REMAINS OF IGNORANCE: Secondary Narcissism

REMAINS OF IGNORANCE is an occasional feature of quick hits on life after Transcendental Meditation.

This post was hard to write. It goes right to the heart of my biggest shame about my time in the TM Org.

I've written in the past about my suspicions that the Maharishi had narcissistic traits (which I explain in this article). What I failed to mention there were my own failings in this area.

Long before becoming a TM meditator at age 18, I had some narcissistic traits. I was a bright kid, always scored higher than the top 1% on standardized tests. Between my parents' natural pride and my teachers' assurances that I could grow up to be anything I wanted to be, I got the message that I was a "special" kid. I walked around feeling vaguely superior to my classmates — despite the fact that many of them excelled in areas I was helplessly inept at, such as sports, arts, music, writing.

There's nothing pathological about such traits. Nearly anyone you know who is an overachiever or ambitious in career or life is likely to have a healthy dose of narcissism.

But my seedling narcissistic traits blossomed into fully-ripened flowers of evil when I became deeply involved with the TM Movement.

I learned to refer to nonmeditators as "stress bunnies" and "mud" (after the Maharishi's recounting of a saint telling him everything outside the Indian "Valley of the Saints" was "all a mud.") I knew I was on the most superior path toward enlightenment — the Maharishi's TM. Everyone else was lost in varying degrees of ignorance. Even brushing against "them" or touching them in a crowd could lead to me picking up their "stress." We were "evolving" a hundred times, a thousand times faster than they were.

Far from being a harmless idiosyncrasy, my feelings of superiority poisoned my relationships with others — including other meditators, my family, my former friends. They were lost, "ignorant." I began to experience distance in my relationships with others. I had problems with emotional intimacy. How could I love anyone — even my wife at the time — if I felt superior to them?

If anyone expressed a a viewpoint on spiritual evolution, or a spiritual experience, I always felt my understanding was superior to theirs, my experiences were "deeper."

Looking back I was overwhelmingly arrogant and condescending. With little sense that God — or whatever power is at work in Nature — had infinite compassion for all of us. And that each of us is blessed with value to offer other humans.

I've termed this process "secondary narcissism." Just as our cult leaders were very often narcissists, I believe they found it to their advantage to blow whatever faint sparks we naturally had of superiority and arrogance into raging flames. It's my hypothesis this helped establish control over many of us. Destroying relationships between friends, lovers, family made us all the more likely to focus our needs and dependencies on the cult leader.

I know I wasn't alone. I remember talking with a regional director one day about the Six-Month Course. I asked if he was excited about becoming a "Governor of the Age of Enlightenment." He said, "What's the point? Everybody's becoming a Governor. I want to be Lord of the Universe."

Narcissistic thinking is something I battle with to this day. There's a big gap between my head and my heart. I've reasoned out my addiction to arrogance, and how it served me in my life — and the purposes of the Maharishi. But I'm ashamed that I still experience it daily. I'm horrified when I find myself unconsciously thinking my thoughts and experience are superior to commenters here, for instance. I forget momentarily that every viewpoint is valid on its own terms for the individual expressing it — and their courage for speaking out their truth needs to be celebrated not denigrated.

I still am distant from my family. I wish my relationship with my second wife were closer.

I've made progress in recovering from narcissism. It's a rare day now that I'm not humbled by an insight of a commenter or an emailer. I've taken to heart a slogan I once taught as an addictions counselor: "Strive to be average."

But I think narcissism is one nasty side-effect of growing up TM that will haunt me for the rest of my life.

Do you have this or similar "Remains of Ignorance"?

Please consider posting your thoughts in the comments below. Just click on "Comments" and type away. Please feel free to remain anonymous. You may help another former TMer with your insights!

John M. Knapp, LMSW
KnappFamilyCounseling.com

TM Casualty Community

Posted for "Ananda":

Hello fellow TMCC’s,

I am in the process of cult therapy.

I have had some thoughts (not in meditation) and self-reflective questions regarding the how’s and why’s of my TM experience. Therefore, I will jump right in. From the very start, I had expectations regarding what TM would do for me. This was even before the intro and prep lectures. As a young child I remember being glued to the TV set listening to every word that MMY said on his ‘late night TV show gig’. What was it, Merv Griffin? Yes, I understood what he was saying. He really wasn’t saying much except ‘bliss’ and ‘in all aspects of life’ and flowers and the lilt of his voice, and giggling, so I knew this was good – very good.

Then there was the meeting at high school held in Room # whatever at lunch. An Initiator came and the room was packed and I went because I didn’t have anyone to eat lunch with that day, I sat in the last seat in last row and I don’t remember anything he said but he was very good looking. Again, this was good – very good.

So then TM came into my life just a couple years later at the simple suggestion of my boyfriend to go to an intro lecture. His drummer and bass player were meditators and he thought they were great people so we went to become great people.
I had suffered from severe depression from the age of 10. At this point, I was 18, so I definitely expected that after starting TM I would become a happy person. Well, that did not happen, my depression stayed, it waxed and waned, and I am still treated for it today. I have chronic depression and after all the years of TM and then other techniques that gave me my constant trance fix, the depression did not go away.

I had felt suicidal at age 14, but not a constant presence. After meditating, those tendencies flared back up and stayed constant for years until about 4 years ago.

