More Frustration and More Fruition

Well, it just came to my attention that I've already lost my class schedule for this next year. I happened to catch the student adviser a few days ago and got to go over my open blocks for this next year and I must say, ended up with at least a few gems. Lots of basic stuff like Science of Creative Intelligence (a full month devoted to jacking off about Transcendental Meditation. The class is a month of watching Maharishi giving speeches in the 70's and then restating it in 2-3 paragraphs while touting TM and bashing on other meditation techniques), Maharishi Vedic Science (so far as I can tell the same as Science of Creative Intelligence), Composition (I have nothing to add here, but feel like I should add parentheses again), Bee-Keeping Certification (fucking sweet), Biointensive Agriculture (how much food can you grow in your own 10x10 raised garden), Something about Green Architecture, and other necessity classes.
I'm mostly just pumped about the bee-keeping and biointensive agriculture but wanted to bitch about SCI and MVS. My homework tonight was 2-3 paragraphs comparing the results of a paper called "Differential Effects of Relaxation Techniques on Trait Anxiety," which sounds like a highly intellectual piece of work and probably is. Unfortunately, the only section reprinted for us was a paragraph composed almost entirely of trivial details about the test environment and one sentence stating "Transcendental Meditation had significantly larger effect size, and meditation that involved concentration had significantly smalled effect." My homework was to write 2-3 paragraphs about that single sentence. I had to jack-off Transcendental Meditation once again.
The part that really got my brain reeling about what is being passed off as sound scientific education is the fact that at the bottom of the single xeroxed page we were given from this article is a cut off sentence starting with "While positive results often have been reported, it has not been established conclusively whether any of these procedures are more effective than others or whether,-". Comma, nothing. Or whether WHAT!? Or Whether Kenneth R. Eppley and Allan I. Abrams were conducting this test on a grant from someone with vested interests in TM? Or whether some patients were secretly dosing themselves before the tests? Or fucking what!?

I started on another rant a second ago but kind of lost steam...it's really really weird being tired at midnight. You get the point.

I'm thinking about being Tony "Raja Ram" Nader for Halloween.

What the FUCK

am I doing here?

Mixed emotions, good new habits, and bad old habits are the name of the game these past 7 days. If this last week isn't testament to the duality inherent of reality, I don't know what is.
Fairfield is a beautiful little town and with little Iowa towns comes that little Iowa silence. No more sirens and parties carried on the wind, just that unmistakable screech of semis on asphalt and trains ripping through the middle of town.
The weather has been far from anything worth complaining about: mid-80's all week with low humidity and sunny skies. And about 40% of the kids around here are of the amiable type, more than willing to partake in small talk and enter into that form of acquaintanceship that warrants a sincere "how's it going?" when you walk past them on campus or in town. The nights dip down into the 70's and feel great as long as you planned ahead and put on an extra layer before venturing out. They sell 40 oz's in Fairfield, and I've been making up for many missed opportunities to drink 40's in this past week. There's one making its way through my liver right now in fact.

But the night-time is also when I start to doubt my ability to live here for 4 years. From what I can tell the only people active in this town after 9 p.m. are the home-brahs of Fairfield and the Ethiopian kids that smoke cigarettes en masse in the parking lot and cast glares that make me feel like dying every time I walk past them. Ya, the 40% of kids are awesome and easy to coexist with, but the other 60% of the students and probably 90% of the townies in Fairfield have such a propensity for that death glare that I have to debate whether or not reaffirming my social pariah status is worth a cup of coffee before I venture out into town.
Being a smoker in Fairfield is kind of like being an untouchable in old Hindu caste system so far as I can tell. Lighting a cigarette in town and you are assured a ten foot circle of uninhabited space with you as the center. Try to find greens and you'll (at least at this point) end up paying forty dollars for a quarter...of shwag. Go ahead and re-read that last sentence, I thought I'd heard it wrong the first time too. $40 for one quarter of an ounce of disgusting months old bricked up greens (browns may be a better term).

BUT
On the upside, the teachers as M.U.M. know their shit and they want you to learn it. They're not just here to teach it; they want you to learn it!
My first day of Transcendental Meditation training was yesterday and I, after a year of failed attempts to integrate meditation into my life, find myself looking forward to tomorrow morning so I can dive into it again. Take it from a skeptic who's never been able to get into meditation before: TM works. After a 20 minute session you feel like you've just woken up from a good nap, had a shot of espresso, taken a bong rip, and smoked a cigarette.

Not to mention that in September, as part of my Base Camp class, I'll be camping, canoing, hiking, and caving in the Ozarks for a week. And a few months after that I'll be learning physics from none other than John Hagelin, most widely known for his contributions to the documentary "What the Bleep Do We Know!?"!

