Are the comments on this fluff piece ever going to end? I mean, this has sparked a major analysis on the part of Barry.
First it was fluff. Then sal finds something redeeming about it. Barry agrees to look at it again, then launches into a more detailed dissertation, faulting, then not faulting the writer. Then discussing the existent or non existent Brothers of the Cult, (great for Halloween, huh) Then if the BOTC are real, what do you think they discuss. Helloooo! ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <turquoiseb@...> wrote : From: salyavin808 <no_re...@yahoogroups.com> ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <mjackson74@...> wrote : One of the more interesting things in this piece is his reference to a private blog group called Cult Bros which is a group of people who grew up in the Movement: "for many of my friends who have left, their relationship with home is a fraught one. Somewhere on the Internet there’s a listserv or private group blog called Cult Bros, where a group of Gen-Xers and Millennials who grew up in the Movement air their grievances. I’m not a Cult Bros member myself, but I can anticipate their conversations — they’d be familiar to anyone who grew up in a community defined by certain dogma, religious or otherwise. There’s the resentment of the years spent trying to be perfect little yogis, frustrations over growing up in what can be a very socially conservative environment, anger at the time and effort and money spent working toward the unattainable goal that is world peace with very little payoff. There’s questioning of the traditions we grew up with, the means to this impossible end — the pujas, the mantras, the jai Guru Devs, the Golden Domes, the yogic flying. Questioning all of the Hindu mythology that’s wrapped up this thing we were told was not a religion. Like anyone from anywhere, the Cult Bros are trying to come to terms with their home." I had a search around but couldn't find them. I thought a good bit of writing was his insight that yogic "flying" is the TMO's Xenu. I did go back and read the piece in spite of my resistance to it, and would agree, except that the guy doesn't explain what a "Xenu moment" is, or even what "Xenu" was about. YOU did that, below, and that is *inclusive* writing, inviting those who don't know and assume the same esoterica that you know into the conversation and including them. As he wrote it, it's *exclusive*, meaning that it's an "in joke" that he wrote for himself and its probable effect among other TM cultists. Xenu being the Scientology creator god who enslaved a then extraterrestrial humanity a billion years ago and threw our souls into a volcano on Earth (or some such bollocks). The joke is that Scientologists spend decades working towards (and paying) for what is supposed to be the ultimate knowledge and is revealed to you only when you've proved yourself worthy enough. When you've reached these dizzy heights of acceptability you are taken into a room and shown this revealed Truth, written in Elrons own hand no less. A cheap sci-fi novel. Imagine how pissed off you'd be? But no, everyone is so caught up in the mind game that is cult beliefs that they accept it and even feel honoured. All their friends know and believe the great secret so why not? So much to lose if you pull out by then... I remember the first day of my TMSP course when I got the first sutra and found out that it wasn't some enigmatic sanskrit term but the word "friendliness". How pissed off was I? A lot. But I stayed and got the rest and practised them for ten years. This is a good point, and I've brought it up before. Can you *believe* that there are still people on this forum who believe that the TMSP is an ancient technique once taught by Patanjali? They say this to strangers who have never learned it, just parroting the same sales pitches that worked on them, but more interestingly they say it to others who *have* learned the TM siddhis. And no one corrects them. Because it's easier to pretend that it's some esoteric, age-old knowledge that they paid thousands of dollars for than it is to admit that they paid all that money for a bunch of phrases in English (or their native language) that they could have gotten -- verbatim -- from a $4.95 paperback version of the Yoga Sutras. (That, after all, is probably where *Maharishi* got the English phrases he sold for thousands of dollars.) The Xenu thang worked because the $cientologists wisely kept it hidden until the students were so far gone into the cult that they wouldn't freak out at how tacky this "final revelation" was. The TM movement similarly tried to keep the reality of what the TMSP really was secret by telling people "What we learn in private we keep private" and creating a kind of myth about the Bad Things that would happen to you if you revealed your mantra or (even worse) the oh-so-secret "flying sutra," which is just a load of bollocks about how light cotton fiber is. In English. That's the way it works. You, me and Xenu. I still wish that this guy had written a somewhat ballsier piece, dealing with the real "meat" of the cognitive dissonance that his more honest Cult Bro friends are dealing with. A better article would have been less fluffy and less "Weren't we silly to believe this stuff?" An honest article would be more real, more along the lines of,"Weren't we absolutely INSANE to believe any of this stuff?" This fellow's "cult bro" friends seem more advanced that he does to me. They are comfortable using the more precise "C word" to describe what it is they were part of. He