Excellent, excellent, excellent points Sal - thank you for writing this.
From: salyavin808 <no_re...@yahoogroups.com>
To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Sunday, March 15, 2015 4:48 AM
Subject: [FairfieldLife] Re: Well, well, well.
---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <s3raphita@...> wrote :
salyavin, I was about to post a message making pretty much the same points :
MMY touted TM as a universal panacea ;That the TMO should release such a
document now is an encouraging sign of progress ;
As the TMO moves at a snail's pace we'll probably all be dead by the time it
develops a sober assessment of TM's (undoubted) strengths and limitations. What
limitations? Well, I don't rule out the possibility that for some disturbed
individuals doing TM could actually exacerbate their condition.
It can indeed, and maybe not even in extreme cases. I lived and worked with the
TMO for ten years and met a lot of people and talked a lot about TM and what it
does or doesn't do. My overriding impression is that there is sometimes a huge
disconnect between what people expect TM to do (or claim it has already done)
and what they have actually achieved using it.
I've met people who would talk endlessly about how spiritual they are and the
benefits they've gained but when I've got to know them better it's turned out
that they are seriously damaged and/or unpleasant people to greater or lesser
degrees. The funny thing is they had no idea, one girl I knew was astonished
when I told her that she had no self awareness whatsoever, she was amazingly
unpleasant when you got past her social persona. I wondered what the point of
devoting your life to meditation is if it can't touch the very things that
probably drive you to seek it out as a therapy in the first place. But here's
the thing, they don't know that it hasn't worked, part of the TM teaching is
elitist in that you are taught from day one that you are a better person for
being in touch with the "transcendent".
I honestly think that it can make people more eccentric, this can be endearing
but can result in them just not fitting in with normal society any more. There
are plenty like this in the long term movement in the UK and all of them are
really genuine spiritual people but they don't realise that obsession with
beliefs, routines and ritual has turned them into inflexible maniacs.
Some of the people I've known have developed mental health problems since
learning TM which isn't what you'd expect if you listen to the TMO. The claim
is that releasing stress cures neuroses and makes problems less likely to
arise. Clearly something wrong there. I know a lot of siddhi practitioners who
see therapists, it was a standing joke at the academy in fact.
But am I looking on the dark side and seeking out the worst case types to
bolster my argument? I don't think so, I became aware of what was going on just
by listening to others and that was only after I got past my own programming
that everything was fine and I was on the fast track to enlightenment. But I
have no idea about the actual percentages of TMers who didn't get what they
expected are.
The trick for any researchers is going to be finding people that learnt TM and
weren't exposed to the belief system and so aren't full of BS, maybe a search
for neurotic traits in long term meditators would be be a fun way to start.
I'll volunteer.
So what will be left if a proper root and branch examination of TM was carried
out? The Maharishi Effect will be gone by the end of the day obviously. In
fact, if you look at the TM website it seems to have gone already, the whole
things looks like a health page from the sort of women's magazine that you see
in dentist's waiting rooms:
http://tmhome.com/
I think the mental health claims will be amended to "Can be effective for some
people with some conditions but may exacerbate the same thing in others. For
yet others it works only at first and that's as long as you don't get swept up
with the hyperbole and keep up another sort of professionally led treatment
plan if you have a particular condition". Not very catchy but seems to reflect
the sort of disappointments I've seen, it just doesn't deliver what is promised
for a lot of people. Or maybe the people I met are so desperate for it to work
they signed up for endless courses in the hope of forcing a breakthrough?
One thing is for sure mental problems aren't caused by "stress" trapped in the
nervous system that could be released by being more relaxed, that's just the
sort of cultish snake oil that has tripped up the Scientologists too. and the
TMO's attempts so far are just more vedic nonsense simply because they have no
other way of looking at the world - it has to have a vedic solution because
everything is vedic. They will come to see the error of that in the coming
years if they keep up the inquisitiveness.
If you don't have any actual problems TM may be more effective. I remember a
Buddhist I knew saying that anyone with problems should get them sorted before
they learn to meditate. Maybe it will still turn out to be the best thing ever,
just with a lot more caveats on the website..
I still do it BTW, I just don't tell myself that it's doing anything at all and
enjoy the experience and I'm not obsessive with it and even [gasp] do other
techniques.
You've spared FFL from my disjointed thoughts with your admirably lucid
message. (Are you a writer in some professional capacity?)
Thanks, but no. Most of what I write is "letters to the editor" stuff or sarky
remarks on newspaper websites, but it's nice to know I can pull some sort of
coherent sentence together when I'm eating me porridge.
As there has been an alarming rise in mental health problems in recent years
I've wondered if a combination of meditation and mainstream techniques of
psychotherapy could be a helpful marriage. For the TMO to investigate different
combinations of TM and assorted therapies could be a fruitful area of research.
