Transcendental Meditation
Yesterday, at the public library, I read the “Events today” paper next to the Events conference room. Apparently there was something about an introduction to “Transcendental Meditation / Peace” that the public at large could attend.
This is a shadow government. Kind of. There was a political party based around Transcendental Meditation — that old joke of the Natural Law Party. The premise is that to solve the world’s problems, you sit around and do nothing, saying “Oom” a lot. I have my doubts about this approach — our current president seems to have a part of that in his philosophy (without the oom) and I can’t say I like the results. Anyways, when the party dissolved in 2004, the erstwhile leader of the party, John Hagelin, converted the key pieces to a “US Peace Government” — which, I guess, would be the very definition of “Shadow Government” (Definition Number Two in a would-be dictionary) in the sense that it shadows the actual government. Which, I guess is the marker for the word “Peace”.
I did not touch this thing with a ten-foot pole.
Something I note at the library: as per the Dewey decimal system, there’s a large selection of books on the Republican Party at the library. Followed by a large selection of books on the Democratic Party with a decimal .2 degrees apart. The two book selections for this that are worth a gander are obviously published as a set: Grand Old Party : A History of the Republicans and Party of the People : A History of the Democrats. The most interesting parts of the books, apart from noting the differences in how the books end up dividing up the years according to the era and sub-eras of the two partys’ histories, are for the Democratic Party the years in exile between 1920 and 1932 and for the Republicans the years in exile in the decade of the 1930s.
Anyways, the next decimal number has one sole volume. A Reason to Vote by Robert Rot, a book promoting… the Natural Law Party.
I smirk “Wow. A while Decimal point for the Natural Law Party!” But I know better. The Communist Party of America gets a whole tenth of a decimal; the Natural Law Party doesn’t. This is a dirge of third party material, and this is the only book the library has here.