I spent more than half an hour talking to Dr. Fred Travis, yet I still don’t know if I talked to someone who’s genuinely glimpsed the secret to success and contentment, or if I simply listened to a sales pitch. How, after all, can one process an exchange like the following?
Me: “Has there been a bad time in your life when this knowledge helped you?”
Fred: “There hasn’t been a bad time in my life, since I started meditating.”
Add that he started meditating 37 years ago – he’s now 59 – and eyebrows may plausibly be raised. No bad times at all? But of course he doesn’t mean that sadness and tragedy haven’t impinged on his life in those 37 years, merely that he’s found a key for dealing with them: that key is called Transcendental Meditation (TM) – and Fred is voluble in singing the praises of this technique, introduced by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in the 1950s. Then again, that’s no surprise – because Fred is Dean of the Graduate School and Chair of the Department of Maharishi Vedic Science at the Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa, founded by the same Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. There’s the suspicion of a sales pitch again.
That said, Dr. Fred makes an unlikely salesman, sitting quietly in the lobby of the Hilton Park in Nicosia, his words barely reaching my tape-recorder. He speaks very softly and also has a slight quaver in his voice, fortifying himself with frequent sips of water which he pours from a silver thermos. His face is pale and thin, his skin somewhat wrinkled; his head is egg-shaped, and clumps of silver hair protrude from the top and sides like knobs on a tree-stump. He looks exactly like what he is, namely an academic with dozens of published papers – over 50 of them, published in journals with names like ‘Consciousness and Cognition’, sporting titles like “Cortical Plasticity, Contingent Negative Variation and Transcendent Experiences during Practice of the Transcendental Meditation Technique”.
He’s always been a scientist by temperament – “Science,” he explains, “makes the world understandable” – though he dropped out of a Chemistry degree in college, feeling he wanted something more. He was born in upstate New York, to an ordinary-sounding family (his mother was a schoolteacher, his dad worked for a large department store); Chemistry made him happy in school, but once he got out in the world he realised “I didn’t know what I wanted to do or be” – so he dropped out, taking a job (of sorts) as Stage Manager with a theatre group that was passing through his college.
The troupe was a strange bird, led by a former actor turned Methodist minister who’d decided to employ his thespian training and write plays in lieu of sermons. They toured up and down the Eastern Seaboard – and Fred soon became fascinated by a certain aspect of his job: “Some days it was really easy,” he recalls, “some days it was like walking through mud. So I had this direct experience that sometimes you just have more access to your inner creativity”. This got him thinking about the mind, and how (if at all) one can control it – but nothing really happened, till a random encounter changed his life forever.
His flatmate was a semi-pro football player, who one night inveigled the young Fred in a double date with a couple of strange girls. “So I’m sitting there with this girl who I didn’t know,” recalls Fred, “and I was being very quiet. And she says: ‘Do you meditate?’” (That was the kind of thing girls said in the early 70s.) Fred didn’t know what she was talking about – but she told him of a lecture that was taking place in Boston, and he looked it up in the paper, learned about Transcendental Meditation and never looked back. And what about the girl? Did the date go well? Apparently not, because he never saw her again. “To this day, I don’t even know who that person is,” he admits, shaking his head at the weird ways of Life – then arches his eyebrows dramatically: “Maybe she never really existed!…”
That’s a joke, by the way. TM may sound dubious and New Age-y to some people, but there are no occult elements – or angels disguised as strange girls – in Fred’s account. Is it spiritual, I ask, or a kind of self-help for the mind? “I would say yes to both,” he replies. There is something spiritual, in the broadest sense of spirituality – what we might define as “the experience of your relationship with everything around you” – but it’s really about the mind, and unlocking its full potential.
“The first time I meditated,” recalls Fred, then pauses: “Well, imagine you’ve been running every day of your life, and one day you sit down and are quiet. That’s the experience I had in my mind”.
He warms to his theme, trying to describe the whole concept. “Think of the mind having a vertical dimension, like a body of water,” says Fred. “And what you learn in school is just the surface of the water – surface waves, individual pieces of information. And what you’re not taught is where do the waves come from? Where do your thoughts come from? Where does the creative impulse come from? Artists will say it comes from somewhere deep inside – we don’t know.” What TM does, he explains, is use the mind’s natural tendency to think thoughts but turn those thoughts inwards instead of outwards, following them down to the “source of Thought”. Then “you’re at the bottom of the ocean of the mind, where things are quiet and full and complete, and everything feels right.”
