As Winston Churchill once said: if you are young and not idealistic, you haven't got a heart.
If you are old and not a realist, you haven't got a brain. That pretty much sums it up. Most of us got over the idealistic phase pretty quickly. And you know, the other saying, about taking what you want and leaving the rest. Generally a good philosophy. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <mjackson74@...> wrote : God I remember the days when I and my TM friends really believed that everyone would one day wake up to the glory of TM and TMSP and everyone would be doing it, and the world would be happy. We utterly ignored the experience that most of us were struggling in various ways financial, relationships and health just to name three. It was delusional. From: "TurquoiseBee turquoiseb@... [FairfieldLife]" <FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com> To: "FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com" <FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com> Sent: Friday, May 8, 2015 10:55 AM Subject: Re: [FairfieldLife] The Culture of Organizational Groups/Sociology From: "Michael Jackson mjackson74@... [FairfieldLife]" <FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com> Sigh. You are right, the story isn't over yet. Bevan and his cronies have not yet paid for all their enormities, David Lynch has not yet cracked up in public and been carted off to a mental institution, Girish has not yet gone to prison for his various crimes, nor has he finished stealing as much of the Indian Movement's assets as he can, John Hagelin has not yet agreed to publicly debate real physicists and get horribly embarrassed, nor has he had to face the music for his abuse of his position as professor at MUM, the Movement has not withered away to the point where Girish and the Srivastavas brothers sell off the lands of the MUM campus, but it is all coming. I can't disagree with your visions of TM's future, Michael, but today all I can feel is sadness for the people like Doug whose sense of self and identity are so stuck in the past that they are unable to move past it and live in the present. They live on dreams of how glorious it all was back when they were young and part of what they considered not only a community but a "movement," one that would change the world forever. They felt important and as if they were at the center of great events, and doing something that would be remembered forever. And now they find themselves in a world that has all but forgotten Maharishi. His name is a quite literally a joke in spiritual circles and the only people who still believe he taught anything of value are the hangers-on in Fairfield and in other closed TM societies. They seem to live for the day that the world will wake up and recognize their folly at laughing at Maharishi and at them for following him, and will praise them the way they still think of themselves -- as noble bringers of a new age and happiness and light and bliss and ice cream for everybody. In other words, they're fuckin' delusional. Some people get wiser as they get older, and closer to death. Others, fearing that they might have wasted their lives believing in things the world no longer values, start to panic and cling even more desperately to the dreams of their glorious youth. I don't know about you, but I prefer spending the rest of *my* incarnation with people who live in the present, not in dreams of the past and how important they think they were in that past. I really can't justify interacting with Doug and people who think like him any more, because it seems to only encourage them to invest more heavily in their delusions, as opposed to shaking them off.
