--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, turquoiseb <no_reply@...> wrote:
BARRY1: For some reason, I find myself still tripping on a phrase used on FFL yesterday. *Not* on the person who wrote it, but on the content, the idea expressed. The phrase was "Now my love for Maharishi was of course the highest love I had ever known." ROBIN1:Well, it is true for me, Barry, and I think THIS IS HOW I GOT ENLIGHTENED. Like that? I thought you might. Maharishi loved Guru Dev more than he loved his mother--more than he loved anyone. He loved Guru Dev as God. For some reason the mystical forces extant at the time--early seventies--were such as to make this experience involuntary, non-projected, spontaneous, and the most natural experience one could have in the presence of Maharishi. NOT to find something resembling this was to be deprived of the source of grace which was dominating the metaphysical context of everything to do with TM and Maharishi and teaching TM. You missed out on the mechanical principle that was set up by Maharishi himself, Barry--and his connection to the Holy Tradition. Ah, just let me say that, Barry: because that love I had for Maharishi: it should be judged according to what it drew out of me even to post about it. I do not love Maharishi anymore; and in a paradoxical sense I consider that love having the same truth status objectively as my enlightenment: read: none. And I have come to know another love since then that is truthful and objective--albeit not as intoxicating and excessively self-surrendering. BARRY1:I admit to stopping in my reading tracks when I first encountered that phrase. My first reaction was, "Excuse me?," followed by a hearty "Of course?" ROBIN1: As I say, Barry, Maharishi held up this "hook" as Marek expressed it, and inside the context of the relationship between the disciple and the Guru this was the most primary dynamic of evolution available. Conceived of in Eastern terms, that is. Such a connection is unknown in the Western tradition. And I do not get the sense of Maharishi's relationship to Guru Dev to be anything like Saint Peter's relationship to Christ. Or even Saint John the Evangelist, the only apostle who gritted it out and watched Christ die on that cross. [The other guys fled in fear.] His mother took it pretty hard too. You have such a perversely arbitrary way of getting your opinions across, Barry. In this case you are reacting to something I have said--and something I have proven was true at the level of my experience. It is not a love which excludes the possibility of loving someone other than Maharishi. That is a very different kind of love. The love I felt for Maharishi was the love for his beauty, majesty, dignity, authority, elegance, and perceived integrity. These are not the reasons one falls in love with someone or attaches oneself to a member of one's family. BARRY1: I'm bringing this up because I suspect that some people here never paused at that "of course," or even noticed it, because for them it really *is* an "of course." They really might also believe that their relationship with Maharishi represents for them the highest love they've ever known. ROBIN1: This undoubtedly is true, and your dismissal of the experiential validity of this love is just a special Barry Wright form of sour grapes. You don't even know the first way to go about invalidateing this love, or making it seem inappropriate--as I ultimately believe it to be. You never take yourself seriously, Barry: always just flinging away your accusations, never following the demands that truth would wish to make upon you in order for you to represent her. Think of how many critics you have on FFL, Barry: Have you ever listened to one of them? Are they all wrong? They have hit the bull's eye so often it is comical. Stop disgracing yourself, Barry. Get real. You are doing your usual sloppy and tendentious and prejudicial job of trying to do away with something--But you lack the grace, the discipline, and the sincerity to do the job. BARRY1: It wouldn't for me. Maharishi wouldn't even make it into my Top Ten. ROBIN1: And what are we supposed to make of *this*, Barry? Is this: appeal to authority? I am sure Maharishi wouldn't make it into the Top Ten for Mitt Romney either. So what? I repeat the statement: "It wouldn't for me. Maharishi wouldn't even make it into my Top Ten". We would have a hard time comprehending how he could make it into your Top Ten, Barry. That would pose a paradox--It certainly would be for me. BARARY1: That's not a putdown, just reality as I see it. ROBIN1: I know I speak for most readers when I say we are relieved to know this, Barry. BARRY1: What, I'm supposed to believe that my relationship with Maharishi -- who I spent very little face time with -- is somehow better or "higher" or on a more elevated plane than my relationship with other people I've known and loved up close and personal for years or decades? That's just SO not going to happen. ROBIN1: Inside the context of spiritual truth and the evolution of consciousness and the quest for enlightenment--Did you ever aspire to enlightenment, Barry?