--- In [email protected], turquoiseb <no_reply@...> wrote: > > --- In [email protected], Mark Landau <m@...> wrote: > > > > Is there anyone here who spent long and equal time with > > M and Rama? > > Besides me, you mean. 14 years each. > > > I have one friend who felt that Rama's darshan blew M's away. > > I would have to agree.
Mark, I was rushing somewhere earlier, thus the brevity of my reply. I'll try to do more justice to a reply in this post, since you have brought up the guy's name a couple of times and seem honestly curious. To put my view in some perspective, I never spent any- where near the time you did in close proximity to MMY, but I did get to meet and work with him "close up" many times during the period when I was a TM State Coordinator and was Stan Crowe's second-in-command in the Western Regional Office. I usually don't talk all that much about Rama here, but it's been on my mind lately because I find myself part of a new online forum among 90+ former Rama students, pretty much the most contact I've had with any of them since 1996. So it's been on my mind. Pretty much everything I have to say about him is in a book I wrote about my time with him called Road Trip Mind. The price is right, if you're curious -- it's online, free, at: http://www.ramalila.net/RoadTripMind/index.html If you choose to peruse it, please bear in mind that I am held in pretty much the same regard by Rama True Believers as you might be by TM True Believers. I bailed from his study a couple of years before he offed himself, and even though I carried through on my promise to him to write a book about my time with him, it is far from the Party Line. I struggled long and hard trying to come up with some way that I could write about him and yet remain true to myself. If it has any value in the canon of "books about spiritual teachers," that value is probably that it's a "seeker's tale," not another tale about another perfect teacher. I tried my best to be honest in it, and tell the story *as I saw it*. You can find books about him by more...uh... serious students at this link: http://www.ramalila.net/LetDrLenzsStudentsBooksTeach/index.html One of the reasons I'm replying is to second the comments of many on this forum. I love the stories you tell, and the way you tell them. There is a refreshing honesty there that is sadly missing from many attempts to tell the story of that most confusing of beings, a Supposedly Enlightened Teacher. One of the things Rama once said was that in his opinion there could never be any such thing as *the* definitive book about any spiritual teacher. He felt that the only thing that could do any of them justice was 20 to 30 books, all written by different people and told from their per- spective, and all of them mutually contradictory. I feel the same way about any attempt to tell Maharishi's story. I'd love to see your attempt added to the canon. If not for publication, in posts here or on a blog of some sort. I think you have a unique voice, and that your view of what it was like to spend time with him would do much to "fill in the gaps" of the story of a complex individual. On the job front, I second the advice here to NOT put your photo on your resume. In Europe that is standard, but that is Europe. I've been an HR person in the past, and I know that many US companies have a rule that if they receive a resume containing a photo it goes straight into the trash, unread. The reason is that they cannot take the chance of being accused of "racial profiling" in their hiring practices. I also second the notion of "networking," and talking to people you worked with in your former company, and any contacts you developed outside the company as part of doing your job. Good luck, on all fronts. Turq (Barry Wright)
