Author: B. Steven Verney

First of all, Jerry Jarvis and Norman O. Brown have never met. If the question had been asked Brown would not have had the foggiest notion who Jerry Jarvis was. And Jerry would probably say, “Norman who??” For me, however, the two men are explicitly linked.

I had received my first printed copies of the The Best of All Possible Worlds in the spring of 2012. Like all brand new authors I had a list of family members and friends that I wanted to send my book out to. In total I may have sent twenty copies out that first week. More would follow over the next two months.

One of the copies went to Jerry Jarvis, who by 2010 was a friend and someone who had read one of the later, longer chapters in the pre-published book and who had made some good suggestions. Jerry has the great distinction of being one of the earliest TM meditators in the United States and later one of the earliest teachers of TM in the world. He and his wife Debbie learned TM sometime in 1960 from Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who brought the Transcendental Meditation technique to the West from India. By 1961 Jerry was one of Maharishi’s closest assistants and he helped to shape the TM movement in the United States. He worked with Maharishi on an almost continual daily basis for twenty years.

I first saw Jerry Jarvis give a lecture in Cambridge, MA on October 10^th 1974. I had begun TM just several months earlier as a 19-year-old sophomore from Plymouth State College. In April of 1974 I had learned the TM technique at the Cambridge TM Center on Garden Street over my spring break.

Once again I was heading to Cambridge, this time with my philosophy professor, Dr. David Haight and his wife Marjorie. David had encouraged me and four other philosophy majors to learn TM. In the fall semester of 1974 I was in two of David’s philosophy classes. In one of those classes we were reading Love’s Body by Norman O. Brown. The book is written in the form of dialectic, a conversation, if you will, between the writing of Sigmund Freud and other western and eastern thinkers. Brown saw Freud as a visionary who was taking the unconscious and making it conscious. He was also combining eastern and western thought in a style so flawless that if the reader gave over to the process his or her awareness would be changed forever.

Brown’s style of writing was so unique in that Love’s Body contains passages from others’ writings that are juxtaposed in such a way that the words shine light upon one another, supporting the central arguments of each author. Brown drives a synthesis of ideas into a unity. Through his style, articulation, and vision Brown breathes life into the old philosophers’ words that they themselves couldn’t achieve on their own.

So there I am sitting in a hall, at Harvard possibly, I can’t remember, next to David Haight with a newly purchased Norman O. Brown book, bought at the Harvard Coop entitled, Closing Time. How do I know this? My memory is not that precise.

When we moved from our home in New Salem, Mass to our new property in Wellfleet on old Cape Cod, we had to move everything worth bringing and that included over a thousand books give or take. Collectively as a family we gave away four hundred or so to the town libraries of New Salem and Wellfleet. In the collection we kept, I rediscovered my copy of Closing Time, and upon opening it I found my three pages of notes on Jerry’s lecture from October 1974.

From a personal historical standpoint it was an incredible find. I had discovered the moment my life began to take a new direction. It was there in that hall, sitting with a few hundred other meditators listening to Jerry talk for two hours, him seated on the stage in a chair with his legs crossed at the ankles in a business suit — not one worn by a banker, more like one worn by a professor — and he gave a lecture on higher states of consciousness punctuated by Maharishi stories and lots of laughter. Jerry would laugh every few minutes. He was so knowledgeable and so joyous. At one point David leaned over to me and whispered, “Buddha in a business suit.” And that summed it up for me. I wanted to be like Jerry. To be so at ease in front of three hundred people and be so fluent and natural about profound knowledge that one could keep us, the audience, so enthralled with every sentence, and finally to be so happy and blissful doing it. I hadn’t really known up to that point that that was even possible. But when I witnessed it I knew it was what I wanted.

I had been thrilled to be reading Love’s Body in David’s class. I gained new knowledge and insights that stirred in my soul an idealistic vision while grappling with the realization that I could not, as a 19 year-old, fully realize that vision. And then I saw Jerry on stage talking with wonderful ease about Cosmic Consciousness, God Consciousness, and Unity Consciousness. He had a naturalness and charm that I had never seen before. With that a path, an opening, an opportunity to jump, to catapult myself into a new world appeared. I realized that I could move into a world of Vedic knowledge with a teacher, a Great Seer, a Maharishi guiding my every step.

