--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "curtisdeltablues" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > Master's article > > Saving the planet > > by the Master , through Benjamin Creme > . . . > I am so tired of God's messengers delivering Mr. Rogers > speeches and then blaming us if we are underwhelmed. One > realistic good idea is what we need from you guys. Is > that too much to ask? Come on Maitreya and His group, > throw us a bone here. Stop the political campaign > promises about all the great stuff you will do when > we start kissing your ass and give us a reason to. > Solve the energy problem and I'll be first in line.
It's not the words, Curtis, it's the investiture. That is, people who have *invested* heavily in another person -- be it a guru figure or a polit- ical figure or even a celebrity -- to the point of identifying with that person and/or his or her hopes and dreams tend to *read things into* his or her words that are simply not there for those who *haven't* invested in that person. Take a quote of Maharishi's that Judy drools over from time to time here: Q: Maharishi, if everything is, as you say, perfect just as it is, why are we working so hard to change things? A: That too is perfect just as it is. To me, this is Guru 101-speak, the kind of stuff that *anyone* can spout if they're trying to sound profound and think that people will buy this level of contradiction, and see no contradictions in it. It has zero level of profundity for me, but to her, it seems to be genuinely profound. She keeps bring- ing it up as if it's one of the most profound things she's ever heard. What would it take for it to sound profound to me? Well, given my background and my experiences, it would take Maharishi first talking about the way he wants to change things, and shifting the state of consciousness of all of the people in the audience to a radically different state of attention from the state of attention they walked in wity, and from which they can see as clearly as he does what needs to be changed, and how to change it. And then, when the student asks the same good question, he shifts the state of consciousness of everyone in the audience to yet another rad- ically different state of attention, Unity, from which they can see the perfection of everything that is, just *as* it is. In other words, I've worked with teachers who can put a little phwam! behind their words, so that they're not just words. When they're talk- ing of the world as it appears from, say, CC, they can shift the state of attention of those who are listening to the state of CC, so that the words are "reinforced" by their own exper- ience as they listen to them. Five minutes later, when the teacher has shifted to describing the world as it appears from the state of Unity, they can shift the state of attention of the students such that they can *experience* the way that the world looks from the level of Unity, so that the students' perception "matches" the teachers' words. If the teacher can't do that, all they're dealing in is words. And, as I said above, the value that someone in the audience *assigns* to those words tends to correlate with the value that they *already* assign to the person speaking. They tell themselves (and often others) that they're wowed by the words themselves, but I'm not con- vinced that's true. In the majority of cases they were wowed before any words were spoken. Nablus is *always* going to believe that Ben Creme is speaking words of the highest possible cosmic wisdom when he's "channeling" Maitreya. We're gonna think he's just spouting NewAge (rhymes with sewage) babble that only an idiot would think is full of wisdom. But if, say, there are some quotes of Sonny Boy Williamson that just completely do it for you, and manage to encapuslate the sum total of humanity's combined wisdom over the ages into one short verse, chances are that some people here will hear the verse and think he's only talking about knockin' off some good nookie. They don't have the level of investiture in the person speaking the words that you do, and so they don't "project into" the words the same level of profundity that you might. But *I* might agree with you, because even though Sonny Boy Williamson is not one of my personal gurus, I'll cut a break to anyone who's in favor of knockin' off a little nookie from time to time. :-)
