Ooops. I actually pushed the Send button while carrying my laptop back to a
plug to recharge it. So I'll continue my previous rap below in this color.
From: "TurquoiseBee turquoi...@yahoo.com [FairfieldLife]"
<FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com>
To: "FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com" <FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Sunday, March 15, 2015 11:15 AM
Subject: Re: [FairfieldLife] Re: Well, well, well.
From: salyavin808 <no_re...@yahoogroups.com>
---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <s3raphita@...> wrote :
salyavin, I was about to post a message making pretty much the same points :
MMY touted TM as a universal panacea ;That the TMO should release such a
document now is an encouraging sign of progress ;
As the TMO moves at a snail's pace we'll probably all be dead by the time it
develops a sober assessment of TM's (undoubted) strengths and limitations. What
limitations? Well, I don't rule out the possibility that for some disturbed
individuals doing TM could actually exacerbate their condition.
It can indeed, and maybe not even in extreme cases. I lived and worked with the
TMO for ten years and met a lot of people and talked a lot about TM and what it
does or doesn't do. My overriding impression is that there is sometimes a huge
disconnect between what people expect TM to do (or claim it has already done)
and what they have actually achieved using it.
This is an important topic, so I hope you don't mind me chiming in. I think
that it may be safe to say that the worst part of any system of meditation or
self-discovery -- and "worse" in the sense that it can actually prevent an
otherwise effective technique from working -- is the dogma that organizations
develop to "explain" things.
I've met people who would talk endlessly about how spiritual they are and the
benefits they've gained but when I've got to know them better it's turned out
that they are seriously damaged and/or unpleasant people to greater or lesser
degrees.
Just think of a few of the people who have declared their "enlightenment" on
this forum, completely oblivious to how other people perceived them on the
basis of their actions.
The funny thing is they had no idea, one girl I knew was astonished when I told
her that she had no self awareness whatsoever, she was amazingly unpleasant
when you got past her social persona. I wondered what the point of devoting
your life to meditation is if it can't touch the very things that probably
drive you to seek it out as a therapy in the first place. But here's the thing,
they don't know that it hasn't worked, part of the TM teaching is elitist in
that you are taught from day one that you are a better person for being in
touch with the "transcendent".
I honestly think that it can make people more eccentric, this can be endearing
but can result in them just not fitting in with normal society any more. There
are plenty like this in the long term movement in the UK and all of them are
really genuine spiritual people but they don't realise that obsession with
beliefs, routines and ritual has turned them into inflexible maniacs.
The most dangerous part of this is that if the new cult recruits wind up
spending the majority of their time in a community of like-minded people, it
becomes a kind of "echo chamber" in which they are very likely to "lose touch"
with how eccentric and weird they have become, from the point of view of people
in the outside world. There are probably people on this forum, for example, who
think that it is perfectly normal to get up early in the middle of a blizzard
and drive or walk across town like the Eloi in H.G. Wells' "The Time Machine"
and disappear into a dome for 2+ hours, and then do it again in the afternoon.
Every day, 365 days a year. And because they are so insulated from the outside
world and cut off from it, they have actually come to think of this -- and
themselves -- as normal.
Some of the people I've known have developed mental health problems since
learning TM which isn't what you'd expect if you listen to the TMO. The claim
is that releasing stress cures neuroses and makes problems less likely to
arise. Clearly something wrong there. I know a lot of siddhi practitioners who
see therapists, it was a standing joke at the academy in fact.
I left the TMO before the sidhis became as widespread among non-teachers as
they are now, but I certainly saw the same trends among TM teachers. There were
FAR more examples of neurosis and real psychosis than I would have found in
similarly-sized populations out in the real world.
But am I looking on the dark side and seeking out the worst case types to
bolster my argument? I don't think so, I became aware of what was going on just
by listening to others and that was only after I got past my own programming
that everything was fine and I was on the fast track to enlightenment. But I
have no idea about the actual percentages of TMers who didn't get what they
expected are.
The sad thing is that TMers were taught to "settle," meaning that they were
taught that a tiny, several-second-long flash of no-thought-no-mantra was a
sign of "something good happening" and important enough to consider a great
spiritual experience. Similarly, they were taught that "witnessing sleep"
(which happens often even in non-meditating populations and thus has no
relationship to "spiritual progress" of any kind) was a sign of growing
enlightenment. So many didn't even *realize* that they weren't getting what
they were promised, because they were constantly being told that these tiny
things were great signs of impending enlightenment.
The thing is, the larger the group one insulates oneself from the world inside,
the more likely one is to "settle," rather than keep striving for more. If
everyone around you has settled for mere "witnessing sleep" as a definition of
enlightenment, then chances are you will, too. So you wind up with people
actually believing that they're enlightened while actually quite ill. Or, as
some may remember, claiming to be enlightened on FFL for years, all the while
taking daily medication for depression.
I'm of the opinion that it's the *dogma* these people were fed telling them
what to expect that is more the root of the problem than the actual techniques
they practiced. That is, it ain't necessarily TM that turns people into elitist
assholes completely unaware of their own elitism...it's the being around a
large *group* of assholes who tell them that their way of being assholes is not
only good, but enlightened that propagates assholiness. :-)
The trick for any researchers is going to be finding people that learnt TM and
weren't exposed to the belief system and so aren't full of BS, maybe a search
for neurotic traits in long term meditators would be be a fun way to start.
I'll volunteer.
Exactly. The whole teaching approach of the TMO almost by definition
invalidates any research because you can't FIND any subjects who were told what
to expect, and what these expected things "mean."
