Today I found myself remembering something Vaj said -- that one of the reasons mindfulness is making inroads into PC-sensitive environments such as publicly-funded schools, in which other techniques such as TM might encounter difficulties, is that mindfulness can be completely secularized. It can be divorced from its origins in a tradition that can be seen as religious and presented without any of its original trappings in Buddhism. You don't even need a Buddhist to teach it; any layman or teacher or therapist can learn its principles and teach them to others. It's the spiritual equivalent of open source software.
In comparison, TM is very much proprietary source software. It cannot really ever be completely divorced from its origins in Hindu (or, if you prefer, Vedic) trappings. To teach it, a person has to not only be specially trained by the organization that holds the copyrights (literally) to the source code of its tradition, he or she has to perform rituals that can easily be construed as religious, prior to imparting mantras that can just as easily be construed as being the names of gods and goddesses. You can argue that this isn't true all you want, but I suspect that even the arguers will admit that there is a strong case to be made for a 1-to-1 link being present between TM and an established religious tradition. That creates problems in some environments. The dedicated people in those environments -- teachers, therapists, health care professionals and even law enforcement or prison officials -- are DYING for techniques that would help the people they're dedicated to helping. But many of these people are also very Politically Correct savvy, and realize that if they introduce a technique or set of techniques into their environment that is PC-controversial, the controversy is pretty much guaranteed to hit the fan. That's just the nature of the times we live in. All of this thinking about Vaj's mention of this idea of a secularized spiritual practice got me to thinking up questions, which I pass along to Vaj or to anyone else here: "What would a completely secularized set of meditation and self-development techniques LOOK LIKE? If you were to design one or speculate about one, what would it involve and not involve?" "Which elements from traditional spiritual practices would you preserve, and which would you not?" "If the meditation practices you suggest use mantras, where would they come from?" "If the meditation practices don't involve mantras, what would they be? For example, some techniques rely on visualization, either inwardly or with the eyes open, on certain designs (yantras, mandalas) or individuals (gods, goddesses, saints). Would you use these same objects of focus, or others? If others, what would they be?" "How would you make this technique or set of techniques attractive to people who could benefit from them without relying on the appeal to 'lineage' or 'tradition?'" "Do you feel that such a secularized spiritual practice would be a Good Thing or a Bad Thing? Would one approach be inherently "better" or "more effective" and the other...uh..."less?" And if so, WHY?" I have no easy answers. If you do, fire away. I am interested both as a "spiritual sociologist" and as a fan of science fiction. Writers in the SF genre have speculated about secularized spirituality for decades. Heck, one SF author even went out and created his own version of one, and has gazillions of followers. But in the process he copped out and called it a religion. What would you come up with if you were trying to do the opposite?
