[FairfieldLife] Re: Growing Up TM
---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, wrote : FF Coffee Haus conversation reports, TM Atheism & Nihilism: Excerpt, ..her daily work consults all day long with people from all over about their spiritual states. https://sites.google.com/site/ jenniferhamiltonsunpoint/home https://sites.google.com/site/jenniferhamiltonsunpoint/home She works with some TM’ers and with other folks who call on her. With old TM’ers it can be ‘checking’ their experience related to meditating. It can be everything. For some while now, also a lot of younger ™.org http://tm.org/ teachers and DLF teachers who have also found her over the years by word of mouth as someone they can talk to for perspective on what they are experiencing as dissonance. More recently she was talking about this from her experience in talking with these kids of the movement about the evident integrity problem the movement is in. What she finds in her experience… paraphrasing, Voice to text.. “The Gen-X and Millennials of TM assert that many people in their group cohort who they do know are atheist, that they are atheist to an extreme. There are two groups. One group in the Gen-X and Millennials of TM is atheist that are the most spiritual people you ever met. And, another group that is atheist in a place of utter rejection of anything: that there is no truth, there is nothing to reality other than a biological event, life. This second group sits with: ..that consciousness has no other place other than in the brain and that when one is born one becomes conscious and then one dies and consciousness goes away. For that group there is no what we might call continuum of experience or continuum of life. There is that group. However, there is a group in what they are going through and what is happening to them that on the level of consciousness is absolutely sublime. Is this going to fit in to ™-Ville and a vision of seven states of consciousness? Probably not. Some of the cohort have personal and direct intimate relationship with their experience (evolution). The description is gorgeous. It happens when they meditate invited to sit in the lap of it and they are held to be in quiet in a capacity built to not get just strung out on their thinking, but just to be in that silence present. God intoxicated and in life. Gorgeous and in detail in Nature. It is gorgeous. Add to this we have the walking wounded of the TM children because of how they were or were not handled in the school and by the teaching. What they saw very early on was the utter hypocrisy of the whole deal while their parents, tru-believers, were ‘drinking the kool-aid’. These kids were going like, “What is going on here?” This is not just news to them. It was a revelation that occurred early in their life. So they have this wound, this impression. Of course they run the gamut, of course they are not all going to be the same, but how many of them consider themselves to be atheist, atheism of the nihilist type. Then you have those that are atheist but they are atheist of the most refined spirituality. They are so non-dual that the idea of god as other, that kind of state they are Stabilizing unity consciousness is in that God absorbed ecstatic kind of union. Stabilizing a unity consciousness they talk about this as their expression. This is before Veda. It is before Maharishi, or Ammas or a David Spero last week or Janet Sussman this week. It is not about it being male or female, it is about it being both of masculine and feminine in balance. Infinite dynamism and infinite silence at the same time and the form of it in expression, in form that the mind can understand. Right now some are in this ‘shiva-shakti’ merging in their experience of state shaped by the direct guru-hood of the experience. It is fascinating. These are very spiritual kids, they are not looking for ‘church’. They are not looking for someone to tell them what to do. They get guidance. They are in to jyotish, they are about insight and perspective. But as far as this whole thing of trying to perpetuate a teaching, that even though the movement say and want to assert that it does not, it most certainly does seek to perpetuate duality because the guru in their minds is, “always perfect”, “beyond reproach”, “not questioned”, everything is deferred to whatever he said, the guru guidelines, it is all of that. All about structuring everything around that; and that you cannot trust your own experience. If your experience deviates from the seven states, in the sense of the tidy super mental linear thing they have, that he barely touched on at the least, that it was something you had to get through in order to have unity. Fascinating, depending on how one defines unity. Unity to what, not a who but a what. Their talk is about the difference in reality not of what who they are but what they are, what is. Not the who. The who impli
[FairfieldLife] Re: Growing Up TM