--one's relationship with Maharishi, if you were a TM Teacher, it had precedence--in some sublime and religious sense even--over any other relationship. Not in some personal or intimate or existential sense; but in terms of what loving Maharishi could do for you. And for me, I attribute my openness to this reality to have been instrumental in my enlightenment--even if now I would only feel an extreme aversion to the mystical lure and siren power of Maharishi (were he who he was in 1973--now). You need to argue honestly here, Barry: you just obnoxiously assert an opinion and your crankiness is all over what you say. BARRY1: Didn't happen when I was a TM TB, and didn't happen with Rama when I was a Rama TB. I might have respected both people, but I never considered them either the most important people in my life, or believed that loving them was more important or in any sense "higher" than loving...uh...my loved ones. ROBIN1: Again, Barry, if you were paying attention to what was being said explicitly by Maharishi, what was the natural tendency of being an Initiator, what the whole context was all about, then you clearly and rationally separated out these two spheres of your life: your relationship with Maharishi; your relationship with someone else. But there were many Initiators who went exclusively for the relationship with Maharishi, in emulation of Maharishi's devotion to Guru Dev. Why be so obstinate and recalcitrant, here, Barry? Every sincere and alert Initiator in the early seventies knew that the capacity to adore Maharishi as he had once adored his Master Guru Dev was a powerful accelerator for one's evolution--as I say, perhaps the most efficacious means of all of acquiring permanent bliss-consciousness--Unity Consciousness. Not one TM Teacher who really had the hang of what was going on would have denied this, Barry. Your pronouncement here is very much after the fact. I happen to agree with you--but you have confused and muddled the issue and made it seem as if a retrospective view of Maharishi now in October 2012 applies perfectly to the circumstance of knowing Maharishi in 1973. And you would not even have tried to get a hearing with regard to the point of view you are expressing now--then. And every non-disillusioned TM Teacher reading this post agrees with me. This does not gainsay the ultimate verdict: That Maharishi was not worthy of the adoration and love we gave to him. But it did give me Ten Years of Unity Consciousness. Or was very much causally significant in my slipping into Unity on that mountain above Arosa, Switzerland. Ironically enough, the truth of what you are saying here--but in a most screwed-up way--is what allows me to even conceive of loving someone personally. I do believe that giving all that love away to Maharishi could negatively influence the extent to which one could give oneself to another human being in some intimate and personal sense. And therefore such mystical love could in fact be deleterious to one's ability to appreciate another person other than one's Guru. So I go along with you here. But what is true now for me in 2012 is not what was true for me--or for you--in the early seventies. And you would never have attempted to get this point of view across to a fellow Initiator at that time. BARRY1: I'm not sure I can understand how anyone who is married or in a long-term relationship can say that. Or anyone who has children, or has helped to raise them. Or, for that matter, anyone who has actual friends. Does the love one is "supposed to have" for one's spiritual teacher somehow *trump* the love you feel for these people? Is it on some "higher" level? ROBIN1: Again you are mixing things up here, Barry. When Maharishi was Great, when he was King of the universe for us--at least for some of us--It was never thought that our love for Maharishi inhibited or delimited or even influenced how we loved someone else--lovers, parents, children, friends. And why was that? Well even conceptually this was not a problem; and empirically it never proved to be a problem, since in the final analysis that love for Maharishi (IMHO--Hi, Khazana) was unreal compared to how one loved someone in the categories you mention. But the notion of loving one's Master for the sake of achieving Cosmic Consciousness--or more pertinently, God Consciousness--this was very orthodox and believable and a matter of almost common sense among all TM Teachers in the know. It was as real as the law of gravity--potentially. And every one of us envied those persons like Jerry Jarvis who seemed so rooted in his love for Maharishi--and yet had his own happy married life. Posing the question to oneself now: the whole understanding has shifted