What the "Maharishi University of Management" is REALLY worth
encapsulight
US school that will take them etc.
I can't see that going there will get you anywhere if you are from the USA.
I would imagine that it is like Parson's used to be ---if you couldn't get
into any real school you would try a place like Parson's ---just to get a
college education at all.
"Lon" <Lo...@HotMail.com> wrote in message
news:siha59...@corp.supernews.com...
> In the past some have complained that it was mostly foreign students who
> couldn't get into other US schools. Many had to learn TM when they
arrived.
>
> "encapsulight" <NoS...@please.nospam.com> wrote in message
> news:RaZV4.78430$R4.4...@news1.rdc1.nj.home.com...
> > I do not understand how anyone could, even in his or her wildest dreams,
> > consider going there!
> > How many students go there and why.
> > I mean it isn't noted for excellence of any kind in anything----any
> > discipline or area of study
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > "Avital Pilpel" <ap...@columbia.edu> wrote in message
> > news:Pine.GSO.4.10.100052...@merhaba.cc.columbia.edu...
> > > Well, Lawson here asked me to find an objective source for why the MUM
> > > isn't considered such a great bet.
> > >
> > > According to the very well-known US World&News report on colleges, MUM
> is
> > > "fourth tier" - the lowest possible ranking.
> > >
> > > In the following web pages, you can see why:
> > >
> > > http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/college/rankings/midunivs/midu_4.htm
> > >
> > > and:
> > >
> > > http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/college/rankings/collmeth.htm
> > >
> > > For the benefit of this group, I will give the main details:
> > >
> > > The MUM scored an abyssimal 1.7 on "reputation" - in fact, it scored
the
> > > LOWEST of all midwest "fourth tier" colleges. This is, of course, the
> ol'
> > > "unfair college president survey" that Lawson is so pissed about.
> > >
> > > But Lawson also "forgets" to mention that "repuatition" on this
> > > survey is only *25%* of the ranking. The rest of it is done by
objective
> > > statistics, such as retention rate, alumni giving, SAT scores, etc, as
> > > explained by the web site above.
> > >
> > > Lawson is greatly misleading saying that the survey is "unfair"
because
> > > it relied on the "subjective opinions" - as if the US News' survey
just
> > > got people together, ased them how they feel about the college, and
that
> > > was all of its work.
> > >
> > > The *other* 75% of the survey, which is *objectively quantified data*,
> is
> > > something Lawson does not want you to know about. MUM has all the
> *other*
> > > distinctions of a "fourth-tier" college, not just low reputation. For
> > > example, a full 30% of all freshmen drop out; merely 45% graduate
> > > withing six years; the college cannot break the 1000 student barrier
(it
> > > has only 850 students); and so on.
> > >
> > > This means that even if the repuation of the college was stellar, or
> > > ignored altoghether, MUM *still* wouldn't have been able, due to the
low
> > > scores on the objective scale, to get much beyound "fourth tier".
> > >
> > > But it costs so much, much more: about 20,600 a year, while other
> typical
> > > "fourth tier" colleges (I chose a few at random and checked) cost
about
> > > 8000 a year (they range from around 3000 or less a year to 15000 for
the
> > > most expensive ones on the same level as MUM.) It costs anywhere from
> > > twice as much to five times as much as comparable colleges.
> > >
> > > Or, to put it in another way: it costs a student as much or more to
> attend
> > > MUM, a fourth-tier college, as it does to attend *any one of the top
ten
> > > colleges in the region*!
> > >
> > > So, there you have it. Even *if* the repuatation of the college was,
by
> > > special dispensation, totally ignored, MUM would *still* be "community
> > > college education at ivy league prices" - and, of course, there is no
> > > reason to ignore the repuatation rankins just 'cause Lawson says he
> > > doesn't like 'em.
> > >
> > > Avital Pilpel
> > >
> >
> >
> >
>
>
Lawson English
On Mon, May 22, 2000 11:11 AM, encapsulight
<mailto:NoS...@please.nospam.com> wrote:
>That makes sense for foreigners -- they want a US degree and it is the
only
>US school that will take them etc.
>I can't see that going there will get you anywhere if you are from the
USA.
>I would imagine that it is like Parson's used to be ---if you couldn't get
>into any real school you would try a place like Parson's ---just to get a
>college education at all.
>
>"Lon" <Lo...@HotMail.com> wrote in message
>news:siha59...@corp.supernews.com...
>> In the past some have complained that it was mostly foreign students who
>> couldn't get into other US schools. Many had to learn TM when they
>arrived.
>>
>> "encapsulight" <NoS...@please.nospam.com> wrote in message
>> news:RaZV4.78430$R4.4...@news1.rdc1.nj.home.com...
>> > I do not understand how anyone could, even in his or her wildest
dreams,
>> > consider going there!
>> > How many students go there and why.
>> > I mean it isn't noted for excellence of any kind in anything----any
>> > discipline or area of study
As you can see from my summary of the URLs that Avital provided, MUM isn't
nearly as bad, technically speaking, as the 1.7 ranking would suggest.
As to whether or not it is worth attending, you'd have to ask the alumi.
BTW, the animation professionals program looks quite good
<>http://www.mum.edu/animationpro/index.html>
The computer science MS degree program looks acceptable:
<http://mum.edu/compro/dept.html>
<http://mum.edu/compro/ms.html>
especially the computer professionals work-study program.
<http://www.mum.edu/compro/welcome.html>
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If everyone lived with a sense of wonder, their lives would be filled with
joy."
-Last words of Doug Henning, 5/3/47 - 2/7/00
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Avital Pilpel
> Now, let's look at how the academic rating was obtained:
> No explanation was given for how these scores were merged! What if only 1
> school responded for MUM and gave it a low rating?
You got to love Lawson's spinning: if only a few persons responded and
the average score was low, he would claim "bias". If most reponded and the
score was low, he would whine, "conspiracy!".
But this is *obviously* getting desperate. Trying to explain away an
abyssimal score by stipulating that *maybe* just one person of
thousands happened to reply about MUM is *just* on this side of claiming
it's all an evil conspiracy by aliens.
> Opinion polls are
> virtually worthless,
Lawson didn't use to think so, but the *instant* an opinion poll (of deans
of colleges, who should know) gave MUM the rap, the scales fell from his
eyes.
It's really funny to see Lawson use the "vox populi" arguments as needed
to support TM. When there are doubts about the scientific validity of TM,
or the effectiveness of the "Yogic Observatory", Lawson shouts, "but what
about ALL THOSE PEOPLE who think TM is real?". But when the people have
spoken - and they said "MUM is crap" - all of a sudden "opinion polls are
worthless".
> >The *other* 75% of the survey, which is *objectively quantified data*, is
> >something Lawson does not want you to know about. MUM has all the *other*
> >distinctions of a "fourth-tier" college, not just low reputation. For
> >example, a full 30% of all freshmen drop out; merely 45% graduate
> >withing six years; the college cannot break the 1000 student barrier (it
> >has only 850 students); and so on.
>
> Yeah, right. [see below, gentle reader]
Yes, *let's* see below:
> >But it costs so much, much more: about 20,600 a year, while other typical
> >"fourth tier" colleges (I chose a few at random and checked) cost about
> >8000 a year (they range from around 3000 or less a year to 15000 for the
> >most expensive ones on the same level as MUM.) It costs anywhere from
> >twice as much to five times as much as comparable colleges.
Nothing at all about THAT, eh, Lawson?
> From the stats below, you can surely see that MUM is a solid tier-2 school,
> and possibly even a top tier school in the Mid-West, on EVERY measure save
> high school % (about 1/2 of the students are from other countries, so the
> stats may not have made sense), and "academic ranking."
TRANSLATION: Except for the *tiny* fact that the facutly is academically
laughable, hence the academic rating, and that no top high school students
would be caught there, hence the low high school percentage, MUM is REALLY
great, because it has small classes. That is not surprising, however:
having only 850 students, it is hard to see how it could give its numerous
faculty something to do without having a small class size. Incidentally,
it is not hard to have a 10:1 faculty ratio when tuition is over 20,000 a
year and there is virtually no research being done there.
Avital Pilpel
Lawson English
On Mon, May 22, 2000 3:18 PM, Avital Pilpel <mailto:ap...@columbia.edu>
wrote:
>On 21 May 2000, Lawson English wrote:
>
>> Now, let's look at how the academic rating was obtained:
>
>> No explanation was given for how these scores were merged! What if only
1
>> school responded for MUM and gave it a low rating?
>
>You got to love Lawson's spinning: if only a few persons responded and
>the average score was low, he would claim "bias". If most reponded and the
>score was low, he would whine, "conspiracy!".
>
>But this is *obviously* getting desperate. Trying to explain away an
>abyssimal score by stipulating that *maybe* just one person of
>thousands happened to reply about MUM is *just* on this side of claiming
>it's all an evil conspiracy by aliens.
>
>> Opinion polls are
>> virtually worthless,
>
>Lawson didn't use to think so, but the *instant* an opinion poll (of deans
>of colleges, who should know) gave MUM the rap, the scales fell from his
>eyes.
>
>It's really funny to see Lawson use the "vox populi" arguments as needed
>to support TM. When there are doubts about the scientific validity of TM,
>or the effectiveness of the "Yogic Observatory", Lawson shouts, "but what
>about ALL THOSE PEOPLE who think TM is real?". But when the people have
>spoken - and they said "MUM is crap" - all of a sudden "opinion polls are
>worthless".
No, opinion pollls are "virtually worthless."
What you snipped was the rest of the quote [typical]:
>No explanation was given for how these scores were merged! What if only 1
>school responded for MUM and gave it a low rating? Opinion polls are
>virtually worthless, and an opinion poll where no record is made of the
>number of respondants on a given question is worse than worthless. Do you,
>Avital, believe otherwise? Why?
Here's a refinement of my question:
do you believe that an opinion question where the resulting opinion counts
for 25% of an overall score is useful when no record is made of the
respondants to the opinion question?
Why or why not?
>
>> >The *other* 75% of the survey, which is *objectively quantified data*,
is
>> >something Lawson does not want you to know about. MUM has all the
*other*
>> >distinctions of a "fourth-tier" college, not just low reputation. For
>> >example, a full 30% of all freshmen drop out; merely 45% graduate
>> >withing six years; the college cannot break the 1000 student barrier
(it
>> >has only 850 students); and so on.
>>
>> Yeah, right. [see below, gentle reader]
>
>Yes, *let's* see below:
>
>> >But it costs so much, much more: about 20,600 a year, while other
typical
>> >"fourth tier" colleges (I chose a few at random and checked) cost about
>> >8000 a year (they range from around 3000 or less a year to 15000 for
the
>> >most expensive ones on the same level as MUM.) It costs anywhere from
>> >twice as much to five times as much as comparable colleges.
>
>Nothing at all about THAT, eh, Lawson?
"But see below" was a reference to the placement on MUM's scores on every
other question save the % of top high schoolers going to MUM. Unless you
want to claim that THAT score is relevant to MUM's academic standing (and
it better not have been included in the test-score since it wasn't
answered), you're left with the MUM scores on the rest of the questions.
It should be obvious to anyone that a school that scores better than the
average score of the top tier universities in a number of catagories isn't
a 4th rank school, at least when evaluated from the perspective of those
catagories.
>
>> From the stats below, you can surely see that MUM is a solid tier-2
school,
>> and possibly even a top tier school in the Mid-West, on EVERY measure
save
>> high school % (about 1/2 of the students are from other countries, so
the
>> stats may not have made sense), and "academic ranking."
>
>TRANSLATION: Except for the *tiny* fact that the facutly is academically
>laughable, hence the academic rating, and that no top high school students
>would be caught there, hence the low high school percentage, MUM is REALLY
>great, because it has small classes. That is not surprising, however:
>having only 850 students, it is hard to see how it could give its numerous
>faculty something to do without having a small class size. Incidentally,
>it is not hard to have a 10:1 faculty ratio when tuition is over 20,000 a
>year and there is virtually no research being done there.
Excuse?
John Hagelin has a PhD in Physics from Harvard. He's the co-reviver of
Flipped SU(5) SuperString theory. You may not like his politics but to
suggest that he's "academically laughable" is laughable.Hes the head of the
MUM Physics dept, last I heard.
BTW, where did you get the idea that the faculty is "academically
laughable?" There's no scoring of that. The academic reputation comes from
the rating of the schools' "academic programs," not faculty.
Lurkers can decide how laughable the senior faculty of MUM is.
Or perhaps, you'd like to furnish an example of the "academically
laughable" faculty at MUM.
Don't be shy, Avital. Name names and why you think they are laughable.
Jeff Ridley
Lawson English wrote in message ...
:
::Or perhaps, you'd like to furnish an example of the "academically
:laughable" faculty at MUM.
Below is a signed, 1986 affirmation from Attorney Anthony D. DeNaro,
equivalent to a sworn affidavit presented to Judge Gasch of the United
States District Court for the District of Columbia as part of Walter
Kropinsky's civil suit, #85-2848. (You may view the facsimile GIF here.)
In this document, DeNaro alleges -- with force of sworn testimony -- "a very
serious and deliberate pattern of fraud, designed ... to misrepresent the TM
movement as a science (not as a cult), and fraudulently claim and obtain tax
exempt status with the IRS." Further he states that early accreditation of
MIU was due to "a clear conflict of interest" on the part of the Chairman of
North Central's Commission on Institutions of Higher Education.
Other quotes from the affidavit that highlight important themes:
"A disturbing denial or avoidance syndrome, and even outright lies and
deception, are used to cover-up or sanitize the dangerous reality on campus
of very serious nervous breakdowns, episodes of dangerous and bizarre
behavior, suicidal and homicidal ideation, threats and attempts, psychotic
episodes, crime, depression and manic behavior that often accompanied
roundings (intensive group meditations with brainwashing techniques).
"The Movement, the defendants, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, WPEC-US, and Maharishi
International University (MIU) were so committed to advancing the
organization and its ideology that they were, and are, very willing to
violate the law and engage in criminal behavior."
"I've also read the affidavit of Bevan H. Morris, President of MIU, and find
that it is replete with transparently false statements."
"The consequences of intensive, or even regular, meditation was so damaging
and disruptive to the nervous system, that students could not enroll in, or
continue with, regular academic programs."
Finally DeNaro clearly believed that the Maharishi personally knew of, and
was therefore responsible for, the damge being done in the name of his
organizations. "[He] was aware, apparently for some time, of the problem,
suicide attempts, assaults, homicidal ideation, serious psychotic episodes,
depressions, inter alia[among others], but his general attitude was to leave
it alone or conceal it because the community would lose faith in the TM
movement. Maharishi had a very cavalier, almost elitist, view about very
serious injuries and trauma to meditators. His basic attitude towards the
concealment of the religious nature of TM was: 'When America is ready for
Hinduism I will tell them.'"
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----
ANTHONY D. DENARO, an attorney admitted to the practice of law in the State
of New York, affirms under penalties of perjury that:
1. I reside at 151 Littleworth Lane, Sea Cliff, New York 11579.
2. On or about August 1975 I was invited to the MIU campus in Fairfield,
Iowa by Steve Drucker, an attorney at law, who was Executive Vice President
of, Maharishi International University.
3. I was hired as a professor of law and economics, and began teaching in
September 1975. However, I returned home briefly (Long Island) to complete
travel arrangements, arrange to lease our house to tenants, and bring my
wife to the campus.
4. Prior to coming to MIU I was a professor of law and economics at Hofstra
University, Adelphi University Graduate School, and Cornell University
School of Labor and Industrial Relations. I was admitted to practice in New
York in 1964, and began teaching law and economics at graduate and
undergraduate levels in September 1964.
5. On November 21, 1975 I began work as Director of Grants Administration at
MIU, and had over-all responsibility for all of the grants and funding
programs including World Plan Executive Council- United States (WPEC-US).
I was also legal counsel and reported directly to either Ed Tarabilda, Vice
President of Legal Affairs and/or Steve Druker, Executive Vice President. In
addition, I had a full time teaching schedule in economics and business law.
Prior to coming to MIU I was initiated into the practice of TM.
My wife worked at MIU as an administrator and researcher, and we resided in
Frat #108. I continued to work as a professor of law and economics until my
last day on campus, July 13, 1975.
6. Within a week, after reviewing tax matters and previously submitted grant
applications to federal, state and private agencies (public and private) it
was obvious to me that organization was so deeply immersed in a systematic,
wilful pattern of fraud including tax fraud, lobbying problems and other
deceptions, that it was ethically impossible for me to become involved
further as legal counsel.
I discussed this with Steve Druker, but agreed to remain as Director of
Grants provided certain conditions and restrictions were met. In practice,
however, because I recognized a very serious and deliberate pattern of
fraud, designed, in part, to misrepresent the TM movement as a science (not
as a cult), and fraudulently claim and obtain tax exempt status with the
IRS, I was a lame duck Director of Grants Administration.
The only project I initiated was an internal education program with valid
and rigorous academic and scholarly demands. (Not very popular with many of
the faculty, who were inclined more towards mysticism than academically
sound content).
In effect, I was nominally Director of Grants, and when time permitted I
attended outside symposia for grants procurement. As noted, the fraud and
deceptions vis a vis IRS and government agencies was so systematic and
wilful, and known to lawyers Steve Druker and Ed Tarabilda, that it was not
ethically possible to work in this capacity.
Occassionally[sic], on an ad hoc basis, where the legal issues did not
present any ethical question, I was able to render legal service.
No part of any information disclosed here is privileged, and was not
obtained through an attorney- client relationship.
6.[sic] I continued as professor of law and economics, and nominally (except
for a limited, strictly academic proposal) as Director of Grants, and, in
effect, quit as legal counsel to MIU and WPEC-US before December 1975.
7. In my capacity as professor, Sy (Seymour) Migdal, Dean of the College of
Arts & Sciences and Faculty Affairs tried to exercise improper and
academically unsound control over the curricula. Ultimately all of the
course content in any discipline was controlled by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
Business law and economics was somehow, through some tortured manipulation
and drastic tampering with content, supposed to be subordinate to SCI,
Science of Creative Intelligence. SCI in reality was a peculiar blend of
mysticism, voodoo academics, bastardized Hinduism (bona fide religious
Hindus and gurus are appalled by the debasement of a major world religion),
hucksterism, pop-philosophy and pseudo-science.
For example, in a basic macro-micro economics, first year course, I've been
teaching for ten (10) years at Hofstra University, I spent a little time on
Irving Fisher (1867-1947), a professor of economics known for his quantity
theory of money. Fisher is a useful bridge for understanding John Maynard
Keynes. Sy Migdal wanted me to teach some esoteric mysticism Fisher
apparently was involved in, and delete the only real economic content of the
course.
This would be somewhat analogous to teaching about Einstein's
stamp-collection or, worse, demon worship, for example, of a pioneering
medical researcher like Pasteur. In sum, the course would have little
academic merit if Migdal and the Maharishi had their way.
The normal criteria and obstacles towards acquiring accreditation from North
Central States Associates of Colleges and Universities was surmounted in
large measure, to the best of my knowledge and belief, by their association
with Paul Silverman, Chairman of North Central's Commission on Institutions
of Higher Education. Professor Silverman was a trustee of MIU, a clear
conflict of interest.
Per letter for distribution to the trustees and others of November 25, 1975,
Ed Tarabilda, an attorney, Vice President of Legal Affairs and Secretary to
the Board of Trustees, writes that Paul Silverman is being nominated for
trustee: "As you know, Paul Silverman serves as the Chairman of North
Central's Commission on Instructions of Higher Education, and was very
influential in our gaining the status of candidacy for accreditation."
Migdal, Druker, Tarabilda and the Maharishi, for example, relied heavily in
their contact and relationship with Silverman to acquire accreditation. In
reality, the course content, syllabi, course descriptions were so seriously
tampered with and camouflaged to make them appear bona fide and academically
sound, that a wilful, systematic fraud was present.
The course in every discipline, humanities, arts, social and behavioral
sciences, and the physical sciences, which had to be subordinate to SCI,
were essentially worthless. The final arbiter, who exercised day-to-day
control over curricula and content was Maharishi. The control was exercised
by telex and telephone even when Maharishi was at MERU in Switzerland or
elsewhere.
In psychology, the manipulative adulteration and dilution of the course was
so substantial, as to constitute a hazard to the usually impressionable and
naive students. Maharishi personally told me in early December 1975 that
western psychology was "no good" and not "natural."
The only course with real academic content, to my knowledge, were the ones I
taught, since I insisted on teaching undiluted and unfiltered economics and
law without the over-riding ideology of SCI. It is inconceivable that the
curricula and course materials could have received proper scrutiny and
evaluation by the accreditation committee.
9. The deliberate pattern and practice of fraud, deceit and
misrepresentation by knowledgeable, aware, educated and intelligent people,
including lawyers, Tarabilda and Druker in tax (IRS) matters, corruption of
the curricula, inter alia, is very pertinent and material to understanding
and gaining some insight into how and why the practices of the defendants
was able to continue without interruption for so long. It also suggests why
they are seeking to cover-up a very substantial and injurious pattern of
deception, fraud and corruption:
They demonstrate, for example, that:
a) The Movement, the defendants, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, WPEC-US, and
Maharishi International University (MIU) were so committed to advancing the
organization and its ideology that they were, and are, very willing to
violate the law and engage in criminal behavior;
b) Essentially the attitude and philosophy was, and, to my knowledge, is
now: "anything goes";
c) There is religiously based justification for this criminal conduct in
Hindu texts, for example, the colloquy between Arjuna and Lord Krishna;
d) Scienter [informed or guilty knowledge] was clearly present in the
frauds, but was justified in the name of a higher ideology, which presumably
means they can lie, come into a federal court, and commit perjury;
e) More significantly, an understanding of their wilful deceits and
machinations in these areas, provides a useful insight and perspective into
the more serious areas resulting in psychological and physical injury to
very vulnerable, and easily manipulated young men and women;
f) If it can be demonstrated that the zealous, and often fanatical, educated
people, including lawyers associated with the TM cult, are willing, even
eager, to engage in an active, deliberate, systematic pattern and practice
of major fraud involving hundreds of millions of dollars against the federal
government, it might reasonably be inferred that they are willing to deceive
and injure (if necessary) innocent and very vulnerable private citizens,
i.e., young students; and,
g) Has specific and direct relevance to actual allegations in the
plaintiff's complaint.
10. The inside, confidential files and correspondence from and between
Edward Tarabilda, attorney for MIU and Charley Egner, State
Coordinator-Ohio, 1818 W. Lane Ave., Columbus, Ohio 43221: (614) 486-9298)
and IMS (International Meditation Society) and illegal deceits to avoid the
consequences of IRS Sec. I-501(c) (3) et seq, sheds important light on a
multi-million dollar tax fraud over a couple of decades.
See, for example, Charley Egner's letter of 10/25/75 to Edward Tarabilda.
Egner writes: ..."the report (for lobbying) was written in the first person,
so Guy would seem independent from the organization." (emphasis added)
Steven L. Schwartz, an attorney and MIU Director of Legal Affairs, answering
in Tarabilda's absence, in his response of 12/17/75 writes: "If you have an
'outside' party willing to lobby...." The letter suggests how to conceal an
integral and ineluctable connection of presumably "independent" lobbyists
from the TM movement and/or World Plan Center.
Similar correspondence between and among Tarabilda or Schwartz, inter alia,
Ginny Hafner, Secretary to the midwest regional TM program (RR3, Box 67,
Long Grove Road, Barrington, Ill., 60010; (312) 381-1610), letter of
6/23/75, Amy Roosevelt of 124 High St., Denver, Colo. 80218 (303)-722-3825),
Tim Gautherat, Chairman of IMS at 248 S. Adams, Birmingham, Mich. 48005
(6/11/75, ltr.), contacts with Lt. Governor Bill Christensen of New Mexico;
and, other correspondence with, among others, Jerry Jarvis, Director of WPEC
in Los Angeles concerning, for example, the behind-the-scenes lobbying by
the secret world-wide network of 108's are particularly instructive on the
attitude, ethics and duplicity of high ranking cult leaders and lawyers in
pursuit of the Holy Grail.
11. I have read an affidavit consisting of one and a half pages, sworn and
subscribed to by Professor John W. Patterson on June 30, 1986, and agree
with his observations and conclusions.
At para 3, page 1, Professor Patterson suggests more than "gross scientific
incompetence" is involved and believes the misrepresentations are the result
of "dishonesty, deliberate deceit and fraud." I agree unequivocally.
The deceptions are systematic and planned. My personal and professional
experience over the last 12 years (since 1975) convince me that the
leadership and upper echelon, for a variety of reasons, ideological and
economic, has systematically and wilfully deceived the federal government,
state and local governments, private and public funding sources and
agencies, the students, and inter alia, the general public about the nature,
purpose and consequences of the TM-Sidhi and SCI programs.
Some deceptions have economic or financial consequences: for example, a
massive and deliberate fraud against the federal government. However, a
disturbing number of wilful deceits have the potential for serious
psychological and physical trauma, particularly among young, impressionable
uncritical and very vulnerable young men and women.
12. The deceptions are intricate, fairly sophisticated, intentional, and are
mainly designed to sell or market TM. I've also read the affidavit of Bevan
H. Morris, President of MIU, and find that it is replete with transparently
false statements.
Professor Morris, in his 6/19/86 affidavit, resorts to standardized, canned
script propaganda, written and disseminated to an uni[n]formed public over
the last several decades to support his application. The only genuine
observation he makes about the need for confidentiality and protection for a
trade secret appears at the end of para. 24-4, i.e. they need the trade
secret shield "to protect the economic viability of defendants."
Actually there is no difference at all between other meditation techniques,
and TM except the much- publicized propaganda and advertising claims. Dr.
Robert Benson's Relaxation Response, for example, produces with less time
and effort, a safer result. It also spares the meditator from using nonsense
mantras with mystical undercurrents. It's also a lot cheaper: a three dollar
paperback (or newspaper article) versus $125.00 [now $1,000] for an
"exclusive, tailor-made" mantra. (Actually not exclusive, as they falsely
and deliberately claimed for years.)
The extent and scope of the deception before, during and after becoming
"initiated" (their term) into TM-Sidhi programs is so vast and far-reaching
with enormous potential for severe injury, and, even death, that it is
impossible, within this necessarily abbreviated brief, to document it all.
At para. 17, President Morris claims "heightened intellectual clarity." As a
professor who taught at MIU that claim is false. The effect is the opposite:
a spaced-out, unfocused, zombie-like automaton, incapable of critical
thinking is the more usual "benefit" of prolonged meditation.
