demonstrated and in fact, except for the levitation are no longer part of the sidhis course.)
And truly if we do have the floaters, disappearers, etc., as claimed it’s going to be a real shocker when our day in court arrives. As I said I’m really about 90% convinced that we do; again, why claim these things if we couldn’t back them up? What would we gain? We’ll see - and I hope it’s soon.
Speaking still further of the sidhis, while giving the Initiator I’d been talking with a tour of the Press area we came upon some rough prints of the results of the first scientific research being done on the sidhis. What I understood of it, like the synchronization of the brain waves from all the different parts of the brain, was mighty impressive if true. And let’s hope they are true ‘cause we may need them in court.
Meanwhile I’m getting psyched up by all this. I’m going to find Ann tomorrow - she wasn’t at dinner, or else I didn’t see her - and get some work done. I swear I’m beginning to like this loony-bin…
July 3rd, 1977
Well, I found Ann but we didn’t get any work done. We were supposed to meet in the studio at a set time but I think we had different ideas of what that time was. No matter, either tomorrow or, that being the Fourth of July, we might let it go until Tuesday, this being the first of our six-day work-weeks - even if it’s only five with the holiday.
A fairly quiet day. Sat by the lake and wrote letters, did my laundry, had lunch, played frisbee and went trekking all over the woods with Dennis, who wanted to show me the artesian well. Not too impressive; just water trickling out from under a big rocky hill. Got my first sunburn of the season.
After dinner Steve and I went down to the studio to wait for Ann. I’m pretty sure I’m the one who got the time wrong. Anyway, Steve found a guitar so I recorded him and double-tracked his vocal - good practice. When it became apparent that Ann wasn’t coming we left.
July 4th, 1977
I spent most of the morning writing a long letter to a friend. The afternoon was spent finally getting those PSA’s recorded with Ann. Yay! We had a long talk about why we were here, how we got here, etc. Ann’s pretty nice, if somewhat flighty. She doesn’t seem to feel that invisible barrier between the sexes here - it seemed very unusual to me when she laid her hand over mine to make a point, never mind so intimate an act as back-scratching, at which we took turns. Nice.
There were all kinds of Fourth of July events happening through the day, including readings from Frost and Sandburg and, God help us, a singing of “America the Beautiful”, which fortunately I missed. But the evening brought forth a picnic out on the golf course, and a somewhat surreal scene it was: all these people in various states of dress, from bare feet and jeans to three-piece suits. Some were clustered around a the food wagon, still connected to the tractor that brought it out, others were squatting, sitting, lying, half-lotused or full-lotused in random clumps on the randomly-cut golf course while a flautist and a clarinetist played classical duets - with a pile of red and white balls (some sort of golf course markers), a teeter-totter, a swing-set and a miniature geodesic dome for a backdrop, plus, further back, a dozen or so people playing with a dozen or so frisbees.
After dark there was a bonfire. I got out a few sparklers that I’d brought along and handed them around. We all scorched ourselves trying to light them from the bonfire. There were also some flares and a couple of roman candles.
The Directors tried to get a sing-along going but nobody really joined in so they gave up and left and I started in on Firesign Theatre - as always, sure-fire material, especially “W.C. Fields Forever” with all its references to gurus and other new-age topics. After I’d done about forty minutes worth Lawrence took over with an unaccompanied version of Jaime Brockett’s legendary “Sinking of the U.S.S. Titanic”. When I - and most everyone else - left he was still going strong.
July 5th, 1977
Back to work. I transferred most of the PSA’s onto a small reel to send out then discovered that one of them needed a tag-line I’d missed. I’ll have to get Ann back into the studio tomorrow morning.
I spent most of the day working on getting those Sports and Business scripts beefed up so they’ll come through when they’re just audio. While nosing around the radio office I came upon two cassettes, one marked Yes and the other… Waka Jawaka. Hot damn, Zappa! Not my favorite album of his by a long shot but Zappa nonetheless. I rushed into the studio, warmed up the equipment, slapped in the cassette, pushed the button and out came… Elton John.
I prepared to heave a large Teac reel-to-reel into the panel when a happy thought occurred: I turned over the cassette, punched it up and… Yes, there it was. Who else could make a classic big band horn section sound as though they’re on acid?
The Yes tape turned out to be Tales from Topographic Oceans, which never did much for me but still better than nothing.
When I’d finished up my work I continued re-reading John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar in the studio.
Dinner was strange; almost nobody showed up. Someone said it was because it was “India Night” on the menu and that everyone had probably gone out to dinner.
