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Mitchell Kapor
on Maharishi, Levitation, and Freedom
 Here is an excerpt from an interview that originally appeared in
the Summer 1994 issue of TRICYCLE: The
Buddhist
Review under the title "Mitchell Kapor on Dharma,
Democracy, and the Information
Superhighway." You will find the entire text -- with wide-ranging
speculations on spirituality, freedom, and cyberculture -- at Mitchell's homepage.
Tricycle: It seems that the material
you've been involved with has addressed internal and
external freedom and an entrenched wariness of authoritarian rule.
Is this perspective
influenced or affirmed by your experience with the Maharishi? [His
full name is Maharishi
Mahesh Yogi.]
Kapor: My dislike for authoritarian
structures goes back as far as I can remember in my
childhood. If I could remember past lives, I'm sure my memories
would extend there too. But
my experiences in Transcendental Meditation ultimately really
deepened my commitment to
anti-authoritarianism.
Tricycle: How did you get involved
in TM?
Kapor: Well, my experience was
typical for my generation. I had gotten to college in the 60's
and started experimenting with marijuana and psychedelics, fairly
heavily. I had some
distressing experiences with LSD. Bad trips. So I stopped doing
drugs and then started getting
acid flashbacks. I decided to give meditation a serious try to see
if that could have some
calming effect. I got hooked in to TM and eventually made the
decision to go through
advanced training to become an initiator, an instructor.
Tricycle: How long did you stay
involved with TM?
Kapor: I was involved for seven
years. It all ultimately came to a head in 1976. The
movement went into a new phase and Maharishi started talking about
siddhis, powers, and
techniques for doing levitation and other things. This created so
much cognitive dissonance in
me that I didn't know what to do. I had to find out if it was real
or not, and I wanted to
believe that it was real, but something in me said that it
couldn't possibly be real. People
weren't really going to levitate. So I went to Switzerland for the
sixth-month course on
"powers." I went and I fell apart. They were using us as
experimental subjects. There was
fasting involved and various austerities that come out of Hindu
traditions, enemas and various
bizarre food combining rituals. A lot of madness got released.
After five months of this I said
whatever problems I might or might not have, TM is not making them
better, it is making
them worse and I decided to leave. This was like leaving
everything, because I had severed all
of my other ties and relations: no job, no career, no marriage and
no prospects. I got up in
the middle of the night and walked to the train station. I felt
like I was crossing from slavery
into freedom, from one intolerable situation into the great
unknown. By the way, no one
really levitates. I fully satisfied myself as to that.
Copyright 1994, TRICYCLE: The
Buddhist Review. Excerpt reprinted with permission of
Mitchell Kapor.
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