My Maharishi: Next

My Maharishi: Next

[00:45] Advice From a Barrister

When I was a young student of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the typical format was that people came from around the world, not in massive numbers yet. This was in the very early days of Maharishi starting to become recognized as a leader of world spirituality, but they would come from around the world to wherever he was.

In this particular instance, it was India, and there was a group table. Celebrities sat there, you know, if it was the Beatles or whoever it was that was visiting him, dignitaries, heads of state. I remember on one occasion Pierre Trudeau, who was the father of Justin Trudeau, and Pierre Trudeau had been the Prime Minister of Canada in that time, and his wife, and I mean, there were Nobel laureates, there were all kinds of people.

Maharishi attracted the glitterati of the intelligentsia of the world, and he attracted regular, uneducated people like me. I was very young and, in this particular story, I was in my very late teens, somewhere in my very late teens. And I had been sitting at the group table at lunchtimes, listening to people who were erudite and educated and who had a better command of English than I had, all holding forth and talking about Voltaire and talking about Plato and talking about…

Because we were sort of in a philosophical environment, there was a lot of discussion about various kinds of thought formats. French existentialism and Jean-Paul Sartre and all of this would come into the conversation.

And I was sitting there, really a kid, with my eyes wide open, my ears open, and wanting to participate. I’ve always been somebody who wanted to engage, and one day a woman who was ancient compared with me, I would say she was probably about 36 or so. I had a bit of a crush on her, even though I was about 10 years her junior.

She was a barrister. And Americans very often don’t understand what a barrister is. In the Commonwealth, you cannot appear in a court of law representing a client, either as a prosecutor or as a defender, unless you are a member of the bar, meaning you’re a barrister. And in the Commonwealth, when you are a barrister, you wear a wig and you wear silken robes, and you’re a cut above all the other lawyers who they refer to as mere “solicitors.”

So, solicitors can’t come into a courtroom defending anybody. They can instruct a barrister. They can be the interface between a client and a barrister. But a barrister is the highest cut of lawyer in the Commonwealth countries. And she was a barrister.

And she took me aside one day after lunch and she said, she had that beautiful clipped kind of Oxford accent, and she said, “Thom,” she said, “you’re such a darling.”

And I thought, “Oh, this is going well.”

And she said, “I know that you want to be a master of speech.”

And I said, “Yes.”

And she said, “Would you mind if I gave you a little advice?”

[04:37] Malapropisms

And I said, “I’d love it.” I didn’t realize that I wasn’t going to love it.

And she said, “There are certain words that you’re using,” she said, “we have a name for them in English grammar. We call it malapropisms.”

And I said, “I don’t know what that is.”

And she said, “Well, it means that you’re attributing a meaning to a word that’s not the meaning of that word. So, for example, when you said that a man had been attacked by an octopus and the testicles were all over him, I think you meant tentacles.”

And I thought about it and I thought, “Oh my God!”

And she said, “On another occasion you asked everybody around the table if, like you, they ever had any erotic thoughts while meditating. And a few people did sort of go like this [holding up hand]. Did you notice how that made people look a little shy?”

And I said, “Yes, because isn’t that supposed to happen in meditation?”

And she said, “Thom, I think you meant erratic. But you thought that if you pronounced it erotic, it sounded more British, right?”

I said, “Guilty. I did. Yeah. I thought that that’s how British people pronounce the word erratic. I meant erratic.”

She said, “But you said erotic and it means something different.”

I said, “Oh, alright.” I said, “What does it mean?”

She goes, “It means having lascivious thoughts.”

And I said, “I don’t know what that means.”

And she said, “We’ll look it up together later.” And then she said, “You know, you said to everybody, ‘Don’t be misled by facades’ [mighzilled by fackades], and everyone looked quizzically around the room, like, what were you talking about?”

And I said, “But these are words. I know their meaning.”

She goes, “Yes, it looks like facade [fackade], because there’s another word, arcade. And facade [fackade] isn’t pronounced facade [fackade]. It’s pronounced façade. Façade. It’s a French word. It means just the illusory front of a thing. It’s a façade.”

And she said, “There’s no such word as misled [mighzilled].”

And I said, “But it’s in the dictionary. M-I-S-L-E-D.”

She goes, “Thom, it looks like misled [mighzilled], but it’s pronounced misled. You meant, don’t be misled by façades.” And she said, “We’re going to practice some of these things together.”

[07:11] I’m Not Like Them

You can imagine at this stage of the game, I was completely mortified, and in my mind, I was trying to recount all the times I’d made these dreadful malapropisms around the table, while trying to big-note myself and sound British around all these people who were 10 and 20 years my senior, and obviously just making a little bit of a fool of myself.

And so I became very, very… I was shell-shocked, and I went off to my room and I thought, “I’ll just meditate now.” Meditation’s very, very powerful, but one of the things it does, in its power, is it causes you to release stress. And when you release stress, sometimes the material that got you stressed appears during your meditation. And all that appeared during my meditation was all those words and my kind of, “Oh, no, oh, no,” thing.

