God Bless You Mr Rosewater (sic) was published in 1965 so predates Kurt learning TM. As salyavin says the novel is Breakfast of Champions (1973). Here's a quote from the novel (warning: mantra info revealed!): When Bunny played the piano bar at the Holiday Inn, he had many, many secrets. One of them was this: he wasn’t really there. He was able to absent himself from the cocktail lounge, and from the planet itself, for that matter, by means of Transcendental Meditation. He learned this technique from Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who once stopped off in Midland City during a world-wide lecture tour. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, in exchange for a new handkerchief, a piece of fruit, a bunch of flowers, and thirty-five dollars, taught Bunny to close his eyes, and to say this euphonious nonsense word to himself over and over again: “Aye-eeeeem, aye-eeeeem, aye-eeeeem.” Bunny sat on the edge of his bed in the hotel room now, and he did it. “Aye-eeeeem, aye-eeeeem”, he said to himself—internally. The rhythm of the chant matched one syllable with each two beats in his heart. He closed his eyes. He became a skin diver in the depths of his mind. The depths were seldom used. His heart slowed. His respiration nearly stopped. A single word floated by in the depths. It had somehow escaped from the busier parts of his mind. It wasn’t connected to anything. It floated by lazily, a translucent, scarf-like fish. The word was untroubling. Here was the word: “Blue.”
---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <no_re...@yahoogroups.com> wrote : ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <no_re...@yahoogroups.com> wrote : Not sure which novel. Hmmmm. I think it was the book where Trout's son was a piano player who did TM and at some point someone's face got scraped bloody by being raked along a piano's keys. If I remember rightly, then there also was a very bad presentation of the TM technique...and maybe the son was shouting his mantra aloud at some point there....dunno. But at the time I was a true believer, and that book put me off my feed as a Vonnegut fan. Might have been "God Bless You Mr. Goldwater." I believe it was Breakfast of Champions, the character ended up getting beaten to death while meditating, clearly the concept of the Maharishi Effect hadn't been introduced yet.... ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <s3raphita@...> wrote : Thanks "Buck in the Dome". That was new info for me. It sounds a high-energy period in the life of the TMO. And "Duveyoung": what was the novel you refer to? I've read a couple of Kurt's novels (Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat's Cradle) but the TM link isn't in either of those. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <no_re...@yahoogroups.com> wrote : Yeah, Ol' Kurt loved TM so much he wrote a novel in which a character learned TM, and Kurt DISCLOSED HIS MANTRA IN THE BOOK, and then that character proceeded to GO VIOLENTLY NUTS. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <no_re...@yahoogroups.com> wrote : Yeah, Ol' Kurt loved TM so much he wrote a novel in which a character learned TM, and Kurt DISCLOSED HIS MANTRA IN THE BOOK, and then that character proceeded to GO VIOLENTLY NUTS.