there is lots of movement kids with deep appreciation and enthusiasm for the knowledge but thats not considered newsworthy
[FairfieldLife] Re: Growing Up TM
Willy Blackmore writes: "I learned how to fly when I was 17. I’m not talking about a plane, and this isn’t some euphemism. “Yogic flying,” which is basically meditation at the black-belt level, offers the potential of human levitation — although in actuality it looks more like energetic, if not rather effortless, cross-legged hopping. Needless to say, most kids who grow up in the small-town Midwest do not learn how to fly. But in my hometown of Fairfield, Iowa, much of the community is devoted to creating heaven on Earth through group meditation. In Fairfield, teenagers fly. My parents, and my friends’ parents, were all caught up in the Transcendental Meditation movement — ex-hippies looking to settle down into a less drugged-out, more socially conservative, post-commune utopia. They came from the coasts, from Canada, from (in the case of my parents) Arizona, to start a university dedicated to consciousness-based education at the former site of Parsons College. The tract of mobile homes that eventually cropped up on the northwestern corner of the campus was named Utopia Park. Growing up in a utopian community in Iowa means you don’t always come off like an Iowan. After spending my high school and college years dying to get away, and finally escaping to California, I’ve finally embraced my Midwestern identity: I’m uncomfortable on the phone, hate being late, loathe being an imposition, and get positively giddy when a rare clap of thunder sounds during an L.A. rainstorm. But on my first trip back in 5 years, I found myself grasping at belonging. It showed. “Where are you all from anyways?” a woman asked me in a restaurant, as she and her friends zipped coats and pulled on gloves. “Because you clearly aren’t from around here.” My then-girlfriend (now fiancée), our 9-month old daughter, my sister, three childhood friends and I were packed in around a four-top at Butch’s River Rock Café. (We’re here to feed ya, not fatt’n ya up, says a cartoon catfish on the sign outside.) The table was scattered with scraps of pork tenderloin sandwich, baskets of sliced fried meat and steak fries smothered in cheese, and just the sugar-glaze residue of a burger served on a donut bun. We were visiting our hometown for the holidays, and had driven on snow-blown roads to Oakland Mills, Iowa, to start 2014 with a resolution-shattering New Year’s Day breakfast. If it weren’t for the steady fall of small, dry snowflakes, the trip would have taken 20 minutes. We may have been wearing the wool coats and scarves of our adopted homes in Chicago, Brooklyn, London, and Los Angeles, rather than the duck canvas and tree-patterned hunting camo favored by the other diners, but we were in our own backyard. Except for my girlfriend and daughter, we had all spent the formative years of our lives a short drive down Highway 34. I explained that we were all visiting for the holidays, “but we’re originally from Fairfield.” “Oh,” she responded as her friends walked outside. She paused for a beat before adding, “I guess you guys just didn’t give off that Fairfield vibe.” This felt like both a failure and a triumph. It had taken me years to shed “that Fairfield vibe” — but without it, where was I from? I’d never really fit in as an Iowan, only as someone who meditated. No wonder that 20 minutes from my hometown, I was being treated like an outsider. The Fairfield vibe is nothing like the Iowa vibe. You could tell from the sandwich I’d been eating. Butch’s is home to what the Iowa Pork Producers Association named the best breaded-pork tenderloin in the state. A stark reminder of our German immigrant roots, this impossible sandwich, which is served on a hamburger bun, features a schnitzel-like expanse of fried meat that reaches beyond the circumference of the bread by a substantial distance. It is quintessentially Iowan — like cheese curds in Wisconsin or queso in Texas. At Butch’s, the meat was cantilevered out a good three inches on either side, which makes eating the sandwich something of a tactical challenge. That morning, at 29 years old, I had eaten my first pork tenderloin sandwich. As a native Iowan, I should consider this sandwich something of a birthright, but in all my childhood and adolescence I’d never even tried one. If Iowa is a pork tenderloin sandwich, Fairfield is Boca burgers. If Iowa is corn and soybeans, hog confinements, and sandwiches at Butch’s, Fairfield is farmers markets, new age-y vegetarianism, and maybe some wild-caught salmon. Transcendental Meditation is still around — you’ve seen bits and pieces of it before. David Lynch is a well-known practitioner, and often describes in interviews how he meditates for 20 minutes a day. Oprah, Jim Carrey, Russell Simmons, Deepak Chopra, Doug Henning — they’ve all learned Transcendental Meditation at one point or another. Jon Densmore and Robby Kreiger first met Ray Manzarek at a lecture on TM at UCLA in 1965. Lena
