Those are excellent points. The ME is the reason behind the yagya program as
well, as supposedly the effect of yagya enhances or is similar to ME so that
world peace can be achieved by yagya (ignoring that fact that India itself is a
rather rough place to live for most of its population even tho one can
supposedly give a few rupees to a priest to do yagya for you and get you all
the stuff you want from the gods) - So create the non-existent ME and it proves
to be useful to create other money generating enterprises as well.
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.
