Transcendental Meditation

 First published in Column 8, 26.6.91

Every time I open the paper these days I see something about TM, more fully known as Transcendental Meditation.

I note that the same old lines are being trotted out. for instance, because it so much improves health the Government should seriously consider making TM a part of the health service – it will save us so much money.

None of this is new. It’s been the line TM exponents have taken since the Beatles became disillusioned with it back in the 1960s.

At the risk of stepping on people’s toes, I’d like to express some of my concerns about TM.

Let me say first, meditation can ease stress – but there are plenty of other styles of meditation around. TM is only one in the bag. When it comes to mind over matter, then TM, like any other form of meditation, works – up to a point. but it’s a lot cheaper to relax in front of an open fire in the winter and watch the sparks fly up, or sit in the garden looking at the birds swinging round the trees in summer. And you don’t have to endlessly repeat some mysterious word.  

It might be okay if that was as far as TM went. But TM is religious in origin, and has in no way lost its roots.

Newcomers, before starting to learn the techniques of TM, are asked to bring some simple offerings, such as fruit. They will remove their shoes, and be asked to bow down before a portrait of Swami Brahmenanda Saraswati, the Divine Master (or Guru Dev). This was the man who trained Maharashi Yogi, who later brought TM to the West. (It seems he felt it was more profitable to do so, since there were already plenty of impoverished Yogi in India. And as he said, ‘people in the West are in the habit of accepting things quickly.’ In fact, until  he found the right way to sell it, they didn’t.)

Then the teacher will intone a Sanskrit hymn of praise in Hindu – to traditional Hindu gods.

TM enthusiasts usually deny it’s a religion, but in at least two countries (one of them being the USA) it has been legally ruled as such. By appearing in various disguises, TM has been passed off as a political movement for world peace (the World Plan Executive Council), a source of calm for the use of stressed-out businessmen, or a method to keep children from unruly behaviour.

But there’s more. I remember hearing a man who’d seen the error of his ways in regard to TM talking about the fact that people learnt to levitate when they became real disciples.

Even stranger was the behaviour of his flatmate whom he heard bumping around his bedroom. After some weeks of being given the brush-off, he finally got the fellow to tell him what he was up to. This guy was supposed to be flying.

From there it was only a matter of time before the first man was trying it too, going to Wellington to what might be called the ‘flying school.’ The flying room was like a large gymnasium with lots of padded mats around, and ordinary New Zealanders trying to get off the ground.

If all this sounds rather foolish, it isn’t. in 1977 TM offered a Sidhi programme which promised advanced students the ability to levitate, fly, become invisible, walk through walls and have superhuman strength.

In 1980 five former TM disciples told the Guardian newspaper that they’d paid £30,000 between them to learn such skills. In spite of the great financial outlay, none of them could do any of these things.

Beatles and Maharashi 1967

 On the clipping of this column I’ve written a note at some point saying, ‘Only column to warrant any editing.’ Editing by the Editor, presumably. I no longer have the original copy of the column and after more than thirty years I can’t remember what was deleted. Perhaps I should be grateful it was printed at all.

Evil

First published in Column 8, 12.6.91            

In the last week I’ve read two reviews of a film showing in Dunedin at present. Apparently overseas critics have raved about the story in which, among other things, a character skins his female victims in order to make a coat out of them.

According to some, The Silence of the Lambs is one of the best horror movies ever made. Critics say it portrays its human monsters in an intelligent way.

No doubt the film has been made intelligently. While we may laugh at most of the horror movies of the past, the best of them – if that’s how you’d describe them – have always been made with considerable intelligence. And I don’t mean those of the Friday the 13^th ilk.

The use of intelligent writers, directors and actors, however, doesn’t mean that the producers of such sick films are concerned about the audience’s intellect, only that they are keen to make a buck – or a million of them – out of any means at their disposal.

In this century I would hazard a guess that we’ve seen more horror than at any other time in history. When I say ‘seen,’ I mean actually viewed it, whether in magazines, in the movies or on television. We’ve been bombarded with graphic pictorial records of every kind of insanity mankind can devise.

Anything to keep the dollars rolling in.

Book publishers are the same. The writer Bret Easton Ellis was paid an advance of $500,000 for the novel, American Psycho, in which an insane but ‘respectable’ killer describes in gross detail how he dismembers men, women and children. Then the publishers got cold feet at the last minute, and cancelled publication.

A glimmer of light in the darkness, you’d say. Unfortunately not. Some other publishers, who by then had the benefit of all the free advertising sent their way, came along and quite happily put the book before the public.

The determination of Viking-Penguin Press to publish The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie in spite of protests was a similar case. No matter that at least two people lost their lives as a result of a book offensive to Muslims, or that the author has been imprisoned, as it were, by his own words.

