Transcending Meditation, TM ? One of the Unity ministers from California told of an active younger Unity laity minister who just started TM that found it very helpful.. Everyone older at the coffee table discussion acknowledged starting TM back in the day, “Oh yes, TM everyone [they] started with that years ago.. tried and true”. “Nice technique well taught”. . But in their spiritual lives they went on to other things spiritual like affecting healing-prayer and meditation sort of like Patanjali TM-sidhis of the subtle system in practice of healing and prayer in a higher level of spiritual practice and service.
In Unity congregations, serving both the families with children and the elderly-in-transition are strategies intertwined for a succession. Likewise TM [Maharishi Foundation] is very consciously looking at teaching TM again to student populations which was so long neglected by the TM-sidhis centric movement of Bevan and Maharishi's administration for years and recent decades gone by now. The Unity ministers recognized too that the generation of the 1980-90's got skipped, the X-er's neglecting within their studies the liberal arts, the classics and spirituality for their MBA's and other technical and professional degrees got missed entirely by spiritual movements. . The lost generation. These particular practiced ministerial communitarian spiritual Unity people I spoke with are busy at it providing services to people with younger families now and looking out for the elderly who are still active but potentially "in transition"; the older who though elderly are independent and well before moving to assisted living, moving away to where their kids live, or to nursing homes or hospice end-of-life. Talking with these active ministers is like talking with the active David Lynch Foundation TM teachers and some of the successful TM.org field teachers now. They have a lot of shakti in their work. In talking with these active Unity ministers it's like what we have seen in TM, that the WWII generation that recognized what was going on spiritually and shared their success and support by the checkbook is pretty much demographically gone now. The traditional WWII generation is pretty much gone now. Now the baby-boom, the “spiritual but not-religious” atheistic individualistic 'in-it-for-yours-truly' sorts are not yet there to supporting altruistically much good in community works. A couple of the California ministers were saying a challenge in Marin Co. California where they live is that only 4 percent of their populations attend a church. 4 percent. The rest? They go hiking for themselves, have membership in fitness centers, and may be go to a yoga studio for their community and spirituality. These ministers I interviewed over coffee were front-line with active large communities who were visiting back on a conference at Unity Village sharing their movement's challenge. Within TM we have seen this trend too as our TM elders who facilitated the late 1950's, 60's, and 1970's TM movement with Maharishi have pretty much all passed away now with their check-books gone too. There are some baby-boomers who are able and community minded with resources but they are fewer now too from the heady days of a few years ago. A lot of the upper-middle-class TM meditators left the TM movement in the 1990's. Likewise, a security person there reflecting on the Unity Village campus spoke in 3rd person about how just 10 years ago Unity V. was still a happening hopping place with a lot of people there and has really since dropped off to not much now in the last five years or so. The challenge the Unity movement see there with these elders-in-transition is that those deeper and sustaining check-books move with these elderly and consequently those deeper check-books move away from supporting their local Unity churches and the larger Unity movement; the baby-boomers are not as able or interested in keeping up the support behind their parents. Their challenge as a movement now out in the world is the competitive marketplace in spirituality where fewer and fewer places have demographics with spiritual church-attending people. I sat with some ministers from California and Texas Unity churches, their comment was around their work engaging young families and middle-age 40's with families with programming like schools, services and such and then additionally attending to their 'transitional-elderly' who are being removed from their independence around by their baby-boomer kids, moving from their active communities and churches in to care facilities away from their communities. Like TM now, their [Unity] founding generations are passed and gone and their successive continuing elders then of the 20th Century height of their movement (1920-30-40-50's) are gone now too with their deep check-books. Like TM now is post-founder, the trick their Unity foundation boards of trustees are dealing with is trying to keep engaged whatever subsequent stalwart-generational members there are of their Unity Churches out in the world so that when those folks [baby-boom] pass away some of their check-books can come to support the physical-plant of even their Unity mecca -Unity Village in Kansas. Om, I was in Unity last nite and meditated there this morning too. Unity Village, Kansas City. Was there last week too passing through. It was really a nice place to meditate. The chapels were nice places to meditate. They were a bunch of spiritual transcendentalists that came out also at the time of the New Thought Movements [google New Thought later for the fun of it] of the late 19th and early 20th Century who though fundamentally transcendentalists in experience couched themselves in 'practical christianity'. Was a big deal in its time. Unity Village in Kansas City, Mo. is sort of like Fairfield, Iowa is now to the TM movement in the USA. An artifact of a time. -Buck back in the Meditating Community of Fairfield, Iowa . . . . .
