From: salyavin808 <[email protected]> ---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... This is very true. Cults form because of a particular trait of human psychology -- once we have given our trust to someone once, we are more likely to do so again. This can be a positive thing if you happen to run into someone trustworthy, because once he or she has earned your trust by accurately describing what the effects of a certain action will be, you tend to trust him or her about the outcome of future actions. Unfortunately, charlatans also take advantage of this human trait. They tell us something that will -- for most people -- turn out to be true, like "When you meditate your mind will calm down to some extent, and afterwards as a result you'll feel more relaxed and energetic." We were all told that by Maharishi, and it turned out to be true. But now fast-forward to the first time he told us something that *wasn't* true, such as "What I teach as the TM sidhis is actually what Patanjali was writing about" (it wasn't) and "If you perform them in a big group of people, the result will be such waves of Woo that it will cause world peace" (it didn't, and doesn't). I agree with you that skepticism can be healthy. It can enable someone who has been told a few true but obvious things by someone to step back and say "Wait a minute..." when he or she suddenly tells them something less obvious. Like "If you enter a building from the wrong direction it'll fuck up your day and cause Bad Things to happen" or "You should only trust Ayurvedic doctors because Western doctors dispense nothing but poison" or "If someone goes 'off the program' you should shun them and drive them out of your community." In retrospect, looking back on it, you wonder how *anyone* ever fell for horseshit like this. But many did. Some on this forum fell for it so hard that they still believe it. And it's all because they got into the HABIT of trusting someone who had suckered them into trusting him in the first place. They grew to trust him so thoroughly that when he told them that Britain was a nation of scorpions and that George W. Bush was a demon from Indian mythology they ignored all reason and rationality and actually believed it. 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. As I said, I was lucky in this regard and bailed early, before any of this garbage was served up by the TMO. At the time I left, they still hadn't even trotted out the "If you bounce on your butt in a group you'll bring about world peace" bit. The TM sidhis had been presented originally purely as a way to advance your own self-discovery, with not a single word about benefits they might have for others. But about the time I left a lot of the "early adopters" who had learned the TM sidhis early were beginning to notice that they *hadn't* done anything much to advance their self-discovery, except eat up a lot more time every day during which they could have been off doing something productive. A *lot* of these people started to walk away and leave the TM movement, about the same time I did and geezerfreak did. And from our perspective, what followed was the result of Maharishi and the TMO *noticing* how many people were walking away and coming up with a new, improved scam. They realized that they couldn't continue to sell the TM sidhis as a "faster track to enlightenment" because nobody had become enlightened practicing them, so they changed the whole focus and changed the dogma and pretended that you weren't "really" doing the sidhis for yourself, but "for the world." And people bought it. Again, I like to think that I wouldn't have, had I still been around. But then I managed to break that habit of believing anything Maharishi said early, and when I found him saying things that *obviously* weren't true (and making a fortune from people believing them), I walked away. Now, 37 years later, I admit to rolling my eyes from time to time at people who bought *everything* he said (not to mention everything he sold them...for big bucks). But I do remember how willing I was to buy crazy shit back in the beginning, and so I earnestly thank whatever forces made me lucky enough to stop buying it early.
