This is Bob Roth

With such a megawatt-celebrity clientele on speed-dial, I’m not sure what to expect from Roth when I walk into the offices of his Midtown Manhattan HQ on a muggy summer Saturday afternoon. My anxieties are soon allayed when I am confronted by the man himself, a rather ordinary-seeming, if notably well-groomed, fellow in casual weekend business attire with a full head of wavy grey hair and immaculate white teeth, someone who, for approaching septuagenarian status, seems remarkably youthful and well preserved. He immediately disarms me with his charm and openness as we chat about his recent photo shoot for Fantastic Man. “This is all so brand new for me,” he confides.

Roth puts me at ease with his genuine interest in my story, the first chunk of our time together consisting pretty much of him interviewing me. You could imagine it as an enticement technique that might be found in some pop psychology bible like ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’, but he does it with such obvious sincerity and gusto that one feels guilty for even having entertained such a cynical thought. Roth will later confess his own Scepticism about TM before his involvement with it. “I am, by nature, a very sceptical person. I’m not a joiner and I didn’t like big groups until I ran a foundation.”

As a seasoned cynic it occurs to me that most people are likely sceptical of a Cult before their indoctrination into it, and that telling people of your own initial scepticism might be a good way of getting them to let their guard down. I’m certainly not immune to Roth’s charms, but with a jaded queen like me, whose favourite joke in ‘Annie Hall’ is when Jeff Goldblum laments, “I forgot my mantra,” it’s not necessarily going to be an uncomplicated seduction.

His father would not infrequently take the entire family to San Quentin for an inexpensive meal, the trustees who served them representing Roth’s first encounter with prisoners. In the early ’80s, he would find himself back in San Quentin teaching TM to the shut-ins. He remembers in his book one particular session in which he conducted a meditation with about 30 hardened criminals, all with their eyes closed. A prison guard informed him how unusual this was, considering, “If you close your eyes in San Quentin you could end up with a shiv in your back,” and that he had the Aryan Brotherhood, the Mexican Mafia and the Black Panthers all meditating together in the same room. Here is a man who is evidently not only deeply philanthropical, but also fantastically fearless.

There’s no denying Roth’s “street cred,” and it’s also clear that his humanitarianism and altruism were instilled in him from a very young age. His practice of TM with the foundation, which teaches meditation to war vets with PTSD, prisoners, women who have experienced sexual assault and domestic violence, and underprivileged inner-city kids, comes completely naturally to him. The seeds of the enlightenment of this former Eagle Scout, it seems, preceded his introduction to the art and science of Transcendental Meditation. He was born into a secular Jewish family – so secular, in fact, that, as he says in his book, “the first Jewish person I met was myself.”

“I wasn’t raised with any religion,” he tells me. “We celebrated Christmas and Easter and had Easter egg hunts.” Then one day, “I came home from school and asked if I could go to catechism, and the next week I was in Hebrew school. My parents were very inclusive, so then we celebrated Christmas and Hanukkah, Easter and Passover.” When I ask if he now considers himself a practising Jew, and if he believes in God, he replies in the affirmative to both questions, adding, “I’m not a ‘meditation-religion’ type person, I’m a regular guy.”

Although Roth’s politicisation started early on (he informs me that he was co-editor of his high school newspaper for which he wrote a column called ‘The Gripes of Roth’), it was his turbulent Berkeley years that drove him in a different direction. Just before he entered university, five days after seeing Bobby Kennedy speak at the San Francisco Civic Center on 1 June 1968, the young, idealistic Democratic senator, whom many thought was destined to be president, was assassinated, and everything turned upside down. “The first year is crazy anyway when you go to college, but it was eruptions everywhere, violence on Telegraph Avenue and strikes, and I had no footing. Religions and institutions were just gone. I was at Berkeley from ’68 until ’74, when I graduated, and there were tanks parked right outside my door. It was complete chaos, and then you had the upheaval of cults – fundamentalist Christian and Hare Krishna. It was just very confusing.”

