The Craze of Meditation

To the Editors:

The great Phineas T. Barnum, master showman, has finally been unseated by the even greater Maharishi Mahesh Yogi [Oct. 13].

Elmer D. Hoag

Milford, Conn.

Rather than having a "genuine hunger for religious and mystical experience," I think the TMers, like the revolutionaries you recently featured, are middle-class kids who are having difficulty with the real world. Upon discovering in the '60s that the ghetto and the war would not be cleaned up at their will, the TMers fled into "cosmic consciousness," and the revolutionaries threw temper tantrums.

William S. Greenfield, M.D.

Philadelphia

I would suggest that anything that can help even drug addicts and alcoholics, as TM does, is more than a craze and much more than one would have a right to expect from 40 minutes a day.

James Edmonds

Philadelphia

When Christians take 20 minutes twice a day to be still and say "Praise you, Jesus" or "Thank you, Lord," we have peace: "The peace of God which passes all understanding." Unfortunately, most of us are so busy busy busy and wonder where that peace went.

Lola Albright

Burbank, Calif.

It is so typical of our time and culture to see people groping for spirituality in such an "American" way. Pay your money as well as a minimal amount of time and thinking and--presto! Relaxation and maybe even a little semi-enlightenment. This McDonald's of spirituality only seems to contribute more to the general plastic atmosphere around us. Must our inner experiences be as shallow as our outer ones?

Fritz Seachrist

Tuckahoe, N. Y.

Have any Transcendental Meditation teachers revealed any mantras? If so, can you tell me what they are?

Robert Brock

Los Angeles

Examples: Sherim, ima, inga.

A Good and Gentle Person

As a longtime friend of the family, I want to correct your statement about Miss Catherine Hearst, eldest daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Randolph Hearst. She is a wonderfully good and gentle person. She is not--as charged by TIME--retarded.

A graduate of Marymount College in Los Angeles with a business major, Miss Hearst presently holds a responsible position. She is well informed and well read, and is especially interested in politics and the press. She feels there is a crying need for a greater sense of responsibility in both areas.

Your cruel gaffe proves her point.

Charles L. Gould

San Francisco

Mysterious Jumpsuits

"Jumpsuits have become fashionable because they are functional." Poppycock! Whoever argues that reasoning must then explain why jumpsuits/overalls didn't become fashionable in 1974 or 1964 or 1944 or whenever. The "because" of fashion is as mysterious and manipulative as it has always been.

Durret Wagner

Evanston, Ill.

Your comments regarding the "new fashion" of jumpsuits was of particular interest to me because in the year when I was writing the screenplay of National Velvet (which makes it 1943), I admired the jumpsuit worn by my gas-station attendant. I talked the owner into giving me one of the jumpsuits.

I took it to the costume department of MGM and the result was two jumpsuits, one pink and one beige, which I still have.

Helen Deutsch

New York City

Did you ever try to take a long plane ride or go to a public toilet wearing a jumpsuit?

Ruth Feuerstein

Cedarhurst, N. Y.

Revolt Against Rape

I don't wear short skirts or revealing shirts, but I got raped almost five weeks ago early in the morning at my bedside by some stranger who broke in. Who do men think they are?

Judi Karlen

Berkeley, Calif.

I had almost gotten over my feelings of guilt for being a member of a "sick society" that "spawns and encourages" two attempts on the President's life in three weeks, when I find that I should also be indicted for rape simply because I am a man.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that I am part of a conspiracy, involving half the population of the earth (many of whom I hardly know), to use rape as a "conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear."

I will not accept that specious reasoning. I refuse to be held responsible for the misguided acts of a few merely because we happen to be members of the same larger group.

Stephen P. Helzerman

Denver

Anyone who thinks that the victims are entirely without fault has never read Eric Berne's bestseller, Games People Play. In it he describes a game called Rapo.

What it comes down to is a woman who seduces a man and then cries rape to prove her contention that all men are animals, beasts, sexual perverts, etc. As to whether a victim of rape "asked for it," my conclusion is that some don't but some do.

Davis A. Cain

West Newton, Mass.

The utter futility of gaining male sympathy for the plight of a raped woman was brought home to me forcefully a year ago when my one-legged sister was raped in her own kitchen by a supposed telephone repairman.

My poor sister, whose right leg is amputated at the thigh, was forced to submit at knife point, with her two-year-old daughter sleeping in the next room.

When she tried to resist, the rapist stabbed her in the stump of her leg and knocked out a front tooth. He ripped out the phone and took her crutches and broke them before he left. She had to crawl with her one leg down the corridor of her apartment house at least 50 ft. before she found a neighbor home to summon the police.

What do you think the first question was that the investigating officers asked? It was: "Are you sure you didn't lead him on in any way?"

The rapist was never apprehended.

(Mrs.) Ellen Moore

Cambridge, Mass.

Three cheers for Ms. Brownmiller! It's about time someone spoke out against those sick, sadistic savages. I agree completely: castrate the bastards!

Amie Dehner

Newington, Conn.

I still say if a woman don't want you to get there, you won't get there. I know; I have tried. All they have to do is keep moving.

You can knock them out, but what good is that?

C.T. Williams

Avon Park, Fla.

Miscarriages

In your interview with Journalist Oriana Fallaci [Oct. 20], I was shocked that she referred to me as a "dishonest woman journalist" because I once wrote that she had had three miscarriages. And I was even more shocked that TIME would print such a scurrilous remark.

Ms. Fallaci did tell me, when I interviewed her for the New York Times in January 1973, that she had had three miscarriages, and indeed, she asked me not to print that fact. I told her at the time that it was impossible because her miscarriages were public knowledge, as she had discussed them in an article about her in LIFE in 1969.

Judy Klemesrud

New York City

I will never understand why the American media are so interested in the number of my miscarriages. A private tragedy as the loss of a child should not be used as a sensation for the excitement of the readers. Doing so is an insult to me and to all women. But, since TIME seems so interested too, once and forever I must state that I never had three miscarriages. I never lost three children. I only lost one, which is more than enough to cry for the rest of a life. And that miscarriage inspired my book Letter to a Child Never Born.

Oriana Fallaci

New York City

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