turq and Lawson, it's amazing to me how Maharishi was even a visionary about aerobics! Some fitness experts no longer advocate long bouts of aerobic exercise as was done in the day when Jim Fixx, a regular jogger, died of a heart attack. It's now thought that such exercise actually strains the heart. Better to do short bursts of intense aerobics. Plus weight bearing and stretching.
On Wednesday, May 7, 2014 4:32 AM, TurquoiseBee <turquoi...@yahoo.com> wrote: From: "lengli...@cox.net" <lengli...@cox.net> To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com Sent: Wednesday, May 7, 2014 10:51 AM Subject: Re: [FairfieldLife] [FairfieldLife] Great oppurtunity for rethinking Repentance Spiritually Whatever. Certainly, wanting to be certain that I haven't wasted 20 minutes twice a day for 40 years, is part of the issue (not to mention another 15 minutes twice-a-day doing the TM-siddhis for the past 30 years). Whatever. But... Think about it: if the effects of TM can be gained from reading a book, everyone should be reading that book. On the other hand, if what TM teachers teach is special in some sense, people need to know that too. Consider the latest research coming out of Africa on PTSD. The studies are overwhelmingly positive and are bound to show "regression to the mean" at least somewhat in any replications, but what if TM really CAN have such an effect consistently on certain people (at least war refugees living in Africa with no other support for stress at all) with PTSD? This is HUGE. While, objectively speaking, it would be nice if other practices had the same or better effect, MBSR is taught over a 2 month period, and researchers don't even bother doing a followup measurement on PTSD symptoms until 3 months after people complete the 8-week course, and even 20 weeks after they first start learning mindfulness practices, they still don't have as good an outcome as even the less-dramatic studies on TM and PTSD in veterans have found in a fraction of the time. I always waned to be a TM teacher, but never thought I was mentally stable enough to become one. Even so, I can help out a little bit, if the practice really is worth what the research suggests it is worth. If the practice isn't as worthwhile, I want research done that will credibly find the truth, period. And TM isn't meant to be a hypertension therapy per se so the fact that it has such benefits is very interesting. Whatever. I didn't know that Maharishi pooh-poohed aerobic exercise. I always heard "engage in as much dynamic activity as possible without hurting yourself." Not true. Back in Squaw Valley he still clung to Hindu superstition that claimed that each of us humans is born with a predetermined number of breaths during our lifetime. Therefore, according to his weird way of thinking, anything that increased the breath rate (running, aerobics, swimming, etc.) was BAD for you because it expended your "allotted number of breaths" sooner and caused you to die sooner. I'm serious. He actually TAUGHT this hogwash, and people were gullible enough to believe it. Runners stopped running, people stopped exercising, and pretty much the only time they moved their bodies was while doing his lame set of yoga asanas. I'm pretty certain that the only exercise Maharishi ever got in his life was walking from a limo into a lecture hall. The flipside, of course, is why you care? I met you online what, 15-20 years ago? You weren't as anti-TM as you appear to be now, even though you made clear that you no longer practiced it. What changed? Nothing changed, because I wasn't "anti-TM" then, and am not now. I am "anti cult thinking" and "anti bullshit" and "anti fraud." To me, TM fits into all of those categories. Believing that someone is "against" you because he is not a fan of something you identify with is just paranoia and self-importance in my book. I still hang at FFL because I'm interested in the cult mentality and I get to see so much of it here. Plus, there are occasionally topics discussed that I'm interested in. But on the whole it's a collection of crazy people, so I occasionally find it entertaining. What you don't seem to understand is that I am against TM *ever* being taught in the schools, and will be even if you produce a thousand studies showing how great it is. TM does not *belong* in U.S. schools because it's taught using a religious ceremony and because the TM teachers simply can't help themselves, and have to try to suck every prospective new TMer deeper into the cult, and thus into cult thinking. If people feel like paying for TM and actually believe it does something good for them, I have no problems with that. Pushing it like a drug onto school kids...that's a whole other thing, one that I would fight on Constitutional grounds any day.
