Dr. Pete, who commented on this video on Facebook today (where I saw it, because he's a FB Friend of mine), seems to agree more with my characterization of these people as brainwashed than he agrees with yours. Sure, they were young, idealistic, and inspired. They were *also* brainwashed, repeating the exact phrases they'd been taught to repeat verbatim, all without having ever seen -- or even *asked for* -- any evidence that they were true.
I'm gonna stick with "brainwashed" and "cultists." One of the reasons I like Dr. Pete is that he has no problem describing his own time with TM the same way and admitting that he was part of a cult. But then he's a shrink...in retrospect probably the only way he *can* justify having been so stupid as to believe the things we believed back then is to point out the systematic, decades-long indoctrination that led to us believing them. Since what he wrote is in public view on FB, I guess I can pass along one of his other comments that I found perceptive: "I helped produce several videos for various MIU functions in the 1980's and it was always a problem to get people to talk about their experiences in their own words rather than in TM jargon. It was the worst with people 'higher-up' in the movement. I interviewed one person, who is in this video too, who kept on saying that he experienced the 'home of all the laws of nature' when he meditated. I asked him, off-camera, if he actually had this experience or if this was a concept he had from MMY. He couldn't distinguish between the two which was rather shocking." Another former FFLer who is actually seen in the video describes it in the comments thusly: "How embarrassing. Now I see why TM lost its popularity and the university changed its name." ________________________________ From: feste37 <no_re...@yahoogroups.com> To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com Sent: Thursday, September 4, 2014 1:43 PM Subject: [FairfieldLife] Re: MIU Promo Video 1981 No, not brainwashed. Young, idealistic, enthusiastic, inspired. I was there in 1981, and it was a good place to be. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <turquoiseb@...> wrote : The shock is not how incredibly brainwashed these people are as they parrot buzzphrases and display absolutely no individuality whatsoever. The shock is that 34 years later people still think like this and talk like this, some of them here on this very forum. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bteLrKEfj3g&feature=share
