French Transcendentalists.. French Origins of American Transcendentalism 
 https://www.jstor.org/stable/1414105?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents 
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1414105?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents
 

 

---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <dhamiltony...@yahoo.com> wrote :

 Importing Transcendentalism (German) to America  
 HISTORICAL NOTE 
 American Turners Records,
 http://www.ulib.iupui.edu/collections/german-american/mss030 
http://www.ulib.iupui.edu/collections/german-american/mss030

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turners https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turners

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freethought 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freethought


 
---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <dhamiltony...@yahoo.com> wrote :

 
 Persecutions by creedal religionists of mystics and their groups of separatist 
transcendentalists across Europe are often a theme in these communal 
narratives. 

 Recently retired to a safety in community of meditating Fairfield, Iowa a 
meditator’s spouse who practiced law for a career in NYC at a law firm kept 
their practice of meditation secret to avoid persecution. 

 ..

 Of the modern day persecution of transcendentalists, up in Wisconsin recently 
I ran into an older ™ initiator from there. This is someone who saw a TM intro 
lecture poster in 1969 in Madison, attended the lecture that was given by 
Walter Koch and learned ™ then in those times. 

 As a State certified teacher working in public school this person then fell 
victim to persecution for associating with ™.  Directly persecuted by school 
superintendents, building principals,other staff, parents asking that their 
kids not be taught by this person or parents going directly to the school board 
to have this person fired for fear this person might be teaching meditation to 
the children. The superintendent calling the local ™ center seeking information 
about this staff teacher. The teacher declined resignation and stayed on 
teaching. But the pressure was great to resign. 
  
 This followed for years affecting this person’s career advancement.  An irony 
now is that mindfulness meditation is taught in the public schools up there 
today.
  
 This person is retired now from teaching and still traumatized by the longer 
experience of it does not talk to friends and associates about meditating or 
being with Maharishi in those days. When the person found I was from Fairfield 
and an old initiator from those days a comparing of old stories opened up. 

 The person was a working school teacher then and made use of school breaks. We 
figured we attended the same weekend residence courses early on in Iowa City as 
new meditators, one month courses with Maharishi, a teacher training course 
with Maharishi, ATR courses with Maharishi in Europe, was with Maharishi in 
Fairfield too.

 This person used the word ‘persecution’ in recounting the experience 
throughout. It was stark. Early days of moving to Meditating Fairfield, Ia. 
gave a small taste of insight in to what persecution in Jim Crow might have 
been to someone who was otherwise majority Iowan, like me coming to Fairfield 
as a transcendental meditationist.

 Now though with a longer time of assimilation the separation is not nearly so 
great in Fairfield.  And evidently, the postmodern is catching up with Madison, 
Wisconsin too as they are teaching meditation in their schools now.       

 ..

 
 In victimization of separatist movements by the hands of creedal religionists 
persecution runs throughout the narratives of these historic satsanga groups 
across Europe and across time as they formed. 
As transcendentalist and essentially heretical to the religious belief and 
ideology of God the Father Church, these ‘separatist’ groups and their 
practitioners evidently fell victim to a State of fear within religious 
formality throughout Europe.

..

 Separating the heterodox and heretical..  A Christian statement of belief, The 
Athanasian Creed it differs from the Nicene-Constantinopolitan 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicene_Creed and Apostles' Creeds 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostles%27_Creed in the inclusion of anathemas 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anathema, or condemnations of those who disagree 
with the creed (like the original Nicene Creed 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicene_Creed#The_original_Nicene_Creed_of_325 
..which various anathemas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anathema against Arian 
propositions were added.[15] 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicene_Creed#cite_note-15).. All mainstream 
branches[citation needed 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed] of Christianity now 
consider (Arianism in that case) to be heterodox 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterodoxy and heretical 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heresy. The Ecumenical First Council of Nicaea 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Council_of_Nicaea of 325 deemed it to be a 
heresy.[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arianism#cite_note-Ferguson2013-3
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athanasian_Creed 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athanasian_Creed
 ..Whosoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary that he hold the 
catholic faith. Which faith except every one do keep whole and undefiled; 
without doubt he shall perish everlastingly.
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anathema https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anathema

 
..

