On Jan 2, 2009, at 9:59 AM, Patrick Gillam wrote:
Maharishi's term for "transcendental" is
"bhava-tita": "beyond causal being" or
"beyond moods". A more popular term is
"para". MMY defines transcending in his
yoga-sutra "translation" as "nirodha" (his words:
"yoga is bringing transcending to the activity
of the mind." YS 1:2) IME many TM practitioners
end up succumbing to torpor: thus all the
reports of people sleeping in the dome. The
Patanjali tradition warns of this as what happens
rather than "going beyond", para, one instead
just "settles down" into a thought-free state
he calls "sthiti". Sthiti has some tamasic
qualities and so it's easy to just lull into
that state, which can feel, experientially
like a bare one-pointedness, but easily devolves
into torpor and then sleep.
The reason why so many TMers fall asleep is
simple: they've turned the marketing description
"effortless" into a mood-making dogma: they're
afraid to use any mindfulness and balanced
attention because of it. When attention becomes
to lax, one falls into the tamasic aspect of
sthiti, and they fall asleep. The "stress at
the level of the nervous system" excuse is BS.
It's a well-known phenomenon.
Vaj, this explanation sounds good to my
intellect, but it doesn't jibe with my
experience. When I do the TM-Sidhis, I'm
using the mindfulness and balanced attention
you call for immediately above, yet I still
get drowsy when I do the practice in the
afternoon. In my experience, sleepitations
are a function of being genuinely tired,
not because I'm caught in some torpor of
thought-free awareness.
Since you're using an appropriate balance of attention then you don't
have an issue, unless of course as you say, you're actually tired. So
actually it sounds like your experience DOES jive with what I'm
describing. And I also suspect if you were on IA you wouldn't be
falling asleep as you wouldn't be as tired from the workaday routine.
In any event torpor is a common deficit in TM, just not for you, for
whatever reason. Consider yourself lucky I guess.