Clearly, there’s no way to comment on this without having tried it – but it sounds fascinating, albeit almost too good to be true. Does it work for anyone? Anyone, replies Fred; “As long as you can think a thought”. Is it hard to learn? Not at all; someone who’s been doing it for two to three months can do it as effectively as Fred himself, who’s been practising for 37 years. “There’s no novice/expert dichotomy with TM, because we use the natural tendency of the mind. And every human has this”.
“Once you give your mind the correct attention and direction and let go, the mind just goes there,” he adds. It’s a bit like diving in a swimming pool: “With diving, you have to take a correct angle – that’s the only thing you have to do. And you let go, and gravity pulls you into the water.”
The trick, of course, is finding the right angle, which is where trained TM teachers come in. There is indeed a business side to all this, as Fred implies when I ask if perhaps the attraction of TM is a reaction to our busy modern world; partly it’s that, he admits – but mostly it’s because “people want to be more successful”. The technique is a tool, and has indeed been ‘sold’ in various fields, from workaholic managers to athletes seeking to become more focused – though also in civic-minded contexts like schools and prisons. Hyperactive 10-year-olds grow calmer, he claims, murderers and drug-dealers learn to free their minds and turn over a new leaf. It actually seems wrong to call Fred Travis a salesman; listening to him speak, it’s more like he’s found the secret to some glorious panacea, and just wants to share it with the world.
His own life has been fairly uneventful since the major turning-point when he went to that lecture in Boston. His daily routine is straightforward: “I meditate, I go and teach a class…” He meditates for two 20-minute sessions every day, in the morning and afternoon, which is enough to re-charge his batteries and (more importantly) give him a certain perspective on Life’s ups and downs: “You just have the bigger picture,” he explains.
It’s not that things haven’t happened in his life. Lots of things have happened. “I got my PhD,” he recalls. “I had my first child – it’s the most incredible experience in the world, it completely changes your idea of priorities.” Papers have been published, idyllic moments enjoyed with friends and family, “my daughter [he now has three daughters] played a tennis tournament and won first place”. But it’s like when you’re walking uphill, he explains, and you measure every ledge, every hand-hold; “Then you get over the top and you’re going downhill – and there’s lots of things that happen, but what’s predominating is that you’re flowing with Time, and flowing with Nature.” All the ups and downs are “like points in the flow of Time. But what’s important is the whole flow of Time”.
That’s my only qualm about Transcendental Meditation (based on Fred’s description; I still haven’t actually tried it) – namely, that it sounds like a recipe for detachment and aloofness as much as self-fulfilment. Fred’s spent a lifetime testing brain patterns, publishing results, giving presentations at neuroscience conferences to demonstrate how the practice of TM leads to actual physiological changes in the mind. Yet what exactly does it mean to “free your mind”? Isn’t it a way of losing your dependence on others? And isn’t that dependence related to empathy and love – to feeling sad when someone dies, for instance, even when you know that Death is natural and the “flow of Time” is more important than any individual point? Can’t the “bigger picture” make for emotional coldness?
“If you have your focus on the outer objects, then [you feel] ‘I’m no longer 20, I’m no longer 30, I can no longer run as far as I could run’,” explains Dr. Fred Travis. “If you’re caught in some specific point – if you identify with some specific point – and that point changes, then your self is threatened. But if you’re not identified with something outside, then your self cannot be threatened by anything. And when you experience your self as something which is outside Time and Space, [then] the body passes in Time but that sense of self remains”. Is “that sense of self” something like a soul, I wonder? “Yes.” So he does believe we have an eternal soul, existing outside Time and Space? “Yes.” So he’s not scared of Death? “Exactly.”
Is he right? Who knows – but one thing’s for sure. Four decades on from that lost teenager who didn’t know what to do with his life, Dr. Fred Travis has found his calling: not just to achieve the exalted mind-state that comes with Transcendental Meditation, but also “to investigate that state, because it’s so very real.”
“It’s not a thing you have to think about,” he enthuses, taking another sip from the silver thermos. “It’s not a mental affirmation, it’s not something you have to visualise.
“Just let the mind settle down, and be who you are.”
