--- In [email protected], "jim_flanegin" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: [...] > my take on the foundation for much of the TM and MMY bashing is that > it comes from folks who believed all of that was their salvation, > but from a superficial perspective- in other words they would not > have to change much but reap all of the benefits. Then when that > didn't pan out, they now have found things to bash TM and MMY about, > in order to justify their decision to drop it, and to belive this > same salvation of theirs can be found elsewhere. Pretty simple > really. >
Consider this gem. I've pointed out that all of his "cognitions" are standard Hindu beliefs, so MMY wouldn't see anything wrong with them, but he does't appreciate MMY's telling him to "be practical in society." I even referred him to the story of Indra and the ants, with no affect on his attitude: http://www.wisdomportal.com/Enlightenment/IndraUniverses.html http://web.archive.org/web/20050309220336/www.trancenet.org/personal/kellet.shtml [...] I had a couple of opportunities to privately relate some of my "spiritual" experiences to him, including an ever deeper awareness on my part of my dedication to him as my spiritual Master. MMY approved of the direction things were going for me. Finally, during this same stay at the "MIU campus" I had very dramatic "spiritual" realization one night. The next morning I waited for MMY and walked with him to his car (he was heading out to view potential Academy real estate in the Santa Barbara hills) to confirm this new realization. I said to him "I am a rishi." For those not familiar with the term, I was telling him that I could cognize ultimate spiritual truths for myself. This was a truly incredible delusion on my part, yet he replied "Yes" in an affirmative tone. I said "What should I do?" He replied "Be practical in society." That evening I additionally "cognized" that I was not really human. I was an incarnated "deva" (analogous to an angel) and, what's more, so was MMY. We had been peers working together on a spiritual plane as "devas" for aeons. But I had done something spiritually wrong (the fallen angel gig) whereas MMY had continued on a spiritually upward path. Now MMY had deserved to incarnate here and lead the spiritual regeneration of this planet, and I was getting a chance to incarnate here also as a human being and redeem myself by helping him. I wanted to "verify this with the Master" also, so I followed MMY into an elevator as he was on his way to his rooms after the evening meeting. As he turned about to face the door I started opening my mouth to tell him this "cognition." He looked into my eyes and interrupted me by saying forcefully "What you have in your mind is right! -- be practical in society." Then the elevator door opened and he walked out of the elevator and off into his rooms. Well, after having the greatest Master on the planet confirm my spiritual status, I didn't question it. Based on a series of continuing "cognitions" I dropped out of college and embarked on eleven years of making important personal decisions based on these delusions, and living in a fantastic and increasingly horrific inner world based upon these delusions. The personal sufferings from mistaken personal choices and from this deluded mental state were excrutiating. Finally someone was able to successfully help me to question the basic unproven assumption underlying my delusions. This assumption, this belief that had been programmed into me since I first walked into an introductory lecture, was the premise that "MMY is a great spiritual teacher with the highest teaching on the planet." After I finally realized that I had absolutely no basis for believing this, and after I further realized that this was even quite unlikely based on what I had gone through, I was finally able to start recovering. Once I realized that MMY was at best an incompetent spiritual teacher the whole set of delusions based on the indoctrination I'd received, and based on his private "spiritual counseling," began to fall like a house of cards. One of the people who helped in my recovery was Dr. Margaret Singer at UC Berkeley, one of the world's foremost experts in the study of destructive cults and their use of "mind control" (or "thought reform" as it's more commonly called by researchers). She had been studying TM and was quite interested in hearing my TM experiences. She confirmed that a significant percentage of the population (I've read elsewhere that it is 10-15%) are highly susceptible to post-trance indoctrination. That is, such people are likely to have a severely reduced level of critical evaluation about anything that they are told immediately after they come out of a trance state. These people are therefore in particular very susceptible to any spiritual indoctrination received while they are in such a post-trance state.