In fact, meditation was used as an excuse (probably valid) by my students
for not completing a project much in the way a "virus" or "the flu"
debilitates the average college student. The consequences of intensive, or
even regular, meditation was so damaging and disruptive to the nervous
system, that students could not enroll in, or continue with, regular
academic programs.
Many of my students offered as an excuse for not being able to sit for an
examination or write a paper, the fact that they had a "bad meditation" or
just "got off rounding" (group TM) and haven't gotten "back to earth yet."
13. The source of my statement that the deceptions existed, were substantial
and material, were intentional, and have detrimental consequences are my
personal and professional observations (I lived on campus with faculty,
staff and students), internal "secret" correspondence (not privileged),
president council meetings, faculty senate meetings, executive sessions and
conferences with MIU and WPEC-US hierarchy.
The individuals I spoke to included, but are not limited to, Maharishi
Mahesh Yogi, on or about December 6-9, 1975 on campus (at least two private
conferences while he presided over a physics conference at MIU), Keith
Wallace ([then])President), Steve Druker, Steve Schwartz, Sy Migdal, Robert
Winquist ([then]Vice President), Ed Tarabilda, Dean of Students Dennis
Raimundi, Robin Babov, Professors Michael Weinless, Barbara Edison, and
Franklin Mason, Vice President David Clay (Vice President of Administration)
and psychologist Jonathan Shapiro.
14. A simple review of internal correspondence reflects the inconsistency
between the outward, sanitized, "safe" public image they try to present, and
the frequently dangerous reality of TM-Sidhi techniques.
A disturbing denial or avoidance syndrome, and even outright lies and
deception, are used to cover-up or sanitize the dangerous reality on campus
of very serious nervous breakdowns, episodes of dangerous and bizarre
behavior, suicidal and homicidal ideation, threats and attempts, psychotic
episodes, crime, depression and manic behavior that often accompanied
roundings (intensive group meditations with brainwashing techniques).
Euphemisms are employed to describe essentially dangerous, unstable and
injurious behavior. "Unstressing," for example, "Baking" is another.
For example, a memo dated 5/21/75 from Dean Sluyter, a copy of which is
annexed (with original markings and notations) to Jon Shapiro, the head of
psychological services, acknowledges that rounding results in bizarre
behavior. The memo notes that it includes a recommendation from the
President's Council [of MIU].
The effectiveness of a course leader depends largely on his ability to
maintain and manifest a fee[t]-on-the-ground, non-rounding perspective.
Constant immersion in the usually "baked" atmosphere of a long rounding
course presents a challenge to that perspective.
Course leaders in Europe have a notorious tendency to get baked.
Jonathan Shapiro, and other experienced Forest Academy and TTC leaders, in a
moment of candor, have personally acknowledged that rounding can result in a
nervous breakdown. However, this is not the term they prefer to use.
15. The care and attention devoted to maintaining the right and proper image
is illustrated from this excerpt from the President's Council Meeting
minutes of 5/28/75.
The BBC are scheduled to visit MIU on June 3-5 to film a documentary...
Everything we can possibly do to prepare for the visit including the
elimination of all objects in the Bookstore resembling Indian handicrafts
such as tapestries, brass incense holders, etc., and the incense must be
discretely displayed.
All Indian objects will be removed from the Bookstore. It was felt by
members of the Council that MIU must project a conservative image that is,
as Jon Shapiro put it, "as American as apple pie." We should be
"supersensitive" to what we are doing and it should be a matter of policy
that we do not have anything Indian in the Store.
16. The TM-Sidhi movement makes absurd claims that meditation reduces
collective stress, crime, violence and assorted social problems. This is
contradicted by their own experiences within the MIU community.
a) "Ed Tarabilda wrote a letter to the boy who allegedly stole a Puja
[brass, initiation] set suggesting that if he has it in his possession it
would be wise to return it." (President's Council Meeting, minutes 7/3/75.)
b) Upon information and belief a married couple experienced psychotic
episodes and manifested irrational and bizarre behavior in the summer and
early fall of 1975. This may have been related to the following excerpt from
the minutes of the President's Council Meeting of 10/15/75.
The situation of Phil and Madeline Simon was discussed, and the Council
agreed that they should be asked to leave the campus immediately. A note to
this effect was drawn up and delivered to them by Campus Security. The
Council felt it would be better for MIU if they left the state as well.
c) Another example of how a meditating community reduces crime:
MIU PERSONNEL CHARGED WITH CRIMES The Council discussed the policy of MIU
with regard to volunteers who commit crimes. A recent incident involved the
alleged theft of a bicycle from a paper boy by an MIU volunteer who works
for Food Services. It was felt by the Council that because MIU is in the
eyes of the public at all times, it should not be necessary to retain
volunteers who have these kinds of social problems. If guilty he will be
asked to leave MIU. (Minutes, Pres. Council Mtg., 7/16/75)
d)
The case of Gary and Patsy Wells was discussed. This couple has been asked
to leave MIU because of unsuitable work and behavior... it was felt we
should offer to financially assist them to get to their families in
Wichita... (Minutes, Pres. Council Mtg., 10/8/75)
There were meditators who experienced serious breakdowns during and
following meditation. MIU and the counselling staff usually opted for
banishment in these cases, although their practices often triggered mental
breakdowns. Many students who experienced severe and uncontrollable trauma
from meditation came to me for assistance and counselling since Jonathan
Shapiro and his staff were punitive and hostile in their "therapeutic"
approach.
Banishing people who have problems not only from the campus, but attempting
to keep them out of the state [Iowa] through extortion, threats or
intimidation is not unusual. In many cases, the problems are precipitated or
worsened by TM-Sidhi practices and/or by activities of the TM hierarchy.
Essentially they cause the problem, blame the victim for his or her
breakdown, and then threaten them with injury or other means if they don't
leave the state permanently.
17. The affidavit of Joanna Feinberg of 6/20/86 submitted to the USDC is so
patently false and joltingly absurd that Mrs. Feinberg must be testifying
falsely with scienter or guilty knowledge of its fabrication.
It is absolutely false to state that no claims were ever made about
reversing the "ageing process," "perfect health," "purified nervous system,"
"personal enlightenment," or "prevention of misfortune or difficulties" in
TTC introductory courses by any individual teaching under the auspices of
WPEC- US.
This is directly contradicted by, inter alia:
a) Scores of papers written by my students in a writing course. In a
typical, non-cult college or university students might volunteer to write
about "how I spent my summer vacation." At MIU they write about "how I
achieved eternal bliss consciousness in ten easy lessons, and loved every
ecstatic cosmic moment."
b) Hundreds of conversations, interviews, term papers, class discussions
inter alia, with students who took similar courses under WPEC-US auspices.
c) In the Spring of 1976, I took a course in Science of Creative
Intelligence. (I was pressured into it by Steve Druker and Sy Migdal.)
Basically I had to attend the course to retain my position as professor of
law and economics although it had absolutely no relationship to my
qualifications or competence in my teaching and research disciplines.
Not only were these claims about "personal health," inter alia, made , but
the instructor, a young man, made the astounding claim in class that higher
consciousness, achieved through regular meditation over a long period of
time, would make the meditator impervious to the effects of a tornado (a
major risk in this part of the country).
Most of the vague nonsense of "purified nervous system" (in fact everything
Joanna Feinberg claims is not part of the course) I left unchallenged.
However, since there were about 30 young, very impressionable and gullible
men and women in the class, I questioned him further. He literally meant
that physically a person would be left unscathed if a tornado swept him or
her away.
Several weeks later, about three or four in the morning I was awakened by
noise and excitement outside of my dorm. A twister (and possibly more than
one) was west of the campus in the direction of Ottumwa and clearly visible.
The students were outside their frats (dorms) in their nightclothes to test
their "supernatural" powers. No one was injured simply because the twister
did not hit the campus. Nevertheless scores of students believed (I
questioned them the next day) that somehow the meditation safeguarded them.
18. These experiences and myths perpetrated by the TM cult might appear
humorous or silly, but in fact I saw many casualties from their
irresponsible lies and deceptions. Teaching methodology, for example, is
actually indoctrination or brain washing and one of the very few (perhaps
only) classes where genuine learning was attempted was in my classroom.
19. I have more than five (5) years family court law guardian experience and
work with young drug abuses and addicts. In addition, I was involved in
implementing a drug addiction program in Nassau County, New York. My
observation and experience of some of the erratic and volatile "unstressing"
(actually nervous breakdowns) on campus was similar to the reactions I've
observed from people who had a "bad trip" or "freaked-out" from dangerous
hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD.
20. In early December 1975, while the Maharishi was on campus, I spent a
great deal of time trying to persuade him to adopt a more honest, less
commercial, approach to meditation, the Sidhi courses, the curricula, the
disguised religious element masquerading as a science, inter alia.
He was aware, apparently for some time, of the problem, suicide attempts,
assaults, homicidal ideation, serious psychotic episodes, depressions, inter
alia, but his general attitude was to leave it alone or conceal it because
the community would lose faith in the TM movement.
21. Maharishi had a very cavalier, almost elitist, view about very serious
injuries and trauma to meditators. His basic attitude towards the
concealment of the religious nature of TM was: "When America is ready for
Hinduism I will tell them."
22. The claims of flying and levitation in the Sidhi courses are more than
just false and dishonest, and an ambitious, cynical money making scheme by a
group of cosmic merchants. They are exceedingly dangerous to a small, but
significant, percentage of people who believe this and uncritically accept
these outlandish claims.
23. In his more subtle and very sophisticated way Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and
his charlatanism is [sic] a far more destructive and dangerous cult leader
than Jim Jones who induced more than 900 people to commit suicide in Guyana.
24. Based on specific and personal observations and knowledge, inter alia,
there is no question, but that the Maharishi had prior and actual notice and
knowledge of the detrimental consequences of some meditative and Sidhi
practices. However, he made a conscious decision and choice a long time ago
to make money, develop a world-wide network of TM-SCI-Sidhi programs,
irrespective of the trauma he caused to many vulnerable and uninformed
people who were willing to trust him.
The above 9 page affirmation by an attorney is the equivalent of an
affidavit in New York, and is true to the best of my knowledge and belief.
[signed]ANTHONY D. DENARO
DATED:
July 16, 1986
Sea Cliff, New York
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----
[letterhead] Maharishi International University
OFFICE OF THE VICE-PRESIDENT
November 23, 1975
Dear Trustee,
I look forward to our next meeting of the Board of Trustees on January 31,
and February 1, 1976, and hope that you will be able to attend.
At that time, among other business, we will consider the nomination of Paul
Silverman and Gordon Aistrop as new Trustees. As you probably know, Paul
Silverman serves as the Chairman of Northcentral's Commission on
Institutions of Higher Education, and was very influential in our gaining
the status of candidacy for accreditation. (He met with our Board the last
time he was here). Gordon Aistrop, whom most all of you know quite well, was
in part responsible for our acquiring the campus in Fairfield, Iowa, and has
been one of our strongest supporters.
Arthur W. Woeffle has recently declined the opportunity to serve as Trustee.
I am enclosing a copy of a memorandum sent to every faculty member regarding
fund raising. After reviewing the same, I would appreciate any comments or
suggestions you might have -- possibly at the time of Maharishi's visit,
during which time we will probably all be together.
Next week an attorney named Tony Denaro [sic], who specializes in Grants and
Proposals, will be joining our fund raising team and should be an extremely
valuable addition.
Looking forward to seeing all of you in the near future.
Jai Guru Dev,
EDWARD TARABILDA,
Secretary
ET/cdg
Enclosure
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Avital Pilpel
> >It's really funny to see Lawson use the "vox populi" arguments as needed
> >to support TM. When there are doubts about the scientific validity of TM,
> >or the effectiveness of the "Yogic Observatory", Lawson shouts, "but what
> >about ALL THOSE PEOPLE who think TM is real?". But when the people have
> >spoken - and they said "MUM is crap" - all of a sudden "opinion polls are
> >worthless".
>
> No, opinion pollls are "virtually worthless."
How horribly I misquoted you, Lawson.
> do you believe that an opinion question where the resulting opinion counts
> for 25% of an overall score is useful when no record is made of the
> respondants to the opinion question?
>
> Why or why not?
Did you stop beating your wife?
Why or why not?
> "But see below" was a reference to the placement on MUM's scores on every
> other question save the % of top high schoolers going to MUM.
Which is a *very* good indicator of how much it's worth. Let me ask you
this, Lawson: if MUM is, objectively, such a great school, how come it
cannot attract top high school students, which "top tier" colleges do with
ease?
> Unless you
> want to claim that THAT score is relevant to MUM's academic standing
Of course I claim that. How many top high school students want to attend
your school is *extremely* relevant to how the school is to be judged.
Essentially, Lawson, MUM fails miserably on the two most important points
for a college: it cannot attract good factuly (hence the horrible
reputation ratings), nor can it attract good students (virtually no top
high school students go there.)
So, first you rant that the academic reputation is "irrelevant" to how
good it is, and now you want to say that whether ot not it gets good
students is irrelevant as well.
> It should be obvious to anyone that a school that scores better than the
> average score of the top tier universities in a number of catagories isn't
> a 4th rank school, at least when evaluated from the perspective of those
> catagories.
Bullshit. The evidence you use to "prove" MUM is good is, essentially,
class size ratio, and you refuse to consider both the school reputation
(=how good the faculty is) and the student body's composition (=how good
the students are.)
But this is a completely meaningless criterion, since on such a scale
virtually EVERY small college will do better than Harvard or Yale, due to
the fact that it is far smaller and far less popular and therefore has
less students, so the class sizes and facualty/student ration is better.
Let me put it this way: on this scale of "academic excellence", if
Harvard's president goes nuts and turn the College into a fundamentalist
Christian college which only teaches basket-weaving, then according to
your "objective reputation", it will "really" be a better college the next
year. Sure, it's reputation score on the survey will drop from 5.0 to 1.2,
and no good students will go there, but, since nobody will apply and
another class will graduate, there will be less students, so the
student/facualty ratio will be better.
This is, in fact, what IS happeneing in the MUM: they have a devil of a
time trying to recruit students, the freshmen class is getting smaller
every years, attendence shrinks. Why? Because thecollege's
reputation is essentially that it is a clown college that asks for
the kind of tuititon the top schools ask for.
Lawson's solution? Try to make this fact look positive by clamoring "small
class size" and "high faculty/student ratio".
> BTW, where did you get the idea that the faculty is "academically
> laughable?" There's no scoring of that. The academic reputation comes from
> the rating of the schools' "academic programs," not faculty.
<grin>
Lawson, you moron... how do you think they RATE the school's "academic
program" if NOT by the facutly that teaches there??? By the color of the
buildings???
Avital Pilpel
askolnick
Bob Parks wrote about Hagelin's almost supernatural ability to generate laughs
from his fellow physicists in the April 9, 1999 issue of his American Physical
Society newsletter, *What's New*. Commenting on the "string theorist and
Natural Law presidential candidate's" proposal to end the fighting in Kosovo by
providing funds and support for 7000 Yogic Flyers to bounce on their butts Park
concluded:
"It was clear to me [Hagelin's] plan would work. Serbian troops viewing 7000
bouncing Yogic Flyers would be rendered helpless by laughter."
Some of Hagelin's former collaborators have been embarrassed and angered over
his use of their superstring theory to promote TM. In an article in the Sept.
10, 1992 issue of the prestigious science journal *Nature*, several complained
about Hagelin's misrepresentation of their work:
"'A lot of people [Hagelin] has collaborated with in the past are very upset
about this,' says Jorge Lopez, a Texas A&M University physicist. "It's
absolutely ludicrous to say that TM has anything to do with Flipped SU(5)
[superstring theory].' John Ellis, director of CERN's theoretical physics
department has asked Hagelin to stop mixing TM and SU(5). 'I was worried about
guilt by association,' Ellis explains. 'I was afraid that people might regard
[Hagelin's assertions] as rather flaky, and that might rub off on the theory or
on us.'"
Indeed, the "flake" has become the laughing stock of the physics community. In
1994, Hagelin was awarded the "Ig Nobel Peace Prize" for his unintentionally
hilarious claims of reducing crime in Washington, DC, through community butt
bouncing. The "Ig Nobel" awards are presented each year to (dis)honor
buffoonery in science by Marc Abrahams, editor of the Annals of Improbable
Research, with advice from a committee of Nobel laureates and other leading
scientists and thinkers.
So when Lawson English says it's "laughable" for anyone to say that John
Hagelin is "academically laughable," he must forgive us for laughing in his
face.
Lawson, you're a riot!
-- Andrew
>
>
> BTW, where did you get the idea that the faculty is "academically
> laughable?" There's no scoring of that. The academic reputation comes from
> the rating of the schools' "academic programs," not faculty.
>
> Lurkers can decide how laughable the senior faculty of MUM is.
>
> Or perhaps, you'd like to furnish an example of the "academically
> laughable" faculty at MUM.
Er... Lawson, does the name "John Hagelin" ring a bell?
>
>
> Don't be shy, Avital. Name names and why you think they are laughable.
I think our sides are splitting enough or otherwise I'd tell you about David
Orme-Johnson -- or about that blimp "Dr." Bevin Morris and his "Ph.D." from one
of Maharishi's unaccredited "universities." ROTFL.
-- Andrew
Remember, the "F" in "Yogic Flying" is silent.
Lon
"Lawson English" <eng...@primenet.com> wrote in message
news:B54F16F...@206.165.44.87...
>
> John Hagelin has a PhD in Physics from Harvard. He's the co-reviver of
> Flipped SU(5) SuperString theory. You may not like his politics but to
> suggest that he's "academically laughable" is laughable.Hes the head of
the
> MUM Physics dept, last I heard.
>
> BTW, where did you get the idea that the faculty is "academically
> laughable?"
Is There a Rebellion Against SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE?
( USA Today Magazine ) Robert L. Park; 07-01-1996
THE UNABOMBER, who had been killing and maiming peopleÂmostly academicsÂfor
two decades, explained in a letter to The New York Times that "We would not
want anyone to think we have any desire to hurt professors who study
archaeology, history, literature, or harmless stuff like that. The people we
are out to get are the scientists and engineers.... We advocate eliminating
industrial society."
The Unabomber, though, posed no more threat to industrial society than
random bolts of lightning. There is simply no way back. Earth can not
sustain its burgeoning population of 5,500,000,000 people without modern
agriculture, transportation, immunization, sewage treatment, etc. With no
control on population growth, technology is in a desperate race just to stay
even. Nevertheless, growing numbers, in one way or another, share some of
the Unabomber's romantic longing for a simpler world. Unable or unwilling to
comprehend the technology on which they depend, they are deeply distrustful
of the science behind it and reject the Western scientific tradition that
created it.
It is a romantic rebellion, led not by the semi-literate yahoos of
fundamentalist religion, who are the traditional foes of science, but by
serious academics who regard themselves as intellectuals. They range from
environmentalist Jeremy Rifkin, who sees disaster lurking behind all
technological progress, to a University of Delaware philosphy professor,
Sandra Harding, who seems to believe that the laws of physics were
constructed to maintain white male dominance. An Afro-centric writer, Hunter
Adams, contends that black Africans were "the wellspring of creativity and
knowledge on which the foundation of all science, technology and engineering
rest." John Mack, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard University, responds
to patients who believe they have been abducted by aliens by agreeing with
them. A Harvard-trained physicist, John Hagelin of Maharishi International
University, claims that experts in transcendental meditation can generate
"consciousness fields" that induce tranquility throughout society.
What these people share is a profound hostility to the reliance on reason
and evidence that is the basis of modern science. This antiscience rebellion
has spread through popular culture like a virus.
In the film "Jurassic Park," the premise is that, having gained control over
the genetic basis of life itself, scientists use their incredible power to
make an amusement park populated by flesh-eating dinosaurs. The fictional
theme of arrogant scientists creating monsters they can not control is
hardly new. Hubris, after all, was the downfall of Dr. Frankenstein.
However, the same theme is to be found at the Smithsonian Institution's
Museum of American History.
The "Science in American Life" exhibit at the Smithsonian actually was paid
for with money provided by American chemists. Concerned that people give
little thought to the impact of science on their lives, the American
Chemical Society approached the Smithsonian in 1989 about creating a
permanent exhibit to remind viewers of how they benefit from science. The
chemists raised $5,300,000 to develop it.
Historians at the Smithsonian had their own ideas of what science meant to
American life. When I visited the exhibit shortly after it opened in 1994, a
middle-aged guide in a white lab coat explained: "In the '20s, we thought
scientists were gods; now we know they're the source of our biggest
problems." That's not exactly what the chemists had in mind. They envisioned
something along the lines of the old Dupont commercialÂ"Better things for
better living through chemistry." What they got was closer to Love Canal.
The first stop on a tour of the exhibit is a re-creation of the 1876
chemistry laboratory of Ira Remson at Johns Hopkins University. It' s a good
place to start. In 1879, Constantine Fahlberg, a German scientist working in
Remson's lab, accidentally stumbled on saccharin while studying the
chemistry of coal tars. The discovery marked the beginning of the synthetics
industry.
Life-size talking mannequins of Remson and Fahlberg stand in the laboratory
among the beakers and test tubes. They aren't discussing the wonders of coal
tar chemistry, though; they are engaged in a bitter debate over credit for
saccharin's discovery. The point of this elaborate display is not that basic
research produces unexpected practical benefits. Rather, it is that
scientists, no less than others, are vulnerable to vanity and greed.
Nearby, an 1890 photograph is displayed showing Remson with his large group
of graduate students. The caption asks, "What do the people in this group
have in common?" The answer is they all have facial hair. Not only are they
all men, they are all white men. In 1890, the same would have been true if
they had been stockbrokers, law students, or architectsÂor historians for
that matter. That's just the point. Scientists, the curators want us to
know, suffer the same character flaws as the rest of societyÂand thus have
no special claim to authority.
As one proceeds from Remson's lab to the present, the exhibit is a catalogue
of environmental horrors, weapons of mass destruction, and social injustice.
Missing is any sort of balance. There is no hint of the millions of lives
saved by the discovery of antibiotics, no mention of those spared from
starvation by pesticides and fertilizers, and no value assigned to improved
working conditions and the leisure to indulge in whatever activities bring
us personal satisfaction.
A visitor to the exhibit might come away convinced that science is a threat
to life. Yet, in the century covered by the exhibit, the life expectancy of
Americans has more than doubled. It is science that made that possible. What
century, one is left to wonder, would the Smithsonian historians prefer to
have lived in?
In defending the exhibit, John Lankford, a historian at Kansas State
University, explained that, until recently, the history of science was
written by scientist/historians. Now, he proudly pointed out, science
history is written by "non-practitioner historians"Âunprejudiced, it
appears, by any knowledge of their subject.
Consider the proposed National Standards for United States History, grades
five-12, released in the fall of 1994. Dozens of historians labored for
three years to produce this new curriculum without encountering a trace of
science. Electricity, radio, jet travel, weather satellites, nuclear
weapons, antibiotics, the Apollo moon landing, the eradication of smallpox,
genetic engineering, and computers might as well have dropped from the sky.
To be fair, a word search of the 250-page document did turn up the word
"science" one timeÂin a list of professions from which women systematically
have been excluded. A search for "scientific" uncovered this gem: "The
swordplay of the United States and the Soviet Union rightfully claims
attention because it led to the Korean and Vietnam Wars, as well as the
Berlin airlift, the Cuban missile crisis, American intervention in many
parts of the world, a huge investment in scientific research and
environmental damage that will take generations to rectify." So, according
to historians, scientific research is merely an expensive consequence of
"swordplay," along with two wars and destruction of the environment.
The History Standards' neglect of science seems benign compared to the
Afrocentric curriculum finding its way into urban schools across the nation.
Based on Hunter Adams' essay, "African and African-American Contributions to
Science and Technology," commissioned by the Portland, Ore., public schools,
this is feel-good history, meant to raise the self-esteem of black
inner-city children. Adams attributes the discovery of flight, metallurgy,
electricity, the theory of evolution, and modern cosmology to the ancient
Africans.
Adams also espouses the "melanist" claim that black Africans are imbued with
special powers. "The ancient Egyptians," he writes, "were known the world
over as the masters of magic, precognition, psychokinesis, remote viewing,
and other underdeveloped human capabilities." Does anyone really believe
that minorities will be helped by a belief in magic and psychics?
In an attempt to accommodate diversity, many educators treat all ideas as
equally deserving of respectÂexcept those of Western civilization. For these
postmodernists, there is no objective truth; one narrative account of the
world is as good as another. "The task of the historian is not to discover
ultimate truth," according to Lankford, "but rather to construct a
convincing explanation of selected aspects of human behavior."
It is as though beliefs are arranged on a shelf; everyone is expected to
walk by and select one. It doesn't much matter which one, as long as you
believe in something. Given such a choice, why would anyone pick something
like science that requires doing a lot of hard thinkingÂor, heaven forbid,
learning mathematics?
Even a Ph.D. in physics is no inoculation against nuttiness. In the summer
of 1993, an organization calling itself the Institute of Science, Technology
and Public Policy, headed by John Hagelin, a Harvard-trained particle
theorist, launched a $6,000,000 experiment to reduce crime in Washington,
D.C. Four thousand transcendental meditation experts from 82 countries
assembled in Washington for a seven-week period, during which they practiced
meditating in unison to generate a powerful anti-violence field that,
Hagelin predicted, would spread peace and tranquility throughout the
nation's capital and even make Pres. Clinton more effective in running the
nation.
Following a year-long analysis of crime reports, Hagelin proudly announced
the results at a Washington press conference. Violent crime, he said,
decreased 18% during the period of the experiment. "Eighteen percent
relative to what?," I asked. "Relative to what it would have been without
the mediators meditating," he patiently explained. "And how could you know
what the crime rate would have been?," I persisted. With just a trace of
irritation, he explained that the expected crime rate was calculated by
"scientific timeseries analysis" carried out by the Institute for Science,
Technology and Public Policy. The analysis took into account such variables
as temperature, precipitation, the economy, and "geomagnetic field
fluctuations."
How did violent crime during those seven weeks compare with the crime rate
in the seven weeks before the test, the seven weeks after the test, or
during the same seven weeks in previous years? Actually, the number of
murders during the meditation period was higher than for any seven-week
period before or since! True, but without the mediators, Hagelin solemnly
explained, the toll would have been even higher. It's lucky the mediators
were there just when they were most needed.
