--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, turquoiseb <no_reply@...> wrote: > > --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "wayback71" <wayback71@> wrote: > > > > Barry, when you saw Lenz levite > > 1. had you heard before that he did this sort of thing? > > No. Not the first time I saw him/it.
Susan, I'd like to do what I forgot to do when first replying, and thank you for the way in which you asked your questions. That is, curious and more than a little skeptical, but not hostile. That is rare, and why I don't talk about this stuff here very much, and why I won't talk about it again for a while after this post. >From my point of view, the important thing about my first post on this subject yesterday was the last sentence: "Lemme tell you, that is a great deal harder to live with than those who think that witnessing levitation would be a Good Thing That Would Make Their Incarnation might think." THAT is really the bottom line. THAT, if there was one, was the benefit of having witnessed extraordinary things. NOT the having done it, but the having to *live with* having done it. What do you DO with having experienced something that you and everyone around you knows could not have happened, if the world is "really" as it has been described to us all our lives? Do you talk about it? Do you try to convince others that it was real, and tell them what you think it "meant?" Good luck with that. :-) You CAN'T ever convince someone who hasn't seen or experienced something like this that it was real. Some people actually are so freaked out by what they realize are the implications of having seen something like this that they try to make the experience GO AWAY. For example, I once took an ex-girlfriend, a die-hard TMer who still is one to this day, to see Rama. I didn't push it on her, because I knew what a stick-up-her-butt TM TB she was, but she asked, so I brought her along to a public talk. At one point during one of the meditations, she, sitting right beside me, opened her eyes and looked at Rama and said "Oh my God!" I opened my eyes and looked at her and she was quivering, shaking. I looked up at Rama and sure enough, he was hovering about a foot above the sofa he had been sitting on. I whispered to her, "What are you seeing?" She said, "He is levitating." She stared at him for some minutes, clearly somewhat shaken by the experience, and then closed her eyes again and meditated. After the talk, I asked her about it and she said, "Yes, there is no question about it...he was levitating. Not bouncing, levitating." Two days later I ran into her, and she denied ever having said that, or ever having seen it. Some weeks later I heard through the gravevine that she now denied ever having gone to see Rama in the first place, because that would have been perceived as Off The Program. THIS is the thing that people who think "All we'd have to do to get everyone to sign up to learn TM is to demonstrate real flying" don't understand. They really don't get the power of denial, and of clinging to what they've been told about the world and how it works, even *in the face of their own experience to the contrary*. That is one of the things that appealed to me about the Carlos Castaneda books. I discovered them *after* having seen many of the extraordinary things he wrote about, in the desert with Rama. What resonated with me, however, is that Carlos was honest about what seeing these things *put him through*. He was sitting there shaking in his boots during many of these experiences, because they HAD just rocked his world, and changed his perception of that world in ways that -- if he was honest with himself about having seen what he just saw -- he could never go back to his previous way of seeing it. He had been changed forever by the experience. Many people don't WANT to be changed forever. They may claim that they do, but that's a pile of crap. They want enlightenment to be as it was described to them by MMY, a slow and linear process, in which waking state is followed by CC and then CC is followed by GC and all of these transitions are easy and don't really rock your world all that much. That is not my experience of how such things often happen. IMO, the different states of consciousness are not linear, they are coexistent and congruent, ALL of them happening to ALL of us at once, simultaneously. We just focus on and get attached to one of them at a time, that's all. I've bounced in and out of various of Maharishi's "Seven states of consciousness" for years, and not one of them was IMO any "better" than another, or all that different from one another. It was more like turning the dial on a TV and choosing to listen to and watch a different show, that's all. And it was the SAME show, only totally different because you'd changed the subjective point of view from which you were watching it. But now imagine having experiences of CC or GC or UC and trying to tell someone who has never experienced them about them. Should they believe you? Of course not. You're describing something they've never experienced. It's much easier to believe that you're just a nut job, or touting your own self importance. Now take that and square it or cube it. THAT is what talking about having witnessed siddhis is like. WHY should anyone believe you? There is simply no reason that they should. As a result, many simply DON'T talk about them. They keep their mouths shut like many of my former Rama student friends, and don't talk about them at all. Or, like my ex-girlfriend, they glom onto "explanations" for what they saw and experienced that makes it seem as if they never really *did* see and experience it. This is just so much EASIER than saying, "I really saw it." I'm in the "I really saw it" camp. I will NOT take the "easy out" and claim that I didn't just because people won't believe me, or glom onto easy "explanations" of how I never "really" saw what I saw and experienced what I did. I *DID* see this shit. I *DID* experience the things I experienced. Admitting that makes me a pariah to many, especially if along their chosen path they have never had similar experiences. Admitting that makes me appear to be a fool, or crazy, or trying to puff myself up and appear more important. You will have to forgive me if I suggest that people who feel that way go fuck themselves. I'm just doing what feels to me to be the only honest thing I can do -- *admit* to what I saw and experienced, but at the same time *admit* that I don't understand it, that I have no explanation for it, and that I don't have the faintest clue about what any of it "means." I just describe my experiences, and allow people to make of them what they will. That's what I did in Road Trip Mind, and that's what I'm doing in these posts.
