Whack-a-mole time: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Vaj <vajradhatu@> wrote: > > On Mar 24, 2009, at 11:06 AM, guyfawkes91 wrote: > [Vaj wrote:] > > > Well, it's been hinted that Hagelin was pretty much > > > forced to write his paper > > > > That's interesting, who's doing the hinting? How > > recently was it hinted? > > In message #139273, Patrick Gillam shared his recollection > (emphases mine), in regards to touring the country promoting > the idea of "consciousness as the unified field", not sure > who I spoke to specifically on the paper, but I've heard > this same story from different people: > > "I'm trying to summon a memory of a conversation > with a former assistant of John Hagelin. This would > have been the late 1980s or early '90s. As I recall, > she said John was under pressure from Maharishi to > tour the country, telling scientists that consciousness > was indeed the unified field. John resisted, saying his > research partners would frown upon it, and more to > the point, it wasn't such a slam-dunk parallel. But > Maharishi persisted, ultimately saying, If you won't > do it, I'll find someone who will. So John did it."
As I wrote the first time Vaj tried to put this over on FFL (echoing points made on alt.m.t when he tried to put it over *there*): ----- Hagelin's speculative paper "Is Consciousness the Unified Field?" was published in Modern Science and Vedic Science in 1987. On alt.m.t, it was pointed out to you that Hagelin's notions about consciousness as the unified field were what led him to come to MIU in the first place. It's hard to tell for certain from a third-hand recollection of a long-ago conversation without a lot more context, but assuming Patrick's memory is accurate and given the known facts, it would appear that what Hagelin was objecting to was not the idea that consciousness was the unified field, but rather the prospect of having to go out and address understandably skeptical non-TM physicists to that effect when the idea was still at a highly speculative stage. It's not clear what "not such a slam-dunk parallel" means, but again, in context, it sounds as though what he meant was that it was hard to prove to the satisfaction of physicists--a point he makes quite strongly in the MSVS paper--not that he didn't believe it to be the case. ----- The next time Vaj trotted it out, I added: ----- It's also not clear that Hagelin ever went on such a tour. According to Lawson, who is pretty familiar with Hagelin's work, Hagelin may have given an informal talk here or there to a particular group, but there was never any kind of full-dress tour. (And we don't know how Hagelin ended up presenting the notion to the groups he spoke to. My guess is that he did present it as speculative, just as he did in the paper.) ----- It's not hard to understand why Hagelin wouldn't have wanted to present consciousness-as-unified- field to non-TM scientists as a theoretical fait accompli. But there's no *question* that he believed in it deeply. MMY got the idea from him, not the other way around.
