To whoever wrote this:
> you are an idiot - I did TM for 20 years, twice a day, every day - it took me > that long to realize it wasn't the only game in town - stupid me. > Stupid? I came to FFL today to ask a specific question and then get back out again, but it was unavoidable to see a couple of quotes that peaked a reaction from me, yours being one of them. I think you have missed the point, that just because there are other "games" does not mean they would have worked for you any earlier or that you would have even found them any sooner. Consider this: I had to do TM for 3 years before I quit smoking because it suddenly became so repulsive that I had to quit. There are many methods to quit smoking but over the 18 years i smoked I never found anything else that worked. Furthermore, over the next few years, 3 of my non-meditating family members died of lung cancer. So, who was stupid? I had to meditate for 5 years before I was smart enough to go from being a drop-out to making an "A" in statistics class, and then to become the first and only person in my family to get higher education, both a BA and a MA. There are many colleges and learning methods, but none of them worked for me. Today I am so well established intellectually that I could go to any school, but do you think it would have happened, just out of the blue, merely an accident of fate, that I suddenly got smarter, learned to concentrate, and succeeded in school, or do you think it's more likely that I learned an easy method, one that required no concentration or effort, called TM? Was there any other "game" in town which I would have tried? Seriously unlikely. I had to meditate for 15 years before I got smart enough to be successful in psychotherapy. I'd tried therapy a few times before and always quit within weeks of starting. So where did the desire, determination, courage, and other aspects of character come from for me to be successful? It certainly wasn't just my therapist, or his methods, but rather despite them that I succeeded. My relatives continued to live out what would have been my fate without TM--they became alcoholics, drug addicts, and suicides. Some finally found other games: AA, religion, prayer. Care to make comparisons in benefits and outcomes? Do you think I would have been so different than the rest of my family to suddenly "wake up" to discover any other system or to work at it if it required more effort than TM? To think so is to think irrationally. I had to meditate for 20 years before I could bear to be in the same room with my mother, to become loving, understanding, tolerant, and to overcome the temper and other aspects of our family dysfunctions. The rest of my family, including my son, are to this day still locked in those same dysfunctions. Why was that I rose to higher planes when they, who could have found alternatives, didn't do so? What made me grow so far so fast so deep when they didn't? It certainly wasn't prayer or religion for some of them practice that religiously. I will skip over what happened after 20 years except to say that I had to meditate for 35 years to become so wise and compassionate that I developed the ability to heal others. Healing is just common sense work when you can see the laws of nature, but do you think I could see these laws of nature without all these years of practicing TM? I have known that for years that there are "other games in town": Tolle, Adyshanti, Amma, Peruvian Shaminism, etc. etc. etc. etc., including some very enlightened people right here in Fairfield. (I know enough about these games to have taught college metaphysics and Comparative Meditation Techniques.) Most of them have enriched my life and my spiritual understanding but this growth would not have happened had they been my original teachers. It took years of meditating for me to open up mentally, emotionally, spiritually to what they to offer. But of what value would they be if my consciousness was not already awakened? And have you observed, who succeeds at these other "games" better than former meditators? It requires an awakening to even be able to utilize these other "games." But there is another point that one needs to appreciate to understand where you are coming from. My observation is that there are 3 stages of gaining knowledge. The first stage is blind devotion. (This is not a stupid stage, as many make it out to be; it is a very healthy stage of purifying formation of character, intellect, and spiritual growth). Where Maharishi's teachings are concerned, we followed him because the message made sense. Unlike many other teachings, his are orderly and comprehensive and they created a framework for us to understand where other teachers are coming from. The 2nd stage is disillusionment when one learns his formerly idealistic viewpoints aren't true, at least not true in the way he understood them, or true as we imaged perfection to be, and he feels betrayed. It's something like an teenager seeing that his Sunday School beliefs are too idealistic to be workable in the "real" world. Historically, my observation is that many people on FFL are still in stage 2--disillusioned, angry, resentful, and fault-finding, still blaming others for what they perceive as failures. The 3rd stage is integration, a mature stage where one accepts reality for what it is. Stage 3 is where one sees the world as a wholeness, where there is no either-or, only appreciation for what IS. Stage 3 is full of gratitude and appreciation, which, Maharishi has said, is a measure of enlightenment. Adyshanti said that when he first woke up, his first thought was that he was in an insane asylum (because most everyone was irrational. (Google Ellis and/or irrationality to see why he said that, for most people are irrational). Byron Katie says that arguing with reality, you lose "only 100 percent of the time." So why keep arguing? And Maharishi said, "The world is as we are." I believe it took you 20 years to understand that there were other games in town, but that doesn't mean that you are stupid or that TM is a fraud. It simply means that it how long it took you to reach stage 2. As you have quit doing TM, I wonder how long it will take you to get to stage 3? (I don't care...its your business.But I wondered if my perspective might be of value to you. Unlike me you may not have anything to compare it to so you can't appreciate just how far the TM train took you before you understood how much you had to have grown in order to have come to appreciate "other games."
