--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "curtisdeltablues" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Snark is condescension after two bong hits and a half bag of Oreos. > > The irony of the rest is too perfect to touch. > > I enjoy our discussions up to the point that you use it as a > tool to criticize me personally, or my style of thinking, > instead of talking about the subject. I think we are looking > for very different things from our exchanges.
I'd be a lot less inclined to criticize your style of thinking if you didn't make such a big deal of the importance of thinking clearly and rigorously, while mocking those whose thinking you feel is muddled and holding up people like Sam Harris as some kind of ideal--and then coming out with something as antithetical to those pronouncements as your Guru Dev/MMY fantasies, in which you construct elaborate fictional narratives around a few bits of fact while ignoring a host of other facts, just so you can come up with a scenario that fits your predtermined conclusions. Your thinking along these lines is also marred by anachronism and ethnocentrism; you have a great deal of difficulty putting yourself in the shoes of people who lived at a different time and in a different place and culture. What I *sense* is that you're driven to find conclusions about the whole TM thing that justify your rejection of it. But you make just as many mental leaps as you did in order to buy into TM and MMY and Guru Dev in the first place. I don't believe your style of thinking has changed at all; rather, you're using that same style of thinking to arrive at a different point. It's as if you look at your earlier conclusions, ask yourself what the opposite of those conclusions would be, and then do whatever mental acrobatics you must to hop, skip, and jump your way to those opposite conclusions. I'm not suggesting your instincts about getting out of TM didn't have a solid basis. But I've *always* thought your rationalizations of why you did so were fishy, entirely disconnected from the real reasons, maybe even subconsciously designed to *avoid* looking at the real reasons. You've had three people now bust holes in your fantasies about Guru Dev and MMY, two of them on the basis of firsthand knowledge. Can you not come up with a mental construct that incorporates what Marek and trinity have told you without also busting holes in your decision to quit TM? Does that decision hinge on Guru Dev not being who he was said to be and on MMY having lied about Guru Dev for the sake of his own self-importance? If Guru Dev was a real spiritual luminary, and if MMY was entirely sincere in promoting him with no ulterior motives, does that make your decision to leave somehow a mistake? It's as if you don't trust your instincts to leave TM and have to build this quasi-rational structure to support them. The problem is that it isn't anywhere near as rational as you think it is. Bottom line, what I'm suggesting is that you don't *need* to rationalize your instincts. But the way you go about the attempt to rationalize them has forced you into a very unhelpful and potentially counterproductive way of looking at the world.
