On 6/6/2014 9:33 AM, authfri...@yahoo.com [FairfieldLife] wrote:
I can't cite chapter and verse where Maharishi ever said the mantras
were meaningless sounds, but it's certainly what he told his teachers
to say.
>
Thanks for the response. But, if true, I can't imagine any TM teacher
not recognizing the TM bija mantras as being related to the devas after
reading the Beacon Light by MMY himself. I guess it's possible that some
TM teachers are not aware of how MMY defined the mantras to Indians and
so they made up the meaningless sounds meme. Go figure.
Almost everyone in India where TM got started knows that the TM mantras
are sounds found in nature and are related to the devas. For example,
the bija 'phat' is the 'crack', 'pop' sound made by an India two-stroke
motor rikshaw, heard all over Delhi - /phata-phata/. And, that /ram
sound/ is the indicator of the deified hero /Rama/ or /Ramchandra. /
Likewise, all TM bijas are formed around the name of a particular deva
and often come from the syllables in the devas referent name or
associated attributes - they didn't come out of a void.
/>/
Of course "meaningless" in the semantic sense doesn't mean the sounds
are of no value. According to Maharishi, a mantra is a "sound whose
effects are known," presumably positive.
>
I guess it all depends on what you mean by meaning - but almost any
sound has meaning of some kind to someone, but maybe not an intellectual
meaning. The phrase /meaningless sounds/ was probably not used by MMY -
instead he probably said something like /the mantras had no meaning for
the meditators./ I'm not a TM teacher so I'm just speculating here/.
/Understand, I am not opposed to the idea TM mantras being /sounds
without meaning/, but it wouldn't make any sense to MMY himself - to
just make up a nonsense gibberish sound and call that a mantra, since it
wouldn't be based on any known Indian scripture or teaching./
/I'm convinced that MMY was pretty astute/, /but not so astute as to
jettison the tradition he called his own, just to attract some
non-sectarian Western students by making up/a *totally* abstract sound
vibration -/ I don't see why that couldn't work in TM, but that's not
exactly what he did - he used traditional sounds./
//
/Otherwise, we could just use any sound that comes to mind and MMY would
have had no reason to explain why he gave out the list of TM bija
mantras to the teachers or why he wrote out the Beacon Light message for
the Indians.
/Hell, I don't know what I'm talking about, Judy - I'm just trying to do
my part to keep the conversation going.//It gets complicated./ Where is
William G. Murphy when we need him?
