--- In [email protected], "geezerfreak" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > --- In [email protected], "shempmcgurk" <shempmcgurk@> > wrote: > > I would LOVE to be on the Invincibility Course...it would be sheer > > bliss...but I just can't knowing that I would possibly get very > > upset once I got there and had to be exposed to TMO bullshit. I'd > > feel trapped. So I know my limitations and stay away. > > Very well put, Shemp, especially the bit about 30+ years of the next > big, I mean it this time, this is the real deal COURSE. I still enjoy > standard issue TM but my days of running off to the latest, greatest > course are looooooong gone.
This whole scene is strikingly familiar to me. In December of 1997, with his cadre of students (and attendant finances) dwindling, Rama (Frederick Lenz) announced a big FREE (almost as shocking as in the TM movement) multiday seminar/empowerment, open to anyone who had ever studied with him (whether or not they had been kicked out in the past). I heard about it. I didn't go. I had been gone from the trip for about a year, and just didn't have it in my to jump through the hoop one more time. As it turns out, I wasn't alone in this. The empowerment was ill-attended. A few people from 'way back in the early days turned up, because it was free. And the students who were still logged on at the time showed up, because that's just what you *do* when you're logged on. But a *lot* of the students who had met him in the early days didn't show. Whatever I may say in criticism of Rama, one of those things will never be to question his sensitivity. The man *felt* things on a level that I have rarely even approached. So I'm sure that the fact that so many of his students over the years showed up hurt him *deeply*. A little over four months later, he was dead, a suicide. As I've written in other forums, I believe that one of the major factors of his suicide was drugs -- he had gotten himself addicted to Valium, and then foolishly tried to quit "cold turkey." This is one of the things that they warn you NEVER to do on the Web pages associated with Valium abuse because the end product of trying it is often suicide. But he had this *macho* thang going for him, and so he had to try to dump the drugs on his own. Three days later he was dead. But even given that, I think that this last big "appeal to my students" thang had to have been a major contributing factor that led to his eventual suicide. His whole ACT had been rejected by those he'd spent the most time with, man. That must have shaken his narcisscistic world no end. Anyway, just a few random thoughts from a Paris cafe in the middle of the night... To subscribe, send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Or go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ and click 'Join This Group!' Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
