--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "authfriend" <jst...@...> wrote: > > -- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "curtisdeltablues" <curtisdeltablues@> > wrote: > <snip> > > Instead you cling to a comfortable caricature of me as a > > villain with a nefarious agenda. To each his or her own. > > Oops, I better not let this stand lest I be accused > of assenting to it. > > No, I don't think you're a villain with a nefarious > agenda. I think you have a tremendous amount of > unresolved personal resentment against MMY
Hey you may be right. Psychology is tricky isn't it? I wouldn't give much credence to your actually looking at me in an empathetic enough way to come to a very profound conclusion here, and you have never really questioned me about it outside a fairly hostile context, but you may be right. There is nothing intrinsically irrational about this conclusion from where you stand. But that ad hominem argument doesn't discredit the content of what I have said about Maharishi. It may speak to motive, but has nothing to do with whether or not he actually had a narcissistic personality disorder or any of the other ideas I have about him. Those ideas need to be refuted on their own, which you have declined or failed to do effectively. I would be interested to see you go through the description of the Narcissistic disorder from the DSM and show point by point how it fails to describe him. To me it reads like a MERU publication. Looking inward, after what I felt after he died, the more likely unresolved part is my unresolved affection for the guy. The resentment seemed easier. I realized he wasn't who he claimed to be and I had to move on, grow up and give up the guru daddy. I stopped blaming him once I decided that he had disorder that made him think he was so important and use people as he did. And I'll bet it was a psychological freak show at Joitir Math. So it is my affection for the guy that is harder for me to reconcile with the guy he factually turned out to be for me. This is fairly common among people who hung out with him some. And I don't feel a need to "resolve" it. I enjoy my affection for the old coot. I had a lot of fun with him. I consider him a Jungian symbol for something in my own mind, a quest for perfection that I know logically isn't a human option. As Judith said so well in her book, Maharishi became a composite projection of himself and the Jesus figure of our youth. I believe my unconscious mind still holds his image and what he represented for me fondly. I have the same feeling about Christian religious symbols, they represent a style of art that continues to inspire positive feelings long after my belief system shifted away from the content of that religion. Nativity scenes, Vedic chanting, Sandalwood intense, Madonna statues (without the spiked bra) all put me in a delightful frame of mind. Same for images of Maharishi. When I see him I feel good. Nostalgia is a bitter-sweet feeling that I seek sometimes. that > prevents you from taking a rational view of him.> There is nothing intrinsically irrational with seeing a guy who claims to be the vehicle for the supreme knowledge of life to blossom in this generation (and as you claim save the world from going down the tubes) as having the disorder that happens to give a person these exact symptoms. And given that there are thousands of people with this disorder it is much more likely that he has this than that he really really IS the guy. You never responded to my point about why you reject Moon's claim to a very similar role. And it isn't irrational to see that once he realized that the sidhis weren't working as planned that marketing them was a bit of a scam. I told you I don't know how sincere he was about all the "knowledge" he laid on us. There is nothing irrational about that. In fact given my premises that he was an ordinary man and not the tool of "nature" it would be highly irrational of me to view him any other way. You mentioned that the balancing factor for his personality defects was all the good he has done. Can you understand that if you remove that premise you might see him as I do, a super religious, ambitious guy who abused his self-appointed authority with a bunch of young people while getting rich advancing his religious and personal agendas? The fact that you hold him in a special place and not in the Jim Baker category may be a result of your irrational working assumptions that are: highly likely to be true but haven't risen to the level of belief due to their metaphysical nature, based on things in Indian religious literature which you also use as a filter to evaluate your own subjective experiences. Our discussion actually contained the opposite of debating tricks. I was applying the Socratic method of questions to uncover assumptions behind your statements, what they were based on. No debater has this luxury of time. And there is nothing unfair about the method, it allowed you to tell me how you put your beliefs together, what you base them on and how you construct them. You might be complimented that I would take the time to ask enough questions to find out what your view is and how it differs from mine. Your saying you "put up with" my tactics for too long is unworthy of an interesting discussion of different values. You had plenty of time to correct how I was restating your position back to you to verify accuracy. And in the end we have different conclusions and had a chance to articulate them. I enjoyed it and learned some things. YMMV. >