radically and irrevocably. So it turns out you are right. But I will not allow you to make what finally emerged as the truth after our disillusionment with Maharishi become the truth retroactively. How absurd is that? And what I said in my letters to raunchy is so much truer than whatever one could take away from this misleading post of yours, Barry. BARRY1:I don't think so. And tonight I'm wondering where the belief that it *does* trump other kinds of love CAME FROM. ROBIN1: It came from Maharishi, it came from what Guru Dev communicated to Maharishi. Maharishi made this kind of love seem the sine qua non of spiritual progress. In fact he implicitly suggested that he did not have to do TM; he just became enlightened through his love for Guru Dev. No? This is the standard impression each TM Teacher received from listening to Maharishi talk about first seeing Guru Dev, and all the stories after that. Maharishi was our Master, Barry: Would you have tried to refute him? Would you have tried, in 1973 to dissuade all of us from believing in the truth of what Maharishi was clearly telling us: If you love me the way I loved Guru Dev, you too will surely become enlightened? This is as basic a truth as any TM Teacher ever learned, Barry. So it is clearly ludicrous to formulate the question about these comparative forms of love as you have done in this post. BARRY1: Think back. Your sense of devotion to Maharishi. Did it develop *before* or *after* you heard stories glorifying devotion and bhakti and holding it up as the "highest ideal?" There were a LOT of those stories. Remember Trotaka? And the stories Maharishi told about how devoted he was to Guru Dev? ROBIN1: No, Barry, this was an innocent experience, very much influenced of course by a mood-making form of devotion; but somewhere there was evidence that to love Maharishi above anything--and there were Teachers who became part of the M group who took this seriously and designed their entire life around this purported truth--the fastest means for evolution--to love Maharishi in this way was normal, admirable, and the purest form of spiritual experience that existed. BARRY1; Devotion to and love for one's spiritual teacher is a very Eastern thing. I doubt that very many of us brought up in the West would ever have decided on our own that it trumped more real, more tangible love relationships. I think that the stories of devotion came before the devotion. I think we were subtly and pervasively *trained* to believe in the "highest ideal" of our relationship with Maharishi being the most important one in our lives. ROBIN1: Believe what you want, Barry, but this is ridiculous: that we were influenced by stories and ideas when we came into the physical presence of Maharishi. You would make a mockery of the lives of hundreds of Initiators who, however betrayed and cynical they might feel today, were at one point in their lives, utterly and thoroughly convinced that Maharishi was the equivalent of Christ, and everything that I said in my two letters to raunchy, and what she said, this was standard fare for those of us sensitive enough to get what was going on. You there, Barry? Maharishi became the most important person in our lives because nature, the universe, creation--what was behind all of this--seemed to, in conjunction with our practice of TM, made this seem the most natural thing in the world. To love Maharishi with an exceptional and self-sacrificial love: What could be better or more desirable than this? Nothing. BARRY1: Think about it, and chime in if you have any ideas on the subject and can express them somewhat peaceably. I'm not going to argue with anyone, but I am up for a discussion. I think it could be an interesting topic: Is bhakti inherent to human nature, or is it a taught -- and learned -- behavior? I think it's the latter. ROBIN1: Well, simply--and peaceably--Barry, you are wrong. Not that finally this love is, I believe, anything but an illusion--and in that sense, it must in some way be "learned" because I believe it to be something not intrinsic to being a individual human being in the universe. But that this love did not get generated from a source more powerful than our own will, our own conditioning, our own psychology--this was so undeniable to all of us who took into ourselves what the universe was serving up to us back then, Barry. Transcendence through TM; love for Maharishi: these were both the most innocent and natural, even influential things in the life of every devoted Initiator. No, the entire Maharishi-TM thing was very real, Barry. EXPERIENTIALLY real, that is. Objectively, I believe you are correct (in what one can finally conclude from your analysis): that love was false. And will do no good for one when there is a final reckoning of one's life. But I would repeat, Barry: It helped make me enlightened, and my enlightenment was real and it was unreal. Do you understand, Barry?