How are we to account for such widespread nuttiness? Is it indelibly coded
into our DNA? Is there, so to speak, a "belief gene"? Perhaps there is.
Without getting into questions of technical feasibility, imagine using DNA
from a mosquito preserved in amber to clone one of our Stone Age ancestors
instead of a tyrannosaur. Cro-Magnons lived in the Pleistocene era some
30,000 years before the dawn of civilization. Would a Cro-Magnon clone be a
savage brute that could escape and terrorize society? I'm afraid
"Pleistocene Park" wouldn't be that excitingÂa Cro-Magnon reared today would
be virtually indistinguishable physically and mentally from the rest of us.
Evolution is a slow business. We pretty much are unchanged from the savages
that survived in the Pleistocene forests by eating grubs off rotten logs. It
seems remarkable that creatures who evolved to find food and avoid predators
should be capable of writing sonnets and doing integral calculus, but our
genes were shaped before humans had any concept of natural law. Perhaps an
acceptance of supernatural forces conferred some survival advantage on our
stone-age ancestors. In a modern technological society, though, it carries
serious risks.
Aided by the silence of the scientific community, a resurgence of belief in
magic and psychic phenomena has spread to all levels of societyÂeven to the
National Institutes of Health. An NIH report, Alternative Medicine:
Expanding Medical Horizons, discusses various magical cures, ranging from
"Lakota medicine wheels" to "mental healing at a distance," as though they
deserve serious attention. It is surely the most credulous document ever
offered in the name of medical science. Its release in the spring of 1995 at
a Capitol Hill press conference was hosted by Sen. Tom Harkin (D.-Iowa). It
was Harkin who fathered legislation in 1992 mandating creation of the Office
of Alternative Medicine at NIH, to the dismay of most members of the medical
community.
This was not the first time Congress had inserted itself into medical
controversy. Remember laetrile, the toxic concoction of apricot pits that
promised to cure cancer? The FDA sought to ban laetrile, but cancer
patients, desperate for any straw, appealed to Congress. It directed the FDA
to conduct clinical trials, and when the trials showed no efficacy, bills
were introduced to force the FDA to release the drug anyway. Meanwhile,
laetrile clinics sprang up across the border. Cancer patients traveled to
Mexico in droves and gave grateful testimony to the substance's life-saving
powers, until, one by one, they fell forever silent.
The FDA saw its responsibility in the laetrile case as the protection of an
unsophisticated public from medical quackery. Now, it seems, the quacks have
their own branch of NIH. It is not the Federal funding that is so
objectionable as the credibility that comes with it.
ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE
Nowhere is the desire to return to an earlier time more evident than in
alternative medicine. Almost all the alternative therapies rely on some
ancient "cure"Âthe older the better. One must assume that, before the
discovery of the circulatory system and the germ theory of infectious
disease, before the discovery of genetics or vitamins, there was knowledge
of cures that since has been forgotten. Take "biofield therapeutics," or
"touch therapy," for instance. Touch therapy is derived from the ancient
practice of laying on of hands. The earliest reference dates back thousands
of years. If it's that old, the argument seems to be, there must be
something to it.
In its modern form, the hands do not even have to touch the patient. Close
proximity will do just as well, since it's the patient's "aura" the
practitioner is manipulating. I've never seen one myself, but auras
apparently stick out; the hands are used to scoop off the negative energy in
the aura. There may be risks involved, however; a patient in a midwestern
hospital reportedly complained after a careless biofield practitioner
working on a patient in the next bed inadvertently scooped some of the
negative energy over onto him.
Or consider "homeopathic medicine." It began in 1786 when a German physician
named Samuel Hahnemann, curious about how quinine cured malaria, decided to
try a little quinine bark himself and found to his astonishment that he
developed the chills and weakness characteristic of malaria. "Oha!," he
exclaimed, "Gleiches heilt Gleiches" (like cures like). This means that
substances that cause certain symptoms when given to a healthy person can
cure those same symptoms in someone who is sick. This theory is sort of like
bleeding, which also was practiced at the time. They both worked about
equally well.
Hahnemann spent the remainder of his understandably brief life ingesting all
sorts of natural substances to see what symptoms they caused and then
prescribing those substances for people who already had the symptoms. He did
encounter a problem; there often were unfortunate side effects. That led
Hahnemann to his second great discovery: if he diluted the substance enough,
the side effects went away, which certainly sounds reasonable enough.
Moreover, no matter how much it was diluted, the medicine was undiminished
in its effectiveness! That I can believe as well.
Indeed, proponents of homeopathy contend the medicine retains its
bioactivity even after it has been diluted until the probability of a single
molecule of the medicine remaining essentially is zero. The structure of the
water, they explain, is altered by the medicine during the process of
dilution, and it retains this structure even after none of the medicine
remains. In short, the water "remembers." Conveniently, it only seems to
remember the cure and not the side effects.
The first scientific attempt to examine mental healing was by Sir Francis
Galton in 1872 in a paper titled "Statistical Inquiries into the Efficacy of
Prayer." Figuring the heads of state and clerics were prayed for more
frequently than anyone else, he looked for any indication of increased
longevity among monarchs and bishops. He concluded that there was no
demonstrable effect, but Galton may have been a little unclear about just
what the common people were praying for.
Modern studies to assess the ability of humans to affect the physiological
functions of living systems by mental means use bacteria, yeast, fungi,
plants, protozoa, and insects as "targets." This certainly seems to rule out
placebo effects, and informed consent does not appear to be an issue either.
The results of these studies all have been positive, according to the NIH
report, but that raises serious ethical concerns. In a discussion of psychic
healing, the paper speculates that it might also be possible to harm distant
organisms by mental means. If further research were to establish such a
theory, it should be possible to cast a spell on one's enemies. That would
take us back at least 300 years, enough to satisfy the most hopeless
romantic.
How can the public be protected from fraudulent or misguided mental
"healers"? "Perhaps," the report muses, "it is possible to establish a
requirement akin to board certification of mental healers to ensure efficacy
and protect consumers from worthless healers and predatory quacks." I, for
one, certainly hope so.
Where is the outcry? Why have the scientists themselves, who forever are
bemoaning the general scientific illiteracy, been so timid about condemning
this sort of pseudo-scientific nincompoopery? It is, I think, linked to a
laudable desire to tolerate diverse beliefs. Scientists no less than others,
are afraid of being cast as intolerantÂeven, it seems, of foolishness.
The public needs to hear that we live in a universe governed by natural
laws. It is much less important for people to know what those laws are than
to be aware that they can not be circumvented by any amount of cleverness or
piety. They can be understood, however, and used to benefit humanity.
Progress rarely is smooth. Each new application of science usually beget new
problems. Nevertheless, it is science that uncovers the problems, and it is
to science that we must turn to solve them, not because scientists have any
claim to greater intellect or virtue, but because science is the only means
we have to sort out the truth from ideology or fraud or mere foolishness.
Lon
> This is, in fact, what IS happeneing in the MUM: they have a devil of a
> time trying to recruit students, the freshmen class is getting smaller
> every years, attendence shrinks. Why? Because thecollege's
> reputation is essentially that it is a clown college that asks for
> the kind of tuititon the top schools ask for.
>
Hi Avital, are you sure you don't mean *criminal* rather than 'clown'?
Fraud of the Fortnight
( Fortune ) DANIEL SELIGMAN REPORTER ASSOCIATE Patricia A. Langan;
03-30-1987
WASHINGTON -- A jury on Tuesday ordered two Transcendental
Meditation organizations to pay nearly $138,000 to a man who
contended the movement falsely promised he could learn to fly.
The World Plan Executive Council-United States and the Maharishi
International University of Fairfield, Iowa, were found guilty of
fraud . . . by the federal court jury . . .
Jurors in the month-long trial . . . heard testimony about TM
followers reading books with their eyes closed and attempting to fly
through a technique known as self-levitation.
The suit charged that students learned only to ''hop with the legs
folded . . .''
-- From an AP dispatch.
Lon
( Independent on Sunday ) Peter Popham; 11-16-1997
LAST Sunday, two ministers in the Indian government helped to inaugurate
their nation's newest Institute of Technology. Two details made the event
notable: first, the institute is part of the worldwide educational empire of
the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi,who blessed the project via a satellite link from
his headquarters in Holland; second, the building bearing the plaque
unveiled by one of the ministers is alleged to have been built illegally, on
land which is the subject of a dispute with the localauthority.
The Maharishi's new institute is in Maharishi Nagar - Maharishi Town - on
the edge of a new town called Noida, some 20kms from Delhi. To get there,
you crawl your way out of the capital through smog, past shanty towns that
huddle on the bank of theYamuna, and into the neighbouring state of Uttar
Pradesh. The arable land stretching across the featureless plain is broken
by randomly dotted, half-finished concrete housing, wooden shacks and straw
huts for storing grain. Bullocks stagger past,hauling carts piled high with
dried cowpats. You turn off the main road and bump down a dirt track, past
naked children and peasants hacking at the soil, to the guarded gates of the
Maharishi's 500-acre eductional kingdom.
The institute appears as an apparition upon the bedraggled plain. Put up in
a hurry some 15 years ago, its heart is a vast architectural mandala of
five-storey high, sulphur-yellow cement buildings, centred on a circular
study block and radiating outthrough banks of encircling dormitories.
Tired lawns and empty flowerbeds separate the blocks, punctuated by trees
and garish pink, waterless fountains. Here, the new Maharishi Institute of
Technology will open its doors to students before the end of the year,
alongside the Maharishi Instituteof Management, a music university, a
university for the study of the Vedas (the Indian wisdom at the root of the
Maharishi's teaching) and a primary and secondary school. In all, there are
believed to be some 7,000 students on the integrated campus.
Elsewhere in Noida are to be found a Maharishi factory, making traditional
Ayurvedic medicine for export; a shop selling homespun, Gandhi-style cotton
clothing, and a gem and diamond business.
Though due to open shortly, the Maharishi Institute of Technology - or MIT -
can offer, as yet, no publicity literature. However, the Maharishi Institute
of Management - MIM - was set up here in 1995, and its brochure gives an
idea of the sort ofeducation on offer in Maharishi Town.
Despite its Indian founder and setting, in most essentials this is an
American school. It was established in collaboration with the Maharishi' s
American arm, the Maharishi University of Management (MUM), in Fairfield,
Iowa.
As the president of that school, Dr Bevan Morris, explains in the preface to
its brochure, MUM "is collaborating fully with MIM in India to ensure that
the most advanced knowledge and methods of modern American management are
available to Indianstudents."
It's an illuminating example of how bridging East and West has enabled the
Maharishi to prosper: first by bringing Transcendental Meditation (TM) to
the West, then, 30 years later, bringing American management education back
home to India. But theMaharishi's core teaching of meditation is not
peripheral to the school: all teachers and students are expected to put in
20 minutes of TM morning and evening. But its philosophy goes deeper than
that.
As Professor MM Mehta, director of MIM, explained: "TM is the basis of
education here. It improves values, creativity and broad comprehension.
Think of it like this: instead of being a torch powered by a battery, you
are hooked up to the main powergenerating centre, to the universal
consciousness. So fatigue hardly ever sets in. Look at the Maharishi."
That's easy to do, as the master's portrait is on the wall above Prof
Mehta's head: he's a little balder than when he captivated the Beatles in
1967, the beard is a little fuller and more snowy, the eyes considerably
more dreamy, but otherwise heappears little changed. "He's 83 or 84, but his
laughter is childlike, and his face shows innocence, sweetness and power.
People who take up the practice start getting this way, too."
The meditation is more than just a way to make a business career less
stressful. The Maharishi is nothing if not ambitious. In 1988, according to
his CV, he "formulated the Master Plan to Create Heaven on Earth for the
reconstruction of the whole world,inner and outer", and in 1993 he
"inaugurated Global Administration through Natural Law" - in case you missed
it. Courses at MIM, as at his other colleges, centre on "Unified Field
Charts" which purport to "map" each discipline from its source in
the"Unified Field of Natural Law" to its application in society. In this
way, Eastern philosophy and the knowledge of the West are happily and
profitably fused.
However, allegations of unethical methods persist - that the 500 acreson
which Maharishi Town stands were acquired by the Maharishi in defiance of
the Noida civil authorities, who had earmarked the land for municipal
development, and that the campusbuildings were erected without planning
permission. Professor Mehta was unable to completely refute the allegations.
"I would seriously doubt whether someone of the stature of the Maharishi
would do this," he said.
"The Maharishi is a rishi - a seer, a saint, respected the world over. He's
created Maharishi Nagar so that this part of the country can benefit from
these institutions. Ethics is the first foundation of the whole thing."
"Avital Pilpel" <ap...@columbia.edu> wrote in message
news:Pine.GSO.4.10.100052...@merhaba.cc.columbia.edu...
> Well, Lawson here asked me to find an objective source for why the MUM
> isn't considered such a great bet.
>
> According to the very well-known US World&News report on colleges, MUM is
> "fourth tier" - the lowest possible ranking.
>
> In the following web pages, you can see why:
>
> http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/college/rankings/midunivs/midu_4.htm
>
> and:
>
> http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/college/rankings/collmeth.htm
>
> For the benefit of this group, I will give the main details:
>
> The MUM scored an abyssimal 1.7 on "reputation" - in fact, it scored the
> LOWEST of all midwest "fourth tier" colleges. This is, of course, the ol'
> "unfair college president survey" that Lawson is so pissed about.
>
> But Lawson also "forgets" to mention that "repuatition" on this
> survey is only *25%* of the ranking. The rest of it is done by objective
> statistics, such as retention rate, alumni giving, SAT scores, etc, as
> explained by the web site above.
>
> Lawson is greatly misleading saying that the survey is "unfair" because
> it relied on the "subjective opinions" - as if the US News' survey just
> got people together, ased them how they feel about the college, and that
> was all of its work.
>
> The *other* 75% of the survey, which is *objectively quantified data*, is
> something Lawson does not want you to know about. MUM has all the *other*
> distinctions of a "fourth-tier" college, not just low reputation. For
> example, a full 30% of all freshmen drop out; merely 45% graduate
> withing six years; the college cannot break the 1000 student barrier (it
> has only 850 students); and so on.
>
> This means that even if the repuation of the college was stellar, or
> ignored altoghether, MUM *still* wouldn't have been able, due to the low
> scores on the objective scale, to get much beyound "fourth tier".
>
> But it costs so much, much more: about 20,600 a year, while other typical
> "fourth tier" colleges (I chose a few at random and checked) cost about
> 8000 a year (they range from around 3000 or less a year to 15000 for the
> most expensive ones on the same level as MUM.) It costs anywhere from
> twice as much to five times as much as comparable colleges.
>
Lawson English
On Mon, May 22, 2000 5:12 PM, Avital Pilpel <mailto:ap...@columbia.edu>
wrote:
>> BTW, where did you get the idea that the faculty is "academically
from
>> the rating of the schools' "academic programs," not faculty.
>
>
>Lawson, you moron... how do you think they RATE the school's "academic
>program" if NOT by the facutly that teaches there??? By the color of the
>buildings???
OK, how DO they rate the academic programs? Do you think that the deans of
the various colleges in other universities check the credentials of the
faculties of the various schools that they rate?
Please give examples of how bad the academic credentials are of the faculty
at MUM.
Thanks ever so much.
Lawson English
On Mon, May 22, 2000 6:43 PM, askolnick
<mailto:asko...@stopspam.mindspring.com> wrote:
>So when Lawson English says it's "laughable" for anyone to say that John
>Hagelin is "academically laughable," he must forgive us for laughing in
his
>face.
>
>Lawson, you're a riot!
>
>-- Andrew
Thanks, Andrew. However, where does it say that John's academic credentials
are laughable?
>
>>
>>
>> BTW, where did you get the idea that the faculty is "academically
>> laughable?" There's no scoring of that. The academic reputation comes
from
>> the rating of the schools' "academic programs," not faculty.
>>
>> Lurkers can decide how laughable the senior faculty of MUM is.
>>
>> Or perhaps, you'd like to furnish an example of the "academically
>> laughable" faculty at MUM.
>
>Er... Lawson, does the name "John Hagelin" ring a bell?
>
>>
>>
>> Don't be shy, Avital. Name names and why you think they are laughable.
>
>I think our sides are splitting enough or otherwise I'd tell you about
David
>Orme-Johnson -- or about that blimp "Dr." Bevin Morris and his "Ph.D."
from one
>of Maharishi's unaccredited "universities." ROTFL.
Bevan's degree is honoray, but he isn't a member of the teaching faculty
and in fact, is no longer running the school anyway.
And what about David Orme-Johnson's academic credentials is laughable?
Lawson English
However, it is confusing, to say the least:
He says that he started working at MIU (now called MUM) in September of
1975. He then continued working at MIU until July of 1975.
Did he mean 1985, perhaps? Regardless, the events he referred to were from
at least 15 years ago, unless he continued working there until 1995. Or was
it 1955?
If you're going to point to smoking guns, Avital, at least make sure that
the smoke is rising and not falling.
However, the afidavit was made concerning events taht happened in
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Lawson English
On Mon, May 22, 2000 7:52 PM, Lon <mailto:Lo...@HotMail.com> wrote:
>
>
>How did violent crime during those seven weeks compare with the crime rate
>in the seven weeks before the test, the seven weeks after the test, or
>during the same seven weeks in previous years? Actually, the number of
>murders during the meditation period was higher than for any seven-week
>period before or since! True, but without the mediators, Hagelin solemnly
>explained, the toll would have been even higher. It's lucky the mediators
>were there just when they were most needed.
>
Murders were up. Every other catagory of violent crime, according to what I
have read, went down during that period, not just from predicted levels but
from the same period the year before.
Significant?
I have no idea, but if the article were at all unbiased it might have
mentioned this fact.
Ken H.
"Avital Pilpel" <ap...@columbia.edu> wrote in message
> Lawson, you moron... how do you think they RATE the school's "academic
> program" if NOT by the facutly that teaches there??? By the color of the
> buildings???
>
> Avital Pilpel
You are talking out your a-hole on this one Avital.
The M.U.M. faculty includes many internationally recognised scholars and
researchers who hold degrees from the most prestigious universities in the
world, such as Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, Yale and
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
I have just fired off an e-mail to a friend/student at MUM asking him to
send me a list of some of the above. I'll post it as soon as I get it.
You should try doing some research before making uninformed comments.
Ken H.
Lawson English
On Mon, May 22, 2000 10:44 PM, askolnick
<mailto:asko...@stopspam.mindspring.com> wrote:
>Lawson English wrote:
>
>> Can't comment on the truth or falsehood of any claim made by DeNaro.
>>
>> However, it is confusing, to say the least:
>>
>> He says that he started working at MIU (now called MUM) in September of
>> 1975. He then continued working at MIU until July of 1975.
>>
>> Did he mean 1985, perhaps? Regardless, the events he referred to were
from
>> at least 15 years ago, unless he continued working there until 1995. Or
was
>> it 1955?
>>
>> If you're going to point to smoking guns, Avital, at least make sure
that
>> the smoke is rising and not falling.
>
>The date DeNaro gave, as can clearly be seen in his affidavit, was July
13, 1976.
>
>http://www.trancenet.org/law/denarog.html
>
>Lawson could have checked it before blowing smoke. But that's not his way.
OK, but I was quoting Jeff's quote, not the original.
And all of this dates back to 1976?
24 years ago? SOmething like 10 years BEFORE the afidavit was written and
about 8 years before MUM was originally accredited.
Get real.
Lawson English
>virtually EVERY small college will do better than Harvard or Yale, due to
>the fact that it is far smaller and far less popular and therefore has
>less students, so the class sizes and facualty/student ration is better.
>
Actually, no.
MUM: 10/1
Harvard: 7/1
Yale: 8/1
CIT: 3/1
askolnick
> Can't comment on the truth or falsehood of any claim made by DeNaro.
>
> However, it is confusing, to say the least:
>
> He says that he started working at MIU (now called MUM) in September of
> 1975. He then continued working at MIU until July of 1975.
>
> Did he mean 1985, perhaps? Regardless, the events he referred to were from
> at least 15 years ago, unless he continued working there until 1995. Or was
> it 1955?
>
> If you're going to point to smoking guns, Avital, at least make sure that
> the smoke is rising and not falling.
The only "smoke" is the "smoke" that usually comes from Lawson.
The date DeNaro gave, as can clearly be seen in his affidavit, was July 13, 1976.
http://www.trancenet.org/law/denarog.html
Lawson could have checked it before blowing smoke. But that's not his way.
-- Andrew
askolnick
> On Mon, May 22, 2000 6:43 PM, askolnick
> <mailto:asko...@stopspam.mindspring.com> wrote:
> >So when Lawson English says it's "laughable" for anyone to say that John
> >Hagelin is "academically laughable," he must forgive us for laughing in
> his
> >face.
> >
> >Lawson, you're a riot!
> >
> >-- Andrew
>
> Thanks, Andrew. However, where does it say that John's academic credentials
> are laughable?
Er, Dormouse... did ANYONE say his "academic credentials are laughable"? As
is your habit, when cornered in a discussion, you just pull a word switch from
out of your ass. Avital said that Hagelin is "academically laughable." You even
quoted his statement, "academically laughable." You challenged him to provide
evidence for his statement. When I provided ample proof of how he is laughed at
by the academic community, you reached into that dark place of yours and pulled
out "academic credentials"
Hagelin is laughed at by the physics community and by many other academics.
And you are laughed at by nearly everyone on these newsgroups who read your
silly posts.
>
> >
> >>
> >>
> >> BTW, where did you get the idea that the faculty is "academically
> >> laughable?" There's no scoring of that. The academic reputation comes
> from
> >> the rating of the schools' "academic programs," not faculty.
> >>
> >> Lurkers can decide how laughable the senior faculty of MUM is.
> >>
> >> Or perhaps, you'd like to furnish an example of the "academically
> >> laughable" faculty at MUM.
> >
> >Er... Lawson, does the name "John Hagelin" ring a bell?
> >
> >>
> >>
> >> Don't be shy, Avital. Name names and why you think they are laughable.
> >
> >I think our sides are splitting enough or otherwise I'd tell you about
> David
> >Orme-Johnson -- or about that blimp "Dr." Bevin Morris and his "Ph.D."
> from one
> >of Maharishi's unaccredited "universities." ROTFL.
>
> Bevan's degree is honoray, but he isn't a member of the teaching faculty
> and in fact, is no longer running the school anyway.
So, the fact that Bevan Morris is no longer the president of MUM somehow makes
this less hilarious? Sorry, people who go around listing a "Ph.D." after their
names and calling themselves "Dr." on the basis of an "honoray" degree are
flim-flamers. An honorary degree does not give you the right to call yourself
"Dr."
Imagine, for many years that gas bag with the "honoray" degree was president of
Maharishi's only accredited university. Sure says a lot about the quality and
integrity of that school.
>
>
> And what about David Orme-Johnson's academic credentials is laughable?
>
There you go again pulling words out of your arse. Nobody said anything about
Orme-Johnson's academic credentials.
-- Andrew
Remember the "F" in "Yogic Flying" is silent.
askolnick
> OK, but I was quoting Jeff's quote, not the original.
And still more smoke from Lawson. You may have been quoting Jeff, but you were
falsely attributing it to DeNaro. And you were doing so in your inane attempt
to discredit DeNaro.
>
>
> And all of this dates back to 1976?
>
> 24 years ago? SOmething like 10 years BEFORE the afidavit was written and
> about 8 years before MUM was originally accredited.
>
> Get real.
No, Dormouse, you get real. You believe in superstitious blather "revived" from
thousands of years ago.
First you feebly try to discredit DeNaro by falsely accusing him of mixing up
the dates of his employment at MIU. Now you claim his affidavit should be
dismissed because you say DeNaro's memory of why he left MIU employment can't
be trusted.
Dormouse, it is your memory that no one trusts.
-- Andrew
Again, I remind you, the "F" in "Yogic Flying" is silent.
Jeff Ridley
askolnick wrote in message <392A8CAC...@stopspam.mindspring.com>...
:Lawson English wrote:
:
:
:> OK, but I was quoting Jeff's quote, not the original.
:
:And still more smoke from Lawson. You may have been quoting Jeff, but you
were
:falsely attributing it to DeNaro. And you were doing so in your inane
attempt
:to discredit DeNaro.
All I did was cut and paste the article from Trancenet. I wrote nothing
original and no one is quoting me. As far as I can see the date DeNaro gives
as his last day is July 13, 1975. This must be a typo; I had not noticed it
and it was good sleuthing on Lawson's part to have noticed the error. But
what is important is the content of the article. What DeNaro says should be
considered very carefully by the TMers and not just dismissed and denied.
It's time to stop the denial of any and all criticism of Yogi and TM/Sidhis.
Some of the TMers here have completely sold themselves out to Yogi and TM.
To them I would say for God's sake have the courage to question and doubt.
It may be a lot easier simply to let Yogi do your thinking for you but
you'll gain a ton of self esteem by thinking for yourself even if that means
giving up your cherished, childish idea of bliss and enlightenment and
heaven on earth and sunshine and lollipops.
askolnick
HEY! Sunshine and lollipops not only make people feel good, they are real!
-Andrew
At the risk of repeating myself, the "F" in "Yogic Flying" is silent.
Avital Pilpel
> Please give examples of how bad the academic credentials are of the faculty
> at MUM.
The problem is not their "Academic credentials", which can be OK. The
problem is their academic *reputation*, that is, how serious their
research and published material is, how they are seen in the academic
community, and so on.
Dr. Hagelin won an Ignoble prize in physics, the equivalent of a
"negative noble prize", given to the scientist who made the *dumbest*
claim in physics during the year; he has been recognized even by USA Today
as one of the leading woo-woos of the pathetic "anti-technology" movement
in academia, together with a philosophy professor who claims the laws of
physics are an attempt to "ensrine white male dominance" and a psychitrist
who claims to "recover" memories of alien abductions; he has been snubbed
by his former collegues who dissociate themselves from him like the
plague, fearing his nonsense will rub on them and will make their
reputation suffer; he hasn't published anything in YEARS except
for looney articles claiming TM is "supported by quantum physics", a
statement all his former collegues reject as nonsense.
Yet, this man, who probably has one of the WORSE reputations and records
in the physics community, is THE HEAD OF THE PHYSICS DEPARTMENT in the
MUM. I guess that means that the other physicists there are even worse -
with all probability, they support the crackpot physics Hagelin does with
even *less* academic repuatation or history of prestigious degrees.
