--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "johnt" <johnlasher20002000@...> wrote: > > You never will in a TM context, but if you study some of Milton > Erickson, Bandler and Grinder and other related sources you will > find that each part of a TM initiation has a well studied > neurolinguistic effect
Did Erickson and Bandler and Grinder study the effects of TM initiation specifically, i.e., with the initiate hooked up to an EEG machine? If not, then you're just speculatively extrapolating, and not very convincingly. From what I understand, brainwave entrainment has been studied only using very regular sound frequencies, usually machine- generated, as the stimulus. The passing of the mantra from teacher to initiate in TM doesn't involve anything remotely near that regular. That is, if the mantra is even "passed" at all, rather than the teacher "enlivening," or simply calling the student's attention to, a frequency already present in the student's mind. That sounds like what you're suggesting here: > which in this case is very effective at producing a self > transcending accessing cue which accesses an experience > at a primal (original) level prior to subsequent > conditioning. But this doesn't necessarily involve "entrainment" per se.(*) I'm in total agreement with Wilber, by the way, about the possibility of understanding religious/spiritual experience in either a mythical or a scientific context (the mythical context being a metaphorical version of the scientific one, when we finally figure out what the latter is). MMY offered both kinds of understanding (even if his nonmythical understanding was only quasi-scientific) and obviously enjoyed the mythical one himself. So I'm not at all opposed to the attempt to understand the process of TM in nonmythical terms. I just don't think the "entrainment" idea is sufficiently developed or studied to be cited as the definitive approach. ----- (*) My own theory--not anything MMY ever discussed, as far as I'm aware--is that the mantra sounds "live" at the most subtle levels of the mind as devata, the processes of knowing. When the TM teacher calls the student's attention to one of them, it becomes chhandas, an object of knowledge. When we meditate, entertaining the mantra involves using that process of knowing (the mantra sound as devata) to *know itself* as that object of knowledge (the mantra sound as chhandas). That creates a feedback loop, like when a microphone apparatus picks up its own sound and magnifies it, only in this case it's a *negative* feedback loop, becoming (as it were) smaller and smaller until it extinguishes itself, leaving the mind without any distinctions between Rishi, the Knower; devata, the process of knowing; and chhandas, the object of knowledge. That's obviously a horrendously crude description of a very vague concept, but I think it's at least potentially consistent with both the experience of TM and MMY's formulation of the Rishi/devata/chhandas structure of consciousness. Of course science hasn't identified any such thing as "processes of knowing" consisting of subtle sound frequencies at the basis of the mind, so this is even more wildly speculative than the "entrainment" theory. But if I were a neuroscientist, it's an angle I'd want to pursue. > > Nope. It's not necessarily what *TM* is, either. I don't > > know where johnt picked up this purported explanation, > > but I've never encountered it in the TM context. > > > > > > ________________________________ > > > From: johnt <johnlasher20002000@> > > > To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com > > > Sent: Saturday, November 5, 2011 11:17 AM > > > Subject: [FairfieldLife] WHY TM CAN'T BE LEARNED FROM A BOOK > > > > > > Why TM can't be learned from a book > > > > > > A TM initiation alters the brainwave pattern of the one performing the > > > puja. When the teacher then passes on the mantra to the person learning > > > meditation he also passes on a brainwave state by a process know in > > > neurophysiology as entrainment. Brainwave entrainment or "brainwave > > > synchronization," is any practice that aims to cause brainwave > > > frequencies to fall into step with a periodic stimulus having a frequency > > > corresponding to the intended brain-state. This is only one of the Neuro > > > effects of a TM initiation which is a very well crafted design of several > > > which lead to a self transcending effect of the mantra.