The recent authorised biography of Nancy Regan is another case. Even if every destructive word of the book had been true, and it seems very little was, its existence is an indictment against the money-greedy publishers who put it on the market.

Nevertheless they wouldn’t have had so much success with it if every newspaper in the USA hadn’t reviewed it – some of them, like the New York Times (in a quite unprecedented move), on their front pages.

Few newspapers or magazines could resist the lure, even though they may have been deriding the book. Anything to keep their readers reading their paper.

What am I trying to say? Not just that the heart of man is desperately wicked – even though few of us would care to admit it – but that when it comes to promoting evil this century seems one long downward spiral.

Maybe there is hope. As far as movies are concerned, pundits quote box office figures to show that moviegoers are mostly staying away from more distasteful films. I’d be interested to know if readers are buying less distasteful books, or people watching less distasteful videos.

Will the producers of these movies and the publishers of the books get the message? The Silence of the Lambs, for instance, is already spawning other horror-movies for ‘intelligent’ people.

Apparently the purveying of evil will go on as long as there’s money to be made out of it. Where there’s muck there’s brass.

 

The advance figure quoted above may have been in NZ dollars; the US figures was $300,000 – still a colossal sum for an advance.

Since this column was written, of course, Rushdie has continued to be a virtual prisoner as his memoir, Joseph Anton, shows, and he has been attacked in public, in 2022, being severely injured. Other people have died or being attacked.

Nancy Reagan’s biography was written by Kitty Kelley who wrote a number of similar ‘unauthorised’ biographies.

As for audiences staying away from ‘distasteful’ films, I think I was being hopeful rather than realistic.

Phones

 First published in Column 8, 19^th June, 1991

One of my readers tells me I forgot to mention personal stereos in the ‘music, music everywhere and not a note to sing’ article.

The difference between the muzak that follows us everywhere we go and a personal stereo wrapped around our ears is that with the latter we can choose what we listen to. (At least I assume we still can. Hopefully our legislators – under urgency with only five members in the House – haven’t passed a law while I was asleep stating that you must listen to parliamentary broadcasts on your personal stereo.)

Here's some good news. I’ve just come across a report of a marketing breakthrough in the States.

It seems that in the land of the brave and free, when you telephone the number you want, you may have to wait to be answered not just for several seconds, but for several minutes. (And Telecom brought Americans in on our little phone system. Oh, boy!)

No longer, however, will you have to listen to telephone muzak. You’ll be able to listen to…wait for it: advertising! First there’ll  be a minute’s worth of the latest music tape, then a little intro by the announcer, and off into the next track. Naturally it’ll be of their choice.

Well, it can’t be much worse than the new phone systems that are proliferating in Dunedin.

We had to have them, of course, being new technology. We couldn’t learn anything from the misery on other phone customers’ faces around the world.

The new system – and I won’t mention the ailing health board or the government department that says it’s their job to be fair where you’ll strike this horrendous device – works as follows.

A recorded voice answers by welcoming you. It then proceeds to inform you that if you have a push-button phone you can press number one and the operator will answer. If you know the extension you want, you can press the required numbers. This won’t immediately get you your extension. A woman’s voice will arise and ask you to wait a moment. Finally the extension phone will start to ring.

That’s what happens when things are working properly. At another place where this system has been installed, the following sequence of events happened to me over and over again. A recorded voice said: This is so and so. If you require the operator, press One. If you know the number…

Well, at that point I pressed one. The voice told me: You have pressed an invalid number, please wait for the operator to answer.

I waited, but the operator, it seems, didn’t know of my existence, because the next thing I knew the recorded voice returned and told me to press One for the operator. Two seconds later, I was informed that I had pressed an invalid number. And so on, until I was ready to dash the receiver into its place with enough force to send it through the wall.

And Gordon McLauchlin races all over America and breathlessly tells us communications are improving.

Phones are such fun! However, there is another side to all this. Sometimes it isn’t just the customer who gets a little tetchy.

I used to work in the International Telephone Exchange in London. Dozens of segregated operators – men at night, women in the daytime – trying their hardest to answer hundreds of calls an hour.

On one overloaded Sunday afternoon (men worked the weekends as well) my neighbour told me listen in on his line: an irate caller was abusing him at length for not having answered his call an hour ago.

Since my neighbour hadn’t stopped answering calls since he came on his shift this was hardly his fault.

Unfortunately the operator’s attempts to explain the delay and apologise fell on deaf ears: the bumptious male caller continued his abuse.

A fatal mistake. In the next second my workmate said a couple of non-Post Office words and the caller’s connection was unplugged. Once more he took his place at the end of the hour-long queue. My workmate sighed a little sigh of regret at losing such a friendly customer.