That's the equivalent of giving the Unabomber the chair of the Ethics
department in the MUM, based on the claim that he has good credentials (a
Harvard degree, for example) and also passed with an A+ an Ethics exam
while in college. The academic *credentials* of the unabomber are OK. His
academic *reputation*, on the other hand, is what matters, and that is
where the MUM is abyssimal.
Does that answer your question?
Avital Pilpel
Avital Pilpel
> The M.U.M. faculty includes many internationally recognised scholars and
> researchers who hold degrees from the most prestigious universities in the
> world, such as Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, Yale and
> Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
No doubt. Hagelin *is* internationally recognized - he won the Ig-noble
prize for physics in 1994, given to the physicist who made the *dumbest*
statement about physics that year. And this man is the *head* of the MUM
physics department...
Avital Pilpel
Avital Pilpel
>
> wrote:
> >But this is a completely meaningless criterion, since on such a scale
> >virtually EVERY small college will do better than Harvard or Yale, due to
> >the fact that it is far smaller and far less popular and therefore has
> >less students, so the class sizes and facualty/student ration is better.
> >
>
> Actually, no.
>
> MUM: 10/1
> Harvard: 7/1
> Yale: 8/1
> CIT: 3/1
So MUM cannot even beat them in THAT?
Christ...
Avital Pilpel
Ken H.
When you use the word "dumbest" below I'm wondering if you looked in the
mirror this morning. You need to view the thread that gives the academic
credentials of all MUM professors including Hagelin. Better yet, visit the
following website http://www.mum.edu/bulletin/18_faculty.html and read
through them yourself. Go all the way through the list and count up the
number of advanced degrees from Harvard, Yale, Cornell, NYU, Oxford,
Stanford, etc. and then look in the mirror and ask who's "dumbest."
Ken H.
"Avital Pilpel" <ap...@columbia.edu> wrote in message
news:Pine.GSO.4.10.100052...@merhaba.cc.columbia.edu...
askolnick
> On 22 May 2000, Lawson English wrote:
>
> > Please give examples of how bad the academic credentials are of the faculty
> > at MUM.
>
> The problem is not their "Academic credentials", which can be OK. The
> problem is their academic *reputation*, that is, how serious their
> research and published material is, how they are seen in the academic
> community, and so on.
>
> Dr. Hagelin won an Ignoble prize in physics, the equivalent of a
> "negative noble prize", given to the scientist who made the *dumbest*
> claim in physics during the year;
Actually it was the Ig Nobel Peace Prize, not the physics prize. (As is often the
case with the Ig Nobles, the category was chosen to emphasize the humor of the
"accomplishment.")
-- Andrew
askolnick
> On Mon, 22 May 2000, Ken H. wrote:
>
> > The M.U.M. faculty includes many internationally recognised scholars and
> > researchers who hold degrees from the most prestigious universities in the
> > world, such as Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, Yale and
> > Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
>
> No doubt. Hagelin *is* internationally recognized - he won the Ig-noble
> prize for physics in 1994, given to the physicist who made the *dumbest*
> statement about physics that year. And this man is the *head* of the MUM
> physics department...
>
> Avital Pilpel
No, it was the Ig Nobel Peace Prize, not the physics prize.
--Andrew
Avital Pilpel
> Avial
>
> When you use the word "dumbest" below I'm wondering if you looked in the
> mirror this morning. You need to view the thread that gives the academic
> credentials of all MUM professors including Hagelin. Better yet, visit the
> following website http://www.mum.edu/bulletin/18_faculty.html and read
> through them yourself. Go all the way through the list and count up the
> number of advanced degrees from Harvard, Yale, Cornell, NYU, Oxford,
> Stanford, etc. and then look in the mirror and ask who's "dumbest."
Wh osaid they don't have degrees from prestigious institutions? What I
said, and I stand behind it, is that their academic reputation is
laughable. What matters is not where you got your degree from so much, but
how many papers and books you published in scientific journals, how many
grants you recieved, and so on. This is a difference you and Lawson seem
to miss.
The head of the physics department in MUM is a physicists that won the Ig
Noble prize in 1994, is avoided like the plague by all his previous
collegues, and hadn't published anything except for TM rants for YEARS
now. The previous head of the entire university, for crying out loud,
didn't actually have *any* academic repuatation whatsoever - and, talking
of academic degrees, only had an honorary Ph.D. from one of the other TM
unaccredited universities. Needless to say, he never published anything or
won any grants anywhere except in TM magazines, if there.
Now, these are the *top guns* in the MUM; I can only imagine how the other
people who teach there are like. How many papers have they published that
were in non-TM publications but in serious scientific ones? How many
grants have they recieved to do research from non-TM sources? I'll bet
that the answer to that question is embarrasing to the MUM.
Avital Pilpel
Avital Pilpel
> >Lawson, you moron... how do you think they RATE the school's "academic
> >program" if NOT by the facutly that teaches there??? By the color of the
> >buildings???
>
> OK, how DO they rate the academic programs? Do you think that the deans of
> the various colleges in other universities check the credentials of the
> faculties of the various schools that they rate?
Lawson, you are such an hypocritical, dishonest schnook.
Only a week ago, you whined and cried that I "dishonestly" used "snipping"
to attack you. Now, when you are doing THE VERY SAME THING - snipping all
my arguments about WHY the MUM is a bad school and only replying to the
last point I made, it isn't dishonest any more, I see.
Obviously, Lawson, you have nothing to say about my most important point:
that MUM is way down in the dumps in the two most important criterions,
e.g. academic repuatation (=how good the techers are) and high school
seniors at the top of their class' precentage (=how good the students
are).
Instead, you whine about how unfair those college presidents were, to dare
and give MUM a bad rating, and how it is all some sort of fraud, or hoax,
or conspiracy against TM.
Avital Pilpel
Lawson English
On Tue, May 23, 2000 12:07 PM, Avital Pilpel <mailto:ap...@columbia.edu>
wrote:
Again:
how is academic reputation measured?
Are you saying that the deans, presidents, etc., of the other universities
are familiar enough with MUM's faculty to evaluate them?
Here is what you said about how these things are to be evaluated in your
response to Ken:
>Wh osaid they don't have degrees from prestigious institutions? What I
>said, and I stand behind it, is that their academic reputation is
>laughable. What matters is not where you got your degree from so much, but
>how many papers and books you published in scientific journals, how many
>grants you recieved, and so on. This is a difference you and Lawson seem
>to miss.
>
So, the academic reputation of a TEACHING school would be lower than that
of a RESEARCH school?
In other words, the question was so ill-defined as to be useless for
prospective undergraduates trying to use the score to help decide which
school they should attend.
An opinion poll that is weighted as 25% of the total score for how good a
school is, where the number of respondants per school isn't listed, and
where the opinion, according to YOU, has nothing to do with how well the
teachers teach.
Er, yes...
Lawson English
On Tue, May 23, 2000 12:00 PM, Avital Pilpel <mailto:ap...@columbia.edu>
wrote:
>
>The head of the physics department in MUM is a physicists that won the Ig
>Noble prize in 1994, is avoided like the plague by all his previous
>collegues, and hadn't published anything except for TM rants for YEARS
>now.
Who says that his former colleagues avoid him like the plague?
The previous head of the entire university, for crying out loud,
>didn't actually have *any* academic repuatation whatsoever - and, talking
>of academic degrees, only had an honorary Ph.D. from one of the other TM
>unaccredited universities. Needless to say, he never published anything or
>won any grants anywhere except in TM magazines, if there.
>
And so, his ability to administrate is based on his ability to research?
_Non sequitur_ in my opinion. Do you base your opinion on anything other
than a need to knock a school you've never visited?
>Now, these are the *top guns* in the MUM; I can only imagine how the other
>people who teach there are like. How many papers have they published that
>were in non-TM publications but in serious scientific ones? How many
>grants have they recieved to do research from non-TM sources? I'll bet
>that the answer to that question is embarrasing to the MUM.
You mean, like the $8 million grant that the National Institutes of Health
gave to MUM recently to do research on the effects of meditation and
alternative medicine on minority health?
Ken H.
Alright, I'll take the hook. If what matters, Avital, is "how many papers
and books you published in scientific journals" here's a list of journals
that have published articles/papers, etc. on Transcendental Meditation:
List of Journals Where Research on the Transcendental Meditation Programme
Was Published
Over 100 journals which include:
Academy of Management Journal
Addictive Behaviors
AGE
American Journal of Physiology
American Journal of Psychiatry
American Psychologist
British Journal of Educational Psychology
British Journal of Psychology
Bulletin on Narcotics
Bulletin of the Society of Psychologists in Addictive Behaviors
Business and Health
Circulation
Clinical and Experimental Pharmacology and Physiology
Clinical Research
College Student Journal
Criminal Justice and Behavior
Drug Forum
Education
Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology
Experimental Neurology
Hormones and Behavior
Hospital and Community Psychiatry
International Journal of Comparative and Applied Criminal Justice
International Journal of Neuroscience
International Journal of the Addictions
Journal of Applied Physiology: Respiratory, Environmental and Exercise
Physiology
Journal of Biomedicine
Journal of Chronic Disease and Therapeutic Research
Journal of Clinical Psychiatry
Journal of Clinical Psychology
Journal of Conflict Resolution
Journal of Counseling and Development
Journal of Counseling Psychology
Journal of Creative Behavior
Journal of Crime and Justice
Journal of Criminal Justice
Journal of Human Stress
Journal of Humanistic Psychology
Journal of Inhalation Technology
Journal of Mind and Behavior
Journal of Moral Education
Journal of Neural Transmission
Journal of Personality and Individual Differences
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
Journal of Personality Assessment
Journal of Psychology
Journal of Psychosomatic Research
Journal of Social Behavior and Personality
Journal of the American Association of Nephrology Nurses and Technicians
Journal of the American Society of Psychosomatic Dentistry and Medicine
Journal of the Canadian Medical Association
Journal of the Israel Medical Association (Harefuah)
L'Encephale
Lancet
Medizinische Klinik
Memory and Cognition
Motivation
Motor and Sensory Processes of the Brain
Progress in Brain Research
Neuroendocrinology Letters
Perceptual and Motor Skills
Pflugers Archiv
The Physiologist
Physiology & Behavior
Psychologia - An International Journal of Psychology in the Orient
Psychological Reports
Psychopathometrie
Psychophysiology
Psychosomatic medicine
Psychotherapie-Psychosomatik Medizinische Psychologie Respiration
Revue d'electroencephalographie et de neurophysiologie clinique
Science
Scientific American
Sleep Research
Social Indicators Research
Social Science Perspectives Journal
Society for Neuroscience Abstracts
Tijdschrift voor Psychologie (Behavior: Journal of Psychology)
Transactions of the American Society for Neurochemistry
Ugeskrift for Laeger
Verhandlungen der Gesellschaft für Ökologie
Vestes: the Australian Universities' Review Western Psychologist
Zeitschrift für Allgemeinmedizin
Zeitschrift für Elektroenzephalographie und Elektromyographie
Zeitschrift für Klinische Psychologie
(link at
http://www.natural-law-party.org/special_progr/where_research_on_tm.htm)
Ken H.
Lawson English
On Tue, May 23, 2000 5:42 PM, Jonathan <mailto:mj...@deja.com> wrote:
>
>Ken H. wrote in message
>
>> Avial
>>
>> When you use the word "dumbest" below I'm wondering if you looked in the
>> mirror this morning. You need to view the thread that gives the
academic
>> credentials of all MUM professors including Hagelin. Better yet, visit
>the
>> following website http://www.mum.edu/bulletin/18_faculty.html and read
>> through them yourself. Go all the way through the list and count up the
>> number of advanced degrees from Harvard, Yale, Cornell, NYU, Oxford,
>> Stanford, etc. and then look in the mirror and ask who's "dumbest."
>>
>
>
>I did this and found that out of over 150 named staff there are only 8
MBAs.
>Quite strange for a University of *Management*, don't you think? Mind you,
>they have dance, furniture-making, & music staff.
>
>Out of the 150+ senior staff, only 20 attended the universities you named.
>Not very many.
>
1 in 8 isn't a bad ratio at all.
In fact, if you look at this year's "top 50" national schools, you'll find
that the faculty of MUM has gotten undergrad/grad degrees from quite a
few,l including:
Harvard (#2), Yale (#4), Cornell (#11), NYU (#34), Oxford (n/a), Stanford
(#6), Princeton (#4), University of Washington (#44), University of
Virginia (#22), Yeshiva University NY (#44), Carnegie-Mellon (23),
UC-Berkley (#20), UC-San Diego (#32), Brown University (#14), Dartmouth
College (#11), Columbia U. (#10), Brandeis University (#29), UCLA (#25),
MIT (#3), Notre Dame (#19), Duke(#7).
That's 20 of the top 50 schools represented in the MUM faculty. All told,
24 of the 97 faculty members listed under the heading "faculty" [rather
than adjunct/visting/whatever] have a degree from at least one of the above
top-50 schools. 25, if you count Oxford.
That's 1/4 of the faculty have top-fifty credentials.
Jonathan
Ken H. wrote in message
> Avial
>
> When you use the word "dumbest" below I'm wondering if you looked in the
> mirror this morning. You need to view the thread that gives the academic
> credentials of all MUM professors including Hagelin. Better yet, visit
the
> following website http://www.mum.edu/bulletin/18_faculty.html and read
> through them yourself. Go all the way through the list and count up the
> number of advanced degrees from Harvard, Yale, Cornell, NYU, Oxford,
> Stanford, etc. and then look in the mirror and ask who's "dumbest."
>
> Ken H.
I did this and found that out of over 150 named staff there are only 8 MBAs.
Quite strange for a University of *Management*, don't you think? Mind you,
they have dance, furniture-making, & music staff.
Out of the 150+ senior staff, only 20 attended the universities you named.
Not very many.
Jonathan
Lon
( Social Forces ) Fales, Evan; Markovsky, Barry; 12-01-1997
In every scientific discipline there arise from time to time challenges to
mainstream thinking that appeal to heterodox theoretical frameworks or
observational claims, or both. How should such challenges be treated? On the
one hand, novelty is the lever of progress, opening to view new
possibilities. On the other hand, no discipline can afford to devote serious
attention to every unorthodox notion that comes over the horizon. This
problem is an especially sensitive one for sociology, given the complexity
and multilevel nature of the phenomena we study and our correspondingly
rudimentary understanding of them.
It is not our purpose to say how scientific disciplines in fact produce or
receive heterodox theories. Instead, we address normative issues: (1) the
standards to which a heterodox theory should be held in order to merit a
hearing; (2) the criteria it must satisfy to merit serious attention within
a discipline; and (3) methods for determining its likelihood of being true.
We provide general criteria for theory evaluation, then discuss special
problems of, and guidelines for, the heterodox. Our thesis is illustrated by
an analysis of a published report claiming that people practicing
Transcendental Meditation at one geographic location have immediate
beneficial effects on social indicators at distant locations.
Evaluating Theories
Scientific theories (henceforward "theories") consist of structured sets of
claims, subject to evaluation via objective criteria (Cohen 1989; Markovsky
1994, 1996). These criteria bear upon a theory's internal structure, its
standing vis-a-vis prior theories, and its relationship to the empirical
world.
THEORY STRUCTURE
Theoretical arguments consist of statements that consist of terms. Because
scientific theories offer unique, nonintuitive ways of understanding the
world, they frequently employ terms with unfamiliar meanings. To be
communicable, however, all terms must be understood in the same way by
members of the intended audience. This requires a hierarchical conceptual
system. At its base are undefined or primitive terms whose meanings are
shared by the theorist and audience. Primitive terms are crafted into
combinations that comprise definitions or indicate correct usage for defined
terms. In turn, higher-order concepts are conveyed by definitions that
include primitives and/or terms previously defined. A parsimonious
conceptual system imparts clear meanings to just those terms needed to
express the theory's statements.
A theory may be unimpeachable formally, but if meanings of terms are
unclear, deriving and interpreting predictions becomes a haphazard affair. A
theory purporting to have scientific credentials must be articulated with
sufficient precision and specificity that the contents of its claims can be
linked to empirical referents and procedures for testing. That is, it must
present a sufficiently precise picture of the constituents and causal
processes of some natural domain that one can construct procedures for
detecting and measuring the properties of those constituents. Those
procedures also will employ causal knowledge concerning the ways that
measuring devices or empirical phenomena should be influenced by the
mechanisms under investigation.
Vagueness about a theory's empirical referents or how they interact with
previously understood parts of our world will undermine any attempt to claim
that certain phenomena provide evidence for (or against) that theory. For to
say that some observed phenomenon measures, or is sensitive to, the presence
of some underlying mechanism presupposes some idea of how that mechanism
behaves - and specifically, how it can be expected to behave in the
conditions under which the observation was made.
Even if all its terms are well defined, a theory still can be toppled by a
single logical flaw. If one claims empirical confirmation for a hypothesis
derived from a theory, but logical analysis finds that the statement is the
product of an invalid argument, then no longer can the theory justify the
prediction, connect to the hypothesis, or benefit from the test results.
Confirmation Issues
There is no fully agreed-upon metric for theory confirmation. However, a
Bayesian framework captures several universal scientific values: For given
levels of empirical evidence and prior knowledge, a theory' s confirmation
is greater to the extent that (1) it is compelling in view of prior
knowledge; (2) the datum whose evidential value is to be assessed is made
probable by theory and prior knowledge; and (3) the datum is not probable
relative to alternative hypotheses and prior knowledge.(1) Even without
precise measures of these components, Bayes' Theorem permits ceteris paribus
assessments of relative confirmation across theories. So with all else
approximately equal between theories A and B, if A explains the evidence
better than B, then A has the higher confirmation status of the two.
Furthermore, when all three criteria favor B over A, no ceteris paribus
provision is needed: B will always have the higher confirmation status.
Special Considerations for the Heterodox
Even if analysis reveals terminological ambiguities or questionable logic,
publication still may be warranted if a theory is the best in its class.
However, journals have limited space and cannot print every such effort, so
the decision process becomes more complicated. Should an exciting, new, but
untested theory have priority over a relatively workaday confirmation of a
well-established formulation? What of the heterodox theory that comes
bolstered by evidence, but flies in the face of established knowledge?
There are good reasons to publish heterodox work. First, it is difficult to
justify rejecting a submission on grounds that it is heterodox when
otherwise it satisfies normal standards. Second, heterodox views, if put
forward with some competence, deserve a hearing if only because sometimes
one of them turns out to be right and makes a major advance. This mandates a
policy of relative tolerance in publication decisions. The low prior
probability of a theory should not contribute, at least in a direct way, to
its being denied a hearing.
On the other hand, there are good reasons to subject heterodox viewpoints to
higher than normal standards: A corollary of Bayes' Theorem suggests that
data providing significant and exclusive support for a very improbable
theory deserve especially cautious and careful scrutiny.(2) Whatever
evidence we have for the improbability of a heterodox theory is, a fortiori,
evidence for the illegitimacy of data purportedly favoring that theory. The
case against the heterodox is strongest when a competing hypothesis can be
established.
Is it right, however, that orthodoxy must supply a detailed rebuttal of all
the data in order to deflect every heterodox challenge? It depends. For
instance, if "all the data" are ten similarly flawed experiments, then
refuting one of them refutes the other nine. Or if the claimant asserts that
one study supplies especially critical support, then the identification of
flaws in that study provides an equally critical falsification. In fact, it
is sufficient that a well- entrenched position offer plausible alternative
explanations for the challenging data. The burden of refuting those
explanations lies with the proponents of the heterodox challenge.(3)
The Theory Behind the "Maharishi Effect"
To illustrate our thesis, we examine a study that was organized by
researchers affiliated with the Transcendental Meditation (TM) movement
founded by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Orme-Johnson et al. (1988) purportedly
confirmed a theory asserting that variations in the number of TM-Sidhis -
advanced TM practitioners - in a given location cause measurable variations
in social phenomena elsewhere through the operation of a "unified field."
The research was conducted in East Jerusalem and employed social indicators
from Jerusalem, Israel, and Lebanon. Meditators' participation was voluntary
and self-selected, their numbers varying from 65-241 between Aug. 1 and
Sept. 30, 1983. The investigators predicted and found that meditation group
size correlated negatively with crime rates, automobile accidents, and fires
in Jerusalem; positively with stock market prices and a national mood
indicator in Israel; and negatively with war intensity and war fatalities in
Lebanon.
Researchers, spokespersons, and politicians affiliated with the
Transcendental Meditation movement claim that this so-called "Maharishi
Effect" is now scientifically proven through rigorous empirical research,
replicated numerous times, and reported in peer-reviewed journals. Newspaper
accounts, promotional materials, subsequent research reports, and our own
communications with Transcendental Meditation researchers, representatives,
followers and defectors all indicate that, perhaps more than any other, the
article we shall discuss provides a special source of pride, vindication,
and scientific legitimation for all affiliated with the movement. In the
subsection to follow we examine the coherence of the theory behind the
Mararishi Effect and its standing vis-a-vis prior theories. Following that
we address research-related issues, noting methodological loopholes and
alternative explanations.
The Theory
Orme-Johnson et al. devoted considerable space to the Maharishi Effect
theory. Its central ideas come from Maharishi's theory of consciousness,
developed further by physicist John Hagelin (1987, 1989).(4) The following
are their core argument and key terms, with numbers added for subsequent
reference.
(1) Collective consciousness is the wholeness of consciousness of the group,
that is more than the sum of the consciousnesses of all individuals
composing that group. (778)
(2) [The theory] posits a unified field of"pure consciousness" as the basis
of the diverse activities of all individual minds. All processes of thought
and perception are viewed as fluctuations or qualified expressions of this
underlying, unqualified, least-excited state of consciousness. Maharishi
likens the individual mind transcending its more active levels and
experiencing its basis in pure consciousness to a localized wave settling to
become the silent, unbounded surface of the ocean. Such experiences are said
to create nonlocal, fieldlike effects of order and coherence in the
environment. (778-79)
(3) Nonlocal effects could be mediated through the agency of the unified
quantum field due to the intrinsically nonlocal structure of space- time at
this scale. (784)
(4) A potential explanation for the apparent propagation of such coherent
effects may lie, however, at the ultimate scale of superunification, the
Planck scale of [10.sup.-33] cm and [10.sup.-44] sec, where the fundamental
forces and matter fields are said to become fully unified. (784)
(5) The localized conscious awareness of the individual becomes
experientially connected back to pure consciousness, the unified source of
order and intelligence at its base, thus increasing coherence, reducing
stress, and accelerating development in the larger society. (784)
Transcendental Meditation thus is assumed to permit the individual to
experience his/her minds' "basis in pure consciousness," which is embedded
in the "unified quantum field" at extremely small scales (4).(5) Individual
and environment are linked by this field (3), and so the consciousnesses of
meditators cause "nonlocal effects" (2) or actions-at-a-distance. Meditators
acting in concert create, it is claimed, a greater wave of coherence in the
unified quantum field than could be achieved by meditators acting
separately. The Maharashi Effect influences anyone in the field's reach (5),
creating in them TM-like coherence. The affected population is ME =
a[N.sub.1] + b[[N.sub.2].sup.2] where [N.sub.1] is the number of meditators
in the population, [N.sub.2] is the TM-Sidhi group size, a and b are
approximately 100, and [N.sub.2] [greater than] 100.
Theory Analysis
The theory receives low marks for meaningfulness. Key terms are undefined or
only roughly characterized using other complex, undefined terms or
metaphors. "Planck scale" and "unified quantum field" are defined in
physics, but the meanings of many crucial expressions are not so clear,
including "consciousness," "collective consciousness," "pure consciousness,"
and "experientially connected." Consider collective consciousness, defined
loosely in (1). First, it relies on another undefined term (consciousness),
the meaning of which is not self-evident. Second, the expression "the
wholeness of" is vacuous. Third, identifying what collective consciousness
is more than still does not tell the reader what it is. Linking collective
consciousness to "pure consciousness" does not help either, for the latter
is characterized through an avalanche of still more vague esoterica. Without
clear definitions, the authors must rely on metaphors - an ocean surface, a
laser, radio signals - all of which break down. Unlike the ocean surface,
the laser and radio signals, collective consciousness is, respectively,
nonmaterial, omnidirectional, and in violation of the inverse-square law of
signal strength (785).
To evaluate the plausibility of the argument, readers (and journal referees)
would need solid grounding in contemporary physics. We consulted several
nuclear and particle physicists and learned that detailed experimental
evidence is lacking for Planck scale phenomena. Also, a number of unified
theories compatible with the existing experimental constraints have been
considered in this highly speculative area (Davies & Brown 1988).(6)
Moreover, physicists examining purported links to the Maharashi Effect
theory find them highly dubious (e.g., Pagels 1986; Stenger 1990). Thus,
although Orme-Johnson et al. give the impression that their assumptions are
well grounded, the soundness of the Maharishi Effect theory's quantum field
connections is an open question at best.
Though more rigorous than the rest of the theory, the Maharishi Effect
equation also has problems. First, no rationale is offered for its
thresholds. The cut-offs of 100 are arbitrary, and the functional
discontinuity they entail produces a rather awkward behavioral model.
Second, why is the measurement unit number of people rather than, say,
physical distance? The implication is paradoxical. Assume there is a
100-person TM-Sidhi group in downtown Chicago and another in rural
Fairfield, Iowa. Ignoring for this example the smaller effect of non-TM
Sidhi meditators, ME = 1,000,000 for both groups. This means that the effect
would have a radius of possibly a couple of miles for the Chicago group, but
more than 50 times that distance for the other group. Chicago's unified
field then would somehow have to "know" that it is not supposed to affect
people if they happen to be more than 27 (or however many) blocks from the
meditation group, and Fairfield' s unified field would have to realize that
it must keep going (and going) to affect its quota of citizens. Although
Orme-Johnson et al. make many claims for their unified field, this level of
sentience is not one of them.(7)
Theory Context
One component of Bayes' theorem pertains to theoretical contexts - the
likelihood that the theory is correct in view of its consistency with, and
plausibility relative to, prior knowledge. In statements such as number 3
above, Orme-Johnson et al. imply that Maharishi Effect theory is consistent
with the theories of contemporary physics. Indeed, Hagelin (1987, 1989)
argues first that the identification of the mental with the physical is
plausible within the framework of quantum mechanics and, second, that this
identification - and a fully worked- out theory of mind/matter that
anticipates contemporary unified-field theories - is found in the oldest
sacred Hindu texts, the Vedas.
