Maharishi & Me

by Susan Shumsky

  The Beatles’ entourage arrived in Delhi after a harrowing journey. The Lennons’ taxi got a flat tire and the driver abandoned them. They were forced to hitchhike in the dark. They speculated Maharishi had put a curse on them.

  In Delhi, John and George told reporters they had urgent business in London and didn’t want to appear in Maharishi’s film. George Harrison traveled to South India, where he contracted dysentery, which he suspected was a spell cast by Maharishi. He was given amulets by famed sitar player Ravi Shankar, and recovered.

  Meanwhile, the Lennons caught the first plane back to London, where in a drunken stupor, John confessed to Cynthia his infidelities with hundreds of women. She was heartbroken. Incredibly, she never dreamt John had been unfaithful.

  Maharishi used various tricks and traps to weed out those not ready to commit to spiritual development, receive his teachings, and remain steadfast. Had this been a test of the Beatles’ faith and sincerity of intention? Could superstars like the Beatles ever be serious disciples of this strict, relentless, exacting, spiritual master? George Harrison said, “Being in The Beatles did help speed up the process of God-realisation, but it also hindered it as there were more impressions and more entanglements to get out of.”189

  On May 11, 1968, Billboard reported Verite Productions, founded by Paul Horn (producer and score composer), Alan Waite (associate producer), and Earl Barton (director) would make the feature titled Maharishi. Four Star paid $80,000 to SRM, $6000 each to Alan, Paul, and Earl, and $300,000 to cover production expenses.

  Paul, who characterized executive producer Gene Corman a “total drag,” was responsible for getting the film made, but possessed no decision-making power. Paul envisioned cinema verité, but Gene demanded everything scripted. Gene disliked Maharishi, bossed him around, and spoke rudely to him. Gene and Paul clashed on nearly everything. The film imploded.

  On May 3, 1968, Maharishi appeared in Washington, DC, with the Beach Boys as their opening act. But the auditorium was half-full, and Maharishi was booed off the stage by hostile Beach Boy fans. The “Maharishi Tour” folded in less than a week.

  Magic Alex ended up wasting an estimated £180,000 in Apple funds inventing products that never saw light of day. Of one hundred patents filed by EMI’s patent attorneys for Alexis, every one was declined as previously invented. He was responsible for the disastrous construction of Apple’s studios. The eight-track tape recorder had no mixing desk, no soundproofing, and no way to run cables from the studio to the control room. All this junk was sold for scrap. It seemed Magic Alex subscribed to Popular Science and the Beatles didn’t, so he enthralled them with his vast erudition.

  Jenny Boyd, who platonically shared a flat with “Magic Alex” in London in 1968, termed him as “Not very magic at all.”190 John Lennon commented, “He was just another guy who comes and goes around people like us. He’s cracked, you know.”191

  Charlie Lutes said Alexis admitted in Rishikesh, “I came to India to get the boys out of India, away from Maharishi.” When Charlie asked, “Why do you want to do this?” he answered, “We don’t want Maharishi to have this much control over the boys.”

  While the Beatles were in India, Maharishi prophetically warned them: “If you don’t continue your meditation practice, your singing group will break up.”

  PART VI

  INEVITABLE AND INESCAPABLE

  We must take situations as they are. We must only change our mental attitudes towards them.

  —Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

  Keystone Pictures USA/ZUMAPRESS

  19

  SHATTERED, SHAKEN, AND STIRRED

  1976 TO 1978

  These are the days of wireless connections from anywhere to anywhere. The relationship between the master and the disciple is not restricted to physical nearness. The link is between heart and heart.

  —MAHARISHI MAHESH YOGI

  It was October 1976. Maharishi told me to go and make money—the last thing I would ever want to do. I staggered to my room on unsteady legs. Once safely inside, away from prying eyes, it hit like a guillotine. Even though I’d seen the signs, when it finally came, the pain cut with piercing cruelty. I construed Maharishi’s brutal expulsion as proof I’d failed his tests and was banned forever.

  I curled up on the bed in a daze and pulled the covers over my head. Hours went by as my mind echoed Maharishi’s words. I counted Staff members I’d made mad or jealous. I regretted my long list of mistakes. After hours of self-recrimination, I welcomed sleep’s sweet oblivion.

