The last three sessions Just In "Time".
I've spent the last month and a half very caught up in life, involved with moving trucks and boxes and a new house and lots of new people. It has been wonderful and stressful and illuminating and distracting all at the same time.
I'd commented in one of my last posts many weeks ago (http://www.cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php?topic=12251.msg87807#msg87807) about how I had begun seeing significant patterns repeating in my life, and that trend has strengthened, now with key 'players' showing up again. Very interesting stuff, (from my perspective anyway). I won't go into the details because that's not the point of this post.
The reason I'm writing this time is to comment on my reaction to the last three sessions from March, May and June, (it has been THAT long since I last tuned in to SOTT? Yikes!)
Anyway, upon moving into this town, which I have lived in before, I ran into again this fellow who had been gently (but persistently) in the past pushing for me to attend one of his Transcendental Meditation meetings in the unstated but clearly obvious hopes that I would follow in the footsteps of Doug Henning and the Natural Law Party etc., in their designs to, (as I am quite certain now), to put the whole planet into a deep slumber.
ARGH!!!!!!
(Pardon me; I am working hard to refrain from using a series of base explicatives to describe how boring and dippy the whole thing was. It's not since high school that I felt such similar urges while sitting in a class room setting.)
The thing is this; I needed the refresher this experience provided in a big way, because when this fellow approached me with his stories about, "1% of the population meditating to reduce crime in Washington," it felt deeply wrong on some level but I couldn't put my finger on it. I had to spend the next couple of days pondering it all, and it wasn't until the two hours before I was going to be picked up and whisked away to his meeting on a stretch of land far, far away, that I began to panic.
I'd been sleep walking until then, more than usual, dealing with the dozen HUGE distractions life was throwing at me, (good lord, I'd forgotten life could be THAT insane and draining!!!), and that morning was especially curious. --Upon waking, I found my thinking to be extremely fuzzy and I couldn't seem to wake up, whiling away the morning in bed trying to summon the energy and will to rise. --When I finally doddered out of bed, I fired up my computer and began searching for all things related to TM, and one of my first stops was SOTT, where I keyed the relevant words into the forum search bar just to see what kinds of discussions had been had in the past on the subject. This has proved to be a very useful tool in the past.
To my (fuzzed-out) surprise and delight, there had been three new sessions with the C's posted since I'd last looked, and more than this, the first of them touched on the very subject of my present concern. So I sat in my shorts reading and absorbing, and finally, due to my head being so utterly dopey and dazed, I lumbered downstairs in search of some coffee and food in the hopes that this would re-ignite my brain.
I made a cup and sat outside to drink it and eat some breakfast and generally sit in the Sun and try to get my head straight. (I don't drink or do drugs and I'd not gone to bed *that* late the previous night. And since I am tuned into the kind of material SOTT covers, the whole experience coupled with my impending date with TM, I was sliding well into paranoia. At this point, I looked up and saw the weirdest thing. . .
--The clouds had formed a very peculiar, very noticeable ring around the Sun. It took up about a tenth of the sky, and it looked hopelessly wrong. It wasn't heat-haze or anything like that. . , it looked like a very deliberate ring of cloud in an otherwise clear blue sky with the Sun at the exact center. I've never seen anything like it, and my head was SO fuzzed out. I couldn't help but think that my date with the TM people was timed just a little too perfectly with this ring thing, and while one half of my mind was saying, "You're being arrogant to think that anybody cares enough about your little affect on the world to go to this much trouble just to screw with your head" and the other half was saying, "NO! The C's said that it takes no trouble whatsoever for personalized attention to be given, that nobody is a nobody!" (I'm paraphrasing, of course.)
Anyway, I went back inside and through main effort, finished reading and thinking and mere minutes before the TM guy came to pick me up, two things happened. . .
1. I realized, "Hold on! Trying to bring Peace and Love to the masses as these TM guys are suggesting by installing a giant meditation machine, *without the conscious consent of the masses* is just another form of population control!! It's a violation of Free Will!" --Duh. Why hadn't I realized that immediately MONTHS ago?
2. The fuzziness in my head vanished and I felt aware and awake and sharp. --And when my ride pulled up in front of the house, I also noted that the Ring Around The Sun was gone.
The TM meeting itself was nothing. It was just silly, and its ploys were obvious. I could comment on the video of the VERY stoned-seeming woman who lulled the audience of three other adults and their kids into a zoned-out slumber, and the gaping issues I had with her numerous statements, and the droning manner with which the attending lecturer avoided dealing with the various points which I was actually interested in. But there's no point to that, really. That stuff can be read by others elsewhere in these forums.
When the sign-up sheets were passed around, I was the only one who thanked them kindly for allowing me to see what their club was all about, but no thank-you, I would not be joining up. All in all, it was very educational and I'm glad I got first hand experience with the group. I'd been afraid, --really quite scared of attending a few hours earlier. I even made sure my landlady knew where I was going to be and what time to start getting worried if I didn't return. --A little over-kill for such a vanilla group, but it was a real struggle to stop myself from canceling out of fear. It's been too easy to avoid collecting experience by hiding under the sheets, and that goes against the whole, "All ships are safe in harbor" thing which I quite believe in.
--But without knowledge of a rather large number of things, I can see an alternate version of myself wandering dazedly into their meeting, without the benefit of even a coffee, (they were down on coffee and nicotine, I should note), and coming out a full-fledged TM zombie. And man, the ones I've met who are right into TM use the same zoned-out happy happy lobotomized tones of voice and mannerisms. So, NO thank-you. The very thought of living in a world where everybody is vibrating on that wavelength is just too much like a cliche sci-fi novel. (Sort of like the one we're living in now, except that where everybody is scared all the time they are instead of buzzed-out on Happy-Happy.)
As it stands, I am now aware of more, and I am also intrigued by Craig's work, which I plan to look into.
It's not that TM itself is bad; meditation can do useful things. It's about the intent of the user. It seems to me that meditation can be used to seek or to hide. Where TM gets exceptionally creepy, is with the desire to affect the behavior of everybody on the whole planet without asking first.
Okay. That's about all I've got for now.
Cheers, and thank-you everybody!
my first leason with forum posts here, live long and prosper (mr.Spock) :)
