Speaking purely for myself, TM is different to other forms of meditation but the effects of the other types my be be more useful if you have the sort of health issues that TM claims (but fails) to address. And may be more useful anyway..
Mindfulness can be highly beneficial for anxiety and depression states where TM is patently not. But if you're just going to judge everything by the EEGs what are you going to find out about it? Not much I would have thought. Here's the shocking truth; different types of meditation can affect and enhance the way you react to things that happen in your life, or because of things that happened previously, in different ways. The immediacy of experience that mindfulness gives you can help you live more spontaneously by freeing you from negative reaction patterns you may have picked up. It can also target things that bother you rather than let you sit around hoping that some "stress" is going to be released at some point in the future and you'll suddenly be able to cope better with problems. This approach can be of enormous value and it's something that EEG research isn't going to be able to help you with. You are way too fixated on this stuff Lawson. Did you read the Stanford research paper MJ posted about how they tested TM claims about stress release and anxiety reduction and found the TMO was exaggerating, mistaken or lying about the long term effects? We all know many people that don't fit the TM model of "perfect functioning" and would undoubtably all know many more if a large majority didn't quit the practise in the first few months, regardless of what their EEGs might be telling us. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <LEnglish5@...> wrote : Former TMers enjoy claiming that TM has the same effects as all other practices, but anyone who looks at the EEG signature of various practices instantly realizes that such people are either speaking from ignorance (willful or otherwise) or deliberately lying. Here's a discussion of no-self and American Buddhism in the context of a course on Buddhist philosophy and how it fits in with the research on Buddhist meditation (mindfulness, though focussed attention practices such as Benson's Relaxation Response, Samatha and Metta, all have teh same overall effect): http://www.patheos.com/blogs/americanbuddhist/2014/05/buddhism-and-modern-psychology-week-five-looking-at-meditation.html http://www.patheos.com/blogs/americanbuddhist/2014/05/buddhism-and-modern-psychology-week-five-looking-at-meditation.html "Now that we’ve seen it suggested that the modular theory of the mind dovetails with the Buddhist theory of not-self, we look at how meditation might fit in to our picture. The first way this is discussed comes by looking at the Default Mode Network, which is the part of the brain that is active when our mind isn’t focused on anything. Brain scans have shown that meditation quiets this network. " The activation of the Default Mode Network (DMN) becomes greater during TM. Coincidentally, activation of teh DMN is associated with "sense of self," so the fact practice of meditation techniques that quiet the DMN also quiet "sense of self" is, well, a no-brainer. Likewise, the fact that TM, a mind-wandering practice, enhances teh activity of the DMN (including strengthening the activity of the brain associated with "sense of self") is a no surprising, either. People who insist that all meditation practices eventually lead to the "same place" are fooling themselves. Mindfulness and concentrative practices, in the long run, distort the functioning of the Default Mode Network. Maharishi called this "subtle damage" to the nervous system. TM enhances the normal restful functioning of the brain, aka the "Default Mode Network," which becomes active whenever the mind is allowed to wander. There's no reconciling the two approaches to spirituality.
