The thing that's frustrating is that our philosophy demands that we see the world as perfect even with its darkness.
Where's the basis for any complaint? But, geeze, I sure can work up a lather when it comes to listing the faults of the TM movement, but there'll be no "sweet truth" told, and so, why besmirch my integrity with the exercise? Why bathe my nervous system with the balance-ruining, psycho-chemical soup that such indulgence in negativity would flood my body/mind with? It is quite a challenge for me to see the personalities here -- the ones that I resonate with -- finding fault when, usually, they seem to have such high levels of intellectual integrity, and yet, here I am agreeing with them and loving the mud wallowing, the victimization of it, the righteousness of my ego, etc. So delicious to put down Bevan etc. I sure can't get snobby about anyone's else's addictions when I'm so eager to jump into shooting up with a needle full of liquid hate, how quickly I tie off for such a "ain't it bad" trip. On some days, when I do the least immorality, the tiniest of wrongnesses, it seems that maybe in Hell, across a fiery plain, endless legions of demons cry "Hoorah! Hoorah! Hoorah! Another soul joins us!" (This concept alone announces my narcissism, eh? Milton's "better to reign in Hell" idea comes to mind.) I'm not saying I'm ultra sensitive, morally speaking, just that even the smallest indiscretion seems to carry so much weight -- as if we were all still in Sat Yuga and for the first time, near the end of that yuga, one person finally does one small thing wrong -- maybe this person doesn't hold the "aa sound" quite long enough in his Vedic recitations, and yet that's all it takes for all of the denizens of Heaven to know that the yuga is now ending and impurity will start to erode the harmonies of love. What an enormous rent in the fabric of creation would be heard in Sat Yuga if someone like I am today were to be running around "back then" and, you know, farting loudly during a puja. Nothing subtle like a poorly pronounced "aa sound." Some days, to me, it seems like it's still Sat Yuga, and I'm under the pews with my toddler friends giggling during the sermons, and any second now, Big Mom, or Big Dad is going to drag me back up and tell me to sit straight. Like that, with such import, how can I try to take my next step with confidence when every single step in my entire lifetime can be construed as "even more flawed" -- devolvingly flawed -- to some degree? How do I trust myself to intellectually or at least intuitively, do anything? Charlie Lutes said that if one could remember all of one's lifetimes, one would be paralyzed with fear, because everything would be triggering memories of how one died doing the most ordinary of actions. Each of us, it seems, have had at least one life time wherein one was cleaning a dish at the sink and dropped it and slashed an artery and bled to death -- just for instance. See? If I had that memory, I would never wash a dish again. Hmmmm, maybe I do have that memory! The answer is that there's no need to trust "ego me" when causality itself is suspect, when everything seems to emerge directly from the Absolute -- seems to not even bother asking Brahma to create it -- the Absolute seems to just fizz with fecundity, each new moment springing forth everywhere instantly from "no where" and in "no time." Like my dreams at night, I arrive fully identified with a character in this Absolute production, and I have hardly the consciousness to grasp the utter magnificence of it, the precision of it, the exacting detail down to the quark of it, the completeness of each aspect. And that's my succor. That's why I'm okay looking at my mug in the mirror. I may be wrong all the time, but that's exactly what the Absolute is presenting, so roll with it. I may be a bad guy in a bad yuga, but WOOT WOOT, wowy-zowy, am I a world-class actor -- I deserve an Oscar for pulling off this illusion! Not that my ego can have any clarity about decision making, but that my ego and all its delusions of doership are just what the Great Cartoonist wanted in my part of the comic strip. I may just be a bit of black paint added for contrast, but I'M NECESSARY! Bevan is necessary just like this too, right? Easy to conceive of Bevan's ultimate innocence, but hard to act upon that concept. Harder still would be me resisting my addiction to judging him. Yet, I'm a flat out hypocrite. I may have judged him and the movement, but I sure didn't stand up and get myself counted. I think that I was tested and failed the movement in the very first lecture I heard by Stan Crowe. I knew he was slinging crappola to the audience -- doing marketing, not spirituality -- when he got weaselly with me when I asked him about angels and gods, because I had read The Science of Being and Art of Living, doncha know. I should have stood up and braced him with the facts that Maharishi was