Transcendental Mischief
Learned Vol. 5, Issue 10
This week: Transcendental meditation. George Harrison did it. So did some seagulls. Should we try it? Maybe. Let's get into it.
Transcendental Mischief
On the most recent episode of the Back to Work podcast, Merlin and Dan talked about transcendental meditation (among other things) and, while I'm not great at meditation, their conversation put me in mind of a few things that I thought might be fun to talk about, starting with TM itself.
So, from Wikipedia:
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi created the technique in India in the mid-1950s. Advocates of TM claim that the technique promotes a state of relaxed awareness, stress relief, and access to higher states of consciousness, as well as physiological benefits such as reducing the risk of heart disease and high blood pressure.
That all sounds fantastic. And slightly familiar. Which, if you're a Beatles fan, it should. The Fab Four dabbled with TM during their late period when they visited India and studied it1. Although Paul, John, and Ringo would later grow away from it, George remained a practitioner for most of his life. But that's not where I first heard of it.
As a young teen, I was gifted a copy of Richard Bach's Illusions, the Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah. I loved it. I quoted from it, at length, all over my friends' high school yearbooks2. In particular, I would recite this passage:
Don't be dismayed at good-byes. A farewell is necessary before you can meet again. And meeting again, after moments or lifetimes, is certain for those who are friends.
Yeah, I know3. But, for me, it was the first in a series of books I would slowly build into my personal philosophy shelf. Lots of books have been added to or removed from that particular mini-library4 over the years, but I keep Illusions there. It's more than a little cheesy and it's feel good and saccharine but...sometimes it helps.
Reading Illusions sent me to the library to look for more of Bach's books. He had risen to fame in the early 70s with Jonathan Livingston Seagull, a book that would later help make the self-help genre a thing. I can't remember if the book identifies transcendental meditation by name, or if it was in reading about the book that I first heard the term, but the entire point of the novel is that the titular Jonathan becomes so good at meditating that he learns the secret of traveling through all space and time5. Which is one of the promises made by the transcendental meditation movement of the 70s. Not in so many words6, but...
But I digress. Modern TM practice is a little more down to earth. And meditation is having a moment with several apps available for our smartphones and all our other gadgets measuring our heart rates and telling us when to breathe. I always feel like it's a bit much. As I said above, I'm not much good at meditating.
In Merlin and Dan's conversation, Merlin brought up the point that with meditation, the practice is both the noun and the verb. You're not supposed to be good at meditation. You're supposed to work at it, constantly and steadily and it is the practice that will help you. In other words, if you were already good at meditating, you wouldn't need to meditate. It's an interesting thought.
And, because this is Learned, I'll wrap up my rambling with a couple of quick observations about the transcendental part of the equation:
not counting the self-referential ones, there are six different uses and meanings for the word.
two of those are mathematical referents that I don't quite get.
the earliest uses of it are in reference to the writings of Kant (who held that we create meaning from what we experience and that what we experience only has meaning because we experienced it. I think.)
transcendent, the root of transcendentalism, comes from the Latin transcendentem, meaning to surmount or rise above.
Given the state of the world at the moment, the desire to find meaning is almost overpowering. So we read too much, watch too much, scroll too much. The hope is that if we can find meaning, maybe we can rise above the horror and the pain. Transcendental meditation suggests maybe it's the other way around. Maybe if we can stay silent and calm and rise up and out of ourselves, maybe there we'll find meaning. Maybe.
Down the Rabbit Hole:
Programming languages fascinate me. I've put some time into studying a few that make most of the modern internet work - Ruby on Rails, Python, and so on - but I'm not what you'd call a coder. But man, seeing some of the weird stuff coders create makes me wish I was. There are a number of projects called esolangs (esoteric programming language) that exist in the arcane liminal area between art and math that are rabbit holes unto themselves. Try these two on for size:
"Airline Food is an esoteric programming language created by User:Largejamie in April 2021 whose programs are supposed to look like Jerry Seinfeld's stand-up." Link
"Chef is a stack-oriented programming language created by David Morgan-Mar, designed to make programs look like cooking recipes. Programs consist of a title, a list of variables and their data values, and a list of stack manipulation instructions." Link
And then get yourself down the massive rabbit hole at Github. Enjoy!
From the Archives:
Two things this week. One, since we're talking about weird little programming languages in the rabbit hole, it might be a good time to revisit my favorite weird little made up language, Toki Pona in Learned Volume 1, Issue 10: Toki!
And then, two, since we're talking about transcendentalism, here's a look back at Learned Volume 2, Issue 3: King for a Day. The main article of this one is about the idiom "king for a day," but what I feel is relevant this week is the secondary article (in Volume 2, we had "Sidetracks" much like Volume 5's "Rabbit Hole") about Emperor Norton the First, a man who transcended his surroundings to become, well, the Emperor of America. Go read it.
I'm over-simplifying quite a bit. The Beatles time in India is a whole thing. Start with the Wikipedia page and prepare to go way down the rabbit hole.
Amazingly, many of them still talk to me.
Sappy, right? High school. What can you do? Oh, I should mention that the other quote that went around my school's yearbooks was one from e.e. cummings: "Endings are just beginnings with their hats on." Maybe it was just the 90s?
The other book that never falls out of favor is Alan Lightman's Einstein's Dreams which is bizarre, hard to read, and occasionally, transcendently beautiful.
And he doesn't even need a TARDIS to do so. Neither do I. I have a map.
I'm not going to get into the whole history of the movement any more than I already have. It was weird, it was before my time, and it's not all that relevant to my life anymore.
I first heard of TM when David Lynch came to campus my freshman year of college and did a whole seminar on it while refusing to answer any questions about his movies. Need to get back into the meditation thing myself. I'm dreadful at it, though that is the whole point, as you say.
I LOVE MERLIN! I first heard him on the Due By Friday podcast, and love his perspective. Didn't know he had another one. Thanks for sharing.
Also, what's the difference between regular meditiation and "transcendental" meditation?