Quote

The point is, over time, I began to sense that he had very human weaknesess. He got irrationally pissed at times, was increasingly paranoid, and could take delight in others misfortune.

Can you just IMAGINE what must be going on with those that have to cater to him in Vlodrop? Wow.

Nail hit on head. He's almost a tame version of his role model ADOLPH HITLER, except who gives a rat's backside. Pity the poor sods who wait on him hand and foot. Eventually they all figure out what's going on and run, very fast: Billy Clayton is an example, great guy, good friend ... but when he finally had that lights-on-eyes-opened experience BINGO

Talking about it does help and I am afraid that after 30something years I still have pent-up/supressed feelings. I'm fortunate, I like talking about those days. Unfortunately, not many like listening to the bildge that pours out.

The CIA rumors were fabricated by our fearless leader.

Kept us feeling paranoid. It was his way of getting rid of people that knew-too-much.

For example, a few old friends of mine were publicly told by MMY "OK, Jeff, go back to the CIA now. You know there's nothing here for you."
They were then escorted out by the German guards, and put on a bus to the airport. This happened in a few isolated incidents.

As my starry-eyed mother told me "Toni, it's incredible that MMY knew all along that the CIA was there! He allowed them to see that we are an innocent, benevolent organization, then sent them away!"

These circumstances happened individually. The men themselves later told me "I wasn't with the CIA EVER!"

They had been involved with some private movement business, $$, and knew-too-much. They were already doubting. The best way for MMY to protect himself was to publicly eliminate potential bad seeds who had inside info.

Later guyz,
t

hi Toni -- yes, Mahesh was the master of the well turned poison rapier. Do you remember the episode of Frazer where he and Niles are trying to get into an excluseve club with only one membership available (the other will have to come as a guest of the successful one)?

Niles, referring to Frazer: please give the membership to my brother, we wouldn't want another messy suicide attempt.

Frazer, not to be outdone: oh, Niles, you use humour so well; it must have helped you so much when you were in prison for threatening the President.

So, Mahesh, great guru, greatest GURU of all gurus, could pull off anything he wished. People to him were like vermin to most hoity-toity snobs. One simply disregarded their right to existence and dispatched them with impunity.

I don't remember; did I ever tell the story here: Mahesh told Marilyn Jest, an old old old time faithful on almost all of the earliest courses (very pixish, Mia Farrow type ... probably with whom he hoped to have a ding-dong) that when Guru Dev died, Guru Dev's consciousness entered him (yes, Mahesh's) body. Marilyn told the story to my friend Len Brown. So the Provinence is fairly good. Mahesh said the experience nearly killed him.

True/False ... Does it matter? Look at his behaviour. He thinks he's absolutely superior. He's as deluded as any of his followers, he just has more charisma, juice, mojo, which the faithful obviously attribute that to him.

He's really a case of the Emperor's New Clothes. He has no power, people simply let him have it.

LEAP, throwing myself into the air, how high Master, how high.

Oh, you were going to say Leap, weren't you? :D It's wickid fun, but therapeutically so and heavens above, we are in such need of therapeutic anything.

Last night, unable to sleep for some peculiar reason, I was thinking of a message I had read at another site, someone who has a quite detestable personality claimed to meditate correctly and another person whom the first dislikes quite openly, having abandoned the Dome, [i:7971194ad1]etc.[/i:7971194ad1] at Fairfiled, was told he was no longer meditating correctly.

No one ever claimed the TMO, Maheshism and the Maheshites (a pun, I guess on British "shite"/Americal "shit") had intact mental processes.

Oh, what a rant as prologue to a really nice, juicy story: When Mahesh first asked me to do his letters, I was afraid to open them, he just said open it and read it to him. So I did. Some guy actually wrote Mahesh a letter saying he was saying his mantra backwards and having experiences of demons.

And he asked what to do! (talk about y'r intact mental processes, eh?)

Mahesh laughed and said just to tell him everything was all right and to just continue.

