Greetings from Utopia Park: Surviving a Transcendent Childhood

Summary (from the publisher): In this and intimate memoir, an acclaimed journalist reflects on her childhood in the heartland, growing up in an increasingly isolated meditation community in the 1980s and ’90s—a fascinating, disturbing look at a fringe culture and its true believers.

When Claire Hoffman is five-years-old, her mother informs her and her seven-year-old brother Stacey, that they are going to heaven—Iowa—to live in Maharishi’s national headquarters for Heaven on Earth. For Claire’s mother, Transcendental Meditation—the Maharishi’s method of meditation and his approach to living the fullest possible life—was a salvo that promised world peace and enlightenment.

At first this secluded utopia offers warmth and support, and makes these outsiders feel calm, secure, and connected to the world. Claire attends the Maharishi school, where her meditations were graded and she and her class learned Maharishi's principals for living. But as Claire and Stacey mature, their adolescent skepticism kicks in, drawing them away from the community and into delinquency and drugs. Eventually, Claire moves to California with her father and breaks from Maharishi completely. A decade later, after making a name for herself in journalism and starting a family, she begins to feel exhausted by cynicism and anxiety. She finds herself longing for the sparkle filled, belief fueled Utopian days in Iowa, meditating around the clock.  So she returns to her hometown in pursuit of TM’s highest form of meditation — levitation. This journey will transform ideas about her childhood, family, and spirituality.

Greetings from Utopia Park takes us deep into this complex, unusual world, illuminating its joys and comforts, and its disturbing problems. While there is no utopia on earth, Hoffman reveals, there are noble goals worth striving for: believing in belief, inner peace, and a firm understanding that there is a larger fabric of the universe to which we all belong.

 

Review: I received an uncorrected proof copy of this book from HarperCollins.

 

This memoir tells Claire Hoffman's story of growing up in a family that practiced Transcendental Meditation. When Claire's father abandoned her family, her mother moves Claire and her brother Stacey to Iowa, the national headquarters for Transcendental Meditation or Heaven on Earth. Led by Maharishi, this method of meditation and "living life to the fullest" promised world peace and enlightenment. Claire, who has always innocently followed her mother's fervent beliefs, quickly learns that non-meditators in the town look down on Claire and her brother. Claire increasingly questions the legitimacy of Maharishi's teachings and goes through a difficult adolescence before finally moving to California to live with her father. This book is a inside look at her childhood that shaped her ideas on both family and spirituality.

 

Transcendental Meditation centered around meditating for ten to twenty minutes twice a day, focusing on your own, individual mantra. With famous followers such as the Beatles and Shirley MacLaine, "by the mid-1970s, the Movement estimated that it had 600,000 practitioners" (17). Claire's home in Iowa was completely dominated by TM and its followers. The neighborhood where she lived with built by TM followers and, when finances allowed it, she attended a private TM school that focused on Maharishi's teachings.

 

Although Claire unquestioningly embraces meditation and her mother's TM-based beliefs as a young child, as she grows older she begins to question the dubious teachings of Maharishi. As the memoir progresses, the teachings of TM appear increasingly ridiculous and implausible. Maharishi's researchers claimed that they found that when "1 percent of a community practiced TM, the crime rate was reduced by 16 percent" (60). Not only did much of the math of the supposed "scientific research" paid for by Maharishi seem questionable, but the figurehead himself comes across as a joke. When Claire finally gets to see him in person, the effect is far from confirmation of her spiritual beliefs: "He was silent for a moment. And then he burped. A big, froglike belch - as if he were at home alone rather than on a stage with thousands of people watching his every move" (66). I couldn't help but enthusiastically agree when Claire says she "thought of the dark fairy tale about the emperor with no clothes" (67).

 

Most ridiculous was the TM's belief that they could learn how to fly or levitate through meditation. Claire's mother takes the class and Claire eagerly imagines adults zooming through the air through the power of meditation. Yet her mother finally admits to her that in fact, most everyone in the class was in the "hopping phase." These constant disappointments put a great strain on Claire's belief in the movement; "Why would my mom spend so much time there if she had just been hopping around for hours? And why would we have endured all the townies yelling names at us if we weren't really flying?" (113).

 

The conclusion of this memoir felt disjointed and abrupt. Hoffman rapidly skims over many years of her life after leaving her home in Iowa and jumps ahead to her being a wife and mother, still questioning her childhood beliefs. I was shocked to find that despite her portrayal of her mother's beliefs, she returns to Iowa to learn how to "fly." After seemingly rejecting the teachings of TM, Hoffman gradually returns to them, even teaching her own daughters how to meditate. She says that "meditation provides a space that is uniquely my own, a mode of being that is totally separate from the ups and downs of the everyday" (261). Although I disagreed, her spiritual conclusion is legitimate, yet I was disappointed that she spends relatively little time relaying to the reader how she arrived at that conclusion. In the end, I didn't feel as if I had Hoffman's full story. On the other hand, this was an interesting read about a movement that I knew little about.

 

Stars: 3