I went down to the lake for a while, watched the water ripple and the sky get dark. The frogs were gronking like big rubber bands being snapped and I sang the little song from Danny Kaye’s version of Tubby the Tuba:
“Alone am I, me and I together.
If I ran away from me
how unhappy I would be.
Me and I, oh my….”
This wasn’t because I was feeling lonely but because it suited the mood of the falling night. I’m really getting spaced out on this place.
July 6th, 1977
Hot damn, Initiators Residence Course this weekend! That means me, and that means an extra round on Friday night, two on Saturday and one on Sunday morning, I believe. It will be the first real rounding I’ve done in five years and even though it’s only a weekend’s worth (we get these courses every six weeks, apparently) I must admit I’m a little nervous. After five years without it anything could happen, even with such a small dose.
Speaking of meditating: as “compensation” for the six-day work-week, I guess, the staff is now allowed a fifteen-minute group meditation with their work-group - Housing, Kitchen, etc. - every day before lunch. I heard tell that a couple of years ago they allowed the staff to do two rounds morning and evening but it ate up too much time and made everybody crazy.
Lawrence told me that the Governors (of the Age of Enlightenment - Movement bigwigs) asked him to check out the possibility of purchasing one thousand cheap speakers, which they want to use to pipe Sama Veda (That is, recordings of Indian pundits chanting the Sama Veda - that section of the Rig-Veda which, when chanted, encourages the physical nervous system of the listener to secrete soma, a mystical substance which is supposed to aid in the cultivation of enlightenment) into the rooms of people taking the Age of Enlightenment course. This would be done at bedtime each night - sort of like playing “Taps”, I guess.
When Ann came in to finish up the PSA work I surprised her by punching up Waka Jawaka. In two seconds flat she yelled, “Zappa!” and had me crank it up. She loved it! And she loves his Lumpy Gravy album too.
Hmm, come to think of it, the change when I threw I Ching when I first arrived, was to Hsien, which is the beginning hexagram in the section of the Ching dealing with “Courtship and Marriage”:
“The Judgement: Influence. Success. Perseverance Furthers. To take a maiden to wife brings good fortune.”
Can’t get much more explicit than that. At this point though, it’s a little hard to even conceive of marriage, never mind think seriously about. Give up being Super-Monk? Never! Still: a meditator, a good-looking, affectionate woman and a Zappa fan? Top of the list, no question.
I finally started grinding out that third program for TWA. It’s like pulling teeth though. I think it’s going to wind up as a slightly more personal than usual Intro Lecture, padded out with Natural Tendency tunes. As I’ve said before I don’t generally care much for their official Movement songs because the lyrics are so in-house, although one song of theirs, “Cosmic Consciousness”, does send chills up my spine.
Marshall McLuhan would get a kick out of this place: using all this media equipment to reach as many people as possible in order to tell them, in effect, that they are all one. Global village? Hah! How about global person?
July 7th, 1977
A singularly unexciting day, rather cold for July, not that it ever seems to get particularly hot up here in the “Jewish Alps”*, as my father calls them. Winters must be killer.
*(AUTHOR’S NOTE: The colloquialism “Jewish Alps” comes from the days when these holiday resorts in the Catskills were part of the Borscht Belt - popular vacation retreats for New York City Jews from the 1920’s through the early 1970’s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borscht_Belt)
Noodled around some more with the third segment of the TWA project and knocked a rough draft together. It still reads like an intro lecture, only punched up with music. As it stands it runs about twelve minutes - should be at least fifteen. Maybe I can graft on one more tune to pad it out.
We had the first of our regular group meditations today, with all of us Age of Enlightenment Productions people sitting in a circle of chairs in the main studio which, what with the cold weather outside and excessive air-conditioning for the benefit of the equipment inside, made it seem as if we were meditating in the storage room of a meat-packing company. I didn’t think I got much of a buzz at first but we all sure got silly at lunch, even Lawrence, who was walking around with a disembodied telephone receiver and holding imaginary conversations.
A little frisbee after dinner with Dennis, vainly trying to keep two discs going at once, helped out by a little kid in the first genuine Davy Crockett coonskin cap I’ve seen in years.
And finally, feeling it was too early to retire to my room I went over to the main office building, known as the Palace, and spent an hour or so going through the boxes and boxes of books that aren’t wanted for the Academy library (which I have yet to locate) and are giving away to any staffer who wants to go to the trouble of ploughing through them. I hardly made a dent in the pile and came away with about twenty: some sci-fi, a John Barth, an Albert Camus (I knew all those high school and college French classes would be good for something), Shakespeare, Jules Feiffer, a book about Lenny Bruce, even a Peanuts book, and best of all two copies of Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me by RIchard Farina, a book I was turned on to years ago at Emerson College in 1969 and now plan to disseminate far and wide around here, beginning with Steve and Dennis.
