--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "Buck" <dhamiltony2k5@...> wrote: > > May the Force be with you, in spite of these TM-haters. Hagelin with the DLF > are driving a spiritual counter-attack right through this breech in these > demographic numbers in both youth as well as boomers identifying as > 'spiritual' and/or 'not religious'. David Lynch and Hagelin are culturally > timely, significant and revolutionary in trend. May you live in interesting > times. The fomenting anti-meditation haters are nothing better than angry > bush-whacking counter-revolutionaries to the larger spiritual change > happening. > -Buck in the Dome
Just who are you referring to here Buck? Most people who have a fixation in some ideology mechanically tend to think whatever they are doing is 'the best'. Most of the people on this forum, in spite of this, are practicing some form of meditation, including me (TM). That is, the lives of the people on this forum have some kind of spiritual arc regardless how one construes them. There is an historical shift going on. More people are falling away from organised religion. The atheist group is rather strong in Europe, at about 18% and it is thought about 50% of Europe is essentially not affiliated. In the US about 16% are unaffiliated with agnostics being 2.4% and atheists 1.6% as part of that group. In the United Kingdom, about 23% are unaffiliated thought some recent studies indicate that the unaffiliated/no religion group is now surpassing Christians in number. The trend is away from people believing the universe is created/run by an intentional agent and moving in the direction of the universe having some kind of embedded essence, or not having any such creator or essence at all. To my mind, spiritual experiences ultimately have nothing to do with any particular ideology or explanation of reality, they seem to be an aspect of the human condition, and anybody can have them regardless of what in the meantime they happen to believe or think is real. All spiritual experiences need are the proper triggers to set them off, and this can be done in spiritual, religious, and secular settings. As long as people are sufficiently intelligent, and sufficiently grounded in a sense of reality that allows some variation in belief in others, it really does not matter so much and people can move along their spiritual arc. The problem is polarisation of belief, which one sees between religions and political parties. When belief is polarised one is disconnected from reality and lives entirely in the world of one's own imagination. Why do we have this desire to suppress the expression of certain kinds of information in others? Do we have some kind of inner dictator that wants to enslave the world and make it our own, responsive to our beck and call? To put this in perspective, this seems to me to be the difference between a spontaneous humbleness in the face of the awesomeness of the world, in its mystery, in its being a self-contained process, a single functioning that in its own essence it is the world and the world's control. This is opposed to ego, where in that point value of individuality, we want to control the world but from the opposite pole, so to speak, controlling the world from a single point of view. This is like the tail wagging the dog. And when one does this from that individual point, you have to know which end of the dog you are on, which is why others may find your presence something they would rather do without. In another post, Judy mentioned studying the sociology of religion, a subject I am hardly familiar with. I was wondering if in those readings she came across any sociological explanations for this behaviour wherein an individual or group wishes to suppress others expressing a counter view. Buck often talks with what I would call a religious style of speech, basically substituting 'unified field' for 'god', and from time to time makes these suggestions for limiting free speech. He wants to get rid of the TM-haters, as if he hates TM-haters, and thus is a hater himself. Thus he becomes just like those he would have removed.