Conclusion: no such thing as right or wrong TM, it's whatever brings in the dosh. Mahesh, a loving, caring guru? Mahesh, more another drag version of Dame Edna!

The way to do his letters, just tell people everything is all right and to just continue.

Which reminds me of another story: when we were flying from Mallorca to Italy (Fiuggi), we were going to fly on a rather iffy airline that could only take off after midnight. People were jittery about this. When told, I was there, I heard him, Mahesh said, [i:7971194ad1]oh, just give them some nice candies and they'll be all right[/i:7971194ad1].

Talk about your hoity-toity attitude towards vermine. Yoikes.

------------------

Toni -- I was also thinking about your mother's ability to rationalize along with the best of the best. My first thought when I first read the message, was [i:7971194ad1]bonkers, whacko[/i:7971194ad1], but that's unfair and probably wrong. It was quite the style, in the 70's around Mahesh, for people who thought highly of themselves to put on such airs. They were just desperate to be recognized for the highly evolved beings they were desperate to suppose they were.

I guess it's called fishing for compliments. We had a lady at our Centre who was inclined to drop hints that she was highly evolved. To their credit, most simply didn't respond.

Oh, Oh, oh, another story: the lady above was named Ruth. She was so pleased that she had a personal letter from Mahesh (something Marilyn Jest actually did have, in abundance ... no green eyed monster here, of course). She even showed it to me: it was a nice letter in Mahesh's handwriting thanking people for some job well done. It was xeroxed. It was obvious that he had written the letter and then, written out the names to whom it was to be sent/xeroxed. Just copy it with each name.

Her's was [i:7971194ad1]Dear Rose[/i:7971194ad1], it was even crocked, you could see bits of the actual name underneath, the one to whom the original letter had been addressed; the entire process was obvious and, I thought, not just a little demoralizing [b:7971194ad1]and she thought it was real, personal, to her[/b:7971194ad1]. She even rationalized that sometimes Mahesh called her Rose -- well maybe he did; I had a university professor who hadn't opened a book since he got tenure who introduced people to one another [i:7971194ad1]all the males were Bob and all the females were Mary[/i:7971194ad1].

-- the TM envelope of sanity, pushed to extremes?

Well, suicide bombers have Maheshites beat by a country mile, of course; but it's still sad that grown people behave like highschool prom queens. But, it keeps the money flowing, so, who's to complain, right. Besides bankrupting yourself mentally and financially in the game of highly evolved is a much nicer way to go than blowing oneself to squishy bits.

What a rant

Hi Martin,

Sounds like everyone was doing a lot of thinking last night! I was looking over all the latest TM "emergency" ploy to get thousands to come to Fairfield and Washington DC to "save the world." It's all SO familiar isn't it? (I don't mean the tragic events in the middle east, but Mahesh's captalizing on the situation).

I remembered an excellent article written about the time of one of the last TM doomsday emergencies, written by former TM teacher John Knapp. Considering what the movement is trying to pull off at the present time, it seemed like a good time to refect back on the last "crisis". John, I hope you don't mind that it is presented again here.

"SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. -- June 12, 1996
Knapp on the History of Crisis in the TM Movement
"Look, the Maharishi has had one crisis after another since the first Year of the World Plan in 1972. So what's the big deal?"
Maharishi's extravagant claims for impending doom have steadily escalated for 40 years. In the 50s, he hinted that only TM could avert nuclear war. He framed "National campaigns" to initiate mass numbers of citizens into TM in Nepal, the Philippines, Nigeria, Israel, the former USSR, Mozambique, Brazil, and elsewhere to avert national calamities, war, famine, and pestilence.
He threatened us that failure to institute his World Plan would begin World War III in the 70s.
World War III reared its ugly head again in the 80s, unless permanent communities of 7,000 --later 10,000 -- TMers weren't assembled immediately, financed by government funds.
Why does the Maharishi make these incessant demands for ever greater commitment by TMers?
The Maharishi has an endemic problem on his hands. "Enlightenment," "flying," the "Age of Enlightenment" and other miracles stubbornly refuse to arrive.
The Maharishi promised enlightenment in a few months during the 50s. When it failed to develop for his followers, he blamed the low state of "world consciousness" and began a World Tour that he claimed would bring peace through meditation within 10 years. He also introduced "advanced techniques" to speed evolution -- at a price.
When world peace didn't arrive in 10 years, at first he announced his retirement, his mission a failure. But when the Beatles breathed life into his tiny movement, he decided he had underestimated Western stress and in the 70s announced that the World Plan would bring enlightenment to everyone within 3 to 5 years, if everyone became a TM teacher at $5,000 a head.
In the late 70s, he promised the sidhis, or supernormal powers, would bring full enlightenment within a single 6 month course -- for another $3,000.
When the sidhis failed to bring enlightenment or levitation, he blamed the "impurity" of TMers lives and made a big push for celibacy and living in groups only with other meditators – while quietly investing in "sidha land" real estate deals.
In the early 80s, he "discovered" that Western medicine had failed and only if TMers discovered Ayur Veda treatments -- priced at thousands of dollars per year -- would they ever become enlightened.
And all these little crises helped distribute the wealth around his world-wide empire.
The Indian TM movement needs an influx of cash? Suddenly there's a global need for a course in India. A faltering resort becomes available overseas at a ridiculously low price? Fine, there's an immediate need for TM Governors to travel to a Baltic nation to avert war. And so forth. (Billy Clayton even suggested that the Maharishi instituted the famous "Thursday fasts" back in the 70s when his accountant pointed out how much money this would save his courses and capitals.
Former TM teachers have talked about transporting suitcases of cash, electronic equipment, records, and other sensitive material across international borders when asked to by TM course leaders. A quick check will show that often two overseas courses are run side by side. One in a country with strong currency, while the neighbor's currency is weak. How odd.
These crises also allow the Maharishi a chance to test the loyalty of his leadership. Charlie Lutes, Jerry Jarvis, Lawrence Domash, Deepak Chopra, and other former leaders were all escorted out of the movement when they became embarrassed by the extravagant claims the Maharishi made for the "latest wave of knowledge." While those of us who stayed behind felt smug in our superior devotion to the Master -- as we bounced on our butts, ate feces-contaminated pills, and wasted our lives and fortunes on Maharishi's ever more crazy dreams.
No one should dismiss the very real dangers of biological wars and genetic manipulation. But no one should confuse these important issues with the delusions of a madman leading blindly devoted followers into isolated camps to await a holocaust.
If there's one thing we've learned from Jonestown, Aum Shinrikyo, Waco, Solar Temple, et al, it is that doomsday scenarios are absolute pressure cookers for the true believers involved.
No matter what the Maharishi's motives are -- he may after all be pure as the driven snow – this is a very dangerous situation.
We at TranceNet have received several reports of TMers selling homes, breaking up families, and so forth to go wait out the "biological war" due within weeks.
Up until the moment that gunfire broke out at Jonestown, Jim Jones was considered a fine humanitarian -- perhaps at worst a little foolish.
(As fate would have it, the Guyana massacre happened during my Teacher Training Phase III. I remember we all held our breath when the TV anchorman announced a massacre among a religious community in Central America. Was he talking about the Maharishi's World Peace Project? Many of us had TM governor friends in Central America at that very moment, rounding to save the world from nuclear disaster.)
(C) Copyright 1996, John M. Knapp. All rights reserved. CONTACT: trancenet.org John M. Knapp, Executive Director 707.996.5560

There is an old joke, somewhat dark: the minister, the priest and the rabbi are talking to god. The minister asks if men and women will ever be really equal. God ponders a bit and says YES, but not in your lifetime. The priest askes if protestant the catholic will ever be united. Again god ponders and finally says, YES, but not in your lifetime. The rabbi asks, will there ever be peace in the middle east. More pondering on god's part. YES, he finaly says, but not in my lifetime. --wish I could work a TM blissninny into this as well, but would god actually talk to such a being?

