From: salyavin808 <no_re...@yahoogroups.com> ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <turquoiseb@...> wrote :
Exactly what Salyavin said. As far as I can tell, the charge of "obsession" falls completely on the shoulders of those who are so attached to their beliefs and so petty as to get uptight when they encounter ideas contrary to their own. Bitching about others having such ideas is weird, and IMO the sign of a weak mind. Becoming *so* uptight about it that they feel the need to try to *silence* the contrary ideas -- and then, when that doesn't work, run away and form a forum where no one is *allowed* to express contrary ideas -- is the sign of religious fanaticism. That's the thing about memes. They can be either productive or destructive, all they need is a willing mind to enact them and they become part of a society. The TMO - like all religious groups - is what you might call a static society, the purpose of the people who have adopted it's way of looking at things is to keep things the same. This is because they believe in the core teaching and it's the teaching that tells us it is complete and cannot be improved upon, but it goes deeper. I remember being told that I shouldn't wear black, the reason given was that black is the opposite of light and we are supposed to be radiating light to the world. Crazy shit right? But I adopted the meme unconsciously and stopped wearing all my black T-shirts. You know you've been got to by a repressive organisation when someone else turns up wearing black and you feel shock at seeing it. Sounds weird and innocuous but there are plenty of examples of control that you will pick up if you get involved in such a static society. What length to have your hair (men only) what age you can grow a beard, what time to go to bed. All these things are part of a social system that exists to stay the same. And we haven't even got to the cosmological beliefs! Being static is only a problem because people aren't static and naturally have ideas. This was the job of the governors of the age of enlightenment - keep everyone on message and use every opportunity to have the memes adopted by others or reinforce them in anyone who wavers. If someone challenges the orthodoxy too much then they have to go. I did and it was made clear that I should probably go somewhere else. What's always boggled my mind is how many of the people who have *BEEN* "kept in line" by TM teachers and "Governors of the Age of Enlightenment" (I mean...just *think* about that term, and that people are *so* brainwashed that they take it for granted and never question it) react. Rather than resenting having been told what they can and cannot do and what they can and cannot think for years by these dweebs, *they aspire to be just like them*. Thus you find people like Jim Flanegin, who never had what it took to become a TM teacher, wanting to become just like them and impose his will on others and force them to live the way *he* wants them to. In a very real sense, this strikes me as the same kind of "inherited behavior" we see in victims of child abuse. Instead of growing up to hate such abuse, they tend to grow up to become abusers themselves. I find the very existence of "The_Leak" quite fascinating. It started because one person on FFL (Jim Flanegin) had a grudge against another person on FFL (moi) because he wouldn't buy into his (ludicrous) claims of being enlightened. "Mr. Enlightened" got angrier and angrier and angrier until one day I used a throwaway phrase to make a point, and Jimbo went fuckin' crazy over it and started slinging libel accusing me of being a pedophile, and encouraging people to sic the authorities on me in the real world. He *also* did the same thing that Doug/Buck is *still* doing, and started appealing to Rick Archer to have me "thrown off" of FFL, and created whole threads with this in the Subject line, thus smearing my name in search engines. Rick of course ignored him like the idiotic control freak he was acting like. Me, because what he was doing was ILLEGAL and the very definition of libel, I sicced the Dutch cops on his ass. "Mr. Enlightened" reacted by not only NOT apologizing for the libel, but by running away and forming his own group, where he has now developed a history of banning anyone who dares to say something he doesn't like. It's not just the COWARDICE of all of this that gets me, but the "abused trying to become the abuser" phenomenon that makes me roll my eyes. After all these years of being indoctrinated by the TM movement, it's understandable that someone with as weak an intellect as Jimbo's can no longer even *conceive* of thinking any way other than he's been told to think. What is less understandable is that he wants to be able to do to other people what was done to him. I guess he finally managed it, by creating a forum on which *HE* has the final word on what anyone can say and what they can't. I hope he's finally happy. That would be a first, in the entire time I've "known" him on the Internet. I honestly hope that Jimbo and his followers have a grand time over on The_Leak. He gets to finally be the control freak he's always wanted to be, and his "followers" get to feel superior to those they've left behind. But the bottom line is that they simply couldn't handle dealing with a forum on which people were allowed to express their own ideas as they wanted. They're only comfortable on a forum in which the ways they're *allowed* to interact with others is dictated to them. If anyone is looking to define "the legacy of the TM movement," I would suggest that this is it.
