--- In [email protected], cardemaister <no_reply@...> wrote: > > Just read that and realized what a supreme teacher Maharishi > was. He could explain extremely abstract stuff so that most > people had at least a chance to understand what he was > talking about! ;D
I'm going to have to disagree with you here, Card. Admittedly, Maharishi had a way of parroting old metaphors in a way that made most of his naive followers think that they were new with him, and he had a way of appealing to the intellect and the need for self importance in his students, in such a way that people felt that they "understood" things which probably *can't* be understood. But I honestly think in retrospect that he was dealing with an "easy audience." No one really ever *questioned* any of the things he said. They came out as pronouncements of Truth, and they were accepted by an unquestioning audience *as* Truth. If Maharishi had been speaking to a university audience, people would have said, "Now wait a minute... you're saying that when a person dies in CC there is no more possibility for further evolution, that they just become 'the drop merging with the ocean.' Well first, *how* do you claim to know this. Second, *how* do you balance this claim with others from your very own tradition who disagree with you?" And so on. But that never happened in the TMO because Maharishi brought with him not only a set of old metaphors that had been bought as Truth by Indians for centuries, he brought with him the tradition of *never question- ing the source*. He established an environment in which it was largely unthinkable to ever doubt a word that came out of his (the teacher's) mouth. He established an environment in which doubting anything said by the teacher was the highest sin, and punish- able by excommunication. This is just NOT the kind of environment in which intellectual discrimination is encouraged and taught. It's an environment in which blind faith in the teacher is encouraged and taught. And the bottom line, the *result* of all of this? Decades later die-hard TMers *still* cannot conceive of the things he said as anything but Truth. They trot his pronouncements out in arguments as if they should "settle things" for other people the way they did for them the first time they heard them and automatically considered them Truth. And they tend to consider him an excellent teacher, in most cases without ever having worked with another one. I have higher standards where teachers are concerned. I like the ones who have *no problem* with their students questioning the things they say. I like the ones who actually encourage students *to* doubt the things they say, and to deeply analyze them to see if they really "ring true" to them intellectually. Most important, I like teachers who never fail to point out that anything they say is at best only *partially* true. That is, it can be considered true or Truth *only* from one state of consciousness or attention. Shift to another, and it is no longer true. I've met and interacted with teachers who do this, and the difference *in the students* is profound. They tend not to glom onto the things that the teacher says as indisputable Truth, and true in all situations and from all perspectives or POVs or states of conscious- ness. They treat all statements from their teachers as "possibly true from one POV, and at one point in time, but nothing more than that." I think that's a healthier kind of intellectual discrimination, and a healthier form of spiritual teaching. YMMV.