Hagelin's case rests on three pillars: (1) supernormal phenomena ("
sidhis"), such as the Maharishi Effect, levitation and invisibility, have no
other natural explanation; (2) parallels between an esoteric theory of
consciousness and quantum mechanics; and (3) parallels between a theory
allegedly embedded in the Vedas and contemporary unified- field theories.
Regarding supernormal phenomena, Hagelin goes to some lengths to invoke the
more recherche possibilities allowable by quantum theory, in particular,
levitation. The problem is that, ignoring for now the Maharishi Effect, no
sidhis are validated and so the far-fetched explanation lacks purpose. Under
the circumstances, Hagelin assigns premier importance to the Maharishi
Effect, saying it provides "the central core of experimental evidence in
support of the proposed identity between pure consciousness and the unified
field" (1987:73).
Hagelin's (and Orme-Johnson et al.'s) other pillars are equally shaky. His
argument for a unified field-consciousness identity suggests that some
quantum-mechanical properties of physical fields match characteristics of
consciousness. However, his argument relies critically upon ambiguity and
obscurity in the terms denoting these properties. For instance, he notes
that "creativity of consciousness" describes intellectual inventiveness,
whereas "creativity of matter" describes the quantum field's capacity to
generate particles. Both kinds of creativity share the characteristic of
production, but Hagelin does nothing to show that these two kinds of
production are the same, or even interestingly analogous. This is about as
cogent as arguing that the mind is a sort of mirror because both reflect,
but it does capture the essence of Hagelin's approach.
To draw his parallels between the Vedas and contemporary unified-field
theories, Hagelin relies on numerological and exegetical styles of
reasoning. For example, his evidence for linkages between the Vedas, the
unified quantum field, and consciousness includes the fact that there are
five special Vedic terms called tanmatras, and there are five "spin-types"
in quantum mechanics. Moreover, the quantum field theory that Hagelin
especially favors is known among physicists as a "superstring" theory. In
corroboration, Hagelin offers a line from a Vedic text that he translates as
"My body is called a string."(8) Hagelin's interpretations of physical
fields in terms of consciousness are supported by nothing more than the
construction of arbitrary formal isomorphisms, metaphors, and a reliance
upon ambiguity and vague analogy.
In sum, Orme-Johnson et al's theory does not pass minimal criteria of
meaningfulness and logical integrity. Even if it did, where the theory in
question is that which is at best foreshadowed in Hagelin' s writings, and
where prior knowledge includes knowledge of physical laws and
neurophysiology, the probability of the Maharishi Effect theory is very
close to zero.(9)
Evidence for the "Maharishi Effect"
Even if the Maharishi Effect theory is not compelling, the kinds of
empirical results claimed to support the theory would be noteworthy if true.
As indicated by Abelson (n.d.)(10) and Schrodt (1990), however, the
empirical claims are weakened considerably by the nature of the research
design and statistical techniques used by Orme-Johnson et al. These critics
emphasize problems endemic to nonrandom treatment conditions, and the
proneness of time-series analyses to Type II (false positive) errors.(11) In
contrast, we take a more direct approach suggested by the two remaining
components of Bayes' theorem: whether the evidence offered for the Maharishi
effect theory is actually predicted by the theory, and whether specific
alternative hypotheses explain the evidence.(12)
Do Predictions Derive from the Theory?
To be credible, Maharishi Effect theory must explain (1) how group
meditation affects the unified field, (2) how these effects in turn cause
changes in the actions of individual human beings, and (3) how those
individual actions have their claimed social impact. Not clear in the theory
is how meditators' brains spontaneously synchronize to produce "coherence,"
how coherence modifies physiochemical structures within the brains of
distant others, why coherence only causes phenomena that happen to be
defined socioculturally as "positive," and how the distribution of behaviors
is affected at the population level.(13)
Hagelin (1987:69) concedes that Maharishi Effect theory does not explain how
meditators affect the ostensible unified field and the emotions, thoughts,
and behaviors of people within it. Moreover, if the material world is
presumed to be influenced by collective meditation (as it must be if the
unified field is affected), then more direct measures are possible:
inanimate Marishi Effect-detectors should be placed at varying distances
from the meditation group.(14) As it stands, causal linkages from individual
TM practitioners to, for instance, a diminished likelihood of Nebraskans
wrecking their cars, are hidden in a very "black box."
Another indication that predictions do not derive from the theory is that
lagged effects were not specified prior to the research. The researchers
then interpret any significant correlation at any nonnegative time lag for
any indicator as supporting their theory. This multiplies the likelihood of
finding "supportive" evidence, but opens the door to Type II errors even
wider.
The Maharishi Effect equation, from which specific hypotheses might have
been derived, was ignored completely in the research. The time- series
analysis employed each day's number of Sidhi meditators rather than its
square, and the number of non-Sidhi meditators was not included in the test.
There also were periods during the study when meditation group size fell
below assumed thresholds for affecting Lebanon, or both Lebanon and Israel,
but Sidhi-group size rather than zero was used as the independent
variable.(15) In fact, the Sidhi group should not have been powerful enough
to influence the Lebanese war, or even most of Israel. Orme-Johnson et al.
argue that the roughly 38,000 non-Sidhi meditators in Israel and 2,000 more
in Lebanon provided the needed boost. However, Orme-Johnson et al. provide
no information about the geographic distribution of these meditators or
evidence to support their assumption that they were in the area and
meditating during the vacation month of August, which comprises half the
test period.
In sum, Maharishi Effect predictions cannot be derived from the Maharishi
Effect theory. There are gaps in the causal chain from group meditation to
the phenomena supposedly affected, there are no specified time lags for the
Maharishi Effect, and despite the capacity of the Maharishi Effect theory's
formal component to generate specific Maharishi Effect predictions, the
model is ignored. Thus, evidence offered for the Maharishi Effect cannot
significantly increase confidence in the veracity of the theory.
Can Alternative Hypotheses Explain the Evidence?
Orme-Johnson et al. 1988 presented their empirical findings several ways,
but the most compelling showed superimposed graphs of (1) a daily composite
index of Jerusalem crime rates, auto accidents and fires; Israeli crimes and
"national mood," and Lebanese war intensity; and (2) the number of
meditators in the larger of each day's two meditation groups. Time-series
analyses confirmed a statistically significant relationship between the
number of meditators and the composite index for lags 3 0. We focus on a few
specific factors that were not included in the analysis but readily could
have influenced both the meditators' decisions to participate and the social
indicators used as dependent variables. Importantly, the research design
prevents us from knowing how many other factors may have contributed to a
spurious correlation.
HOLIDAYS AND VACATION MONTH
Orme-Johnson et al. recognize that mundane events affect both meditation
group size and their social indicators: Their statistical model compensates
for weekend effects and for three Jewish holidays, but there are other
factors for which the authors failed to invoke statistical controls. Perhaps
the most obvious omission was that of three other major Jewish holidays
during the study period - Succoth, Shemini Azeret, and Simhat Torah. Nearly
all of the meditators who participated in the research came from the liberal
end of the Jewish religious spectrum.(16) As was dear in the graph of
meditation group sizes, they were willing to travel and meditate on the
Sabbath and holidays. In contrast, Orthodox Jews do not cook, light fires,
or travel in cars on religious holidays or the Sabbath. Undoubtedly the
holidays also produce some elevation in mood, and may coincide with
reductions in war hostilities measured from nearby Lebanon. Therefore, the
same factors that increase meditation group sizes at certain times would
also correspond to the abstinence from cooking and travel for a very
significant portion of the Israeli population. We might then expect to find
not only a heightening in national mood at the same time that larger numbers
of meditators turned out for the study, but also coincident reductions in
domestic fires and automobile accidents.
Another effect, obvious in the graph of meditation group sizes, is
attributable to August being vacation month in Israel. During August
Israelis leave the country in large numbers. Critically, the investigators
did not take into account the effects on fires and auto accidents of the
lower population in Israel during August, of the tendency to cook less
during hot weather, and of the potential for reduced war hostilities in the
desert heat.(17) It may be difficult, but the burden of eliminating these
possibilities rests upon the researchers.
THE LEBANON WAR
Orme-Johnson et al. highlighted the negative effects of meditation group
size on war intensity in Lebanon. Hostilities in the Lebanon war involved an
enormously complex interaction between a multitude of social, political and
military forces. A good sense of this complexity can be gleaned from The New
York Times Index "Middle East" entries for this period.(18) We offer several
observations:
Orme-Johnson et al. make no mention of the many widely publicized military
and political events that may have both influenced the Lebanon war and
induced meditators' patterns of participation. Many such events occurred
around the midpoint of the study, coinciding with the wildest fluctuations
in group size and war intensity. For example: (1) Israel announced it would
withdraw its army from the Shouf mountains overlooking Beirut to a line
along a river to the south. Major fighting erupted in Beirut just before the
announced withdrawal date. (2) During the study period Prime Minister Begin
both announced his intention to resign, and did so. (3) The Lebanese army
completed a successful sweep of Beirut. A lull then occurred until the
Israelis withdrew from the Shouf. Fighting promptly erupted among various
factions. (4) Within days battles were being waged over the Shouf by U.S.
and Druse militia, and the U.S. congress voted to keep the Marines in
Lebanon for 18 more months. No effort was made to ask meditators why they
showed up or stayed home in droves at various times during this period of
the study.(19)
In sum, it is hardly unreasonable to suppose that the fluctuations of the
dependent variables measured by Orme-Johnson et al. would have remained
exactly as they were even if there had been no meditators at all. The claim
that Marishi Effect theory provides the only plausible explanation of these
data cannot be sustained. There are alternative explanations that do not
depend on esoteric or paranormal influences.
Discussion and Conclusion
We have devoted considerable space to the analysis of a particular heterodox
report, the upshot of which is that, at this time, the claims of that report
do not merit being taken seriously by the scientific community. The theory
motivating the research is ill-constructed and not compelling in view of
prior knowledge; the evidence offered is not impressive and mundane
alternative hypotheses offer plausible explanations for the findings. Only
if its data were above suspicion, and no alternative explanations were
known, would Maharishi Effect theory warrant any significant confidence in
its truth. It is only by acquiring evidence of a sufficient quality and
quantity, rendering any thought of its rejection irrational, that the
heterodox theory ultimately can triumph.
Defenders of Orme-Johnson et al. might complain that we have not really
explained their data. After all, we have not demonstrated that the causal
factors we cite account for the observed correlations, nor have we
reanalyzed the data to show that the Maharishi effect vanishes when controls
are entered for all those test periods when known exogenous factors might be
influencing the results (which is almost for the entire duration of the
experiment). Such an objection would be entirely misplaced. The ball is in
the other court: It is sufficient, for the purposes of defense, that a
well-entrenched position offer plausible alternative explanations for the
challenging data. The detailed task of ruling out those explanations lies
properly with the challengers. Failing that, the heterodox theory cannot
rise even to the level of being worthy of serious consideration.
Our criticisms may be divided into those directed against the Maharishi
Effect theory and those disputing interpretations of their data. As to the
first, the main points were that the Maharishi Effect theory has serious
problems regarding the clarity and integrity of its arguments, and it does
not cohere well with other strongly confirmed theories, hence conflicting
with the evidence supporting those theories. Maharishi Effect theory is
underarticulated, often vague or enigmatic, reliant upon specious analyses,
and silent about key processes that link causes to their alleged effects.
These defects are not uncommon in novel theories, but in this case they
allow nothing better than crude plausibility arguments for its extraordinary
predictions. Contrast this with, say, the theory of relativity, which was
not only formulated in a highly precise fashion, but which entailed
relatively simple and numerically precise predictions for its tests. So
Marishi Effect theory has a low prior probability. That, after all, is what
makes it unorthodox, and its road to plausibility is bound to be arduous.
Not only must a great deal of supporting data be amassed but, most likely,
an indefinitely large body of established science will have to be overturned
or revised to accommodate the new results.(20)
This brings us to interpretation of evidence. The Maharishi Effect theory
predicts correlations that are supposed to support its causal claims.
Against those claims we have launched, in descending order of importance,
(1) arguments that offer concrete explanations of findings without invoking
the Maharishi Effect; (2) more speculative arguments from plausible
serendipity; and (3) arguments that do not explain a correlation between two
variables, but that suggest the dependent variable can be fully explained
without recourse to Sidhi group sizes. In the first class fall our
suggestions concerning fires, auto accidents, national mood, and the
immediate consequences of the Begin resignation; in the second category, our
speculations about the lull in the war during part of August; and in the
third, our mention of some of the many factors affecting the vicissitudes of
the war generally. Even without quantitative support, this sort of defense
of normal science is sufficient to undermine claims of plausibility on
behalf of unorthodox theories that claim quantitative support. The low prior
probability of a heterodox challenger suffices to establish a presumption of
guilt.
A further point is relevant to the social and historical sciences, which
often treat events that, once passed, can never be duplicated fully. Even
worse, relevant details, unless recognized to be significant and recorded at
the time, later may be unrecoverable. In this case normal science,
inevitably a Johnny-come-lately upon the scene, would suffer an irremediable
disadvantage if the demand for a fully developed alternative explanation had
to be met. Thus, unless a heterodox challenger can produce experiments that
are well controlled, thoroughly analyzable, and replicable, the standard of
disproof to which normal science can legitimately be held is quite low. Even
arguments of the weakest class (3, above) must be reckoned to weigh heavily
against any theory with a prior probability as low as that of Maharishi
effect theory.
Finally, we do not pretend to resolve two difficult but important practical
issues. First, to what extent should the scientific community devote time,
effort, and journal space to debates over unconventional theories, at the
expense of more conventional work that is more likely to be fruitful? We
offer two brief observations. First, when research is conducted on behalf of
an organized group (as was Orme-Johnson et al. 1988), its results will often
find publication in arenas that do not afford an opportunity for informed
rebuttal. Second, such rebuttals (as we have shown) need not be overly
expansive to undermine an unorthodox theory.
As for the second issue, publication confers a certain aura of legitimacy in
the eyes of the lay public and even in the research community. Proponents of
unorthodox theories know this and, as with proponents of Transcendental
Meditation, often attempt to parlay such recognition into research grants
and influence with public policymakers and the public at large. To what
extent does the scientific community have a responsibility to allow - or not
allow - these considerations to influence its handling of unconventional
proposals? How much responsibility the scientific community bears is, in
part, a function of the significance of the consequences of public
acceptance. Publication of an unorthodox medical claim, for example, might
dearly have severe consequences, whereas publication of some novel view
about the formation of igneous rocks most likely would not. It is here, in
any case, that a much wider understanding of the principle that publication
should not be taken to confer respectability in the sense of acceptability,
would be beneficial.
The authors contributed equally to this project. We are grateful to Scott
Eliason, Jeffrey Erger, Donald Krieger, Michael Lovaglia, and Philip Schrodt
for their insights and comments on an earlier draft. A much more
comprehensive treatment of the issues and analyses in this article is
available from the authors upon request. Direct correspondence to Evan
Fades, Department of Philosophy, or Barry Markovsky, Department of
Sociology, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, 52242. E-mail evan-
fa...@uiowa.edu or barry-m...@uiowa.edu.
Notes
1. This is expressed most rigorously by the formula P(T[where]e&k) =
P(T[where]k) x P(e[where]T&k) / P(e[where]k),
where P is the probability or level of confirmation of the theory (T), e is
the empirical evidence for T, and k is prior knowledge relevant to T. The
formula asserts that T is confirmed to the degree that P(T[where]k)
[approaches] 1, P(e[where]T & K) [approaches] 1, and P(e[where]k)
[approaches] 0.
2. If P(T[where]k) [approximately equal to] 0, and if, for every competing
alternative T, P(e[where]T & k) [approximately equal to] 0, then, even if
P(e[where]T & k) is high, P(e[where]k) will be very low. This follows from
the expansion
P(e[where]k) = [summation of]P([T.sub.i][where]k) where i = 1 to n x
P(e[where][T.sub.i] & k). This generalizes to the case where k [less than]
1, where k includes
well-established theories and their supporting data. In effect, because
those data support theories that conflict with T, they conflict with e.
Unless the truth of e has been established beyond any possibility of doubt,
this weakens rational credence in e. See Falk (1995) for a formal Bayesian
analysis.
3. In his classic discussion "Of Miracles," Hume ([1748] 1955) defends an
even more cavalier dismissal of heterodoxy. He observes that it is not
incumbent upon one to uncover fraud or error in dismissing every miracle
report. Nevertheless, we can feel confident in such a dismissal because the
occurrence of the miracle would violate our well-entrenched understanding of
nature, and would therefore be placed in competition for our allegiance with
the enormous mass of evidence which supports that understanding. It will
therefore be more likely than not that some undetected - perhaps
undetectable - mistake lurks behind the problematic data.
4. See also Wallace (1989) for a more comprehensive but less detailed
review. Hagelin is a faculty member of the Maharishi University of
Management and was the Natural Law Party's presidential candidate in 1992
and 1996. The NLP promotes Transcendental Meditation as the solution to
virtually all of society's ills.
5. Aron and Aron (1986:11) state this more bluntly: "the pure consciousness
experience is actually the subjective experience of what in physics is
called the 'unified field.'"
6. We are grateful to Wayne Polyzou, Yannick Meurice and Bill Klink of the
University of Iowa Department of Physics and Astronomy, for their input.
7. The intuitive answer is that individuals in the field "use up" the
"energy" generated by the meditators. However, this is not our understanding
of how the underlying physical field is presumed to operate, nor is it a
process that we have found discussed in the literature on Transcendental
Meditation.
8. Frederick Smith (personal communication), a Sanskritist at the University
of Iowa, notes that Hagelin's translation is an esoteric one, dramatically
different from that which standard Sanskritic scholarship delivers.
9. Important general questions have been raised by philosophers about the
content of k, prior knowledge. For practical purposes and in the present
context, however, it seems entirely fair to include in k, as we have done,
those well-established theories and data from physics and biology to which
Hagelin et al. themselves appeal.
10. In 1994 we were informed by the editor of the Journal of Conflict
Resolution that Abelson's article was forthcoming. It has not yet appeared
at this writing.
11. Schrodt (1990) cites research demonstrating that business cycles "cause"
sunspots and that eggs "cause" chickens (but not the reverse). The problem
is that the noisier the data, the greater the range of frequencies it
contains. Standard time-series methods then become ideally suited to
extracting whatever "effect" one desires.
12. A reanalysis of the data also would have been desirable, though not
essential for our case. However, David Orme-Johnson has refused numerous
requests for a copy of the raw data set.
13. Beyond the purview of this critique are the moral and ethical issues
that arise when meditators purport to alter experimentally the moods,
thought processes, and behaviors of others without their informed consent,
and when the transcendental meditation movement assigns itself the
responsibility of manipulating the substrate of all existence.
14. This is the approach adopted by Radin and colleagues in their
consciousness research (e.g., Radin, Rebman & Cross 1996). They look for
attentional effects in the anomalous output sequences of random number
generators.
15. We argue below that Sidhi group size is affected by some of the same
factors that influence the social indicators. Including Sidhi group size in
the analysis when it is below threshold is thus likely to increase the
"confirmatory" observations, artificially increase the apparent Maharishi
Effect, and further bias results in a direction favoring the hypothesis.
16. Confirmed in conversation with David Orme-Johnson and Charles Alexander.
17. Confirmed in conversation with Alexander.
18. We also relied on more extensive analyses provided by Frank (1987),
Friedman (1991), Schiff and Ya'ari (1984), and Yaniv (1987).
19. Confirmed in conversation with Alexander.
20. Transcendental Meditation researchers claim over 40 replications of the
Maharishi Effect. Of those which are published, most are in obscure or newer
journals (e.g., Hatchard, Deans, Cavanaugh and Orme- Johnson 1996). Moreover
no two "replications" that we have reviewed actually employ identical
procedures, measures and/or model specifications, and none of the field
studies employed safeguards against the sorts of problems we raise.
References
Abelson, Robert P. N.d. "Editorial Comment." Journal of Conflict Resolution.
Aron, Elaine, and Arthur Aron. 1986. The Maharishi Effect: A Revolution
Through Meditation. Stillpoint.
Cohen, Bernard P. 1989. Developing Sociological Knowledge. Nelson- Hall.
Davies, P.C.W., and J. Brown. Superstrings: A Theory of Everything?
Cambridge.
Fales, Evan, and B. Markovsky. 1995. "Evaluating Heterodox Theories: The
Maharishi's Extraordinary Social Physics." Presented at the annual meeting
of the American Sociological Association, Washington, D.C.
Falk, Arthur. 1995. "Wisdom Updated." Philosophy of Science 62:389- 403.
Frank, Benis M. 1987. U.S. Marines in Lebanon 1982-1984 Washington, D.C.:
History and Museums Division, Headquarters, U.S. Marine Corps. Government
Printing Office.
Friedman, Thomas L. 1991. From Beirut to Jerusalem. 2d ed. Farrar, Strauss,
Giroux.
Hagelin, John S. 1987. "Is Consciousness the Unified Field? A Field
Theorist's Perspective" Modern Science and Vedic Science 1:28-87.
-----. 1989. "Restructuring Physics From its Foundation in Light of
Maharishi Vedic Science." Modern Science and Vedic Science 3:3-72.
Hatchard, Guy D., Ashley J. Deans, Kenneth L. Cavanaugh and David
Orme-Johnson. 1996. "The Maharishi Effect: A Model for Social Improvement.
Time Series Analysis of a Phase Transition to Reduced Crime in Merseyside
Metropolitan Area." Psychology, Crime and Law 2:165-74.
Hume, David. [1748] 1955. An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding. New
York: Liberal Arts Press.
Markovsky, Barry. 1994. "The Structure of Theories." In Group Processes:
Sociological Analyses, edited by Martha Foschi and Edward J. Lawler.
Nelson-Hall.
-----. 1996. "Theory, Science, and "Micro-macro" Bridges in Structural
Social Psychology." Current Research in Social Psychology 1(4):30- 42,
http://www.uiowa.edu/~grpproc.
Orme-Johnson, David W., Charles N. Alexander, John L. Davies, Howard M.
Chandler, and Wallace E. Larimore. 1988. "International Peace Project in the
Middle East: The effects of the Maharishi Technology of the Unified Field."
Journal of Conflict Resolution 32:776-812.
Pagels, Heinz R. 1986. Affidavit No. 85-2849, United States District Court
for the District of Columbia.
Radin, Dean I., Jannine M. Rebman, and Maikwe P. Cross. 1986. "Anomalous
Organization of Random Events by Group Consciousness: Two Exploratory
Experiments." Journal of Scientific Exploration 10:143-68.
Schiff, Ze'ev, and Ehud Ya'ari. 1984. Israel's Lebanon War. Simon &
Schuster.
Schrodt, Philip A. 1990. "A Methodological Critique of a Test of the Effects
of the Maharishi Technology of the Unified Field." Journal of Conflict
Resolution 34:745-55.
Stenger, Victor J. 1990. Physics and Psychics. Prometheus.
Wallace, Robert Keith. 1989. The Neurophysiology of Enlightenment. MIU
Press.
Yaniv, Avner. 1987. Dilemmas of Security: Politics, Strategy, and the
Israeli Experience in Lebanon. Oxford University Press.
COPYRIGHT 1997 University of North Carolina Press
Fales, Evan; Markovsky, Barry, Evaluating heterodox theories.. Vol. 76,
Social Forces, 12-01-1997, pp 511(15).
"Lawson English" <eng...@primenet.com> wrote in message
news:B54F5C1...@207.218.84.69...
>
> On Mon, May 22, 2000 7:52 PM, Lon <mailto:Lo...@HotMail.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> >How did violent crime during those seven weeks compare with the crime
rate
> >in the seven weeks before the test, the seven weeks after the test, or
> >during the same seven weeks in previous years? Actually, the number of
> >murders during the meditation period was higher than for any seven-week
> >period before or since! True, but without the mediators, Hagelin solemnly
> >explained, the toll would have been even higher. It's lucky the mediators
> >were there just when they were most needed.
> >
>
> Murders were up. Every other catagory of violent crime, according to what
I
> have read, went down during that period, not just from predicted levels
but
> from the same period the year before.
>
> Significant?
>
> I have no idea, but if the article were at all unbiased it might have
> mentioned this fact.
>
Lon
"Lawson English" <eng...@primenet.com> wrote in message
news:B550B18...@206.165.44.3...
>
> On Tue, May 23, 2000 5:42 PM, Jonathan <mailto:mj...@deja.com> wrote:
> >
> 1 in 8 isn't a bad ratio at all.
>
> In fact, if you look at this year's "top 50" national schools, you'll find
> that the faculty of MUM has gotten undergrad/grad degrees from quite a
> few,l including:
>
> Harvard (#2), Yale (#4), Cornell (#11), NYU (#34), Oxford (n/a), Stanford
> (#6), Princeton (#4), University of Washington (#44), University of
> Virginia (#22), Yeshiva University NY (#44), Carnegie-Mellon (23),
> UC-Berkley (#20), UC-San Diego (#32), Brown University (#14), Dartmouth
> College (#11), Columbia U. (#10), Brandeis University (#29), UCLA (#25),
> MIT (#3), Notre Dame (#19), Duke(#7).
>
>
> That's 20 of the top 50 schools represented in the MUM faculty. All told,
> 24 of the 97 faculty members listed under the heading "faculty" [rather
> than adjunct/visting/whatever] have a degree from at least one of the
above
> top-50 schools. 25, if you count Oxford.
>
> That's 1/4 of the faculty have top-fifty credentials.
>
>
>
>
Avital Pilpel
> 1 in 8 isn't a bad ratio at all.
<sigh>
Riiiight, Lawson.
So far, what we've got is:
1). A universty "of management" with only EIGHT MBAs on the staff.
2). Despite the rant about all those good schools the staff went to, only
*1/8th* of them went to those top schools. Lawson desperately tries to
make this into 1/4th, still less than impressive, by deliberately
excluding those who are not permanent faculty. Of course, he *didn't*
exclude those people when he ranted about what a wonderful student/faculty
ratio the MUM got and how that makes it "a second tier college"...
3). The head of the physics department has won the "ig noble prize" in
1994 for making the dumbest remark about physics that year, and his former
collegues are furiously trying to disassociate themselves from him, lest
his kookiness rub off on them.
4). The former head of the university had the amazing "qualifications" of
an *honrary* degree from one of the *other*, unaccredited schools the
Maharishi founded.
