--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, ruthsimplicity <no_re...@...> wrote: > > You are assuming a conclusion that > simply can't be assumed. We have no idea as to whether TM > successfully produces enlightenment or "unity consciousness." The > TMO does not say that out of X number of meditators, Y have reached > GC, or UC.
More important, the TMO cannot produce *repre- sentatives* of CC, GC, or UC. The most they can say is that a few people show *some* of the things that our teacher claimed were "symptoms" of these states. And even then, not all of the "symptoms," and not regularly. That really IS what David OJ's statement says. > Plus, even more importantly, we don't even know if higher states of > consciousness are in fact higher or important or just different. > > After all these years we know next to nothing. The 60s, the 70s, the > 80s, the 90s, and soon the 00's will pass. Meditators get old, > meditators die, still thinking that they are hammering a nail when > there is no indication that they have either a hammer or nail. Exactly. What we are seeing is "argumentation backwards from the conclusion." Many of the folks here who argue the benefits of TM *assume* those benefits as a "given," and then base all of their subse- quent arguments on that assumption. They assume that TM is a hammer because they were *told* that it was. Rather than admit that they just believed was fact this when it was told to them, they assume that it's a hammer *as if it were a fact*. Vaj goes overboard in his attempts to prove that TM isn't a hammer (doesn't produce enlightenment as it has been described throughout history), and that puts some people off, including me sometimes. But I am at least willing to admit that my former belief in TM as a method for realizing permanent enlightenment was based on *what I was told*, not anything I ever experienced personally or saw around me in my days with the TMO. I was stupid, and just believed what I had been told. When I experienced other perspectives on the enlightenment process, and other, more rigorous definitions of what "enlightenment" might be (and other, more interesting subjective experiences of the states in question), I stopped believing in the TM model, and admitted to myself and to others that the main reason I believed the TMO's spiel at the time was that it was really the only one I'd ever heard. For many people on this forum, it still is because they react to any others by sticking their fingers in their ears and saying, "I can't HEAR you...I can't HEAR you." I'd have more respect for the TM apologists here if they 1) could admit the degree of *assumption* they have about TM and where those assumptions came from (from believing what they were told), and 2) if they were more open to open intellectual inquiry into other spiritual disciplines and *their* desc- riptions of enlightenment and what the "definitions" of it might be. The bottom line, however, is that as far as I can tell not a single TM apologist on this forum can point to a single human being on the planet and declare, "This person is fully enlightened, and they got that way by doing TM and only TM." The *TMO* itself cannot do this. And yet they keep repeating over and over and over and over the tired old claim that TM not only produces enlightenment, but that it's the fastest and most effective way to produce it. One would think that after a few decades of saying this shit that one or two of them would have been able to actually *hear* the words as they came out of their mouths, and wonder why they were still saying them.
