Thanks for the response. Comments below. --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB <no_re...@...> wrote: > > --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "authfriend" <jstein@> wrote: <snip> > > Would it have > > become less about self-discovery for you? > > No. It would have been irrelevant. > > But it would not have been irrelevant to, say, > the former Catholic priest who shared a trailer > with me at Humboldt.
(This was what, a rounding course? TTC? Neither?) If the origin and the > nature of the mantras had not been hidden from > him, he would never have begun TM. Some months > later, he *did* learn about those origins, > and dropped TM like a hot potato. He also > felt betrayed and lied to. > > That's because IMO he *was* betrayed and lied > to, by people like yourself who were trying to > "protect" him from knowledge he "didn't need" > to know. See, here's my problem. If a former priest could go this far--to the extent of attending a residential course taught by MMY--without having any suspicion that there was anything religious about it, *how religious could what he was being taught have been*? And he was getting a lot more of the SCI-type stuff than Lynch's kids will. What exactly *did* he later learn about the mantras and their origins? Was he told they were the "names of Hindu gods"? Or just that Hindus associated them with gods? Did he do any research into the origins of the bija mantras? Did he come to believe he had been invoking actual supernatural beings? This kind of thing just makes no sense to me. It seems to me that the outrage is a function of getting only *part* of the picture beyond what you get in the basic TM course. (And not incidentally, there has been *at least* as much "deception" from those seeking to paint TM as Hinduism as there has been from the TMO seeking to paint it as secular, and on the basis of a far less admirable motivation. Of course, that gets into the issue of whether ends ever justify means, but I don't believe there's an absolute answer to that.) I don't have any particular comment on most of the rest of what you write, although I do disagree with the "baby steps" characterization. But that's a different issue. One final point: > So, bottom line, the issue of whether TM or > the TMO were a religion had nothing to do with > *MY* walking away from TM. But that issue was > and will continue to be important to those > who feel a loyalty to a particular religion, > and later find that information was hidden > from them that caused them to (in their own > eyes) violate the tenets of that religion. > > That is essentially what you have been advo- > cating lately. What I would like above all would be for folks to have the *complete* picture. It wouldn't satisfy the fundamentalist types, of course, but I'd be willing to bet that a good portion of the more reasonable folks, including many nonfundamentalist religionists, would realize the "Hindu origins" bit is just not significant. But there's *no way* people can ever have the complete picture without really getting into it, including plenty of experience of the technique. In between virtually no information about TM's origins and context and full information, there's a big swath of *partial* information that is essentially misleading. If one thinks practice of the TM technique is highly beneficial for most people, and conveying full information isn't a practical option, what does one do?
