Demeaning the TMO is one thing. Demeaning the TMers here is quite another.
---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <no_re...@yahoogroups.com> wrote : Funny thing this, I do TM twice a day and have never felt demeaned by a Barry rap on the TMO, in fact I agree with a lot of it as I worked there too and saw much unwitting (perhaps) cultish behaviour and plain gullibility and stupidity from my fellow devotees. Much of B's three posts on the subject today rang true, I know people still who don't do exercise because they think it will "stress" them in some way. I knew people who believe the secret to long life is not breathing too much. Seems to me that you can believe whatever crap you like about meditation and enlightenment, it won't make it any more or less likely. You've got it or you haven't I suspect. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <authfriend@...> wrote : The reason you get attacked, Barry, is that you're so fucking nasty in sharing your great wisdom with us. You make all kinds of gratuitously demeaning assumptions about the TMers here, many if not most of which are simply not true; and you consistently exalt yourself as superior. Plus which, many of your "ideas" are shallow and poorly thought out, not to mention repeated over and over and OVER again. You pretend to be doing all this to be helpful, but that's bullshit. You do it because you get off on insulting people. You may have "earned the right" to challenge ideas, but you haven't earned the right to dump on the people who hold them. Here's the FFL dynamic, as I see it. I and a few others labeled as critics make a few statements challenging the sense of elitism and entitlement and "specialness" that TMers have been taught to feel about themselves. They react *not* to the actual points we raise, but by attacking us personally, and trying to "get" us. And by trying to encourage others to attack us, too. We challenge *ideas*, and they try to attack *us*. I am merely presenting alternative points of view on a number of subjects relative to the world of meditation, self discovery, and pursuit of that crazy thing some call enlightenment. They are in fact often my points of view, although they are not always my *only* points of view on the subjects. I feel I have *earned* these points of view on the basis of long experience with TM, the TMO, with other spiritual traditions, and as the result of a lifetime's worth of questioning pretty much *everything* and attempting to see it in new and interesting ways. I contend that trying to "shoot the messenger" rather than dealing with the message itself is a pretty puny and lazy-ass way of presenting oneself as "spiritual." If that's the only intellectual tool these TMers have in their arsenal after all these decades of practice, it really doesn't say much about the value of the TM technique and philosophy, does it?