I would think the personality aspects I had, these things resulting from a difficult childhood would have improved. They did not. Granted I apparently came to TM rather damaged. Was there someone there to notice? No, you weren’t kicked off a TTC unless you were schizophrenic.

Moreover, speaking of TTC. I went to TTC 5’7” and 138 lbs. That is healthy normal, not movie star normal, healthy normal. After 6 weeks on the Course I went to the “doctor” on the course and weighed myself on a scale someone told me was there. I had lost 30 lbs! Yes and I did not know it. How could I not know of this? I knew my clothes were lose, but I was so spaced out I wasn’t aware of the weight loss. 3 months after starting the Course we changed locations for 1 week and there was a full length mirror in the bathroom. I discovered to my horror what had happened to me and that I had lost another 10 lbs.

Why had this happened? There was no meat; I ate lots of fruit and chard, dhal. I didn’t eat cake and ice cream or sugar laden cereals with room temperature milk. That is all that was available. I craved protein so much I greedily ate the goats milk cheese when it was available, how gross was that? I left the course with nine cavities, which I was terrified to have treated in or around Avoriaz, France.

If the technique was going to enable me to utilize a greater portion of the 90% of my thinking brain that I wasn’t tapping into then why wouldn’t my health improve? Especially since, I was listening to hours and hours of lectures by MMY convincing me that it would.

I think dipping into the transcendent state might just be bullshit. If it is supposed to improve the effectiveness of an individual in the here and now then why were the Initiators I worked and lived with so dopey and loopy?

I love you all my brothers and sisters,

Ananda

The Nature of Experience, some random thoughts

Wifey, Philip – your insights and introspections are very valuable to me. I think you have seen exactly what this strange business of experience is all about. AND, you have helped me clarify my own thoughts on the matter of experience. Thank you, especially, Wifey, for bringing up this captivating idea which, I hope others can chime in on.

If experience brings about change, then I think we can conclude that it was valid, if not, then, not so much, perhaps. For me, this is one of those rare touchstones that enables the spiritual quest. I am grateful to you, Wifey. Many, many things.

Not all change seems good. But that’s more in the nature of evaluation and relative consideration than experience per se, at least that’s what I think.

I began TM in 1968 and have had many diverse experiences during TM as well as after in Zazen, Śamatha-Vipassanā, Dzogchen and Mahāmudrā. (I have omitted Kriya Yoga as I failed to be able to take it or Yogananda or his organization seriously.) My first real experience doing TM was very, very real (to me), lasted maybe a minute and years later when I told some initiator friends, they started jumping for joy, for me! But it didn’t change anything for me or them, unless their getting all bunched up about it changed something for them.

My first genuine, life-changing experience happened when I was at University. This was during my third year in 1964. I had been very worried and distressed because a very gifted friend was ruining both his life and his chances for a career he seemed destined to discharge brilliantly. His family and other mutual friends were also deeply concerned. I was sitting alone in an empty lecture room pondering his fate and my own helplessness to affect his course of action when, suddenly (then, as now, I know this was real in my mind, not “real” in the room), I literally “saw” (as in my mind’s eye) angels ascending and descending a latter that went up and up, I assumed, then as now, to heaven. It was literally breathtaking. I have no idea how long it lasted, 5 seconds? 2 hours? No idea.

Literally I staggered out of the room into the sunshine (it was towards the end of May; 4 years later, at the end of May I began TM – relationship? questionable). I felt both wiped out and light. From that day onwards everything was/has been totally different from my life before that day. What happened? I have no idea. (No, drugs were not involved.) This is as close to an explanation as I have ever come. From that day I was no longer interested in Church or any of the religious ideas in which I had been raised. Everything was subject to scrutiny and questioning. I had had notions of entering the ministry at one point. Such notions no longer existed. I was, on the contrary, interested completely and unaccountably in Eastern “stuff” and searched the libraries for something about China and Chinese religion, although the concept of “religion” doesn’t quite say what I mean. Other than Christianity, there was no such thing as any other religion then, there. I was also young, inexperienced and largely unaware that there was a world outside the limited worldview in which I had been accustomed. That, too, began to change.

This experience continues to resonate as “alive”, even now, 44 years later, as does that first major TM experience; but the TM experience didn’t change anything for me, I have watched movies that changed me more. Possibly, that first TM experience impressed me, but I was so new at TM that I don’t think I made a connection between it and TM or it and anything else.

Four years later, when I saw a copy of Science of Being, my curiosity instantly peaked and when I began to read the book, that first line to be is to live struck me as utterly fantastic and exactly what I was searching for. It just seemed so right. So, maybe a connection can be made between the experience I had had 4 year previous. I cannot make that determination.

I really thought TM was “it”. But had Mahesh not asked me to stay with him in Mallorca in 1971, I would probably not have continued with it much longer as TM was beginning to be routine and life was not particularly fulfilling. However, I did feel compelled (I’m not sure that that is the right word) to continue seeking. I had thought that seeking more and more deeply into the promise of TM was the way to go, yet, because of Mahesh and because he kept me close to him and I did get more and more deeply into the “promise” of TM, and I was increasingly discouraged by its prospects.

I hope that this is valuable to others, to someone. If not, that’s ok. If it does help, that’s good, too.