The different experience of dying by the ignorant and the enlightened by Maharishi
Another opinion: MMY: When an ordinary man leaves his body it's a very great pain. When a realized man leaves the body it's the experience of greatest happiness-bliss. RESPONSE: Wrong. Maharishi has no direct or verifiable knowledge of this. The person who dies is not the Self, or pure consciousness. The person who dies is the person who so-called got enlightened. That person is all that counts. It is a lie that someone can become so identified with pure consciousness such that who and what they are as an individual human being simply no longer counts for anything. This is the terrible illusion of Hinduism. Maharishi according to this must have experienced the "greatest happiness-bliss" when he died. How so? If Maharishi experienced this, then it must mean he did not diehe just continued to experience transcendental consciousnessand this was his post-death identity. But on the contrary: what creates the pain of death is something objective and unavoidable: the violent sundering of the soul and the body. Did Maharishi contradict this truth when he died? There is no record of anyone dying in the manner that Maharishi describes here. Has any "realized man" had a near-death experience? MMY: Why? Because the state of enlightenment comes by many times becoming unaware of the body. Metabolic rate comes to nil. Million times the metabolic state has come to nil. And in that state what we had experienced? Bliss consciousness-during meditation. Because the state of enlightenment is the result of millions of times getting to that time of pure awareness, transcendental, that means physically the body comes to that restfulness, comes to that restfulness, comes to that restfulness. ..... RESPONSE: Transcending in TM, does it mean the actual individual flesh and bones human being stops existing? What possible relevance does transcending in TM have to do with dying? As if to say, if you transcend, you are preparing yourself for the death experience. Well, this is absurd. What death is all about (And The Tibetan Book of the Dead is no better than Maharishi in this) is the subjective, individual personthe person you are who is reading this post right nowlosing his or her unified experience of integrity, which requires the existence of the body. To become just a soul means to suddenly be incomplete. But the soul (the part of the human being closest to its Creator and immortal) is what goes through and survives the death experience. As if Maharishi is telling us: Transcend "a million times" and you will find death to be a breeze. Maharishi is deceived. Even though throughout this talk he is marvellously seductive and persuasive because he seems to be coming from a place of holiness and perfect knowingness. But consider what anyone who is rooted in the West could possibly make of this claimsomeone who had never done TM, who was educated, who was a philosopher, or a scientist. You mean to say most people have stopped meditating, and it was actually the key to a blissful death? This is Maharishi at his best, convincing us through his state of consciousness. But Maharishi himself, he suffered physically towards the end of his life, and he was unable to become an example of what he tells us is the case here. It could never be the way Maharishi describes it. Death, that is. It is a very personal experience, and it contains all the terror implied by coming face to face with the intelligence, the reality, which first created the person that one is. At that moment one has no free will. It is the metaphysically ultimate experience, and it decides everything. TM, transcending, bliss consciousness, self-realization has nothing to do with itexcept in so far as the person who believes what Maharishi says here will receive the same shock that Maharishi did in March of 2008. MMY: During meditation the mind becomes finer and finer and finer, and then disassociates itself with the body. Prana also-that is breath- becomes finer and finer and finer and finer, and then eventually in the transcendental consciousness, disassociates itself with the body. So, senses: based on the finer aspect of the senses start function finer, finer, finer, finest aspect of the senses start functioning. And then the senses remain behind, the area of the senses remains behind and they are no more in the transcendental awareness. RESPONSE: So Maharishi is saying that consciousness separates itself from the body during TM"disassociates itself with the body". Does this mean that Maharishi believes that the person is equivalent to that transcendental consciousness? Again, Maharishi spins his story and we are entranced, so much so that we just allow him to take us along for the ride, assuming that no one could talk like this except someone who knows exactly what reality and death is all about. But Maharishi knows nothing. Imagine presenting this idea to the doctors at The Harvard