---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <authfriend@...> wrote :
I'm not sure what "blanking" refers to, actually. Could you explain? I remember as a child deciding it was impossible to stop thinking. I worked at it and worked at it, but I'd always catch myself watching to see whether I wasn't thinking, and I realized that the "watching" was itself a form of thinking. There was no way around it, as far as I could tell; it was a catch-22. Exactly. I did the same thing. I remember as a child doing this kind of thing, trying to "see" things like thought or no thought and of course, if I was aware I was not thinking or thinking I was not thinking then I just had a thought. What I meant by "blanking" is, again, something you only realize afterwards that you were doing once you're not doing it (blanking) anymore. You might find yourself simply staring at something and you are aware you have been doing this for a little bit of time and you also realized that you weren't actually thinking about anything because all of a sudden you are thinking about the fact you were staring and not thinking! Sort of hard to explain, but basically blanking is doing and thinking 'nothing'. Exactly right. To call transcending an "experience" confuses the issue when you get down to the nitty-gritty. I don't think it's "gobbledygook semantics," it's just that we don't have a language of transcendence, so we often have to go through semantic contortions. Exactly, there doesn't seem to be an exact language to really describe it because I'm not sure it's describable as we don't actually experience it except for afterwards perhaps thinking we had just transcended because we realize we were not thinking anything. Just trying to define it makes me confused. As far as I'm concerned transcendence seems like blanking. We're told this is a good thing. I guess I'll have to take other's word for it. You make an excellent point when you say "the line between being conscious of something and having a thought about that something is very fine if not non-existent." It is non-existent! And that's crucial to the mechanics of TM. BTW, when Seraphita says, "So you are *not* doing what Maharshi says," she is referring--I think!--not to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi but to Ramana Maharshi. I could be wrong, but I don't think MMY ever gave any such instruction with regard to waking, unless it was some sort of specialized advanced technique. I don't remember MMY saying anything about this but I'm no authority on him or TM for that matter. - Maharishi said that everyone passes through transcendence as they go from one state of consciousness to another (waking to dreaming to sleeping and back again). He probably would not have recommended trying to hold one's awareness in that in-between stage, at least not for ordinary meditators. Sounds to me as though Ramana Maharshi was turning a description of his spontaneous experience into a prescription for practice instead of just letting it develop naturally in his students. Ann, one might well not notice an instant of transcendence between waking and sleeping--it's easy enough to miss when one is meditating (since there's quite literally nothing to it, nothing to be aware of). Yes, and I make this point in a recent post to Seraphita. You know, this transcendence business is a funny one because it seems like you only realize you were transcending after the fact and that is kind of like having had amnesia and someone tells you that for the last five minutes you were bellydancing except you don't remember a thing. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com mailto:FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, wrote: Re Ann's "The transition between waking and sleeping is not transcendence in my book. It is full of thoughts and awareness that do not feel transcendental at all.": So you are *not* doing what Maharshi says. You have to hold your awareness at the point you wake up *before* thoughts arise. Presumably it worked for Ramana because he was in a state of Unity already; his suggestion is that it could work for others also. I mention him as his ideas rather nicely dovetail with Lynch's description of transcending during meditation. And I mention Lynch and the commentator on the article as their take on TM as an intermediate state between sleep and waking is more helpful than the Official TM approach using bubble diagrams. Re Richard's "Meditation means "to think things over". So, TM meditation is based on thinking. Anyone who can think is probably already practising a basic meditation.": If "meditation" means thinking then "Transcendental Meditation" suggests "going beyond thinking". But "meditation" only means thinking in western contexts. Easterners use whatever word they use in their language for "meditation" in a sense closer to western ideas of "contemplation".