John Knapp. Wonderful guy. Had the best web site going until a year or so ago when he took it down. It still exists as an archive somewhere. Check "Falling Down the TM Rabbit Hole". I printed almost all of it off a few years ago.

Mahesh may not be another drag version of Dame Edna, but Chicken Little, there's a thought.

So many stories and such pleasure in discussing them; such sadness that Mahesh uses people as Nixon used our generation, for cannon fodder. I have no idea what motivated Nixon, but Mahesh is motivated by personal greed, I know no other way to say it. [i:b63a7d499b]The mind goes in the direction of more and more[/i:b63a7d499b] that's greed, by definition.

Oh, look, turtles. Just keep looking, I'm busy picking your pocket. Turtles, yes, see, over there, just keep looking.

Highly recommended, Javiar Sierra's [i:b63a7d499b]The Secret Supper[/i:b63a7d499b]. Makes [i:b63a7d499b]The Da Vinci Code[/i:b63a7d499b] seem like a comic book. It's all right in front of us, best way to ensure we won't see.

I need to clairfy why I recomment Sierra: he goes to great pains to unravel a "secret" that he and many, many others are looking at. It's all right there in front of them and they can't see the message.

For me, the "message" is that while it is well and good, highly recommended and so that all of us who have been tainted by cults get real and professionl help, when is sometimes overlooked is actually looking right at the experiences/situations we were in. We don't have to start with the most painful bits. Start with the good that can be found and work up to seeing the whole thing and really seeing it.

The discovery? Well, for most of the book we are all looking at the same picture and trying to see the message. When we do, the experience of not being able to understand is no longer present.

It's a book about waking up from the dream world. Give it a shot.

The author was suitably weirded out.

[www.latimes.com]


A lotus amid the Iowa corn
A new Midwestern town has the teachings of a well-known maharishi at
its heart.
By Carina Chocano, Times Staff Writer
September 10, 2006


WHEN I booked my trip last April to attend a conference on
Transcendental Meditation at the Maharishi University of Management
in Fairfield, Iowa, I had no idea I would be visiting another
country. My airline ticket clearly indicated Cedar Rapids, and from
there I would rent a car and drive about two hours to a small town 50
miles from the Mississippi River. I was a longtime fan of filmmaker
David Lynch, one of the conference's keynote speakers, and I was
interested in meditation, occasionally popping in for a guided
meditation at a neighborhood Buddhist temple.

By the time I had made the travel arrangements, I knew I would be
spending two nights at the improbably named Raj, an ayurvedic spa-
hotel improbably located in the middle of a cornfield. I knew I would
be attending a conference entitled "Consciousness, Creativity and the
Brain," where John Hagelin, the onetime Natural Law Party
presidential candidate would also speak. Hagelin once offered to
deploy 400 "yogic fliers" to Kosovo to meditate for peace (then-
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright declined).

What I didn't know is that the Raj is not in Fairfield but just
outside of it, in a brand-new town called Maharishi Vedic City, which
happens to be the North American capital of the Global Country of
World Peace.

So to say that Maharishi Vedic City exists on a plane of its own is
not quite to speak metaphorically. The town, which consists of
several still-sprouting residential developments, is surrounded by
cornfields dotted with barns and gloomy Victorians. The area is no
stranger to sectarian lifestyle experiments: Not far away is the
Mennonite community of Kalona, where bearded men and bonneted women
drive around in buggies.

When I arrived, the sky looked as though it had been carpeted in a
gray Stainmaster Berber. Fairfield proper looked as though it had
seen better days — specifically 1854, when it hosted the first Iowa
State Fair. It has the stately but melancholy air of a once-
prosperous Midwestern town in decline.

By contrast, M.V.C. displays all the architectural characteristics of
a new exurban development: gaudy, oversize construction that has no
stylistic relation to its environment but instead vaguely alludes to
a theme-park version someplace sort of magical and far away.