isn't. He's still trying to pretend it was just silly. From: "TurquoiseBee turquoiseb@... [FairfieldLife]" <FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com> To: "FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com" <FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com> Sent: Thursday, October 30, 2014 5:46 AM Subject: Re: [FairfieldLife] Growing Up TM From: "Michael Jackson mjackson74@... [FairfieldLife]" <FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com> https://medium.com/the-archipelago/growing-up-in-utopia-8102f58dfcbc https://medium.com/the-archipelago/growing-up-in-utopia-8102f58dfcbc https://medium.com/the-archipelago/growing-up-in-utopia-8102f58dfcbc Growing Up in Utopia https://medium.com/the-archipelago/growing-up-in-utopia-8102f58dfcbc When your family and friends want to save the world by meditating, you can sometimes feel out of place in small-town Iow… View on medium.com https://medium.com/the-archipelago/growing-up-in-utopia-8102f58dfcbc Preview by Yahoo I couldn't read this piece because I couldn't get past the first paragraph. Whatever the author's intention in writing it is or was, his cluelessness in that first paragraph stopped me in my tracks, and kept me from reading any further: "I learned how to fly when I was 17. I’m not talking about a plane, and this isn’t some euphemism. 'Yogic flying,' which is basically meditation at the black-belt level, offers the potential of human levitation -- although in actuality it looks more like energetic, if not rather effortless, cross-legged hopping." This person (although his intention may have been to suggest the opposite) is IMO *still* suffering from the ill effects of growing up in an insane asylum. Bouncing around on one's butt and calling it 'yogic flying' is NOT 'meditation at the black belt level,' it's INSANITY at the black belt level. Try picking any town in America, walking along its streets, stopping people at random, and explaining to them, "I'm doing a survey. Twice a day I bounce around on my butt on big slabs of foam, along with other people who do the same thing because we are convinced that doing this will reduce crime, affect the weather, and create world peace. What do you think of this?" My bet is that you would get answers like, "Uh...sounds fine to me...good luck with that..." spoken over the interviewee's shoulder as they were edging away, watching you carefully and hoping that you weren't following them so that they didn't have to break into a run. See, this is the thing that makes interacting with long-term TMers on this forum so challenging -- they really have NO IDEA how insane they are, and how insane the things they believe are. For many of them, it seems as if it's been so long since they've actually talked with anyone who WASN'T indoctrinated with all of this cult nonsense they way they were that they've forgotten how these normal people think and act. They're used to interfacing with people who don't bat an eyelash when you announce to them, "Sorry...got to go...it's time for me to go fly now." Hint: That's insane. No one is "flying." No one has EVER "flown" in *any* of the TM "flying" halls. And no one ever will. Most people, told that this would even be *possible*, would react with either laughter or derision, and walk away. TMSPers reacted by paying several thousand dollars to learn how. Hint: That's insane. And it's as insane now as it was when you first paid those thousands of dollars. The only reason people on this forum and around you in Fairfield don't think so is that you live in an enormous insane asylum, in which the residents are reinforcing their shared delusions by pretending that they're "saving the world" instead of acting out less-than-sane fantasies. Some of these inmates who post to this forum get upset when I or Michael or Salyavin or Curtis point out HOW far away from mainstream definitions of sanity they are to believe that there actually IS such a thing as the 'Maharishi Effect.' I imagine that inmates in mental hospitals feel the same way when doctors and nurses point out that they're not *really* Napoleon or Jesus Christ. To these people I say, "GET OVER IT." Wake the fuck up, take a look around at international standards for sanity, shake yourself, and realize that if you actually believe that bouncing on your butt can be called 'flying' and that performing this bouncing is creating world peace...uh...you're INSANE. You're NOT "special" or "more evolved" or "10,000 X more powerful than lesser people," you're INSANE. It's OK to *be* insane, if your insane beliefs give you some sense of comfort and don't hurt anybody. After all, millions of people believe in an invisible man in the sky who watches everything they do, and as long as they don't get in other people's faces about it, they can be that insane and still be considered productive members of society. But ferchrissakes don't pretend that the things you believe AREN'T insane, and don't pretend to be outraged because other people point out the insanity. You CHOSE to be considered insane the moment you signed that check and paid thousands of dollars to learn how to 'fly.' Live with that choice now, and try not to pretend that you're still sane after having made it. Having made that choice makes you an outlier, an anomaly within human society. A nut case. 99% OR MORE OF THE PEOPLE ON THIS PLANET ARE GOING TO CONSIDER YOU A NUT CASE IF YOU TELL THEM YOU BELIEVE THAT BOUNCING ON YOUR BUTT IS 'FLYING' AND THAT IT'S 'THE BLACK BELT OF MEDITATION'. It's not. And no amount of claiming will ever make it so.
