From: "curtisdeltabl...@yahoo.com [FairfieldLife]" <FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com>
Officially it never would have happened. I had a hook up on the library staff and these were transcripts that were under official radar. It helped me understand the different eras of Maharishi's presentation better both in the movement and now that I am out. He was a guy who learned as he went along and adjusted. His message changed considerably through the years. I think in some ways he was just entertaining the people on those early courses with his wild stories. Think about the pressure of keeping so many foreigners engaged for hours when he had never been a scholar himself. This corresponds to my first experience of seeing him have to fill time (6-10 hours of talks a day for a month) at Squaw Valley in 1968. Before that, I had only seen him "perform" in short bursts, which he was always able to steer back to his (by then) well-practiced intro lecture. But at Squaw Valley he had several hundred people sitting in a room, and he had to find ways to entertain them. So he'd drag out (in my opinion) a lot of Other People's Stories and tell them as if they were his. The most egregious examples of this were when he'd open the microphone to questions, and people would ask him about other spiritual paths and other spiritual teachers he knew nothing about. At least twice I saw/heard him say things that were *completely* wrong, 180 degrees opposite from what the organization believed and that the teacher taught. To this day I don't know whether he just made this shit up, or had heard it from someone who was also making it up, like Charlie Lutes. His duties around Guru Dev were not intellectual ones, he was an advance man and communications department. So he told stories from every source he could remember or dig up to create the impression that he knew about everything. Later he had Vedic pundits some in to occupy the time.They would jabber for a while and then he would declare that they were saying that transcending was blah bah blah. One very curious thing about the movement is how cagy they are about this era of his teaching. It goes so counter to the image of who he is that they promote. If this guy was really the most important thinker in modern times wouldn't it be imperative to get everything he ever said out? When I worked for the Regional Office in L.A., I was "in charge of the tapes." All of them. Unfortunately, during the period I worked there, that meant that not only was I in charge of boxing them up and sending them to the teachers who were scheduled to teach one of our residence courses, about twice a month I was in charge of boxing up the tapes that Seelisberg had *demanded be returned to them* to take them out of circulation. Several times during this period I was told to write to all TM teachers in the Western Region and demand that *they* send back any "unauthorized tapes" in their possession. The impetus for this -- at that time -- was clearly legal. The American TMO was still claiming its practices weren't religious in nature, but there were *dozens* of tapes out there in which Maharishi himself exhibited exactly *how* religious it was. Interesting, isn't it? The most important thinker in modern times and people, even devout believers have so little access to the thousands of hours of his teaching. And with today's random access it would be so easy to get it all online and indexed for people to be "enriched" by his profound words. But his words are hidden because the image is more important than the message. It always has been. I believe it is one of the biggest indictment of the movement that they have treated his teaching as if no one is trusted to know what it is in its completeness. It is as if they know people would realized that there is no there, there! I completely agree. I honestly think that if most people on this forum were forced to go back and listen to a few hours of what *in their minds and memories* they consider "Maharishi's Greatest Hits," they'd be shocked to discover how repetitive and inane they were, and how little was actually said. This is just human nature. *At the time* we were sitting in rooms listening to these talks "live," and we were all swept up in the emotion and the enthusiasm of it all. So in our minds an association was formed between all of those exciting emotions and the talks we assumed were inspiring them. When you go back and listen with the experience of two to three decades of life experience under your belt, you are are often surprised at how little was actually said, and how much you *projected* into your memories of the Same Old Intro Lecture, Rehashed. I actually recommend the experience, if you can somehow *find* some of these tapes that you have such a fondness for in your memories. I suspect you'd find the experience revealing, as I did a few years ago when I decided to go back and re-listen to the music I thought was so great back in the late 60s. In my mind it was great stuff. But when I actually found the albums and listened to them again, I found that with only one exception (Jimi Hendrix) there was only one possible reason I'd liked these people's music as much as I had -- I was stoned. I suspect that the same would be true for anyone here doing a "binge listen" to old Maharishi tapes, and for the same reason. