--- In [email protected], "deep.peace" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Just a short post to mention that Oprah's show yesterday > was about staying young, most of it was nothing special > and silly really. Than she had a guest, a woman who lived > in N.Y., a black woman, Oprah pulled her from the audience > and joked at guessing how old she was. > The woman looked to be 35 at the most, well it turned out > she was 70! When asked her secret the woman mentioned > years of Transcendental Meditation.
Cool. Now that's the way to sell the benefits of meditating -- not by crying doom and gloom and telling people they have to butt-bounce for peace, not by dressing people up in white robes and crowns and saris and playing bagpipe music as they walk into the room. I don't know that it's due to meditation ( I'm open to it being a lingering byproduct of all the LSD I took back in the mid-Sixties :-), but when people guess my age, they're usually ten to fifteen years light. Even given common, everyday, garden-variety flattery, that indicates to me that I'm doing at least *something* right. On the other hand, when I run into former students of meditation who have gotten involved in studies that may have a...uh...questionable side to them energetically, it's often astounding to see how much they've aged, and the amount of degradation in their skin and aura. I'm talking specifically about people who have taken up channeling or who spend a lot of their mind manipulating others through the use of occult power. They may still meditate, but the meditation doesn't seem to mitigate the effects of the *other* things they do. I ran into a couple of women from the Rama trip whom I had not seen for a while and it was as if they had aged twenty years in the five years since I had seen them last. Go figure. Bottom line for me was expressed in a song by Joni Mitchell, "Happiness is the best facelift."