Rounding tomorrow…
July 10th, 1977
I decided not to write in this journal while rounding over the weekend unless something exciting happened, which it didn’t. Got pretty spaced, pleasantly so, and saw and heard lots of Maharishi tapes. Rounding is much as it was five years ago except that I tend to go a lot deeper now. Very nice. I feel good: a bit clearer and perhaps a bit warmer and more devoted - but still crazy.
My reputation as a comedian is getting around. There’s talk of having me do some stuff for the next Cafe Night but I don’t know what I could do that wouldn’t outrage the “dignity of the Movement”* We’ll see.
*(AUTHOR’S NOTE: this phrase was one that got tossed around a lot , generally when people were seeming to enjoy themselves too much.)
Rumor has it that the European staff members have been given the sidhis (Sounds like an infection, doesn’t it?) and that we may be getting them soon. Sounds okay to me. Also heard that the Initiators - that’s me! - get eight weeks of ATR (Advance Training Resource - a fancy term meaning lots of rounding) every six months. Yay!
July 11th, 1977
Started getting creative last night as I was falling asleep; I kept getting idea for a potential comedy bit for Cafe Night so I kept turning on the light and sitting up to write them down, thereby not falling asleep until around 2 AM and therefore feeling like absolute crap all the next day, what with lack of sleep, Monday blues and probably lots of unstressing from the weekend.
It was a good thing I didn’t have to be creative today. Instead I spent the whole day recording an Initiator who’s also a singer-songwriter*. Just voice and guitar with an occasional overdub. Turned out pretty nicely, I thought.
*(AUTHOR’S NOTE: I actually held on to a reel-to-reel copy of this session for several decades but I think it finally got recycled and I no longer remember the name of the artist, unfortunately. All I remember is one song-title: “Who is She?” and another song about winter.)
Come evening Dennis and I realized there was nothing to do whatsoever. It was raining, so no frisbee or hiking; the studio was being used so no videotapes in there; the downstairs screening room was being used and the ping-pong tables were locked up. We finally snuck into the room usually used for S.C.I. classes and watched some old Saturday Night Live shows, including the one with John Belushi doing his Joe Cocker impersonation. I am dead tired.
July 12th, 1977
Almost forgot the one good thing that happened yesterday: got a big manila envelope from The National Surrealist Party - the home base of the Firesign Theatre fan club, as it were. A friend had subscribed me to the “Edison Electric Journal and Firesign Times”, their quarterly newsletter.
Membership includes - natch - a membership kit, complete with membership card, clubhouse sign and, most important, my “Official Electric Detective Decoder Wheel” so I can read all the official secret messages. It’s all done up like the premiums kids used to save up their Ovaltine labels for back in the 1940’s and send them in to their favorite radio show - but with Firesign twists, such as Item #2 in the “Young Tom’s Junior Scientists Honor Code”: We will never mix chemicals in boxcars or heavy metals in garages, and we promise not to play with Powers we don’t understand.
I finally gave in and started using shaving cream again. When I had my beard I only shaved a small area of my neck and I could usually do that without cream if I did it right after a hot shower. But now I just slash my face up trying to do it all that way.
We had some very odd entertainment tonight. Apparently some other wackos besides us live in this neighborhood: something called The Art of Living*, but I’m damned if I can figure out what they’re into. A bunch of them came over and gave a slide presentation on South Africa, from which I gather several of them hail, and put on a rather moronic play, the gist of which was that love can solve all our problems.
*(AUTHOR’S NOTE: The Art of Living Foundation is a spiritual group founded by Sri Sri Ravi Shankar - no relation to the famous sitar player.)
Steve and I got to talking with one of them afterwards, an attractive London girl whose name, as might be expected, I’ve forgotten. Strange, though - I had such a different feeling about her than about the women here. Here the feeling is that we’re all engaged in too lofty an enterprise to be more than social with each other; we’re a team, not a family. But this woman I felt I could take for a walk, hold her hand, kiss affectionately, etc., though I didn’t have time to find out, of course.
But there’s talk of an inter-group softball game and anyway the place is only fifteen minutes’ walk from here, or so she said. Hmm… Sounds like trouble.
