So, you're still trying to convince us that you practiced TM for over a decade without realizing that you were praying to a Hindu god? If true, then you must be one of the most uninformed people on the planet. ---In [email protected], <[email protected]> wrote :
Who wouldn't go for it once they've brought everything else? ---In [email protected], <turquoiseb@...> wrote : 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. It takes someone that is highly susceptible to suggestion to spend a decade inside a TM center repeating a one word Hindu prayer, and never even ask where the secret mantra came from. Go figure. Go figure. I think if it's your first apparently certain philosophical system you can buy the whole thing. I figure you bought the whole thing - a nonsense syllable. A bit of prior knowledge and scepticism can save you form the worst perhaps... Non sequitur. 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. Non sequitur. 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. Non sequitur. 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. Non sequitur.
