---In [email protected], <turquoiseb@...> wrote :
OK, my bad. I clicked on the wrong folder and the email below opened, far enough that I caught a glimpse of the pasted-in Rama blurb below. That was a real blast from the past, and caused me to laugh out loud for some time. So because I'm still chuckling I think I'll actually address this particular instance of let's-try-to-paint-Barry-as-a-cultist-so-people-will-ignore-him-calling-us-cultists stuff from Jim and Richard. :-) I *was* a cultist, for the time I was a part of the Rama group. No question about it. It was a cult, Fred was its cult leader, and I was a cultist. I have No Problem saying any of this, because it's all true. Justify, Justify, Justify. That said, that was then and this is now. I bailed from Rama's study a couple of years before he died, and before some of the *really* crazy shit went down. I last saw this silly demand for a "monthly summary" shortly before I bailed from the group. Why I laughed so hard seeing it again is that laughter was my reaction when I *first* saw it. I laughed, and then I promptly ignored it. I had, in fact, been teaching basic meditation for the guy, and really enjoying doing the teaching for free, both in the US and in Amsterdam. But I really *didn't* like one aspect of the way he'd set up the teaching thang -- he'd made it competitive. The purpose of teaching became not just to teach people how to meditate (which was cool in my opinion), but to urge them to become full-time students with Rama (which was not). Furthermore, if you found such students, they became your "apprentices" (a la Castaneda), and you had to run their day-to-day study, and be kinda responsible for them. If you got ten apprentices, you got a spiritual name. Really. Hey, I told you it was a cult. :-) Justify, justify, justify. Anyway, I was already partly out the door, so when I heard all this shit about apprentices my first thought was, "Yeah, like that's gonna happen. I'll just teach for the fun of teaching and if any of my students feel like continuing with it I'll turn them over to one of the other teachers." And that's what I did. I never sent in a single one of these silly reports because I never considered myself part of the "apprentice" thang. With one exception -- a girlfriend I introduced to Rama and who subsequently studied with him for some time -- I have never been more instrumental in "soliciting" anyone deciding to study with him than being the person who gave their "intro lecture." But to bring this whole diversion (for that is what it is) back into the present, I really wish that Richard, Jim, and a few others would leave off this try-to-get-to-me-by-bringing-up-Rama shit. It's old, and it's based on your *own* cult thinking and how *your* minds work, not how mine works. You guys IDENTIFY WITH your time with Maharishi, and with being part of his group, or of being a teacher for him. A great deal of your own personal "spiritual story" revolves around this identification. So when someone such as myself or Michael makes fun of Maharishi or says what we really think about his teachings, you get all defensive. By "attacking" him, you feel as if we are "attacking" you, and you get your buttons pushed. Lurking reporters please note: bawee is a mind reader. Or is he simply projecting? So you try to do the same thing to me, trying to push my buttons by making fun of Rama or criticizing him. Imagine, someone doing unto others. How dare they? But I really don't IDENTIFY with Rama or with that time any more. It's really just a part of the past, something that I walked away from over 18 years ago. I don't give a shit what Willytex makes up or that anyone else posts about Rama. He's dead, Not in your mind he's not. And you so "don't give a shit" that you are spending how many paragraphs writing about it? LOL and I walked away from him two years before he died. What you think of him doesn't interest me in the slightest, and it doesn't push any of my buttons. I don't feel the need to "defend" him, and never have. That is why I continually post about how cool and cutting edge he was. I similarly don't feel the need to "apologize" for any of the time I spent with him. That is why I am about to justify why I hung around him for as long as I did. Much of that time was cutting-edge, hang-ten spiritual practice, with access to experiences you people never got a glimpse of within the TM movement. And yes, some of these experiences were a little odd and out of the ordinary, like witnessing levitation and invisibility and stuff like that. But it all really happened. Or at the very least I saw it happen. End of story. It was fun for a long time, and when it stopped being fun I beat feet. Exactly like my experience with TM and Maharishi. :-) Now back to ignoring these folks... You can only ignore them if you can stop thinking about them, which, you apparently can't. One small slipped click and you read something and you are off and running. Lurking reporters, what do you think?
