Jerry Jarvis and Norman O. Brown

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.