To my parents’ chagrin, I left Plymouth State that December to start the journey of becoming a teacher of Transcendental Meditation. I moved to Amherst, MA in part because my girlfriend at the time lived there and in part because there was a full time TM Center where I could take the Science of Creative Intelligence course two nights a week as the first step in becoming a teacher. I worked six days a week as a nurse’s aid at the Amherst Nursing Home, taking care of eighteen older men. Over the summer I worked making pizza pies on the Jersey shore where my girlfriend worked as a waitress. I applied for Phase 1 of Teacher Training — a three month in-residence course held in the Catskills at an old borscht belt hotel in Livingston Manor.

The course began in September of 1975. Maharishi came through twice and Jerry was with him. Maharishi’s presence was life changing. I completed the course and spent the next five months doing fieldwork in Montclair, NJ, which included giving introductory talks on TM and checking new meditators’ meditations to ensure their practice was effortless. In April I was off to the French Alps for another three-month residence course to complete the training. Finally in July of 1976 Maharishi made me a teacher of TM. It is a moment that is so crystallized in my mind it feels as if I could never forget it in a thousand years.

David Haight, whom I count as one of my dearest friends in the world, Jerry Jarvis, and Maharishi, to whom I am forever and gratefully linked, all loom large in my mind still.

Forty years later I’m still teaching TM. I sit like Jerry in a chair in the front of our small den with my wife Kay, who is also a TM teacher, and tell Maharishi stories and talk about transcending and higher states of consciousness. I’m still an insistent reader…. I will have two or three books going at a time. Occasionally I still pick up Norman. As a nineteen year-old I could for the most part create only an intellectual framework in trying to understand him. Now at 62 I think I have his vision. I understand what he was doing and where he was going.

Norman finishes Love’s Body by leading us to a passage from Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism with these words:

“The antinomy between mind and body, word and deed, and silence overcome. Everything is only a metaphor; there is only poetry.”

‘Hereby the duality, the discrepancy between mind and body, mundane form and supramundane formlessness, is annihilated. Then the body of the Enlightened One becomes luminous in appearance, convincing and inspiring by its mere presence, while every word and every gesture, and even his (her) silence communicate the overwhelming reality the Dharma. It is not the audible word through which people are converted and transformed in their inner most being, but through that which goes beyond words and flows directly from the presence of the saint: the inaudible mantric sound that emanates from his heart. Therefore the perfect saint is called “Muni”, the “Silent One.’

Govinda, Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism, p. 226

There is a great ocean of silent Being within all of us. Effortless transcending is the key to discovering this part of ourselves. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, as the custodian of this knowledge, taught the technique of Transcendental Meditation so that everyone could have this experience and grow in expanded consciousness, health, and success. This is the path I’ve taken and I’ve never looked back.

 

When I began writing my first novel, The Best of All Possible Worlds, I didn’t know what to expect.

I had encouragement from my wife, sons, and a few close friends. One of those friends said over dinner one evening, “Steve, I think that you’ll write like you talk. If you write in the style in which you tell your stories I think it will be very interesting.” Funny, that unexpected comment coming from a bright, intellectual woman was the tipping point.

I had so enjoyed writing in high school and college that I had aspirations to become a writer. But the realization of that desire had to wait for another day as the stream of life rushed by and carried me along with it; marriage, children, family obligations, the necessity of a steady income—all that brought my mind into focus as to what was needed. Of course, I had happily fallen in love with my dear Kay. I was overjoyed and delighted to have two sons born—Michael first, and Jonathan second. I was more than eager to enter into business to prove I could support my wife and family. I was dedicated to being a husband, a father, and the bringer-home of the bacon.

Over a period of twenty-five years, from 1981 to 2006, we had started and ran three businesses. Sixty hour weeks were more common than not, especially in the beginning of each business. Not just the first few months, but also the first three to four years. There were enough obstacles to each endeavor that none should have succeeded. Some obstacles I unknowingly created, some were just karmic. But I was determined to make whatever success I could in a honest and ethical way, and I did succeed in that I had three creative businesses that reflected our values and supported us in a welcoming middle class way.