July 13th, 1977
Well, I’m reasonably proud of myself. Today I ran the sound for a video production - Lawrence being absent for the day - all by myself, even to the point of coping with extra miking for live music that Lawrence had forgotten would be happening during the production. Pretty weird miking too: we had to use the boom mike for when the guest played trombone (As usual I’ve forgotten his name but he’s played with Stevie Wonder and Duke Ellington, among others) and then ride the volume on his lapel mike for when he played the recorder. It went well, too.
I’m starting to get the hang of that Neve board; I even figured out how to get the turntable hooked in and played some Oregon and some Sibelius through those amazing studio monitors.
Due to other technical difficulties it took us until mid-afternoon to complete the taping of the show and after that I was too burned out to do much so a couple of the video guys and I watched old Bugs Bunny and Heckle & Jeckle cartoons and Sesame Street until quitting time. Now that I’ve been working here a while I can really appreciate the amount of effort that must go in making a show as fast-moving and flashy as Sesame Street.
Tomorrow marks one month that I’ve been here.
July 14th, 1977
And an unspectacular day it was, too. Spent the whole time transferring audio tapes of The Law and Justice World Conference - or something like that - onto 16mm sound-film. It took all day to finish seven tapes and there are about thirty of them.
I think today I may have finished releasing the excess stress I seem to have shaken loose during last weekend’s rounding. My spine felt very clear in meditation and that bordering-on-a-headache feeling at the top of my neck and behind my forehead has gone away, thank goodness. Very deep, warm evening meditation; it’s good to get that kind of reassurance.
I told myself that I was just going for a walk after dinner - the first time I’ve been ‘off-campus’, at least by way of the main road, since arriving - but I found myself scouting around for the place where those people who were here the other night (Remember the British girl?) came from. I may have found it: I came upon a gated back road with all kinds of ‘No Trespassing’ signs nearby, but the bugs drove me away before I could investigate further. Maybe next weekend when Steve’s not busy.
July 15th, 1977
We had a surprise party for Michael Barnard’s birthday this morning. Having gotten rid of him on some suitable pretext the entire audio/video/film staff proceeded to festoon the back hallway with crepe paper, balloons and used film and videotape. We arranged for two horn players to leap out behind Michael as he entered the hallway, and sound the charge, after which we, in full regalia of paper hats and bearing flags, marched out, double-file, and sang the following words, more or less - mostly less as they didn’t fit too well - to the tune of “The Halls of Montezuma”:
Ode to Big B
From the film lab to the printer,
From the office, video and design,
From the timer, the switcher, the splicer and the cleaner
and KSCI down the line
This is your day, noble hero.
For us the first and best.
Our guide from darkroom to stage lights.
With our love this day is blessed
Hail to thee, our fearless leader
in whose domain we fight
‘gainst the foes, Tamas and Rajas*
with miles of celluloid might.
*(AUTHOR’S NOTE: Tamas and Rajas are two of the three ‘Gunas’ or fundamental forces of the universe according to Vedic literature. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gu%E1%B9%87a)
For when TM comes on the screen
we forget the star who starred
in that Hollywood flick that we just saw.
All we think of is Barnard.
What greater glories await him
no one of us can see.
so onward from the halls of A.E. Prod,
to the shores of Shandelee*
(AUTHOR’S NOTE: Shandelee was the name of the lake at the Academy.)
After Michael recovered from a major fit, embarrassment fighting it out with hysterical laughter, we brought on the presents and punch, with the cake arriving later.
Otherwise an average day, though it ended a little early due to the fact that this weekend is the staff residence course. All us Initiator types who rounded last weekend get to fill in on essential services like kitchen and front desk while the rest of the staff is rounding. I’ll be at the front desk tomorrow night and running the big dishwashing machine on Sunday.
Almost forgot: I cut out my “Electric Detective Decoder Wheel”. The secret message for this issue of the newsletter is, “Hi gang, welcome to the club. ‘Never say fuck to the schnifter’. Bye for now, Tom”. I also hung my membership card and “Young Tom’s Junior Scientist Radio Honor Code” in the window of the radio office.
July 16th, 1977
The guy who’d been living in the room below mine moved out to take a course, leaving behind him all the shelving he’d used for the million or so plants he’d kept - which he gave away or sold even though he’s only moving about ten yards down, to the Press Club building. So, figuring it was fair game I helped myself to one long, wide board and a couple of cinder-blocks against the day when I finally get my stereo and records here.
Life behind the front desk is an incredible bore. Either there was nothing whatsoever to do - and I read the bulk of Steinbeck’s Travels with Charlie today - or I was telling callers that they couldn’t reach the party they’re looking for or that I didn’t know whatever it is they wanted to know. Glad that’s over with.