Yes, sure signs of academic excellence we've got there. But, hey, that's
why it costs as much as any of the top ten school in the area...
Avital Pilpel
Avital Pilpel
> And so, his ability to administrate is based on his ability to research?
Wha ya hypocrite you are, Lawson...
When I claimed that the academic reputation of the school is shot, you
claimed that academic reputation is "subjective" and doesn't matter, and
what is "important" is the aademic DEGREES the people in the MUM got.
So, when it was shown to you that the ex-head of the university had no
degrees except for an honrary Ph.D. from an unacredited school, all of a
sudden you claim the degrees don't matter!
You keep moving the goalposts: whenever someone shows you that contrary to
your claims, the MUM is NOT good in whatever criterion you claimed is the
one that "really matters" for deciding its reputation, you simply ignore
it and demand the MUM be proven bad by yet ANOTHR criterion.
Of course, the result of that is - the MUM being what it is - that *all*
of the MUM's faults are laid out for all to see.
Avital Pilpel
Lawson English
On Wed, May 24, 2000 9:23 AM, Avital Pilpel <mailto:ap...@columbia.edu>
wrote:
>On 23 May 2000, Lawson English wrote:
>
>
><sigh>
>
>Riiiight, Lawson.
>
>So far, what we've got is:
>
>1). A universty "of management" with only EIGHT MBAs on the staff.
>
Not every student wants an MBA, you know. To keep that 10:1 ratio, as many
as 80 students (or about 8-10% of the school) could be taking management
courses.
>2). Despite the rant about all those good schools the staff went to, only
>*1/8th* of them went to those top schools. Lawson desperately tries to
>make this into 1/4th, still less than impressive, by deliberately
>excluding those who are not permanent faculty. Of course, he *didn't*
>exclude those people when he ranted about what a wonderful student/faculty
>ratio the MUM got and how that makes it "a second tier college"...
Actually, I excluded the non-resident faculty because "visiting faculty"
may or may not be teaching there.
As far as I can tell, the given ratio applies to the permanent faculty
only.
if there are less than 1,000 students, and there are 97 professors, that
works out to a faculty-student ratio of about 10/1...
>
>3). The head of the physics department has won the "ig noble prize" in
>1994 for making the dumbest remark about physics that year, and his former
>collegues are furiously trying to disassociate themselves from him, lest
>his kookiness rub off on them.
Unless, of course, his research is valid, in which case he's eligible for
the *Nobel* Peace prize and what does that have to do with his ability to
teach, or be a theoretical physicist, BTW?
>
>4). The former head of the university had the amazing "qualifications" of
>an *honrary* degree from one of the *other*, unaccredited schools the
>Maharishi founded.
Which has WHAT to do with his ability to adminstrate the needs of the
school?
His BA and MA in Philosophy from Oxford University indicates that he's a
reasonably intelligent person, I think.
>
>Yes, sure signs of academic excellence we've got there. But, hey, that's
>why it costs as much as any of the top ten school in the area...
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Lawson English
On Wed, May 24, 2000 9:35 AM, Avital Pilpel <mailto:ap...@columbia.edu>
wrote:
>On 23 May 2000, Lawson English wrote:
>
Er, the former head of the U. has a BA and MA in Philosophy from Oxford
University, England. His PhD may be honorary, but big whoop. He was/is an
administrator, although I'm sure he could adequately teach philosophy at
the undergrad level.
Lawson English
The permanent faculty? Likely 100%
The "adjunct" or "visiting" faculty are another matter entirely.
PZ Myers
<eng...@primenet.com> wrote:
Errrm, "big whoop" is right. If you have a *real* Ph.D., you actually
did work in a discipline, and demonstrated some mastery and depth in the
field. If you have an honorary Ph.D., you didn't. It's that simple.
However, I agree that an administrator doesn't need that much in the way
of academic credentials. Just don't go around claiming honorary pieces
of paper on the wall represent real academic firepower.
--
PZ Myers
Avital Pilpel
> >You keep moving the goalposts: whenever someone shows you that contrary to
> >your claims, the MUM is NOT good in whatever criterion you claimed is the
> >one that "really matters" for deciding its reputation, you simply ignore
> >it and demand the MUM be proven bad by yet ANOTHR criterion.
You didn't actually answer this point, now did you, Lawson? Gee, I wonder
why...
> Er, the former head of the U. has a BA and MA in Philosophy from Oxford
> University, England. His PhD may be honorary, but big whoop.
Yes, indeed, Big Whoop! Especially when YOU are the guy who kept claiming
that the "objective way" to test universities are the degrees the staff
earned and not their reputation!
How many of the "top tier" or "second tier" colleges, which you claim the
MUM is one of them, ever gave their *top job* to someone who didn't even
have a Ph.D.?
Want to bet that the answer is "none"?
What does THAT tell you about the level of MUM, if the degrees are so
important like you claim they are?
Your argument is: "degrees of the staff prove high quality when the MUM
staff has them, but don't say anything bad about the staff when it doesn't
have them."
No wonder you can "prove" the MUM is a "good" school.
> He was/is an
> administrator, although I'm sure he could adequately teach philosophy at
> the undergrad level.
So MUM, with all its "management courses", counldn't find a better
administrator than a philosophy MA?
What would you say of a hospital that gives its top job to someone with a
MA in French literature, explaining that "well, it's an administrative
job, so he doesn't have to be a doctor?"
Would you go there to get an operation? I wouldn't. In a similar vein, a
"university of management" that gives its top management position to a guy
with an MA in philosophy...
...just how good can its management be?
Avital Pilpel
Lawson English
On Wed, May 24, 2000 11:55 AM, Avital Pilpel <mailto:ap...@columbia.edu>
wrote:
>So MUM, with all its "management courses", counldn't find a better
>administrator than a philosophy MA?
>
>What would you say of a hospital that gives its top job to someone with a
>MA in French literature, explaining that "well, it's an administrative
>job, so he doesn't have to be a doctor?"
>
>Would you go there to get an operation? I wouldn't. In a similar vein, a
>"university of management" that gives its top management position to a guy
>with an MA in philosophy...
>
Sigh. The "management" in MUM was from a name change a few years back. The
guy you are complaining about is currently not with the school, although he
was for many years.
The school is all of 25 years old or so, and has only been accredited for
about 15 years or so.
Given its age, and everything else, I don't think it has done too badly.
Lawson English
On Wed, May 24, 2000 6:12 PM, willytex <mailto:will...@yahoo.com> wrote:
[massive amount snipt]
>What makes an object real? Are there two reals? Why or why not?
>
>- willytex <too much to do>
And I thot that *I* had too much time on my hands...
;-)
willytex
100...@sawasdee.cc.columbia.edu>,
Avital Pilpel <ap...@columbia.edu> wrote:
>
> So MUM, with all its "management courses", counldn't find a better
> administrator than a philosophy MA?
>
> What would you say of a hospital that gives its top job to someone
> with a MA in French literature, explaining that "well, it's an
> administrative job, so he doesn't have to be a doctor?" Would you go
> there to get an operation? I wouldn't. In a similar vein, a
> "university of management" that gives its top management position to
>
> Avital Pilpel
>
>
Avital - Most hospital administrators are not M.D.'s. You must be
thinking of the Chief of Staff, who indeed is usually a Medical Doctor.
Actually, most large companies like hospitals have administrators with
Ph.D's, i.e. 'Doctor of Philosophy'. But you knew that right?
- willytex
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.
willytex
askolnick <asko...@stopspam.mindspring.com> wrote:
>
> Hagelin is laughed at by the physics community and by many other
academics.
>
> And you are laughed at by nearly everyone on these newsgroups who
read your silly posts.
>
>
Skolnick - What makes you so sure we are laughing at Lawson? Actually,
I'm laughing more at your feeble attempts at humor and perception. I
think Lawson's doing pretty good, since I figure you were bested by
Judy long ago anyway. You even put up a website to prove it. You sounds
like a person with a lot of time on their hands. Any real work lately?
willytex
"Get real!"
Jeff wrote on 5/23
"All I did was cut and paste the article from Trancenet. I wrote
nothing original and no one is quoting me. As far as I can see the date
DeNaro gives as his last day is July 13, 1975. This must be a typo; I
had not noticed it and it was good sleuthing on Lawson's part to have
noticed the error. But what is important is the content of the article.
What DeNaro says should be considered very carefully by the TMers and
not just dismissed and denied. It's time to stop the denial of any and
all criticism of Yogi and TM/Sidhis. Some of the TMers here have
completely sold themselves out to Yogi and TM. To them I would say for
God's sake have the courage to question and doubt. It may be a lot
easier simply to let Yogi do your thinking for you but you'll gain a
ton of self esteem by thinking for yourself even if that means giving
up your cherished, childish idea of bliss and enlightenment and heaven
on earth and sunshine and lollipops."
Andrew A. Skolnick wrote on 5/24
"HEY! Sunshine and lollipops not only make people feel good, they are
real!"
>
Andrew - Jeff - Here is something to think about: I take exception to
your statement that 'lollipops' are real. I am not sure that I even
agree with you one hundred percent on the 'sunshine' issue.
Like Bales said, in order to evaluate the plausibility of your
argument, one would need solid grounding in contemporary philosophy and
logic, as well as physics. I consulted several professors and learned
that detailed philosophical systems are lacking in your area of
expertise, that is naive realism. Also, a number of theories compatible
with the existence of 'reals' have been considered in this newsgroup by
me and others, and they remain highly speculative. Moreover, many
philosophers and logicians have examined your theory of the 'real' and
found it highly dubious. (e.g., A.J. Bahm; D. Hume). Thus, although you
give the impression that your assumptions are well grounded, the
soundness of some of your metaphysical theories is open to question.
I am sure you are aware, that for the purposes of argument, a statement
such as you postulate, must have supporting data. The detailed task of
presenting those explanations lies properly with the postulant, namely
yourself. Failing that, the theory cannot rise even to the level of
being worthy of serious consideration.
Also, your theory of the 'real' receives low marks for meaningfulness.
A key term 'real', is undefined or only roughly characterized using
other complex, undefined terms or metaphors. 'Real' and "lollipop" are
not defined in physics nor philosophy. But the meanings of many crucial
expressions are clear, including "realist" "naive
realist" "materialist" and "skeptic". And while one can appreciate a
good skeptic, such as James Randi (in exposing us to the 'fairies' that
were ostensibly seen by Arthur Conan Doyle), your brand of skepticism
is particulary noteworthy for it's lack of humor and insight.
Consider Skolnick's use of the term 'swami' in describing Maharishi
Mahesh Yogi (A. Skolnick, 1991). First, the term 'swami' as a title or
descriptive term, relies on an undefined Sanskrit word, the meaning of
which is not self-evident. Second, the expression 'swami' is vacuous.
Third, identifying what 'swami' means still would not tell the reader
why Skolnick chose to describe Maharishi Mahesh Yoga as a 'swami'
instead of a 'yogi'. Be that as it may, a definition of 'swami'
and 'yogi' and his reason for using or not using a particular term does
not really help either, for Skolnick et al will not clearly state their
metaphysical position, yet they insist on using metaphysical
terminology and attempt to discuss spiritual matters.
Many parts of yours and his posts here are characterized by an
avalanche of still more vague esoterica. Without clear definitions of
what you mean by these terms, such as 'conciousness', 'guru', 'mantra'
etc. or how you interpret them, we must rely on guesswork. Your
fondness for muckracking and for insults is clear enough, and indicates
a common denominator here, but do you have any insights into the nature
of reality other than your naive realism and skepticism? For instance:
What makes an object real? Are there two reals? Why or why not?
- willytex <too much to do>
askolnick
I wonder if someone stuck a pin in this guy, how many hours -- or days --
would it take for all the hot gas to escape.
-- Andrew
Remember, the "F" in "Yogic Flying" is silent.
Dominion
Of course by claiming that the "Junk Yard Dog" page is proof that Judy
"The Mouth" bested Andrew you have instantly lost any credibility you
might have had.
No wonder you admire Lawson.
------------
- Dominion -
Debate. Create. Participate.
The Skeptical_Wiki
}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}
http://www.wikiweb.com/~Skeptical_Wiki
{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{}{
Dubitando ad veritatem venimus.
By doubting we come to the truth
Lawson English
On Wed, May 24, 2000 10:37 PM, Dominion
<mailto:dominion@take_this_out.pdq.net> wrote:
>On Thu, 25 May 2000 00:49:31 GMT, willytex <will...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>> In article <392A205C...@stopspam.mindspring.com>,
>> askolnick <asko...@stopspam.mindspring.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Hagelin is laughed at by the physics community and by many other
>>academics.
>>>
>>> And you are laughed at by nearly everyone on these newsgroups who
>>read your silly posts.
>>>
>>>
>>Skolnick - What makes you so sure we are laughing at Lawson? Actually,
>>I'm laughing more at your feeble attempts at humor and perception. I
>>think Lawson's doing pretty good, since I figure you were bested by
>>Judy long ago anyway. You even put up a website to prove it. You sounds
>>like a person with a lot of time on their hands. Any real work lately?
>>
>>- willytex
>
>Of course by claiming that the "Junk Yard Dog" page is proof that Judy
>"The Mouth" bested Andrew you have instantly lost any credibility you
>might have had.
>
>No wonder you admire Lawson.
Of course, most people automatically assume that anyone who creates a
web-page mocking someone else has lost it completely, but apparently you
aren't most people...
willytex
massive <snip>
"And I thot that *I* had too much time on my hands..."
>
transcendental when you are constantly engaged in insignificant
repartee with skeptics and materialists talking about subjects in which
they have absolutely no knowledge, practical experience, or insight.
Time indeed.
What about the problem of knowledge itself?
What is knowledge? Can there be knowing without that which is known? If
not, then what is it that is known? An object? What is an object? Can
an object exist without being known? Or do obè™»ects depend upon subjects
for their existence? Is all knowledge true? or may there be false
knowledge? What is meant by true and false? What are facts? Is it
proper to speak of unknown knowledge waiting to be discovered? How does
knowledge originate? What happens to knowledge after it has been
forgotten? What differentiates knowlè‹Ÿdge from belief? When are beliefs
reliable? What is error? Is certainty a matter of feeling, conviction,
faith, or do necessary truths exist regardless of our attitudes? Why
are some beliefs considered certain while others only probable? What is
the difference between sensation, perception, feeling, judgment,
experience, reasoning, thought, and appreciation? Is all science
knowledge and all knowledge science? These are just some of the issues
raised by Maharishi Mahes Yogi in the past thirty years.
Questions such as the foregoing constitute philosopher's problems, and
each person is a philosopher to the extent that he accepts them as his
own and/or seeks to solve them by means of the philosophical attitude
and methods. Most, but not all of the readers of this newsgroup will
previously have been confronted by, and, somewhat troubled by, these
questions. Most, but not all, may even already have partial answers to
them.
If one is not fully satisfied with his conclusions, it may be that he
has never seriously and systematically grappled with these questions.
The purpose of this newsgroup, as I see it, is to help readers
comprehend the significance of the problems of knowledge, reality, and
values, by discussing some of the major solutions presented by
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. These new ideas may be a challenge to those who
are yet engaged in philosophical slumber; yet those of us of a
spiritual bent will find them challenging and we will accept or reject
them.
- willytex <time to wake up>
willytex
<snip>
"I wonder if someone stuck a pin in this guy, how many hours -- or
days -- would it take for all the hot gas to escape."
>
one, since remember: the 'k' in ASkolnick is silent. Be that as it may,
severe and contemptous criticism has been levelled against your
doctrine of Skepticism by all school of Indian Philosophy. Brhaspati is
regarded as the traditional founder of this school. Unfortunately, his
Sutra has been lost, therefore, it is difficult, if not imposible, to
accurately reconstruct his doctrine, and since you refuse to state your
philosophical position clearly, and you have not rebutted my posts
describing this dictrine, I can only infer that you are a Materialist.
If so, the question is: What is a valid means of knowledge?
The epistemological doctrine of Brhaspati's school is that perception
is the only means of knowing. Do you agree? If so, you would reject
even inference, as a valid means of knowledge. To accecpt the validity
of perception and, at the same time, reject the validity of inference
is thoughtless self-contradiction. And why?
The basis for this whole conversation about meditation is that
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi infered that there must be something other or
beyond our normal perceptions. Hence, his use of the word
transcendental. A specific instance of his logic was stated in 1972 at
a lecture Maharishi gave called 'A Promise for the Family of Man: An
Introduction to SCI', Jones Hall 1972; where he stated "We INFER that
there must be something,..." To refuse the validity of inference is to
refuse to think and to discuss. All thoughts, all discussions, all
affirmations and denials, all proofs and disproofs are made possible by
inference.
In fact, the Materialist position is, itself, based on inference.
Thoughts and ideas, not being material objects, cannot be seen, they
can only be infered. Not only that, but perception itself is often
found to be false. We percieve the earth as flat, but it is almost
round; we percieve the disc of the sun as being of small size, but it
is much larger than the earth. All these arguments, in themselves,
cannot account for the radical rejection of Materialsism, as a system
of philosophy. Why do you think Materialism is really rejected?
By the way, Andrew, still with the AMA?
- willytex
Jeff Ridley
willytex wrote in message <8ghulc$92b$1...@nnrp1.deja.com>...
:
Your fondness for muckracking and for insults is clear enough, and indicates
:a common denominator here, but do you have any insights into the nature
:of reality other than your naive realism and skepticism? For instance:
:What makes an object real? Are there two reals? Why or why not?
:
:- willytex <too much to do>
There appear to be two types of people: one that sees reality quite clearly
and can discern what is really happening; and the other that misunderstands
all they see. The reality that some of us are pointing out is the reality of
what Yogi is up to and what TM/Sidhis really does. I don't give a toss about
philosophical debate about the reality or illusion of the world because when
it comes to the crunch all of us behave unconsciously as if the world and
its objects are real regardless of what clever theories we may espouse. If
you can't even tell the reality that lies behind Yogi's not so clever false
appearance what possible hope can you have to discern the reality behind the
infinitely more convincing appearance of the world?
Ken H.
"Jeff Ridley" <jri...@direct.ca> wrote in message
news:mFaX4.8818$58.3...@brie.direct.ca...
>
>
>
> There appear to be two types of people: one that sees reality quite
clearly
> and can discern what is really happening; and the other that
misunderstands
> all they see. The reality that some of us are pointing out is the reality
of
> what Yogi is up to and what TM/Sidhis really does.
And the reality that others are pointing out is that we believe Maharishi
and in what TM/TM sidhis offer and based on that belief, practice the
techniques he offers and are involved in whatever programs he offers that we
choose to participate in. We also live in the world, have families, jobs,
friends, etc.
>If you can't even tell the reality that lies behind Yogi's not so clever
false
> appearance what possible hope can you have to discern the reality behind
the
> infinitely more convincing appearance of the world?
And I say to you if you can't even tell the reality behind the regular
practice of the TM technique and the chance to, if not achieve spiritual
enlightenment then at least fast forward your spiritual evolution, then I
feel sorry for you. You will wake up at some point down the road and
realize all the time you wasted bashing one of our spiritual saviors.
Ken H.
Lon
this group was something else, but it's not. Again Chilly Willy here's the
FAQ the rest are working from. On second thought you know them very well,
don't you?
"willytex" <will...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:8gjc1r$8rf$1...@nnrp1.deja.com...
Jeff Ridley
Ken H. wrote in message <8gje64$b0m$1...@nntp9.atl.mindspring.net>...
:And I say to you if you can't even tell the reality behind the regular
:practice of the TM technique and the chance to, if not achieve spiritual
:enlightenment then at least fast forward your spiritual evolution, then I
:feel sorry for you. You will wake up at some point down the road and
:realize all the time you wasted bashing one of our spiritual saviors.
:
:Ken H.
Spiritual enlightenment is to the TMer what heaven is to the Christian:
merely concepts that provide hope for a future happiness. The here and now
is all there is and is real. Concepts are not real. Waking up means
accepting life as it is. If you are dreaming of spiritual enlightenment then
you are still asleep.
Ken H.
Based on my personal experiences over 30+ years I am positive I am not
dreaming and that spiritual enlightenment, as I understand it, is not an
unreal concept and that I am waking up to it/in it, more each and every day.
I am sorry to tell you that, in my opinion, you are the one that is
sleeping.
kh
askolnick
Your provocative discourse just probes the skin of the universal beast. We
need to explore further for a better grasp of life's meaning. Why is a door
something that a dog always wants to be on the other side of? What is it
that the dog is telling us? And do wet birds really fly at night? No,
Willy, when you come down to it, the questions you pose are really
superficial. We need to probe much deeper. Close your eyes. What do you
see? The darkness of your eyelids. But when we blink, we do not see our
eyelids. We do not see this darkness for a reason. Many like you are
content to look the other way and not stare into the abyss of such
mysteries. But it is profound questions such as these that must be addressed
if any meaningful answers are to be found.
For example, why is Arkansas pronounced "Arkansaw," but Kansas is not
pronounced "Kansaw"? And why do people accept these contradictions without
questioning? Indeed, this question is at the heart of why you fear to look
deeper than the superficial level you are content to ponder.
Why does the modest avocado tree need such an enormous pit while towering
redwood trees sprout from tiny seeds? Why do some people, like the
Maharishi, take so much and give so little, while others, take so little and
give so much?
Why is it better to love and lose than never to love at all? And why does "I
love you" always begin with "I"? If we truly love some one, shouldn't we put
them first and say, "You I love"? And why, did Augustus MacCrae have to
die? Was it his karma for cheating a poke out of Lorena?
If beauty is skin deep, why do we wear clothes? Are we afraid of beauty?
Must we always hide our eyes from the truth? If clothes make the man, does
he die when he undresses? And what are women made of? Are they just older
sugar and spice and everything nice? And what happened to one of the three
blind mice that the clock struck? Was he killed or just injured? We are not
told.
So you see wee Willy, you need to look further than your own navel. Or at
least clean out all that smelly lint.
Jai guru dev,
Andrew
willytex wrote:
I thought so. You're just one of those phantasmogoric bad dreams. Whew!
-- Andrew
willytex
<snip>
"There appear to be two types of people: one that sees reality quite
clearly and can discern what is really happening; and the other that
misunderstands all they see. The reality that some of us are pointing
out is the reality of what Yogi is up to and what TM/Sidhis really
or illusion of the world because when it comes to the crunch all of us
behave unconsciously as if the world and its objects are real
tell the reality that lies behind Yogi's not so clever false appearance
what possible hope can you have to discern the reality behind the
infinitely more convincing appearance of the world?"
Jeff - Nice theory. Unfortunately, it is full of holes. Appearances can
be decieving, especially when generalizing about people. There are not
two kinds of people Jeff, there are billions of kinds of people, all
with their own conception of reality, and probably none see too
clearly. If you think that you are one of the few that can see reality
clearly, would you plese post your philosophical system here for us to
read. The only reality that you have pointed out so far is how
inexperienced you are in matters of metaphysics and philosophy, yet you
insist on using metaphysical terms to describe your views and to talk
about spiritual matters. But let me see, according to what you post
above, the world is 'as if real because when it comes to the 'crunch',
whatever that is, we 'unconciously' accept the world and its objects as
real', but 'yogi has a clever false appearance'. Hardly convincing
postulates. And besides, that is precisely what we are asking about
here Jeff. Is there such a 'state of being' as 'conciousness'
or 'unconciousness' or is this world limited to 'objects' and 'things'?
What do you mean by 'seeing', 'reality', 'yogi', 'TM/Sidhis' [sic]
etc.? What is your level of expertise in these matters? We already know
you don't give a toss about philosophical debates and that you accept
the 'world', whatever you think that is, as real. If is true that you
don't 'give a toss' why bother to debate? I don't buy into that view
that we need someone, like yourself, to save us from ourselves. What
qualifications do you have, except the claim to use 'skepticism' as
your philosophy, yet break the rules of common sense repeatedly? As
pointed out by Judy ad infinitum. And thanks to Andrew, all there for
us to review.
Consider that in its beginnings, philosophy is neither abstract nor
abstruse, for it starts with the simplest, clearest, and most obvious
questions. Only when simple answers conflict with each other are we
forced to look for more complex solutions. When perplexities arise in
previously settled areas of belief, we naturally feel that what was
obvious now is obviously not obvious.
Thus, for common-sense reaons alone, one is led to abandon common
sense. The complexities to which one is drawn inhere in the very
questions which one asks himself when he begins to wonder. Whoever
pursues his questions, even with a matter-of-fact attitude, soon finds
himself demanding insights which agree neither with the viewpoints
which he shares with others nor with his own past opinions.
- willytex
Avital Pilpel
> The school is all of 25 years old or so, and has only been accredited for
> about 15 years or so.
>
> Given its age, and everything else, I don't think it has done too badly.
Ah, so now the backpeddaling begins...
No longer is it a "second, perhaps top tier" college, is it, Lawson?
Now you just claim that "given its age, it didn't do too badly".
Avital Pilpel
willytex
"Your provocative discourse just probes the skin of the universal
beast. We need to explore further for a better grasp of life's meaning.
Why is a door something that a dog always wants to be on the other
side of?"
Andrew - What universal? What on earth could you be talking about? Are
there universals in this world? Tackling first the inquiry into
the 'nature a dog' and a 'thing called a door', let us consider just
what common sense tells us about a door. It is colored, It is solid. It
has size and shape. It is heavy and it endures. If we left the room and
came back later, it would still be there and would have been there all
of the time, unless, of course, someone had moved it in our absence.
Our looking at it does not affect it, does not change its nature, does
not modify it in the least. Its color, size, and shape really are just
as we see them. We could feel its weight if we lifted it. When many of
us look at it, we can all see the same thing.
If anyone doubts the foregoing statements, he is usually judged a bit
strange. Yet, common sense itself gives rise to doubts which lead us
eventually to deny many of these assumptions. In order to name the view
held more or less commonly by unreflective people, for purposes of
comparing it with more reflective views, epistmologists have come to
adopt certain fairly standardized terms. The view just described is
sometimes called the "Common Sense View," or "Common-Sense Realism."
Since it is a view which we acquire and hold naturally, it has been
called 'Natural Realism'. Because such natural acquisition occurs
without much reflection, or naively, it may be referred to as 'Naive
Realism'. Naive Realism Philosophers are reflective, whereas naive
realists are unreflective.
Therefore, there are reflective accounts of an unreflective views. For,
strictly speaking, the moment a naive realist reflects upon his view he
is no longer completely naive. Thus, the naive realist is something of
a straw man set up by epistemologists to represent us in our
unreflective moments. This straw man may not be quite like any of us,
for most of us have reflected somewhat. Yet we can recognize that it
represents a view we hold much of the time.
