Though I was once reamed by LB for making a statement to the effect that Fairfield is Maharishi's territory and that other gurus are behaving with poor ethics by moving onto his doorstep, I have come to see that ethics isn't the issue. It's plain market dynamics.
It was absolutely inevitable that people would come into town to seek a part of the MIU/MUM market, both for share of mind and share of wallet. A foundational concept in the community was entrepreneurism within the TM family itself, offering services and facilitating goods that complemented the TM practice (e.g., Olde World Cafe and Portafoam Flight Cushions). No one in the early days realized the unavoidable fact that people from outside the TM family would come in to supply directly competing spiritual programs, and that a demand for them would arise within the TM group itself. This is especially true given the monumental failure of the school. What failure do I refer to? Given all that the school has to offer, the fact that it hasn't grown consistently year after year from its founding, perhaps even with double-digit growth, is a failure of staggering proportions. The lack of growth is probably attributable to vast buffoonery on the part of administrators, if not Maharishi himself. In that vacuum, it is only natural that many meditators would welcome competing spiritual services and programs into the town to create expansion. After all, didn't SCI teach everyone that, to be fulfilled, a man must display more creative intelligence every day, and that one of the fundamentals of progress is growth? (Bonus question: Who can name the other four fundamentals?) To repeat an idea I brought up a long time ago, and that was roundly ignored, one area in which this dynamic has not yet unfolded is in academic competition. It seems to me that a fully mature market in Fairfield would include a competing academic institution, one offering the converse of MUM. Rather than being a closed ashram disguised as a bonifide academic campus, the new place would be first and foremost a serious academic facility, with embedded unaligned spirituality. Imagine a school striving for research and teaching excellence, incorporating as many good ideas from MIU/MUM as possible but encouraging debate, inquiry, and free thinking. Meditator or not, anyone could attend, and those who did practice spiritual programs could come from any background. Perhaps, many of the best profs from MIU/MUM who have been dismissed over the years would be interested in returning to teach and conduct research in MIU2. Such a new school could become a hub for the spiritual strands in Fairfield that compete with TM. The curriculum would maintain consciousness as a central organizing principle, but with a more scholarly and less sectarian bent. If you were an academic like Amit Goswami, author of The Self-Aware Universe, which of the two campuses in Fairfield would you be drawn to visit or possibly join? --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "L B Shriver" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Fairfield's Future > > Over the past several years, I have engaged in countless conversations about > the state of > Fairfield and its prospects for the future. I have generally taken the > position that Fairfield's > best years are yet to come. A few years ago, most of the people I engaged on > this topic > were surprised by my position and only a few agreed. Within the past year, > however, I > would say that the majority agree: Fairfield's best years are yet to come. > ...snip... To subscribe, send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Or go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ and click 'Join This Group!' Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
