Vaj: The majority of TM initiators not only stopped teaching TM, but have probably even stopped meditating. I am almost certain of this.
However, for you to propose that the Puja ceremony works on the basis of the placebo effect is so bizarre and misinformed as to be the same as saying that when you are in a car that is moving, it turns out it is really an illusion: you are actually not going anywhere. Maybe one in a hundred TM initiators (of all those that Maharishi made teachers) still do the Puja;; but even all those who have turned their back on TM and Maharishi, they, to a one, know that *the Puja works*. That is, to say, singing the Puga (especially in the context of teaching someone to meditate) alters one's consciousness, changes one's perception, and acts on every level of one's being, including the physical. Now I personally would never conceive of doing a Puja, because of its very power to change me in a way that I believe is inimical to sustaining the integrity of my own personality.But for you to advance the idea that the effect of singing the Puja is produced by the placebo effect, this is the final evidence of your fraudulent claim to be a TM initiator. And not only this: it proves you never learned TM, because you would not make this claim had you passed through that experience. No, Vaj; you must stop this. Whatever TM, Maharishi, and the Puja are all about, the notion of the placebo effect is utterly inapplicable. I have the strongest resistance and aversion to the TM experience, to Maharishi, to the Puja; but I know this: were I to sing it alone right now, and go through the proper ritualistic motions (and offerings) my consciousness would undergo an objective change, and I would find myself, however subtly, in another context than the one I am in as I write this. TM and the Puja, they do, as Maharishi insisted, operate mechanically. Your attempt to portray the Puja as a placebo effect is so wrong-headed, so false to reality, and therefore such a lie, it would be as if you said that lifting weights cannot affect your muscles. Not one initiator could ever say to himself or herself: That Puja thing; it was just the placebo effect. And if anyone saying he or she was an former initiator said it worked on the basis of the placebo effect, every initiator in the worldwho did not have a dishonest agendawould know that such a person never knew Maharishi, never learned Transcendental Meiditation, and never was a Teacher of TM. The Puja was perhaps the most powerful thing about the whole TM Movement. And it truly bathed us in the purest form of Hinduism. You never got baptized, Vaj. You are an outsider. Even among those of us who have repudiated Maharishi and TM and the beneficence of their influence upon a human being, know that the Puja is anything but something that could have its efficacyexperientiallyon the basis of the placebo effect. You are deceived in this Vaj: Like saying the sensation of the fragrance of a rose is the placebo effect. Or that the effects of fasting are just imagined in the mind. No, Vaj: the Puja is the heart and soul of TM and the TM Movement. And I knew this the moment after I had performed my first Puja and motioned to my initiate to kneel as I was kneeling. The Puja as taught to us by Maharishi is flawless, it is real, and it has a potency that refutes everything you say. --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Vaj <vajradhatu@...> wrote: > > > On Nov 6, 2011, at 8:58 PM, "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 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 > > It's called the placebo effect silly. > > We actually now know where the TM puja came from and what sources the puja > was hobbled together from. It's from a pundits poem that Mahesh was told to > throw away. There's nothing magical about it at all - unless you believe it > is. But it does not come from a real lineal tradition, it's something Mahesh > made up. >