From a writer’s standpoint, my business years gave me opportunities to travel, meet thousands of people, and live a rich and varied day-to-day life. As a result I have lots of material to draw from as I let my imagination animate my stories and experiences. In the end, all those years were a blessing because it set the stage for the second half of my life.

Then in January of 2006 I woke up one morning and felt the weight lift. I lay in bed realizing the karma of those past two and a half decades was resolved. I had worked through it and it was time to sell our third business, our modest wholesale bakery, which we then did later that year. With that sale and a timely gift from my wife’s parents I could look up from my bakers table, take off my apron, and seek new horizons.

So I got back to creative writing after a 25-year hiatus. Here’s the experience that I had when I began writing my novel…I had the beginning, something of the middle, and the end of the story, sort of, but I didn’t have the whole story. That only came as I started to write and continued writing. I also noticed that when I started writing a part of my brain woke up, or turned on, and my consciousness shifted into what I called writing mode. Once that switched on, everything flowed and my writing was effortless. That doesn’t mean it was all good, just uninhibited. So my writing style wasn’t ‘let’s write 3-4 pages today and stop and repeat again tomorrow’. No, I wrote whole chapters in one sitting, could be 18 pages or 30 pages, but the whole chapter emerged.

In between chapters, which could be a week or two, I found I just thought very quietly about the story. I asked myself what would happen next and then let my awareness work on that. At some point I would get a ‘signal’, and I knew I was ready to sit and write again. And write I did, nonstop for 2-3 hours at a time before I would reach the end of the chapter, and then I would stop.

The process was thrilling. I was highly focused but not in a forced way, more in a witnessing way. Sometimes I felt like I was taking dictation. Sometimes the characters would get in a conversation and I just transcribed their words. Many times I was surprised at what was being said and what I was writing. I laughed out loud. I actually cried a couple of times as I typed. I think that the spontaneous welling up of deep emotions translated into my writing so that the readers could feel it too.

All of this being said, the first draft took me about 16 months to complete. It was well over 400 pages, approaching 500. It was as wonderful as it was raw and it needed much work. I read it all the way through. What I saw was that I became a better writer as I progressed through those 16 months. Not really surprising, but worth noting. I did some rewriting and revision.

But I knew I needed help to get this in shape. I needed an editor and found one with whom I worked for a year. Oh what a year that was! If I was elated during my writing process, I was summarily brought to a place of frustration, distress, and sometimes anger in working with my editor. Honestly, she did save the book despite the fact it was a torturous path for me. Writing and working with an editor is not for the faint of heart, or one deeply insecure about their self worth. But I survived it and learned a great deal. And I finally had a manuscript I could work with.

In the end I did three partial rewrites (the last one was big) and gave it to a copy editor. Some more revising and learning about the Oxford comma ensued (I had learned in a college writing class that ‘and’ took the place of the last comma when naming a list of things, but the editor insisted I still needed that last comma). In this way, writing can be tedious and involve hard work. Not hard work like being in the restaurant business or running an artisan wholesale bakery, but mind-numbing hard work just the same.

I read somewhere that writing a book is an act of pure creativity and publishing a book is an act of pure ego. Although that seems a little harsh, I can tell you after spending five and a half years on writing and rewriting The Best of All Possible Worlds one certainly desires readers. With that, the author enters into a whole different world of expectation, happiness, and disappointment. If you’re lucky and can manage expectations you end up on the positive side. Fortunately, I landed on that side, and thus I’m working on my next novel. It does come down to doing the work. Any excuses not to continue working your craft or form of creative expression needs to be firmly dealt with and then brushed aside. Just keep going. Keep getting better at what you do and enjoy the process.

This is my way of saying that if you aspire to be a writer, an artist, a dancer, a musician, a singer, a poet, a storyteller, a photographer, and this is truly what you want, then don’t let anyone convince you otherwise. Do the work, manage your expectations, and enjoy the creative process. The process is the important piece, because the process changes your brain and your awareness. It opens you up. It gives life-affirming energy. It makes you feel young and alive. That’s the reward. The rest is just a bonus.