While the entire USA began spinning into a bad trip in the late ’60s and early ’70s, Roth decided that he could heal the soul of the nation through the widespread teaching of Transcendental Meditation. When he became aware of the Maharishi and started meditating at the Berkeley TM Center in 1968, he tells me, “one of my first thoughts was not ‘I want to get enlightened.’ My first thought was, ‘Oh, I want to teach this to kids.’” He travelled to Italy and Spain for five months to learn how to become a TM teacher directly from the Maharishi and then returned to the States to begin his quest. Not surprisingly, Roth speaks reverentially of the Maharishi. “He was a radical,” he says, “because he said this is for everybody, including ‘untouchables.’ Don’t get into this macho pride thing of ‘I can concentrate and I’ve got orange robes and nobody else can do this.’”

Roth also likes to emphasise that the Maharishi started out as a man of science (he was a physicist), and that his teachings are grounded in scientific investigation. (One could easily draw a direct connection between Roth’s reverence for his own father, a compassionate doctor who lived to heal others by studying the effect of stress and trauma on the brain, and for the Maharishi, as father figure.) The scientific approach is always present in his discussion of TM. “You get up first thing in the morning,” he says, “you sit up in bed and you do 20 minutes of TM. It energises you. It gives you Alpha-1, which is the brainwave pattern signature of restful alertness that’s great for learning and creativity.”

For Roth, science and cosmic consciousness are in no way incompatible. It was, in fact, at a science and education conference that Roth first met Mr. Lynch face to face, and the David Lynch Foundation was born. “I had been working in Oakland,” he says, “and I was putting on a science conference on TM and trauma and education, and David was in the Bay Area so I invited him to come. And afterwards we were talking and I said, ‘I really want to start a foundation so we can raise money to bring this to kids,’ and he said, ‘Let’s do it.’ So that’s really how our paths crossed.”

If the passion and intensity towards achieving his Lofty Goals weren’t so seemingly rational and based in such manifest compassion, Roth might almost seem megalomaniacal. “I want to teach a million Syrian refugees to meditate,” he tells me. “I’m not talking about bringing this thing to a handful of people on the Upper East Side.” He later pontificates about his work with children. “I can teach a 10-year-old, inner-city kid to meditate – a kid who sleeps in a bathtub because gun shots come through the wall. And that kid goes from flunking out of school to getting As and Bs, and now he gets accepted into a better high school than where he was. And if I can do that with millions of kids rather than just 50…”

He also talks about teaching meditation to “all the Republicans on Capitol Hill” where the foundation has an office. At times Roth reverts to a kind of political vision, even though when it comes to specific political action or affiliation, “we have to stay out of that.” When he brings up the notion that the ancient meditation texts talk about an underlying field of consciousness that connects us all together, and that if enough people tap into it (TM calls it “the Maharishi Effect”), it could change the course of history, it does seem to have some political underpinnings.

In the context of President Trump and the creeping Fascism currently festering in the US, isn’t it almost a luxury of sorts to eschew the political and only be interested in meditation and calming everyone down when anger and agitation are so clearly needed? “It doesn’t make you passive,” he tells me. “It makes you more resilient.”

It seems that there’s still at least a little bit of Bobby Kennedy left in Bobby Roth. “You could say, right now, America has PTSD. What are the symptoms? Hyperreactivity, high blood pressure, substance abuse, anger management issues, insomnia. The whole country has post-traumatic stress. There are a lot of people in Washington who are not using their brain. They’re just reactive and narrow thinking, and it’s not just Trump. He’s a symptom. And as a lifelong Democrat, let’s just say the Democratic Party is in bed with a lot of the same special interests.”

Feeling a little riled up myself by this rousing call to action, I’m compelled to ask Roth one last political question, as dumb as it may sound. It seems to me that Trump is already in some kind of strange detached state, but hypothetically, if he or some (other) evil dictator (manqué) began practising TM, would it in fact make him or her a better, clearer, more focused evil dictator?