The first thing that alerted me to the existence of the Global
Country of World Peace was a bright yellow flag with an orange
sunburst design, which I took at first to be an _expression of
meditator pride, the TM equivalent of a rainbow flag. Checking in at
the Raj, I noticed a display of the Global Country's paper
money, "the ideal currency of the city" (though they did take my
American Express).

*

Think pink

STEVE YELLIN, my guide and PR liaison for the weekend, met me at my
room, which was bright and plush, done in a smoothed-over rustic
style I decided to call Santa Barbara Provençal. He was wearing a
radiant pure pink cashmere sweater, which I initially took for a
fashion statement. But it turned out pink was everywhere. It was the
color of the media room at the Raj, where pastel Barcaloungers faced
a TV permanently tuned to the Maharishi Channel. And it was the color
of the private plane that first delivered the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
to rural Iowa in 1971.

Over a vegetarian buffet lunch, I got a brief history of the town.
The maharishi (now an octogenarian billionaire living in the
Netherlands) introduced TM to the West in the 1950s. He founded the
Maharishi University of Management in 1971, around the time he became
one in the long line of "fifth Beatles." (John Lennon would go on to
write the none-too-flattering "Sexy Sadie.")

Vedic City grew around the school, incorporating in 2001. "Vedic"
refers to "Veda," the Sanskrit word for "knowledge," which the
maharishi claims to have distilled into a comprehensive system for
living. TM is just the beginning. The "complete Vedic science of
consciousness" encompasses architecture, education, health,
agriculture, administration, economy and defense.

There are, according to the TM organization, more than 6 million
practitioners worldwide. Fairfield/M.V.C. is home to a few thousand
of them and offers, beyond individual daily practice, an all-
inclusive lifestyle.

After lunch, my guide took me on a tour of the town. All of the
structures in M.V.C. are built in strict adherence to Maharishi
Sthapatya Veda technique, which requires that all buildings face
east, include a central "quiet space," and be adorned with a golden
dollop called a kalash.

The houses cost $200,000 to $800,000, including consultation fees and
royalties, which sounded like a lot for rural Iowa, but I was told
that "people who live and work in these buildings report that they
think more clearly, make better decisions, feel happier and
healthier, feel more alert and refreshed throughout the day, have
more restful and refreshing sleep, have more energy and less fatigue
and experience less stress and greater peace of mind."
(Blurting, "Oh, like feng shui," in response to an initial
explanation of how it all works is the wrong thing to do.)

I came to Iowa on a lark — or as close to a lark as you can come
while on assignment for a major newspaper. The TM organization courts
the press with an interest that borders on ardor and, as a result,
throughout the weekend, I felt less like a fly on the wall than the
elephant in the room.

Because Vedic City wants you to visit. It believes in the creativity-
enhancing, stress-reducing, intelligence-increasing, health-promoting
and world-peace-increasing properties of TM, and it really, really
wants you to believe in them too.

Vedic City also wants you to know that Vedic City is for foodies. It
wants you to sample its desultory smattering of ethnic restaurants
and conclude that here you'll want for nothing. The town of 285 has
big plans for expansion, for attracting tourists and potential
meditators. Mayor Bob Wynne (a longtime meditator) has said that the
idea is to expand to 1,200 residents by 2010, and eventually reach up
to 10,000. Since it incorporated, the city has purchased more than
100 acres of farmland, which someday will be the site of a theme
park, a golf course and botanical gardens.

There was something about Vedic City's architecture, not to mention
the mammoth vehicles parked in the driveways, that was disconcerting
yet familiar; it was exoticism snugly tucked into a marketable
lifestyle brand. Vedic McMansions, Vedic lodges, Vedic Cape Cod
bungalows and Vedic condos commingled within a short distance of
giant his-and-hers Golden Domes of Pure Knowledge where the yogic
fliers congregate. On the way back to the hotel, I passed a mobile
home park called Utopia Park ("The Homes by the Domes"), which is
just off Heaven and Taste of Utopia streets.

The organic grocery was like the hippie co-op in every college or
lefty town — except the bulletin board was disproportionally
dedicated to guru services and the "for-rent" fliers list Eastern
orientation as an amenity.

