The 2008 U.S. News and World Report college guide is out, and MUM continues to have the lowest reputation ("peer assessment") score of any school (1.4 out of a possible 5) anywhere in the country, even among the other 4th-tier schools with which MUM is grouped.
I'm sure that MUM management thinks that this poor reputation is just a matter of people not understanding what TM is all about, not understanding its great practical value. But somehow school officials manage to overlook the weird cosmography and apparent distaste for academic freedom of the Mormons and award peer assessments much higher than given to MUM to Mormon schools for the practical value of the education that students get -- BYU campuses in Idaho, Hawaii, and Utah got reputation scores of 3.6, 2.1 and 2.9 respectively.
MUM has a bad reputation because it has screwy management, period. And this year's screwball pronouncement that a new branch campus in Kansas would have 10K students this Fall is typical of the bird-brained posturing that has given MUM a very weak reputation. Schools all over the country are opening this week for the Fall semester, but there is no word from Maharishi Central University when they will open -- and you can be sure that when they do, the school will be lucky to have 1% of the projected number of students. The upside of this low enrollment is that the TMO will continue to have only one college with a bad reputation in the most-used college guide, since U.S. News and World Report does not rank schools with fewer than 200 students.
Maharishi, of course, with his cosmic vision, is not worried about the apparent stupidity of the movement bureaucracy or any bad reputation in academia. At the level of real power, the transition to a more orderly life on earth is happening, and we just need to be calm about the disturbances on the surface of life: "We have to be careful not to get upset by little or big things. If we lose our basis, our dignity, the phase transition will take much longer. Don't give importance to things which may upset us, Maharishi said. This is a very precious time for the world. Everything depends on how our awareness is; just don't let it be shaken. Our awareness is the basis of all these transformations. More than ever before we are ourselves. We are at the basis of the power of Rudra. Time demands we remain completely ourselves. It is a very tender, delicate time for us -- we should not become angry, indifferent, or sad, we should just be like an ocean. The evolutionary power is waking up. We shake it, then leave it; then after some time shake it again. Each time a new level of purity, awakening is added ... It is the awakening of both values: Para and Apara, says Maharishi." 27Aug2007
The TMO started off 2007 with the announcement of another big project, a school for 40,000 students located in the center of the USA. However, as with the "world's-tallest-building" project and numerous other no-shows on the TMO agenda, it becomes clear that Central University is just another fantasy project when you hear CU's President John Hagelin announce that 10,000 students will be on campus for the Fall 2007 semester. It's not irrational to plan for an institution in the nation's Brahmastan (center), but it's clearly nuts to think that the TMO could raise $500 million, build a campus and enroll 10K paying and qualified students in less than 8 months (and don't forget hiring ~600 PhDs). But then, we are hearing from a guy who seriously thought that he would be sitting in the White House after the 2000 presidential election...
If we adopt a very optimistic and generous outlook, the TMO could possibly raise at most $25-50 million from TM enthusiasts in the U.S. (although support for the manic CU project clearly seems slight among donors, in sharp contrast to the warm support for the Pundit project in Vedic City, Iowa), but there is no way that the proposed bond sales could come even remotely close to financing the remaining $450 million. Only a very few hyper-adventurous souls would buy such bonds, even at 15% interest (a sky-high rate which was offered on another TM venture which never went anywhere). Anyway, even with financing, there is no way that 10K students could be rounded up on such short notice -- the MUM campus in Fairfield, Iowa, has fewer than 1000 students after having been in business for 36 years (and since MUM's new student union, opened in Feb 2008, has a 360-seat dining hall to serve both students and faculty together, it's seems clear the school doesn't look forward to much growth). If MUM is reluctant to lose face by opening their Kansas branch campus this fall with a few transfer students poached from MUM-Iowa, maybe they will end up opening a virtual campus, like California's San Jose State University -- you can populate the virtual world with as many students as you want.
A more logical place for a non-virtual World Peace University would be in India, which has a dramatic lack of higher-education infrastructure, and where many millions of Hindu students would not blink at pursuing studies at a meditation-based school: "...American universities, eager to expand to markets abroad, are training their sights on India. Some 40 percent of the population is under 18, and a scarcity of higher education opportunities is frequently cited as a potential hurdle to economic progress." Amity college currently has 35,000 students on its campuses, so there is clearly a demand for private colleges in India that the TM movement could fulfill easily, instead of engaging in a futile effort to scrape together a few students in the U.S. With the support of the government, Indian billionaire Anil Agarwal is planning a university for 100,000 students -- unfortunately, despite its name, the Vedanta University campus will not have a Vedic architecture design.
Maharishi certainly thinks the focus should go to India:"What more is to be done?' 'When I have reached [the point] in my teaching ''What more is to be done?''—last night I was reaching this point: focus on India." However, this intention to focus on India may meet some resistance from the Westerners who now run the TMO, since their importance would necessarily be reduced in a movement focussing on India.
