Lawson, nice post and thanks too for the Maharishi quote about spiritual and material.
On Monday, June 2, 2014 5:43 AM, "lengli...@cox.net [FairfieldLife]" <FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com> wrote: Eh, has it ever occurred to you that you might be wrong? The United Nations relief agencies don't care about enlightenment, but they DO care about what is the most efficient therapy for PTSD. The American Heart Association don't' care about enlightenment, but they DO care about what is the best way for patients to reduce high blood pressure. School teachers and principals don't care about enlightenment, but they DO care about what is the best way to help their students. It turns out that TM is often a good fit for what other professions are concerned about, even though TM is specifically a PTSD or hypertension therapy, nor is it explicitly designed to help students do better than school. Those happen to be side-effects, for many people, of growth towards enlightenment, and the research happens to show that. L ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <turquoiseb@...> wrote : What you do not seem to understand, Lawson, is who the *audience* for all of this supposed "scientific verification of claims about TM" is. It is NOT newbies, who have never learned TM and are being given a sales pitch about it. It's those who bought it years ago, and who by now -- after decades of empty promises about TM providing "the fastest path to enlightenment on the planet" -- are desperate for something (anything!) that can convince them they haven't wasted 7,300 to 43,800 hours of their life ** sitting around with their eyes closed waiting for something that is never going to happen for them. The "TM research" is an exercise in "preaching to the already converted to keep their donations and course payments still coming in." ** Normal TMer practicing 2X20 for 30 years: 7,300 hours (384.2 days, or .83 years) Normal TMSPer practicing 2X60 for 30 years: 21,900 hours (912.5 days, or 2.5 years) Fanatical domegoer practicing 2X120 for 30 years: 43,800 hours (1,825 days, or 5 years) ________________________________ From: "LEnglish5@... [FairfieldLife]" <FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com> To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com Sent: Monday, June 2, 2014 4:47 AM Subject: [FairfieldLife] Re: Lightmint vs EEG claptrap On the other hand, we have this, which is Maharishi's response to complaints about studying enlightenment via modern science: Spiritual and Material Values Every experience has its level of physiology, and so unbounded awareness has its own level of physiology which can be measured. Every aspect of life is integrated and connected with every other phase. When we talk of scientific measurements, it does not take away from the spiritual experience. We are not responsible for those times when spiritual experience was thought of as metaphysical. Everything is physical. Consciousness is the product of the functioning of the brain. Talking of scientific measurements is no damage to that wholeness of life which is present everywhere and which begins to be lived when the physiology is taking on a particular form. This is our understanding about spirituality: it is not on the level of faith --it is on the level of blood and bone and flesh and activity. It is measurable. -Maharishi Mahesh Yogi Waiting for the wailing and gnashing of teeth (not just weeping). L ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <emptybill@...> wrote : Apparently none of the posters on this thread read the short article by Swartz about the difference between mindfulness and awakening to the innate awareness that makes us what we are. The actual discussion by James Swartz was about the difference between the practice of Buddhist Vipassana and its relationship to the Vedanta teachings about awakening to one’s invariant witness-awareness. EEG's indicate nothing about Lightmint and have never demonstrated anything about consciousness "as such". The assumption is that EEG brain activity enumerates variant forms of subjectivity, all the while never investigating this unsupported claim itself. That assumption is not challenged because it attacks the very funding-base (University and Institutional) that supports most of these studies. Read it and Weep, Weep, Weep. “The reflected awareness that bounces off the tiny mirror of an individual intellect and makes perception and inference possible casts such a small penumbra of light that it is impossible for it to reveal the complete cognitive process. It may reveal those parts of the chain of experience that are less subtle than it but it cannot illumine the causal factors of which it is an effect. Modern psychology has developed an understanding this process, which Vedanta does not contradict. But, because it assumes that consciousness is an effect of matter, it does not understand the actual relationship between awareness/consciousness and matter and therefore is of no help in our inquiry into the self.” James Swartz, Discrimination between the Self and the Not-Self
