---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <turquoiseb@...> wrote :
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." Most things are embarrassing when you look back at yourself 25 or 35 years ago. I mean, just the hairstyles and fashion alone is enough to make anyone wince. Now couple that with our youth and our idealism and combine that with something we were involved in and it is usually cringe-worthy. But not because it was the wrong thing at the wrong time necessarily but because over time we tend to view our old selves as uninformed, naive and rather silly. Lighten up, bawee. It was a different time and a different place but it was part of who we were in our youth. I've left it behind for the most part and the parts I have brought forward still enrich me.