“No. Actually a reporter once asked Maharishi: ‘If a criminal started meditating, would he be a better criminal?’ And Maharishi said, ‘Yes, he would be a better criminal, but no longer be a criminal.’ So, President Trump doesn’t sleep; everyone knows it. He is hyper-reactive; he even admits to it. There are two parts of the brain that are involved there, absolutely essential. One is the prefrontal cortex, which is your executive functioning. That’s your judgment and planning and decision-making and sense of self and ethical reasoning, and that gets shut down under chronic fatigue and stress and tension.” His inference is that if Trump meditated, all of those qualities would be improved and he would no longer be Evil Trump. Inshallah.

But isn’t there a contradiction between his hyperviolent, sometimes sexually perverse movies and the meditative state?

“Stories are stories,” he tells me. “I get ideas. The artist doesn’t have to suffer to show suffering.” He adds, “Ideas present themselves. They’re gifts, like on Christmas morning.” When I ask him about the infamous eighth episode of his recent ‘Twin Peaks’ reboot, which plays something like a cosmic, if rather dark, inner spiritual journey, he declines to connect it in any way to his meditation practice, but allows, “In some ways, everything is connected.” I ask him about the link between meditation and creativity. “Negativity is the enemy of creativity. There’s a tube that ideas flow through and when you’re stressed or filled with anxieties, that tube gets squeezed, and people do get writer’s block and ideas don’t flow, and happiness doesn’t flow. You start practising TM, and that tube gets opened up.”

Finally, I can’t resist sneaking in a question I’ve asked a number of creative film people who make challenging work, from Paul Verhoeven to the screenwriter Joseph Stefano: has he ever had the desire to make a porn film? “Oh yeah, sure,” he says. “It would be a very abstract film. Very abstract. So much is mental and emotional. But it would be interesting to do that.” When I inform him, before signing off, that Roth has offered to arrange for me to be taught the TM technique, Mr. Lynch advises me to “stay regular” in my practice and suggests I’ll be a “happy camper.” I can’t think of any better advice, or a more Lynchian response.

I’m also compelled to ask him about the lingering rumours about the Beatles and the Mia-and-‘Dear Prudence’ imbroglio. He points out that both the Beatles and the Farrow sisters have debunked the myths; that Paul and Ringo still support TM, having given a concert not long ago at Radio City Music Hall to raise funds for the David Lynch Foundation; and that Prudence Farrow still teaches TM in Florida. Roth has even taught Sean Lennon how to meditate.

I’ve also occasionally encountered homophobic and sexist attitudes in yogic teachings having to do with the belief that homosexuals and women are beings not as evolved as heterosexual men, and that it’s something they have to work through karmically. (Another famous cult, Scientology, allegedly encourages members to divest themselves of their homosexuality.)

Roth assures me that this is certainly not the case with TM, suggesting that when you become less fearful and more compassionate through the practice of meditation, these prejudices fall away. He even points out that there are gender-neutral bathrooms at Maharishi University in Fairfield, Iowa. He also informs me that he has a gay brother, a TM instructor, who is politically active in the San Francisco community and is the director of the David Lynch Foundation’s HIV Wellness Initiative. “There’s data that shows that the T-cell count goes up when you meditate, so we want to do a big study with that, because anxiety, tension and depression have a big impact on people living with HIV.”

My previous anxieties having been mostly assuaged, I finally feel emboldened to ask, coming on a bit too much like Barbara Walters, about Roth’s personal life. He tells me he’s single now, but he helped his sister raise her two sons, now 32 and 29, whom he just had lunch with. “I’m a single guy and happy. What else?”

“Do you date?” I continue shamelessly.

“I’m just really happy, I’m not looking for a partner right now, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen, just not right now.”

At the very end of our conversation, Roth once again turns the interview back on me, asking the same kind of personal questions I had just asked him. I’m happy to oblige. And I’m also eager to take him up on his offer to be taught the gentle art of Transcendental Meditation in Toronto. After all, who in their right mind could refuse the opportunity to become, as Mr. Lynch would have it, a happy camper?