-- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "whynotnow7" <whynotnow7@...> wrote: > > Hey Barry, Belief by others has no bearing on these things. You would have > been in popular company believing and declaring in the 15th century that the > world is flat. This is what I meant in the past Barry when I have said you > strike me more as a follower than a leader. > > The spiritual journey is always a singular one, not needing anything except > one's own integrity and dedication. To try and game it into some sort of > popularity contest is misguided and immature, imo.
There is a significant difference in today's "enlightened" from the past though. That is that in the past there was an extensive support system of interaction with someone entrusted to evaluate progress. Most traditions involved communities of people whose constant interaction was in fact a real time monitoring process. That combined with a strict protocol and interaction with a representative of a tradition created a lot of checks and balances. This is a important point in how we are proceeding today with evaluating what these internal states mean. On one hand people seem confident to use the scriptures to support claims of enlightenment while at the same time living completely outside the traditional structures meant to support such a claim. Maharishi was very clear about the need to external evaluations for claims of enlightenment and at least gave lip-service to some benchmarks. This all starts with Maharishi who sort of set these techniques free into the world but really offered little continuing support for people as their mental states changed. There was a theater of such support like in the fairly recent show of a few questions in the dome on some course. Carefully monitored and without any follow-up. I remember writing my monthly experience reports for years after taking the sidhis with no feedback. That would be a fascinating pile of material to evaluate the sidhi program from. I hope that someday someone sifts through that for some insight. I am in the camp that believes that our minds can be shifted significantly but that we can't look to the past interpretations for what it means. We need to find out on our own. It seems that you have blended a bit of each approach in presenting your own inner state here. I did listen to your Batgap interview and felt that you were giving it the old college try to explain where you were at internally. A genuine attempt to go beyond jargon that I appreciated. It is hard to provide something convincing to others that something meaningful has occurred for you. I believe that Batgap tends to gloss over statements of miracles as mundane or at least not necessary to back up with some proof. I think that is a reasonable bar to clear for any claim of an interaction with the world that could be measured. My views on all this is still a work in progress. I've had enough of my own shifts of state to know that such things can be dramatic but still have not been convinced that all these changes are better states. Some of them seem like too much of a good thing to me. Thanks for keeping up the dialogue Jim. > > --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, turquoiseb <no_reply@> wrote: > > > > --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, cardemaister <no_reply@> wrote: > > > > > > --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, nablusoss1008 <no_reply@> wrote: > > > > > > > > Oh ? I claimed to have jumped 6 meters from the sitting > > > > position several times. > > > > Not exactly flying, but quite close. > > > > > > I think that certainly can be called flying unless you were > > > on a trampoline or somesuch! IMO, that's nothing short or > > > semi-sensational! ;D > > > > I suspect that the word "delusional" works better in > > this case than "semi-sensational." :-) > > > > I further suspect that the number of people on this > > forum who believe Nabby when he claims this is equal > > to the number of people who believe Jim and Ravi when > > they claim to be enlightened. The word "delusional" > > may factor into this mathematical equation as well. :-) > > >
