Greetings from Utopia Park: Surviving a Transcendent Childhood

by Claire Hoffman

Overview

In this engrossing, provocative, and intimate memoir, a young journalist reflects on her childhood in the heartland, growing up in an increasingly isolated meditation community in the 1980s and ’90s—a fascinating, disturbing look at a fringe culture and its true believers.

When Claire Hoffman’s alcoholic father abandons his family, his desperate wife, Liz, tells five-year-old Claire and her seven-year-old brother, Stacey, that they are going to heaven—Iowa—to live in Maharishi’s national headquarters for Heaven on Earth. For Claire’s mother, Transcendental Meditation—the Maharishi’s method of meditation and his approach to living the fullest possible life—was a salvo that promised world peace and enlightenment just as their family fell apart.

At first this secluded utopia offers warmth and support, and makes these outsiders feel calm, secure, and connected to the world. At the Maharishi School, Claire learns Maharishi’s philosophy for living and meditates with her class. With the promise of peace and enlightenment constantly on the horizon, every day is infused with magic and meaning. But as Claire and Stacey mature, their adolescent skepticism kicks in, drawing them away from the community and into delinquency and drugs. To save herself, Claire moves to California with her father and breaks from Maharishi completely. After a decade of working in journalism and academia, the challenges of adulthood propel her back to Iowa, where she reexamines her spiritual upbringing and tries to reconnect with the magic of her childhood.

Greetings from Utopia Park takes us deep into this complex, unusual world, illuminating its joys and comforts, and its disturbing problems. While there is no utopia on earth, Hoffman reveals, there are noble goals worth striving for: believing in belief, inner peace, and a firm understanding that there is a larger fabric of the universe to which we all belong.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062338860
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	11/21/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	293
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Claire Hoffman writes for national magazines and holds a master’s degree in religion from the University of Chicago and a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University. She was a staff reporter for the Los Angeles Times and Rolling Stone. She serves on the board of her family foundation, the Goldhirsh Foundation, as well as ProPublica and the Columbia School of Journalism. She lives in Los Angeles, California.

Table of Contents

Preface xi

Part 1 Believing

Chapter 1 Initiation 3

Chapter 2 The Hoffman Curse 21

Chapter 3 Stranger in a Strange Land 37

Chapter 4 Levitation 49

Chapter 5 Taste of Utopia 59

Chapter 6 Fortunate Are We! 73

Chapter 7 Utopia Park 89

Chapter 8 On the Program 99

Chapter 9 200 Percent of Life 119

Part 2 Doubting

Chapter 10 Dad Comes Home 135

Chapter 11 Your Meditation Brought Down the Great Wall 151

Chapter 12 The Costs of Karma 165

Chapter 13 Ojas 179

Chapter 14 Townie 187

Chapter 15 Meth Heads and Meditators 205

Part 3 Searching

Chapter 16 Adulthood 223

Chapter 17 A New Utopia 239

Chapter 18 The Flying Course 247

Epilogue 259

Acknowledgments 263

Editorial Reviews

With honesty and sincerity, this account of coming of age within the ostensible confines of an alternative lifestyle delivers valuable knowledge of another phenomenon of cultural divergence.” — Library Journal

“A clear-eyed critique that generously accounts for humanity’s ‘profoundly sincere and motivated’ quest for happiness and peace.” — Kirkus Reviews

“In both a compelling memoir and a valuable testament, Claire Hoffman tells of the struggle to find her own path to truth while growing up amid the distractions and contradictions of a guru’s prescribed utopia. Her triumph, and the reminder for us all, is in excusing the external guru and trusting the guide within.” — Melissa Coleman, author of This Life is in Your Hands

“The mystery of faith may never be resolved, but Claire Hoffman helps us understand the influence that strong beliefs exert in the lives of individuals, families, and communities. This book is personal and scholarly as well as passionate and honest, which makes for a thrilling read.” — Lawrence Wright, Pulitzer Prize -winning author of The Looming Tower

“Claire Hoffman brilliantly captures a world that is at once familiar and exotic, yet it is more than that. It is about the meaning of faith in the modern world and how the simple desire for spiritual connection can sometimes lead to devastating consequences. I love it.” — Reza Aslan, author of the #1 New York Times bestselling Zealot

“As fascinating and unsettling as discovering a magical Oz in the middle of Kansas, Hoffman’s unflinching memoir presents a remarkable landscape unlike any we’re familiar with, one in which its narrator navigates her troubled way through a youth colored utterly by the cultlike atmosphere in which she finds herself. Dark, powerful, and ultimately uplifting, Greetings from Utopia Park is a book to be pondered and savored.” — Val Brelinski, author of The Girl Who Slept with God

“[A] wise, funny, and fascinating book.” — San Francisco Chronicle

“Wonderfully intimate: a cautionary tale that develops into one of inspiring self-determination.” — Booklist

From the Publisher

As fascinating and unsettling as discovering a magical Oz in the middle of Kansas, Hoffman’s unflinching memoir presents a remarkable landscape unlike any we’re familiar with, one in which its narrator navigates her troubled way through a youth colored utterly by the cultlike atmosphere in which she finds herself. Dark, powerful, and ultimately uplifting, Greetings from Utopia Park is a book to be pondered and savored.

