Edg sez: > > I stopped watching it about half way through. Edg, I hope you know that I'm not replying because you weren't a fan. I firmly believe that taste is in the eye of the beholder, and that you're more than entitled to yours. I wasn't much taken with it the first time I saw it, either. I'm replying because of what you said next:
> Thing is for me: if Thor comes to Earth, it changes > everything far more than the series' "lite" take on > that event.....let alone The Hulk et alia being exposed > to the masses in one stroke, and add to it aliens from > a worm hole. Here is where we disagree. And it's because to some limited extent I've been there, done that. A lot of people "raised up in" the TM movement and its utter lack of anything spectacular or miraculous or even interesting seem to believe that (to synthesize comments made on this and other TM-related forums) "If someone just demonstrated Yogic flying fer real -- real hovering- in-mid-air-the-way-a-brick-doesn't stuff -- it would Change The World." People would be so wowed out by such an event that it would change them forever, and the world would never be the same. I disagree. I've been in lecture halls in which the general public paid their $2 entry fee and came to a talk by a guy who then levitated onstage -- real hovering- in-mid-air-the-way-a-brick-doesn't stuff -- right in front of them. I invited one such non-pre-programmed guest (meaning that I never suggested *anything* she might experience, except an interesting meditation) to one of these talks in L.A. once. She was an ex of mine, but we were on friendly terms until that evening, even though I was distinctly Off The TM Program and she couldn't be more On The TM Program if she were sucking Maharishi's dick in secret and wearing saris and looking virginal in public. :-) I was sitting right beside her as she watched the guy do his thing. She's a bit of a Chatty Cathy, so we whis- pered to each other a lot during the talk. She kinda liked his rap, and his general talk-in-plain-people-talk approach. I think it appealed to her after years of having to speak Hindu-but-not-religious-because-TM-isn't-religious TM jargon. Then we meditated, and the guy invited newbs to either meditate with their eyes open, or open them occasionally to check out the room they were meditating in, and him up there onstage, if they felt like it. She did. Sitting next to her when she did this, I occasionally heard her gasp and say, "OMG, he's levitating!" Or "OMG, he just turned invisible!" Or "OMG, the whole room just turned gold!" And even the clincher, for an OTP TMer, "OMG, I'm having the best, deepest, and most profound meditation of my life, in the L.A. Convention Center." After the talk, she continued in that vein. Over coffee before she went home (she really was an ex, and I had no intentions about her, personally or cult-ily), she babbled on about what she had seen. I didn't bother to call her the next day, or for a few days, figuring she needed to "sit with" what she'd seen and experienced. When I saw her next, she denied having seen or felt ANYTHING extraordinary that night. I reminded her of what she'd said about seeing him levitating and turning invisible and having a great meditation that night, and she denied ever having said it. I have heard in the years since that she even denies *ever having gone to see him*. THAT is how far people who are heavily invested in their current world view will go to protect and preserve it. To this day, I don't know exactly *what* it was we saw in those lecture halls and out in the desert and on mountaintops, but there is no question that we saw it. Literally thousands of people had these experiences. Some accepted *that* they had had them -- whatever they were -- and "went public" with them. Others, like my ex, blotted them from their mind and their memory and above all from their oh-so-important public image, and claimed never to have had such experiences. THAT is how I think people on the street would react to the events of "The Avengers," and The Mighty Thor and The Hulk walking the same streets they walked. IMHO, 95% of them would have blotted out the memories of those events within a few days, just so their world view wouldn't be threatened and have to change.
