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I'll do the rest later if I can find it again. It's around here somewhere -- unless I threw it out. 
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Sorry about that ,Jim.I read it quickly and was kind of confused and gobsmacked all at once and didn't know what to say.I thought that I would read it when I had more time( which I will do) and try to make sense of it. Were you still a premie when you wrote it ? On one quick read my impression was how cute it was ( just like Susan says )......I thought " My ,he was so sweet then....". It was all rather bewildering. If it was a dissertation why didn't you finish it ? It didn't seem to follow the "Introduction,presentation and explanation then conclusion" format. Anyhow you had obviously shed a lot of your Holy Joe-ness since the letter to your parents from Millenium, days. Thanks for posting it.
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Lexy, I was not a premie but still had a sweet tooth, if you know what I mean. It wasn't a proper paper with a thesis or anything, more like a memoire. My prof said that would do just fine and that's what I wanted to write. I took it as far as Millenium because it was already pretty long by then and I knew that even my future ex-premie friends would never want to read much more twenty years later.
Modified by Jim at Thu, Nov 23, 2006, 17:44:43
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My first thought was how well written it was, but after the first page I felt such a collection of things I was actually embarrassed.
It was so convincingly relatable, I would easily have been talked into Maharaji's hay ride by your satsang, had I not already bought a ticket. There were feelings of nostalgia, that made me try to forget the whole thing, before I started to trip down memory lane.
The latter page, sort of eased me back out of my temporary lapse into sympathy with the premie and was more like a well written, fair, reporters view. I'm surprised now, how many of those post millenium appraisals there were.
Now they make perfect sense, but at the time, when I read about the failures in Houston, I remember thinking, perhaps saying, "But it's not about money, surely". But clearly it was.
Shows what I knew.
Modified by Saph at Fri, Nov 24, 2006, 01:46:49
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Speaking of which, have you seen Borat yet? This guy plays this Latvian reporter ... but he's not really from Latvia. He's just a British comedian ... ... sorry, John. !!!
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Borat gives an indepth report on life in Latvia, especially on the parentage and sexual habits of the Latvians.
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He's from Kazakhstan. And the village in Romania where the film was made is sueing Sacha Baron Cohen, star and producer of the film, for exploitation. On Monday a $30m (£15m) lawsuit was filed in Manhattan's federal court on behalf of Nicolae Todorache and Spiridom Ciorebea, two residents of Glod, the Romanian hamlet where scenes in Borat's "home town" were filmed. The men claimed they were told the film was a documentary about extreme poverty in Romania that would accurately depict their lives. "Nothing could have been further from the truth," the lawsuit says. "The project was intended to portray the plaintiffs ... and other villagers as rapists, abortionists, prostitutes, thieves, racists, bigots, simpletons and/or boors."
