MAHARISHI PREP.(The Talk of the Town)

Ben Pollack is a preternaturally self-possessed eleventh grader from Fairfield, Iowa, who is considering a career in public relations, because, he says, "I love speaking to people about what I feel, and what I believe in." Such a misapprehension of the publicist's usual relationship to sincerity will not get young Pollack very far at some of New York City's better-known public-relations establishments; but it stood him in good stead last week when he was flown into town to appear at a press conference advocating the use of Transcendental Meditation among schoolkids. Pollack has been a practitioner of Transcendental Meditation since he was ten years old, and he, along with a handful of other junior meditators, had been drafted by the New York Committee for Stress-Free Schools to demonstrate just how fantastically healthful and helpful a state of what was described as "restful alertness" could be for the city's teen-agers--who, New York parents will have observed, are more typically prone to a state of restless lethargy.

The press conference included testimony from a variety of educators and scientists touting the virtues of TM: Gary Kaplan, the director of clinical neurophysiology at North Shore University Hospital, on Long Island, spoke of the "coherence of activity between the hemispheres and the front and the back of the brain," while Jane Roman Pitt, a senior fellow at the Institute of Science, Technology and Public Policy, in Fairfield, Iowa, described benefits more easily comprehended by a layperson. "To walk into a room and see a hundred middle-school students in a state of silence--deep, pure silence that you can feel as well as hear--is wonderful," she said.

The highlight of the morning, though, was the demonstration by Pollack and half a dozen of his peers, who, on command, folded their hands in their laps, shut their eyes, and did a few minutes' worth of meditation in their chairs. All of them appeared immediately to achieve a state of restful alertness--except for one small boy who kept rubbing behind his eyeglasses and snatching quick squints at three TV cameramen who were circling the meditators, shining bright lights in their faces and trying to eke some B-roll dynamism out of the scene.

Afterward, the ...