--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Rick Archer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > on 8/5/05 10:10 AM, shempmcgurk at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote > > > > My dirty little secret is that, for me, it's MORE than "brief > > moments": I wish I had the capacity to "believe" as TM Acolytes do > > all the time, and unthinkingly be devoted to the craziness of the > > TMO. LIfe would be a hell of alot easier. > > Would it? I don't see too many of them living easy lives.
Define "easy lives." What makes life easy, your circumstances, or your attitude toward/experience of those circumstances? If I may, I'm going to repost some things I said on alt.m.t a couple of years ago that may be germane in this context. (I've edited them slightly for length and relevance.) The first post was in response to a comment from TMer Tom Pall. ---------------------- Tom Pall wrote: <snip> > I have reported experiences on this newsgroup wherein I > feel that MMY and I are on the same level. When I look out over > the landscape, everything MMY does and says makes perfect sense. > It's sort of a Vedic version of Mr. Roger's Neighborhood where > there is no muck and mire. Time both exists and doesn't exist. And > each of MMY's creations make sense. It's a make your own reality > world. A king wearing a funny hat and ministers of everything make > as much sense as being really into one of Shakespeare's plays where > the language, allusions and ideas all make total sense and are as > real as anything can be real. Even more real than that, as > there's the Absolute driving it, just as there are universal > archetypes and/or the shared Human Experience driving Shakespeare's > play.. That's really well put. Back in 1995, I spent the summer at the TM facility in Asbury Park, New Jersey. It was a big, fancy hotel that housed national and international staff and an MA-V clinic; it served as an R&R stop for movement folk from all over the world, including Jyotishis and vaidyas and Gandharva Veda musicians and TM-Sidhis administrators. Residence courses and complete TM-Sidhis courses, including the flying block, were held there. There was also a contingent of Purusha in residence. It was really a cross-section of the entire movement at the time. The facility was also a working hotel, movement run but catering to non-TMers, at the same time. But they didn't have as many paying guests as they would have liked, so they had a special deal where TMers could rent suites on a monthly basis for an extremely reasonable fee and carry on their normal lives. I thought it would be neat to have a sort of working vacation on the Jersey shore for the summer (the hotel was right on the beach, and I got a suite with a full ocean view) and have the opportunity to do group program on a regular basis, while I was doing my regular editing work. So I had the unusual experience of living right smack in the middle of the movement without actually being a part of it. I socialized at meals and during off-hours with all the movement folks, including a number of old-time TM governors, who would frequently hold forth about the early days of the movement and who loved to talk about Maharishi and explain why he did what he did. Anyway, there were times during that summer when I had a very similar experience to what Tom describes: everything about the movement made perfect sense. (It wasn't an experience of higher consciousness, as Tom's seems to have been, though, at least it didn't feel like that at all.) It also became obvious during these experiences that the "real world" was nuts, completely out of kilter. But then because in the course of my work and other activities of my "normal" life I would have frequent contact with the "real world," I'd get pulled out of that perspective, and all of a sudden the real world would look completely rational and the movement would look nuts and out of kilter, just as it always had before. I shuttled back and forth between these two perspectives all summer. It was truly weird; there was absolutely no way to reconcile them. Whichever one I was immersed in, the other was utterly, hopelessly incompatible. When I was in movement mode, I would occasionally contemplate committing myself to the movement. But I realized I'd have to completely give up the "real world" mindset; I couldn't keep one foot in the real world and one foot in the movement. The "rules" were just too different. In the end, obviously, I went back to the "real world." I don't regret making that choice for a second, but to this day I genuinely don't know whether the movement mode I got into was some kind of pathological delusion, or an alternate reality that was entirely legitimate and supremely sane on its own terms. ----------------- Then later in a thread that was discussing how MMY jumps from project to project, I elaborated a bit: ----------------- That's what I described as the movement mindset. Living in the "real world," I can't relate to it at all on any sort of visceral level. But when I was living at Asbury Park, as I said in my earlier post, I was able to get into it for brief periods, and it was *incredibly* liberating. It was a real pain in the butt to go back to the real-world mindset where I had to care about results. Again I'd emphasize that in referring to the movement mindset, I'm talking about psychology, not state of consciousness, in my case. It wasn't experiential. But it isn't a matter of *should* not care about results, it's a matter of *don't have to*. It's not an obligation you take on, it's an obligation you're relieved of. It's really hard to describe, but when you have "permission" to drop your preoccupation with results, it very quickly becomes clear what an oppressive load you've been carrying around, and how completely unnecessary it is, how it hems you in, shackles you. All of a sudden you realize you can do things just for the joy of doing them, and you realize how *rare* that is out in the "real world." This psychological mindset seems to make actual development of consciousness go much more smoothly. I think it literally facilitates transcending in meditation, and it makes it possible to be fully, unreservedly involved in activity, which is what is said to stabilize pure consciousness. According to several very wise old movement hands I've spoken to, this is precisely why MMY is constantly starting new projects and dropping old ones. It has nothing to do with the projects themselves, it's training for the movement staffers who work on them. It's one of the very few psychological techniques he uses to facilitate development of consciousness. You *have* to let go of expectations, you *have* to stop worrying about results, because you never get to *see* anything but the shortest-term results before you have to drop whatever you're doing and start in on something new. I think it may also be a way of weeding folks out of the inner movement circles who aren't yet at the point where they're able to let go this way. They need to "cook" out in the real world a little longer. I don't know if this is really why he does it, but it certainly fits the observed facts, and it's absolutely consistent with what he teaches. So I'm inclined to think it's very plausible. To subscribe, send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Or go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ and click 'Join This Group!' Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
