The Kat offers "a short selection" of Octopus Paul stories -
RTL recently reported that a Russian company was interested in hiring Paul as a "bookie", whereas German magazine Der Spiegel informed us that an American composer Parry Gibb composed a love song for Paul ("Paul the octopus, we love you") which can be experienced on YouTube. The Telegraph then reported that Kazakh bookmakers were "furious at Paul" and blamed him for "their paltry World Cup profits", whereas Chinese website Xinhuanet reported that the Chinese comic suspense film "Kill Paul Octopus" will open in Chinese cinemas in August. Paul, also made an enemy: The Telegraph today reported last week that Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad proclaimed that Paul symbolizes the "decadence and decay" of the Western world. In the latest news today, we learn from the Austrian Der Kurier that Paul will now also record an album of Elvis songs ("Paul The Octopus Sings Elvis"). I still have hope that the latter was meant to be a satirical article but I fear that this is a genuine news item.Time, I think, for the Octopus chat show ... and the Octopus Election Poll (Will Julia Win? When will they unmuzzle Barnaby Joyce? Octupus Paul Sees All, Reports All ... and presumably eats whatever German Octopi have for dinner after a spot of dissecting tomorrow's movement on the DAX.) What about Wanda The Wombat, provider of tips about the Melbourne Cup, the ASX and the availability of ACTION buses?
A corporate law contact has meanwhile pointed me to Martin Gardner's 'Doug Henning and the Giggling Guru' in 19(3) Skeptical Inquirer (1995).
Gardner comments that Transcendental Meditation instructors
promise to teach you, after you fork over thousands of dollars for advanced courses, a variety of awesome supernormal powers known as sidhis. They include the ability to become invisible, to see hidden things, to walk through walls, and to fly through the air like Peter Pan and Wendy. Doug’s conjuring was fake magic. TM teaches real magic.Oh dear.
Vedic flying has been the most publicized of the sidhis. Photographs distributed by TM officials show devotees in a lotus position and seemingly floating in midair. The photos are misleading. No TMer has yet demonstrated levitation to an outsider. The best they can show is the ability to flex one’s legs while in a lotus position on a springy mattress and hop upward a short distance. The phony photos were snapped when the supposed floater was at the top of a bounce. One cynic said he never believed the woman in a picture was actually levitating, that instead she was being held up by an invisible TMer!
The flying sidhi has four stages. First, a twitching of limbs. Second, the hop. Third, hovering. Fourth, actual flying. Only the first and second stages have been shown to skeptics, although devout TMers firmly believe that there are Vedic flyers in India and that Maharishi can take off whenever he likes even though no one has ever seen or videotaped him in flight.
“When you reach your full potential,” Henning told a reporter, “and you think ‘I want to levitate,’ you can levitate.” And in a lecture: “You can disappear at a high state of consciousness because your body just stops reflecting light.”
Gardner continues that -
Amazingly, TMers are greatly entranced by lotus hopping. Last October a demonstration was held at the University of Toronto. Three Vedic “flyers” giggled while they bounced on their bums for five minutes, looking (said one observer) like legless frogs. I was told by Charles Reynolds, who for many years designed Doug's stage illusions, that during one of Henning’s TV rehearsals he periodically halted all activity so those present could meditate and send him powerful vibes while he tried vainly to float. He actually believed he might be able to demonstrate levitation on his forthcoming show!And the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, friend of quantum gurus Deepak Chopra and Ervin Laszlo?
Several disenchanted TMers have sued the organization for failing to teach them powers that were promised. In 1987, for instance, Robert Kropinski, a former TM instructor, asked for $9 million because he was never able to fly. He also charged that TM had caused him “headaches, anxiety, impulses toward violence, hallucinations, confusion, loss of memory, screaming fits, lack of focus, paranoia, and social withdrawal.” A Philadelphia jury awarded him $138,000.
Since he started TM, the giggling guru has raked in an estimated $3 billion from his millions of gullible followers. He now controls a vast empire that includes a conglomeration of Heaven on Earth Hotels around the world, a consulting corporation, numerous trading companies, medical clinics, and other firms here and there.What about the research, which includes - quelle surprise - another One Big Theory Of Everything?
Maharishi Ayur-Veda Products International (MAPI) sells a raft of herbs, teas, oils, incense, and natural food substances said to cure diseases and reverse aging. Admirers of the best-selling books on “quantum healing” by Boston’s Deepak Chopra may be surprised to know that he is a TM booster with close ties to MAPI, president ofa Maharishi Vedic University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and owner of an Ayur-Vedic clinic in Boston. In 1989 His Holiness awarded Chopra the title of “Lord of Immortality of Heaven and Earth.”
Maharishi Research universities are all over the globe. There is one in Lake Lucerne, Switzerland, others in Fairfield, Iowa (the movement’s U.S. headquarters), in Buckinghamshire, England, in Asbury Park, New Jersey, and in Vlodrop, Netherlands. Vlodrop is the movement’s world headquarters, where Maharishi now lives. The colleges seem to spring up and die like mushrooms.
The word “research” in the names of these universities refers to investigations of what is called Vedic science. It is said to combine the subjective approach of the East with the objective approach of Western science and to usher in what the Maharishi calls the “full sunshine of the dawning of the age of Enlightenment.” According to His Holiness, the universe is permeated by a “field of consciousness” underlying the laws of quantum mechanics. The Maharishi, who once studied physics, is keen on the latest results in particle theory.That's a nice echo of the 'bigger than Ben Hur' accolades by the Akashic Field folk in World Futures.
Expensive double-spread ads in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Toronto Globe and Mail, Time, Newsweek, and who knows where else, periodically promote the Maharishi’s unified field theory. Physicist John S. Hagelin is the movement’s top quantum-mechanics maven. He has predicted that Maharishi’s influence on history “will be far greater than that of Einstein or Gandhi.”
Hagelin and other scientists at TM universities have written hundreds of technical papers, most of them published by TM university presses, although a few have sneaked into mainstream science and medical journals unaware of the authors’ TM affiliation.
In his paper "Is Consciousness the Unified Field?" Hagelin (who has a Harvard doctorate in physics) conjectures that the sidhis operate by upsetting “the balance of statistical averaging in quantum-mechanical laws:Indeed, the phenomenon of levitation, with its implied control over the local curvature of space-time geometry, would appear to require the ability to function coherently at the scale of quantum gravity, which is the assumed scale of super-unification and the proposed domain of pure consciousness. In this way some of the sidhis, if demonstrated under laboratory conditions, would provide striking evidence for the proposed identity between pure consciousness and the unified field.TMers have no doubts about the "Maharishi effect". This refers to incredible changes produced by mass meditations. The movement claims that their efforts helped bring down the Berlin wall, resolve the Gulf War, cause stock-market rises, collapse the Soviet Union, decrease traffic accidents, and cut the crime rate in Washington, D.C., and other cities. Such wonders are supported, of course, by highly dubious statistics.
