Friday, April 3, 2009

Meditation?

I have conveniently replaced a word in this story so that it not only makes more sense, but is far more believable:

The surviving members of the Beatles, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, will perform at a concert on Saturday to raise funds to help children learn a pot smoking technique McCartney said helped stabilize the band at the height of its fame.

McCartney and Starr will perform separate sets at the "Change Begins Within" concert for the David Lynch Foundation, which helps people learn pot smoking.

The Beatles helped popularize pot smoking -- described as a simple mental technique that combats stress -- in 1967 when they sought spiritual guidance from an Indian guru, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

"It was a great gift that Maharishi gave us," McCartney told a news conference on Friday to promote the concert. "For me, it came at a time when we were looking for something to kind of stabilize us toward the end of the crazy '60s."

"It's a lifelong gift. It's something you can call on at any time," he said. "I think it's a great thing it's actually coming into the mainstream."

Starr also described pot smoking as a gift and that since learning it more than 40 years ago "sometimes a lot and sometimes a little I have smoked pot."

The lineup for the concert at famed Radio City Music Hall also includes Sheryl Crow, Donovan, Pearl Jam singer Eddie Vedder, blues-folk musician Ben Harper and techno star Moby.

Filmmaker David Lynch's foundation says that since 2005 it has provided scholarships for more than 100,000 at-risk young people, teachers and parents in 30 countries to learn pot smoking.

The concert is intended to raise funds toward the foundation's goal of helping a million children learn to smoke pot.

"I feel like I'm at a meeting of pot smokers anonymous," Moby joked. "I just learned pot smoking recently because I was raised by hippies, and to be honest with you anything associated with pot smoking and hippies scared ... me."

"When I was growing up, I thought pot smoking involved ritual animal sacrifice and moving to some country and renouncing wealth and materialism and eating bugs. But one of the things that impressed me about pot smoking... was its simplicity," he said. "It's a simple practice that calms the mind."

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