On Dec 19, 2011, at 12:15 PM, turquoiseb wrote:
Is it the same thing, or something different? Beats me? I am no neuroscientist, or even a trained behavioral scientist. All I know is that if some of the states that we commonly see "awakened" people go through are (as we suspect) a little more than "eccentric," it's a situation that is made more serious by total belief in the sanctity and "truth" of subjective experience.
What's amazing to me is to have witnessed the machinations of a so- called "enlightened man" in 1983 and to find no discernible difference between 1983 and 2011 - except I have a better understanding now of mental illness, back then it was just the intuition that 'something's not right here'. Of course once everyone saw the videos of "the enlightened man" beating one of his students, on official video, on the stage - that was the last straw. The emperor of ice cream melted.
People have been taught for decades that their subjec- tive experience is the holy grail with which to judge "spiritual experience" or their "evolution" towards something they've been told is enlightenment. At the same time, there was no instruction along the way that taught them how to differentiate between actual spir- itual experience and overwhelming emotion.
Well, as TMers we were not taught to refine attention, let alone master it's balance - but we believed we were anyways....that's what they said! An institutionalized fear of effort made sure of that never would occur. Hell some TMers still imagine themselves in these exalted samadhis - it's insanely hilarious and insanely sad at the same time.
Circa the early 80's many TMers I knew got caught up in 'healing the "emotional body"' thang. The belief that was spread around was that TM was too dry as it transcended the emotional body, thereby skipping it. So a popular cult arose, combining a mixture of hyperventilation, focused massage and rebirthing in hot tubs. It was during one of those sessions that the first friend I knew declared his status as an awakened one. Shortly thereafter, the ex-initiator started his own system - suspiciously based on this bubble diagram-like drawing. We were all encouraged to move to the Southwestern US, as 'that's where all the evolved ones were going'.
He did make an interesting first "channel" on how the followers of RWC were actually all reincarnations of an off-split that had caused disciples to leave a legit guru for a false guru.
As a result (IMO), they get into a manic state, interpret the overwhelming emotions of it as "spiritual," and consider what they're going through -- *whatever* it may be -- synonymous with Truth.
They're healing their emotional bodies, can't you SEE? All that emotion's been pent up from all that rounding. TM was just too damn efficient for American nervous systems!
So in a way the manic states become self-replicating. Having convinced themselves that a previous manic state was something akin to enlightenment, they mood-make more of them.
Well it's interesting because the Sanskrit word for "mood" is "bhava". The words for TM are bhavatita-dhyana, that is literally "beyond moods meditation". But what is it they get enlightened in?
Moods. Or mood management. Or lack of mood management. Whatever you want to call it.
