"A Spiritual Bypass"? "Certain meditation can bring tremendous benefits to us. But it’s also possible to use meditation as a spiritual bypass, so that we can escape our difficulties by finding some peace and calm. But later on—at work, with family, or in relationships—old patterns and ways that we get caught up in begin to show themselves. Human development is a mandala, and so we can develop certain aspects, and others don’t come along; thus, ..Spiritual teachers can be one-sided just the way an athlete or a physics professor can. ..Fortunately, what we’ve learned in the West over many decades now is that it’s possible for us to heal deeply traumas of the past. It’s possible for us to embody and bring into our relationships and our actions the same beautiful spirit that we might find in a deep, silent meditation, that those become integrated." -spiritualityhealth.com/articles/how-can-people-be-deeply-spiritual-and-emotionally-immature
'It would be good' to have a re-certified representative of Maharishi's knowledge come on here and address some of this. This could be a safe enough forum now for a discussion with them. Apertures. Good comment in this and that other thread here you are having with Bhairitu, Empty. Even for the illumined on the path these are always good 'checking' as to help keep from being fooled. A friend of mine attended a residence course recently with a bunch of 'awakened' folks and came away feeling small for lack of an experience that evidently others were having saying, “..Most of the people were Awake. (I felt like a spiritual midget.) “ Awakening? But some pity too on the poor feelings of the unawakened spiritual midget. Emptybill & Bhairitu you both seem learnt in your ways, could you give some advice or consoling to non-meditators here or any long-term practicing meditators reading your exchanges here who may themselves not have come to 'wakening'? I received this excerpt below in an e-mail on the side which makes me wonder how people feel if they are not yet wakened and reconcile what they are hearing from others talking about 'awakening'? “..at a retreat I attended in Ladysmith on Vancouver island.. Rick Archer was there, interviewing. It was quite the gathering of people; you may have met or heard .. was on Purusha for a long time.. and now conducts gatherings on Vancouver Island. Most of the people were Awake. I felt like a spiritual midget.” ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <s3raph...@yahoo.com> wrote : Re "in Western culture there’s a common experience of self-judgment and self-hatred that will arise for people when they’re doing spiritual practice—an unworthiness that will arise": That wouldn't be my problem! Sounds like a version of that self-loathing that infects those attracted to various brands of political correctness. or, spiritual correctness? ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <dhamiltony2k5@...> wrote : “..we found that in Western culture there’s a common experience of self-judgment and self-hatred that will arise for people when they’re doing spiritual practice—an unworthiness that will arise. Often, a spiritual practice can be turned against ourselves, and we use it to judge ourselves further or feel inadequate or not good enough. “I’m not doing it right. I’m not enlightened enough.” When we asked the Dalai Lama about this in the 1980s, he was shocked. He’d never heard the word self-hatred. That word doesn’t exist in the Tibetan language. And after some pondering, he said, “This is a mistake.” What we have done is to incorporate a tremendous amount of compassion and loving-kindness as the basis for the other dimensions of spiritual discipline. Training in mindfulness and concentration have to be married to compassion and loving-kindness. And with that field of love, which it turns out is a form of mindfulness or awakening, people begin to discover that they are loving-awareness itself, and that spiritual practice isn’t to change or perfect oneself. Spiritual practice is about perfecting their love." - How Can People Be Deeply Spiritual and Emotionally Immature? http://spiritualityhealth.com/articles/how-can-people-be-deeply-spiritual-and-emotionally http://spiritualityhealth.com/articles/how-can-people-be-deeply-spiritual-and-emotionally How Can People Be Deeply Spiritual and Emotionally ... http://spiritualityhealth.com/articles/how-can-people-be-deeply-spiritual-and-emotionally An Interview with Jack Kornfield View on spiritualityhealth.com http://spiritualityhealth.com/articles/how-can-people-be-deeply-spiritual-and-emotionally Preview by Yahoo "Thirty or 40 years ago, there was a great resistance to using the tools of Western psychotherapy and Western psychology. People at various ashrams or Zen centers or Buddhist centers and so forth would say, “All you need to do is chant, or do the mantra, or sit in Zen meditation, and it will take care of everything.” And other tools were considered to be unnecessary or even kind of lower-level practices. ..that in our modern, Western time, we need all the help we can get. We need to marry these powerful spiritual disciplines with the wisdom and the understanding of this particular culture. That wisdom and understanding includes tools for healing, tools for trauma work, tools for emotional intelligence. And in the last 40 years, these have become integrated much more actively across the spiritual teachings." -Jack Kornfield how-can-people-be-deeply-spiritual-and-emotionally-immature ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <dhamiltony2k5@...