So yep, I probably left out quite a few points about the ups and downs of this week but drinking a forty will do that to you. Before I finish though I will add, although I think it goes without saying, that I miss Kansas City and everyone it entails to me like hell and can't wait to make it back for a weekend.

My first homework assignment in 3 years!

How is Maharishi's understanding of meditation and consciousness different from the view that was standard in the West in 1958?

When the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi arrived on the scene with his revolutionary rethinking of ancient mediation techniques rooted in the Vedas and Upanishads, he forced the Western world of 1958 to rethink their definitions of meditation of consciousness. In many ways he taught us that the absolute converse of our thoughts on these matters was closer to the truth. The general thoughts toward meditative techniques and the nature of consciousness in and before this time, as well as in the public eye today, were largely the result of thousands of years of separation between the time these books were written and the time these practices were “perfected”, leaving ample time for reinterpretation and misunderstanding. By closely re-examining these ancient texts and the conclusions that had been drawn since, he was able to form what has come to be known as Transcendental Meditation- a return to a purer more effective form of meditation than the arduous, exclusive, and often mystic forms that had formed throughout history.

In a time when meditation was an esoteric tradition reserved for practitioners of foreign, generally Eastern, religions to transcend the physical world or empty the mind of all content and emotion, Maharishi proved that in actuality meditation is a natural tendency of the mind that may be perfected with minimum effort and requires no subscription to any one religion or belief system. Meditation had gone from a harnessing of an already present mental process to promote full functioning of the brain and nervous system to a rigorous, often self-depriving, system of mind reprogramming entailing years of pain-staking practice, and even then results were not guaranteed. Rather, Maharishi taught us that the task is effortless and fail-safe. Its very effortlessness is what guarantees its results.

The results of these meditation techniques at the time, given their metaphysical or supernatural nature, were also considered to be beyond the realms of scientific and mathematical quantification. On the contrary, because the results of Maharishi’s meditation, Transcendental Meditation, are natural in every sense of the word and happen on a conscious and subconscious level (to a large degree the desire of meditation is a better cohesion between the two,) the results can and have been proven in more than anecdotal form with the advent of brain-monitoring technology. Therefore, the idea of meditation as a form of access to altered states of conscious has given way to meditation as access to healthier more aware states of what could be called normal, or control, consciousness rather than entirely new forms thereof.

...I hate writing conclusions. Seriously, if your memory is so bad you need a recap of what you just read, re-read it! Luckily it's not technically an essay question so I think I'll be okay.

T-Minus Negative 9 Hours...

and counting.

Day one at the Maharishi University of Management. A socially awkward (read: retarded) freshman at an incredibly tight-knit private school in rural Fairfield, Iowa hoping to get a degree in sustainable living as quick as possible and get the hell back home. Until seven a.m. this morning, I was a twenty-year old barista living in Kansas City, working in Johnson County, and making a point of hanging out with friends and fucking with strangers. Six hours before that I was forced to say good-bye to the only girl I've kinda-sorta liked (bullshit, I love her,) in a long time while we re-assured each other that it's not even a big deal.
Kansas City, Missouri to Fairfield, Iowa: you take 35-North to 34-East and just keep driving until you get there. Right around four hours, depending on traffic. Sure as shit, not even a big deal. Two steps, a few hours. Position yourself within two feet of her, take one sure-footed step forward, and push your lips against hers. One to two seconds...depending on traffic. That's not a big deal.
Indeed, not a big deal. It's everything else that amounts a big, depressing bum deal that has officially been dealt and now I'll have to deal with. I'll apologize in advance; I've been reading Tom Robbins and have a bad habit of thinking/writing like whoever I'm reading: Newton dropped the bomb of gravity as god, the ultimate force affecting everything we know, but it's not just her gravity drawing me in. And no, Einstein, it's not just light-beams reflecting off her into my optic nerve that attracts me to her, although your unified field mumbojumbo does open some intriguing ideas. Not just her sound-waves in my eardrums nor tiny pieces of her huffed into the olfactory organs. I can't say for sure it isn't just harmonized electromagnetic brainwaves sending euphoria straight to the brain, but I can say that even if that is the case, at this distant to waves have grown too few and far between over distance to still be effective.
It's probably none of the above, something else entirely beyond the realm of science, or that something else and all of the above. But I believe her body could keep me in orbit without gravity, I would still search for her in infinite dark, imagine her smell with no nose, listen to her voice without ears and I find myself constantly trying to tune in to her waves.
Form and light can be captured with picture, sounds can be broadcast with cellphones. But scratch and sniff is more imagination than marvel, and at this moment, pictures and cellphones are about as legit as scratch and sniff to me. To buy: one NASA-sized space satellite to tune into her brain, suck up her waves, and beam them down on me. It's no big deal, but what ever kind of tiny deal it may be, it absolutely sucks.