Brotherhood Dharma, Destiny and the American Dream (26 page)

Being in private practice was satisfying, but it had its faults. At the most mundane level my day was filled with overweight women who looked at me with hope in their eyes. They had been told that getting fat could be traceable to a “gland problem.” Ninety percent of the time or more I dashed their hopes. The problem wasn’t low thyroid but high calories. Their disappointment bothered me. I no longer played the hero in an emergency room, and the intellectual challenge of laboratory research was gone. I had learned what a good doctor understands: There is a limit to what he can really accomplish.

Is that why a new aspect of the self began to emerge? Perhaps I had kicked out some invisible bricks without knowing it, leaving an aching hole. All that I noticed was a sense of disappointment in myself. I was smoking and drinking too much. The stress of eighteen-hour days couldn’t be shrugged off anymore. I wondered whether the answer might lie in meditation. No one in my Indian circle gave meditation a second thought. You weren’t going to win the race by sitting in lotus position.

The Americans had given it a new twist, though. Ever since he sprang to worldwide fame as a guru to the Beatles, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi had accomplished a cultural shift. “Mantra” had entered the English language as a hip word. (In the background of a Woody Allen comedy a Hollywood agent is anxiously saying into a telephone, “I forgot my mantra.”) With everything too foreign stripped away, meditation was now about stress release and increased energy. You didn’t have to sit in lotus position. It was promised that you could still win the race even if you had inner peace at the same time.

When I decided to try Transcendental Meditation, the Sixties were long past. In the early Eighties TM was already so established that it had become passé. American popular culture thrives by making sure that there is always room on the shelf for something new. Inevitably that means shoving something old out of the way. In my case, however, three streams of influence were merging. I respected my mother’s religious nature, as a physician I kept wondering about the mind-body connection (although at that point it was purely a
chemical fascination), and I knew that my stress level wasn’t going to decrease on its own. No one had yet coined the phrase “a perfect storm,” but I was at the eye of one.

“How can you follow a guru?” one friend said. “I’d never surrender my life to somebody else.”

Others turned away discreetly with obvious embarrassment. The synonym for guru that readily came to American minds was charlatan. At home, sitting on the bank of the Ganges with matted hair, rags for clothes, and a begging bowl, gurus had their place. But something bad happened when they came West. Here, gurus led cults. They pretended to be God. They practiced tricks of mind control, and their followers were hopelessly brainwashed, which they came to realize too late, long after their wallets had been cleaned out. Silent or spoken, a deep suspicion of spiritual teachers from India had fouled the nest.

The tainted image is a tragedy. Now Maharishi is dead—the obituaries in February 2008 called him “the Maharishi,” but he used the title “great sage” like a first name, without “the”—and my association with him ran the gamut of gurudom. He was such a domineering figure in my life for a decade that it’s only fair to see him outside the context of my reactions. Something important had come into the modern world.

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi started out as one kind of cultural curiosity—a lone Hindu monk who aimed to teach meditation to everyone on earth—and ended up as a different kind, the one-time guru of the Beatles. He came remarkably close to fulfilling his original intent, though. In the Seventies millions of Westerners learned Transcendental Meditation. He thrived long after the departure of the Fab Four, who decamped almost as soon as they sniffed the thin air of Maharishi’s Himalayan retreat. Only George Harrison turned into a genuine seeker and remained a quiet ally.

Maharishi owed his survival to two things. He was sincerely a guru, a dispeller of darkness as the word means in Sanskrit, who had the good of humanity at heart, despite the wags who turned TM into
“the McDonald’s of meditation” and the cartoonists who morphed his white-bearded image into a pop cliché. Sincerity would have served him little if Maharishi hadn’t also been a gifted teacher of India’s ancient traditions. Many visitors who came to gawk went away moved by what he had told them about the self and the soul.

