A FLOWER FOR MAHARISHI

I had been working at the TM Center in Washington for about five months after I graduated college. I just wanted to be around the knowledge of TM--Transcendental Meditation-- as much as possible. I’d had wonderful experiences having learned TM a year before and in my heart was devoted to my teacher, Maharishi. I just wanted to be immersed in his knowledge as much as possible and, as it turned out, the way my opportunity afforded itself was for me to be the maintenance man at the TM center. After graduating college I had gone to my first TM in-residence course. There I decided I would do anything to be around these wonderful TM teachers, even clean their toilets if I had to. Sure enough, this was part of what I ended up doing for the next 9 months!

But around the fifth month of my work at the TM center, I was given the opportunity to see Maharishi at the Science of Creative Intelligence symposium at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I had never seen Maharishi in person before and I had received tickets to go up to Boston from Washington. My girlfriend and I traveled up there and we attended the various proceedings, and one day she said to me, "I want to give Maharishi a flower”. Fine. If she wanted to do that, OK. But the thought of me giving Maharishi a flower, giving any other man a flower for that matter, to my mind at that time in my life, did not appeal at all, to say the least!

We went to a flower shop and she picked out the most expensive flower in the shop, and then she turned to me and she said, “Aren’t you going to get Maharishi a flower?” So she sort of shamed me into it and I said “Well, alright.” And I picked out the cheapest flower in the shop, a little daisy.

We went back to the lecture hall and when the lecture finished we waited outside to wait for Maharishi to come out. So a number of us gathered there and Maharishi slowly made his way through our line, receiving flowers from the people. And my girlfriend handed him her flower. By this time my daisy was quite wilted and very droopy, and when Maharishi turned in my direction, I held it out to him. He took the flower and he said to me “Jai Guru Dev” (glory to Guru Dev, Maharishi's teacher). And I looked into his eyes; I said “Jai Guru Dev”.

As I looked into his eyes, what I saw was, all the love in the universe was concentrated in this one man. All the love between man and God, man and woman, between father and son, mother and son, brother and brother, you name it. All the love in the universe seemed to be emanating from this man, but actually, I then realized that no, it wasn’t really emanating from Maharishi, but that it was actually coming out of my own heart. I experienced that, somehow, Maharishi was drawing that love out of my heart and then reflecting it back to me.

That gave me a great insight into self-realization; it’s all within us.

Jai Guru Dev.

Romper Room - 1953

My Time On Romper Room

February 1953 was the beginning of Romper Room's forty year run on television. "Miss Nancy" was the much adored teacher. Her stage name was "Nancy Rogers" but she was actually Nancy Claster, married to the show's producer, Bert Claster.

In December of '53, at the age of four, I was one of the children on the show, for the standard two week stint. But Miss Nancy asked my mom to have me extend for an additional two weeks, and we did.

Nancy Rogers (Claster), America's predecessor to Fred Rogers of "Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood", was a GODDESS to me and probably millions of other children! She radiated goodness, beauty and light. And when, as you see at the end of the film, she asks me if I would like to give her a hug, well, I took maximum advantage of the opportunity!

For my Romper Room show-and-tell I brought in a scale model of a house that was built by the construction firm my dad worked for. As a result, the TV station, Baltimore's WBAL, was swamped with inquiries about the house. It sold within a week (but no commission for me, darn it).

47 years after this film was shot, I made a video of my own sort of "Romper Room" on the streets of India. To view it, see above: it is called "Harmony For The Homeless".