Always fun — like going home again, only without the home-cooked meals. Spoke to the current Guidelines group last night, and as always I enjoyed that sense of community that is so difficult to describe, and even more difficult to explain. I think it’s why sometimes people who haven’t been there worry …. I remember one of my friends returned home and his wife was positive he had joined a cult.
So how to explain the allure?
Sometimes i say it’s like living in the future. So what do i mean by that?
Some day, in the future, if we’re fortunate, the culture at large will learn first-hand that what it presently thinks is reality is really only a stripped-down, mechanized version of reality that leaves out the best parts. It will learn that the magic of life is still there, underneath all the false values that have obscured it. And it will learn that we have more abilities, more access to guidance, more genuine promise, than anything our contemporary society suspects.
Well, at TMI the participants already know it. They can talk, from personal experience, to others who have had the same kind of experience, who share a common language, who actually understand the things unsaid. Not, at all, that they share all the same opinions or attitudes; not that they all instantly bond as friends; not, even, that they necessarily stay in touch with each other afterward, though some do. Nonetheless, for the time that they are at TMI together, they are citizens of a common republic that doesn’t necessarily exist where they live the rest of their lives.
Always nice to return for a visit, and to meet more old friends….