You're a good historian of the movement, Doug. I hope the university survives, although I have recently heard it spoken of in most disparaging terms by someone who has been on faculty there for a very long time.
I regret that it is no longer the liberal arts college that it was back in the 1980s and has become focused on computer science and business, for which it seems to recruit almost exclusively from Africa and Asia. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <dhamiltony2k5@...> wrote : In governance tt is said that, 'leaders reflect the consciousness of their followers'. In smaller orgs and businesses it can the other way around where organizations can be the reflection of a leadership. In TM right now it is something in between for the corporate organization and movement. For instance broad-based pressures from the bottom up in various alumni groups of TM are evidently forcing change in leadership here. The attrition has been huge and long in so many elements of TM. The leadership really does not know what to do about where the larger movement has gone and where a much smaller and depleting remnant of a movement is going. A pressure has built now from people moving away from the movement, attrition that had started by the late 1970's as some retired in the change-over from TM being a meditating movement to the TM-Siddhis movement and then attrition also from the late 1980's as people started to be administratively separated from the group over seeing saints. Big calls to group meditation since have also had its pogroms that propelled old meditators to find their own way separately. The cumulative effects of leadership behavior has had its own result. There are good people yet in TM who work altruistically for change to work out for the movement and the larger meditating community. A question is whether things can change fast enough to affect enough change for the University's survival and the movement's relevancy. There is a lot going on right now about survival of the movement's organizations beyond just a short few years more of the current geriatric generation. This mental health policy changes were a part of that progression. A lot went in to that policy change-over. The movement did change. There are other things being done to change things in the larger corporate culture of what has been TM. The problems and solutions are very much about culture. Lack of transparancy and people's sense of safety..chrony-ism and sexism for instance. A conscious person here observes, the problems and solutions for the movement reside in the first three sutras of the TM-siddhis. Yes you are right, culture change does not just quickly happen. The work in progress has an urgency to it right now as to whether it can happen fast enough for TM, and Fairfield? ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <dhamiltony2k5@...> wrote : This published source book from July 1975 is really interesting to look at. It is an accounting country-by-country of how TM was doing then. It showed up in a used bookstore in Fairfield recently. Though TM in the United States in shear numbers of initiators and meditators completely dwarfed those in Western European countries and everywhere else in 1975, yet after 1976-7 the US movement never had a substantial American overseeing following Jerry Jarvis and the experience of his generation like in Walter Koch and others. Their leadership got turned completely out from about then and the American TM movement got turned over to young foreign authoritarians who had little time and experience in leadership. The fall off [attrition] in TM has never recovered from this change in leadership style. Put different people in and you get a different organization, according to Maharishi’s absolute theory of management. Organizations reflect their leader [different from or the other way around from national governments]. This change in org leadership in the org of TM is a good example of how TM and the culture of the Fairfield meditating community has got to where it is now. [ ] In orgs, Put authoritarians in who rule by fear and you get an organization filled with fear. 'Corporate' culture. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <dhamiltony2k5@...> wrote : It is true that in the spiritual regeneration of the world which Maharishi Mahesh Yogi commenced back in the 1950's that Sweden and Germany were relative bright lights among Western European countries in furnishing initiators and meditators at a time. Though the Europeans were way behind the United States and Canada in furnishing numbers by comparison. Source: First National Leaders Conference in the Age of Enlightenment, July 1975 -JaiGuruYou ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <hepa7@...> wrote : Well, FWIW, it seems like refugees (and "refugees") are attracted especially to the countries in Europe, where TM at the moment is most popular, IMO (e.g. Germany and Sweden)...
