goblinbox

In which I wish I was there.

Bghead just texted me to tell me that the Big M has died. I’m at work, so I googled it immediately (while on the phone with a customer laboriously explaining why she probably doesn’t want to install the lastest version of Outlook Express on her 11-year-old Windows 95 box)…

…and holy cow. Maharishi’s dead.

I spent 15 years, give or take, living in Fairfield directly and indirectly because of the Transcendental Meditation movement. Nearly everyone I know in that town was a meditator or sidha, and even if they weren’t they’d been around people who were for so long that they knew all the vocabulary.

It’s indirectly because of TM that I met Amma – and that was the single most profound event of my entire life, bar none.

Because of TM I’ve met people from all over the world, I’ve traveled, I’ve grown from being a weird little white middle class creature to being… well, whatever the hell it is that I am now.

TM fascinated me, drew me, embraced me, infuriated me, and pushed me out. I despised the Movement for a long time after I got off campus, until I realized that all organized religion is that way: only little folks – pencil pushers and bureaucrats – will stay to run institutions once based on real transformative shit, but their idiocy doesn’t necessarily make the seed knowledge any less profound. No doubt all the biggies would have apoplexy if they had to try to navigate their own institutional legacies today. Pretty much everyone agrees that Christ wouldn’t have anything to do with Christianity if He returned.

Anyway.

So we roos have all been waiting for Maharishi to die for some time now. We’ve none of us been able to answer with any kind of emphasis whether TM – as an organization, not as a technique – was good, bad, or both. (Nearly every meditator – except those who bugged all the way out to TM-ex, that is – will say the technique was good. At the very least, it cured headaches.) And now he has and I’m here in Washington, too far away from what are undoubtedly amazing conversations, tears, knee-jerk reactions, random drunken ramblings, residence courses, policy switchbacks, conference calls in the dome, and confused press releases…

Will the University survive? Will the TM community survive? Will the town – as we know it, at least – survive? How will Movement policy change? Will it get better? Worse? Will people still learn TM? (Most importantly, will the Beach Boys or the remaining Beatles say anything?) (I’m being facetious.) (No, really.) What’ll happen to the Movement’s already wonky monetary structure? Who owns all those TM centers around the world? What will happen to all those multi-million dollar Stapathya-vedic ‘homes’ around Fairfield, once there’s no market for them? Will birds live in them?

Gawd, I really wish I could be in Fairfield this week. I really do. Someone should fly me out so I can get drunk at the Dead Cock and make John Bloch cry. And where the hell is Harold Turner when you need a pink purse?

In which the Movement is moving to the center of the nation.

AmmZon told me this morning that she’d heard that the Big M had decided to build a peace palace or something in Kansas, so I immediately googled it. It’s totally fascinating! The Movement really has bought 600 acres in north-central Kansas, and they plan to build there:

‘So here in traditional Kansas, the recent purchase of land by representatives of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi to build what they’re calling a World Capital of Peace — just outside town — where meditators will send “waves of coherence” across the country — has many residents riled.

‘The group plans to spend at least $15 million to erect 12-15 buildings for a retreat, training center and residences.’
[link to article]

The nearest town to this newly-purchased property is small, aged, and dying… and it’s smack-dab in the middle of the bible belt:

‘”They say they’re not a religion. I say they’re a sect of Hinduism,” said Greg Hubbard, pastor of Smith Center’s Evangelical Free Church. “Bottom line is, I don’t buy you can be a Christian and a Hindu at the same time.”

‘Hubbard and eight other local ministers recently signed an open letter decrying the proposed new city as a threat to “the eternal souls of people.” A large Christian crusade spurred by the controversy is scheduled in Smith Center this month.’
[link to article]

He’s right: they are a sect of Hinduism, even though they’ll swear up and down that they’re not (and even went so far as to ban ownership of Hindu icons a few years ago, causing local thrift shops to fill up with abandoned deities). They celebrate Guru Purnima and Mahalakshmi, study Sanskrit and do pujas, and have their jyotish charts done. They’re totally fucking Hindu, as much as Hinduism is a religion and not merely a culture.

Hubbard’s also a closed-minded, bigoted idiot. (American Christians are FUCKING INSANE.) All religions are compatible. The rituals are different, but the underlayment is always the same. Only fundamentalists — and unfortunately, nearly all Xians are fundies — think that only their religion is the true one. THEY. ARE. ALL. THE. SAME. The differences are nearly always CULTURAL. Sheesh.

I hate all organized religion. (I already hate what will happen when my Guru leaves Her body — beaureacrats, rules, rigidity. It’s inevitable — and She hasn’t even done it yet.) I have no idea why God bothers with us, other than enlightened beings don’t appear to be much affected by suffering, so to them it’s no big deal.

Anyway.

In other news, I have an interview on Thursday morning. The job’s only part-time, but that’s better than no-time. Wish me luck!

—–Original Message—–
From: {name removed}
Sent: Tuesday, July 26, 2005 9:44 AM
To: Admin
Cc: Supervisor
Subject: {name removed}

{name removed} just came into the office requesting us to walk softer, or stop �hopping�. Apparently the ceiling frames and tiles in the suite below us has collapsed twice. {name removed} apparently {kind of business} and is able to hear us all day “stomping around” and “making all kinds of noise”?

I think that is odd due to the employees sitting @ their desks the majority of the day , and when we move around the office, nobody is running or jumping. Just a little confused and concerned of why {name removed} always seems to blame our department. Just an FYI.

Thanks,
{name removed}

—–Original Message—–
From: Admin
Sent: Tuesday, July 26, 2005 1:20 PM
To: {name removed}
Cc: Supervisor
Subject: RE: {name removed}

Don’t be concerned. {name removed} often makes somewhat strange requests. We have asked her repeatedly to not give any our employees instructions or advice. She is supposed to liason with {name removed}. If she comes in again suggest that she talk to {name removed} regarding any issues about the building.
——–

I thought it was just roos, but apparently it’s all pseudo-conscious hippie freaks everywhere!

“There are so many ‘aware’ consumers carefully reading labels and making proclaimations about the product in their hands–to the air, if they’re alone. They won’t get out of your way if you just need that one carton of chicken stock behind them, they just stand there all doped up on anti-depressants and Valerian and wrapped in fleece and natural fibers and stare at you like you requested a kidney if you ask them to please step aside.”

Read the most wonderful rant ever, Why I Hate Whole Foods, from Rants & Raves on craigslist.org.

Did I ever tell you about the day I dropped out of MIU?

It’s not MIU now, of course. It’s MUM, short for Maharishi University of Management (which is completely absurd as roos can barely ‘manage’ to drive from Annapurna dining hall to the Golden Domes of Pure Knowledge without killing dogs and children in the street with their beat up old ugly cars, but there it is).

I majored in Literature. I was taking ‘The Transcendentalists: American Literature in the Eighteen Hundreds’ or something similar, with this amazing little mini-prof named Dr. Setzer. I was pulling something comfortably above a 3.5 GPA. I was the darling in most of my classes, and teachers and co-students alike appeared to love me.

My pod room in The Candy Shop was cool-looking, and I had a hotplate and a little fridge, and my room was situated early enough in the HVAC loop that I got heat and air, but late enough that I didn’t get too much of either and freeze or dry up – something of a major coup in dorm life.

I sang in a band, which in a town this size made me a rock star. I laid any boy I wanted and was proud of that (as I still hadn’t figured out that women, not men, decide who gets laid. I’m a late bloomer, what can I say).

I had ample student loans to cover the outrageous amounts of tuition, room, and board MIU charges, and was paying those bastards good money for the whole experience.

But I didn’t go to group program.
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