July 18th, 1977
By the time I got back last night it was too late and I was too exhausted to write. Running the Hobart - the big dishwashing machine - and all the attendant duties such as pot-scrubbing with a high-pressure hot water hose - for almost nine hours just about killed me. It was testimony to the amazing rejuvenating power of the evening meditation that I made it to dinner rather than sleeping right through to breakfast.
In fact I got to feeling rather boisterous and invited a few people down to the radio room to hear Waka Jawaka. Man! Good music and an audience, that’s all I ask. After that, as I said, it was too late to write so I just went to bed.
Today I sent away for some of the stranger premiums from the Edison Electric Journal, including an honorary degree from “Solid State University”, all while plugging away at those Conference tapes, which will probably take another two days to finish.
I found out last night that Sharon, one of the women on staff here, is a 1974 UMass graduate, knows people I know, etc. Tonight she asked me to dictate the rest of the Checking Notes to her as she’d missed part of them due to being on the Age of Enlightenment course for a week. I had to borrow some other Initiator’s copy of the Notes, of course, as I’ve completely forgotten them and even if I remembered them they’d be out of date as they’ve been revised since I got them.
Anyway, it was very nice. We got a blanket, went out to the golf course and sat on a hill overlooking the lake. We worked on the Notes until it started to get dark and then just sat and talked and listened to the night-sounds and watched the stars come out. Romantic as all hell, it was.
Then I walked her ‘home’ and sat around in her room for a while. I had the strangest feeling that I was being given the come-on but that could have been just my own horniness coming out as wishful thinking, who knows. Anyway we have a ‘date’, same time and place tomorrow night, to finish the Notes. Again, who knows? I’d certainly feel weird about getting sexually involved with her, especially on such short notice. I seem to have unconsciously accumulated quite a mental block about these things since arriving. Hmm… Conditioning?
July 19th, 1977
Finally finished transferring the tapes, hooray! What next?
I was feeling sort of disoriented all day, particularly after the pre-lunch group meditation, or “the group dive” as it’s become known; might have something to do with the fact that I’ve jacked my meditation time back up to forty minutes. We’ll see how that goes.
Finished dictating the Checking Notes to Sharon at her place then we went for a two-hour walk on the golf course, grooving on the after-storm atmosphere and the frogs and getting our feet wet. It was all dark and misty and unreal. We looked in the little cabin under the water tower for the wicked witch but she wasn’t there.
What’s going on between us? I don’t feel any attachment coming on, exactly, but something’s happening - we’ve got too much of our past in common for it to be otherwise.
July 20th, 1977
The video crew, including Lawrence, were up really late last night finishing a production, and Mike Barnard was in New York until 3 AM, so nobody but me showed up for work in the morning, which was a problem since I’d finished my last work order yesterday and needed Lawrence to get started on the new ones. So I mostly just fooled around all morning, transferring my Abbey Road tape to a better quality reel with noise reduction.
At lunch Sharon invited me to go for a boat ride so we did, and it was fun since neither of us could row worth a damn and went mostly in circles. Before we went back to work I offered to show her my room. When we got inside she closed the door behind her and made sure it was latched. Hmm… Then she made me a present of a little red flower for which I made a vase by emptying out an old medicine bottle.
I don’t know - my feelings so far for Sharon are strange: I don’t feel particularly attracted to her, physically or personally, but I don’t feel un-attracted either - there’s sort of vacuum there. Yet my intuition has been telling me, from the moment she told me she’d been to UMass, that something’s got to happen, that I’m going to be spending a lot of time with her. And my intuition in cases like this is rarely wrong.
The situation reminds me of a girlfriend I had back home: she went to UMass, lived in the same dormitory as I did and worked at the radio station too, but we didn’t meet until we happened to work at the same store back home, she being from the town next to mine. And when I met her I knew too.
The afternoon wasn’t too strenuous; I just “helped’ Lawrence do sound for a video production then got one of the new job orders done.
July 21st, 1977
Well, the ice has been broken, God help me, and right on schedule. After walking around on the golf course (after another storm) for an hour or so Sharon and I spread a blanket out on one of the two hills which overlook the lake - the same place where we’d done the Checking Notes before - and talked for a long time while it got dark.
I knew it was coming, and there was such a sense of energy in the air tonight. Maybe it was just the situation, my mental state, but I really felt as though I was in tune with some sort of guidance, that I could do no wrong acting from the level of consciousness I was experiencing. So as I said, I just knew it was the right moment to touch her hair and then let my hand slide down to start massaging her neck.
