--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "authfriend" <jstein@...> wrote: > > --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "Xenophaneros Anartaxius" <anartaxius@> > wrote: > <snip> >> The reason for meditating using any system is to get >> beyond conceptual thought and experience not only the >> context of thought but the relationship of thought with >> what it represents, which typically is rather tenuous. > > Given that this is the reason for meditating, then... > >> The problem every spiritual movement has is as time goes >> along, the conceptual framework by which is understood the >> reason and purpose of meditation, by way of peer pressure >> and group conformity becomes a mental prison just as >> imprisoning as the one one is supposedly escaping from by >> virtue of starting some meditation system. > > ...could you be more specific as to what about the > conceptual framework by which the reason and purpose of > TM are understood has become a mental prison? > > The principle you elucidate sounds right, but I'm having > trouble translating it into its application for TM.
Judy. All movements have this problem, at least in my estimation. My early experiences with 'transcendence' were not with TM but were related to Buddhist practices. The experiences that resulted were not deep (though at the time I thought they were). The emphasis intellectually however was on direct experience, on bypassing one's belief system, on seeing that a lot of what we consider real is just a conceptual overlay on perception, and that that overlay controls our behaviour. After learning TM, which I found easier than what I had done previously, I spent more time intellectually with the TM model. However after many years I found I was forgetting the insights I had previously gained. As the TM movement branched out into all sorts of auxilliary techniques and 'vedas' (e.g. sthapatya veda), I found my focus getting distracted. As a natural sceptic, eventually I scaled down or discarded most of this additional load, just maintaining TM. Instead of reading spiritual stuff I read science fiction, westerns, books by atheists. Then I just sort of stopped, except for meditation. One day, out of the blue, the conceptual framework of my experience simply blew away. Explaining this is difficult, but it was pretty much like waking from a dream. In the following years this shift has wormed its way deeper, and I find I am much less attached to conceptual models, though of course I still must use them for practical things. The strange thing is this is the experience that is aimed at with meditation. It actually seems to come after everything seems to stop working pretty much. It is really mysterious, because it is also possible to lose the effect of the experience if a particularly difficult stress starts to release. Eventually it becomes more stable. Maharishi said 'Unity is real, diversity is conceptual'. This is it. It is so simple. Yet the movement has so much conceptual baggage it is easy to get totally lost in it. I could not fit this experience into the movement's sense of progression of experiences, but I began to reread and find new sources in other Eastern enlightenment traditions that seem to explain this experience much better. I do believe Maharishi talked about this, but it seems to be buried in off-hand comments he has made. It is not directly spoken of, and so the focus on experiencing that one's conceptual view of life is essentially ridiculous, that one completely misconstrued the nature of spiritual experience, is diluted, and the attention is distracted to other pursuits, like balancing doshas and whatnot, and rectifying jyotish charts. This is all unnecessary unless it is the only way to keep someone meditating, which I do not believe is actually necessary because everyone is exactly what they are, every aspect of enlightenment is present all the time, and we are just distracted. Talking about the goal that occurs when meditation matures is really helpful. Maharishi started out teaching people that had no clue as to what spiritual knowledge consisted of. There are many more people today who now have a clue, but the bulk of the material in the TMO, at least what we hear, is aimed at the beginners, and it pictures enlightenment in much rosier terms than it really is. He tended to leave out the hard parts, to make it attractive to busy people. I think being intensely curious and probing one's own ideas and those of others helps a lot to kept from getting locked into a conceptual system. Conceptualisation is a tool to get through life. We grow up with it. It is what makes us forget who and what we are. I do not know what the best solution is, but meditating regularly, and a lot helps, but keeping the mind more flexible and not taking our ideas as seriously as we sometimes think they are, especially spiritual ideas, may help keep conceptualisation from overpowering the benefits of meditation. Yet in the end, seeing through this illusion of our own mind is very strange and mysterious, and there is no way to know, really, what it is like until it happens to you. The biggest error in conceptualistion is in regarding self-realisation, because the mind spontaneously thinks it is something that one can attain, or acquire, that it is something in the future. It is none of these things, but if one is fortunate, meditating gradually wears away these pursuits until the conceptual load is light enough that one's own being finally can make that final self referral loop back into its own nature, and one finally experiences through the distortion of one's own mind. TM is a tiny self-referral loop, but the one I am talking about takes in the whole universe. So perhaps the practice, as it evolves, keeps expanding that loop with each successive meditation until at last it takes in everything. People's experience differs a lot, their load of stress varies a lot, so this conceptual story I have made up may not fit them as well as it did me. But still it is just a story, an idea to explain something that defies description. A really good question to ask oneself is 'what if everything I have thought about life is just plain wrong?' This is what self-realisation brings to experience. This is why, in some traditions that are not too self important, enlightenment is considered a joke. The ultimate joke. And of course, the joke is on us.