 “The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mystical. It is the power 
of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no 
longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is 
impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and 
the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their 
most primitive forms — this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true 
religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong to the rank of 
devoutly religious men.” -Albert Einstein
 

 

 Separatism. 
 The historical ‘separating’ of spiritual mystics from the creedal orthodoxy of 
institutional ‘churches’ (Catholic, Lutheran, or Anglican) evidently is also 
contemporary.  

 In the early 1970’s as a ™ teacher I was able to visit and ‘check’ the 
meditations of Cistercian trappist monks in Spencer, Mass  who after having 
studied the spiritual experience of the ‘desert mystics’ and so many others of 
the early Christian era found in themselves a lacking in spiritual depth of 
experience where they then reached out for methodology outside their own 
confines of practice.  These Spencer, Mass Trappist monks were earnest, 
scholarly and dedicated spiritual seekers who set about finding better method 
than what they had in their order. (At one point one of these monks exclaimed, 
“Thank God for Vatican II!”).  Of course Thomas Merton, also a Cistercian in 
the 1940’s, 50’s and 60’s, had done the same thing a generation before in his 
visiting with Buddhism or Eastern practices and writing about his experience.  

 The Spencer, Mass. monks proceeded then from their experience in learning to 
meditate with ™ to abstract instruction from the ™practice and share with 
others what they subsequently re-branded as “Centering Prayer”, a meditative 
technique for lay people with features taken from ™.  Centering Prayer now is 
widely taught as church adult education classes taught and supported by these 
monks in courses with video and lectures as a transcendent meditative practice 
for lay Catholic religious people. In a type of movement Centering Prayer now 
has also crossed over as progressive spiritual practice methodology to 
Protestant churches.
 
 A couple years ago I visited the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky where I found 
the legacy of Thomas Merton supporting a thriving monastic community serving as 
a Merton pilgrimage site, with a modern museum and a bookstore doing active 
business vending in so many books by and about Thomas Merton. 

 By contrast a few weeks ago I visited New Mallory Abbey near Dubuque, Iowa.  
In the 1980’s I had opportunity to visit and stay at New Mallory in their guest 
house quite a lot. I was excited recently to be able to return and visit back 
there and also see their bookstore.  In their bookstore  surprisingly I found 
not a book on Centering Prayer or Thomas Merton, by contrast. A little puzzled 
after this visit there to New Mallory I asked around about this seeming ‘edit’ 
and obvious blank and was told that some in the Church feel those teachings are 
heretical to the Holy Father Church. Even within the Church today?  Evidently 
dangerous for being out of control (unorthodox) the mystics in cultivated 
spiritual experience and by their critique in transcendentalism are still 
‘separated’ from the orthodox. 

 “They who believe their practice is best are devotees
 They who believe their technique is the only are zealots.”
 -Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
 

 
..

 It seems that every generation or so in European history a mystic in 
experience and a satsanga would rise up in contrast to the form of religious 
institutions of the day. The nature of the spiritual experience in 
transcendentalism places transcendentalists in critique of religious 
materialism. 
 
..
 

 Throughout these narratives below, in cycle a mystic shares their 
transcendentalist experience at living-room satsanga-like meetings, a group 
organization may form for facilitating meetings ‘separate’ from the churches, 
the separate movement gets discovered by institutional religionists and in 
reaction the persecution begins in fear for the critique being given. History 
repeat. 
 

 ..

 I. Mysticism.   Contextualizing a where we have come from as 
Transcendentalists this monograph on 'mysticism' published in the 19th Century 
takes
 an inter-generational line of 'separatist' teachers and satsanga and lights it 
up with some detail.
 

 Starting with a contextualization defining of 'mysticism' as we might know it 
in experience the first 30 pages of the monograph are a fair accounting fleshed 
out of an arc of spiritual 'separatist' movements in the West, connecting the 
dots of luminaries.
 

