---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <fleetwood_macncheese@...> wrote :
Yes, 1978 was The Year Of Invincibility, according to Maharishi, just so you recognize that your fresh insights are tracking an event that is 36 years old. Anyway, that was my first year working for the TMO. I was 24 years old, single, and had basically no skills. I took Maharishi at his word, and decided to become invincible, or as I would prefer ro call it, "a lamp that does not flicker in a windless place". Since then, I have been happily married, raised my daughter to be a wonderful and beautiful human being, had a challenging and rewarding career as a training manager/consultant for twenty plus years, and am now on the brink of living in a place where I can dedicate myself to continuing my art, composing, musical skills, and other creative pursuits, in an nurturing, inspiring, and natural environment. It is a wonderful thing, to realize the fullness of each of Maharishi's expressions, really dig into each one, to find its completeness, and how that translates into daily life. Invincibility, indeed. Thanks for the reminder. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <turquoiseb@...> wrote : Having written recently about the buzzword I consider most debilitating in the TMO lexicon (the U word -- "unstressing"), I thought I'd take advantage of this Day Off to rap about the most embarrassing TMO buzzword. I don't see this particular buzzword as capable of doing as much long-term damage to students as the U word, but that's partly because it *is* so embarrassing. Who, after all, is going to take seriously the claim that the practice of TM or the group practice of the TMSP is going to make a person, a town, or a nation "invincible?" WTF, right? I mean, how many invincible people have you encountered, either in your life or in history? Outside of the world of myths and fairy tales and comic books, that is. Even the Vedic gods and goddesses weren't invincible -- the gods got snorfed as often as anyone else in those myths and fairy tales, and *according to scripture* the goddesses certainly weren't invincible when it came to sexual harassment, rape, kidnapping, and even murder. So why on earth did Maharishi come up with this particular buzzword, and fall in love with it so much that he based much of his marketing plan on it? This just doesn't compute unless he completely misunderstood the meaning of the word. Did he really believe that career soldiers were going to believe it when he told them that bouncing on their butts was gonna make their troops invincible? Did he not understand that national leaders were going to *laugh* at the people who tried to extort money from them using that buzzword? Did he really not get that anyone who *did* know the meaning of the word was going to be turned off, not turned on? As someone who follows the machinations of the world's cults, the I word strikes me as one that could only develop and flourish IN a cult. You really have to have been brainwashed for some time, and effectively, to consider the possibility of becoming "invincible" for more than a few seconds. Most people would hear the word "invincible" and think, "Invincible. Yeah, that would be cool. Stop bullets with my bare hands, that sorta thing. Naaah. I'd rather be rich." But I guess Maharishi had already used up the "wealth-building" buzzword for SV houses, so he was stuck with "invincible" when pitching his other products. I suspect that some here might bristle at this rap, and feel somewhat reactive at being called on rolling over and just accepting such a ridiculous buzzword and sales pitch as "invincible" for as long as they did. I would certainly be embarrassed by this if I had still been part of the TMO when it was coined, and had reacted to it with anything but uncontrollable laughter. But instead of lashing out at me for having brought it up, might I suggest to anyone who feels a little bristly that their time might be better spent presenting some of the arguments FOR "invincibility" being something that TM or the TMSP could *possibly* deliver. A few examples of these practices having actually created measurable examples of invincibility wouldn't hurt, either. Silly bawee. Read history. Learn something. Don't you realize how many armies, how many soldiers were convinced by their leaders that they were invincible? The brainwashing has been going on for centuries. The belief in one's invincibility is an aspect of being willing to go to war, to fight, to take on the enemy that virtually animated millions of soldiers throughout the ages. This old chestnut of claiming your "followers" to be invincible in order to get them to take action in a certain context is as old as human beings themselves. Convince someone they are acting according to God's will or in the service of some sort of "right", tell them they are fighting on the "good" side and thus "nature" will support them against some inferior or negative "foe" and you've done what hundreds before you have done before. Now go find something interesting to write about, something original that we don't already know.
