TM Flight School

While I wait for a call-back from Smart Move customer service, I'll share another one of those group photos that turned up while I was packing stuff from our home office.

This is circa 1978 or 1979 and I'm the first guy in the back row.

I was on the final stage of the Transcendental Meditation Sidhi Course at Maharishi International University (I think it's the Maharishi School of Management, now) at Fairfield, Iowa, and we were learning the last set of sutras, or formulas, which included the one for levitation, or "flying."

The framed portrait in the center of the group is of Guru Dev, who was Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's teacher and the one to whom Maharishi gives all credit for the TM program.

My recollection is that it was a two-week program and it represented a couple of accomplishments for me. First, I achieved the first step of levitation, known as "hopping." Second, I quit smoking once and for all.

We did our flying in a large room, wall-to-wall with foam pads. Mostly, it's an inner experience in which you feel a sense of lightness. Outwardly, it looks like people just hopping around in a cross-legged sitting position. I never saw anyone actually hover and critics argued there is nothing paranormal happening here at all. Maybe so, maybe not.

But just sitting here and reflecting on the experience, I feel a certain light-headedness and am suppressing the impulse to hop.

Practice of the TM Sidhi program, in those days at least, meant spending upwards of 90 minutes, twice a day, in meditation and flying. I lapsed a long time ago and haven't done the full program in at least 15 years, maybe 20. I've even forgotten most of the sutras and the order in which they are invoked.

Maharishi encouraged us Sidhas (those who practice the Sidhis) to do our meditation/flying programs together as often as possible and in a large a group as possible. The group practice was supposed to generate a superraidiance effect - a positive influence on the environment of far greater power than if we were all doing the program at home at whatever times fit our personal schedules. Presumably, cities where there were large numbers of Sidhas flying together experienced lower crime rates and generally less environmental stress.

So when this photo was taken, I was a True Believer and was convinced that TM and the Sidhi program were going to change the world. Maybe they did and we just didn't notice. At the very least, we got a pleasant period of rest twice a day. And, since TM is incompatible with recreational drug use, it helped us all stay straight and out of jail.