Levitation, anyone?

I can fly, kinda sorta.
Back in the 1980s, I took the advanced Transcendental Meditation courses that led up to learning to levitate.
Actually, levitation is a bit of an overstatement.
If you were around at the time, you probably saw or read stuff in the media about how Maharishi Mahesh Yogi was teaching people the technique of yogic flying. Photos were released showing cross-legged meditators in mid-air above mattresses of foam rubber.
Yeah, I did that.
But let me back up a bit to 1967.
That was the year of the Summer of Love in San Francisco. The adventurous part of me desperately wanted to drop acid and head to ‘Frisco with a couple of my college friends. The responsible part of me was engaged to my first wife and had just landed a job as a reporter with the largest evening daily newspaper in the state.
So I passed on the Great Adventure and chose the path of responsibility.
In retrospect, I don’t regret it. My two buddies who took the other path fried their brains on drugs. One is living on 100% disability from a helmetless motorcycle crash and the other, who graduated with a math degree and a 4.0 GPA, was last seen being homeless and living on the beach in Fort Myers, Fla.
Even though I was newly married with my first child on the way and in the first year of a 34-year newspaper career, I still had one foot in the counterculture. I had subscriptions to the Berkeley Barb, the San Francisco Oracle, the Los Angeles Free Press and the Village Voice. If I couldn’t live it, I could sure as hell read about it.
So when Maharishi Mahesh Yogi began showing up in the counterculture media, I was one of the first in the Midwest to notice and be intrigued.
One of my friends, the future motorcycle crash victim, learned Transcendental Meditation – TM for short – gave up dope and adopted the mannerisms of a peaceful, blissful soul. I was impressed.
Two years later, the first TM course was offered in my city and I was quick to sign up. I showed up at the initiation site with my $75 course fee, my three pieces of fruit, flowers and new white handkerchief which the initiator used in a puja – a ceremony of gratitude to Maharishi’s deceased teacher Guru Dev and all the other masters who handed down the tradition of meditation. At the end of the puja, he intoned my mantra – a meaningless sound which he had me repeat verbally, then continue repeating mentally with my eyes closed.
A couple of minutes later – at least that’s what it felt like - he asked me to stop repeating the mantra and slowly open my eyes. I glanced at my watch and noticed 15 minutes had passed. Hmmm. Something was going on here.
I and all of the other people who learned TM that day returned for the next three evenings for “checking meetings,” follow-up instructional sessions in which we received more information about the technique as we accumulated experience by meditating for 20 minutes twice daily at home.
I learned, among other things, that the difference between the actual and subjective times of meditation meant there were periods in which I had “transcended,” i.e. gone to a place where there is no thought. Instead of having awareness of the mantra or some random thought, there was no object of awareness – a state of pure awareness without an object. This, we were told, is a timeless state but since our nervous systems were rendered inefficient by the stress of day-to-day living, we could not be consciously aware of that state and, therefore, it accounted for those gaps in time that made a long meditation seem short.
Sometime during the first couple of weeks after being initiated, I was seated comfortably in a living room chair at home, doing my afternoon meditation, when I experienced what felt like a bolt of lightning shooting up my spiral cord and exploding in a blinding white light in the top of my head.
“Holy shit! How often is this going to happen?” I wondered.
Someone later explained it was what is known as a Kundalini experience in which all seven of the charkas – energy centers along the length of the spine – opened, allowing my life energy to surge to the top, or Crown Chakra. It was a rare and good thing, however distracting. It never happened to me again, but it was a cool experience and one most people never have.
I, of course, became a true TM zealot and doubtless tried the patience of all of my friends as I jabbered on about what a great thing TM was. I’m sure many of them thought I’d become a hopeless head case, especially when I opened my house for use as the city’s first TM center and took a month off without pay in August, 1970, to attend a teacher training course Maharishi conducted at Humboldt State College in Arcata, Calif.
Sometime around 1978 or so, Maharishi began teaching the sidhis – an advanced technique that supplemented the regular TM routine and was aimed at cultivating a variety of qualities and abilities, culminating in levitation.
The course was conducted in several phases and, all told, cost $3,000. The various phases were taught in two-week sessions at Maharishi International University – a TM-based college on the campus of the former Parsons College in Fairfield, Iowa.
In each phase, we learned a set of sutras, words or phrases that were supposed to promote the development of the desired qualities or abilities. Repetition of the sutras was tacked onto the end of the regular meditation session. By the time we got the final set, including the flying sutra, our 20-minute meditations had become extended into an hour-long program, beginning with yoga postures, alternate-nostril breathing called pranayama and concluding with flying.
So what’s it like to fly?
Outwardly, it looks like you’re hopping – sitting cross-legged on the foam, bending slightly at the waist and leaping forward. Inwardly, I was aware that my muscles were initiating the hop, but at the same time, I felt an unusual lightness, a buoyancy that suggested something was happening beyond mere physical exertion.
People experienced this to varying degrees and there is a euphoria that goes with flying. Some people found themselves making involuntary vocal nonsense sounds, analogous, I suppose, to the “speaking in tongues” some religious types experience. One of the guys in my group inexplicably fixated on the phrase “tunafish.”
“Tunafish! Tunafish! Tunafish! Tunafish! Tunafish! Tunafish!” Ned would mumble as he hopped across the room. It was a pretty bizarre scene.
Maharishi encouraged us to gather at our local TM center – by now the movement had bought a large house in my city for use as a center – to do our program and fly together twice daily. The theory was that group flying produced a powerful positive influence in the atmosphere that nullified stress and resulted in reduced crime and antisocial behavior in the community as a whole.
That required a considerable amount of time – about three hours a day, counting drive time to and from home – for me and I only made it down to the center for my evening program on a sporadic basis.
Maharishi tested his theory in a couple of global hot spots, sending large numbers of TM flyers to Iran just before the fall of the Shah and again to the Philippines just before the collapse of the Ferdinand Marcos regime. If the intent was to quell the revolutions brewing in Iran and the Philippines, the experiments were very conspicuous failures. It was around this time that changes in my life, a shortage of time and doubts about the efficacy of the technique combined to make me less and less regular in the full hour-long program.
I went back to the 20-minutes twice a day until around 1992 when I quit altogether.
These days, I meditate occasionally on an as-needed basis.
I don’t regret my involvement with the TM program: it spared a lot of stress, cured a case of spastic colon, kept me free of recreational pharmaceuticals and helped me go from 3 packs of Viceroy cigarettes a day to smoke-free in two weeks.
My mistake was trying to make it into a way of life and taking the whole thing way too seriously.
As far as the levitation goes, it’s been more than 20 years since Maharishi started teaching yogic flying and I don’t know of anyone who has actually achieved hovering. So far as I know, they’re still tunafishing across the foam rubber mattresses.