Re "I found the emphasis on devotion to the guru in the TM movement always disconcerting":
What emphasis? Maharishi was never a guru - he was a teacher of meditation. "The guru-shishya tradition is the transmission of teachings from a guru to a disciple. In this relationship, subtle and advanced knowledge is conveyed and received through the student's respect, commitment, devotion and obedience." That sounds nothing like the usual experience of learning TM in which one is given a mantra and left to get on with it on one's own. No devotion or obedience was ever expected. ---In fairfieldlife@yahoogroups.com, <anartaxius@...> wrote: authfriend wrote: 'My parents sent me to Sunday School at a nearby nondenominational Christian church a couple of times when I was around 10 or so, feeling they should at least give me some exposure to religion. I didn't like it, and they didn't make me go again. I had a brief flirtation with Unitarianism in my teens, but it didn't last. Then after starting TM I began to feel a need for a worship context and joined the church where I'd attended Sunday School, stayed a couple of years but wasn't inspired enough to continue, since I really wasn't into the Personal God aspect of the belief system (or Christ as savior). God as Unified Field, the ultimate (and unworshipable) abstraction, is about as far as I can go.' My exposure to religion was rather slight, and by high school I was essentially agnostic although at times early influences would kick in on the emotional level. What you said here is pretty much what is available to agnostics, atheists, and non-theistic religions or philosophies (such as Zen Buddhism; Tao). One pretty much has to bypass that conception of a personal level of 'creation' (assuming there really is creation). It is possible other conceptual states might take the place of the personal god concept. What I found as time went on was I would make the attempt not to visualise the goal, I would easily try to deflect the tendency to give it a form. This worked for me. But a lot of people have trouble without some kind of concrete image in the mind, I find it interesting that TM takes the mind away from concrete imaging, yet when people come out of the meditation, it does not seem to register that that experience of formlessness has something to do with what one experiences through the senses. Ultimately that empty blank is what is experienced as being all the forms. The Bhagavad-Gita says that those bent on the unmanifest may have a tough time of it - a few translations follow, Chapter 12 Verse 5: 'For those whose minds are attached to the unmanifested, impersonal feature of the Supreme, advancement is very troublesome. To make progress in that discipline is always difficult for those who are embodied.' 'Those whose minds are attached to the unmanifest aspect have much greater tribulations, because devoid of any perceptible form and attributes, success is achieved with great difficulty due to the beings identifying with the body.' 'There is greater trouble for those whose minds are attached to the unmanifest. For, the path of the unmanifest is difficult to attain by the embodied.' As a kind of space case, perhaps I was attracted to a less concrete view of the universe. For example, without wanting to be a Buddhist, I was attracted to its Zen lineage because of the lack of conceptualisation and emphasis on direct experience. I found the emphasis on devotion to the guru in the TM movement always disconcerting as it did not seem to have any relevance to my so-called path. Others, of course, found devotion quite amenable to them, if it was natural; but faking devotion because one sees others doing it that way probably would be a disaster. I have seen people in the movement live and on tape seemingly straining to appear devoted when it seemed (as it appeared to me) they were just doing it out of peer pressure. Devotion is a property of what you like the most, whatever is most likable to you, that is your devotion, what you pursue, and that pursuit continues until it is fulfilled, or completely thwarted.
