Anyway, so I want to talk you about TM, which I have now been doing for 41 years
I don't remember exactly how I started. It was some kid I knew
I had just gone to college and, you know, we were still kind of in the flush of the
feeling of the sixties and I just wanted to try any new thing that I heard about
and so I went and I Iearned TM and I do remember the very first
time I did it and I remember that I was up the entire night cause I never felt
that good before! And I had terrible acne, I think I was about eighteen, and it just
all just went away! And I became world famous comedian. That's my story!
That's the entire story of my life. And now here's the tragic part of my TM
story. Slightly tragic. So I'm doing TM from 1972 and I started and I didn't do
the morning one. You're supposed to do it twice a day, and I stopped doing the
morning one pretty early because I didn't understand getting out of
bed, and then resting. I had trouble with that concept. Get out of bed, now rest!
So maybe I did it for a couple of months and then I stopped, but I was
very regular with my afternoon meditation and when I was doing the TV
series in which I was the star of the show
the executive producer, the head writer, casting and editing for 22 to 24 episodes
on network television - not cable! Network! For nine years!
That's a lot of work! And I'm a regular guty I'm not one of
these crazy people that has endless, boundless energy, I'm just a normal guy!
But that was not a normal situation to be in.
And so what I would do is, every day when everybody would have lunch, I would do
TM. And then we would go back to work and I would eat while I was working
because I had missed lunch. But that's how I survived nine years. It was that 20
minutes in the middle of the day that would save me. Because you've got to
imagine... I mean, I know everybody's life is hard and every job
is hard but I mean, when it's your name on the god damned show... the pressure is it's
it's intense! And then the show got successful and everybody expected each
week to be even better than the last and it was a lot of pressure and I loved
every second of it but was a lot of pressure lot of work and it was all great
but I never could have accomplished it without TM. But I was not doing the
morning one, as I told you. And this past January, Bob Roth, who everybody loves -
he taught my kids TM! And so one day we were standing in my kitchen and I was
telling him about something I was doing and he says, "you really should try doing the morning one."
41 years in I find out I'm not doing it right! That's the tragic part of the
story. So now I do the morning one and now ok so my life now
I don't like to take up too much time but, you know, I've got a wife and three
kids, I do stand-up comedy almost every weekend. I fly out Friday, I'll do a
show in one city, I'll fly to another city and another city... I'll come back, like,
Saturday night at like four or five in the morning, and then I have three little kids and
and I do this other little internet show... so I'm very busy. And now I'm sixty,
by the way, I'm 60 years old. And I really thought, well, the time has come
to throttle back the output
of life. I need to work less, I need to do less, because I'm old!
Let's cut the engines and glide a little bit. So Bob introduced me which I
should have known forty years ago but I didn't - to the morning TM. And my entire
energy and focus and ability to function all day and come home and have the
family I'm sixty year old guy with little kids it's all screwed up
it shouldn't be like this! And now I am functioning on this level that I really
did not think was possible for someone my age. And I
thought it would be too much. So that's how my life changed dramatically this
year. Meeting Bob and doing TM properly. And I've become
obsessive talking to people about it. My press officer is here I
got him to do it, I got my assistant, every person I meet! Now I'm just
grabbing them by the lapels and saying, "you gotta do this!" Because it's just a
dumb way to live, not doing it! is just dumb. I quoted a line from Richard Pryor
this one of my favorite lines. It's actually from a bit he did about
racism and he starts the bit and he says, "before we talk about racism
it's hard just being a person. Forget about having to deal with racial
hostility, just being a person is hard!" And that that would be my introduction
to people who don't think they need TM. Being a person is hard! Now all these
people that we just saw these are people that really have some enormous
challenges but all of you here, by virtue of the fact that you're here, I know you're
slamming it! You're killing yourself and that's fun and great but
you don't need to die for what you want to accomplish. And that's what TM is
about! And Bob and I did a show on ABC Good Morning America
and I came up with the line that TM is like you have a cell phone and someone
gives you the charger and you go
now I can keep using this thing! It will work all the time!
So are there a lot of people here that don't do TM?
That is just a just here to learn a little bit? Ok so the other way
I'll describe it to you, is that I can see from the faces, who does it and
doesn't do it, by the way. The other way I will describe TM to you is, you know how
three days a year
you get a good night's sleep. And you wake up and feel like, this is how I
should feel all the time! but you can't get more than three good night sleep a
year because of the circumstances of your life. While with TM, you can! You
have that every day every day! The bar on the cell phone is all
the way up. You leave the house and the charger is full. You know that tremendous
feeling of power when your phone is fully charged, and somebody calls, you go:
"I wanna hear every detail of his story. I am loaded with juice!" that's what
TM is. I will now take questions.
I will. Is there anything anyone wants to ask
me about?
I do it and that's another thing that's crazy!
I'm only getting five hours sleep as it is. I'm not going to get up earlier than
that to TM. It works! You'll feel better doing
four and a half hours and doing that 20 because that's deeper than anything you
get when you're sleeping. Look at your bed when you get out of it. What does it
look like? It looks like a war went on in there! And that's not restful!
All you did was stop, and take the fight from the day into the bed. But
you're fighting all day, you're fighting all night! You need a break, folks!
You need a break.
That's what TM is. Thank you very much.