After the tour, I went back to the Raj to rest before the weekend's
welcome reception. I wandered around the calming lobby, stopping to
check out the scale model of the Vedic Observatory on my way to the
gift shop. I hung out in the media room for a bit. The maharishi was
on TV, talking about the unified field. (You couldn't spit without
hitting a portrait of the maharishi around here.)

In the gift store, I bought some beautiful Indian-themed notecards.
The woman at the register was very edgy and stressed out for someone
working in a shop where, at that moment, there was only one customer
standing there without so much as a pricing question. When a
colleague came in with a technical problem, she melted down. I went
back to my room, clutching my relaxing bath salts, feeling sort of
jittery myself.

A few hours later, I joined Steve and his wife for dinner at a now-
closed restaurant called Regina's. I ordered the salmon on a plank of
flaming cedar, which, I was surprised to discover, actually came on a
plank of flaming cedar. My fish was on a wood chip that was on fire.
When the flames failed to subside, I smothered them discreetly with
mashed potatoes. It was delicious.

The bulk of the weekend, though, I spent in a big room — something
very much like a hangar, in fact — attending a conference
on "Creativity, Consciousness and the Brain," listening to talks on
the relationship between quantum physics and peace-creating energy
fields, and watching the brain waves of a young student of meditation
hooked up to an EEG as a group of bald men stood around beaming.

The conference constituted the last leg of a 12-campus tour
introducing college students to TM and promoting Lynch's new
scholarship program, "The David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-
Based Education and World Peace." If the need for meditation
scholarships sounds strange, considering the ease with which
meditation instruction can be obtained, you should know that the
formal four-day TM instruction and a personal mantra (plus future
adjustments) will run you $2,500.

Early on Saturday morning, Lynch graciously took questions from the
conference-goers, who were encouraged to ask him about anything,
whether it be meditation or movie-making. Judging from the questions,
what many of the young attendees sought were grand unifying answers.

They worried, perhaps prematurely, about how to retain their
integrity and creativity in Hollywood, an industry known for its bone-
headedness and venality. They wanted to know should they shoot on
film or digital video? They wanted to understand what releases
creativity, what its limits are.

"The Maharishi Mahesh Yogi talks about an ocean of creativity and
consciousness," Lynch replied. "Then modern science says it's true —
everything that is emerges from this thing. Quantum physics and the
unified field."

*

So, what's the secret?

THE questions were much like those aspiring filmmakers ask directors
during a Q&A at a film festival. In those sessions, it's generally
been my experience that directors are rarely asked about aesthetics
or ideas.

What people want to know — and sometimes they ask this cleverly,
sometimes clumsily — is how they can stop being themselves and start
being the actor/director/famous person. They want answers, in other
words, on how to transform their lives. They want the secret formula,
the treasure map, the magic phrase, the secret mantra.

There's something indescribably alluring about a "simple, effortless"
daily practice that purports to alleviate everything that ails the
21st century brain. And like most indescribably alluring things,
there's something unsettling about it too. TM sells itself very
aggressively as the one true meditation practice, a practice unlike
other practices that require contemplation or analysis or some other
form of effort.

And here, in southwestern Iowa, just in time for the baby boomers'
twilight years, is their Eastern-philosophy utopia. What 40 years ago
might have been an "alternative lifestyle" is now a marketable
lifestyle product; an entropic mix of spirituality and materialism;
self-betterment and self-absorption as a cure for all of humanity's
ills; consciousness-expansion as a way to building wealth and saving
the world. For the not-so-low price of $2,500, you're offered inner
peace, world peace, reduced blood pressure and the sense of yourself
as a maverick pioneer, a "cultural creative."

Meanwhile, neither the square footage of the average house (in an non-
temperate year-round climate) nor the size of the gas tank of the
average car seems to factor into the peace equation.