Related link: Sacha Not Fun Have For Suit Made In Romania
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Modified by ocker at Sat, Nov 25, 2006, 23:42:49
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I did read it, Jim, though it got busy here for me with work and Thanksgiving (I cooked and hosted this year). I thought it was pretty good and I wish I had something similar to find other than my stupid gopi journal. You were still tentative about being critical of Rawat, but it was definitely worth reading, and I think it's fun to move and then go through old boxes of stuff like that. It definitely can show how much you've (one's) grown. Cynth
Modified by Cynthia at Sat, Nov 25, 2006, 12:09:20
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This is the first thing I've ever OCR'd and it took me some time to even find it on my computer again. I don't think I'm going to submit the whole thing as a Journey now. It's too boring and ambiguous. It's wordy and it also has a bunch of my own personal stuff, like with friends and such. But there are a few things kind of interesting. Here's one, I think (with some found humour where the text-recognition software screwed up): One might wonder how, after such a short time, I was so sure of the experience. Why did I accept so much so readily? The answer lies in the experience itself. So far, I had only experienced the Word and Light. I noticed nothing when I did the other techniques. Still, those I did experience were like powerful mirrors that instantly reflected a deep, changeless reality. When I meditated on the Word an amazing transition took place. Moments after starting I would begin to feel peaceful. Although I might not have thought I was tense beforehand, the inner connection always brought some sense of relief. If I stayed concentrated something strange would happen. The Word would begin to appear somehow conscious. Far from being just a spiritual tool of some kind, it began to feel like it was alive. I had heard so often how Maharaj Ji was revealing the divine energy that sustained all life, but still, to experience it like this was astonishing. It was what happened next that convinced me so handily that Naharaj Ji was the Lord. As I meditated on the Word, all the time enjoying the feelings of love and sanctity that seemed to radiate from it, I started to merge into it. Soon, if I surrendered, I would actually feel myself deeply locked into the vibration. For a moment at least, I would become the Word. What told me this was really taking place was that, at that moment, I felt I was inside the energy, looking out. Think of a movie. The camera tracks across a building until it finds an open doorway. There is something inside, but because of the bright sunlight it’s impossible to tell just what. Slowly the camera closes in on the doorway. Finally it makes out the shape of a man standing a few feet inside, looking out. The camera moves closer and closer until finally, for a brief moment, it is filled with the man’s face. Then, suddenly, the perspective is reversed. The camera now sees what the man saw, and the soundtrack, to stress the point, is filled with the sounds of breathing that only the man himself would be able to hear.
So it was the Knowledge itself that told me how to think of it. I trusted the process mainly because when I was fairly deep in meditation I felt completely familiar with it. Maharaj Ji had spoken of the joy two lovers might feel upon meeting each other after a long~ separation. Imagine, he said, the feeling that a heart would have upon finally rejoining with its creator. The heart itself would lead the way. It would recognize the divinity within us and the mind would follow. In fact, on this path, the mind, so used to wandering unfulfilled but nevertheless autonomous through life, would always lag behind
( Here, things get wonky in the software but one phrase comes through -- Knowledge was rot based on belief nlyjsJ~e t._~€~ try it-~ b~fore judg~n-g--~t, ~-n-’--~e end”~-~ balanoe~- on an element of faith.
I could have done the techniques somewhat more testily. I could have questioned the role my own expectations played in my developing awareness. But I had other paradigms to follow. I simply felt that I had been shown enough at first to warrant my belief. Further, I trusted that the other premies, not to mention Mahatmas and of course Maharaj Ji, had all seen much more than I had. Therefore I was sure that further, more conclusive evidence — even greater than what I had felt I had experienced with the Word — would come my way in abundance. I thought it would be particularly rewarding to trust Maharaj Ji implicitly from the start, perhaps in the hope that he would return the compliment and acceleraj~my progress. If my approach seems to have been lazy or even reckless, one must appreciate how untoward it would have been to meet these people, obviously intelligent and well—intended, with anything but a flexible scepticism. I couldn’t help think that if, as I hoped and guessed, everything claimed proved accurate, I didn’t wanted to think of myself as one who had been unable to simply trust my fellow man.
Yes, indeed, Knowledge was "rot based on belief"!!
Modified by Jim at Sat, Nov 25, 2006, 13:09:56
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If my approach seems to have been lazy or even reckless, one must appreciate how untoward it would have been to meet these people, obviously intelligent and well—intended, with anything but a flexible scepticism. I couldn’t help think that if, as I hoped and guessed, everything claimed proved accurate, I didn’t wanted to think of myself as one who had been unable to simply trust my fellow man.
What an idiot!
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Total mental laziness, if one part of an equation was accurate, then all of it must be, especially when mainstream society could not countenance any part of the equation being accurate.
It was the only reason I stayed around the official org on any level at all for so long, since the practice of k worked as it said on the packet for me, then there was a high probabily the whole package was true, even when I could never get a real connection with gm inside however strong my experience.
I also wonder if the fear, that if I left, the experience would go, like an artist too afraid of questioning their own internal processes in case the creative spark would go,
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