So that evening, Maharishi gave his regular lecture at the regular time, and as he was leaving the lecture, he walked past me and looked at my face and said, “What?”

And I said, “Nothing.”

He said, “No. Not nothing. Come.” And I followed him and sat down with him and he said to me, “What is it? Say it. Get it out.” And I told him the whole story, and he said, “Hmm.” He laughed a little bit too. I can remember him chuckling, and I wasn’t laughing, but he was.

And then he said, “So now how you…?” This is the way he spoke. He would put verbs in different places in the sentence to what’s usual. He would say, “So now how you are feeling?” And that’s the way he would ask a question with an inflection on the end. “So now how you are feeling?” And you had to answer that.

I said, “I’m just feeling like, Maharishi, you’ve assembled all these amazing people around here, and here I am. I’m here and I’m afraid I’m not like them.”

And he goes, “Oh. Oh.” And then he said, “And you know that everyone who is here is handpicked by me?”

I said, “Yes, I know I’m handpicked.” He said, “Would you say then, that maybe somehow you’ve kind of fooled me? Fooled everyone, and fooled me?”

I said, “Up to a point, yes. Yes. I think I did fool you.”

“Oh,” he said, “so I’m a fool?”

And I said, “No, Maharishi, I didn’t mean that you’re—”

“No. Don’t talk.” He’d hold his hand up and say, “Don’t talk. Don’t talk.” And he’d say, “No. You said it. I asked you if you fooled me, and you said, ‘Yes.’ That means I’m a fool. And all of them are also fools. Don’t talk. Now this arrogance. This arrogance that you have.”

I said, “Maharishi, I don’t feel arrogant.”

“No. Don’t talk.” He said, “You know what the word arrogant means?”

I said, “Maybe.”

He said, “It means you hold an opinion about yourself that others don’t share. Doesn’t matter if it’s a great opinion or it’s a low opinion. You hold an opinion about yourself that others don’t share.” He said, “This is it. This is arrogance.”

And he said, “So how to cure the arrogance. How to cure the arrogance. Get those papers,” and it was a stack of paper, “take some pencils. Go. They’re all having dinner now. There’s 40 of them. Go hand out the papers. Tell them one at a time, ‘Maharishi told me I have to get you to write about me, whatever you think of me, and you have to be candid.’”

I was going, “But Maharishi…”

He goes, “No. Obey.”

[11:48] How Can We Get Out of This Arrogance?

So, I just got the papers and went and did exactly what he said, and then I had to wait for 10 or 15 minutes till they finished. And I went back in to him and I said, “They’ve all written things.”

And he goes, “Collect all the papers, bring them.” I brought them. He said, “Sit down. Read. What did they say? Read.”

And then one at a time, I went through 40 sheets of paper, people writing about me. And I have to say, they were all glowing comments, except the barrister, who at the end wrote, “He thinks too little of himself.”

So then Maharishi said, “Now see what that is?”

I said, “Yes.”

He said, “This is what people actually think, compared with you, who you think you know better. You think you know better, that you’re actually this low, and they all think you’re high. And you think you’re low.

“Arrogance. How can we get out of this arrogance? Each time you think to yourself some idea what I am, what other people think of me, you just think the word, ‘Next?’ And what does next mean?

“Next means what is the next right thing to be doing? There’s some next right thing to be doing, and you’re not doing that thing when you’re thinking about this. What do people think about me? What about me? What? Who am I to people? What… all that.”

[13:25] Engage in Action

He said, “Every time you think this, what about me? Forming a self opinion. You feel yourself forming a self opinion, you replace that thought with this thought, ‘Next?’ And next means engage in the next right thing to be doing. Engage in action.”

He said, “Do that for some time.”

I said, “How long should I do it?”

He goes, “Six months. Six months should do the trick. Now go.” It was his way of, very sweet, kind way of a master dealing with a student really. Like he wasn’t going to sit around letting me waste his time.

“Now go.” And so I went and that’s what I practiced for six months. Every time I got to a self-opinion thought, trying to think who I was and what people thought about me and what I thought about me, or whatever. Next? I’d have to engage in an action, whatever that action was.

Was it make the bed? Was it make the sandwich? Was it give the talk? Or do whatever it was? Listen? There was always a next, and that little technique that I’m sharing with you is extremely valuable.

For those of you who suffer from low self-esteem or you suffer from low self-worth, which I was plagued by, it had a fantastic curative effect on me to just stop rolling in the mud like that, but to actually move on and make yourself useful to whatever was the next evolutionary thing to be doing.

Very helpful, but a very entertaining story too. And I lost contact with that barrister woman, but I rather think that she’d be quite proud of her having set me on the path of being a relatively articulate orator.

Don’t be misled [mighzilled].