> wrote : 'It would be good' to have a re-certified representative of Maharishi's knowledge come on here and address some of this. This could be a safe enough forum now for a discussion with them. Yes, it is interesting how easily a sattvic practice can turn into tamas if we fall into a rut. Then there is no clarity and the progress in consciousness is obscured. "..Speaking of "the goal", it can be seen as sort of a linear path, a culturing of consciousness until Self Realization occurs and then it becomes necessarily spherical, so the growth, our evolution, never stops. A continuous shift of identity, until Brahman eats them all." And depression while on the path, .. 'You're not awake?' This aspect of feeling a type of failing we can find on occasion in the old meditating community here where there can be some depression around what might be judged as one's meager sense of attainment when faced with others' spiritual advancement by comparison. In the Dome culture itself there has been all this attention given to the 'number-one' experience. On occasion there have been people leaving (life or town) with feelings of a lack of accomplishment. Some with a depression of maybe having wasted life or failed by comparison with others. Of course there is a whole spectrum. Hearing of awakenings can have its effect of triggering awakening for some. Being in the field effect of communion with others who are spiritually attuned evidently has its validity. And then for instance, my wife in her career practice as an RN vigil- ing with people has found folks on occasion feeling like midgets for all the time they put in (and yet others who leave life quite awake, but that is the different consideration than this acedia-trigger by comparison, she has been with hundreds of meditators or others as they have died and seen or been with the whole spectrum). Rick in his experiment with BATGAP has uncovered and given voice to a lot of luminaries. I would bet that a feeling of disappointment or depression is not necessarily uncommon as some would sit and listen to all these other awakened. What do you feel about this? Just wondering. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <dhamiltony2k5@...> wrote : Dear S3, the science seems to indicate some evident good benefit in health and well-being in meditating 20minutes 2X a day. The reasons there in the science to take time to meditate seem many and good evidently. If only in the name of science take courage and sit with it some more. Sitting with other strong meditators in meditation too it seems can be of help to some in their practice of meditation. -JaiGuruYou! s3raphita in FFL#421769 Speaking as someone who is emphatically not enlightened or awakened and is almost certainly not going to make that elevated grade in this life . . . And as I am rather dubious that there are any other lives for S3 (or any of us) to follow this one (either via reincarnation or in some post-mortem existence in a heaven or hell) it's not looking good is it! One thing I would claim for myself however is that I've never been a hypocrite. (Except in those minor matters that sometimes crop up in life and are rather more a case of common politeness - like telling a friend that yes, their new ghastly hairstyle is fabulous!) If you are not going to break through to a spiritual illumination or a rebirth or a profound insight into life's deepest meaning then what is left for us common folk to do? Isn't the best option (and surely the only option?) for us to at least stay true to our own feeble self's precarious take on the baffling, ever-changing situation in which we've all found ourselves thrown? Yes, we should read or listen to the best that has been written or said on the "spiritual life". My "mentors" (if only I'd actually met them!) would include Plato, Ramana Maharshi, the author of The Ashtavakra Gita, William Blake, Marguerite Porete, Thomas Traherne, St John of the Cross, the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, Simone Weil, Plotinus, Rilke, Nisargadatta, Dionysius the Areopagite, Lao-Tzu, Jiddu Krishnamurti (OK - I did meet him!), Meister Eckhart, and Jean Pierre de Caussade. You would come up with a very different list as our temperaments, preferences and life experiences are so varied. But as I've been emphasizing it's fatal to take any of these "authorities" as,well, authorities. Take what you need from what they have to say and leave the rest if it doesn't tally with where you're coming from. Refusing to be a hypocrite (even an Alan Watts' style "genuine fake") has