Naive Realist View
1. Objects which are known exist independently of their being known.
They can endure or continue to exist without being experienced by
anyone. Knowing the objects does not create them.
2. Objects have qualities, or, if one prefers, properties,
characteristics, or attributes, which are parts of the objects. As
qualities of objects, they do not derive their existè‹Ÿnce or nature from
the knower.
3. Objects, including their qualities, are not affected merely by being
known. Knowledge of objects in no way changes their nature.
4. Objects seem as they are and are as they seem. Or, as we sometimes
say, an object that seems obviously so is so.
5. Objects are known directly; that is, there is nothing between them
and our knowledge of them. They occur in our experience. We experience
them exactly as they are without distortion by any intervening medium.
6. Objects are public; that is, they can be known by more than one
person. Several people can see the same object and see it exactly as it
is.
Trouble arises for the naive realist when attention is called to the
fact that the first and fifth statements are incompatible.
As for 'Why Arkansas is pronounced "Arkansaw," but Kansas is not
pronounced "Kansaw"? that is an easy one. It is because a lot of people
don't realize that these terms are from a foriegn language. As for
the 'avocado tree needing such an enormous pit while towering redwood
trees sprout from tiny seeds?' this sounds exactly like the rhetorical
kind of question Maharishi has asked. He claims that it is because
there is a 'cosmic order' in the universe called 'dharma' or 'Natural
Law'. What explanation do you have? Is there such a thing
as 'Dharma', 'rta' or 'divine cosmic law'? Or do things happen because
of cause and effect, or by fate. Or again, is it preordained or does a
creator inject itself into human history and cause change? Are things
created?
"Why is it better to love and lose than never to love at all? And why
does "I love you" always begin with "I"? If we truly love some one,
shouldn't we put them first and say, "You I love"? And why, did
Augustus MacCrae have to die? Was it his karma for cheating a poke out
of Lorena?"
Andrew - What scriptures say it is better to love and lose, than not to
love at all? Wasn't this statement made by a secular poet? What is
love? What is 'I'? What is 'Karma'?
"If beauty is skin deep, why do we wear clothes? Are we afraid of
beauty? Must we always hide our eyes from the truth? If clothes make
the man, does he die when he undresses? And what are women made of? Are
they just older sugar and spice and everything nice?"
Andrew - Maybe its for seeing.
"And what happened to one of the three blind mice that the clock
struck? Was he killed or just injured? We are not told."
Andrew - It is unfortunate that you were not told, or did not bother to
find out, about the meaning of the blind mice limerick. Delia might be
able to explain it better than I. I noticed that she has become quite
fond and adept at these esoteric subjects. As I recall, three blind
mice ran up the clock because they had stolen the farmers wife and they
wanted to escape from the blade. Interpreted, in your case, it would
mean that you ran off with Maharishi's name to make a name for
yourself, JAMA didn't have time for anymore yellow journalism, so you
tried a newsgroup and you got your tail cut off by someone who knew
more than you did. The one blind mouse, namely you, was then left
injured and hurt by inattention, so you put up a website about someone
else and was forced to debate with a guy named Lawson, who pretty much
finished you off. The real question is why would you want to run off
with someone else's name and fame for your own self-aggrandizement,
instead of doing some original research. You should be thanking
Maharishi, your very own straw man, for whatever infamy you have
achieved.
But wait, you are a savior of mice and want to save all of us poor mice
from ourselves.
Dominion
wrote:
>
>On Wed, May 24, 2000 10:37 PM, Dominion
><mailto:dominion@take_this_out.pdq.net> wrote:
>>On Thu, 25 May 2000 00:49:31 GMT, willytex <will...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>>
>>> In article <392A205C...@stopspam.mindspring.com>,
>>> askolnick <asko...@stopspam.mindspring.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Hagelin is laughed at by the physics community and by many other
>>>academics.
>>>>
>>>> And you are laughed at by nearly everyone on these newsgroups who
>>>read your silly posts.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>Skolnick - What makes you so sure we are laughing at Lawson? Actually,
>>>I'm laughing more at your feeble attempts at humor and perception. I
>>>think Lawson's doing pretty good, since I figure you were bested by
>>>Judy long ago anyway. You even put up a website to prove it. You sounds
>>>like a person with a lot of time on their hands. Any real work lately?
>>>
>>>- willytex
>>
>>Of course by claiming that the "Junk Yard Dog" page is proof that Judy
>>"The Mouth" bested Andrew you have instantly lost any credibility you
>>might have had.
>>
>>No wonder you admire Lawson.
>
>Of course, most people automatically assume that anyone who creates a
>web-page mocking someone else has lost it completely, but apparently you
>aren't most people...
I do not believe that most people automatically assume that anyone who
creates a web page mocking someone has lost it completely. I believe
Lawson English wishes it were so. I suspect most people did what I did
which is go and read what the man has to say. Once you read the Junk
Yard Dog page, you get the true sense of what a debate with you and
Judy entails. Now you may not like that Lawson, and it does not
surprise me that you don't, but everything on that page is true. I
have read the page and have checked the archives.
You and Judy are a joke. Get used to it.
I am still working on your cites Lawson. So far I can't find one that
shows that TM is a better technique than other methods. Of course you
also had that twisted definition of "better" that I did not accept so
perhaps that is the problem.
Since I am still working your list would you like to tell me where
those emails are from those consultant you have been communicating
with? Was I right Lawson? Were you only going to dispute start up cost
and ignore all the other points I brought up? Or was it that your
consultants agreed with me? Or is it even possible you were lying?
I am sure we would all love to know.
Lawson English
On Thu, May 25, 2000 8:03 AM, Lon <mailto:Lo...@HotMail.com> wrote:
>Tex you can't even keep a thread going on these matters here. You can
wish
>this group was something else, but it's not. Again Chilly Willy here's
the
>FAQ the rest are working from. On second thought you know them very well,
>don't you?
>
Actually, I far prefer willytex's questions to the TM/anti-TM-bashing that
is the norm on this newsgroup.
Erick A. Heikkila
says...
>
<snyppe>
>
>Why is it better to love and lose than never to love at all? And why does "I
>love you" always begin with "I"?
English is an SVO -language?
Lawson English
On Thu, May 25, 2000 7:07 AM, willytex <mailto:will...@yahoo.com> wrote:
[wonderous questions snpt]
>
>If one is not fully satisfied with his conclusions, it may be that he
>has never seriously and systematically grappled with these questions.
>The purpose of this newsgroup, as I see it, is to help readers
>comprehend the significance of the problems of knowledge, reality, and
>values, by discussing some of the major solutions presented by
>Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. These new ideas may be a challenge to those who
>are yet engaged in philosophical slumber; yet those of us of a
>spiritual bent will find them challenging and we will accept or reject
>them.
>
>- willytex <time to wake up>
These are all engaging issues. I think that MMY's quote says it best:
"knowledge is structured in consciousness"
In other words, whatever answer we come up with will change as we mature.
This maturity might still be of a "relative" nature ala Piaget's stages, or
it might be post/trans-piaget, ala
enlightenment/physiological-state-of-consciousness (or paerhaps, both).
In the end, the issues will only be resolved when we are fully enlightened
(AKA "in 'Unity'"), and there we will allegedly see ALL possible
perspectives as partially valid.
Or something like that.
In the meantime, it is fun to argue with Skeptics, Seekers, etc.
-as much for the insights that we gain about *ourselves* as about any
clarification of the issues that might arise, I think.
Lawson English
On Thu, May 25, 2000 8:28 AM, Jeff Ridley <mailto:jri...@direct.ca> wrote:
>
>Ken H. wrote in message <8gje64$b0m$1...@nntp9.atl.mindspring.net>...
>:And I say to you if you can't even tell the reality behind the regular
>:practice of the TM technique and the chance to, if not achieve spiritual
>:enlightenment then at least fast forward your spiritual evolution, then I
>:feel sorry for you. You will wake up at some point down the road and
>:realize all the time you wasted bashing one of our spiritual saviors.
>:
>:Ken H.
>
>
>Spiritual enlightenment is to the TMer what heaven is to the Christian:
>merely concepts that provide hope for a future happiness. The here and now
>is all there is and is real. Concepts are not real. Waking up means
>accepting life as it is. If you are dreaming of spiritual enlightenment
then
>you are still asleep.
>
True. But for the enlightened man, what others call 'being awake', he calls
being asleep, and what others call 'being awake,' he calls 'being asleep.'
This, according to MMY, is a reference to the experience of "witnessing"
during sleep, dreaming and waking, AKA "Cosmic Consciousness" (CC) in MMY's
lexicon.
This is said to be a state where the Pure Consciousness state sometimes
attained during TM practice, has become a 24/7 reality as a none-changing
background of "wakefulness" during all states of consciousness.
There's even a pilot study on witnessing sleep:
Mason, L, Alexander, C., Travis, F, Marsh, Orme-Johnson, D.W., Gackenback,
J., Mason, D.C., Rainforth, M., & Walton, K.G. (1997). Electrophysiological
correlates of higher states of consciousness during sleep in long-term
practitioners of the Transcendental Meditation program. Sleep, 20: 102?110.
<http://www.mum.edu/psych_dept/eeg/eeg6.html>
Lawson English
On Thu, May 25, 2000 9:49 AM, Avital Pilpel <mailto:ap...@columbia.edu>
wrote:
I said that, on certain measures, it was a 2nd, perhaps top-tier, school.
You've complained that the chief administrator didn't have a normal PhD,
and therefore it couldn't be very good.
WELLL, given that it is only 24 years old (and only accredited for half
that time), I think that this last is not very important. PhD's are a dime
a dozen these days. The first and second presidents of MUM had PhDs, but,
by all accounts, were not as able administrators as the 3rd president of
MUM, who stayed in that position for well over a decade.
By YOUR criteria, in order for the school to be acceptable, the MUM
trustees should have rejected the better administrator in favor of a less
competent one, simply based on academic credentials.
In my business (computer programming), one runs into this issue all the
time. Software houses run by programmers tend to favor accomplishments and
raw talent over degrees when hiring. Software houses run by suits tend to
look at degrees first and foremost because they don't have the ability to
evaluate talent and experience.
Guess which businesses tend to produce better products?
willytex
"I suspect most people did what I did which is go and read what the man
has to say. Once you read the Junk Yard Dog page, you get the true
sense of what a debate with you and Judy entails."
Dominion - What I got after reading the site and seeing Skolnick in
action, is that he could not win a debate on the newsgroup, so he put
up a website as a way of trying to win his argument. Even a cursory
review of the threads on this newsgroup this month show at least a half
dozen unrebutted posts by Judy. Judy, on the other hand makes a
standing offer to debate anyone, anywhere, anytime on any subjects
mentioned on the site and gets no takers. Huh?
On 5/7 Judy Stien wrote
<snip>
"This site, in fact, is a *superb* collection of demonstrations of the
accuracy of my characterization of Andrew.
I have a standing invitation for anyone (including Andrew) to pick
anything from that site concerning me and post it here for
documentation of how it represents Andrew's malicious deceptions.
For him to suggest that I ever lie or attempt to deceive in any way is
the most egregious of Andrew's lies. Of course, he doesn't have much
choice; if he were to acknowledge that I always tell the truth, that
would amount to admitting he lies.
But it's a really difficult position for him to maintain, since there
is such copious evidence in the newsgroup archives that he *does* lie,
routinely, casually, maliciously; and since neither he nor anyone else
has ever *once* managed to pin a lie on me.
Of course, there are also the questions that arise about the mental
stability of a person who would create an entire Web site devoted to
slandering one of his chief critics."
Dominion - A web page that selectively snips, extracts, and arranges
words from members of a newsgroup without their knowledge or consent,
is not a debate. We have a word for it here where I work. But I have
noticed that several persons think nothing of copying and pasting
copyrighted material to this newsgroup and elsewhere. A simple hyper-
link would suffice in most cases; no need to use up bandwidth. Mike
already saw to it that his biased web site Trancenet got a hyper link
on the so-called amt FAQ. Debate indeed.
And speaking of jokes. I'm looking over your posts too.
askolnick
> On 5/25 Andrew A. Skolnick wrote
>
> "Your provocative discourse just probes the skin of the universal
> beast. We need to explore further for a better grasp of life's meaning.
> Why is a door something that a dog always wants to be on the other
> side of?"
>
> Andrew - What universal? What on earth could you be talking about? Are
> there universals in this world? Tackling first the inquiry into
> the 'nature a dog' and a 'thing called a door', let us consider just
> what common sense tells us about a door. It is colored, It is solid. It
> has size and shape. It is heavy and it endures.
Thus we have another example of how Wiliytongue presumes overreaching
generalizations or outright falsehoods to reach a baseless conclusion that
satisfies some obscure craving. Like the time he argued that birds cannot
fly straight because they have only one wing, and that the fact that crows
fly straight is the exception that proves the rule. Whether talking about
birds or doors, he clearly is no deep thinker
Here he presumes several non-truths about doors, for reasons that may not
even be clear to him: A door "is colored," he says. "It is solid," he says.
"It is heavy and endures," he says. But of course none of those statements
are necessarily true. I am looking outside my window at a glass door. It is
transparent and has no color. And some doors are hollow, made of flimsy
plywood that would cave in if anyone to bang on it too hard. Such are the
doors of the House that Maharishi built.
Wiliytongue then goes on to spin further webs of falsehoods:
> "And what happened to one of the three blind mice that the clock
> struck? Was he killed or just injured? We are not told."
>
> Andrew - It is unfortunate that you were not told, or did not bother to
> find out, about the meaning of the blind mice limerick. Delia might be
> able to explain it better than I. I noticed that she has become quite
> fond and adept at these esoteric subjects. As I recall, three blind
> mice ran up the clock because they had stolen the farmers wife and they
> wanted to escape from the blade.
Why Wiliytongue wants to deceive us about these matters is unclear. First,
he seeks to mislead us by calling the "Three Blind Mice" nursery rhyme a
"limerick." Of course, it's no more a limerick than it is an opera overture.
He then tries an even more devilish deception, by accusing the mice of
"stealing" the farmer's wife. The mice, or course, are totally innocent of
such a crime. Why has he so cruelly defamed three disabled mice with such a
scurrilous and false accusation?
Is it because of his long-time habit of spouting apologetics for con men and
other miscreants, that Willytex felt a need to justify the farmer wife's
sadism? By making the handicapped little mice into "thieves," he would claim
that the wife was justified hacking them up with a carving knife.
Yet, Wiliytongue's deception does not stop there. There was NO farmer's
wife at all in the three mice ran up a clock nursery rhyme, as you can
clearly see:
Hickory-dickory dock,
Three mice ran up the clock.
The clock struck one,
And away they ran.
Hickory-dickory dock.
There is no "slasher" wife in this remarkably simple but profound story of
nature vs. human invention. Wee Willytex tried to put one over on us.
We must examine the reasons why he would attempt such subterfuge --
especially considering its not too subtle sadistic and misogynous
overtones.. Is he a pathological liar who cannot help himself? Perhaps. The
fact that there seems to be no real gain in his lie suggests that that may
be the case. He lies, simply because it is his nature.
Or is it because he is like Lawson, "rowing his boat without all his soda
straws in the water?" Perhaps. He does claim to admire Lawson and find his
discombobulated blather both meaningful and inspiring.
But then, he could also be lying about that.
Most likely, we will never know what makes the Wiliy one tick or tock. So
let's just call him "Rosebud" and get on with our lives.
-- Andrew
There was a crooked man who walked a crooked road and he told everyone it
leads to Nirvana.
Dominion
>On 5/25 Dominion wrote
>"I suspect most people did what I did which is go and read what the man
>has to say. Once you read the Junk Yard Dog page, you get the true
>sense of what a debate with you and Judy entails."
>
>Dominion - What I got after reading the site and seeing Skolnick in
>action, is that he could not win a debate on the newsgroup, so he put
>up a website as a way of trying to win his argument. Even a cursory
>review of the threads on this newsgroup this month show at least a half
>dozen unrebutted posts by Judy. Judy, on the other hand makes a
>standing offer to debate anyone, anywhere, anytime on any subjects
>mentioned on the site and gets no takers. Huh?
Of course you fail to note that any argument with Judy eventually ends
up with her making trivial charges about the words you are using.
"Well when you say this it is obvious you really mean this" Spare me.
>On 5/7 Judy Stien wrote
><snip>
>"This site, in fact, is a *superb* collection of demonstrations of the
>accuracy of my characterization of Andrew.
>
>I have a standing invitation for anyone (including Andrew) to pick
>anything from that site concerning me and post it here for
>documentation of how it represents Andrew's malicious deceptions.
I have seen Judy attempt to document deceptions. Again it usually
boils down to "You said this, but it is obvious by using definitions
that are only clear to me that you are a liar". Big deal.
>For him to suggest that I ever lie or attempt to deceive in any way is
>the most egregious of Andrew's lies. Of course, he doesn't have much
>choice; if he were to acknowledge that I always tell the truth, that
>would amount to admitting he lies.
And yet Andrew manages to document quite a few lies from Judy. Good
substantial lies too, not piddly little semantic tricks. Makes ya
wonder eh?
>But it's a really difficult position for him to maintain, since there
>is such copious evidence in the newsgroup archives that he *does* lie,
>routinely, casually, maliciously; and since neither he nor anyone else
>has ever *once* managed to pin a lie on me.
Which in and of itself is a lie. See Judy does not even have to be in
posting in the newsgroup to lie. It is simply amazing what YogiTech
(tm) can do for you.
>Of course, there are also the questions that arise about the mental
>stability of a person who would create an entire Web site devoted to
>slandering one of his chief critics."
After reading the Junk Yard Dog page one walks away with clear
questions about mental stability, but it ain't Andrew's your
questioning.
>Dominion - A web page that selectively snips, extracts, and arranges
>words from members of a newsgroup without their knowledge or consent,
>is not a debate. We have a word for it here where I work. But I have
>noticed that several persons think nothing of copying and pasting
>copyrighted material to this newsgroup and elsewhere. A simple hyper-
>link would suffice in most cases; no need to use up bandwidth. Mike
>already saw to it that his biased web site Trancenet got a hyper link
>on the so-called amt FAQ. Debate indeed.
LOL, willy you old fox you. Sorry misdirection does not work very well
on a magician (ask Lawson) but nice try. There are no post on that
site that are selectively snipped. Obviously it is edited because of
the nature of usenet, but if you really have any doubts about the msg
threads there is always Deja. See willy unlike certain true believers,
when I read a web page I go beyond it. Andrew in no way made it
difficult for people to go to Deja to check out what he was saying. I
did that. Did you? No of course you didn't.
>And speaking of jokes. I'm looking over your posts too.
LOL. I am shaking in my boots. Let us hope you do a better job than
Lawson!
Stu
come through for you here. I thought, perhaps you are right - there is no
transcendental consciousness we are all just mold eating away at this planet
until the next mold takes over.
But you did not do your research, you shot from the hip and missed.
in article 392DB6CD...@stopspam.mindspring.com, askolnick at
asko...@stopspam.mindspring.com wrote on 5/25/00 4:27 PM:
> Wiliytongue Willytex wrote:
>
>> On 5/25 Andrew A. Skolnick wrote
>>
>> "Your provocative discourse just probes the skin of the universal
>> beast. We need to explore further for a better grasp of life's meaning.
>> Why is a door something that a dog always wants to be on the other
>> side of?"
>>
>> Andrew - What universal? What on earth could you be talking about? Are
>> there universals in this world? Tackling first the inquiry into
>> the 'nature a dog' and a 'thing called a door', let us consider just
>> what common sense tells us about a door. It is colored, It is solid. It
>> has size and shape. It is heavy and it endures.
>
> Thus we have another example of how Wiliytongue presumes overreaching
> generalizations or outright falsehoods to reach a baseless conclusion that
> satisfies some obscure craving. Like the time he argued that birds cannot
> fly straight because they have only one wing, and that the fact that crows
> fly straight is the exception that proves the rule. Whether talking about
> birds or doors, he clearly is no deep thinker
>
> Here he presumes several non-truths about doors, for reasons that may not
> even be clear to him: A door "is colored," he says. "It is solid," he says.
> "It is heavy and endures," he says. But of course none of those statements
> are necessarily true. I am looking outside my window at a glass door. It is
> transparent and has no color. And some doors are hollow, made of flimsy
> plywood that would cave in if anyone to bang on it too hard. Such are the
> doors of the House that Maharishi built.
I looked at the original post I could find no allusions to the nature of
doors. Windowed or otherwise. Perhaps you did not understand the deeper
meaning of his discourse.
> Wiliytongue then goes on to spin further webs of falsehoods:
>
>
>> "And what happened to one of the three blind mice that the clock
>> struck? Was he killed or just injured? We are not told."
>>
>> Andrew - It is unfortunate that you were not told, or did not bother to
>> find out, about the meaning of the blind mice limerick. Delia might be
>> able to explain it better than I. I noticed that she has become quite
>> fond and adept at these esoteric subjects. As I recall, three blind
>> mice ran up the clock because they had stolen the farmers wife and they
>> wanted to escape from the blade.
>
> Why Wiliytongue wants to deceive us about these matters is unclear. First,
> he seeks to mislead us by calling the "Three Blind Mice" nursery rhyme a
> "limerick." Of course, it's no more a limerick than it is an opera overture.
> He then tries an even more devilish deception, by accusing the mice of
> "stealing" the farmer's wife. The mice, or course, are totally innocent of
> such a crime. Why has he so cruelly defamed three disabled mice with such a
> scurrilous and false accusation?
>
> Is it because of his long-time habit of spouting apologetics for con men and
> other miscreants, that Willytex felt a need to justify the farmer wife's
> sadism? By making the handicapped little mice into "thieves," he would claim
> that the wife was justified hacking them up with a carving knife.
>
> Yet, Wiliytongue's deception does not stop there. There was NO farmer's
> wife at all in the three mice ran up a clock nursery rhyme, as you can
> clearly see:
>
> Hickory-dickory dock,
> Three mice ran up the clock.
> The clock struck one,
> And away they ran.
> Hickory-dickory dock.
>
This rhyme is not at issue and it goes:
Hickory-dickory dock,
The mouse ran up the clock.
The clock struck one,
And away they ran.
> Hickory-dickory dock.
> There is no "slasher" wife in this remarkably simple but profound story of
> nature vs. human invention. Wee Willytex tried to put one over on us.
>
Three Blind Mice
Three Blind Mice
See how they run
See how they run
They all ran after the farmer's wife
Who cut off their tail with a carving knife
Did you ever see such a sight in your life
as three blind mice.
We can see the farmers wife clearly had motivation. As does Willietex as he
chases you philosophically. Andrew - you are like the blind mice dancing in
random circles to escape the knife edge of a positive and enlivening
philosophy that dares to say that all things are possible and we humans have
unlimited capabilities.
> We must examine the reasons why he would attempt such subterfuge --
> especially considering its not too subtle sadistic and misogynous
> overtones.. Is he a pathological liar who cannot help himself? Perhaps. The
> fact that there seems to be no real gain in his lie suggests that that may
> be the case. He lies, simply because it is his nature.
>
Andrew you are not a liar, you are only misinformed. There is much more to
the world than simply running around scaring farmer's wives. If the blind
mice opened their eyes they would see that the world is not limited to cold
scientific fact but is full of grace and wonder. Realizing that they would
not waste their pathetic lives scaring farmers wives but instead looked for
a constructive and creative outlets for their ambitions.
> Or is it because he is like Lawson, "rowing his boat without all his soda
> straws in the water?" Perhaps. He does claim to admire Lawson and find his
> discombobulated blather both meaningful and inspiring.
>
> But then, he could also be lying about that.
>
> Most likely, we will never know what makes the Wiliy one tick or tock. So
> let's just call him "Rosebud" and get on with our lives.
>
> -- Andrew
>
> There was a crooked man who walked a crooked road and he told everyone it
> leads to Nirvana.
For a fee. ;-)
askolnick
> Andrew, I was really rooting for your scientific deterministic arguments to
> come through for you here. I thought, perhaps you are right - there is no
> transcendental consciousness we are all just mold eating away at this planet
> until the next mold takes over.
>
> But you did not do your research, you shot from the hip and missed.
I was not "arguing" you silly goose! I was blathering nonsense. I was mimicking
the crackpot sophistry that Wee Wiliypretex obviously thinks are deep
philosophical thoughts. ROTFL.
And now you also want to debate the "motivation" of the farmer's wife for cutting
off the tail of three mind mice with her carving knife.
Too funny for words!
-- Andrew
Jeff Ridley
willytex wrote in message <8gjleg$gdk$1...@nnrp1.deja.com>...
:
:What do you mean by 'seeing', 'reality', 'yogi', 'TM/Sidhis' [sic]
:etc.? What is your level of expertise in these matters? We already know
:you don't give a toss about philosophical debates and that you accept
:the 'world', whatever you think that is, as real. If is true that you
:don't 'give a toss' why bother to debate? I don't buy into that view
:that we need someone, like yourself, to save us from ourselves. What
:qualifications do you have, except the claim to use 'skepticism' as
:your philosophy, yet break the rules of common sense repeatedly? As
:pointed out by Judy ad infinitum. And thanks to Andrew, all there for
:us to review.
:
:Consider that in its beginnings, philosophy is neither abstract nor
:abstruse, for it starts with the simplest, clearest, and most obvious
:questions. Only when simple answers conflict with each other are we
:forced to look for more complex solutions. When perplexities arise in
:previously settled areas of belief, we naturally feel that what was
:obvious now is obviously not obvious.
:
:Thus, for common-sense reaons alone, one is led to abandon common
:sense. The complexities to which one is drawn inhere in the very
:questions which one asks himself when he begins to wonder. Whoever
:pursues his questions, even with a matter-of-fact attitude, soon finds
:himself demanding insights which agree neither with the viewpoints
:which he shares with others nor with his own past opinions.
:
Philosophy holds no answers. Your mind is full of concepts. You seem to like
to display philosophical knowledge in the same way that you used to
shamelessly display the names of celebrities with whom you had allegedly
associated many years ago. You wear them like medals. But I am sure you've
read the Zen stories of proud intellectuals being stripped of their
accumulated learning and finally learning to stop their grasping minds. You
may even have heard of 'beginner's mind' and 'don't know mind', etc. This
refers to the non grasping mind that is content to not know. There is
nothing to be gained that you don't already have. If you are looking for
your key and you look in your pocket and find the key is not there then you
don't continue looking in your pocket. Philosophy is empty. There is no key.
