http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/college/rankings/midunivs/midu_4.htm
In his commentary on v.34, Ch.2 of the Bhagavad Gita, Maharishi says that :
"The underlying principle of good fame in society is that when a man constantly does good he becomes a centre of harmonious vibrations which, enjoyed by the people around him, naturally create warmth and love in their hearts. That is why he is described in glowing terms by all. In this way the good fame of a man is the criterion of his goodness, and ill fame the criterion of his badness. No one who is good could possibly acquire ill fame. It is the vibrations spreading from a man's actions that induce people to speak well of him or otherwise."
Maharishi University has the lowest reputation of any Midwestern college, a clear sign that the school's management and policies are seriously wrong-headed. Also, the rankings for the 1999-2000 edition place MUM in the 4th tier of schools, a drop from the previous 2nd-tier ranking. UPDATE: The 2000-2001 edition continues to list MUM in the 4th (bottom) tier of schools, and the school's lowest-ranking reputation score drops even lower (MUM is so shy of giving figures for national publication that the school refused to fill out the survey form sent out by U.S. News). You can tell a lot about the popularity of the school by the claimed 6 to 1 student-faculty ratio at MUM, which arises because the school operates on a slave-labor wage scale in which faculty members get as low as $500 a month plus room and board, which allows MUM to hire a raft of (often mentally ill) professors to hold classes for wished-for paying students who fail to appear because only desperately poor foreign students will put up with the cult environment. MUM faculty : all dressed up and no one to snow?
http://www.yogicflying.orgMany cultures have recorded instances of levitation by thought-power and other gravity-defying stunts -- here's the state of the art in the re-introduction of levitation science.
How Charles Lutes became a non-person Bevan's fantasy factory produces wildly improbable scheme #6901 -- Make sure to bring plenty mosquito repellent (and maybe automatic weapons to deal with the ferocious Brazilian crime). There is a tremendous market for the advantages which practicing TM brings among Brazilians (along with everybody else) -- instead of a TM elite camped out on some island trying to radiate their wonderfulness, how about just promoting TM throughout Brazil for everyday use by ordinary working people? I guess a simple idea like this doesn't meet Bevan and buddies' need to be as grandiose and impractical as (im)possible ...
Why many TM insiders refer to the Natural Law Party as the BNP ("bliss-Nazi" party).
How Gilligan and the Professor saved the world...
The German NLP's poll (Click on press releases, then 1999, then "Opinion Poll Shows Public Recognition of Value..."(9 July 99)
The disconnect between the reality of public indifference towards the NLP and the great expectations of the NLP creates considerable cognitive dissonance in the little minds of NLP leaders, so this poll was cooked up to make them feel better about their efforts. The claim is made is that 29% of the Germans polled think adding TM to politics is a good idea -- kind of a surprising result in a country where the German government, repulsed by the greed and manipulation of TM-movement "bliss Nazis," regards TM as a cult only slightly less dangerous than the heavily-sanctioned Scientology group -- not surprisingly, the German TM movement's tax-exempt status was revoked long ago.
The reason for this surprising poll finding is found in the press release, which indicates that the people polled were told that TM is a well-documented technique for reducing stress, fatigue, and disease. It's well known that you can get most poll respondents to say almost anything in polls depending on how you phrase the question ("push polling" is the term used in the poll biz to describe the practice of "polling" that's really trying to create some slant in public awareness)-- suppose the people had been told that the TM movement is a controversial group and is taxed just like Volkswagen? Think the outcome would have been the same?
The witless spinning of the NLP
The leaders of the TM movement are so deluded that they are willing to do or say anything that appears to give some credibility to their silly political agenda, instead of pursuing a rational policy of just directly marketing TM to the people (for more laughs, check out the 3 July 99 press release about the "stealth" NLP candidate in Livorno, or the witless spin on the NLP's poor election results in the 23 June 99 release at www.natural-law-party.org).
Can you force people to meditate?
Suppose the absurd were to happen, and the NLP came to power (hey, reasonable people laughed off Hitler at the beginning) -- an NLP-led German government would still have to sell people on the advantages of practicing TM, through public advertising, as governments do with anti-smoking campaigns and so on.
You cannot force people to practice TM -- you can force people to close their eyes, as they do with many poor foreign students at MUM who are taking advantage of the free-ride college scholarship, but unless people feel that they need and want to practice TM because they perceive some benefits, no amount of coercion by any government is going to make people meditate. The same lesson about not forcing people to meditate applies in the business world too, as beer baron Bill Coors found out when he ordered his executives to learn TM. What the Coors family finally did sounds like a great recipe for the TM movement, when Bevan's arrogance and indifference inevitably catches up to him:
The book's final pages chronicle the Coors men stepping aside and hiring an outsider to run the company. More than a century after the brewery was founded, the arrogance and indifference had caught up with them. Mr. Baum says they would have made more money by closing the place in the early 1980's and putting their money in a passbook account.
