Good rap, Xeno. My experience is similar to yours, in that over the years "intellectual knowledge" has become less and less interesting to me, to the point that now I have little tolerance for it. And interestingly in my case the "tipping point" was because of my own experience -- some of it with Rama - Fred Lenz, some with Buddhist teachers -- of having one's conceptual framework just "fall away."
*Whatever* it was that Rama did to achieve it, he did have a knack for being able to shift other people's state of attention. Radically. When discussing some aspect of duality (even if it involved some "higher" aspect of duality such as the siddhis or occult power), he wasn't just talking about it; he could shift your state of consciousness such that you were experiencing the state of attention he was talking about, *as* he talked about it. But then he'd "mix it up" to provide a series of Tantric contrasts. For example, after a few minutes talking about more occult, dualistic mindstates, he'd shift things radically and start talking about (and "broadcasting") Unity. Bam! Suddenly *everything* he had been talking about earlier from the POV of occult dualism was now completely irrelevant. Nothing that you believed only five minutes ago was "true" is now either "true" any more, or relevant. I am not convinced that gaining "intellectual knowledge" (or, as you put it, strengthening one's conceptual framework) is of value in the pursuit of spiritual experience. The more firmly you come to believe that "you know the truth," the further you are away from the truth. To some extent, coming to believe in some framework from which to view the world around you is like getting fat; every concept is just another pound weighing you down and interfering with an in-the-moment, more accurate view of the world around you and the ability to dance with it. That said, in retrospect I think that Maharishi's simplistic rendering of "seven states of consciousness" is one of the most debilitating beliefs he ever came up with. Believing that "waking state" is only ONE state is like believing that white is the only color in the world. I'm much more comfortable with the Buddhist "ten thousand states of mind," in which there can be *thousands* of variations in one's waking state state of attention, each of them as different from one another as MMY's simplistic waking state is from Unity. That said, I disagree strongly with his statement, "Unity is real, diversity is conceptual." It's ALL real. To believe otherwise is still (IMO) to be caught up in a hierarchical view of consciousness, in which some experiences can be said to be "higher" or "better" or "more real" than others. Just more conceptual twaddle IMO. "What if everything I knew was wrong" is not a challenging question, but a liberating one. IMO the more you think you know about reality and how it all works, the less you know. And the less likely you are ever to experience it as reality. --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "Xenophaneros Anartaxius" <anartaxius@...> wrote: > > 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. >
