Chapter Four
Appendix
The Real Effects
of Meditation

In the Vedas and later texts, the spiritual aspects of meditation are defined entirely as an increasing association with Brahman, the Creator. I will not, however, be referring to the Vedas, any religion or belief system. Except that, occasionally, it is impossible not to relate my experiences to statements in the ancient holy books. Nor will I be mentioning God. God is a conceptualization that comes in many guises and with a shed-load of baggage. And who needs that?

So a little history first. I was inititiated by the Spiritual Regeneration Movement in November 1967 at a flat belonging to Jemima Pitman in Sloane Street, London. I have meditated regularly pretty much every day since then. There have been periods of a few months when I stopped meditating regularly but they are few and far between.

I learned to meditate for a number of reasons. Like many young people in those days I had cracked open my mind and seen the vast expanse of consciousness that lay within it. On acid I had transcendental experiences that changed me beyond belief. Using cannabis and LSD I had experienced the euphoria of higher levels of consciousness and I liked it. I got interested in Buddhism and Indian mysticism and discovered that there were saints in India who seemed to be ‘high all the time.’ I wanted some of that.

Had it not been for acid I probably would not have learned to meditate. The unshrouding of the inner-self through acid is often a dramatically revelationary experience. Having had that experience of vast unfathomable mind, it seems that people are often moved to take up a technique that will develop it. I have talked to people for years about meditation without eliciting any interest. But give them a tab of acid or a few mushrooms and within weeks they become meditators.

Although when I attended my Introductory Talk in a large and crowded room at the Caxton Hall in London, I was pretty convinced already, the clincher came when they talked about karma. That made me sit up for, although I had no name for it, I had long been aware of karma as an apparently random force in my life. What is more I had worked out that it was somehow linked to my actions. As a heavy user of many different substances, I was used to ‘instant karma’ (it is not just a great song, you know) and paranoia being what it is I had learned to respect and even fear this powerful force.

One aspect of the talk which became relevant and active in my life was the assertion that with meditation one‘s actions and behaviour naturally came increasingly in line with Cosmic Law. I am not sure if they still tell you that but if not they should because it has implications that are extremely far-reaching.

I was fortunate enough to meet Maharishi Mahesh Yogi on several occasions. He was an impressive if diminutive person. The first time I met him face-to-face was on a three week meditation course held on the Keele University campus in, probably, 1969. From beingnning to end the course was an absolute joy. There were many young people on the course who had learned meditation on the coat-tails of the Beatles, ex-hippies one and all, and we had a lot of fun playing elves and pixies in the woods.

Maharishi arrived ten days into the course. In those days, Maharishi greeted each course participant individually and accepted a flower from them. As we waited for his car to arrive, there was a lot of nervous expectation in the air. We had all invested a lot in this little man from India and if he turned out to be a fraud none of us knew quite what we would do.

As his car arrived we were all assembled into long line, each of us clutching our flower between nemasti’d hands. With a retinue of aides surrounding him, Maharishi made his way down the line, taking a flower from each course participant and exchanging a few words with them. As he moved down the line towards me, I could feel my knees begin to quake. Suddenly he was right in front of me, his deep brown eyes gazing into mine. All my nervousness drained out of me through the soles of my feet and I was surrounded by a cone of silence and radience. Everything outside of that cone faded into soft focus, images and sounds both, and it was just me and Maharishi. He took my flower without my noticing and together we said 'Jai Guru Dev.'

As he passed on down the line, the silence and the distance between me and what was happening around me stayed. As I stood there almost numb with relief, I realized that I had tears running down my cheeks. While Maharishi led everyone else into the conference hall for the inaugural lecture, I walked up to a copse on a small hill to reflect on the experience I had just had.

I have sat at the feet of saints in India and elsewhere but no one has ever impressed me more than Maharishi did on that day.

I met him a couple of times in later years and on each occasion I felt that I was in the presence of a Divine Being and Saint.

In the years following my initiation I received three expensive and pretty useless advanced techniques and attended many ‘rounding courses.’ Rounding courses were held at many residential TM centres and lasted from a weekend to a couple of weeks. A ‘round’ consists of a set of simple exercises called asanas, followed by a couple of minutes of pranayama, breathing exercises, followed by 20 minutes of meditation, followed by 20 minutes of resting ideally on the back. Rounding courses were the only occasions on which one did more than the prescribed two meditations a day. With each day the rounds would increase until the middle day of the course was reached when they would start to decrease back down to the normal level. Between morning and evening rounds, course participants would watch video tapes of Maharishi and have group discussions. Exciting stuff. The rounding courses were said to provide deep rest and relaxation and to hasten one’s progress towards the first permanent state of increased consciousness in the TM lexicon: Cosmic Consciousness. (The state of Cosmic Consciousness was said to be a state in which the active mind is ‘witnessed’ by the transcendental mind.)

In the late 1990s, somewhat reluctantly, I learned the TM Sidhis. I have never practised the sidhis as taught, as I regard them as a recluse technique. In an effable way meditation has a very profound effect on karma. TM is a technique for householders because the two periods of meditation do not provoke major outrages in karma as more or longer meditations might. Practising the TM Sidhis seemed to move karma (and, therefore, one’s evolution) big time. There were many tales within the TM Movement of sidhas who had lost fortunes, had businesses go bankrupt and of marriages hitting the rocks. I am not a recluse. I am very involved in the world, and I wanted my life to be a smooth and benign experience. That was, after all, one of the reasons that I had first learned TM. Although I did not practise the sidhis as a program, I never forgot them, particularly the ones that resonated with my own beliefs. And I also developed a few of my own.

So, historically, that is it. Forty-three years a meditator. What more can I say? Except that it is interesting to note that over that time my enthusiasm for the technique has not only sustained, but increased. Today I am more enthusiastic about meditation than ever. I very much believe that it is a technique that can Enlighten the world or at least have a very positive effect upon it. I base that belief entirely on my own experience of the technique.