Recently, following up like a mindless TM robot to a mention of the name of the Dalai Lama by someone she doesn't like, someone posted a quote from a Google Group. The quote indicated that the Dalai Lama had some positive things to say about former president George W. Bush.
IMO, the person's intent in posting this was to interject a "thought stopper" into the conversation. The idea was that if the Dalai Lama said something good about someone we all know to be thoroughly bad, then the Dalai Lama couldn't possibly be good, either. This just days after doing exactly the same thing when the name of a scientist who wrote a book saying that in her opinion all the "quantum consciousness" nonsense was in fact nonsense came up. The same person posted what was clearly intended to be another "thought stopper" by pointing to a few anonymous "reviews" of the book on Amazon. Again, people with feeble minds were supposed to *stop thinking* positively about the author, and think negatively about her. Add to this a long history of this poster and other posters on this forum utilizing "thought stoppers" to demonize people they don't like. Call someone a "liar" and (in their minds) everyone is supposed to stop thinking of the person accused of lying as pos- sibly having any positive qualities and instead think of them as something less than human. Call someone a "predator" and again the readers are sup- posed to *stop thinking* and just write the accused person off. In this post what I'm suggesting is that those who use such "thought stoppers" are demonstrating, more than anything else, how quickly their own thought processes stop working. They lack breadth of vision and compassion. They cannot *conceive* of a person being George W. Bush and yet having positive qualities. To them, if Bush is "bad," he is ALL "bad;" there can be no possible positive qualities in the man. Those positive qual- ities are not *possible* because he's "bad," and if a person is "bad," he's ALL bad. That's what they would have you believe. Therefore, if someone like the Dalai Lama is able to meet Bush and find something in him to praise -- anything -- then *he* must be linked to the "bad" Bush and be "bad" himself. Same with calling someone a "liar." Science tells us that human beings tell on the average 25 lies a day. A self-honest person can look at themselves and realize that they tell lies, too, if only to themselves. Only an idiot would claim, "I never lie." But some idiots not only claim this, they attempt to use the epithet "Liar!" as a thought stopper. Again, the implication is that by calling someone a "liar," you can make people think of the person you are attempting to demonize as ALL liar. "If they're a liar," the rationale of the thought- stopper-hurler goes, "they are *complete* liars. They cannot possibly have any other qualities or attributes. *Stop thinking* of this person as human; only think of them as a 'liar.'" Same with the epithet "predator." It conjures up images of child molesters and worse. And it is *supposed* to. Hurling the term "predator" at some- one you don't like is designed to get people to *stop thinking* about that person as human. They are supposed to think of them the way YOU do, as one-dimensional, as ONLY a "predator." Same with invoking "Kali Yuga" as a catch-all excuse for why things suck. The idea is that one can throw that term out and people will stop think- ing that there is anything they can possibly *do* to *change* how things suck. "You *can't* really change it," goes the thought stopper rationale, "because it's Kali Yuga. Things *always* suck in Kali Yuga." I'm pointing this out because I think a lot of people on this forum FALL for "thought stoppers." The TM movement was not long on compassion. It never taught its followers that a person could be partly good, partly bad. The model invoked was always the clear-cut "It's only the Pandavas and the Kauravas, the rakshasas and the perfect saints" scenario we see in TM stories. Black and white, no middle ground. So if a person is characterized as black, they are ALL black. As a result IMO, many people who have come out of such an environment are easy prey for those who use thought stoppers as a tool of debate. And the people who *rely* on thought stoppers know this, and use the thought stoppers as often as they possibly can. They know that the audience they are talking to has been taught to *despise* "shades of gray" and the possibility of feeling compassion for someone who has been accused of being "bad." They know that many people coming out of a TM environment will automatically consider George W. Bush ALL bad simply because Maharishi once characterized him as bad. Therefore they can "springboard" off of that and suggest that because someone *else* they want to demonize, like the Dalai Lama, once said something positive about Bush, he might be ALL bad, too. I think that the use of thought stoppers like this is the sign of a lazy intellect. The person who uses them frequently is demonstrating that they are incapable of thinking *past* a thought stopper, and that *their* thought processes stop at the first convenient label. And they want you to be just like them.
