Who says that the ego is destroyed or weakened or you are taken out of it or whatever with TM?
Part of the issue is that we try to conflate Freud's terminology with Maharishi's and part of the issue is that we tend to assume that all meditation practices have the same effect, so the fact that mindfulness practices tend to weaken the functionality of the parts of the brain having to do with sense-of-self, combined with the interpretation of some very popular Buddhist sects that sense-of-self is evil, leads to all sorts of confusion. TM practice strengthens "sense of self." Samadhi, or pure consciousness, during TM, also happens to be the point where the relaxed mind-wandering activity of the brain associated in Western science with "sense of self" happens to be greatest. When Fred Travis interviewed the people reporting CC for at least a year continuously, his interview question was: "Describe your self." The people in CC responded along these lines, none of which suggest destruction of ego, in the sense that Freud would have understood, I believe: L1: We ordinarily think my self as this age; this color of hair; these hobbies . . . my experience is that my Self is a lot larger than that. It's immeasurably vast. . . on a physical level. It is not just restricted to this physical environment L2: It's the ‘‘I am-ness.’’ It's my Being. There's just a channel underneath that's just underlying everything. It's my essence there and it just doesn't stop where I stop. . . by ‘‘I,’’ I mean this 5 ft. 2 person that moves around here and there L3: I look out and see this beautiful divine Intelligence. . . you could say in the sky, in the tree, but really being expressed through these things. . . and these are my Self L4: I experience myself as being without edges or content. . . beyond the universe. . . all-pervading, and being absolutely thrilled, absolutely delighted with every motion that my body makes. With everything that my eyes see, my ears hear, my nose smells. There's a delight in the sense that I am able to penetrate that. My consciousness, my intelligence pervades everything I see, feel and think L5: When I say ’’I’’ that's the Self. There's a quality that is so pervasive about the Self that I'm quite sure that the ‘‘I’’ is the same ‘‘I’’ as everyone else's ‘‘I.’’ Not in terms of what follows right after. I am tall, I am short, I am fat, I am this, I am that. But the ‘‘I’’ part. The ‘‘I am’’ part is the same ‘‘I am’’ for you and me ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <anartaxius@...> wrote : Actually you can. If TM takes you out of the ego, the sense of personal self, and if it works every time (i.e., you transcend at least once during a sitting), then in 40 years of meditation with some residence courses thrown in, you commit suicide some 30,000 times. If TM goes the distance (which some doubt), then eventually the suicide will be permanent. It won't be permanent in CC because ego is still in the centre of the active part of life in that experience. You need BC to catapult the ego to the periphery of life where it basically is on a short leash and can't run the show. Physical suicide results if TM dredges up something the ego can't deal with, and is more likely to occur in a 'see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil' oppressive environment where help is unavailable by design. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <LEnglish5@...> wrote : Here are the conclusions you could draw from this: 1) TM makes you more likely to commit suicide 2) people who do TM who decide to go live in Fairfield, Iowa, tend to self-medicate using TM, rather than seeking professional help for thi[ng]s that TM doesn't affect. 3) both of the above. There's no way to tell which conclusion is correct. L
