Xenophaneros , your comment here is absolutely fair observation to a reality in the culture of the Transcendental Meditation movement. Certainly as anyone gets closer to the middle of TM administration a judgment of devotion is part of a calculation in cultural fealty test. Certainly the people Bevan keeps around him, people who were let in around Maharishi, and people who are let in currently around Nader Ram now are there by the vetted felt sense of having passed fealty to Maharishi and the teaching. It's a type of a defining esprit de corps. Of course a long consequent is an isolation of that echelon of the movement from everyone else. It was interesting to see the broad assemblage in a lecture amphitheater last week full of veteran meditators of the old movement. Most all of them have never had tea with the Prime Minister of the Global Country of World Peace let alone Bevan coming down and being seen showing up for coffee at a public place like Paradiso Cafe in the morning where the larger meditating community flows through getting coffee or even in the Dome meditating with the group anymore. The show-of- hands of veteran meditators was something else to regard that seems even surprised Bevan how many people are here still from the beginning days. Of course at his level in the bunker he would not know except for some of the fawned ones that get in to that level. That is a fair observation about the group. -Buck
---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <anartaxius@...> wrote: What you say is true of regular meditators and learning TM for the most part, but if working in the movement, devotion seems to be considered above all the other conceivable ways you could image what a spiritual path would be. Maharishi promoted this idea, because, I think, of his own experience with Brahmananda Saraswati. Within the movement there is a kind of unspoken peer pressure that the path of devotion, and in particular, devotion to Maharishi's stated ideals, is the one you ought to be pursuing. Further some sort of adulation of Maharishi himself seemed to be part of that influence, whether or not Maharishi himself ever directly said such (he tended to imply that devotion was the superior path without saying 'you should be devoted to me'). There is a lot of hidden and unvocalised (and also vocalised) compulsions in organisations, and particularly spiritual organisations, or any organisations that have a 'mission', that there is a right way to go about it and think, and a wrong way to go about it and think. I was speaking about those more closely allied with the TMO than regular meditators, and many here probably have the sense of what I was writing about. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <s3raphita@...> wrote: Re "I found the emphasis on devotion to the guru in the TM movement always disconcerting": What emphasis? Maharishi was never a guru - he was a teacher of meditation. "The guru-shishya tradition is the transmission of teachings from a guru to a disciple. In this relationship, subtle and advanced knowledge is conveyed and received through the student's respect, commitment, devotion and obedience." That sounds nothing like the usual experience of learning TM in which one is given a mantra and left to get on with it on one's own. No devotion or obedience was ever expected. ---In fairfieldlife@yahoogroups.com, <anartaxius@...> wrote: authfriend wrote: 'My parents sent me to Sunday School at a nearby nondenominational Christian church a couple of times when I was around 10 or so, feeling they should at least give me some exposure to religion. I didn't like it, and they didn't make me go again. I had a brief flirtation with Unitarianism in my teens, but it didn't last. Then after starting TM I began to feel a need for a worship context and joined the church where I'd attended Sunday School, stayed a couple of years but wasn't inspired enough to continue, since I really wasn't into the Personal God aspect of the belief system (or Christ as savior). God as Unified Field, the ultimate (and unworshipable) abstraction, is about as far as I can go.' My exposure to religion was rather slight, and by high school I was essentially agnostic although at times early influences would kick in on the emotional level. What you said here is pretty much what is available to agnostics, atheists, and non-theistic religions or philosophies (such as Zen Buddhism; Tao). One pretty much has to bypass that conception of a personal level of 'creation' (assuming there really is creation). It is possible other conceptual states might take the place of the personal god concept. What I found as time went on was I would make the attempt not to visualise the goal, I would easily try to deflect the tendency to give it a form. This worked for me. But a lot of people have trouble without some kind of concrete image in the mind, I find it interesting that TM takes the mind away from concrete imaging, yet when people come out of the meditation, it does not seem to register that that experience of formlessness has something to do with what one experiences through the senses. Ultimately that empty blank is what is experienced as being all the forms. The Bhagavad-Gita says that those bent on the unmanifest may have a tough time of it - a few translations follow, Chapter 12 Verse 5: 'For those whose minds are attached to the unmanifested, impersonal feature of the Supreme, advancement is very troublesome. To make progress in that discipline is always difficult for those who are embodied.' 'Those whose minds are attached to the unmanifest aspect have much greater tribulations, because devoid of any perceptible form and attributes, success is achieved with great difficulty due to the beings identifying with the body.' 'There is greater trouble for those whose minds are attached to the unmanifest. For, the path of the unmanifest is difficult to attain by the embodied.' As a kind of space case, perhaps I was attracted to a less concrete view of the universe. For example, without wanting to be a Buddhist, I was attracted to its Zen lineage because of the lack of conceptualisation and emphasis on direct experience. I found the emphasis on devotion to the guru in the TM movement always disconcerting as it did not seem to have any relevance to my so-called path. Others, of course, found devotion quite amenable to them, if it was natural; but faking devotion because one sees others doing it that way probably would be a disaster. I have seen people in the movement live and on tape seemingly straining to appear devoted when it seemed (as it appeared to me) they were just doing it out of peer pressure. Devotion is a property of what you like the most, whatever is most likable to you, that is your devotion, what you pursue, and that pursuit continues until it is fulfilled, or completely thwarted.
