On May 6, 2009, at 1:28 AM, sparaig wrote:
Such states are easily demonstrable by methods known for thousands of
years. So if the state is legit., it would be relatively easy to
know,
even without a lot of fancy science. What I've found is TMers
learn to
talk and think in flowery language as a part of the TM mythos and
that
ends up having little basis in reality, although they're quite
convinced what they're experiencing is something remarkable.
Remarkable experiences require remarkable proof. So far no proof...
Aside from the thousands of non-TM hits on the term "pure
consciousness event"
cointed by someone writing about TM research and adopted by all
sorts of non-TM reserachers over teh past decade or so.
Attaching coached experiences to ambiguous wording is of little
value. Show us the hard data.
The actual originator of the term, Robert Foreman pointed out, "pure
consciousness" is not a very helpful word. It's not only imprecise,
you can attach whatever you want to it. That's why it's better to
have an experiential understanding of the various states of
consciousness so we can label them precisely, this is murcha/swooning
or this is a certain type of laya, rather than to try to impress with
big sounding words. Creating new words and avoiding traditional ones
is a great way to fool people, but that's typically not the goal of
authentic spirituality.
The question really is not to define the fact—for we cannot do that—
but to get at
and experience it.
- Edward Carpenter (1844–1929)
A word is a word. An experience is an experience. Both are different.
- S. Shigematsu