As Fred Travis, director of the Psychophysiology Center at MUM,
softly droned on about "the delightful flow of fine feeling and soft
thinking" brought on in the college brain by TM, I wandered off. I
think I was suffering from severe scientific proof fatigue. From the
moment of my arrival, I had been regaled with tales of millions of
dollars in research grants from the National Institutes of Health,
the findings published in prestigious medical journals, the studies
conducted in partnership with major university hospitals. Nearly
every conversation, whether it concerned elementary-school academic
performance or cholesterol or crime-rate reduction, at some point
included the phrase "There was this study…. "

Maybe someday we'll look back on these early years of the 21st
century as the moment when it became clear that money, competent PR
and, above all, frank and unabashed banality have the power to
normalize anything. When life itself transformed into a mall
of "lifestyle choices," laid out end to end on a flat, infinite plane
of possibility.

I wandered into the student union bookstore, which carried no books
except for the maharishi's. In the admissions building, I perused a
display detailing the maharishi's blueprints for an "ideal city." It
is grid-like and built around gardens. Examples of bad cities include
Paris and New York.

Later, another journalist asked one of the PR guys whether the
maharishi would really prefer to see a big square suburb where Paris
is. I mean, it's Paris, she said.

He considered this and then replied, "Well, it might be nice for us
to visit, but think about the people who have to live there."

*



TM zone

GETTING THERE:



From LAX, Delta, American, United and Northwest have connecting
service (change of planes) to the Eastern Iowa Airport in Cedar
Rapids. Restricted round-trip fares begin at $314.

Thank you so much Toni -- this is brilliant.

To paraphrase the poet: ah, what some gift [it would be for] the gifty [I guess he meant god or our genetic makeup to] give us to see ourselves as others see us.

Well, I suppose that Burns (not George) is rotating in his grave over that one.

I wonder how many of the TM faithful realize just how absolutely they have been snared in the spider's web. Yes, I am sure they have all sorts of pat responses, great debater's conversation stoppers; but our lives are not debates, they are opportunities for growth and from my experience, Mahesh does not promote that. I remember his lashing out at the Kaplans, calling them Demons because they stopped giving him money.

What does that say, I wonder!

In Joyce Collin-Smith's wonderful book "Call No Man Master" she recounts how Mahesh sent Devindra off to meditate. It destryoed him (Devindra, that is).

Everone should get a copy of "Call ... " -- but everyone should also take a look at what Mahesh is doing at [i:115339d0ec]their[/i:115339d0ec] expense. Imagina thinking that a $25 plastic doohicky on your roof, that you paid a hell of a lot for, was somehow going to make your life better.

Can you say magical thinking? Obviously Mahesh can sell it. It's very, very sad. But that's what many religious leaders do, rip off the flock, or is that fleece the lambs?

At least there is help. Anyone who wants answers to serous questions can now find them. Before the Internet, well it was very difficult; but now this site and many similar can give straight answers to real questions. You only have to go for it.

Well.. the LA times (2 postings above) wrote about my home town.. ugh!

Sunday's NYTimes Magazine published a live interview w/ Mahesh today in Holldand


Encounter
Outer Peace
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By LILY KOPPEL
Published: October 8, 2006
In the 1960’s, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi — called the giggling guru by the press — gained a measure of celebrity for promoting his mantra-repetition technique of Transcendental Meditation around the world and for serving a brief stint as spiritual adviser to the Beatles. His message was that with the proper techniques, each individual could find peace, as one of his disciples, George Harrison, sang, “within.” Today, his organization claims to hold U.S. assets of $300 million and to have taught six million adherents (training now costs $2,500) in T.M. centers around the world. It also operates a university in Fairfield, Iowa.


Peter Dejong/Associated Press
Maharishi, who is believed to be 89, now confines himself to two rooms in his golden-hued log house in the small Dutch village of Vlodrop. Although he has emerged only a few times in the past year — for fresh air on a chauffeured drive — he contends that his most important work lies ahead of him. His first 50 years, he says, were merely a “warm-up” for his goal of creating world peace by, among other things, rebuilding national capitals according to his harmony-producing precepts. Inner peace, it turns out, is not enough.

