You have a ton of great old TM stories - thanks for posting that one Barry.
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On Mon, 1/13/14, TurquoiseB <turquoi...@yahoo.com> wrote:
Subject: [FairfieldLife] Re: Religion that doesn't take itself deadly seriously
To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com
Date: Monday, January 13, 2014, 4:40 PM
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Share Long wrote:
>
> turq, good point that unisex means women dressing like
men. I hadn't thought of that because for me wearing
uniforms happened in Catholic schools and they did want the
girls to look different from the boys, albeit, like one
another.
>
> I think part of uniform wearing is to simplify life and
help a person have their attention on something other than
what to wear to school. Also uniforms are easier on the
parents budget.
>
> I'm fascinated by the topic of uniforms because I
wore them to school from age 6 to 18. Then when I went to
college, everyone wore blue jeans so that was also a bit of
a uniform. To this day, I tend to be nonchalant about
clothing, tending to wear what's comfortable.
>
> I've noticed that people for whom clothing is a
medium of expression will find ways to express their
individuality even when wearing a uniform.
True that. Back in my TM daze,
my "medium of expression" was ties. I mean, you
can't look all that much different from the other TM
Teacher Clones in your TM Teacher suit, right? And the
"rules" said you had to wear a tie (even to the
beach...really...I heard Maharishi say this several times),
but they didn't specify what *kind* of tie.
Heh heh. I specialized in Tastefully Outrageous Ties. I
still have a collection of Jerry Garcia ties that are now
worth 5-10X what I paid for them on eBay. Jerry (whatever
else he was into) had great taste as a watercolor artist,
and so when those designs were transferred to ties, what you
got was great taste, not psychedelia. I had a number of
"museum ties," patterns taken from works of art in
museum, that I thought were pretty damned tasteful, but
which were so colorful that many might have considered
them...uh...unfashionable.
My favorite tie to wear during the six months I worked and
lived at the TM National Headquarters at the end of Sunset
Blvd. was a nice pale blue tie with a line drawing on it of
a female nude. The drawing was lifted from a famous artist,
but was subtle and (IMO) tasteful, and so I liked wearing
the tie for aesthetic reasons.
But the tie was also useful as a Consciousness Test. As I
said, the design was subtle, so from a distance it probably
looked like swirls of black lines on a blue background. But
get closer, focus on it for half a second, and it was
obviously a fairly voluptuous female nude. So I'd wear
that tie around National, all day, and count the number of
people who even noticed it.
Interestingly -- and perhaps revealing of the state of
attention of full-time TMers -- I could often get through a
whole day without anyone noticing. I once wore it to a
meeting we were having with visitors from Seelisberg, the
"higher ups" of the European TMO. Jerry Jarvis was
there, and all of the US leaders, but not a single person
noticed the tie. And I don't mean "no one
acknowledged it." I'd been running this
Consciousness Test long enough at this point to know the
difference. They just didn't care enough or weren't
conscious enough to notice that one of their number was
sitting there wearing a tie with a naked babe on it. The
memory of that meeting still cracks me up to this day.
:-)
