on 8/30/05 9:49 AM, akasha_108 at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
> Rick said he would post relevant letters to the editor.
>
> Rick, how are you doing this? Scanning the print version? Or do you
> have a link for the Letters to the Editors?
Erik Gable sent me his "Tale of Two Gurus" article as a text file. The last
two letters I posted, I typed. There's a scanner with OCR software I can use
at a business I sometimes work at in town, but I wasn't going there, so I
typed them. I sent my letter to Erik this morning. Here's how it ended up.
Apologies to any whose suggestions I didn't incorporate.
--------
Intelligent, sensible meditators at MUM and around town (and there are many)
must have cringed when recent letters by Jon Kelly Kirkpatrick ("Respecting
Maharishi requires absolute belief") and Lawrence Topliffe ("Meditators
aren't deluded - nonbelievers are") were published. With spokesmen like
these, who needs critics? I'm afraid these fundamentalist rants exemplified
points I made in Erik Gable's earlier article (A Tale of Two Gurus). If I
could rephrase what I was quoted as saying, it would be to say that some in
the TM Movement have degenerated into a cult-like mentality, or have yet to
grow out of it. Every organization is comprised of a variety of people, and
I apologize for seeming to imply that this mentality characterizes the
entire TM movement.
There are people in every religious, spiritual, and political group who
believe that their particular teacher or perspective is superior to all
others. In some groups, this may be a subtle bias held by a minority. In
others, it is official doctrine.
Kirkpatrick's contention that Maharishi alone possesses "Total Knowledge"
misrepresented Maharishi's teaching, as I understand it. Maharishi never
described total knowledge as something that anyone may possess exclusively,
but rather as the experience and understanding of the most fundamental level
of nature's functioning – a universal, timeless reality that may be
discovered in the core of one's being, and that many people in different
cultures and traditions throughout history have experienced as a living
reality, often contemporaneously. Nor did Maharishi ever advocate belief,
either in himself or in anything he taught. For the most part, at least in
the earlier years of his teaching, he emphasized scientific and experiential
verification.
On that note, Topliffe's letter contained several examples of unscientific
exaggeration. For instance, there may have been some study in which TM was
shown to reduce occurrences of some illness by 90%, but on the whole, its
health benefits are much less dramatic, and it was disingenuous to imply
otherwise. Also, contrary to Topliffe's suggestion that yogic flyers really
are levitating, after nearly 30 years of practice, there are no documented
accounts in the TM movement of anyone actually floating in the air‑and yogic
flyers are well aware that this is the case.
Unsubstantiated beliefs are not a stable foundation for life, because they
constantly clash with reality. This leads to a defensive, "us vs. them"
mentality that is fundamental to all political, ethnic and religious strife.
According to the ancient Chinese text, the I Ching, "The healthy mind
challenges its own assumptions." Examining one's assumptions and beliefs and
revising or discarding them if necessary may not always be comfortable in
the short run, but it results in a harmonious, secure, and far richer life.
As Bertrand Russell put it, "What is wanted is not the will to believe, but
the wish to find out, which is the exact opposite." Do we know absolutely
that our beliefs are true, or do we hold them because our parents, our
culture, our politicians, or our spiritual leaders told us we should? It
might be liberating to step back and take a fresh look. So what if most of
our certainties become mysteries. Ironically, this makes one more secure –
not less – because one has less to defend. A childlike sense of wonder is
much more fascinating than dogmatism. And as Jesus said, it's a prerequisite
to entering the Kingdom of Heaven.
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