Live in not knowing.
askolnick
Stu wrote:
> Andrew, I was really rooting for your scientific deterministic arguments to
> come through for you here. I thought, perhaps you are right - there is no
> transcendental consciousness we are all just mold eating away at this planet
> until the next mold takes over.
>
> But you did not do your research, you shot from the hip and missed.
I was not "arguing," you silly goose! I was blathering nonsense. I was mimicking
the crackpot sophistry that Wee Wiliypretex obviously thinks is deep
philosophical thoughts. ROTFL.
And now you also want to debate the "motivation" of the farmer's wife for cutting
off the tail of three blind mice with her carving knife.
Avital Pilpel
> You've complained that the chief administrator didn't have a normal PhD,
> and therefore it couldn't be very good.
a-Hem.
What really happened was that, when you were faced with the fact that the
MUM is rated as literally the *worst* school in the region, ranted that it
is unfair because what "really" matters is the "objective" measure of what
degrees the teachers in the school got.
When it turned out that by YOUR SCALE, this "management" university has
only eight MBAs, and that the ex-president of the university had an
honorary Ph.D. from a Maharishi unaccredited school, you changed the
subject.
> WELLL, given that it is only 24 years old (and only accredited for half
> that time), I think that this last is not very important.
Funny, Lawson, it WAS terribly important to you to show all those great
Ph.Ds the MUM faculty had when you ranted how "unfair" it was to judge
them by their degrees and not by their (rock-bottom) reputation.
All of a sudden, it doesn't matter?
> PhD's are a dime
> a dozen these days.
If this is the case, why were you huffing and puffing about all the
important universities that gave the MUM's faculty their Ph.D.? After all,
that doesn't matter, now does it - "Ph.D.s are a dime a dozen these days".
> The first and second presidents of MUM had PhDs, but,
> by all accounts, were not as able administrators as the 3rd president of
> MUM, who stayed in that position for well over a decade.
Ah, but Lawson, don't you KNOW that such "accounts" are just subjective
nonsense - at least when they rank the MUM low on the reputation scale? Do
you have OBJECTIVE PROOF that they did better? How do you know that those
who wrote all those "accounts" actually knew what they were talking about?
Isn't it FAR BETTER to rely on the "objective facts" that the first
administrators had Ph.D.s and this guy didn't? After all, you ranted that
checking degrees is the way to go when the "unobjective" reputation score
didn't go your way...
(see how easy is it to deny facts when you feel like it, Lawson?)
> In my business (computer programming), one runs into this issue all the
> time. Software houses run by programmers tend to favor accomplishments and
> raw talent over degrees when hiring.
But that means they rely on the REPUTATION of the programmer that they
hire! Isn't that a TOTALLY UNFAIR way to do it? How do they know that all
those who gave them opinions about the programmer really KNOW how that
programmer is REALLY like?
Obviously, your company uses such totally subjective, unfair criterions
like "repuatation" - even after you PROVED it is meaningless in your
defense of the MUM when you dismissed its abyssimal reputation as
unimportant!
What a horrible way to run a company...
Avital Pilpel
Jeff Ridley
Ken H. wrote in message <8gjhq4$l6d$1...@nntp9.atl.mindspring.net>...
:
:Based on my personal experiences over 30+ years I am positive I am not
:dreaming and that spiritual enlightenment, as I understand it, is not an
:unreal concept and that I am waking up to it/in it, more each and every
day.
:I am sorry to tell you that, in my opinion, you are the one that is
:sleeping.
Regardless of which one of us is right, it's good to see you stepping into
the fray and fighting. There was a time when you wouldn't. In fact you
wanted to start your own news group where only people who said positive
things about TM and Yogi were allowed. I felt this was rather childish. It's
to your credit that you are willing to state your opinions and defend your
beliefs in a forum such as a.m.t. Say what you think, take your knocks,
don't get upset, give as good as you get, have fun.
Stu
asko...@stopspam.mindspring.com wrote on 5/25/00 8:16 PM:
> Stu wrote:
>
>> Andrew, I was really rooting for your scientific deterministic arguments to
>> come through for you here. I thought, perhaps you are right - there is no
>> transcendental consciousness we are all just mold eating away at this planet
>> until the next mold takes over.
>>
>> But you did not do your research, you shot from the hip and missed.
>
> I was not "arguing" you silly goose! I was blathering nonsense. I was
> mimicking
> the crackpot sophistry that Wee Wiliypretex obviously thinks are deep
> philosophical thoughts. ROTFL.
>
> And now you also want to debate the "motivation" of the farmer's wife for
> cutting
> off the tail of three mind mice with her carving knife.
>
> Too funny for words!
>
> -- Andrew
I guess I am a victim of sarcasm and/or ironies. I am glad I raised a smile.
It takes me back to a paper I wrote in college concerning existentialism and
tooth decay: a dental hygienist's insights into nothingness.
I am still open to the farmer's wife motivational debate, it would be no
worse than arguing for days over the inadequacies of MUM. Live and let live,
why get upset because there are people out there willing to shell out the
bucks for a dream of a perfect world? Who cares?
Sometimes the rhetoric on this NG gets thick.
It is too bad though that Willytex's thoughts are lost on you.
--
~Stu
Lawson English
On Thu, May 25, 2000 8:58 PM, Avital Pilpel <mailto:ap...@columbia.edu>
wrote:
>
>> The first and second presidents of MUM had PhDs, but,
>> by all accounts, were not as able administrators as the 3rd president of
>> MUM, who stayed in that position for well over a decade.
>
>Ah, but Lawson, don't you KNOW that such "accounts" are just subjective
>nonsense - at least when they rank the MUM low on the reputation scale? Do
>you have OBJECTIVE PROOF that they did better? How do you know that those
>who wrote all those "accounts" actually knew what they were talking about?
>Isn't it FAR BETTER to rely on the "objective facts" that the first
>administrators had Ph.D.s and this guy didn't? After all, you ranted that
>checking degrees is the way to go when the "unobjective" reputation score
>didn't go your way...
Those who scored MUM low on the academic reputation tally may or may not
have had valid reasons to do so, but do you know how many actually
responded?
Opinion polls need a percentage-responding column to be evaluatable.
>
>(see how easy is it to deny facts when you feel like it, Lawson?)
>
>> In my business (computer programming), one runs into this issue all the
>> time. Software houses run by programmers tend to favor accomplishments
and
>> raw talent over degrees when hiring.
>
>But that means they rely on the REPUTATION of the programmer that they
>hire! Isn't that a TOTALLY UNFAIR way to do it? How do they know that all
>those who gave them opinions about the programmer really KNOW how that
>programmer is REALLY like?
Presumably, everyone who is asked, responds. The person asking knows for
sure how many people were asked and how many responded.
Not so with the data under discussion.
>
>Obviously, your company uses such totally subjective, unfair criterions
>like "repuatation" - even after you PROVED it is meaningless in your
>defense of the MUM when you dismissed its abyssimal reputation as
>unimportant!
>
>What a horrible way to run a company...
Heh. When someone asks a former employer what the applicant's reputation
is, the former employer generally has some idea of how to respond.
Certainly, the person asking the question knows how the former employer
responded.
Do YOU know how many people responded to the question of MUM's academic
reputation?
Do you think that this matters?
Lawson English
On Thu, May 25, 2000 9:30 PM, Avital Pilpel <mailto:ap...@columbia.edu>
wrote:
>On 25 May 2000, Lawson English wrote:
>
calls
>> being asleep, and what others call 'being awake,' he calls 'being
asleep.'
>
>in really annoying ways just to spite.
You snipt the rest of the article.
Avital Pilpel
> True. But for the enlightened man, what others call 'being awake', he calls
> being asleep, and what others call 'being awake,' he calls 'being asleep.'
Apparently, the "enlighthened man" is either a). Insane, or b). uses words
in really annoying ways just to spite.
Avital Pilpel
Dominion
wrote:
You know Avital I have read that sucker three times and it still makes
no sense to me.
"what others call 'being awake' he calls being asleep and what others
call 'being awake, he calls 'being asleep'"? Is this supposed to be
profound? Because Lawson said the same thing twice?
It seems to me that the enlightened man has simply has trouble knowing
when the people around him are awake. The enlightened man thinks that
everyone around him, at all times, sleeps. I would think this would
lead to either extreme boredom, since the enlightened man cannot
communicate with anyone since they appear to be doubly asleep, or to
rude behavior, the enlightened man screaming "wake up" all the time to
his fellow being.
And what about the enlightened women? Does she also think everyone
around her sleeps at all times, apparently twice as much? <???> What
sort of enlightened behavior would this lead too? I mean my wife
elbows me in the side if I dare fall asleep during one of her
"enlightenment" raps. Will enlightenment lead to frustration which
will spiral into violence? And just why did we leave out the
enlightened woman? Does it have something sinister to do with Yogi's
background? Perhaps the enlightened women is not as enlightened as the
enlightened man?
Bottom line. I would like to know just who the hell can SLEEP with all
this LIGHT!
Dominion
Third-world education at world class prices!
Don't you just love the way it drips from your tongue?
Dominion
wrote:
>
>On Thu, May 25, 2000 8:58 PM, Avital Pilpel <mailto:ap...@columbia.edu>
>wrote:
>>
>>> The first and second presidents of MUM had PhDs, but,
>>> by all accounts, were not as able administrators as the 3rd president of
>>> MUM, who stayed in that position for well over a decade.
>>
>>Ah, but Lawson, don't you KNOW that such "accounts" are just subjective
>>nonsense - at least when they rank the MUM low on the reputation scale? Do
>>you have OBJECTIVE PROOF that they did better? How do you know that those
>>who wrote all those "accounts" actually knew what they were talking about?
>>Isn't it FAR BETTER to rely on the "objective facts" that the first
>>administrators had Ph.D.s and this guy didn't? After all, you ranted that
>>checking degrees is the way to go when the "unobjective" reputation score
>>didn't go your way...
>
>Those who scored MUM low on the academic reputation tally may or may not
>have had valid reasons to do so, but do you know how many actually
>responded?
>
>Opinion polls need a percentage-responding column to be evaluatable.
What nonsense. If one person out of all people questioned said that
MUM sucked, and because of that one person MUM failed on the opinion
portion of poll, there is more than enough objective evidence that he
was correct. Lawson you have yet to really challenge Avital on any of
his points. You are so desperate to grab anything that you have
totally lamed here.
But what I think REALLY matters here is whether or not MUM overcharges
out the ass for the education that you get. Lawson, you have done
everything you can to ignore this. Is the education you get at MUM
worth the amount you are paying? If I were a freshman investigating a
college, MUM would make me laugh.
>>(see how easy is it to deny facts when you feel like it, Lawson?)
>>
>>> In my business (computer programming), one runs into this issue all the
>>> time. Software houses run by programmers tend to favor accomplishments
>and
>>> raw talent over degrees when hiring.
>>
>>But that means they rely on the REPUTATION of the programmer that they
>>hire! Isn't that a TOTALLY UNFAIR way to do it? How do they know that all
>>those who gave them opinions about the programmer really KNOW how that
>>programmer is REALLY like?
>
>
>Presumably, everyone who is asked, responds. The person asking knows for
>sure how many people were asked and how many responded.
>
>Not so with the data under discussion.
Once again Lawson thinks that funny little world he lives in applies
to reality. First off, I am sure that the organization that asked
these universities to rate each other KNEW how many college were asked
and how many responded. When I hire someone for some job, certainly
*I* know who I called for references and I know how they responded.
But if you think that the person that I am hiring does, your nuts. If
I were hiring you for a job I would not call you up and say 'Hey
Lawson, I called three of your friends and this is how they rated
you". I don't set up stats on every person I hire to keep track of who
I called and what they said. I do my calls, I hear what they say, and
I rate them on that bases.
>>
>>Obviously, your company uses such totally subjective, unfair criterions
>>like "repuatation" - even after you PROVED it is meaningless in your
>>defense of the MUM when you dismissed its abyssimal reputation as
>>unimportant!
>>
>>What a horrible way to run a company...
>
>Heh. When someone asks a former employer what the applicant's reputation
>is, the former employer generally has some idea of how to respond.
>Certainly, the person asking the question knows how the former employer
>responded.
Are you saying that the colleges that responded with a negative rating
for MUM did not know what they were talking about? ROTFLMAO! All
Avital has done was so that MUM sucks as a university, and hell I am
not even sure it would not get a giggle as a high school. Even for the
sake of argument I grant you that none of them knew a thing about MUM,
it would be one case where ignorance was right on the money!
>Do YOU know how many people responded to the question of MUM's academic
>reputation?
Who cares. If it were one person that hated Yogi and gave MUM a
negative rating on that bases alone that person would still be right
on the money.
>Do you think that this matters?
Only you think it matters Lawson. After all the negative things that
have been brought out about MUM for you to complain because we don't
know who responded and what they said is obscene. The fact is that an
entering freshmen at MUM is going to pay out the nose for his
education and then he is going to be laughed at when he graduates. Try
dealing with that!
Dominion
wrote:
>
>On Thu, May 25, 2000 9:30 PM, Avital Pilpel <mailto:ap...@columbia.edu>
>wrote:
>>On 25 May 2000, Lawson English wrote:
>>
>>> True. But for the enlightened man, what others call 'being awake', he
>calls
>>> being asleep, and what others call 'being awake,' he calls 'being
>asleep.'
>>
>>Apparently, the "enlighthened man" is either a). Insane, or b). uses words
>>in really annoying ways just to spite.
>
>You snipt the rest of the article.
Lawson you are such a fuckin' hypocrite that it is amazing. For you,
YOU, of all people, to complain about someone snipping an entire post.
This goes right up there with the "your following me around" bullshit.
How do you sleep at night?
Lon
"Stu" <HH...@nospam.net> wrote in message
news:B5534CB1.71CD%HH...@nospam.net...
> Sometimes the rhetoric on this NG gets thick.
> It is too bad though that Willytex's thoughts are lost on you.
> --
> ~Stu
And everyone else who is not a true believer/cult member.
Lon
her evolution/enlightenment is to have children.
"Dominion" <dominion@take_this_out.pdq.net> wrote in message
news:4861D22D5BCA30C5.FACC1D14...@lp.airnews.net...
> On Fri, 26 May 2000 00:30:14 -0400, Avital Pilpel <ap...@columbia.edu>
> wrote:
>
> >On 25 May 2000, Lawson English wrote:
> >
> >> True. But for the enlightened man, what others call 'being awake', he
calls
> >> being asleep, and what others call 'being awake,' he calls 'being
asleep.'
> >
> >Apparently, the "enlighthened man" is either a). Insane, or b). uses
words
> >in really annoying ways just to spite.
>
> You know Avital I have read that sucker three times and it still makes
> no sense to me.
>
> "what others call 'being awake' he calls being asleep and what others
> call 'being awake, he calls 'being asleep'"? Is this supposed to be
> profound? Because Lawson said the same thing twice?
>
> It seems to me that the enlightened man has simply has trouble knowing
> when the people around him are awake. The enlightened man thinks that
> everyone around him, at all times, sleeps. I would think this would
> lead to either extreme boredom, since the enlightened man cannot
> communicate with anyone since they appear to be doubly asleep, or to
> rude behavior, the enlightened man screaming "wake up" all the time to
> his fellow being.
>
> And what about the enlightened women? Does she also think everyone
> around her sleeps at all times, apparently twice as much? <???> What
> sort of enlightened behavior would this lead too? I mean my wife
> elbows me in the side if I dare fall asleep during one of her
> "enlightenment" raps. Will enlightenment lead to frustration which
> will spiral into violence? And just why did we leave out the
> enlightened woman? Does it have something sinister to do with Yogi's
> background? Perhaps the enlightened women is not as enlightened as the
> enlightened man?
>
> Bottom line. I would like to know just who the hell can SLEEP with all
> this LIGHT!
>
>
askolnick
> Dom, remember the old fart believes that the best thing a woman can do for
> her evolution/enlightenment is to have children.
I'm sure that was what was going through Maharishi's mind when he tried to get
Mia Farrow into bed. Only Mia didn't want his "enlightenment."
And remember, this is the young woman who would later be "enlightened" by
Frank Sinatra.
-- Andrew
Erick A. Heikkila
>
>On 5/25 Andrew A. Skolnick wrote
>"I wonder if someone stuck a pin in this guy, how many hours -- or
>days -- would it take for all the hot gas to escape."
>>
>Andrew - Good question. You would probably be the one to answer this
>one, since remember: the 'k' in ASkolnick is silent.
ASolnick or ASkolnic?
Stu
5/26/00 5:29 AM:
If for nothing else Mr. William's ability to spell all those long Indian
names is noteworthy. This is not the first time you have referred to me as
a "believer". I am not sure where the "leap of faith" is in this notion of
there being more to the world than what our limited sensory organs deliver
to us. Most of Mr. William's text is questioning the nature of what is lost
in the translation as we confront the world.
As for being a cult member. I am finding myself siding more and more with
you, Legion, Andrew and Dom. Not so much for what you guys post, but for
what I read subtextually in Lawson, Theo, Chet and Ken's posts. The cult
itself is wacked. I can't help feeling that the weirdness of the movement
(stuff that gives Area 51 buffs a run for its money) is seated in either
structural problem or perhaps the basic tenants of Yoga have been
misinterpreted and twisted.
--
~Stu
Avital Pilpel
> >> True. But for the enlightened man, what others call 'being awake', he calls
> >> being asleep, and what others call 'being awake,' he calls 'being asleep.'
> >
> >Apparently, the "enlighthened man" is either a). Insane, or b). uses words
> >in really annoying ways just to spite.
>
> You know Avital I have read that sucker three times and it still makes
> no sense to me.
>
> "what others call 'being awake' he calls being asleep and what others
> call 'being awake, he calls 'being asleep'"? Is this supposed to be
> profound? Because Lawson said the same thing twice?
On such "deep" claims, my dad likes to say, "it is like discussing the
beauty in truth and the teauty in bruth".
Avital Pilpel
Chet McCann
>If for nothing else Mr. William's ability to spell all those long Indian
>names is noteworthy. This is not the first time you have referred to me as
>a "believer". I am not sure where the "leap of faith" is in this notion of
>there being more to the world than what our limited sensory organs deliver
>to us. Most of Mr. William's text is questioning the nature of what is lost
>in the translation as we confront the world.
>
>As for being a cult member. I am finding myself siding more and more with
>you, Legion, Andrew and Dom. Not so much for what you guys post, but for
>what I read subtextually in Lawson, Theo, Chet and Ken's posts. The cult
>itself is wacked. I can't help feeling that the weirdness of the movement
>(stuff that gives Area 51 buffs a run for its money) is seated in either
>structural problem or perhaps the basic tenants of Yoga have been
>misinterpreted and twisted.
>--
>~Stu
>
Stu...
Please don't lump me in with people. Lawson, Theo, and Ken are
probably fine lads, but I doubt my "subtext" is the same as any of
them. I came on to this n.g. with critical questions about the TM
movement. I've never been part of "the cult," though I did allow
certain ideas of the movement to roost in my mind at certain periods.
I realized I was giving those ideas and attitudes the right to dwell
in my mind, however.
I'm going to repeat something I wrote to Judy Stein when she
questioned my background and capacity for comment on the TM
movement...
[to Judy]
I choose to read and consider your posts with the most receptive frame
of mind I can bring to them, rather than to take the tone of your
remarks as supercilious.
FYI... I read Science of Being first in 1971. Around that time I took
the TM "checker's" course. I read MMY's Gita translation first in
about 1974. I bought and read Anthony Campbell's Seven States of
Consciousness around the time it came out. I have also re-read these
books, attended at least four or five residence courses, taken
advanced techniques, and spent most of a month with MMY and a large
group of TMers. I've dropped into the TM centers more times than I
could estimate, and have kept up (to a certain degree) with both the
literature published by the movement and with some of the coverage in
local and national newspapers and magazines.
Among my acquaintances is a psychologist who was also a TM teacher.
After a few years of study of TM from a (non-MIU) scientific
standpoint, he left the movement in order to take a more objective
view of TM's effectiveness.
My comments, questions, and musings are on the basis of this
background, and not derive from a lack of such. I'm not a dedicated
basher of the TM movement. I feel there is much good in it, though
perhaps it has a distorted self appraisal, to some degree...
So, what I'd like to say is I neither slam the TM movement as totally
worthless, nor do I defend it by any means as flawless.
... Chet
lJr
"askolnick" <asko...@stopspam.mindspring.com> wrote in message
news:392E7193...@stopspam.mindspring.com...
lJr
willytex
"In my business (computer programming), one runs into this issue all
the time. Software houses run by programmers tend to favor
houses run by suits tend to look at degrees first and foremost because
they don't have the ability to evaluate talent and experience.
Guess which businesses tend to produce better products?"
>
Lawson - It's hard to know if someone's good at what they do, harder if
they do complex things. Although it's not a guarantee of competence,
the difficulty of making that determination is why professionals are
certified.
I run into this problem all the time with paper MCSE's and paper CNA's
here where I work. Working for an academic institution also has it's
own set of problems, i.e. 'tenure', where faculty are rewarded for
length of service. The easiest mistake is to expect too much of
certification and academic credentials.
Personally, I feel that the fact that Morris Bevan has a Masters degree
in Philosophy from Oxford and that he has spent countless years at
Rishikesh studying and practicing yoga and meditation, pretty much
makes him a good candidate to be President of a University which
integrates meditation into a study curriculum. I do not know him
personally; this is just an opinion.
From the point of view of the individual, meditation and TM
certification will take time and cost money. Like IT certification, the
experienced person may not have to study as much as a rookie, but you
still have to study the format. You can expect certain fees like any
other course, plus the cost of your time. Time and cost suggest that
there must be a payoff from such study.
From the point of view of a newsgroup that reads about TM and
meditation, we expect to benefit from the knowledge of experienced
meditators who post. That is why those posting on amt should have at
least, some experience in meditation of some kind, and be able to
clearly articulate their experience to others. Taking the certification
analogy a bit further, we should expect from posters:
1) Competency - Although certification is no guarantee that a meditator
knows what he is doing or can explain what he is doing, we get some
assurance that the posting individual meets a certain standard, that
is, he has experienced an altered state at least once, and that he uses
basic defined terminology understandable by the readers.
2) Definition tradition - Whether the subject
is 'meditation', 'yoga' 'mantra' etc. there's been no one standard for
what these terms apply to or what they mean. If you choose your words
carefully, readers gain some assurance that the scope of what is being
described is relavant to the topic. This is important and there should
be no gaps.
3) Objective measure - Because certification is granted on a verbal
basis either by a teacher or his associates, you get certain minimum
standards for evaluation.
Preferably, posters would have experienced at least some degree of
transcendance. Otherwise, one can only assume that they are posting out
of curiosity, or that they are just conducting a trolling excersise in
negative dialectic. One often wonders why rookies insist on projecting
expertise on topics for which they have no expertise.
A one or two hour self-study course in microcomputer architecture for
an A+ certification isn't a substitute for two or three years of in-
field training or education. A certified technician may or may not be
the person you want installing a high-speed mainboard. Certainly with
regards to meditation claims, like any other discipline, you expect a
degree of expertise and experience.
Otherwise, you can pretty much take what they say about spiritual
matters, especially metaphysical pronouncements, with a grain of salt,
that is, unless they are just being maliciously obnoxious, in which
case experts can easily expose their false claims to competency,
knowledge and expertise.
Lawson English
On Fri, May 26, 2000 5:44 AM, askolnick
<mailto:asko...@stopspam.mindspring.com> wrote:
>Lon wrote:
>
>> Dom, remember the old fart believes that the best thing a woman can do
for
>> her evolution/enlightenment is to have children.
>
>I'm sure that was what was going through Maharishi's mind when he tried to
get
>Mia Farrow into bed. Only Mia didn't want his "enlightenment."
>
>And remember, this is the young woman who would later be "enlightened" by
>Frank Sinatra.
>
I thought she was already married to Sinatra at that point.
Lon
middle way. But of late it's been hard to tell, and all that gray area gets
in the way of my black and white world.
"Stu" <HH...@nospam.net> wrote in message
news:B553E6E2.71E1%HH...@nospam.net...
> in article sisrf...@corp.supernews.com, Lon at Lo...@HotMail.com wrote
on
> 5/26/00 5:29 AM:
>
> >
> > "Stu" <HH...@nospam.net> wrote in message
> > news:B5534CB1.71CD%HH...@nospam.net...
> >> Sometimes the rhetoric on this NG gets thick.
> >> It is too bad though that Willytex's thoughts are lost on you.
> >> --
> >> ~Stu
> >
> > And everyone else who is not a true believer/cult member.
>
Lawson English
On Fri, May 26, 2000 8:57 AM, Avital Pilpel <mailto:ap...@columbia.edu>
wrote:
Actually, I mis-quoted.
It was supposed to be:
For the enlightened man, what others call 'being awake', he calls 'being
asleep,' and what others call 'being asleep', he calls 'being awake.'
This is a reference to the [defined] 24/7 witnessing-state of the
enlightened person. Even when in deep sleep, there is still a part of him
that is self-aware, and hence, "awake." For the enlightened man, even the
most wakeful moments of the unenlightened are held to be less wakeful than
the deep sleep of the enlightened.
Lawson English
Aren't you the one who bases his impression of MUM's academic standing on
his 1975 encounter with it?
Ken H.
"Lawson English" <eng...@primenet.com> wrote in message
news:B55440C...@207.218.84.52...
The problem, in my opinion, is that you are failing to take into
consideration the personal goal(s) of those that swallow what MMY offers,
hook-line and sinker. My goal is nothing less than spiritual enlightenment.
During my first couple of years association with the TM movement, and the
one month I spent with Maharishi in Poland Spring, Maine in the summer of
1970, I determined that he was the spiritual master for me and that I was
going to do what he said/take advantage of what he had to offer regarding my
spiritual development. It is now 30+ years later since I learned TM, and I
have had my differences with Maharishi, have been very angry at him, and
have, for the most part, worked out the my differences within myself.
After all is said and done, I find myself back where I started-I believe him
and trust him with my spiritual development.
Saying that, I ask you to consider that just because your goals aren't the
same as mine (and many other TM practitioners) doesn't mean that there
actually is anything twisted about TM and Maharishi. Perhaps it's just that
the concepts themselves are alien to you.
Ken H.