Millions of baby boomers owed as much to his meditation teachings as they did to LSD, both gateways to another state of consciousness. The parallel was fatal, however. If dropping acid equated with dropping out, becoming a drug freak, and flouting respectable society, then what a guru teaches must somehow be nearly as corrupting.

I wasn’t American enough to consider “guru” a suspicious term in this way. Superficially I was a stressed-out doctor who needed an alternative to Scotch and a cigarette. I read about TM in a book, so in October 1980 it wasn’t momentous to seek out a TM teacher in Boston to initiate me into the practice. Culturally, however, I was carrying around some deep impressions dating back to the times when my uncle Sohan Lal, the traveling field hockey salesman, took me as a boy to sit with the saints. My uncle took a very simple attitude to these excursions. He wanted the darshan of a holy man, and he was satisfied with setting eyes on one—the blessing of darshan required nothing more. A restless boy sees the situation differently. I didn’t find the half-naked bodies and long, matted beards exotic. They were everyday sights. What impressed me was the charged atmosphere that existed around these saints.

Walking into the presence of a holy man, if he is the real thing, causes an instantaneous change in you. The air seems calm but infused with vibrancy. Your thoughts quiet down and approach silence. At the same time your body feels twice as alive. My uncle had become addicted to soaking up this kind of influence. I had only a passing acquaintance with it, but after I learned TM, that would change. Beginning in the mid-Eighties, I had the opportunity to know Maharishi as an intimate. Whenever my medical practice permitted, I joined his inner circle, which at that time often stayed for periods of time in Washington, D.C., where the TM organization had bought a hotel on H Street to use as a live-in meditation center.

If I had qualms about a guru pretending to be God, they were needless. It wasn’t necessary to be reverent in Maharishi’s presence. He made a point of not being seen as a religious figure but as a teacher of higher consciousness. He gave a memorable answer when someone asked him if a guru should be worshipped.

“No, the proper attitude is openness. Accept that he may be telling you the truth, no matter how strange it seems to your ordinary way of thinking.”

Of the many recollections I could offer, here is the most intense: Maharishi had fallen mysteriously and gravely ill on a visit to India in 1991. My father was consulted on my advice because I immediately suspected heart trouble. He ordered Maharishi to be rushed to England for emergency care. Soon I was standing outside London’s Heart Hospital, watching an ambulance navigate the snarled traffic, sirens wailing. Just before it arrived on the hospital’s doorstep, one of the accompanying doctors leaped out, running up with the news that Maharishi had suddenly died. I rushed to the ambulance, picking Maharishi’s body up—he was frail and light by this time—and began carrying him in my arms through the traffic jam.

I laid him on the floor inside the hospital’s entry and called for a cardio assist. Within minutes he was revived with CPR and rushed to intensive care on a respirator. The doctors fitted him with a pacemaker that took over his heartbeat. I became Maharishi’s primary caretaker during this crisis, tending to him at a country house outside London. It quickly became apparent that he was totally indifferent to his illness, and he made an astonishingly rapid recovery. The hospital expected lasting health problems, but there were none apparent. Within a few months Maharishi was back to his round-the-clock schedule—he rarely slept more than three or four hours a night. When I approached him one day to remind him to take his medications, he gave me a penetrating look. In it I read a message: “Do you really think I am this body?” For me that was a startling moment, a clue about what higher consciousness might actually be like.

As he saw himself, Maharishi had come tantalizingly close to changing the world, as close as any nonpolitician who doesn’t wage
war can. He held that humanity could be saved from destruction only by raising collective consciousness. In that sense he was the first person to talk about tipping points and critical mass. If enough people meditated, Maharishi believed that walls of ignorance and hatred would fall as decisively as the Berlin Wall. This was his core teaching in the post-Beatles phase of his long career before he died peacefully in seclusion in Holland, age ninety-one, his following much shrunken, his optimism still intact.