I'm sure it would. One of the things TM does that is of benefit is that it kind
of resets the mind when you first learn. We all get used to thinking in our
normal ways and TM throws the brain into a previously unknowable state, it's a
good way of realising there are other ways to be. Hallucinogenics do the same
thing but more reliably, I think TM has different initial effects but I've no
idea if it could be predictable for different personality types. Everything
seems to be the cure for everything these days.
I suspect that at least one contribution to modern neurosis is that people feel
guilty that they are not happy! In the West we've created stable, peaceful and
affluent societies and are subject to a constant stream of ads telling us how
this or that consumer good will bring us fulfilment. But anxiety and depression
are endemic as there's always something missing. One thing that TM hopefully
does is develop that sense that right here and right now you lack nothing
essential. That has to help inculcate an ability to live at peace in each
moment as it arises which, other things being equal, should have a spiritually
beneficial effect.
I remember that as one of the main attractions, an immunity to what life throws
at you because of strengthening the inner self. Has it worked for me? It's an
interesting question, I was always an anti-establishment type and didn't live
the consumer lifestyle so I can't say if I'm happier or not because of that.
I'd like to have done a 'before and after' personality test and then another
every five or ten years of meditating to see how I'd changed. Too late for any
sort of reliable self-reporting I think.
It would be hard to select from long term meditators a group that hadn't also
been exposed to the non-materialistic spiritual belief system and, as I
outlined above, weren't just kidding themselves anyway. Lawson posted a link to
some research that studied long term TMers and they were self-reporting all
sorts of wonderful inner evolutionary developments in how they relate to
themselves and the world. Inspiring stuff but made me wonder where mine was
after 20 years? As all the respondents were from Fairfield, maybe they'd
inadvertently proved the Marshy Effect. Or maybe they'd been swept up with the
mythos and were incapable of interpreting their lives in any other way? I
wonder how much my scepticism would help in research like that.
And it won't do any harm to tackle the social insecurities and inequalities
that also plague our existence. Even a dismal subject like politics has a role
to play. Is there a cure for the modern world? It's changing so fast, I feel
like I'm on a carousel sometimes but I'm standing in the middle with it all
swinging round me so that's a good sign. Sometimes it drags me in and I can't
cope any better than I used to, which isn't a good sign!
---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <no_re...@yahoogroups.com> wrote :
---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <mjackson74@...> wrote :
At least they are addressing the issue.
Not really addressing it though, this reads more like that article on
Scientology that Turq posted a few days ago. In particular the chapter on how
they cover up the homophobia that was a major part of Hubbard's teaching and is
apparently caused by subconscious "stress" that could be relieved by
Scientology auditing.
They cope with that intellectual and therapeutic error nowadays by denying that
Hubbard ever said it, and they have the tapes to prove it - not that you'll
ever hear them - but it's all in the books in black and white.
In the same way, TM being the cure for all psychiatric problems is a major part
of Marshy's teaching and forms a chapter of its own in his main book "The
Science of Being and Art of Living". Seeing a counsellor was actively
discouraged and the techniques they employ were rubbished as being "shallow"
compared to TM which deals with problems from the infinitely powerful level of
the unified field.
But it's good the TMO is climbing down from that demonstrable absurdity, sooner
or later everyone knows someone with mental health problems or has them
themselves, what they were telling us clearly wasn't true. But the trouble for
them in future is that once you start questioning hallowed teaching you can't
just stop with one example. Sooner or later someone is going to put other
aspects of the teaching under the microscope, this will be seen as a "bad
thing" at first and will face the usual denial and counter activism, until the
evidence becomes too well known for them to hide behind the "knowledge" any
longer and more caveats and contradictory clarifications will be published.
But it isn't a bad thing as it's how knowledge - genuine knowledge and not
religious dogma - progresses. Someone has an idea and it gets tested for
accuracy and is either accepted or rejected or modified depending on how well
it stands up to scrutiny. Nothing to be scared of but it will be interesting to
watch how the TMO adapts to a reformation, especially one caused by the
scientific processes they were hoping would ultimately justify their beliefs as
revealed to them by Marshy.
Which sacred cow will be next?
This is straight off the MUM web page for faculty.
What does it mean when someone practicing the TM technique develops a mental
illness or commits suicide? It does not mean thetechnique does not work. The TM
program is neither an instant nor astand-alone cure for all the illnesses
people may suffer, nor is itrepresented as such. People may be born
withcertain conditions, stresses, and susceptibilities that emerge atvarious
stages in their lives. As published research has indicated, theTM technique
triggers a global repair mechanism in the physiology andpsychology of everyone
— but it cannot be predicted how, when, or towhat degree the benefits of the TM
program will unfold for a particularindividual.
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