--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "dhamiltony2k5" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > I have been out traveling from FF to spiritual places out > West and recently out East, and it is informative to hear > people in reaction to Maharishi when you go other places.
This strikes me as an excellent exercise in the "healthy mind challenging its own assumptions" credo that distinguishes FFL from other TM-related sites and most of its participants from TBs. One of the things I think we all agree on is that if one bases one's opinion of Maharishi and TM *solely* on what one hears from *within* the TM movement, one gets a rather different picture than one would get if one examined feedback from a broader sampling within the larger spiritual community. One Web resource that is fun, although rather subjective, is "Sarlo's Guru Rating Service" at: http://www.globalserve.net/~sarlo/Ratings.htm Its value (if it has one) is that it is a compilation of feedback from *lots* of different individuals and sources on various spiritual teachers, past and present. For each one (currently over 1500), "Sarlo" presents the teacher's basic path (A=Advaita, B=Buddhist, C=Channels/New Age, D=Devotional, E=Earth Medicine, F=Fringe, G=Gnostic/Scientific, H=Humour, I=Indian, L=Literature, M=Middle Path, N=Nonduals, O=Other/misc, P=Perennials, Q=Quasi-Christian, S=Sufi, T=Tibetan, X=Disappeared, Y=Yoga, Z=Zen), feedback he's received pro and con, a list of sympathetic and anti links, and an overall rating. His ratings are: *** = the greats, helping many ** 1/2 = limited, some handicaps, or maybe not yet full stature ** = very limited, narrow approach or ideology, or still developing * 1/2 = suspect but on balance positive * = suspect 1/2 = bogus, may have some value, who knows 0 = worse than bogus, no redeeming value Unrated = too new, old or retiring, not enough info, or a "teacher" type Just for fun, here's his entry on Maharishi (rating = *): "Founder of Maharishi Thousand-Headed Purusha... Transcendental Meditation®... discovered the Constitution of the Universe... Yogic Flying to create supreme mind-body coordination in the individual and coherence in world consciousness... Absolute Theories of Government, Education, Health, and Defense to raise every area of life to perfection." Guru was Shankaracharya of Jyotir Math. Anti link is an ex-TM-teacher, talk of hypnosis, adverse reactions. Tripletalk, enormous money, but benefit of doubt. 2nd anti site into exposing "myths."