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <mjackson74@...> wrote : I'm surprised they would let you have access to those early lectures, but I guess things got tighter as time went by. From: "curtisdeltablues@... [FairfieldLife]" <FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com> To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com Sent: Tuesday, December 9, 2014 11:53 AM Subject: [FairfieldLife] Re: George Hammond's November 30, 2014 Lecture I really enjoyed that, thanks for posting. Many good points I agree with and a few I don't. I do think that George had a brain event that is more than just imagination. I believe that his ability to distinguish between internal and external experience was drastically compromised. Just a guess. I agree that he was a rambley speaker. In his defense so was Maharishi when he started. I spent a lot of time at MIU reading transcripts from Maharishi lectures in India and they were much more Hammondy. With unverifiable claims right and left like entering someone else's body after death by using yogic techniques if you hadn't reached enlightenment in your own body. Over the years he refined his pitch to basically be an intro lecture no matter what the topic under discussion. He would toss out a few Vedic terms, talk about how they related to his message of TM and close with a call to action for us to keep on doing his program. It was a formula that minimized challenges to assertions. His greatest speaking talent to me was to appear to have some new detail of interest to hook us in before we found ourselves back at the intro! And like those guys who sell the latest potato peeler sitting on a milk crate outside subway stations, he had the salesman ability to make every pitch as enthusiastically as his last, as if he was just discovering that TM WAS the solution to all problems in life, and he was just sharing his revelation as he was having it himself. I wonder if you have any thoughts on how we would be able to determine if someone was enlightened among the movement leaders? That seems like a step back into the world of subjectively reported experiences that George just provided a vivid cautionary tale against. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <no_re...@yahoogroups.com> wrote : Some reflections on George Hammond's November 30, 2014 Lecture: The following reflections are my own opinion only (I believe strongly that opinions should never be presented as facts). It was fun to see in the audience someone who played an important role in the Movement, and who was briefly my friend on our mutual TM-Sidha course. He looked like he found the talk entertaining, but I hope, like me, that he did not take it seriously. My impression of Hammond is that he doesn't act like a hoaxer, which unfortunately does not guarantee that he isn't one, or that his ideas are reliable or useful. He seemed like someone who was either very well-rehearsed or an experienced actor. He also impressed me as a very dull speaker, who uses only a monotone to spice up his presentation. He moves his hands like a robot. He tells pointless stories about Shankara, Vyasa, and other familiar names from the Shankaracharya tradition of India, and others like Jesus and Jehovah God. Not one of his off-hand stories has any possibility of verification, or any interesting depth. (Jesus told him that people in Manhattan should build more parking garages instead of praying to him for a parking space over and over again. Funny? Might depend on the listener's mood.) These qualities make me feel that I've wasted my time listening to him for three hours. I can only hope that this review is helpful for helping someone else avoid having to listen to the whole recording. I think his content is based on imagination. The whole concept of reincarnation, which seemed during one section to be the cornerstone of his beliefs, seems a waste of time to me. It has no physical evidence, no satisfying theoretical rationale, and is clearly motivated by the ego's desire to survive, which is based not on spirituality but on the separation of an alienated life and the identification with a limited mind and body. To discuss reincarnation as a personal fact, as Hammond did, along with other clues like his very limited descriptions of the nature of fear and transcending, reveals to me his limited personal state of consciousness. Why should we take the imagined reports of the words of Maharshi, Jesus, Socrates, and Jehovah seriously when the speaker knows so little about spiritual matters, such as the higher states of consciousness, and the nature of pure awareness? All is spiritual statements are compatible with Maharshi's views; there seems to be nothing new here. The funny thing is that Hammond's announcement promised important information for Movement leaders, TM teachers, and TM meditators, yet delivered nothing but his own recasting of Maharshi's principles and