Lloyd Pflueger
I first met Lloyd Pflueger in Switzerland, in 1977. Maharishi had just brought out the TM-Sidhi program, and we were on the same 3-month course to learn it — in the beautiful Alpine village of Wilderswil. We quickly become good friends.
He was born in Alaska but moved to California as a teenager.
Three months after the end of that course, we both found ourselves at MUM.
This was the beginning of the 1977 academic year. People were needed to teach the two-week Writing Core Course. There was a syllabus but no faculty.. Lloyd and I volunteered. It proved to be great fun.
When the course ended, we set about improving it. Dr. Susie Levin Dillbeck, then the dean of the graduate school, gave us a wonderful new responsibility: create a writing-across-the-curriculum program for our first-year Core Course program. In every one- or two-week course, students would write and revise (based on feedback) an essay about the main theme of the course.
It was a terrific program. Some students professed to dislike it (because it was rigorous and demanding) but ended up appreciating it (because they saw it improving their writing).
For the next five or six years Lloyd and I worked out of a windowless office in the library basement. We became known as the Write Brothers.
Lloyd went off to the University of California at Santa Barbara to earn a master’s and doctorate in religious studies. Today he is a professor of philosophy and religion at Truman State University in Kirksville, Missouri, where he has been since 1993. Prior to that he taught at taught at the University of Wisconsin, California Polytechnic State University, and California State University-Long Beach. He specializes in South Asian religion, classical yoga philosophy, Indian philosophy, and classical Sanskrit.
Back to beautiful Alpine Wilderwil in early 1977: His birthday occurred during that course, and as a birthday gift I bought him a tube of Weleda toothpaste. Because he also spoke some German, I wrote this accompanying note in German for his amusement. (Apologies to all native German speakers for any mistakes. Ich entschuldige mich bei allen deutschen Muttersprachlern für etwaige Fehler.)