International Telephone Exchange - though note
the man in amongst the ladies; not in my day!
Photo courtesy of Science Museum

A bit sinister

 First published in Column 8 on the 29^th May, 1991

 My left-handed relative and I (she in her pre-war gumboots, of course), were recently out in the sun sawing up wood.

While we stopped for a cuppa her eye caught a report by a Canadian professor regarding left-handed people in an old newspaper.

Reading it, my relative thought his statements smacked of Leftism, a form of prejudice at least as old as racism, and possibly older.

“Just look at the words he uses,” she said. “Sinister, and macabre and gauche. Even the headline refers to ‘lethal.’”

I suggested some smart-aleck sub-editor may have added the headline.

That really set her off. It was bad enough for a professor to draw his conclusions from insufficient evidence – he’d only used a sample of 1896 students – but for some upstart newspaper man to give his bias free reign was beyond the pale.  

Had I forgotten that left-handed people had been forced to go against their inner nature for years, hypocritically pretending to be right-handed?

The professor’s survey indicated that left-handed people were in grave danger of shortened lives.

My 74-year-old relative scoffed. “He didn’t include my 95-year-old grandfather in the survey, did he? Or your 75-year-old mother-in-law? Pablo Picasso was no chicken when he died – what’s he using him as an example for?”

The professor had also come to some conclusions regarding the driving ability of left-handers.

“What nonsense is this about left-handed people being worse drivers?” she asked. “The only accident I’ve ever had was when a drunken pedestrian bumped into my car.”

I pointed out that the professor had unwisely taken his findings from students, a group in the age range with the worst road accident record. This seemed to provide his figures with something of an inbuilt bias.

My relative checked the report again. “It’s plain the man’s no statistician,” she said. “One minute he says we widdershins are 85% more likely to have a road accident, and further down he says the figure is 135%. Can’t he make up his mind?”

“And,” she added, “what’s this nonsense about being likely to swerve to the left in a crisis and hit other cars?”

“He’s plainly myopic when it comes to countries that drive on the left-hand side of the road. If a driver in New Zealand raises his right hand on the steering wheel, and lowers his left, he’ll sail off onto the footpath, and mow down the pedestrians.”

Her final comments – before we went back to sawing the wood – were about the peculiar results of other surveys mentioned in the last paragraph, where it stated that while 13% of 20-year-olds were left-handed, only 1% of 80-year-olds were.

“Probably the left-handers were just showing off their ambidexterity on the days those surveys were taken,” she said.

“Left-handed people are so much more adaptable. By the time they’ve reached 80 they’ve truly learnt to be ambisinistrous. You have to be, in a world with right-handed scissors and knives and cheque books.”

“Show me some right-handers who’ve achieved ambidexterity,” she added, “and I’ll show you left-handers galore who’ve adapted themselves to a right-handed world.”

My relative picked up the chainsaw. “Come on slacker, we haven’t got all winter.”

Junior Campbell playing left-handed guitar
courtesy Justthefactspal

Left-handedness was a hot topic for me when this was written. I had a mother who was left-handed, as well as a mother-in-law, and two children. I’m left-handed myself when it comes to playing any game that involves a bat, or a club – anything that you swing in order to hit a ball.

Music memories

First published in Column 8 on the 5^th June 1991

Recently we acquired a record player after having been some years without one. (The last was picked to pieces when the boys were small and investigative and had to see how everything worked.)

Hearing records not played for years brought back some strange memories. There’s something special about the music we first heard when we were very young and our world was somewhat unexplored.

I put on Imagine and I’m back in an upstairs London flat in a row of terrace houses in Tooting Bec, in front of a pale brown radio my English uncle gave me.

I play James Taylor and think of long evenings sitting in front of a gas fire sucking up its two shillings, listening to Taylor’s half-melancholy tapes, with my soon-to-be wife snuggled up beside me. And if it wasn’t James Taylor, it was gloomy Leonard Cohen, or Harry Nilsson draining every last ounce of romance from songs on the one record of his we owned.

I pick up a Moody Blues album and remember a terrible residential child care placement I had in the middle of Cheshire, where two other displaced persons and myself used to listen to the group’s sci-fi sounds after all the awful maladjusted kids had been put to bed.

Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, the Pastoral, was on the first LP I ever owned. Hearing it was like going back to childhood and discovering that the world is so much bigger than you’d ever imagined. (Walt Disney tried to ruin the Sixth for me by using it in Fantasia, but Beethoven and I survived.)

When I heard Mahler’s Fourth Symphony it was as though Mahler himself and his sleigh bells and all the angelic choirboys had burst blazing into my Dunedin living room.

From the sublime to the ridiculous. Noel Coward is credited with remarking that there is a potency in cheap music, and it’s strange how something that really has no particular depth can affect you again and again.

