What a presumption you make about how the TM community reacts to such an event.
As Share mentioned a few days ago, you have been removed to any involvement for going on 40 years. You view from a distance, as the rest of us do, what Bobby Roth, or DL, or JH say about TM and what it has to offer. You can offer an opinion about whether it makes any sense. But most everything else you say about this suicide is just pure speculation, and really an intent to put the worst possible spin on it. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <turquoiseb@...> wrote : OK, I'm not going to stay out of this at all. I'm going to rap about it. And one of the reasons is that I think my life experience -- both personal and with the study of cults/spiritual communities -- offers me a few insights into the issue of suicide. Few events provoke more cognitive dissonance than the suicide of a friend, family member, or member of "our" community. If they knew the person, the survivors are stuck with questions like "Why didn't I notice?" or "Could I have *done* something to prevent this?" Worse, in tight-knit communities -- ESPECIALLY those of the spiritual Jkind -- there is also often a suppressed and carefully hidden sense of ANGER towards the person who committed suicide. "How could he/she have done this? Didn't he/she know that by doing this they would be 'letting down the team?'" Suicide within spiritual communities is almost ALWAYS viewed that way, especially if the community has been carefully indoctrinated for decades into believing how "special" they are, and how "These sorts of things just don't happen here, because of <insert name of belief system or meditation technique here>." The first reaction among those whose sense of elitism and "betterness" has just been challenged by the suicide of a colleague is almost always what it was here on FFL -- to search for some "reason" for the suicide, to make *themselves* feel better. They're hoping for some kind of "out," like "brain damage" or "the prospect of facing a terminal illness" so that they can continue to think of themselves and their group as elite. They can think, "Oh, now that I understand the *reason* he/she did this, I can relax, because it doesn't impact the myth of our superiority and elitism in any way. The person who did this was an *exception*." The community thus gloms onto the *excuse*, and relaxes. But, and speaking from some experience, this is all bullshit. The community to some extent CAUSES the suicide, by creating an environment in which the victim feels that they can't talk about their problems, because the mere fact of admitting to *having* problems would cast doubt upon the myth of "specialness" and "freedom from such problems" that the whole community believes in and pretends is actually true. One can always come up with "reasons" for suicide, but they're always excuses that serve the living, not the dead. Me, I've dealt with suicide close-up a couple of times, having had both a brother and a spiritual teacher who checked themselves out. In both cases I can cite "excuses" that I feel were partly to blame. In my brother's case, he was a closet alcoholic in a culture full of closet alcoholics (the American South), all of whom were busy most of the time pretending not to be alcoholics. That's why he was able to get away with being one for much of his life. No one noticed that he was having more serious problems than being a drunk, because most of the people around him were so drunk so much of the time. In the case of Rama - Fred Lenz, I know for a fact that part of his decision to commit suicide was chemically induced. He had developed an addiction to Valium, and being the "I can handle it" kinda guy he was, he decided to quit taking the drug "cold turkey." It says right on the label never to do this, *because of the danger of suicide*, but he figured he could "handle it." Three days later, he was dead, a suicide. So yes, there were excuses. And yes, they serve to make the survivors feel better, and a little less guilty about not having noticed that these people were so close to the edge. But they're bullshit in spiritual groups because the excuses are a way of avoiding cognitive dissonance so that they don't have to deal with the heart of the problem. The common denominator in many suicides is the person feeling either *guilty* about their problems and being afraid to "bring shame upon" a group they feel part of (family, church, cult), or *unable to talk to anyone* in the group because no one in it wants to hear that they have problems. In spiritual groups, both of these factors are very common. With regard to the TMO, there is simply no question that it is an organization built on decades and decades of dogma that portray its members as "special," as "superior," and its environment as one in which "these sorts of things just don't happen." Consider how difficult it must be to be having mental problems in such an environment. Who do you turn to? The problem as I see it w.r.t. TM and the TMO is elitism. All you have to do to see what the TM movement P.R. is is to follow Buck's and Nabby's rants here. TMers are *better* than other people, doncha know. They're special. And TM is the technology that can solve ALL problems. This is the very *basis* of how TM has promoted itself since its inception. And then a suicide happens, and everyone realizes that not a word of it was true. TMers are no more "special" than anyone else, no more "elite" than anyone else, and no more "protected" from things like this than anyone else. And that's a GOOD thing to realize, because the myth of "specialness" is a LIE. But people who have lived much of their lives within the LIE aren't going to see it that way. They're going to try to do anything they can to put the "exception" out of sight and out of mind, so they can get back to the LIE. Lies are comforting that way. If there is a lesson to be learned from Yet Another TM Movement Suicide, it should IMO be that no one who does TM is in any way more superior or more elite than anyone who does not. Shit happens in the TMO, just as it does everywhere else. That *should* be something that inspires humility, but often it just provokes anger, and a desperate attempt to dive as quickly as possible back into the LIE of elitism.