Given that there are more than 800 million Hindus in India, it would only be necessary to get 1% to give $100/year in order to fund this large university and other TM initiatives in India, something that could readily be accomplished with heightened public awareness in India of Maharishi's revival of Vedic culture. The TMO broadcasts on a satellite channel in India, but this is just preaching to the choir, to people who have already learned TM. In order to inform the hundreds of millions of Indians who are not aware of MMY's work, it's necessary to go to where the people are watching and let them know. 61 million households in India have cable TV, reaching about a quarter of the population. Although most people in India are poor, earning less than $100/mo, there is enough of a middle-and-upper class to contribute significantly to the TMO. Well-made ads (i.e., artistic presentations of the Vedic wisdom, not the pedestrian infomercials which are the majority of the videos found on the TM.org site) on TV in primetime should quickly bring Maharishi's work to the attention of the Indian public and then the "5000 Club" (donors of 5000 rupees/year) would enable an actual revenue stream of $800+ million/year, rather than the virtual trillions the TMO has sought in numerous silly and unanswered appeals to the general public.
The silly announcement that CU would have 10K students this Fall is only one in a long string of harebrained schemes and pronouncements that make the TMO look silly. Why does the brilliant Maharishi tolerate such stupid and unproductive behavior by the administrators of the TM movement? Well, for one thing, since the early adopters of TM have tended to be predominately crackpot, those who have assumed positions of authority in the TMO are generally borderline personalities (or , apparently, just plain crooks -- Neil Patterson has been a top TMO leader in North America for some time) who could not be coaxed into rational behavior by anyone. The inadequate personalities who dominate TM management are also very needy people -- the CU project seems pretty much just a way for John Hagelin to have his own vanity project so he can feel important by impressing the hoi polloi with his impenetrable physics-speak.
Maharishi could, of course, always go outside the movement to hire competent help, but it turns out, paradoxically, that this is not indicated because of the dense ignorance in which the planet is cloaked. Back in the 60s, Maharishi wrote that enlightenment values could only be unfolded gradually to avoid causing "fear and havoc" among the benighted denizens of this brutal epoch. The old gibe, "if they had any brains, they would be dangerous," is quite literally true for TM administrators, since a too-effective promotion of TM would cause a populace used to darkness to panic at the onset of the light of awareness.
At a more abstract level, Maharishi's tolerance of fantastic thinking is based upon an understanding of the true nature of human capacity when it opens to cosmic life, expressed throughout the ages in sayings by many prophets and seers: "...you will say to this mountain,'Move from here to there,' and it will move; and nothing will be impossible to you." Although the announcement that CU will have 10K students this Fall is only stupid, because administrators of the TMO do not operate from the level of life that would enable something like that to be accomplished, MMY's work is all about reminding people of a practical way (TM and other Vedic technologies) to accomplish anything in life, by operating from a level of life that is cosmic, so tolerance for TMO knuckleheads proposing impossible ideas has a symbolic value in challenging the long-held notion that life can only be a struggle.
Maharishi:
'Poverty is imaginary. Real is affluence. So if someone is leading an unnatural life in poverty, suffering is unnatural. Pains are unnatural. Natural is health, infinity. Whether it is infinite magnitude of life or point value of life, they is both on the same level — point is made of infinity.
'It's the point of infinity. And infinity is made of points, so for a point it is natural to bask in the sunshine of infinity. If a point begins to be poor, then it is understandable how he can be poor. If he's only himself, he knows that he is a point of infinity.
'The individual — we have been talking from house-tops loudly for all these years — the individual is cosmic. Cosmic is the potential of the individual. For many years it was found we seemed to be only idealistic in principle, but practically the situation is different.
'People are suffering, so today's topic is how to eliminate suffering. The word how makes it difficult. Suffering is in essence not a reality. Dr Hagelin, it is such a beautiful point of knowledge, that suffering is imaginary. Only imaginary. It is imposed on oneself.
'The real is total, infinite, and on that reality of infinite, [there is] only affluence, invincibility, harmony, totality, all possibility. These are natural to life. Poverty is imaginary. But if someone has fallen into a dream of poverty, we shake him up and say 'You are not poor, but if you are feeling poverty, fine, here is the treasury of the Global Country of World Peace.'
'The Global administration beats [the drum] — the principle that only affluence is real; only cosmic status is real. But in case someone has fallen into that kind of situation, then take the principle and understanding from here, and realize that you are not poor.'... 'There is a great time now for transformation. We are sponsoring their education so that no one will be unhappy or sick or anything; all these are wrong things. Every religion has always held that the man was made in the image of God. In different words people have said it, but the fact was 'Man was made in the image of God', and the son of God is the son of God — the son of a king is a prince, he is a ruler.
'So tell everyone that tomorrow it is possible that all the poor countries can ring the bell of eureka that there are no more poor [people]; they can shake hands with all the rich people. It's a practical thing we are talking."
'The world is administered by infinite creativity, enormous self-referral affluence, which is the Unified Field in the world of science, and which is Veda—the expression of Total Knowledge. In the Vedic terms, there is only affluence.
27Mar2007Click here for pre-2007 updates
