--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, grate.swan <no_re...@...> wrote: > > --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Peter <drpetersutphen@> wrote: > > I'd be a fool to reduce my conceptual understanding of him > > to some sort of un-enlightened con artist. > > I am not attempting to be argumentative or challenging, nor do > I have an agenda regarding the Maharishi. I am simply curious > (a statement that can stand alone and perhaps describes me well.) > > Reversing Byron Katie, what if that were true. Would that change > your life?
May I use one of my last two posts of the week to suggest that it's really good to have your balanced voice here on FFL? This post and your suggestion about the enduring worth of an "IA buzz" are classics -- both of brevity and insight. Interestingly, the two "issues" that you address in these two posts are -- to me -- the same. How do people *react* when something that they believe is challenged? The Byron Katie technique is brilliant for deter- mining the bottom line of such a challenge. "What would change about my life if I chose to believe this thing that is contradictory to what I believe today?" In one case, if you are convinced that your views are not racist, but pretty much everyone around you thinks they are, what could change is the sense of complacency you havve *about* those views. An oppor- tunity could be seen to LEARN SOMETHING NEW, and move forward in life unencumbered with beliefs that have been shown to be less than productive. In the other case, if you are convinced that someone who "added value" to your life was enlightened and then you find out that he possibly wasn't, *what changes* about the "value?" Even if it turned out that the person who added value really *was* "only in it for the money," if you perceived value in what you *got* for the money, where's the issue? I think that your mention of the Byron Katie tech- nique is timely, in that I've been seeing the ill effects of *not* using it lately. In two recent cases -- Edg and L.Shaddai -- the person being told something that challenged something they believe about themselves reacted 1) emotionally rather than rationally, and 2) by "excommunicating" the person who had dared to suggest something to them that was contrary to what they believed about themselves. Dr. Pete, above, certainly did not do that. I suspect that he's able to flow with the winds of change well enough that if he found something that convinced him once and for all that Maharishi *was* an unenlightened con man, he'd be cool enough to love him anyway, *for the value he added to his life*, con man or not. The same thing *could* have been true with discovering that one has a racist streak that needs some work, or with discovering that one had (again) reacted emotionally to something that pushed his buttons, by reading things into the button-pushing that weren't there. The person being presented with something that challenged their current view *could* have perceived in the challenge a way to change, and a way to LEARN SOMETHING NEW, and move forward in life unencumbered with beliefs that have been shown to be less than productive. Instead, they chose to "wall out" the challenging infor- mation, and the challenger, and thus STAY THE SAME. Seems to me that the Byron Katie technique you remind us of is one of the keys to being able to change and grow, whereas the tendency we see so often here to reject the challenge (and often the challenger) because it "threatens" change is an attempt to STAY THE SAME. I guess some people *like* staying the same, and never growing or changing. That must explain why they so seldom seem to.
