Back in the day, I got to use up about 30 seconds of my Warholian "15 minutes of fame" on NBC Nightly News. I don't remember the year, but it was post-Beatles and possibly post- or during-the-Merv thang. At any rate,TM was Big News, and of all the stations in L.A., NBC got there first with their request to do a show about this new fad.
I didn't work at TM National those days, but I did work at MIU Press, and was around 1015 Gayley a lot, giving intro and advanced lectures, and I guess Jerry Jarvis saw me give a few and liked what he saw, because he pulled me aside one day and asked if I would drive out into the San Fernando Valley that evening and give a TM intro lecture there, so it could be videotaped. I said, "Sure," figuring "How hard could it be...I do this stuff all the time." Then I got to the hall and there was this team of two reporters, two camera guys, one sound guy, and one gal whose function seemed to be makeup and wardrobe. My cheap initiator suit must have passed muster, because she didn't bother me about that, but she did try to get me to wear makeup, which I declined. Then they set up some lights, set the cameras on tripods, and proceeded to film a normal, everyday TM intro lecture in the Valley, talking loudly amongst themselves through the whole lecture. Videotape is cheap, and they must have had a lot of it, because they shot at least half an hour of my talk, maybe more. Then they disassembled their equipment -- again right in the middle of my lecture -- and walked out without even bothering to thank me for my contribution to their show and the television arts in general. My first taste of Hollywood. :-) So I wait for the show to actually be broadcast, and because Jerry told me when it would be on my parents are actually watching at their house, too, waiting to see their boy on national TV, and the intro lecture bit comes on. Out of 30 minutes of recorded lecture, they gave me 30 seconds in the final cut. Color me doing my version of Otto's "Disappointed!" routine from "A Fish Called Wanda." :-) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvbQ4wJak_c But then I thought, "No problemo...TM will become so popular that I and other teachers will be having to give these televised intro lectures on a regular basis." Not. Never happened again. Jerry *did* ask me to go to a big-assed church in Pacific Palisades one night when they were having a "TM is really a cult" rally and "stand up for TM." And I even did it. THAT was pretty interesting...far much more so than my brief media drive-by on NBC Nightly News. ________________________________ From: salyavin808 <no_re...@yahoogroups.com> Two little stories for you. Both rather pertinent to your comments below as they show how the TMO expect to be treated by the press, or would prefer to be anyway... I was on a course in '96 I think it was, and one of the tapes shown, after the mornings TMSP session was an interview with John Hagelin by someone purporting to be a presenter on some sort of apparently serious news discussion show. It was so obviously faked, it stank to high heaven of set-up but it was funny to watch. For me anyway. What happened was you had Hagelin in a studio with intro music and titles (World Affairs or something similar) and the presenter asked him what he had to tell us, JH gave a typical intro talk about the Marshy Effect research and the "interviewer" asked a few pathetically and transparently easy set-up questions and JH then assured him that the science was good and well reported and peer reviewed etc. It took about 20 minutes and was nothing but buttery stroking of JH's ego. After the tape had ended and I'd stopped smirking we went down to dinner and the conversation was of the order of "wasn't that fascinating? I wonder when it was broadcast?" I couldn't believe it, I don't think it was just my background in public relations that helped me smell the rat, it was so obvious. But if you want to see it as true then it was an easy and effective confirmation. I left no one in any doubt of my opinion about it (namely that the only place it had been broadcast is John Hagelin's wet dreams). But I didn't take it up with the course leader, which I should have done but I thought it was funny that they needed to fake it. I imagined JH coming up against Paxman on Newsnight and thought that would be unlikely to be shown on a course to people trying to rest. LOL Or was it something more sinister? Were they trying to aggrandize the research by getting us to think it had survived some sort of media scrutiny, however limp and anodyne. Lying to make us believe it because other people did? My other story concerned the day I saved the TMO from just such a fate as the interview we were talking about. We were in the Media office and a request came through to have Geoffrey Clements on a Channel 4 prog hosted by one Graham Norton. There was real excitement about it as C4 is a major channel, but I put a stop to it for the very good reason that it was post-pub viewing and Norton is a notoriously sarcastic interviewer who revels in making people uncomfortable. The whole programme is the opposite of the sort of stage the TMO, especially the leader of the NLP, would want to be on. He never would have coped either, the place would have been full of drunk teenagers laughing at him. The opposite of the sort of reception he gets in the TMO where everyone had to give him respect because he was Marshy's choice of top dog. We were better off in our stately homes away from the prying and cynical eyes of the press I thought. