December 1999

"How I Learned TM:" The Rose and the Laughing Man

by Deborah Fineblum Raub

Moving through the long hallways of the University of Maryland Student Union in early November, 1971, my eye was caught by a poster. On a bright white background there was a single rose, juxtaposed against the photograph of a man, his black beard cascading over his white gown. As I drew closer, I could see that the man wasn’t just smiling, but laughing, as at a delicious joke, his head thrown back in pure glee.

I’d seen that look before, and suddenly I recalled where. A friend from the drugstore where I worked part-time had a husband with a rather strange practice: Every evening when he came home from work, he retreated to a comfortable chair in the living room and sat with crossed legs and closed eyes for what seemed an unnaturally long period of time. If I was visiting, my friend and I would stay in the kitchen and whisper so as not to disturb him.

My attitude was, I recall, one of mild distrust. What was this odd ritual? Why did he need it to relax? Wasn’t it like the drugs so many of the kids I knew were into? And what about it made him act so happy, afterwards, not unlike the man with the long beard in this poster?

I had some vague sense that the thing my friend’s husband did was called TM and this laughing man must be doing it too. Then I strolled off to the student union’s TV to keep my 1:00 appointment with All My Children.

But something was to happen that would alter the way I’d look at that poster. Over the following weekend, I walked home with my friend and, as she unlocked the door of her apartment, we could faintly make out the silhouette of her husband sitting in his special chair. We’d evidently caught him by surprise and, as our pupils grew accustomed to the darkened room, I could see that his eyes had opened. It was those eyes, looking for all the world as if they’d been called back from somewhere very far off, that I couldn’t stop wondering over. It was those eyes that gave me the first sense of how profound an experience was this TM.

So, on Monday, instead of rushing past the poster with the rose and the laughing man, I stopped and wrote down in my notebook the date and time of something called an Introductory Lecture. Then I called my younger sister, Tobi, who was home on a break from college and told her about my friend’s husband’s strange habit and about the look in his eyes, and about this Introductory Lecture. She listened quietly, then said she’d pick me up.

 Instead of finding Maharishi in a white robe, there was a young man in a jazzy pair of madras slacks and a blue knit shirt. Introducing himself as Terry, a teacher of TM, he talked about thoughts bubbling up, sketched a few on the blackboard, then explained where thoughts came from, a subject none of my psychology courses had ever tackled. When he invited the 20 or so college students and the couple of old people (no doubt in their 30s), to return for a Preparatory Lecture, Tobi and I agreed to do so, without hesitating. We could think a thought. It sounded easy. And I kept remembering my friend’s husband’s eyes.

The Preparatory Lecture was a few days later. There was more talk of thoughts, but details too, about mantras, and how the meditation worked and what makes it unique from other mental techniques. There was to be no drug use before we learned to meditate, an announcement that sent an unhappy ripple of muttering through the room. But Tobi and I were the first to sign up, after pondering where we’d find the "steep" initiation fee: $35.

It was a crisp November morning. Tobi was driving our parents’ station wagon through the maze-like streets of our nation’s capital, and we climbed the old steps bearing flowers and oranges and apples and cotton hankies. The house that was home to the TM center stood on a dignified old tree-blessed street. This ancient mansion had a stately tall staircase running down its spine. And it was up those stairs that Tobi followed Terry; she being the less nervous of the two of us had volunteered to go first. And it was down them that she floated some 20 minutes later, wearing a broad, almost surprised, smile. My turn had come. So up we went.

The learning, looking back 28 years on the moment, was sweet, the moment redolent of flowers and oranges, of journeys into uncharted thought territories, of questions nervously asked and softly answered.

The next three nights of checking, back on campus, was time enough for all our questions, and Terry’s answers. I sensed I’d taken some giant step in my life, though Tobi seemed to understand more of what we were experiencing than I did. She was reading everything she could get her hands on and, within a few short months, was making plans to become a TM teacher herself. She eventually taught our parents, youngest sister and grandmother to meditate, and went on to teach all around the world.

None of our subsequent travels will ever diminish the joy of discovery the two of us shared in those autumnal days in 1971, days destined to enrich our lives for all time as they opened to us, each in our own way, the field of all possibilities.

Contribute Your Story to a New Book! Enlightenment magazine is planning to publish a collection of stories on how Meditators learned the Transcendental Meditation technique, and the benefits they’ve experienced in their lives.

To make the book complete, we’d like stories from people of all ages and backgrounds. We hope that you’ll write your story in 1,000 to 3,000 words, and send it to Enlightenment magazine: PO Box 26, Hillsboro, NH 03244 or email to editor@enlightenment-magazine.org.

Deborah Fineblum Raub is a staff writer for the Democrat and Chronicle in Rochester, New York.