Good comments, David. Very real. --- In [email protected], "David Fiske" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > <snip to> > Face dog I don't think he attracted a lot of conmen. I think > he attracted a lot of young people who felt inspired to feel > that working for him might well make a huge difference in > the world.
Gotta agree with this one. On the whole, the people I met in the TM movement were enthusiastic, dedicated seekers, not just for themselves, but for the world as well. Their enthusiasm often exceeded their abilities, but I don't think that any of them started out as conmen. Over time some of them became conmen, and the lack of discrimination in the environment helped them to do so, but on the whole the TMO attracted pretty nice people. <snip again to> > It causes great grief that all those hard efforts from so many > people have ended up with a movement about as far removed from > any positive influence as one could imagine. If I were Maharishi > I would feel despair. He must self reflect like us all. I wish, > like a good friend, I could chew the cud with him as, late in > life, he weighs up things.. I kinda doubt there would be much cud to chew. My take on Maharishi is that he *doesn't* self reflect like all of us. I'm sitting here racking my brain trying to remember any example of seeing him do so publicly, or having heard stories from others who spent a great deal more time around him than I did, and I can't remember a one. Maybe someone else here can, but it appeared to me that self-reflection, especially if it required him to assess his own actions critically, was just among the tools in his toolbox. I've seen him actively participate in revising his own history (that is, going back and editing passages out of movement books that had proven embarrassing in the time since they were first published, ordering the "recall" of audio or videotapes that, again, had been deemed dogmatically incorrect) too often to believe that he will ever spend much time in self-reflection. Maharishi *shapes* his image; he doesn't examine it critically. Just my opinion.