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <turquoiseb@...> wrote : From: salyavin808 <no_re...@yahoogroups.com> ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <fleetwood_macncheese@...> wrote : Excellent find, prison boy! That "reporter" came in all arrogant, and muck-raking, wanting to do his hit piece, and Maharishi tells him basically to fuck off, and leave the building! Priceless! Watched it twice. I disagree that the reporter was arrogant, there he was confronted with a bunch of deluded fruitcakes who think they can fly, and who are also doing shady deals to gain property in his country, he's damn right to be suspicious. Trouble is, a lot of people here lack the objectivity to see that they are mixed up in something so bizarre and lacking foundation. It's more than a little scary that people like sometimes-rational feste don't see the insanity in this news clip that 99.99% of the world's population would see. Maharishi is just fuckin' GONE, man, which one might attribute just to senility and old age, if it weren't for the fact that most of the other people who represent the TMO in the segment are equally GONE. Bevan has never *been* more embarrassing than he was in this bit, and that's really saying something. I still think that a lot of it w.r.t. the brainwashing is the "frog in the pot" syndrome. Yeah, I know it's probably a real phenomenon, but the metaphor was that if you put a frog in a pot of hot water, he recognizes the threat to life and just jumps out. Put a frog in cold water and slowly raise the temperature, and he'll just sit there and allow himself to be boiled to death because he gets used to it in small increments. That's what happened to formerly rational TMers. The brainwashing "snuck up on them" over a period of years and decades. Over that time they got used to seeing things around them that would sent had them running for the exits if they'd been allowed to see them during their first months with TM, but by the time they *did* get to see them they'd been trained to consider these things "normal." This is what is scariest to normal 99.99% people watching clips like this one. It's *not* the craziness of the principals, like Maharishi and Bevan and "King" Tony -- it's the craziness of people like feste who make excuses for them, and write off their obvious insanity by claiming the interview was a "hatchet job." Now *that* is scary. You'd almost *expect* the leaders of a worldwide cult to be crazy, but the everyday followers of the cult? When I was a newbie meditator I was filled with the usual fervent zeal of the newly converted, convinced I'd discovered some truth that has eluded the mainstream. Imagine my surprise when the Sunday Times did (for some reason) a round up of cults and what they were all about. I was shocked to see TM in there at all but the fact they got a maximum loony rating seemed amazing at the time. But I didn't know anything about them then. You need to be on the inside not to see it. Exactly. Part of the *definition* of "being on the inside" is having been sufficiently brainwashed to consider these levels of insanity normal. The scariest part, from my point of view, is that once one has made an internal (and rarely conscious) decision to accept this level of craziness as normal, it's very, very, very, very difficult to ever be able to see it another way. Once brainwashed, people tend to *stay* brainwashed, unless they have a great deal of personal power and will and an inability to be coerced by cult peer pressure. Marshy came over very badly I thought, were you convinced that the reason he refused to meet in person is because he found that new people waste his time? He was *clearly* reacting to the reporter's 'tude, which refused to give him the suck-up obeisance he'd gotten used to getting from almost everyone. So he did what all Narcissistic Personality Disordered people do in situations like that, and tried to "regain control" by stalking off. Think Robin Carlsen stalking off from FFL when no one would treat *him* the way he expected to be treated. What sort of crappy excuse is that. "Can you fly?" is a perfectly reasonable question to someone who makes a fortune out of telling others they can. It certainly is. Especially when you've got top-level toadies like Bevan claiming that he could. And the faux grovelling outrage by Bev and Da king convinced me not at all. That *was* interesting, wasn't it. I got the feeling that at least Tony realized what an ass he was making of himself, but Bevan had nary a clue. He was as "out of it" and as unconscious of what constitutes normal behavior as lifetime schizophrenics I used to see in a state mental hospital I once worked in for a short time. Bottom line, someone didn't take them seriously and they didn't like it. Exactly. Furthermore, this "someone" had access to the media and about halfway through the interview they realized they didn't. I think that one reason Maharishi reacted the way that