After a few seconds she said something like, “It’s funny, I was really very interested in becoming a Checker - until I met you.”
I felt a little guilty at that, thinking that my usual irreverent attitude had affected her dedication. I started to say something to encourage her but she continued, “I was really uncomfortable in Checking class last night. Really restless, you know? Because I’d rather be with you.”
Boom. So we just started talking about stuff again and pretty soon she said her hands were cold and put them under mine, and then soon afterwards we began kissing and hugging. As I said, it seemed inevitable.
But still my intuition tells me that kissing and hugging is where it stops. As I wrote the other night, the physical click isn’t there, that personality click isn’t there; it’s just a sense of, ‘Well, this is going to happen, okay?” In fact I had the intuition that this is happening for her sake, that I’m just fulfilling a small part of her pattern. We’ll see.
Tricky business, though. Being an Initiator in this environment means I have to be doubly cautious about the degree to which I’m known to be, uh, fraternizing. Sharon and I have made it a game called “Secret Identities”.
Quite a day all around. Dennis got all psyched up about radio last night and stayed up until 2 AM preparing a proposal to give the administrators for a radio station here at the Academy. Looks good, though I’m sure it’ll take at least a year before we get all the FCC and Movement red tape straightened out.*
*(AUTHOR’S NOTE: It was actually another twenty years or so before the Movement started its own radio station: KHOE-FM on the campus of Maharishi University of Management. http://www.khoe.org/)
I’m back to transferring tapes again, this time from the National Leaders World Assembly or something along those lines.
And right in the middle of all this, in walk the two Academy Directors, along with an Indian family - three generations worth. This included a Dr. Rho(?), whom I found out later is one of the richest and most influential men in India and has recently become a follower of Maharishi and has therefore been getting the red carpet treatment to say the least, including being flown all over the place in the Movement’s private plane.
They’d come into my studio to make a cassette of the Doctor’s daughter singing something in Sanskrit to give to Maharishi. So I hustled around, nervous as hell, trying to look as though I knew what I was doing - which, it turned out, I did. It came off without a hitch, though the mike placement could have been better. They also tried to get his grandchildren to sing something for a relative back home but they wouldn’t cooperate.
Such an unusual situation, having all these Indian people in traditional garb, right down to the tilik marks on the foreheads of the women, in the studio. And as they started to leave the Doctor turned around, came back, took my hand between his two, bent over and touched it with his forehead and said something about being in my debt. I stuttered out something about having enjoyed it and gave him a “Jai Guru Dev” and a bow with hands pressed together. It was very hard to concentrate on my work after that.
July 22nd, 1977
Spent most of the day transferring tapes. Some interesting stuff for a change: Maharishi had some of the six-month sidhis course participants talking about their experiences. One, a professional magician by the name of Doug Henning, talked about an experience he had while doing the “celestial perception” sutra, I believe it was. He sort of directed his awareness into a nearby thunderstorm and tasted the ozone, felt the wetness and the electricity, etc. Another reported seeing from behind his eyeballs, watching his iris dilate, etc., while practicing a sutra having to do with perception of internal organs. Another talked about becoming partially invisible, and someone who had been there had told her that her face and arms had just become particles of light. Some fun, huh?
At the all-staff meeting we received this month’s bummer: a freeze on all course grants for two months, maybe more, while the Movement re-adjusts its finances.
Extremely deep meditation tonight. I thought maybe it was because a lot of the new sidhas were coming back from Switzerland and zapping the atmosphere.
July 24th, 1977
Yesterday was a slow day but a long one so I didn’t get a chance to write.
After dinner went with Jerry to his room. I couldn’t believe he had Chris McGregor’s Brotherhood of Breath album with all those totally crazed horn arrangements. We sat around and talked about music in general and jazz in particular.
Jerry is a strange but likable guy, defensively cynical but okay once he gets to know you. It was great to hear music again: Charlie Parker and Mingus, Santana with Mahavishnu John McLaughlin - but I must admit I was so into talking about music that I hardly listened, though there was a great Mingus take-off on the first part of Rachmaninoff’s Symphony in C# Minor or whichever it was. We rapped non-stop for about two and a half hours.
After that I went and picked up Sharon, as previously arranged, and we went down to the lake, sat on the dock bench and snuggled for a while. A long while - I didn’t get back until about 12:30, which is why I didn’t get a chance to write my journal entry for yesterday. Gotta watch that stuff.