Before we ever met, I had a sense of respect for him: Maharishi had single-handedly brought India to the West. The price he paid was that fame makes people assume they know you, for good and ill. Maharishi imprinted in everyone’s imagination an image that could be adored or reviled. The West projected the wildest notions of divinity on him, and once the Beatles disappeared, Maharishi faded from sight.

Starting in 1980 Rita and I became regulars at the TM center on Garden Street in Cambridge. (With a note of pride, people at the center said that because Garden ran into Chauncy Street, the savant-like character that Peter Sellers played in the movie
Being There
got the name Chauncey Gardiner. But the film was more than ambiguous about whether he was a holy fool or just a fool, so the character’s other name was Chance.) Two weeks after we learned TM, so did Sanjiv’s wife, Amita.

Meditation was something I instantly loved. I became exuberant about it and probably an annoying proselyte that people avoided if they saw me coming at cocktail parties. I felt no insecurity that India was reclaiming me. If I was going into the light, it was hardly a brilliant flash. What lay ahead was unbelievable, however. Maharishi’s ambition to change the world hadn’t died as his reputation faded. He needed a younger surrogate to make his dreams come true and, unwittingly, I was about to step into that role.

16

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Being and Bliss

Sanjiv

Sanjiv and Amita on vacation in St. Martin, 1975.

T
WO WEEKS AFTER DEEPAK
and Rita learned Transcendental Meditation they were at our home in Newton, telling us that it was undeniably the best thing they had done in their lives. I listened with a high level of skepticism. My brother has always been a person with great curiosity, and when something interested him he pursued it with vigor. Rita had encouraged him to try meditation, she explained, but insisted on joining him because otherwise she knew he just wouldn’t stop talking about it. She had to learn it or she would never hear the end of it. We all laughed, knowing this to be absolutely true.

TM appealed to Amita immediately. Growing up she had been a very spiritual child. Her father, a very practical man, an engineer, would sit cross-legged in the lotus position on a deerskin rug every morning at the break of dawn to meditate. On Sunday evenings her parents would take her to the Ramakrishna mission, a worldwide spiritual movement dedicated to helping people, and while they were inside listening to monks giving a discourse on the Vedas, the sacred and ancient scriptures of Hinduism, she would sit in the meditation hall, in front of the marble statue of Ramakrishna, trying to imitate his posture and find the peace that was so evident in his splendid demeanor. As she later understood, she was yearning for some kind of spiritual experience.

When she was eleven years old Amita went to her father and declared that she wanted to join the ashram of the followers of Paramahansa Yogananda, one of the learned spiritual teachers who had first brought Hinduism to America. She even cut off much of her long flowing hair, a remarkable thing for a child to do, to show that she was very serious about this calling. Her father understood her feelings and took her to a meeting at the ashram. There they told her
that she was far too young but that after she completed her schooling, if she still wanted to join the ashram she would be most welcome.

A year later, when she was only twelve years of age, her father died suddenly of a massive heart attack. After that Amita tried to teach herself meditation, practicing how to control her breathing as she had seen the monks doing. And at times, completely on her own, she had been able to reach a certain distinctly different state of consciousness. But then her studies and social life had become more important and she had put this quest aside. So when Deepak and Rita came to us bursting with excitement she was immediately receptive.

But not me. By this time I was as American as an Indian immigrant could be. My career was progressing very well, I had a nice home for my family in the suburbs and I had become a pretty good tennis player. I didn’t want anything at all to do with that meditation stuff. I associated meditation with people who wore saffron robes and walked around banging drums, chanting hymns, and often carrying begging bowls. No, sir, thank you, I’d seen too much of these folks in India, and to me it had always looked like some sort of scam in which they were selling spiritualism for a few dollars the way con artists sold miracle cures for every malady. It was the kind of stuff Deepak had always been more interested in than I was. I liked my life just the way it was and I didn’t see any need to change it. So when Amita said she wanted to learn how to do it, I told her please go ahead, good for you. You’ll probably like it. But it’s not my cup of tea.