---In [email protected], <turquoiseb@...> wrote :
From: salyavin808 <[email protected]> Who wouldn't go for it once they've brought everything else? I like to think that I wouldn't have. Probably not. I guess most of us have a limit somewhere but some do buy the whole shebang. Go figure. I think if it's your first apparently certain philosophical system you can buy the whole thing. A bit of prior knowledge and scepticism can save you form the worst perhaps... I found my limit with jyotish which is how I got to hear about yagyas. Some guy at the academy I was a keen visitor to rang me up one night and asked for a donation for a yagya. I didn't know what one of them was and he told me he'd seen a jyotishee and been told that he had some bad karma returning and needed a yagya, which is a vedic ceremony he said, to correct it before it got to him. This all came as a surprise to me as I didn't know the TMO was into astrology and the idea that it actually worked, and could tell you when bad karma was returning too, seemed astonishing given the way they go on about science. But I thought he'd have to go to India for the ceremony as that is where they are carried out, but he said no, you just hand over the money and they do the ceremony. I asked how the beneficial effects got to you then and he said "Though the transcendent". I told him it wasn't the sort of thing I was interested in and hung up. Finely honed bullshit detector yes? But I didn't make the connection there and then that the movement was steeped in this stuff and it stank to high heaven, so I co-existed with the idea that meditation would lead me to enlightenment but there was also a lot of BS hanging around the margins. As I got to know them better I sussed the cosmology and rejected the whole thing, except the meditation. After all, I managed to figure out that the siddhis were a scam only a few months after I learned them, back in 1977. OK, that one took me ten years. I like to think that's my natural optimism... So I bailed from the whole organization. I like to think that had I had the misfortune to stick around, any mention of Ayurveda, Jyotish, Rajas, or S-V would have had me bolting for the door, long before they trotted out yagyas. :-) I'd like someone to ask David Lynch about it at a public meeting. See if he ducks and dives. He managed to dodge the "the problem with Hitler was that he didn't succeed" debacle in Germany. He does the SIMS Shuffle even better than we old SIMS teachers did it, so I figure he'd be able to brush off any such questions without actually addressing them. He's never really touched on the Marshy Effect either. He seems to get away with promoting only the bits that stand up on their own and that the average punter can relate to. And the TM website seems to have followed suit. It's like they're embarrassed or something...
