---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <dhamiltony2k5@...> wrote :
Yes, this larger survey is interesting base-line data on the larger meditating community in Fairfield from back when the meditating community and the Dome numbers were more around their peak as the long decline (attrition) was then ensuing. You can see the seeds and the consequent beginning of the cultivated socioeconomic exclusivity sprouting then and the administrative separation of meditators from membership in the group meditation over visiting saints and spiritual people that had started in the late 1980's and through the 1990's to present. Since the larger sample community survey of the early 1990's there have only been small sample surveys of sub-groups. In a way the recent book on Fairfield [How a New Age Movement Remade a Small Town in Iowa] by the journalist, Joseph Weber is a survey by extensive interviewing of the Fairfield meditating community that is current. A few years ago when there was such strife in the sustainable living students an interview survey was hired and conducted of the university SL students about their experience at the university. The results were presented to the administration and then defended against by the President. That survey and more recent surveying has been useful more recently in guiding some policy changes around the university and MSAE student life currently. While the progressive side of the TM movement has been methodically tracking metrics and hiring marketing surveying related to the teaching of meditation, there have not been broad surveying of the meditating community of the scale of the 1994 survey. That could proly be too frightening for some of the key patriarchs of old administration on watch of the movement to see. The closest thing to that kind of surveying would be a larger ongoing survey of collected first-person cases by a sub-committee of the Fairfield Mental Health Alliance compiling cases where people have felt their well-being was effected by their experience with the culture of the movement. There is a range and distribution to those collected cases which have clearly indicated areas for policy changes that could improve elements of culture and consequences in aspects of the movement. Elements of the movement are moving on some of this while some ideologues try to hold a dogmatic line against it. Having 'data-points' has been extremely helpful towards seeing policy. There is a lot in process going on and things are also fluid. -JaiGuruYou This last paragraph is enlightening. This Mental Health Alliance group is important, it seems and the data it could produce would/could address all sorts of aspects with regard to the socio-economic factors that may have resulted in damage to individuals coupled with its relationship to their involvement/participation in or practice of TM. In the sense that TM is supposed to factor into all aspects of one's life this mental health thing is relevant in perhaps revealing where the meditation technique might not measure up to its promise. Those in the meditating community in FF are often old timers, not only in their practice of TM but chronologically. The mere fact of the existence of the Mental Health Alliance is evidence of the need for psychiatric aid for those practicing TM. How could anyone in the Movement cling to dogma in the face of such a fact? Perhaps they require the attention of the professionals in the psychiatric department there. Rabid or avid denial is a form of aberrational behavior, is it not? ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <awoelflebater@...> wrote : This is interesting but 20 years old. Is there anything more recent to compare this to?