 

 Look for part !, Mysticism..
 Google Book:
 
https://books.google.com/books?id=Y6naAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=History+of+the+Amana+Society,&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi2-aSUs77TAhVn_4MKHUlHBnAQ6AEIJTAA#v=onepage&q=History%20of%20the%20Amana%20Society%2C&f=false
 
https://books.google.com/books?id=Y6naAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=History+of+the+Amana+Society,&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi2-aSUs77TAhVn_4MKHUlHBnAQ6AEIJTAA#v=onepage&q=History%20of%20the%20Amana%20Society%2C&f=false
 

   This monograph goes well along with the paper linked below of Northern 
European Transcendentalist satsanga that is further back in this thread.  
 
 ..

 Science.. means
 unresting endeavor and 
 continually progressing 
 development toward an 
 aim which the poetic 
 intuition may apprehend, 
 but which the intellect 
 can never fully grasp.  -Max Planck
 

 

 On the Way..
 “The Higgs particle validates that there is this field that exists everywhere 
in the universe that allows us to exist. That field exists. It sounds religious 
but this is different than religion , this field exists and had to be 
discovered, and that is what the large hadron collider was about. 
 “The Greatest Story Ever Told, So Far”  -Lawrence Krauss 
 “..not just a great story of human ingenuity, but the greatest.”
 #  Science Friday interview..
 https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/why-are-we-here-physics-has-answers/ 
https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/why-are-we-here-physics-has-answers/

 “The Tao Is”
 

 
 (21st Century) Transcendentalism:
 

“Maharishi explains that pure consciousness has a field-like character and is a 
universal field at the basis of everyone’s thought and behavior. When a 
sufficient number of individuals are experiencing pure consciousness during 
group practice of the Transcendental Meditation and TM-Sidhi program, the field 
of pure consciousness is enlivened in the entire population. This field effect 
positively influences the quality of consciousness in the individuals in 
society in much the same direction as that experienced by those practicing the 
Transcendental Meditation technique,” said lead author MUM Professor Dr. 
Kenneth Cavanaugh.
 
.. 
 
 From Historic German Transcendentalism, a sequence.. 

 ..We can now offer an expanded definition of Transcendentalism: It derives 
from the “transcendental” philosophy of Immanuel Kant; its proponents 
emphasized the divine in nature, the value of the individual and of human 
intuition, and a spiritual reality that “transcends” sensory experience, while 
also providing a better guide for life than purely empirical or logical 
reasoning.  The term refers to a cluster of concepts set forth by a number of 
individuals rather than a formal philosophy.   -Professor Ashton Nichols, 
Emerson, Thoreau, and the Transcendentalist Movement
 

 
 Our initial working definition of transcendentalism, however, will stress a 
divine force in each individual, a force that is also linked to nature and has 
the power to transform lives, as well as social institutions. -Professor Ashton 
Nichols, Emerson, Thoreau, and the Transcendentalist Movement
 

 20th Century Fairfield, Iowa, Radical American Transcendentalism: The 
Transcendental Meditationist! ..The Unified Field Akbar! 

 
 From reading their histories evidently practicing transcendentalists would 
move around Europe to the protection of more progressive aristocrats. That 
safety could vary by locality and through time.  A challenge in this is that 
natural mortality [turnover) could quickly change the climate of a region’s 
leadership with areas quickly shifting between rigidities of the formality of 
the Roman Church or Protestant churches. 
 

 Current edition of Journal of Military History Quarterly has published a 
reproduction of a hand drawn hand colored map that depicts the 
sub-principalities of the Austro-German parts of Europe of the 1840’s.  By the 
1840’s the commotion of the ‘social question’ from the industrial technological 
revolution [dislocation] was well underway with social strife and civil war 
breaking out between localities.  

 At that point a lot of transcendentalist leaning folks fled Europe to the 
safety of America.  I have grandparents on both sides coming in that time frame 
from transcendentalist meditationist groups [satsang communities], one side of 
the family from England and the other side from German spiritual ashram 
communities fleeing conscription into local armies within the ‘locality’ of 
civil wars that were raging throughout Europe then.  A lot of spiritual peoples 
came then to America fleeing both social dislocation and religious persecutions 
of those times.   
 

