--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Duveyoung <no_reply@...> wrote: > > And all the folks I ever met in FF and the TMO sure seem > like they never changed. I never not once met someone -- > decades after teacher training say -- who was not immediately > recognizable as the same person. Anyone detect any changes > in any of the long timer leaders? Aren't they all at about > the same level of ass-hole-ish-ness as when you first knew > of them?
Good rap, Edg. As a commentary, once after years away from both TM and the TMO I happened to pass through Fairfield. Curious, I parked my car and spent a little time wandering around the town and the campus. This was a few years after I had started studying with the Rama guy, and although I had certainly felt subjective changes, I wondered if any of them would be evident to anyone I ran into who had known me previously. Alas, I didn't run into any of those people. Until I real- ized that I needed to mail a letter and didn't have a stamp, and went to the Post Office, as I remember the one either near or on campus. There was a long line, and while I was waiting I noticed a woman also waiting in line whom I had known back in L.A. and on various TM courses. I smiled, but she didn't seem to acknowledge it. We were in parallel lines, and thus arrived at the window at the same time, so I turned and said hello to her. She looked at me as if I were a complete stranger. We had slept together. [ Ann is free to insert one of her bitchy remarks about how less-than-memorable sex with me must have been, and she may well be correct. But the issue was genuinely not that she remembered me less than fondly, but that she didn't recognize me at all. ] I finally had to introduce myself, and at first she smiled and brightened and said, "Oh yes...Barry...my God, I didn't even recognize you." But then she paused, and her face darkened, and she said (I shit you not), "But wait...didn't you leave the Movement (it had a capital letter the way she said it)? Didn't you go Off The Program (three capital letters)?" I laughed and admitted both. She left hurriedly. She may have actually taken a bath when she got home to wash the Cooties off. :-) One of the differences I have noticed between some spiritual traditions and TM's is that in the former, people seem to visibly change, and often. In the TM movement, they don't. People may believe that they've changed on the inside, but it rarely seems to make it to the outside.