  Something startled me awake. I bolted up and cried, “Oh God, what will I do without Maharishi?” Terror shot through my body. Nothing could stop the avalanche of loss, the hopeless emptiness. After a fitful night, I woke, desperate and inconsolable.

  I didn’t leave my room all day. I felt nauseous and couldn’t eat. Then I realized, No, I have to get out. Better find Mindy and give her my precious book. Must see Prakash to get money for plane fare.

  It was hard to wrap my sari that night. My fingers faltered. My feet ventured tentatively toward Mindy’s office. I paused, wondering whether to return to my room and keep the manuscript. What will Mindy do with it? Who’ll be the wiser if I keep it?

  But disobedience to Maharishi never ended well. So, carrying dread and emptiness in my heart, and the folder in my hand, I forced myself to trudge toward the office. Beverly answered the door. I thrust the voluminous notes in her direction.

  “Here. I’m leaving for the States. Maharishi told me to give this to Mindy.” Beverly, speechless, stared at the folder, a blank expression on her face.

  I turned and walked away.

  “But Susan, Susan …” Beverly called after me.

  I didn’t respond. I just kept walking.

  Next stop: Prakash Srivastava, Maharishi’s nephew. It seemed his relatives were taking over accounts. I said, “Maharishi’s sending me to the States. I need a plane ticket.”

  Prakash replied with utter contempt, “We’ll just forget about that.”

  “What?” I said.

  “We will not be having any plane ticket for you,” he said in a Hindi accent.

  “But I’ve been working for Maharishi for six years.”

  “No. No ticket. No money.”

  I said nothing. What would words do? I despised him violently. An animal trapped in a cage, I glared out through the bars, poised to attack my jailer. But the cage was locked.

  When I returned to my room, I had to scream. The pillow fell prey to my abuses. “Damn them. Damn them all!” I don’t have money for plane fare, let alone to live on. I’ve subsisted for years on $25 a month. $25!

  The next morning I woke to what hell really was. How will I get back to the States? No money. No way to earn a living. Though I felt like a palm frond thrashing violently in a hurricane, I fought the gale and struggled to move in the direction of lunch. There I feigned a calm face. I attempted to eat without revealing the overwhelming panic and adrenaline-freak-out churning inside.

  One of the friendliest women from the “108,” Veronica Foster, sat beside me. “I heard you’re going back to the States.”

  “Bad news travels fast,” I replied, staring at my soup.

  “You know why he did it, don’t you?” Veronica asked.

  “Because I screwed up royally, that’s why.”

  “No. Because he wants you to realize where God really is.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Time to discover God is within you,” she said.

  “Well … he did say, ‘You are too much dependent upon me as a person. I won’t always be here.’”

  “Doesn’t surprise me at all. Could have guessed. You’re very talented, Susan. You’re gonna do just great.”

  My throat tightened. I grabbed my napkin and covered my face. Veronica tried to put her arm around me. But I wrenched away and fled in shame.

  By the time dinner rolled around, with as much dignity as I could muster, I began quietly soliciting funds.
I entreated wealthy friends, engendering sympathy. A kindly lady “108” from Kansas City took pity and gave me a generous $400. Another charitable “108,” whom I’d known since childhood in Colorado, gave me $300. With $700 in my pocket, I would get a plane ticket, settle in the USA, and ostensibly take on the world.

  A few days later, the night before my flight, I spent hours packing. At 1:00 a.m. I entered the elevated glassed-in walkway—borderland between the Sönnenberg, where women stayed, and forbidden territory of the Külm, where Maharishi and male devotees lived. German WYMS guarded the doors like Gestapo.

  In their private wing of the Külm, Karl Werner and his WYMS Wehrmacht played Wagner operas, dressed in formal attire, and dined with their evening-gown-bedecked high-heel-clad lovers. Under a gilded domed ceiling and crystal chandeliers, the lavish banquet hall was adorned with garish oil paintings, tapestries, foliage blinking with white Christmas lights, and faux-Roman statues. A long banquet table held a lacey tablecloth, porcelain china, sterling silverware, and candelabra. Starched waiters filled crystal goblets with wine and served calorific seven-course meals of lamb, duck, roast beef, Coupe Dänemarks, bonbons, brandy, and more.192

  It was a far cry from our International Staff dining room, where we wore saris and sandals and ate basmati rice, zucchini, salads, minestrone soup, bread, butter, yoghurt, and fruit. Not that meat ingestion or luxury dining interested me. For a decade, my culinary tastes had been simple vegetarian fare.

