Come on Buck - saying that what these folks are doing now stems from being
initiated into TM is like saying an adult man is a great lover because of all
the jerking off he did as a pimply adolescent teen.
The Unity folks actually do have programs and a feeling for, as you said, the
elderly and families with children in stark contrast to the Movement which has
always looked upon all of us as money producers - the TMO program is, if they
aren't producing money and support for us, get rid of 'em.
The difference in the two points of view should be enough to send any sensible
person away from TM and to something more meaningful. I am happy to report that
one of my old friends who has done TM since 1972 recently ceased his TM
practice because he could no longer justify doing a practice he could not in
good conscience recommend. A good deal of his change of mind and heart had to
do with the info I shared with him in the past 2 years, much of which was
gleaned here on FFL.
All glory to FFL! Jai Guru Truth and Common Sense!
--------------------------------------------
On Wed, 3/19/14, dhamiltony...@yahoo.com <dhamiltony...@yahoo.com> wrote:
Subject: [FairfieldLife] Re: Meditating Fairfield, Iowa and Unity Village
Kansas City
To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com
Date: Wednesday, March 19, 2014, 2:08 PM
Maybe the Transcendent is possibly
more than you are cracking your TM meditation
alpha-global-coherence
brain wave TM research up to be and these people are
transcendental
meditators still growing in Spirituality may be as
something more
than just alpha wave coherence. Touting alpha coherence as
some gold
standard is not to say that these people have not taken TM
practice
in experience in to their lives in different ways, like in
to the
heart of the subtle system which Fred Travis and his
TM-science
cohorts are not even close to understanding
spiritually.
These were pretty
illumined people
[Meissner-like Field Effect of consciousness]. I'd
grant them some
thing good that came of doing TM as new meditators years ago
may be
even larger than global-alpha-wave-coherence in just doing
TM. Egg,
If you came down off your high horse and sat with them too I
think
you too could even welcome them as effective [Transcending]
meditators in life.With Kind
Regards, -Buck in the
Dome
sparaig writes:
The fun thing about such folk
is that they've missed the point that TM's effects
continue to accumulate, even 50+ years into the practice, so
dabbling in it for a few years or decades means that
they've missed out on the accumulated effects.
Of course, one
could claim that they have stopped breathing for every
meditation period as they enter PC immediately and remain
there, and therefore don't need to do TM any more, but
no-one has ever been observed to show that so the likelihood
that all of the Unity people were in that state seems slim,
to me.
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 ......