Medical Schoolor to Socratesor to Wittgensteinor to a mother whose child dying. (Just get him to do TM and then if he transcends enough times, he will just go into the Absolute and it will be the "experience of the greatest bliss-happiness". No tragedy here at all. Your child has become the Self. He got initiated into TM, so there's nothing to cry about. He was, after all, always just the Self anyway." Can anyone really believe this? Maharishi himself didn't really believe it, else he would have remained a serene, equable, stable, loving, detached, objective human being right through to the end of his life. And we all know by now he began to lose it, became bitter, angry, and paranoid. Where was the bliss-happiness then, Maharishi? Now when he spoke the words here that Rick has given us, he was on a roll, and coming in 1968, how could anyone dare think of refuting him. I am sure that every initiator and meditator at Squaw Valley who heard him became convinced that he was telling them the complete truth. The giveaway for me, apart from the trivializing of what it means to be an existing, knowing, experiencing, decision-making human being, is the aesthetic of his speech: it is so blissful and subtle and musical inside his Hindu Enlightenment: it is like a siren, a siren who takes one into a make-believe world. And that is what Maharishi did: he took us into a dream. And some of us have awakened from that dream. MMY: What is happening during that: the prana is disassociating itself from the body, and the mind disassociates itself from the body, senses disassociating themselves from the body. All this disassociation of the subtle body, or the inner man, has been a habit. And the experience has been: when all these disassociate from the body, then bliss consciousness is the direct experience. And therefore, as long as the machinery is functioning with the disassociation of these subtle aspects, the experience is that of pure consciousness or bliss consciousness. So the last experience that the body can give will be of bliss consciousness when the subtle body starts disassociating itself and drops off. This is the time of death. So the death of an enlightened man is just the same phenomenon of transcending and gaining transcendental consciousness. RESPONSE: Follow Maharishi here: he actually tells us that "the death of the enlightened man is just the same phenomenon of transcending and gaining transcendental consciousness." Does anyone still believe this? How can a singular human being with his own private and incommunicable sense of what it is like to be the person he or she is, get identified with transcendental consciousnesswhich has nothing to do with the intrinsic nature of this personsuch that he/she leaves behind the reality of this person and becomes this transcendental consciousness, thus sparing himself or herself even the experience of having to die. Oh, says the dying TM person: here comes transcendence (yes, I know: Maharishi is talking about someone in Cosmic Consciousness; but the principle is essentially the same: who is to say that one might just transcend just once more and go into CC just before dying: after all, CC is just maintaining this transcendental consciousness along with waking state): No worries: I will just treat it as the opportunity to slough off my individual waking state consciousness and *become* only that pure consciousness. But that pure consciousness, by definition, is not the individual at all. You mean to say, Maharishi, that one can be an infant, a child, an adolescent, an adult and acquire all this experience over a lifetime, and then just ditch the whole thingincluding the very who that has lived this lifeand this through something as simple and mechanical as Transcendental Meditation? I mean I believed all this at one point. But if you rigorously and non-romantically examine it, it is a crockas blissfully happy as Maharishi seems in uttering it. Way too simple. Bypasses everything. Maharishi is waving his magic wand here and we are falling into a dream. It is all so unreal. So much like a drug trip. MMY: Whereas in the case of others who have not experienced the inner man's disassociation from the body-who have never experienced that-then it is a very terrible thing for the eyesight to disassociate itself from the eyes. It's a very terrible thing for the sense of touch to disassociate itself from the hands. Like that. Very terrible experience of pain. Very great. For the sense of hearing to disassociate itself from the ears, from the whole machinery. RESPONSE: No, Maharishi is inspired here, but he is describing what he went through, and it was terrifying for him. For although here he tells us that to experience this from transcendent consciousness robs the experience of all dread and pain, in fact pure consciousness is an illusion. Imagine: not a single person in the West (who had not heard about TM) who died ever had the chance to know about pure consciousness. So