Thanks (I guess) for your comments about my and Curtis' past comments trying to
psychologically lay-diagnose Maharishi and other spiritual teachers we have
worked with.
Some may pooh-pooh this as low-vibe or "materialistic" or whatever, but I for
one think that as a species we *have* learned some valuable things from
psychology and psychiatry, and although neither of those fields are probably
any closer to determining what "truth" is than their religious or spiritual
counterpart fields are, I think we can use some of their findings to help us in
finding the answers we seek about our own experiences as human beings.
In my case, I have never presented myself as a psychologist or psychiatrist. I
took a few psychology courses in college. But then it was the 1960s and I
"majored in changing majors," so I took a few courses in pretty much
everything. The only degree programs that allowed me to do this and still rack
up all of the course credits I had earned towards an actual degree were
Sociology and English, so those disciplines are what my degree is in. :-)
All of this is a way of saying that most of what I've learned about psychology
was learned long after I worked with any of the spiritual teachers I have
known. After bailing from TM, I hung out on my own (without benefit of
spiritual leadership) for a while in L.A., but then ran into the Rama guy, and
spent the next few years with him. When I finally bailed on his trip too, one
of the first things I did was to move to a different town, one whose only draw
was that I had always wanted to say "I lived there" at some point in the
future. Voila. Color me rolling in to Santa Fe, New Mexico -- free of spiritual
teachers, free of sanghas, and trying desperately to become free of all the
stuff that they had imprinted me with.
As fate would have it, one of the first friends I ran into there in Santa Fe at
the Downtown Subscription cafe that became my second home was a
psychologist/psychiatrist. We became friends first, because we were both
displaying more than a touch of grey, because we enjoyed talking with each
other, and because we had mutually chosen this particular cafe to do our
talking in. So we'd meet pretty much every morning and chat with each other and
with other friends over coffee. Neither of us had any agenda whatsoever. We wuz
just talkin' shit over coffee before starting the day.
Thus it took some time -- probably a couple of years -- before we mutually
discovered that he was a fairly well-known expert on a type of mental illness
known as Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and that I was a former cultist who
had spent nearly three decades studying with spiritual teachers who could
accurately be described as suffering from Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
When we finally discovered this, it was Kismet -- thereafter I learned from
him, and he learned from me.
His experience as a therapist had been with dealing with NPD in primarily
one-on-one situations -- NPD husbands who had tried to dominate their wives,
friends, and/or employees, or vice-versa -- and my experience was more along
the lines of what this personality disorder he was teaching me about looked
like when it occurred in a GROUP, and the attempts at domination were more
widespread.
For the record, given everything I learned in subsequent discussions with my
friend over coffee, I firmly believe that Frederick Lenz-Rama met the DSM-IV
definitions of Narcissistic Personality Disorder 100%, and that Maharishi met
them, too, but to a somewhat lesser degree...maybe 90%.
But just because you're studying with a person who can be accurately diagnosed
as suffering from Narcissistic Personality Disoder, that doesn't mean that they
can't teach you anything useful. They can. And I try to honor those useful
things that both Maharishi and the Rama dude taught me to this day, even though
both of them were (as I see it today) Bat Shit Crazy. :-)
From: salyavin808 <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Sent: Thursday, March 5, 2015 4:18 PM
Subject: Re: [FairfieldLife] Meet the Ancestor!
---In [email protected], <anartaxius@...> wrote :
In the past day or so there have been 30 posts to FFL and 8 to the Peak. Since
I am on both forums, I redid my email, sorting them into FFL and Peak folders,
and one particular poster also on both goes directly to the trash, so these
figures here represent everyone else. The intellects here are much more likely
to jump on inconsistencies and sloppy thinking here. There have been a few
conversations of note on the peak, but mostly it is kind of tepid with a halo
of woo fluff. Without a challenge the mind gets soft. Right now there seems to
be a conversation about Vernon Katz's new volume. While here I can wonder what
percent of my DNA matched that of Australopithecus Afarensis, or whether Buddha
would have liked coffee if he had had access to it. Here you can say what you
really think. For example, watching Maharishi on tapes some 35 years ago, I was
watching him pounding a flower against his face chuckling to himself and I was
really thinking, is this guy some kind of saint or a daemon, it was like there
was this experience of a dark thread running through that session. I have
lately been reading a bit about sociopaths, and it certainly does not seem
inconceivable that Maharishi was a sociopath considering the way he dealt with
people and because of his incredible focus on getting what he wanted. There are
certain features of sociopathy and states developed via meditation that cross
over, and 'bad' socipathic traits might get enhanced by practice.
Turq and Curtis did some excellent posts a while back on the subject of
Marshy's mental health. Narcissistic personality disorder and borderline
sociopathy seemed to be excellent matches for a lot of the observed behaviour
of the Reesh. And all of it was as intellectually justified and cogently
delivered as you would expect from those two.
If only Neo provided us with a decent search facility as it was a conversation
worth revisiting and it wasn't just a case of trying to provoke a response from
the TB's, but a serious attempt at explaining a lot of what we just mutely
accepted as advanced behaviour when we were in the gang, but was really
manipulative and self-aggrandising. It's hard to dismiss the possibility that
what we saw in our great leader wasn't something to aspire to but something to
avoid at all costs.
From: "TurquoiseBee turquoiseb@... [FairfieldLife]"
<[email protected]>
To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]>
Sent: Thursday, March 5, 2015 9:09 AM
Subject: Re: [FairfieldLife] Meet the Ancestor!
From: salyavin808 <[email protected]>
---In [email protected], <turquoiseb@...> wrote :
LOL. I was going to make the same comment. :-)
I just took my first ever look at the Peak, it's a bit too anodyne for my taste
but I totally get why they didn't like hanging around with us! I'm almost
embarrassed at having actual opinions about things.
At least now you understand the irony I've been pointing out about The_Leak
since its inception. People like Ann, Steve (seventhray), and Buck *claim* that
they're there on The_Leak because it's higher vibe and they prefer that. But at
the same time they make a surprising number of posts *about* FFL. And *in*
those posts they make it clear that they still come to FFL and *read every word
of every post made by the people they hated while they were here* -- you, me,
and Michael. What's up with that, eh? The_Leak is "higher vibe," but they can't
get their rocks off without slumming at FFL?
Meanwhile, while claiming "28 members," the 107 posts made on The_Leak in the
last week were primarily made by 5 people, with another 4 contributing one
each. Compare and contrast to contentious and "abyss-mal" Fairfield Life, which
during its last full week contained 321 posts, made by 18 people, with another
8 contributing one post each. (And in fact -- and to counter your assertion
that they "don't like hanging around with us" -- three of The_Leak members
posted more *here* on FFL than they did there.)
I stand by my original predictions -- I don't see The_Leak surviving. I see it
headed for the same fate as the similarly anodyne BATGAP messages forum, which
still nominally has 116 members, but which had ZERO posts last week. Statistics
don't lie -- there simply is no lasting market for namby-pamby.
What's going to be fascinating is how Jimbo is going to try to spin things when
The_Leak fails and he comes back here seeking his attention fix. Now THAT is
going to be entertaining. :-)
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