When I was young, I spent a couple of weeks in some larger North Island town – possibly it was Hamilton. Two things I remember vividly – learning to swim on my back, and everywhere I went hearing the song sung by Frank Sinatra, Strangers in the Night.

The moment that used to get me every time was when, about two thirds of the way through, the music suddenly shifted up a notch. It was like remembering when you first fell in love. (At that naïve stage, I hadn’t.)

The composer Michael Tippet said in a newspaper interview that all sorts of music stopped him in his tracks. He and I would be in agreement about Strangers in the Night, I think, in spite of the simple device it uses to wind the listener up.

Pavarotti has the same effect when he sings the aria from Turandot over the ad for all those anguished footballers. Puccini might be turning in his grave, but emotionally, for the rest of the world, the combining of the film of those footballers and the achingly romantic music is a stroke of genius.

Music can move people at their point of least resistance. At a party years ago, late at night, when the drink had turned everyone soporific, the radio played Paul Simon singing Bridge Over Trouble Water. One man, a respectable policeman by day, was crawling around the floor on his hands and knees, shaking his head, tears in his eyes, and mumbling, ‘It’s the greatest piece of music ever written.’

And in some ways he was right.

Pavarotti in St Petersburg

‘Extraordinary how potent cheap music is’ – the line comes from Noel Coward’s play, Private Lives.

There’s a rather poor recording of the World Football Cup ad here.

 

Much music

 First published in Column 8 on the 22^nd May, 1991

 I was informed after my column on cycling that I couldn’t be old enough to remember when motorcycle helmets were first proposed: it was pre-war, seemingly. That proves I wasn’t born in the total dark ages.

However, is anyone else old enough to remember a time when, unlike the lady who had rings on her fingers and bells on her toes, you didn’t have music wherever you goes?

I’m not just referring to ghetto blasters and their like. They’re usually like ships that pass in the night, and a quickstep away from them is all that’s needed.

I’m more concerned about the tendency to debase music by shoving it in where it isn’t wanted, such as on the telephone, when it’s supposed to keep you cool while you wait for someone to come.

I used to enjoy listening to office noises, off, and trying to figure out what was happening. Even more I enjoyed the times when someone had their hand over the receiver, but not properly, and you got an earful of what you weren’t supposed to hear.

Now we have the mind-disorientating experience of a Strauss waltz in one ear, and your own shop muzak in the other. I know that sort of thing is considered very modern in the serious music scene, but when you’re not already trying to keep track of who you’re ringing and why you’re doing so in the first place, it’s discombobulating. (By the way, ever seen someone who’s combobulated?)

These days there’s music everywhere: trains and planes and buses, the dentist’s and the doctor’s, supermarkets and government offices. (Now there’s an area where Ruth Richardson could save some money.)

What’s the problem with having music everywhere you go, you might ask? Isn’t it supposed to soothe the becalmed spirit? Isn’t that a good thing in these days of super stress? Doesn’t it take our minds off our problems?

Exactly. It distracts constantly. Just like television, when it’s in a permanent state of ON.

The human mind needs space. It needs times of quiet, not being filled up every moment of the day with someone else’s noise. We never have a chance to think because the thinking part of our brain competes constantly with noise. And where does it dump all this aural rubbish?

If it was true that things go in one ear and out the other – and it isn’t, because I’ve tested my kids and there’s a definite blockage between one side of their heads and the other – we could let sounds musical waft through without a murmur of complaint.

But as it is, the sound gets stuck in there somewhere, as in that old song: ‘The music goes round and round, whoa-oh-oh-oh’ (Danny Kaye and several Pennies.)

Eventually, like a computer with all its bytes taken up, we’re going to find the drains of our brains are clogged beyond further action.

All right, all right, I know most of us are supposed to use only 10% of our brains anyway, but just think what it’ll be like if we ever make it into the other 90. We’ll find endless screeds of leftover muzak have soaked up all the cells, with songs we’d thought we’d forgotten and songs we wish we had. (And who’d want to recycle that?)

Meanwhile, out in space all these aliens listening in will find their airwaves becoming increasingly jammed. At least we’ll have no fear of any invasion with all that noise going on – who’d want to invade a planet that’s never quiet?

Unless they want to put us out of our misery.

So who’s going to help me found a Society for the Prevention of Extraneous Music?

 

The German melodic death metal band Dawn of Disease 
at Rock unter den Eichen 2018 in Bertingen, Germany 
courtesy: S. Bollmann

Things have got worse, of course, since this was written. Telephone muzak is anything but calming these days: it usually consists of something exceptionally repetitive, or some unknown ‘artist’ wailing his/her heart out in a fashion that’s anything but musical.

Of course, we now know that it’s virtually impossible to use up all the bytes in a computer…and the idea that we only use 10% of our brains has long been shown to be a myth.