they died this painful death that Maharishi describes here. But in fact dying is dying *as the whole person that you are, that you have always been*. There is no escaping from, transcending, the person that you know you are, the person that God himself created you to beand gave you free will to live out your life. The person who faces death is the person; it has nothing whatsoever to do with pure consciousness, as Maharishi surely came to know himself. Would Maharishi tell us this now? No, one one who has ever died can give testimony that is in accordance with what Maharishi is telling everyone here at Squaw Valley. But he is more than pulling it off, because everyone believes he is the embodiment of the truth he is uttering. And Maharishi became a broken-down man towards the end of his lifenot in his consciousness, but in his individual behaviour and in his experience of what was happening to him. If he was identified with transcendental consciousness, did this mean he witnessed himself behaving as he did? MMY: You can imagine how a man cries if his house is not insured [laughter]. If he is not hooked to safety, not insured then if the house begins to fall and burns away, he cries out and sees that oh, what beautiful ceiling I made, with such great labor and such great love and this and this, and now it is falling off and falling off and falling off. Everything that he built so dearly and with such great love and joy and labor, all that, is falling off. He starts crying at the fall of everything. Such a great pain at the time of death-for someone who has not known how to disassociate himself from his body. RESPONSE: No, Maharishi, TM could never teach one "how to disassociate [oneself] from [one's] body". What you describe here (in the person who does not know how to transcend through TM) is exactly what happened to you, Maharishi, when you died. Your Enlightenment played no part in your death, except in so far as you realized it was infinitely irrelevant. No, Maharishi: what you faced in your death was the judgment of yourself as a man, your deeds, the person that you were in all that you did. And that is what you are nowonly you are a soul severed from your body, so that you are in a state of acute and helpless vulnerability. MMY: And in TM, every time we get disassociated from the body, at that time the experience is bliss consciousness. Great experience! It's like someone whose insurance is much greater than the value of the house [laughter]. When it begins to burn, he puts a little more petrol there [laughter]. He enjoys that. Because it is hooked to safety. So it's no loss. RESPONSE: Yes, Maharishi: we rounded and rounded (thus getting prepared for death), but most of us became convinced: There is a dead-end here. We are going nowhere. Transcending via TM does not produce the perfectionnot even closeyou promised. In fact the vast majority of us teachers have been inspired to get free of you and your organization. And for those who have remained loyal to you? What can they show for their forty years of transcending? Are they more prepared for death than anyone else out there in the world? I think not, Maharishi. And either were you. There is no safety in meeting one's Creator. How did I first come to exist as the person that I am? In death we meet the author of our lifenot the author of our transcendental consciousness; we meet the author of the person that we are, the person who we are as we read Maharishi's words here. For I am sure some of us, in first coming upon what Rick has posted here thought: Perchance Maharishi was right about everything, and I have committed a fatal mistake in leaving the Movement and even perhaps giving up TM? But examine what Maharishi says here soberly, critically. I can't believe anyone who is sane can really believe Maharishi has done away with death and life in what he has proposed to us here. MMY: So, the experience of death of an enlightened man is the same experience of transcending when we meditate. So that is bliss to the enlightened and the greatest suffering to the ignorant. This is the difference. And that's why-he's always ready to die. Doesn't matter what. Always ready to die means: he is not ready to DIE, but he doesn't mind dying anytime. RESPONSE: Maharishi himself belies all this. He was never ready to die. His body gave out. Therefore the act of dying for Maharishi was involuntaryhe died in his sleep. Does this mean he remained in transcendental consciousness and asleep at the same time? That would mean he missed out on the bliss-happiness experience. Too bad. But he didn't, because once his soul began to separate from his body, even though he appeared to reman asleep, inside he was fully awake. And he discovered what he had to go through did not bear any relationship to his splendid and irresistible lecture he delivered at Squaw Valley in 1968. --- H.H. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Squaw Valley, 1968 ar RESPON
