---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <awoelflebater@...> wrote :
---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <noozguru@...> wrote : On 05/24/2014 06:41 PM, awoelflebater@... mailto:awoelflebater@... [FairfieldLife] wrote: ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com mailto:FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <steve.sundur@...> mailto:steve.sundur@... wrote : Michael, You just miss the point. I am no great TM defender. But you start with a misguided notion of what the practice of TM is capable of doing. And on that basis you make connections about what problems can be attributed to the practice of TM. There are many things I think are out of whack in regards the TMO culture, but I know, from experience, with my own 21 year old son, that this is a difficult period of ones life to navigate, with or without the practice of TM. And from my own difficult adolescence, the most the practice of TM was able to do for me was give me a few minutes of respite each day. I would wager, (or at least hope), that any parent within the TMO culture who felt they had a child at risk would take any necessary steps to address that risk. I knew the parents, or at least the father of the boy who committed suicide a few years ago, Daniel S. He did not live in any kind of fantasy world about TM. You make this silly statement that if my beliefs are so strong, I should consider working full time for the movement. To me that points out a blind spot in that you seem to have taken every claim made about TM at face value, never figuring in a discount that most people would naturally take. And when it fell short, you developed a vendetta. This has been my point all along. I don't think it is about taking the TM promises so literally - it is all so literal how MJ is 'reading' these claims and then presenting them as proof that TM doesn't work. It's almost as if he believes that those who practice TM are incapable of making a mistake or being sad or getting divorced. Come on. Get a grip. No one believes that just by learning a meditation technique that you are going to become super-human, infallible and perfect. And no one is buying the fact that because a meditator has decided to end their life that it completely invalidates the entire TM practice and condemns the Movement as being one big fraud. The world is never so black and white. But that was the promise, do you remember the Science of Being book? Apparently TM is better than psychiatry because it solves problems on the level of the all powerful unified field and not on the level of thoughts and emotions - which are obviously shallow in comparison. This is standard SCI thinking and TM teachers to this day will parrot it, championing TM over regular therapies. I think the trouble starts when people take Marshy and the TMO at their word and ignore their own emotions, it's easy to backtrack after a disaster and claim that it wasn't supposed to be taken seriously but people do. As we all know, it isn't better than other therapies so they should scrap the superiority complex and stop all this "invincibility" nonsense. MJ isn't reading these claims anymore than I was when I pointed out that someone going postal with an AK47 during a World Peace Assembly doesn't skew the results, it is the results. The drug doesn't work so they should change the marketing strategy to something a bit more realistic. It's not unreasonable to say it. Samskaras still will be there and play out even in enlightenment. Otherwise enlightened people would just be a blob doing nothing. Maharishi made a mistake giving the impression that enlightened people would be perfect when Indian philosophy says otherwise. Enlightened people just experience things from a different perspective. And just what is that supposed to mean? Is god still moving in mysterious ways? Your trouble is you want to have it all ways, he's the best teacher ever when he's right but when he's wrong it's because he has a different perspective? This is cognitive dissonance in all its unfortunate and glory. Exactly.
