This morning's cafe rap is purely informative. In it I'll springboard off of one of my favorite quotes of recent years and how I think it's relevant to two vastly different forms of spiritual teaching, and why I prefer one of them over the other. (Note that I use the word "prefer." This is NOT the same as saying that one of these approaches is "better" than the other, merely that someone might prefer one over the other, depending on their predilection in life.) The quote is:
"In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But in practice, there is." Most spiritual traditions -- including, of course, TM -- teach on the basis of presenting a theory about some experience or ability or state of consciousness *to those who have never experienced it*. This method of teaching is necessary because the teacher has no way to give the student the experience he's talking about in "real time," here and now. The experience or ability or SOC is always something "promised," something that the student will experience "someday," or Real Soon Now. But never Right Now. For example, Maharishi would give talk after talk after talk to his students about CC, GC, and UC, knowing that the people in the audience had never experienced these states, and thus just had to take his word for it that 1) they were as he described them, 2) that he knew what he was talking about, and 3) that what they "felt like" subjectively was what he said they felt like. Same with the siddhis. He talked *about* them, but could neither demonstrate them nor give his students the ability to witness them, at least as they have been traditionally described. That is, no one has ever actually levitated, or turned invisible, or seen anyone who can. It's all theory, around which a set of dogmas and "knowledge" has been constructed to convince the students that they "know" all about these SOCs or siddhis and that they "understand" them. There is another way of teaching. It is possible, for teachers who are capable of such things, to talk about states of consciousness while "putting on" the SOC in question and then radiating or "broadcasting" it so powerfully that the students can "put it on" and "wear" it themselves as they listen to the talk. If the talk is about CC, the teacher is able to temporarily "boost" the students' SOC from wherever it was before the talk/demo started *into* the state of CC. The students get to subjectively experience the SOC being talked about. Same with GC or UC. Same with more finite or granular states of attention, such as the variant of waking state from which one can see auras or other subtle phenomena, or "see the future," or "read minds." As the teacher is describing these states, the student is able to actually DO the things the teacher is talking about. With siddhis, if the teacher is capable of performing them, it is not as common for the student to be able to perform them, too. If the teacher, for example, is demon- strating the siddhi of levitation, and giving his talk about that phenomenon while hovering in mid-air exactly the way a brick doesn't, it is not likely that the student will lift up off their chair and join the teacher in mid- air. What *does* happen when witnessing the siddhis being performed, however, is that the student gets to feel the "energy field" produced by those siddhis being performed. That energy field (in my experience) "explains" the nature of the siddhi far better than any amount of talk "about" the siddhi. So those are the two main approaches to spiritual teaching, as I see them, and as I have experienced them in my life. I prefer the second, because of the quote I posted at the start of this rap. Being able to "put on and wear" a SOC is "practice," not dry theory. It is also IMO far more effective at presenting that SOC or ability than merely talking about the theory of it. And sitting in the energy field of a siddhi as it is being performed IMO conveys *far* more information about the siddhi than just hearing about it. Practice vs. theory. So that's the theory. :-) In practice, it is not all that easy to find teachers who can teach the second way I talk about above. I have encountered only a handful in my life. But the experience of working with them and having been exposed to the model of "shared practice" vs. dry theory was IMO valuable, and has spoiled me rotten. I would never be interested in studying with any teacher who was only capable of teaching using the first method. Some, on the other hand, might not only be happy with the theoretical approach to spiritual teaching, they might actually prefer it, the way that some prefer reading or hearing about other people's spiritual experiences to having their own. Different strokes for different folks.
