--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, navashok <no_reply@...> wrote: > > --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "sparaig" <LEnglish5@> wrote: > > > > All MMY claimed about TM mantras was: > > > > 1) they are not om or some other monk-oriented mantra (if > > there are any, in his mind); > > > > 2) he deemed them to be suitable for householders; > > Since TM mantras are for householders, are there mantras > for gays and lesbians as well?
More to the point, if TM practitioners committed to Maharishi's Purusha or Mother Divine programs, and thus chose to effectively becomes monks or recluses, were they re-initiated using a more "appropriate" recluse mantra? If they were not, I suspect we have the reason why the person held up to represent the epitome of Purusha life for so long -- King Tony -- turned out to have been secretly married with children the whole time. He was meditating with a "householder mantra." :-) Just poking fun, because unlike many here, I do not believe in the magical Woo Woo properties of mantras, period -- the TM kind or any other. They're just words, and have no power or attributes other than those we project onto them. I know from experience that one can meditate -- and transcend, into long periods of thoughtless samadhi -- on mantras other than those used in TM, on ordinary words chosen at random, and using no mantra at all. This leads me to believe that all the Woo Woo TM emphasis on mantras was just marketing hoopla, a way at first to make people feel unique and special because their mantra was chosen "especially for them," and not based on some simplistic formula like, say, one's age. After all, when he first started teaching TM, didn't Maharishi prescribe the same mantra -- Ram -- for everyone? Only later did he change this, and several times, such that teachers who went to TTC at different times have very different sets of mantras. I *know* that some people like to imbue both the mantras themselves and the Woo Woo of "imparting" them with mystical, magical attributes, and it's their right to believe this if they want. My personal experience, and the experience of thousands of others I've talked to suggest that such beliefs are 1) pure superstition, and 2) almost always a form of self- importance -- "My mantra is better than your mantra because [...fill in the blank here...]." My point is that a lot of these discussions are, from my point of view, falling prey to one of the most chronic TM fallacies. People repeat stuff they were TOLD -- by the people selling them the technique -- as if it were not only true, but cosmically true, Gospel Truth. They consider these things Truth so strongly that they *assume* them, parrot them along without even *noticing* the assumption, and then base other, subsequent statements on them as if the Truth of the assumptions was a given. An example is the parroting in this thread of "the TM mantras are for householders." How do you KNOW this, those of you who have been repeating it so mindlessly? Simple, you "know" it only because it was TOLD to you, and you've bought what you were TOLD so effectively that for you it's become a kind of core belief, a baseline truth than *can*, and in fact *must* be assumed. But the only real truth in this equation is that you have no reason to believe this other than the fact that it was TOLD to you by the person selling you the technique you learned, and you just bought it at the time and now keep repeating it as if this phrase itself were some kind of holy mantra. It's not. It's a *belief*, based on what someone TOLD you. I for one think that it's beneficial to keep that in mind when presenting things you were TOLD to others as if they were Truth.
