--- In [email protected], "Rick Archer" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > I'm not talking about getting to see him. I doubt very > much that the Dalai Lama lavishes jewels and expensive > clothes and cushy digs on the important people while > treating the little people as expendable commodities.
>From what I have been given to understand from friends who have worked with him closely for decades, it is the exact opposite. The Dalai Lama hates the publicity shots with the rich and famous, and tends to "come alive" and interact joyously with everyday "journeyman" monks who do the "grunt work" of spreading Tibetan Buddhism. To put this in perspective, that would be like Maharishi giving a special audience to the guy who had worked his butt off in the field to spread TM and, as a result, had initiated over 1000 people within a year, while ignoring the person who was standing there with a check for Big Bucks in his hand. I mention this not as metaphor but as something I actually saw happen. Only in reverse. Maharishi blew off the initiator who had taught (at the time) the most people in TM movement history within one year, and spent his entire time hobnobbing with a German who had become a TM teacher years before, had never taught TM to anyone in his life, but who had a check for measly sum (at that time) of 100K in his hand. And this was back in the Seventies, before the lust for money became *really* out of hand. I repost here something I posted on TM-Free this morning, as a comment to a thread that dealt with the "coronation" of the latest "Raj Rajeshwari." Betty writes (in a comment to Gina's post): "I was never aware of the shame of not being wealthy until I went on TTC." An interesting and accurate perception, Betty. I can only say that it wasn't always that way. On my TTC back in 1972, the vast majority of us were "poor folk," having had to scrape up the money to attend TTC however we could, and having done so because we had a desire to help other "poor folk" like ourselves to learn to meditate. But back then learning to meditate the TM way cost $35 to $75. That was before Maharishi started equating being rich with being highly evolved, and equating giving as much of those riches to him as possible with being even more highly evolved. One of the saddest things you can see in any spiritual tradition is this transition. In the beginning, putting one's life on the line to help others is viewed as good karma, and as an indication of one's spiritual worth. But in the last days of any dying spiritual organization, only cutting a check is seen as indicative of one's spiritual worth. The costumes and the pomp and circumstance of "coronations" such as this one are just the surface symptoms of a greater dis-ease. They are like the carcinomas that appear on the skin of a patient who is already close to death.
