---In [email protected], <turquoiseb@...> wrote :
From: TurquoiseBee <turquoiseb@...> To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> Sent: Wednesday, April 9, 2014 10:57 AM Subject: Re: [FairfieldLife] Re: The Maharishi Murderer From: salyavin808 <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Wednesday, April 9, 2014 9:45 AM Subject: Re: [FairfieldLife] Re: The Maharishi Murderer The trouble with TM I think, is all the BS you get taught about it. Maybe it's different now but in my day TM was seen as the cure for everything, the simple mechanics of stress release (claimed) on the charts seemed to imply that it was just a matter of time before the deep relaxation cured you of all and any problems you have accrued in life. This is really the crux of the issue. It's the combination of three myths that have been taught to TMers consistently since they were instructed. The first is "TM is 100% life-supporting and has no possible negative side effects," and the second is "TM is all you need...it will solve all problems you could possibly have," and the third is "Something good is happening," delivered as a rote response to anything that seems to contradict the first two. The issue with Shuvender Sem, as even Lawson admitted yesterday, is that *no one noticed he was crazy*. But the REASON no one noticed is that he was just one more crazy person in a closed environment full of other crazy people. Anyone who has ever spent any time in one of these closed all-TM-all-the-time environments knows what I'm talking about -- almost everyone around you is a mass of neuroses and weirdness, with a few touches of psychosis "on the side." And all of this is written off as "Something good is happening," and "just unstressing." What else, after all, accounts for people considering *obviously* crazy people like Robin Carlsen not only "normal," but exemplary, and as "role models" to be envied and followed? What else accounts for people admiring and envying the many people who Rick interviews, many of whom normal people on the street would consider at the least spaced out and dissociative, and at worst poster children for Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Closed TM environments are a ZOO of craziness, characterized by almost everyone in them thinking that they're "normal," or even "more evolved" than other people. OF COURSE no one noticed that Shuvender Sem was off his meds and off the wall. Just to follow up and explain a bit more, since I have the time this sunny morning, I am not trying to make a case that *all* TMers are crazier than most people. I'm sure there are many of them who just practiced TM and stayed the fuck away from the TMO and any of its closed environments who are pretty normal. It's the ones who gravitated to the "closed environments," the "echo chambers" in which they rarely speak to anyone who isn't a fellow TMer, who just as rarely even see them, and who spend hours a day "doing program" and listening to hours upon hours of indoctrination tapes telling them what and how to think who are abnormal. And the main reason is that they spend all of their time doing all of these abnormal things *while being told that they're SUPERIOR and 'more highly evolved* than the people they never interact with. They really come to believe that the abnormalities they see around them on a daily basis ARE normal. I can't be bothered to read your post further than this, but one comment about your paragraph above would be what came first - the proverbial chicken or the egg? Those who felt it necessary to immerse oneself in courses like Mother Divine or whatever the male equivalent of that was (Father Almighty, maybe?) were probably needing a few screws tightened to start with. I mean, what would possibly compel someone with balance in their heads or their lives to spend that much time cloistered away meditating and listening to Rig Veda or engaging other such riveting activities? They really believe, for example, that everyone probably spends as much money on nostrums and healers as they do, and that they spend as much time thinking about and worrying about their own health as the TMers around them in these closed environments do. They really believe that no one would think badly of them for hiding out during full eclipses and being afraid to enter buildings from the "wrong" direction. They really believe that bouncing on their butts in an obvious placebo reaction to thinking English-language phrases about flying means that they're going to really fly someday. And every day they see no one around them but people who seem to believe the same crazy things. Also, on another level, look at the people within the closed TM environments who have been presented to them over the years as "role models," people to be revered and respected and who they should endeavor to be like. People like the hideously obese, probably close-to-three-hundred-pound whale who gives lectures about "perfect health" without realizing the irony. People like the guy who wears robes and a crown and is referred to as their "king" and who was presented to them by Maharishi for years as the very personification of celibate wonderfulness, but who all along had a secret wife and family that even his best friends never knew about. People like the guy who chain-smokes and chain-gulps coffee and who makes movies that celebrate women being degraded talking about how TM is going to cure young people of their ills and mental problems and better prepare them to grow up to be solid citizens. This is a veritable *incubator* of cognitive dissonance. Someone walking into such an environment for the first time might notice how hypocritical and oblivious to reality many of its inhabitants are, but someone who has been there day in and day out for *years*, all while fucking with their brains by doing "long rounding?" OF COURSE people in TM closed environments are weird. And OF COURSE they deny it and pretend it isn't true, because they prefer to believe what they were told about themselves rather than what they'd see if they took a long, hard look in the mirror, or inside their own minds. So OF COURSE no one noticed that Shuvender Sem was having a schizophrenic break...he was just another crazy fish in the fishbowl. And OF COURSE no one thinks too hard about him murdering someone at the very epicenter of the ME Invincible Woo Woo that is supposed to make such things possible. That just produces too much cognitive dissonance to ponder, or to even think about. Better to fall back on the old standards, and continue to portray anyone who *does* think about such things and even <spit> talk about them publicly as misfits or people with a vendetta.
