Stephen Fry in America by Stephen Fry

Author:Stephen Fry
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2008-10-15T16:00:00+00:00

The mighty Tower of Invincibility, seen here looking up at an architectural feature of the Maharishi University.

M.U.M.

Since 1974 the Maharishi University of Management (formerly Maharishi International University) has opened its doors to students from around the world. I have come to have a look round both at its campus and a new township that has been built just outside, Maharishi Vedic City.

I look in on the office of one Dr Fred Travis, who has got his daughter Dariana wired up with dozens of electrodes to a computer. He is monitoring her EEG activity as she goes in and out of TM states. He explains to me what these data on screen reveal, but I am ashamed to say the theory has all gone out of my head. I seem to recall being surprised that the claim for TM is not that the brain relaxes but that it becomes more active. I may have got that wrong. I have never met any regular TM practitioner who has struck me as having a mind of any especial speed, dynamism or creative energy, but I have no doubt the practice gives pleasure and rewards to many. When the electrodes are implanted in my brain I cannot tell what it is that is different about the readings, but Dr Travis, whose qualifications are real enough, assures me that these experiments prove something. He is less comfortable when I ask him about yogic flying and other aspects of Vedic ‘science’. Ah well.

Next I wander around the campus, noting the Maharishi Tower of Invincibility. There are almost no signs of the original Parsons College. Despite most of that campus being on the National Register of Historical Places, nearly all of it was bulldozed to make way for new buildings that accorded with the Maharishi Sthapatya Veda, which is a kind of Vedic Feng Shui. A few years before he died the Maharishi informed the world that it was vital for the whole planet to live and work in buildings constructed according to Sthapatya. It seems to come down to everything facing east and looking like a ghastly impersonal hotel.

I am in a thoroughly bad mood by this time. I wouldn’t mind all this nonsense if it didn’t arrogate half-understood principles of Western science, attempting to marry its ‘philosophy’ with the ideas behind quantum mechanics, probability, chaos theory and other essentially mathematical and empirically derived concepts. You cannot simultaneously insult Western thinking and use its precepts to ‘prove’ your moronic theories: not without losing my respect at least.

I go to the dining hall and eat with some of the students. The food at least is excellent, all organic, all fresh, none processed or frozen. I sit with some students, mostly Muslims, who come to the university to study computer science, which seems to be far and away the most popular course. They all appear to put up with the strictures of the university (lights out by 10.00 p.m., enforced physical exercise and TM) as a price they are willing to pay for an American education.

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