  Gone were the glory days of women visiting Maharishi privately without permission from layers of guards through tiers of fortifications. At the barricaded gate to the Külm, I phoned the current skin-boy, a Canadian, on the intercom. “I’m leaving for the States in the morning,” I said. “I want to see Maharishi.”

  “I think he just went to bed,” he replied. “Let me go check.”

  Moments later he returned to the intercom. “Too late. Maharishi has gone to bed. Come in the morning at 9:00.”

  “But I’m leaving at 7:00.”

  “I’m so sorry. Can’t help you now. Wish you’d come earlier. I would have told him. Now it’s too late. Call him when you get to the States. I’ll give you his phone number.”

  My first thought was, He’s lying. Maharishi never retires this early. Then it felt like someone hurled a cannonball at my stomach, and panic set in. No. This can’t be real. Oh God, no. Now I’ve really blown it! No one had ever left Staff without seeing Maharishi.

  Next morning, Erich Buchman, a kindly young Swiss meditator who was Maharishi’s driver, loaded my luggage into a Mercedes. When he opened the trunk, it looked like a junk pile—papers scattered everywhere, haphazardly, apparently discarded.

  Erich piled my luggage on top of the refuse. He tried to squeeze the final suitcase into the trunk. It wouldn’t fit, so he packed it into the back seat. As I walked around the car, I got a closer look at the trunk and picked up a castoff page.

  A strange sight emerged.

  Oh my God! The loose notes of my precious Vacuum State book, strewn about the trunk of this random Mercedes. I didn’t know how they got there, but there they were! I gasped in dismay. Erich asked, “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s the notes for my Vacuum State book!” I cried. “Maharishi told me to give them to Mindy! I don’t know why they’re in this car!”

  Erich asked, “Do you want to take them with you?”

  “No,” I replied. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  I arrived in Manhattan, in culture shock and bliss-withdrawal trauma, alone and penniless in a threatening world. I’d just spent seven years cloistered with a guru who convinced me, with great effectiveness, that without his direct care I was nowhere, and life was dangerous. While he touted self-sufficiency, he also made us fear everything outside his insular walls. Now, expelled from heady heights of his paradise, nothing seemed real. I had no context for a new life.

  Ten years earlier, I’d introduced Gloria Zimmerman to TM. Now she was the New York TM Center Chairman. Surely Gloria will find me a place to stay. “No,” was her answer. “Everyone always asks for a place to stay in New York. I can’t help you.” In her world, I was nobody.

  After phoning everyone I could conjure, a generous woman, Angela, whom I’d met while on International Staff, and her husband Ralph Radetsky, took me in. I slept in their storage closet for two weeks. Then I moved into a furnished room at $250 per month in a high-rise in Flushing, Queens, with an elderly Jewish couple.

  After seven years of seclusion, ingesting daily doses of heavenly bliss, the noises, vehicle exhaust, subway slime, weird street people, and crushes of negative vibes assaulted me. Everything about Switzerland was refined. In New York, whenever I walked down the street, I wanted to shower off its gross energy.

  Fractured and dispossessed, I flopped around like a crustacean without its shell. Devoid of social or survival skills, I could barely finish a sentence. I was incapable of relating to anyone, not even meditators or TM Teachers. In Switzerland all we ever talked about was what Maharishi said or did that day.

  What can I possibly say to these people? How do I try to make small talk when Shangri-la is my home? My universe isn’t here. Utterly addicted to Maharishi’s darshan—breaking this dependency was like drug withdrawal.

  In culture shock, devoid of television, radio, movies, or entertainment for ten years, I was a displaced refugee from a remote planet, with alien language and civilization. I spoke a foreign tongue: Maharishi-speak.

  An entire decade of American culture was absent. I pondered how to open a soda can and asked for a can opener from a puzzled cashier. To define me, “introverted” was an understatement. “Paralyzed” was more accurate. An appalling sense of helplessness overtook me.

