---In [email protected], <[email protected]> wrote :
Thanks for being "a little sad" for me, Turq. I'm honored to have a place in your emotions, if only a small one. I said I was pleased to have been associated with it. I didn't say that my views hadn't changed since those long-off days. Ahhh!! CD for the turq. CD Alert, CD Alert!! But it was all very valuable at the time. It was part of a long journey, and I always honor the inns in which I have stayed for a while. ---In [email protected], <turquoiseb@...> wrote : 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. 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. 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. 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. ---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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bteLrKEfj3g&feature=share
