A SEASON IN HEAVEN

A season at a remote Spanish seacoast where Gibson (The Miracle Worker; Two For the Seesaw) came to find his wandering 19-year-old son at Maharishi International University and, mirabile dictu, joined up for a course on "creative intelligence" and "cosmic consciousness" — the end reward promised to the disciples when they have put in enough hours meditating, "rounding" and memorizing the Master's cryptic utterances. In the company of these neat and clean-shaven young seekers, Gibson allows himself the indulgence of Sanskrit chants, mantras and spiritual-physical exercises whose purpose is to cleanse the soul of "impurities" and "unstress" the psychic knots. To be fair, Gibson does express an occasional doubt ("it startles me how much abdication of self there is in these kids") yet what most impresses him is the new-found serenity of the erstwhile freaks and acid heads. That, and "my own soul's opening to benevolence," and by semester's end he is drawing diagrams which unite the artist's creative energy with Maharishi's mystical schemata of the universe and expounding on the manifest and the Absolute with the best of them. None of it was especially manifest to us, and even Gibson's usually graceful prose is not up to coping with transcendental "oneness." A metaphysical ramble which is difficult going even on its own terms. Uninitiates less tolerant than Gibson may find the discipline preparatory to enlightenment a new and distressing form of totalitarianism — even if everyone around the Maharishi wears a beatific smile.