When I visited Vlodrop this spring, Maharishi agreed to a rare interview. I was permitted in his house but was not allowed into his upstairs quarters. His followers told me that seclusion preserves his energy and that he talks in person to only a small circle of attendants. I spoke to Maharishi by videoconference from a downstairs room where his red velvet gilded throne sat empty.

Framed in a flat-screen monitor, he appeared more than ever a mystical creature, his thin face sketched with a white beard. He was dressed in his customary white silk dhoti, a fresh necklace of yellow petals around his neck. His aim, he explained in English, is to create coherence in a world undone by our stressed brains, artificial national borders, terrorism and irrational violence. “My coherence-creating groups are going to put out all this mischief-mongership in the world,” he said in a high-pitched voice, holding President Bush up as the greatest mischief-monger of all. “The world is going to come out to be a neat and clean world. All these countries will fade away.”

Maharishi regards his own 65-acre enclave as the capital of a Global Country of World Peace; it even has its own currency, the raam. He lives here with 50 of his adherents — including his “minister of science and technology,” John Hagelin, a Harvard-educated physicist, but sees little of the bearded Westerners who come for long meditation retreats or research projects. The compound is in a parallel universe to Vlodrop, with its 2,000 locals. One of the few who has crossed over is the town florist, who practices T.M. and each day removes all the thorns from the yogi’s daily order of bushels of organic roses.

Maharishi is not content to promote peace just inside his compound. Hagelin has run for president of the United States three times, and recently, Maharishi chose 40 countries in which to support corps of “yogic fliers.” The human fliers supposedly use surges of energy to physically lift themselves off the ground. Like a number of aspiring religious thinkers these days, the Maharishi and Hagelin say they believe that the physics of quantum mechanics, with its leaping particles and abundant paradoxes, can be combined with ancient traditions into a new philosophy that stresses the world-changing potential of a “transcendental consciousness.” Maharishi argues, for instance, that when the square root of 1 percent of the earth’s population — that is, 8,000 people — meditate all at once, the result will be the diffusion of a higher state of consciousness into the atmosphere.

Another element of his vision is to rebuild the world according to Vedic principles. He has called for the demolition of “improperly oriented” buildings, believing them to be toxic, and includes among them the United Nations and the White House. There are proposals for New York and Paris to be cleared to make way for 3,000 marble peace palaces. (His organization operates such palaces in Bethesda, Md., Lexington, Ky., Houston and Fairfield.) Maharishi is also convinced that every country’s capital is wrongly located. In India and America, his organization has bought land near what it calls each country’s “brahmastan” — or the geographical and energy center. The future capital of the United States would be Smith Center, Kan., population 1,931.

Despite the support of celebrities from David Lynch to Donovan, Maharishi has been disappointed in his efforts to recreate the world. Hagelin’s poor showing in the 2000 presidential race did not lift his spirits. Locked in legal battles, his organization has not gained permission to raze a Franciscan monastery on its property in Vlodrop. It was also unable to establish sovereignty on 100 acres of Rota, an island in the Pacific. But even so, he has managed to transform, if not the world, then at least his gated utopia into an eerily peaceful place. At nightfall, the lawn, mowed by robots, lights up with decorative deer.

Lily Koppel is on the staff of the magazine.

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This is a real old thread, but it was fun reading. I started TM in high school in 1972 and became a TM teacher the next year. Went to MIU from '74-'78. Governor Training in '78. Even was on Purusha for a year right when it started in '81 (at least I think it was that year.). I still do TM and enjoy it quite a bit. My paradox with MMY has been the very deep spiritual experiences that his techniques and his presence have triggered in me. I know all about the financial and sexual nonsense too. I can't really reconcile the two sides to this rather interesting man, so I don't try too. Intellectual reconciliation would, right now, involve some sort of denial or at least minimumization of one side of the experiencing and I'm not interested in doing that. I just accept that there is more to all of this than I can realize right now and just let it go at that.