> And, he thought, I know why. They want to be the agents, > not the victims, of history. They identify with God's > power and believe they are godlike. That is their basic > madness.
A long time ago I gave a lecture on TM and the ME to some bright young people and one of them jumped down my throat at the suggestion that people should have the power to control others through thought alone. At the time I couldn't see his problem. Surely if we're doing good it's OK. But now I know better, it's not OK because it poisons the minds of the people who think they have a right to control other people without their consent. In stark terms there are two ways to get your ideas across to other people. (1) you sit down with them, discuss, reason, argue, and lead them to your point of view, or have your own point of view changed in the process. (2) You bash them over the head until they do as you tell them. Maharishi started out with (1) but ended up at (2). It doesn't matter that mass YF doesn't involve actual blood letting, simply the belief that it's not necessary to put up a decent argument and that it's possible to use force of some kind is evil dressed up as good intentions. You diminish the audience into the ranks of untermenschen to be controlled. Their opinions are worthless, subhuman. The instant the idea snuck in that it would be possible to dominate lesser beings by a magical force, the language, the command structure, the whole demeanor of the TMO became that of a military organisation intent on world domination. The very idea that an elite group of people should dominate lesser beings is inherently military and opposed to peace. Look around you, every institutionalized nastiness in the movement can be traced back to the belief in a "right" to overcome others by force, for their own good of course, it always is. Look at the architecture, "Towers of Invincibility" (with hoards of orcs slaving in the dungeons no doubt). Look that the literature, listen to the songs "Victory before War". Look at the faces of Bevan and others when faced with a hostile audience in Berlin. They're not thinking "how can we explain things more clearly?" they're thinking "how can we raise coherence to overcome them?". It's an attitude that's not very different to "open fire!". The German audience sensed that because they've seen it before. They saw something in the panel that the panel couldn't see in themselves. That idea of using a magical force in place of rational discussion is the sweetly seductive poison that killed the movement. It's just as well it's a false idea.