(from a 7 Jul 2000 New York Times review by Alecia Swasy of Dan Baum's Citizen Coors)
So, instead of trying all this NLP fluff about "applying TM to politics" (which has no meaning at all unless lots more people start TM of their own volition), the TM movement should directly market TM to the populace using mass media and well-known figures (maybe if I repeat this mantra 10,000 times, Bevan will push himself away from the buffet table and take notice).
The Crime Vaccine by Jay Marcus
Marcus presents an earnest argument for the efficacy of TM practiced by a small percentage of the population as a "crime vaccine," but the fact is, Marcus' own law firm was the site of a major crime while this book was being written. In the "Acknowledgements" on page 227, Marcus thanks Janet Derby, an office manager who embezzled $186,000 over a 3-year period from the two-lawyer firm of Marcus and Thompson in the small Iowa town of Fairfield, where 20% of the people practice TM (the 24 March 98 issue of the Fairfield Ledger reports that Derby plead guilty and got a deferred judgement so that she could repay some of the money -- Ms. Derby died in Fairfield at age 45 on 7 Dec 2000).
Making large claims about TM in order to support one's campaigns for public office (Marcus has run for Iowa Attorney General and other offices) seems a bit of a stretch in light of the experience of the clearly "un-vaccinated" Marcus and the small town he lives in -- although Fairfield has about the same population as when MUM moved there in 1974 (1980 population), crime has continued to increase, and the jail is overflowing.
Iowa as a whole despite having the same population {2.9 mil in 1980, 2.9 mil in 2000}, has seen a quadrupling of the prison population since 1980, and continues to pour inmates into prisons at the system-overwhelming rate of 400 a month despite a booming economy and a boom in prison construction.
Marcus is typical of the rich, arrogant buffoons who make large, pointless claims about TM in order to inflate their image in the small circle of the TM elite, achieving nothing except a few chuckles from the public, instead of promoting TM's everyday value in increasing enjoyment of life, an approach that has been shown to work. Even a third-party loony like Ross Perot, because he struck a populist chord, got 19 million votes in 1992, a figure that no NLP clown -- including NLP refugees trying to sneak into another party's tent -- will ever see, because of the insipid NLP message.
Marcus is trying to distance himself from the NLP, but make no mistake, he's full of crackpot ideas that you find in NLP thinking -- for example, Marcus thinks that prisoners should be paroled based on their levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin. But human behavior is too complex to make incarceration decisions based on a biochemical marker, and this is an idea, like Marcus' chronic attempts to get elected to office in Iowa, that is doomed to failure.
Displaying the mindset that you would expect from a corporate-law attorney, Marcus wants to eliminate the corporate income tax and replace it with a 15% national sales tax in addition to state sales tax -- what a warm and wonderful human being, huh? Not even Steve "Give the rich a break" Forbes had the nerve to make a proposal like this.
Low voter turnout in the 2000 congressional primaries in Iowa, attributed to overconfidence or to a view that nominations were worthless because Iowa's congressional incumbents are so strong, led to Marcus' nabbing the Republican nomination for the 3rd District race by a margin of 500 votes. The Des Moines Register :
....some candidates were complaining the low turnout resulted in the nomination of candidates so quirky that they have little chance of winning in November.
"The results were especially disappointing because voter turnout was so low," said Phil Ferren, the Ottumwa lawyer who lost to Marcus. "In part, it was the result of many people who believed that the contest would not be close and that traditional Republican values would prevail."
(8 Jun 2000, p.B1, "Low voter turnout yields surprise results")
Are meditators improving the quality of life in Fairfield?
Drug abuse in on the rise in MUM's home town, and many of the people arrested for drunk/stoned in public or drunk driving give "1000 N. 4th St." (MUM's address) when they are busted. TM makes you feel good, but many meditators, especially younger people with fewer coping mechanisms, use alcohol and drugs to escape the nasty cult environment fostered by zealots at MUM. And far from improving the mental health of the region, the influx of crazy meditators to Fairfield has strained the budget of the county.
Small towns have small problems -- that's why people like to live there, and, compared to the breathing-holes-of-hell that American big cities are, Fairfield is a good place to live and work. But Fairfield residents are tired of loudmouth claims by MUM knuckleheads, and I'm tired of the bull, too. Click The unlikely crime stats for MUM
MUM also only reports campus crimes that the Fairfield police are informed of : "Non police data not available" for MUM, which means that a school as notorious for trying to cover-up problems as the old Soviet Union (which wouldn't even report plane crashes because this would reflect badly on the "worker's paradise") is undoubtedly withholding the true extent of campus crime as reflected in MUM security-patrol logs, as well as student-involved crime off-campus, which should also be reported (see properly reported stats of a small Massachusetts college).
Another small Iowa college just paid a $15,000 fine to the DOE for misreporting campus crime -- help knock down that $5 trillion national debt by being the first one on your block to report MUM's lack of veracity to the DOE.
UPDATE: Whether or not MUM campus crime is being reported accurately, sure as heck the 20% population of superhumans in Fairfield is not having a salutary effect on the town's crime rate -- adult crime was up 25% in 2000, juvenile crime up 10%, according to the Fairfield police. (more on Fairfield crime)
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