Lost in the Funhouse_ The Life and Mind of Andy Kaufman - Bill Zehme [47]
“Now, this meditation, according to what they told me at the meditation center in Boston—what will happen is that it gives you deep rest and it expands your consciousness and gets rid of stress and gets rid of things that are holding you back from accomplishing what you want to accomplish. They didn’t say anything about [stopping] alcohol, but what I found was that, as I meditated every day, as time went on, I wanted alcohol less and less, until I just stopped drinking it entirely.”
The bliss people, they had caught his eye. They were blissful happy friendlyfriendly people, whereas other people were so angry about war and presidents and things—but the bliss people had innocence was what it was. His own innocence, he had begun to think —that’s what it was exactly!—was not so innocent anymore and, if he was not innocent, then how could people believe him when he said he was just fooling only in fun no really? They would just think he was a jerk but he wasn’t a jerk because of his innocence which was getting less and less innocent. Plus, he did better with girls and with friends when he was innocent. “I always had trouble acting naturally, acting like myself. When I did thrive socially, I was at my most naive and innocent. No one had met anybody like me. I was very innocent and lovable—like a little boy. And when I lost my virginity and started going out with a lot of girls, I lost this side of me. For the next two years I tried to recapture it, but you can’t go back. Every few years my innocence [had] come back naturally, and I would have a great time again. I was very confused. In college I started meditating … and after that, I didn’t have to think about how to act anymore.” The bliss people in their TM Center seemed to blink away all bad things and they smiled so hard and so fast at him when they handed him the pamphlets which he took and read and decided to live life as they lived theirs—except that he was never much of a natural smiler per se. Peace Energy Happiness Maharishi—four words spun in an official halo crest encircling the grizzled benevolent face of His Holiness, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi himself—symbolized and defined the Movement, and it was a movement, quite new and very old and seriously Eastern, whose credo was just like Learning by Doing because it was all about focus. Sit comfortably for fifteen to twenty minutes twice a day with the eyes closed and the Transcendental Meditation technique is easy to learn effortless to practice and does not require specific beliefs behavior or lifestyle and is open to all people of all ages cultures religions and one’s mind settles down and one experiences a unique state of restful alertness that is Transcendental Consciousness when the body gains a unique state of deep rest releasing accumulated stress and revitalizing the entire nervous system resulting in development of the mind’s full creative potential and improvement of health so that one enjoys increasing success and satisfaction in life and exhilaration and bubbling bliss and coherence and positivity.
Well, nothing would happen overnight, of course, and it didn’t, but eventually it did—“Slowly, but surely, I just felt such confidence and so much more strength within me.” Now he had found the tool and would always say the tool had saved his life, had spared him from the gutter, had given him the ability to quash all shyness and step up and get on with it. Plus, he liked it because it was kind of like sleep and sleep was among his favorite activities and so he had started taking his energizing enlightening meditation “naps”—that was how he thought of them, as little naps—twice a day and sometimes he liked them to last way past twenty minutes and sometimes these naps, one or two hours in duration, would drive people crazy because people