Val Brelinski

In both a compelling memoir and a valuable testament, Claire Hoffman tells of the struggle to find her own path to truth while growing up amid the distractions and contradictions of a guru’s prescribed utopia. Her triumph, and the reminder for us all, is in excusing the external guru and trusting the guide within.

Melissa Coleman

In both a compelling memoir and a valuable testament, Claire Hoffman tells of the struggle to find her own path to truth while growing up amid the distractions and contradictions of a guru’s prescribed utopia. Her triumph, and the reminder for us all, is in excusing the external guru and trusting the guide within.

Lawrence Wright

Claire Hoffman brilliantly captures a world that is at once familiar and exotic, yet it is more than that. It is about the meaning of faith in the modern world and how the simple desire for spiritual connection can sometimes lead to devastating consequences. I love it.

Reza Aslan

[A] wise, funny, and fascinating book.

San Francisco Chronicle

Wonderfully intimate: a cautionary tale that develops into one of inspiring self-determination.

Booklist

Wonderfully intimate: a cautionary tale that develops into one of inspiring self-determination.

Booklist

[A] wise, funny, and fascinating book.

San Francisco Chronicle

05/01/2016
With unflinching candidness, journalist Hoffman provides an examination of growing up within the transcendental meditation movement of the 1980s and 1990s. After being abandoned by her alcoholic husband, Hoffman's mother desperately decided to raise her small children away from the stress of urban life. Familiar with transcendental meditation, she relocated from New York to the group's self-proclaimed compound of "Heaven on Earth" in Fairfield, IA. Initially, the housing, schools, and seemingly boundless opportunities for growth through contemplation felt welcoming. However, promises of enlightenment and material comfort always seemed just out of reach to young Hoffman and her brother. As they matured into adolescence, these siblings were drawn to life outside the compound and forbidden temptations such as drugs and alcohol. The author recounts the break she made from Iowa as a teenager and her eventual life in California. Many recent memoirs, including Joshua Safran's Free Spirit: Growing Up on the Road and Off the Grid, have provided insight into unconventional childhoods. VERDICT With honesty and sincerity, this account of coming of age within the ostensible confines of an alternative lifestyle delivers valuable knowledge of another phenomenon of cultural divergence.—Mary Jennings, Camano Island Lib., WA

Library Journal

2016-04-03
Searching for bliss in America's heartland.In her candid debut memoir, journalist Hoffman, a former staff reporter for the Los Angeles Times, recalls her childhood in Fairfield, Iowa, in the 1980s and '90s, on a 272-acre campus established by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi to promote Transcendental Meditation, spiritual enlightenment, and world peace. "The Movement I had grown up in," writes the author, "call it a cult, a religion, a community, it was all these—had rescued my family from a scary time." Her alcoholic father had abandoned his family; her mother, left with Claire and her brother, was destitute. Swept up in the TM movement, which was notorious for its celebrity followers (the Beatles, Mia Farrow), Hoffman's mother saw in Iowa the promise of utopia. "We are talking of a new civilization," Maharishi claimed. "No one will remain stressed, no one will remain hectic, everyone will fulfill one's wants." At first, Hoffman went to the local public school because her mother could not afford the pricey Maharishi School, but when an anonymous donor paid her tuition, she joined the school, where the curriculum focused on bliss. "Everyone wanted to be experiencing and emanating bliss"; everyone followed the Maharishi's directions to become enlightened, which meant meditating twice a day and following his dictates for "the way you ate, slept, built your home, wore your jewels, and looked to the stars." As she grew up, Hoffman became increasingly suspicious of the Maharishi's grand plan. First, she noticed "a tangible shift…from mantras to products" that the Maharishi trademarked. Maintaining that "Americans only value things if they have to pay for them," he increased the school's tuition and charged thousands of dollars for his coveted Flying Course in levitation. The author was also suspicious about his claim that the fall of the Berlin Wall had resulted from the power of meditation. A cleareyed critique that generously accounts for humanity's "profoundly sincere and motivated" quest for happiness and peace.

Kirkus Reviews