Today was Sunday and after a six-day work-week it was savored, believe me. I spent the morning writing letters and reading; likewise a large part of the afternoon. Sharon and I took a short row, only to discover that the wind was too strong and the water too choppy to make any progress.
Picnic Night out on the golf course, which was fun. As I may have mentioned earlier they use a tractor to bring out a huge, already loaded table onto the course. After that Sharon and I wandered off and eventually wound up lying on our backs, staring up into the cloudy gray sky as it darkened. I felt very spacey.
We ambled back in and heard that Disney’s Peter Pan was being shown downstairs so we hustled down there and caught the last twenty minutes or so Great stuff.
I lent Sharon my I Ching and sent her off. Again, I’ve got to be careful about how much we’re seen together. It’s like a very concentrated small town here sometimes.
July 26th, 1977
On the other hand, in a very un-small town way, sometimes you don’t know what’s coming until you get hit over the head with it:
Just before group meditation yesterday Mike Barnard came in and read off a list of names from within A. of E. Productions, mine included. We had to go immediately to a meeting in the Oval Room with the Directors. Those of us whose names had been called looked at each other as if trying to figure what we all had in common that the Directors would want to see us about.
We found out soon enough - and in fact had half-jokingly guessed the truth as we hurried through the rain to the Palace, home of the Oval Room. We started to walk in but there were about thirty people from Kitchen and Housing having a group meditation so we waited for the Directors to come and lead the way.
As it turned out the Kitchen and Housing people were part of the meeting too. The Directors led into the subject with their usual delicacy, saying that it was great that all these sidhas (people who have learned and are practicing the sidhis) were coming to the Academy to work and enliven the atmosphere. We’d heard about that and it sounded pretty good - maybe we’d get a demonstration, finally. The Directors then went on to say that they wanted, as they were sure we wanted, all of us to become sidhas too.
For half a second you could almost see the thought forming in the group mind: “Oh boy, they’re gonna give us the sidhis!” And then the real implication of what they were saying hit us: we were all being given the axe in order to create job openings for the incoming sidhas.
“The axe” is an appropriate phrase - talk about a sudden cutting off. All at once fifty people whose plans for the future had involved being at the Academy for months or even years longer had to start think in terms of literally leaving tomorrow. Or by Friday, three days from now, at the latest, we were given to understand.
Needless to say, lunch was mostly forgone as incipient hysteria put the clamps on our appetites. Mostly we all just stood or sat in clumps around the dining hall, unable to stop laughing at the situation and saying over and over again, “I can’t believe it, I just can’t believe it.” Everyone was laughing hysterically - it was too sudden a shock to be dealt with any other way.
(AUTHOR’S NOTE: Although things have improved in recent years, or so I’m told, the Movement’s occasionally callous treatment of its volunteer staff was legendary during the 1970’s and 80’s.)
People tried to get organized, make phone calls, arrange for rides, etc., and eventually succeeded but it wasn’t easy explaining to friends and parents what was happening when we didn’t fully grasp it ourselves.
But somehow the afternoon went by and after meditating everyone for some reason felt pretty good so we decided to have a going away party for ourselves in the Mouse House, a crazy, boarded-up place (in which several staff people reside, by the way) which used to serve as the clubhouse/locker room for the now unused outdoor swimming pool. We got out a stereo and all kinds of funky records - Earth, Wind & Fire, Kool & The Gang, Parliament/Funkadelic, etc. - and boogied it up.
People were drinking beer, even smoking cigarettes. We just went stone crazy, dancing and shouting out the standard jokes people make when they get fired. Later Sharon and I went out on the golf course for a while. That hill out there, the one overlooking the lake - I swear it must be one of those power centers Don Juan told Carlos Castaneda about; I always get such a power-buzz there, especially at dusk.
I’ve got a ride back to Boston lined up, which is some relief. I think now is a good time to throw the Ching, which I got back from Sharon last night. Hey, #50-The Caldron. Supreme good fortune. Success.” I’ll take it.
-------
Well, diary, this appears to be it. Sharon just left, having come to cozy up for a while, leaving me with this huge, over-stuffed Army-surplus “Child Protector” - just a big, thick plastic sack with a tie cord, can’t imagine what it protects from or how - to carry my excess baggage since my knapsack is already bulging.
I wore my ‘rock & roll star’ purple shirt with the red, gold and white spangles, along with my Oshkosh B’gosh overalls to dinner. Quite a thrill.
Someone’s parents are taking me as far as Brookline, hopefully near a subway station. I’m really not up for staggering around with all this stuff.
It figures that the last major meal would be the notorious India Night, when most of the staff skips out for pizza. Oh well, salad will do.
