I’ve read several books on cults like polygamy and Scientology so Greetings from Utopia Park was right up my alley. Claire Hoffman’s mother found Transcendental Meditation and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi as a college student and introduce Claire & her brother, Stacey, to the practice as toddlers. Like most cults TM uses a lot of pseudoscience to trick people into becoming loyal devotees before draining them of all their money in an effort to get more enlightened.
I never knew Maharishi. Despite the fact that he lived at the center of our lives, he was always presented to me as beyond human, with scant biographical details offered to give him shape beyond that of a luminous outline. As a kid, I knew him as the man in the pictures, the man who had meditated for two years in a cave and then come to the West to teach all of us an ancient practice with the goal of transforming Earth to Heaven. We were blessed to follow his example. I knew that he had paused to look into my mom’s sparkling blue eyes and forever shifted our destiny.
When Claire was 5 her father, an alcoholic aspiring playwright, abandoned his family which prompted Claire’s mother, Liz, to move to Fairfield, Iowa to fully immerse the family in TM at the movement’s national headquarters. Liz bounced from job to job trying to make ends meet but spent an ever increasing amount of money participating in TM. Claire was thrilled to be at the Mecca of TM although she was hurt and confused by the disdain her public schoolmates had for the movement. The Hoffmans were also dirt poor in a town populated with enlightened millionaires. Liz explained to her kids that things were so expensive because Maharishi believed Americans didn’t value anything they didn’t pay for and eventually Stacey & Claire were able to go to the Maharishi school when an admirer of their mother offered to pay. Eventually the family was also able to move on campus to the trailer park dubbed Utopia Park which gave Claire sanctuary from the cruel townies. Claire enjoyed the bubble that was Utopia Park and the Maharishi school but things got more difficult as she got older. She became less sure about the practices of TM, beginning with her disappointment in the “flying” course and growing with each additional cost the Maharishi imposed on the people of Fairfield, and eventually found herself fleeing Fairfield for California following her high school graduation.
As an adult Hoffman became a journalist so this is unsurprisingly a well written and well researched story. She intersperses additional facts about Maharishi and TM throughout her personal narrative which leads to a well rounded read. I really didn’t know anything about the TM movement prior to Hoffman’s memoir and was fascinated to discover it is still a thriving practice spearheaded in the US by filmmaker David Lynch, albeit more for its calming meditation practices than as a full fledged religion.