--- In [email protected], "wayback71" <wayback71@...> wrote: > > --- In [email protected], turquoiseb <no_reply@> wrote: > > > > My favorite such moment, just as a suddenly-triggered- > > memory aside, took place in Amsterdam. Me and a bunch of > > other guys had gone there to teach meditation, for free. > > The idea was that we would go and offer free courses in > > meditation, see who came, and then after a few months > > he'd come over and give a big public talk. > > > > So, having the liberty to do so, I went over to Amsterdam > > for a few weeks, planning to spend the first week teach- > > ing before he arrived for his talk and spend the two weeks > > afterwards teaching some more. As it turned out, other > > students had the same idea about the "week before," and > > they wanted to teach, too. I graciously stepped aside and > > allowed them to do so, because I knew that I'd still be > > in Amsterdam, and thus able to do some teaching, for a > > couple of weeks after they left. > > > > This left me with not a whole fucking lot to do there for > > that first week but wander around and get to know Amsterdam. > > Good Thing or Big Mistake for me karmically. My life has > > never been the same since. > > > > Anyway, the talk around the "teaching apartment," after the > > students had gone home, was often -- among this group of > > pseudo-celibate guys -- "Who is going to be the first to > > hit the Red Light District?" I listened to their raps about > > this but to tell the truth wasn't all that interested because > > I got over my Red Light District fetish when I was 15. I > > waited until they'd finished and then said, "The real ques- > > tion is who is going to be the first person to hit the > > coffeehouses and smoke some Amsterweed?" > > > > Dead silence. You could have heard a flea fart. :-) > > > > But then I raised my hand, and broke the silence. Everybody > > laughed, because they thought I was making a joke. > > > > But that's exactly what I did. The next day I found a cool > > coffeehouse, bought a big fuckin' joint of a brand of > > Amsterweed called -- no shit -- Laughing Buddha, and > > inhaled my first puff of that herb since the late Sixties. > > > > And it was good. :-) > > > > I thoroughly enjoyed having my assemblage point shifted > > in a major way by the improvements that the Dutch had made > > to lowly marijuana. :-) > > > > The point, and the relevance to the above stories about > > running into your spiritual teacher after or during a cool > > period of time for you subjectively, is that after the week > > was up I wound up sitting across a table from Rama at the > > five-star hotel he was staying at. It was just me, one > > other student, and Rama. > > > > As you might imagine, I was sitting there thinking, "What > > if he can tell that I've been toking up every night? What > > will he say? What will he do?" > > > > He looked at me, not having seem me for a few weeks, and > > said, "This place agrees with you. I haven't seen you > > this happy and this full of light in years." > > > > Go figure. Go fuckin' figure. > > I know. We were so young then that we did not have the > simple wisdom to ask the obvious questions, like what > do you make of my current experiences (to MMY), or how > can this be if I have been smoking dope for the past > week? And we were settled into a mode of thinking that > shied away from being so direct and even thinking like > that (at least I was) and we were young and respecting > our older revered teachers.
That was certainly part of it. Thanks again for "getting" what I was getting at in relating this story. Part of it was indeed that reluctance to ask the dude hard questions like, "Now wait a minute...I know you have no hard and fast rules about doing drugs, but how can you reconcile what you just said to me with what you've said before about grass lowering one's state of attention?" As you say, I was reluctant to get into that level of detail with him, so I didn't broach the subject at the time (the day he was to give his talk). As it turned out, given the experience at the talk itself, and his reaction to it, which triggered my heavy doubts about him and whether I should continue studying with him, I didn't broach the subject later, either. The reception of the students we had invited to his talk was...uh...less than favorable. They not only didn't like him, some of them hated him. >From his side, he took this very personally and started (from my point of view) "acting out" his frustration with them during the talk itself. Imagine some of the ways Jim Flanegin acted out on this forum when people didn't respond to his announced enlight- enmentitudeness the way he wanted them to, squared. :-) He cancelled the entire Amsterdam teaching experi- ment and "called off the game," took his ball and went home, Some of the things he said about the experience soured me forever on him and left me wondering more about *him* than the Dutch folks who had rejected him. He saw absolutely no fault from his side, and I did. He'd rolled into town like a Dick On Wheels, wearing his $2000 Kenzo suit and Versace tie, and expected them to react to that level of presentation from a spiritual teacher the way a New Yorker might. Didn't happen. They reacted to him the way they might have to Donald Trump, and honestly I sided with them. And this was (to my knowledge) *before* he'd gotten him- self addicted to Valium, and had begun to suffere its debilitating effects. In retrospect this trip to Amsterdam triggered my own eventual "walking away" from him as a teacher. > I heard from others at the time that Rama was able to > do these incredible things witnessed by hundreds, not > just a few. How in the world do you explain that and > then have him say what he did to you? Yeah, go figure > sums it up. That sums it up, period. Yes, he could demonstrate siddhis and the "broadcasting states of consciousness" stuff I talked about earlier to large groups of people. He even did so in Amsterdam, but because the Dutch are to some extent a superficial people who tend to stop listening and stop being receptive if a teacher's image doesn't match their preconceived notions of what it "should" be, very few noticed. In retrospect, the thing I value most from the time I spent with him is exactly this sense of cognitive dis- sonance with regard to my subjective experiences. As I said to someone in another thread this week, if *you* were in a room with someone and saw them lift their butts off of the sofa they were sitting on and levitate, *not only* how could you ever convince anyone else that you experienced this, but how could you be certain *yourself* that you had experienced it? The "natural tendency," when dealing with these kinds of extraordinary experiences in hindsight, is to try to find some way to "rationalize them away," so that you can pretend you didn't really experience what you experienced. I've had my go at that over the years since, but it never really worked for me. I *did* experience what I experienced. So, as you say, did hundreds of other people sitting in the same rooms with me, or in the desert. Each of us was -- and is -- in the same position. We can NEVER convince anyone else that what we experienced subjectively really happened. But it happened for US. So what do you DO with that? I have chosen to accept these experiences as real, in the sense that not only did I experience them, when they were going on they had the subjective "feel" of exper- iences that were not only real but "more real" than many others during my lifetime. I can to this day "re-run" some of these experiences in my mind and "re-access" the states of attention I accessed when they were first happening. Again, go figure. So to me it's all still a mystery. And I'm fine with that. I no longer feel a need to "explain" all of the odd and wonderful things that happened around Rama, no more than I feel the need to defend or justify some of the less wonderful things that happened. He was a "mixed bag," as was Maharishi. The experience of studying with him had its ups and its downs, and I learned from both cycles of the roller coaster ride. In retrospect it was a real "E-ticket ride" and I wouldn't trade it for anything.