Tomorrow morning, 8:30, Real World, here I come. Again I hope I won’t stay so long this time. Happy trails to me, until we meet again…
July 28th, 1977
I made it home with comparative ease. To tell you the truth I was incredibly high all day yesterday for no apparent reason; I wasn’t even tired when I got home. Sitting at the bus stop, waiting for Mom to come and pick me up, I felt as if I was almost radiating.
So even though I don’t have the slightest idea what I’m going to do next it almost doesn’t matter. I’ve had a taste,as Lenny Bruce would say, and now I’m hooked.
I have a very specific goal now: Money (M-I-U, S-C-I, M-O-N-E-Y). I’m sufficiently convinced now - flying or no flying. It’s C.C. for me, see? A couple of months of rounding, and soon. If this current buzz stays more or less constant I’m going to know I’m closing in on it.
I had the feeling that I was witnessing* in my sleep the last few days I was there but it didn’t last into waking so I don’t know.
*(AUTHOR’S NOTE: “Witnessing” is the term used to describe the experience of having the fourth state of consciousness - the Transcendental or ‘pure awareness’ state - be present at the same time as any or all of the first three states: Sleeping, Dreaming or Waking. When the fourth state of consciousness becomes a constant presence along with the other three the experience becomes that of the fifth state or Cosmic Consciousness.)
I’m going to write to the Course Office and find out about the cost; I might even have enough bucks to cover a two-monther.
Oh god, a TM junkie once again…
*** T H E E N D ***
____________________________________________________________________________
EPILOGUE
I heard from Sharon once (she stayed on at the Academy, I believe) but I’m sorry to say that I never wrote back. And no, I never did go on that two-month rounding course, it being out of my financial reach at the point.
I worked as a temp in Cambridge for a while, then in a bookstore for several years, also volunteering as a d.j. for the nearby Tufts University radio station, WMFO. In the early 1980’s some of my goofy audio-production work there brought me to the attention of someone at Boston’s most popular commercial station, WBCN, and for a while I found myself part of the comedy-writing/production team for the #1 morning show there. They liked my work and had just offered me a full-time position when…
...I suddenly started hearing about a little town called Fairfield, Iowa, the new home of Maharishi International University. I had kept up my meditation practice in the intervening years but had pretty much soured on the Movement after the Academy experience, and at first I refused to be interested.
But I had reached a point in my life where I was realizing that whatever success I might achieve in radio wouldn’t be worth the amount of stress that would accompany it. (Working for the morning show on WBCN involved getting up at 4 AM in order to be there by 6 AM, and you try being funny at that hour. Plus it was just a generally high-pressure environment there.). I decided I didn’t want what was being offered and turned the job down.
In August of 1982 I headed out to Fairfield, joined the staff program at M.I.U., and after many trials and tribulations (Joke: What’s the difference between the Movement and a cult? A cult is organized.) was finally able to take the sidhis course. Which turned out to be worth the wait, by the way.
A short while later I finally met the love of my life, Sandra. We’ve been married for twenty-two years and can’t imagine living anywhere else but Fairfield.
(April 2014, Fairfield)
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What I Learned On My Summer Vacation
‘Yogic Flying’
on ten inches of polyurethane foam
in the Golden Domes of Fairfield, Iowa
is a lot like
Body-surfing in the Atlantic Ocean
at Egypt Beach in Scituate, Massachusetts.
Drifting among dark seaweed-clouds of thought
or in sunlit, rolling saltwater
is much the same
when you sense the rising wave
and your nearly forgotten body
somehow aligns itself on the crest
There is no pause before the wave begins to break
but it always feels as if there is,
as if a deep breath were being taken,
held for an instant and then
let go in a rush of ecstatic liquid motion,
formless but totally purposeful,
with you as its always unexpectedly silent
center, remaining
when the wave dissolves from around you
like a broken spell
and sighs back into the ocean.
You follow…
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Hello, Andrew.
ReplyDeleteI was trying to scout out some trace of my old boss, Mike Barnard, via Google when I discovered your blog here. Who am I? [grin!] I am "Lawrence," or more accurately, Loren, and I was the film- and video-sound guy while you were doing your thing at Shankaracharya Nagar, a.k.a. "Livingston Manor."
A LOT of water under the bridge since that time, and if you want to reminisce about the old days or whatever, please feel free to give me a shout: Troublemaker125@yahoo.com ... and if not, then not. In any case, all the best.
Loren
Really, really good storytelling -- thank you for this time capsule of your young life.
ReplyDelete