*From:* feste37 <[email protected]>
You're cherry-picking the comments. Have another look and you'll see
many positive ones. There was nothing sinister or cult-like in the
fact that the University provided an intellectual framework in which
students could have some understanding of their experiences. It was
helpful. It was useful. It was, dare I say it, enlightening. I'm
pleased to have been associated with it.
>
On 9/4/2014 8:16 AM, TurquoiseBee [email protected] [FairfieldLife]
wrote:
I'm happy for you.
But at the same time I'm a little sad that all these years on you've
developed so little discrimination that you're happy to remain a cultist.
>
/"An ad hominem is a general category of fallacies in which a claim or
argument is rejected on the basis of some irrelevant fact about the
author of or the person presenting the claim or argument."/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem
>
Most of my friends from the TM days figured out what Maharishi was
about and how he had suckered all of us into his cult back in the
mid-70s, before this video was even made. We can *understand*
believing this kind of idiotic cult stuff, because we were there and
we believed it, too. We were idiots.
>
Ad hominem is the second to last resort of someone who is losing a
debate and is unable to respond with legitimacy. The last resort, most
difficult for the ego, is to consider that he might be wrong.
>
What we *can't* understand is how someone could possibly *still*
believe it, all these decades later, and choose to *remain* idiots.
That's somewhat scary. There is simply no way we can identify with
anyone that weak-willed and weak-minded.
>
/Character assassination/ is a deliberate and sustained process that
aims to destroy the credibility and reputation of a person, institution,
social group, or nation. Agents of character assassinations employ a mix
of open and covert methods to achieve their goals, such as /raising
false accusations, planting and fostering rumors, and manipulating
information./
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_assassination
>
---In [email protected], <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."
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*From:* feste37 <[email protected]>
*To:* [email protected]
*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 [email protected], <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