  Nothing could stop the excruciating pain—no cure for the grief and rejection. My connection with Maharishi felt broken and my only chance for spiritual enlightenment in ruins. With nothing but regrets for friends, life seemed meaningless. And I felt it was my own fault.

  The New York Times listed positions for book designers, graphic artists, paste-up, and so forth. But no one wanted a designer whose only job experience was a non profit in Switzerland that printed everything with Victorian flourishes and masses of gold ink.

  I dragged my heavy portfolio in the snow from packed, stifling subways to dozens of magazines, book publishers, and ad agencies to try to get freelance illustration work. My arms ached. My shoulders hurt. I was cold. Tears filled my eyes. No money to live on. No money for subway tokens. My rent was overdue.

  After agonizing months of defeat, I got a pitiful assignment from Health-Tex children’s clothing manufacturer in the Empire State Building. I designed hanging tags and woven labels. Then a new magazine, Entrepreneur, hired me to illustrate a few articles. It took seemingly forever to execute these illustrations, for which I received $150 apiece—long hours with little pay. But my luck improved when a TM meditator asked me if I could design jewelry.

  “Sure. Why not? I can design everything else,” I replied.

  After designing a line of jewelry for them, they promptly went bankrupt. However, it whetted my appetite. I could draw a jewelry design in thirty minutes and sell it for $30. In 1976, that was serious pay. Maybe this was what Maharishi meant by, “Make a lot of money as an artist.”

  I created a portfolio and hawked my wares on Forty-Seventh Street, the jewelry district. To my delight, I actually sold some designs. Moreover, I could pay rent and buy pizza at a dollar a slice, and a Papaya King once in a while.

  A year went by while I struggled to save money. I was encouraged by design sales, but it wasn’t enough to return to Switzerland.

  I lugged my portfolio to the biannual jewelry trade show, held at the Hilton and Sheraton. Sam Ziefer, president of Meyer’s Jewelry, a large diamond jewelry manufacturer, and his consultant Al Jaffee, perused my portfolio in their suite, amidst hors d’oeuvres and booze. “There’s nothing here I can use, but I’m impressed with your talent. I think we can work toget
her,” Al said.

  “If you’re so impressed, why don’t you buy something?” I scoffed. Seven years in the ashram with closed eyes hadn’t improved my tact.

  “Okay, I’ll buy a couple of designs, just to show I’m serious. But once you understand what I want, we’ll develop a jewelry line together.” That’s how I ended up designing line after line for Meyer’s Jewelry for two decades.

  TM had become wildly popular, especially after Maharishi appeared on The Merv Griffin Show three times, along with celebrity meditators—on April 14, 1975 with Ellen Corby of The Waltons, October 31, 1975 with Clint Eastwood and Mary Tyler Moore, and December 14, 1977 with Burt Reynolds, Squire Fridell, and Doug Henning. Clint had learned TM during Maharishi’s 1970 course at Humboldt. A long list of celebrities became TM meditators, including film director David Lynch, who started in 1973.

  In November 1977 I moved to The Cenacle, formerly a convent in Armonk, New York, where “Executive Governors of the Age of Enlightenment” (Maharishi’s hyperbolic title for Initiators who’d graduated from the AEGTC Course) were teaching residence courses.

  Richard Chamberlain, television star of Dr. Kildare, showed up for a course. He was often spotted on the patio strutting around bare chested. Aspiring radio personality Howard Stern was staying there while hosting the morning show at WRNW in nearby Briarcliff Manor.

  I became infatuated with a so-called “Governor”—Robert Schumacher, from Glen Cove, Long Island. I imagined him the man of my dreams—a Jewish-TM-John-Travolta-lookalike, talk-alike, act-alike. He stopped by my design studio for our daily walks in the crisp autumn air—he in his three-piece suit, I in my sari. Our footsteps crunched the rainbow of leaves blanketing the near-frozen ground.

  “Susan, what was it like around Maharishi?” Robert asked.

  I paused to consider the yellow, orange, and red leaves strewn about my feet. “The master-disciple relationship is difficult to fathom. It’s easily misinterpreted,” I said.