From: TurquoiseBee <turquoi...@yahoo.com> To: "FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com" <FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com> Sent: Friday, April 4, 2014 10:45 AM Subject: Re: [FairfieldLife] Research Shows Group Meditation Can Reduce Crime Rates
The point I don't understand, Lawson, is WHY anyone would want to do "research" to validate or "prove" something as ludicrous as "We can affect other people and the world by bouncing around on our butts on slabs of foam." Please explain to me HOW anyone could develop enough of an attachment to such a dumbfuck idea as to want to "prove" it. It occurs to me that someone should provide a little history about the TM Sidhis for those who weren't around when they first came out. That is, in the beginning there was NONE of this "Maharishi Effect" crap or even the *concept* that we were "doing it for the world" or anything like that. The TMSP was marketed to us True Believers at the time as: 1) a way to master superpowers like levitation, and 2) a way to (supposedly) progress more quickly towards one's *own* enlightenment. In the beginning, during the early courses, reason #1 was the one emphasized in any sales spiels. As the courses progressed and NO ONE ever manifested any siddhis, then they shifted their sales pitch to emphasize #2. By this time I'd given up on the whole thing and bailed from the whole TM movement, and *at no point had anything ever been mentioned about the TMSP benefiting anyone other than the person practicing it*. The whole "Maharishi Effect" nonsense was invented later, after they had realized that not only the original reason #1 for practicing it was never going to happen, but that #2 wasn't going to ever happen, either. People had spent literally thousands of dollars learning to "fly" without flying, and had spent similar amounts learning to "become enlightened" without that ever happening, either. Many people were beginning to quit TM and walk away from the TM movement, *including* many who had learned the TMSP. So what they did was to invent two mechanisms to keep people hanging on, still chasing carrots at the end of the stick. The first was that the TMSP didn't "work" properly unless you were in a big roomful of people doing it with you. This was supposed to create a "herd" mentality and cause people to identify with the group, and of course it worked. The second was to invent the made-up "Maharishi Effect" and pretend that doing the TMSP was somehow benefiting other people, and the world. This worked, too, because it gave people a reason to keep practicing it, plus it made them feel self-important, because they were "saving the world." I just thought it was important to remind people of this, because some here like to pretend that the way the TMSP is currently marketed is how it always was. And they like to pretend that the idea of the ME was always present, and always part of the sales pitch. Neither is true.
