---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <anartaxius@...> wrote :
My read folder Ann, contains certain posters who tend to not just post one liners or irrelevant comments. Edg is in the read post. Another criterion for this folder is a person does not post excessively. As you now have your own folder it's easy to find your messages. Barry is in the read folder. Putting you in that folder however is like putting protons and anti-protons together. Now that is funny, Xeno! I like it when you show a sense of humor, not to mention you are spot on! In the past Edg has made some rather interesting posts but infrequently. His great dissatisfaction with things TM only came to my awareness with this recent series of posts. Now I have been dissatisfied with many things the TMO does, but I always had a certain detachment from it all, for one thing, I had certain goals, I started TM at a later age than many here did, I was not enamoured of Maharishi, only if what he said was useful for me at a particular time was he important to me, and I had some rudimentary knowledge of other traditions so the stuff in the TM movement was something I had to collate with what went before, it did not replace what went before (that of course is a TMO no no). Gurus were tools for me. What I got from the tools related to my goals and everything else was on the outskirts of it all. This is probably a good thing. It appears some here got very involved with the superficial trappings of all the other add-ons and upsells that the Movement went on to try and sell to its "followers". For me, I started TM in 1970 at the age of 14, took SCI and decided it was "speaking" to me, attended MIU in 1975-1980 and learned the Siddhis at that time. Ran into Robin in 1982, returned to FF for a short time then proceeded to move around and follow his merry band for the next 3.5 years after which I was pretty confused about TM (we learned other Robin version TM advanced techniques which he had learned and passed on to us) so I pretty much wanted to let it all lay where I abandoned it when I realized that what I was involved in with him was evolving into something that was too crazy for me. In other words, I exited the TM Movement before all of the yagya, investment schemes, real estate projects and Vasta got up and really running. I think I must have been at MIU during part of the time Edg was there, but I tend not to remember people's names very well, and am kind of reclusive. I do not think I personally have met anyone on this forum except, briefly, Rick Archer, but who knows, I may have met more. Maharishi was useful for me when he was useful, but it was almost always by proxy. I only saw him, I think, three times in person. Noticing how the movement handled money, and that it always went one way, I was always careful to not give them any for projects. I spent more on a few residence courses in the mid-seventies than I ever spent on techniques, unless you count my time working in the movement as cash spent. But I was there for my own reasons, not for Maharishi. Ditto for me. Maharishi never held the sway or the thrill for me. I was meditating for very personal and self centered reasons. I was not out to save the world except in the small ways that I could contribute to it by being a deeper, better person. Devotion to a teacher was not my path; my was somewhat undefined, but it was based on a moderately clear experience before I learned any form of meditation, so that experience was my guiding star, the criterion for sorting what to pursue or not. It meant whatever enlightenment was about, it was a larger framework than gurus and organisations, that they were at best in the service or disservice of realisation, and could be sorted in or out on that basis of having an outline, so to speak, of the larger framework. I became a bit more interested in the "guru" when I felt that Robin was the closest thing to that that I was going to find that I could relate to. He was a Western guy who was smart, had read and experienced a lot. He was dynamic and fun and it was very, very exciting being around him. I loved the notion of good and evil and the drama of it all. Trying to find the ways in which one could counteract the negativity in myself and others was fascinating. It all fell apart eventually but it was a blast before it did. Sitting for long periods of time meditating, reading long passages in books and living aescetically just isn't my bag so I needed someone more like Lenz (did I just say that?) than Maharishi to keep me interested. If something did not work, I would tinker with it until it did or I dropped it. There are certain restrictions on what you can do when in the movement, but the main thing was not to turn over one's rational thinking and retain a curious, investigative mind, so one could sort through worth and worthless, and to avoid letting the movement get emotional hooks into you. So Maharishi's shortcomings, and the failings of his lackeys and the general twisted machinations seems to have affected me much less than Michael or Edg as far a negative impressions. I can relate. I understand what you're saying. Did you become a TM teacher? I find that many of those who hold the biggest grudges/resentments are those that invested the most time and energy. I think in MJ's case he was treated badly by arrogant and unimaginative assholes who ran the MIU staff and who were generally "in charge". Staff is worked hard at MIU and to feel like slaves and to be disregarded is enough to make one pretty mad after a while (is that a samskara peeking its head out, when you resent being bullied?). Negative and positive impressions were not where it was at for me. You might say I just stumbled through the whole thing and finally got back to where I began. So for me the final result was positive, but I was not sure of that until this last decade. As for now, I do not see the movement has anything to offer of value to me now. No, I think my TM/Movement days are long over. If enlightenment is real, it will make one independent of the means that got one there. Any enlightenment movement that fails to recognise this is doomed to become a dark cloud on the awareness of mankind. Transform and release is the process. But most movements only partially transform and do not release, they try to hold on to you. They cannot let you succeed because if you do, you will not need them for anything. So a corrupt spiritual movement wants you to believe certain things so you cannot reason, because you need to be able to reason to work your way through the veil of ignorance, for if you do that, you will see the beliefs are always false, if you go far enough. Here you are speaking from either some experience I have never had or you have come to this conclusion through observation. I have not been involved in any other movement other than following the drama that surrounded RWC and, after a while, it wasn't about enlightenment so much as engaging in the processes of recognizing and attempting to split the divine from the demonic. It was easy to get caught up in the lifestyle, the fully engaging lifestyle we all lived around him and with each other. It was the ultimate summer camp, the spiritual Las Vegas. A spiritual system is like a septic system, crap in one end, and reasonably clear water out the other. A corrupt spiritual system is like a clogged gold-plated sewer pipe. Looks nice on the outside, but inside... I avoid anything too structured in the way of spiritual systems. I tend to move with the pole star, turn where the wind pushes me and listen to the tree frogs. From: "awoelflebater@... [FairfieldLife]" <FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com> To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com Sent: Saturday, September 13, 2014 2:12 AM Subject: Re: [FairfieldLife] Re: Maharishi keeps his promises (was Why MMY's Bhagavad Gita will never be a classic. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <punditster@...> wrote : On 9/12/2014 12:37 PM, Duveyoung wrote: WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU, NABBY, THAT YOU CAN SAY "WHAT EDG GOT?" My question is, at the risk of getting beat up virtually, what category would Xeno create and label for Edg's posts? I'm pretty sure they wouldn't qualify for the "fluff" file.