speaking in the book about deeply religious concepts but here he was presenting TM as if it were something one did as a scientific experiment. I should have called him on the duplicity, made him pony up that his training was elitist -- that he had been told to "not confuse the lesser minions with subtleties." I should have said, "Hey, this Hinduism stuff in this book excites me -- do you really mean that I can be part of this kind of splendid universe?" But I didn't. I let him have his space to conjure up his scientifically valid, utopian panacea for us. That was my first lack of integrity. And it just went downhill from there. I acquiesced and didn't rock the boat. I didn't get up at Humbolt and complain that certain persons in charge were "saving seats up front close to Maharishi for their friends." I didn't complain each and every time some small person with a little bit of bureaucratic power could have me twisting in the wind. I didn't complain about the oddity of the creeps that seemed to get into these power positions. But mostly, I didn't complain when Maharishi told me the mantras and how to determine which went to whom. I didn't get up and say, "Wait a second! What the hell is this? You mean that willy-nilly, the mantras I give out are going to be correct and precise -- even when other initiators are being instructed to give a different mantra to that same person? Arrrgh! You mean that my ego is not a decider, that your method of mantra selection-distribution is not in the least clever or insightful, and that it seems that God Himself will deliver the correct person to the correct initiator to get the correct mantra and that it simply doesn't matter how I go about helping this, it will turn out perfectly? Well, THAT'S NOT WHAT I WAS SOLD ON! I was lead to believe that we soon-to-be-initiators would be given some amazing way to "see a person" and, you know, be a guru of some merit. What the hell's going on here?" That's what I should have said. And it just never stopped being like that for me. And, I failed repeatedly to fight the good fight, be honest with the movement's representatives about what I was really thinking. I even mindfully "went against my own evolution," by fudging the truth about myself on the advanced-technique application forms. I didn't want to admit that after eight months long rounding with Maharishi, after a 1,000 pujas, after meditating for years, I still wasn't having very much of that "white light" they were asking about on the forms. If I had integrity I would have revealed myself to be someone that TM hadn't done much to improve. I don't think I deserved to get any of the advanced techniques -- I lied on all the forms -- my first lie was to myself, of course. But untruthiness was the common experience in the movement. I wasn't allowed to ask the questions that mattered -- my dome badge was at stake -- there was a goon squad that went around blacklisting folks for unknown crimes -- everyone knew that. I knew it directly -- I got on a blacklist and had the luck to know someone high up enough in the movement to, well, simply take me off that list. But the blacklisting goons kept up their snooping on all of us. The witch hunt for commies back in the 50's ain't got nothing on the TM movement when it comes to paranoia, when it comes to moving the masses with fear. The movement trained us all to shut up or hit the road, and I, for one, just kept letting this be a part of my life, my family's life. This is a hard confession I am making here -- and, it's so hard to see what must be seen in this mess. Have I learned from this? Will I actually, you know, tell the truth to everyone from now on? But, thankfully, I don't have to burden my ego with this analysis. Ah, this is where my philosophy advises me to have a hearty laugh. Can't solve life, can only live it. Can't grasp life, can only be life. I've woken up and found myself in a theatrical production, the spotlight is on me, and I don't have a clue about what my next line is, so I wing it, open my mouth and let the Absolute sing. In the fun house, with every mirror distorting my image, making me grossly fat or astigmatic, I'm holding my sides in pain from the laughter. That's a good tag line, eh? I'd pay to see a film entitled, "Painful Laughs." We all bought that ticket, eh? Edg --- In [EMAIL PROTECTED], Vaj <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > On Apr 14, 2007, at 10:54 AM, jyouells2000 wrote: > > > Can you call it a success when tm'ers are leaving this world faster > > than new one's are starting? When, except for professionally placed > > PR, the tm program been all but forgotten by the public? Are more > > wealthy people really practicing TM? Do 'peace palaces' really > > promote peace? Does more real estate ownership bring more > > 'coherence' to this world? > > > I do believe you hit the nail right on the head John. A little > honesty was in order. Thank you. >