a whole bunch of imagined reports of events and people (either imagined or perhaps based on a dream he had around the time of his sister's death). Would Jehovah really spend time with a human medium discussing Elizabeth Smart and her significance for Mormon women? I doubt it. Is the message "Cruelty is the desire to gain happiness from someone else's pain; the Movement should explain how to transcend cruelty," really of vital interest to us or the Movement? I doubt it. I think he invented it, along with everything else. He ended the talk by singing a silly song. I think that was fitting. Everyone who has attended Maharshi's lectures knows that he could speak for hours without once saying anything that was not obviously natural, sensible, and correct so far as we could determine based on our own experience. This was clearly based on his own clarity of awareness and thinking, as well as his supreme talent as a teacher. We can see similar qualities in great teachers from other traditions today, such as Mooji and Rupert Spira, who both teach the Direct Path of nonduality. We do not see this wonderful quality of teaching in George Hammond; we merely see the polished speaking of a very well-educated man with a general background and a vivid imagination. He himself admits that his relationship with the Movement is slight--he listed the handful of people in the Movement who know him. He appears to have no deep understanding of Maharishi's knowledge or indeed of Buddhism or any other source of spirituality. His knowledge of the Bible and history, and of reincarnation, could have been picked up in conventional sources. I feel certain that most listeners took this lecture with a big 'grain of salt', not being won over by the free use of terms like 'the purity of the teaching' that are so important to many of us. There wasn't much actual content from people like Maharshi, Brighu/Shankara, and so on, and of this content, not much was significant for what we (or the Movement) should do in the world. I myself could give a very short talk that would provide useful suggestions for how the Movement could become more effective in reaching its/our goals; it's not very challenging. Hammond talked a lot of the fear of death. Yes, it's an important fear, but I doubt that it comes from incorrect thinking, as Hammond suggested. It comes primarily from identification with the body, which will die. The alternative is not reincarnation, as Hammond stated, but enlightenment (self-realization), which leaves one free to live the qualities of the Absolute in relative life. Freed from limitations, we are fulfilled, and not likely to have residual desires that would make us want the body or the mind to live forever. Instead, we are free to live as we wish, either in a body or free of a body. This is a much greater human possibility than envisioned by Hammond the self-proclaimed spirit medium. In the final analysis, what is important about spiritual knowledge is that it makes it easy for each person to discover their true nature, align themselves with that nature, and act in the world in accordance with that alignment. There is no need for discussion of angels, reincarnation, cruelty, or even of right and wrong. There is no need to discuss worry, fear, anxiety, or other feelings. There is no need to discuss thinking, or even problems associated with ego, as Hammond did. These are all relative concepts. Following Maharshi (or any other true spiritual teacher), we need only consider the fullness of the Absolute, our true nature. Aligning ourselves with unbounded and eternal awareness, we can easily act in harmony with our environment, helping others to reach and even exceed our own level of consciousness. I do not think any of this message came from a Maharshi who is still alive on an imperceptible plane of existence. But I do think it shows that there is a thirst among his followers to know more and to evolve quicker. We should address that thirst and provide more knowledge, both from Maharshi's own video-recorded words as well as from his enlightened teachers and leaders. Jai Guru Dev David Spector, Governor of the Age of Enlightenment, June, 1972 (not currently teaching TM) Maine, USA #yiv9361053330 #yiv9361053330 -- #yiv9361053330ygrp-mkp {border:1px solid #d8d8d8;font-family:Arial;margin:10px 0;padding:0 10px;}#yiv9361053330 #yiv9361053330ygrp-mkp hr {border:1px solid #d8d8d8;}#yiv9361053330 #yiv9361053330ygrp-mkp #yiv9361053330hd {color:#628c2a;font-size:85%;font-weight:700;line-height:122%;margin:10px 0;}#yiv9361053330 #yiv9361053330ygrp-mkp #yiv9361053330ads {margin-bottom:10px;}#yiv9361053330 #yiv9361053330ygrp-mkp .yiv9361053330ad {padding:0 0;}#yiv9361053330 #yiv9361053330ygrp-mkp .yiv9361053330ad p {margin:0;}#yiv9361053330 #yiv9361053330ygrp-mkp .yiv9361053330ad a {color:#0000ff;text-decoration:none;}#yiv9361053330 #yiv9361053330ygrp-sponsor #yiv9361053330ygrp-lc {font-family:Arial;}#yiv9361053330 #yiv9361053330ygrp-sponsor #yiv9361053330ygrp-lc #yiv9361053330hd {margin:10px 0px;font-weight:700;font-size:78%;line-height:122%;}#yiv9361053330 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