--- In [email protected], "Kirk" <kirk_bernha...@...> wrote: > > I must say however that David Lynch does seem rather naive. > Is it possible? I suppose also that Twin Peaks sounds alot > like siamese twins playing doctor, so there's that too.
I had an email conversation going for a while with a lovely woman who had worked as Lynch's private secretary for many years. While she loved the guy, she often described him as "the most naive person I have ever met in my entire life." She said he was *always* being scammed by people, because he just had no internal defenses. He believed everything anyone told him. She also described some of his quirks, which verge on OCD. He ate the same thing every day, *exactly* the same thing, and tended to panic if he couldn't get it. While I applaud his naive intention in trying to make this "teach TM in schools" thing happen, I really wish he hadn't been enough of a TB to waste his money trying to make it happen in American schools. It's going to fail, and fail big in my opinion, because of the...duh...US Constitution. The first big implementation of one of these "quiet time" cases is going to create a court case, and the judges are going to be shown translations of the puja, Rajas dressed up as pretend kings of a pretend country, hordes of cultists watching pundits chanting and paying for *very* expensive yagyas to propitiate Hindu deities, and TM is never going to be allowed nearer to an American school than a convicted child molester, ever again. And Constitutionally, I think that's a Good Thing. But it'll set back the teaching of medi- tation *as a whole* terribly. That's my real objection to this initiative. In his naivete, David Lynch is believing the TMO PR and believing that he can "get away" with teaching TM in American schools. I don't think he can, in today's political climate. He certainly couldn't have gotten away with it back in Jefferson's time. Tom would have ridden him out of town on a rail, like he did the Christian preachers who were trying to do the same thing in schools in his state. I wish he'd just created a somewhat *broader* initiative, and thrown his money into better PR for TM *for the public*, and since the TMO has priced it out of the market, subsidized the cost of TM instruction for *everyone*, not just schoolkids. That would be a Cool Thing, IMO, and a thing I would support wholeheartedly. But trying to do this with students? And IN schools? That's just a level of naivete that cannot HELP but backfire IMO. And it backfires not only on TM but on *all* forms of meditation. It will "set back" the possibility of getting REAL secular meditation practices acceptable in school systems. The school systems will look at the TM debacle and think, "If one of these meditation techniques was a scam by a religious cult, then all of them are." All of them aren't. As Vaj has pointed out, there are some GENUINELY secular forms of meditation out there, and they *would* have a strong place in schools. But IMO they're going to be "tarred with the same brush" as TM in the wake of what Lynch's failed experiment is going to produce. IMO, Curtis got it right. Lynch is a very sweet and very naive TM TB who bought Maharishi's instruction to teach TM in schools without ever thinking it through. If he had, he would have realized that given the US Constitution it is never likely to succeed, and that the REAL reason Maharishi wanted to teach TM to kids was that towards the end of his life he'd begun to realize that he couldn't teach it to anyone else. No one else was buying.