 
.. 

 Yes, evidently transcendentalism and transcendental meditationist practice 
goes way back.   It seems that about every generation or so mystics by their 
own experience with it would satsang and teach a meditation.  
 Often time meditationism as spiritual practice gets put under the label of 
Quietism.  In time Quietists evidently were disperse across Europe giving 
critique to the ‘formalism’ of the established churches and religion. Their 
essays, pamphlets and books were traded across Europe through generations of 
‘separatists’, as they are also often called. Spiritual people in Europe, 
meditationists, would flow to where there was changing safety within satsang 
and ashram villages as they could find cover.    
 Eventually as these lines immigrated to America this spirituality is much part 
of a thread in our collective history. 
As it comes to us, ours is a remarkably safe period of time now to be a 
practicing transcendentalist, by comparison.  A lot of a story of Europe has 
been the contending of spiritual people with religionists.  
 

---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <jr_...@yahoo.com> wrote :

 Doug,
 

 Did these European transcendentalist use a meditation method.  Do you know any 
of them.  Is it like TM?  If yes, these may be similar to what Angela Mailander 
learned when she was a child, as she described in the BATGAP interview.

 
.. 
 

 The European Transcendental Satsanga, and the forming of the Western 
ashram-like village:
 Mysticism and spiritual community growing through individual spiritual 
experience, to living room 'satsanga' gatherings, to meetings, to intentional 
community...
 


 ..

 
 Interestingly as it has happened in time, as many of these spiritual communal 
villages located in America liquidated their communal assets at a point in 
their own histories their meeting houses often followed a different path from 
the productive assets of the villages. 
  Subsequent to sale their central artifact of mystical heritage as their 
village meeting houses have often ended up outside the bounds of what may have 
become their modern museum interpretation, the meeting houses even coming in to 
the hands of denominational forms of institutional religion. Such seems a 
life-cyclical fate of transcendentalism.
 

 One of the best ironies now in this 'meeting house' history is the Harmonist 
brick meeting house in Economy, Pa. now being owned subsequently by a Lutheran 
church, the church of persecution of these transcendentalists fleeing from 
Europe. http://www.stjohnsambridge.org/ http://www.stjohnsambridge.org/ . 
  A close second, the old Zoar brick 'meeting house' being presently owned by 
United Church of Christ goers. Both of these old meeting houses presently 
sitting outside the bounds of and not necessarily included on tour 
interpretation of these old communal spiritual villages within the respective 
State Historical Society museum presentations. 
  Also, the original brick meeting house of the Community of True Inspiration 
at the hamlet of Ebeneezer in New York (current day West Seneca, NY) is now 
operated presently as a Catholic Church is another example of transcendentalism 
spiritually forgotten and overlooked for religious form. From Ebenezer, NY The 
Community of True Inspiration as a spiritual communal group subsequently 
settling as the Amana Colonies in Iowa. In present day Amana several of the 
meeting houses are in the hands of the present day Amana museum collection of 
buildings for interpretation. 
 


 

 #
 
 Excerpts from:
 The German Pietists:
 Spiritual Mentors of the
 German Communal
 Settlements in America
 Victor Peters
 Professor of History
 Moorehead University
 Moorehead, Minnesota
 

 Published in:
 Communal Societies, The Journal of the Communal Studies Association

 
 http://www.communalstudies.org/communal-societies-vol-1-1981 
http://www.communalstudies.org/communal-societies-vol-1-1981
 

 

 Paracelsus, 1493-1541
 The dream of a New Jerusalem where there are no rich and poor,
 where there is no war and violence, and man is "whole" in body, mind,
 and spirit - the formation of the communal colonies in America was
 nothing less than an attempt to realize, with God's help, this dream. In
 Paracelsus we find a harbinger, a religious-social precursor and advocate
 of this new, God-sanctioned order.
 

 His full name was Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, but he


















































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