Bronte Baxter wrote: <snip> > What I come up with is this. TM did deliver experience of the stillest > states of awareness, that most of us had been too outward-directed ever to > have noticed before. It pointed us toward home. That was fantastic. But just > as a bad product offer can include a really good freebie giveaway, TM > attached a pretty big pricetag to the good that it gave us. That pricetag > wasn't noticed until we'd been meditating a long time, until we'd bought the > philosophy hook line and sinker. Kind of like those credit card deals that > start out with zero interest then slowly build interest until you're amazed > to find yourself swimming in debt. > > The pricetag was, you pay a toll to the gods to ride the road to > transcendence. You get to pure consciousness using a toll road highway. At > first you're asked for only a tiny toll, no pinch at all. You're informed > this is the only way to the ocean -- taking the freeway is far too dangerous. > So the aspirant flies down the toll road, thrilled to be using it, paying 35 > cents at a tollbooth now and then. But as the years go by, the toll charge > rises -- he gets an advanced technique, he starts reading Vedas to the gods > every day, listening to chants -- his mantra gets "namah" added to it. > Bowing, bowing down. Delivering soma to the gods. > Actually the "advanced" techniques are more like the traditional mantras without omkara. But most TM'ers including teachers never step out enough to learn mantra shastra to know that and MMY never taught mantra shastra which is the science of mantras. Using bij aksharas as a meditation mantra is very controversial among Indian sages and without om even more controversial. > > > <big snip> > TM gave us something. But that was the thing that was always free to us > anyway, had we only known where to look. It's something that still waits for > us, never demanding we pay a toll. It's there for the experiencing, without > gods or mantras, bajans or ego-suicide. It's just what we Are, and it just Is. A few years back I was initiated into a tantric tradition by a Indian tantric who resides locally. This tradition which is village tantra is not over scholasticized like we find in the TM movement. It had to be kept simple because village people often don't have the education to delve into things academically. But it is a very powerful tradition and Indians will tell you the most powerful tantrics are the ones who reside in the villages probably because their energies are not drained by the stress of the city. Which also means that in its simplicity it is more apropos for our modern western lifestyle.
Having a personal guru (who also treats me as his buddy) is a lot different from having a remote out of touch "pop" guru. There is of course plenty of time to ask questions including very deep ones that even if you got to ask MMY he would have blown off. He also does not rule over my life but instead it is "here are some techniques to practice and when and how to practice them." We've had much discourse on mantra shastra too. It is actually very simple as is shaktipat which we use in teaching. And there is no cult. In fact I have met only a few of his other initiates. There are no group meetings as it is one-on-one instruction. What I've learned is meditation is good even if it just calms someone down for a couple of periods a day. It is amazing if it opens your eyes to reality. The Kali tradition which is dangerous unless under the instruction of a guru peels away illusion like the layers of an onion. Every week there is a new "aha!" experience. And my guru teaches that kind of experience is unending. BTW, before I learned TM I had tried some of Ramana Maharishi's techniques (and even before that when I first tried meditation I had kundalini rise). I learned TM because I intuitively felt that mantra meditation would deepen what I had already learned through self-inquiry. And it did and in fact they played off one another. Gods, BTW, are just personifications of the subtle fields that sages experienced in meditation. They were personified so that the ordinary person could conceptualize them.
