This one is from a friend in the UK: One of my many hilarious TM memories was on my flying course in 1986. Several of us had already "taken off" and had "flying fatigue" after a few days waiting for the stragglers, so we'd gone to get something to eat in the dining room. Suddenly we heard a tremendous disturbance coming from the flying room, which was next door. We ran to see what was going on and opened the door to the amazing spectacle of a huge guy called "Dave the Roof" (because he was a roofer by trade), face down on the foam thrashing around uncontrollably and making the most extraordinary noises - it was so loud and aggressive it sounded like a one-man pub brawl. All week he had been most upset that he had not taken off or had any real experience that the frustration must have burst out as the flying sutra finally hit the spot. Everybody was staring at him, horrified, all thoughts of their own programmes forgotten except this hilarious Irish guy called Roddy, who sat there in full lotus the whole time, unmoving and with his eyes shut. As Dave's full-on seizure subsided there was a stunned silence and Roddy opened one eye, peered at him and said, "And this is how we meditate at home."
I almost suffocated. These two are mine: I can remember two very intense laughter suppression episodes in the movement. One was on the Santa Barbara ATR course where Maharishi decided that comparing TM to screwing would be a good analogy. He went on for about 15 minutes saying that TM was just like screwing. I'm quite sure he meant drilling a screw into wood. We were all dying, trying with varying degrees of success to suppress laughter. I guess Jerry Jarvis set him straight later on, because I never heard him use the analogy again. The other was in Switzerland. I had a cold and was fasting on orange juice. I was in some weird spacey hyperglycemic state, when Maharishi asked me to get up and read the constitution of the People's Republic of China. It went on and on about "Capitalist Roaders" and sounded so absurd that I was cracking up, but trying to keep a straight face and read. It was really a struggle and I must have looked and sounded very weird.