[FairfieldLife] Re: Growing Up TM
"I learned how to fly when I was 17. I’m not talking about a plane, and this isn’t some euphemism. “Yogic flying,” which is basically meditation at the black-belt level, offers the potential of human levitation — although in actuality it looks more like energetic, if not rather effortless, cross-legged hopping. Needless to say, most kids who grow up in the small-town Midwest do not learn how to fly. But in my hometown of Fairfield, Iowa, much of the community is devoted to creating heaven on Earth through group meditation. In Fairfield, teenagers fly. My parents, and my friends’ parents, were all caught up in the Transcendental Meditation movement — ex-hippies looking to settle down into a less drugged-out, more socially conservative, post-commune utopia. They came from the coasts, from Canada, from (in the case of my parents) Arizona, to start a university dedicated to consciousness-based education at the former site of Parsons College. The tract of mobile homes that eventually cropped up on the northwestern corner of the campus was named Utopia Park. Growing up in a utopian community in Iowa means you don’t always come off like an Iowan. After spending my high school and college years dying to get away, and finally escaping to California, I’ve finally embraced my Midwestern identity: I’m uncomfortable on the phone, hate being late, loathe being an imposition, and get positively giddy when a rare clap of thunder sounds during an L.A. rainstorm. But on my first trip back in 5 years, I found myself grasping at belonging. It showed. “Where are you all from anyways?” a woman asked me in a restaurant, as she and her friends zipped coats and pulled on gloves. “Because you clearly aren’t from around here.” My then-girlfriend (now fiancée), our 9-month old daughter, my sister, three childhood friends and I were packed in around a four-top at Butch’s River Rock Café. (We’re here to feed ya, not fatt’n ya up, says a cartoon catfish on the sign outside.) The table was scattered with scraps of pork tenderloin sandwich, baskets of sliced fried meat and steak fries smothered in cheese, and just the sugar-glaze residue of a burger served on a donut bun. We were visiting our hometown for the holidays, and had driven on snow-blown roads to Oakland Mills, Iowa, to start 2014 with a resolution-shattering New Year’s Day breakfast. If it weren’t for the steady fall of small, dry snowflakes, the trip would have taken 20 minutes. We may have been wearing the wool coats and scarves of our adopted homes in Chicago, Brooklyn, London, and Los Angeles, rather than the duck canvas and tree-patterned hunting camo favored by the other diners, but we were in our own backyard. Except for my girlfriend and daughter, we had all spent the formative years of our lives a short drive down Highway 34. I explained that we were all visiting for the holidays, “but we’re originally from Fairfield.” “Oh,” she responded as her friends walked outside. She paused for a beat before adding, “I guess you guys just didn’t give off that Fairfield vibe.” This felt like both a failure and a triumph. It had taken me years to shed “that Fairfield vibe” — but without it, where was I from? I’d never really fit in as an Iowan, only as someone who meditated. No wonder that 20 minutes from my hometown, I was being treated like an outsider. The Fairfield vibe is nothing like the Iowa vibe. You could tell from the sandwich I’d been eating. Butch’s is home to what the Iowa Pork Producers Association named the best breaded-pork tenderloin in the state. A stark reminder of our German immigrant roots, this impossible sandwich, which is served on a hamburger bun, features a schnitzel-like expanse of fried meat that reaches beyond the circumference of the bread by a substantial distance. It is quintessentially Iowan — like cheese curds in Wisconsin or queso in Texas. At Butch’s, the meat was cantilevered out a good three inches on either side, which makes eating the sandwich something of a tactical challenge. That morning, at 29 years old, I had eaten my first pork tenderloin sandwich. As a native Iowan, I should consider this sandwich something of a birthright, but in all my childhood and adolescence I’d never even tried one. If Iowa is a pork tenderloin sandwich, Fairfield is Boca burgers. If Iowa is corn and soybeans, hog confinements, and sandwiches at Butch’s, Fairfield is farmers markets, new age-y vegetarianism, and maybe some wild-caught salmon. Transcendental Meditation is still around — you’ve seen bits and pieces of it before. David Lynch is a well-known practitioner, and often describes in interviews how he meditates for 20 minutes a day. Oprah, Jim Carrey, Russell Simmons, Deepak Chopra, Doug Henning — they’ve all learned Transcendental Meditation at one point or another. Jon Densmore and Robby Kreiger first met Ray Manzarek at a lecture on TM at UCLA in 1965. Lena Dunham learned how to medit
