Vaj,. Really nice description below of how it has come for some spiritual folks
here. Thanks. That is quite a valid description, included like in the second
nite of TM 3-day checking in learning TM and also the culminating practice of
patanjali too. This is where it has gone for a lot of people in Fairfield.
Is also a lot of what Master John Douglas brings in his practices that a lot of
the TM movement does now. Like as a melding of effortless transcending wakeful
mindfulness meditation beyond mantra.
This is really an excellent description regardless of where it came from.
Maharishi always fundamentally felt that people should practice for a lot
longer than 20 minutes twice a day. TM twice a day was an accommodation to
placate householders and busy-businessmen with their obligations . The Raja's
program is actually a more ideal program towards cultivation of spiritual depth
or like the Invincible America course schedule. Practices with discipline and
time taken to get the experience. Certainly there's a lot of depth to
spiritual silence.
Best Regards,
-Buck in FF
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Vaj <vajradhatu@...> wrote:
>
>
> > How do YOIU describe 20 minutes without thoughts?
>
>
> Since it takes about 3 hours to really settle down, I doubt there'd
> be much worth commenting on at 20 minutes.
>
> But if one is an expert at the practice of samadhi and attains it,
> it's first marker is a dramatic shift in the nervous system often
> experienced along with a brief sense of numbness at the top of the
> head. After this, mental and physical pliancy ("flexibility") -
> cheerfulness and a lightness of the body arises. There's the feeling
> one could meditate for as long as one wants, at whatever level of
> subtlety and that actually becomes a possibility. Physical and mental
> bliss arise as well and are at first a little overwhelming, but that
> rapture quickly fades, like a plane passing through the eyewall of
> the hurricane. With the final achievement of samadhi one leaves the
> world of meditative objects (mantras, various mental objects, etc.).
> Only the aspects of the sheer awareness, clarity, and joy of the mind
> appear, without the intrusion of any sense objects. Any thoughts that
> arise are not sustained, nor do they proliferate; rather they vanish
> of their own accord, like bubbles emerging from water. One has no
> sense of one's own body, and it seems as if one's mind has become
> indivisible with space.
>
> While remaining in this absence of appearances, even though it is
> still not possible for a single moment of consciousness to observe
> itself, one moment of consciousness may recall the experience of the
> immediately preceding moment of consciousness, which, in turn, may
> recall its immediately preceding moment—each moment having no other
> appearances or objects arising to it. Thus, due to the homogeneity of
> this mental continuum, with each moment of consciousness recalling
> the previous moment of consciousness, the experiential effect is that
> of consciousness apprehending itself.
>
> The defining characteristics of consciousness recollectively
> perceived in that state are first a sense of clarity, or implicit
> luminosity capable of manifesting as all manner of appearances, and
> secondly the quality of cognizance, or the event of knowing. Upon
> attaining samadhi, by focusing the attention on the sheer clarity and
> the sheer cognizance of experience, one attends to the defining
> characteristics of consciousness alone, as opposed to the qualities
> of other objects of consciousness.
>
>
> That's one description of how it might be described.
>
