--- In [email protected], Duveyoung <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > I'm sure you're right, Jim. Who can know the future?, but > I wasn't predicting so much as I was summing up a stance I > have about the TMO. If it's a slow news week, maybe Maharishi's > death would make bigger headlines. Or, if someone actually > hovered, then all bets would be off.
I don't think I agree with you on this one, Edg. I mean, Rama did this stuff in the Los Angeles Convention Center, ferchrissakes -- open to the public, for 2 bucks a shot -- and it never made the Nightly News. Go figure, eh? But I was there, watching this amazing shit go down, and wondering why people *didn't* make a bigger deal of it, and trying to figure it all out. I still haven't, but here's my best shot at it. Most people like *comfortable*. They've got things All Figured Out, mostly. Things make sense, and even if their lives arent as great as the lives they see on TV, they're not chopped liver. These folks *like* things the way that they are, limitations and all. And then something intrudes into their lives that *changes* all of that, and smashes those limit- ations to smitereens. Onstage in front of them they see something happening that almost everyone in their entire lives have told them *can't* be happening. So they make it not happen. They gasp when it happens, but by the time they've made it to their cars in the parking lot, they've made it Go Away. They've forgotten that it ever happened. If you read Castaneda, you will recognize the phenomenon I'm talking about. These phenomena happen in a Separate Reality, an altered state of consciousness. They don't really *fit* in this one, the world of the everyday. Even those of us who experienced Castanedan moments in the desert have trouble remembering them once we're not there. Many of the exper- iences just don't "map" to everyday reality. It's difficult to even remember them, much less try to put them into words and try to express them to others. Believe me, I've tried. And it was *no* different for us in the audience at the Los Angeles Convention Center or out in the desert with Rama. We sat there watching this shit with every molecule of our bodies in *revolt*, man. Our very cells and neurons were *screaming* at us, telling us to *forget* what was happening, make it Go Away, get back to normal. Many did just that. But some of us must have listened to Bruce Cockburn somewhere along the Way. He dealt with normal with the line, "The trouble with normal is that it always gets worse." Whereas the thing about dealing with what's right in front of you is that sometimes things get better. We stuck around and tried to make sense of That Which Probably Doesn't Make Sense, and I think most of us who stuck around feel better for having done so. But it's really not everybody's cuppa tea. Most are going to forget that they were ever *served* tea, much less that it was a superb blend from the foothills of the Himalayas.