he did (like a petulant, narcissistic, spoiled brat of a child) is that he realized *during this interview* that it was OVER for him in terms of the general public buying his act. There was a day when he could have charmed even a reporter like this. But no more. This guy was treating him the way he would have treated any other crook, and Maharishi couldn't allow that to continue so that the sycophants around him could witness it. Better to stalk off in a snit and pretend that he held the upper hand than to allow them to see that he'd been thoroughly bested by an average-intelligence Australian TV reporter. I think that this news clip should be shown to every sucker school, company, and military organization that has been bamboozled into taking David Lynch's spiels seriously. No preaching, no lobbying...just sit the principals of the organization down and ask them to watch this clip before deciding on whether to pour money down the TM toilet and flush it. I suspect that the outcome would be *exactly* what holding-on-for-dear-life True Believers fear it would be -- NO ONE would ever take the TMO claims as anything other than madness ever again. Just think about the buzzword that Maharishi was trying to sell as a product during this clip -- "Invincibility." Here he was claiming that TM and the TMSP would make whole nations "invincible" and he was so fragile and so emotionally out of control and so intimidated by a TV reporter that he reacted like a petulant child and stalked off. Some "invincibility," eh? Just as an aside, isn't it fascinating that Mr. Enlightened Trailer Trash thinks Maharishi's "stalk off when someone asks a question he doesn't want to answer" routine is a "win?" That, after all, is JIM's act whenever someone brings up something *he* doesn't want to deal with (like pretending to be a woman for months on FFL). He gets angry, loses all self control, and then stalks off himself, dropping out of sight, often returning later with a new ID and hoping everyone has forgotten how much he embarrassed himself. As cult leader, so like cult follower...Jimbo is parroting not only Maharishi's dumbass dogma, he's mimicking his behavior. This is just what people suffering from Narcissistic Personality Disorder DO. They attempt to control those around them, and if that attempt fails, they either find a way to get rid of them (excommunication, firing them, sending them home from a course, canceling the interview), or leave themselves (stalking off in a snit). --In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <turquoiseb@...> wrote : Great find, Geez. It's quite an experience watching this and listening to Maharishi and many people I know personally, just after reading Sam Harris' new book. Bevan's so insane it hurts to look at him. I love the Australian announcer's way of putting things...it's very dry and witty and Sam Harris-like. For example, standing in front of the MUM sign with the flying dome in the background, saying, "I mean...its surreal...students here studying physics who believe they can *fly*." :-) :-) :-) Rather than lashing out at this news report as we all know some True Believers on this forum are girding their loins to do, I think they'd be better served by actually listening to it again and paying attention. This is not a "hit job." This is what rational people in the real world think of TM True Believers. And they're right. ________________________________ From: "geezerfreak@... [FairfieldLife]" <FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com> To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com Sent: Tuesday, September 16, 2014 6:03 PM Subject: [FairfieldLife] Established in Being, let anger take over Wait for the MMY interview 30 seconds in. Maharishi Exposed Maharishi Exposed This feature is not available right now. Please try again later. View on www.youtube.com Preview by Yahoo ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <turquoiseb@...> wrote : Great find, Geez. It's quite an experience watching this and listening to Maharishi and many people I know personally, just after reading Sam Harris' new book. Bevan's so insane it hurts to look at him. I love the Australian announcer's way of putting things...it's very dry and witty and Sam Harris-like. For example, standing in front of the MUM sign with the flying dome in the background, saying, "I mean...its surreal...students here studying physics who believe they can *fly*." :-) :-) :-) Rather than lashing out at this news report as we all know some True Believers on this forum are girding their loins to do, I think they'd be better served by actually listening to it again and paying attention. This is not a "hit job." This is what rational people in the real world think of TM True Believers. And they're right. ________________________________ From: "geezerfreak@... [FairfieldLife]" <FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com> To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com Sent: Tuesday, September 16, 2014 6:03 PM Subject: [FairfieldLife] Established in Being, let anger take over Wait for the MMY interview 30 seconds in. Maharishi Exposed Maharishi Exposed This feature is not available right now. Please try again later. View on www.youtube.com Preview by Yahoo