to be the next-best thing to being a "genuine saint". But I can already imagine those of you on FFL who claim (perhaps genuinely) to be already enlightened shaking your heads and regarding my paltry defense of my poor false self as simply proof of how lost in ignorance I am - and will remain. But then Jesus had a serious downer on hypocrites so maybe I'm in good company! And what else should we unenlightened beings do as we each await our inevitable demises (and that final and definitive end to all our egos)? ## But, staying true to one's experience is valid. Maybe one can attach a title to it, maybe one can't. Enlightenment or ignorance. Sometimes what looks like judgement may simply be an opinion based on experience or lack thereof. No one can fault a person for naming or knowing the world based on what one has seen, known and understood - or not. Does an enlightened person know for sure someone else is not? Do they know for sure that someone is? What is this recognition based upon? If I were to agree with your last paragraph then it stands that I can never know by looking at another's actions, words or deeds if they are awakened or not. So where does this leave us? My tantra guru put it another way in that enlightenment does not get rid of ALL your samskaras and what remains determines the personality of an enlightened person. Maharishi put it in terms of "remains of ignorance" that exists in enlightenment. To judge people externally for enlightenment is therefore folly. As is to judge enlightenment even if you haven't had a little taste of it. It's like judging a movie without so much of even seeing the trailer. But, staying true to one's experience is valid. Maybe one can attach a title to it, maybe one can't. Enlightenment or ignorance. Sometimes what looks like judgement may simply be an opinion based on experience or lack thereof. No one can fault a person for naming or knowing the world based on what one has seen, known and understood - or not. Does an enlightened person know for sure someone else is not? Do they know for sure that someone is? What is this recognition based upon? If I were to agree with your last paragraph then it stands that I can never know by looking at another's actions, words or deeds if they are awakened or not. So where does this leave us? To judge people externally for enlightenment is therefore folly. As is to judge enlightenment even if you haven't had a little taste of it. It's like judging a movie without so much of even seeing the trailer. The important thing is to experience enlightenment yourself and not worry about other people's state. The roles of the guru is to get you to enlightenment, not put on a show for you. Yes, it is interesting how easily a sattvic practice can turn into tamas if we fall into a rut. Then there is no clarity and the progress in consciousness is obscured. "..Speaking of "the goal", it can be seen as sort of a linear path, a culturing of consciousness until Self Realization occurs and then it becomes necessarily spherical, so the growth, our evolution, never stops. A continuous shift of identity, until Brahman eats them all." ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <dhamiltony2k5@...> wrote : Or like pre-Newton you are possibly just not awake to it as in 'not your experience' in understanding. Your inexperience with it may not necessarily invalidate the yogi-science. That is okay. -JaiGuruYou ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <no_re...@yahoogroups.com> wrote : ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <olliesedwuz@...> wrote : This appears to have morphed into a defense vs criticism of the TMO. Not my fight, though you may want to consider that yogic science has been around a lot longer than any branch of western science, and the benefits are there, if not always accepted. trying to avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater. PS I don't think your comments wrt yogic science were racist, though that may be one reason such science is not taken seriously - the "not invented here" syndrome. salyavin808 writes: OK, I'll consider how long yogic "science" has been around.....bit of a disappointment really. In all that time I'd expect a genuinely successful method of inquiry to have amassed a wealth of useful information about the world but it hasn't at all* I wonder why? *Not compared to the world since Newton anyway, and the main innovation he brought was universality - knowledge of underlying forces that affect all things, thus making the universe much simpler to decode. No one had thought of that before. Amazing really, but that's real genius - it makes plain what was hidden right in front of you. Since then, and once the religious had been told to mind their own business, there's been no stopping it whereas the yogi's seem rather stuck in the same old rut. Unless I'm mistaken? ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <no_re...@yahoogroups.com> wrote : ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <olliesedwuz@...> wrote : Yeah, there is a pretty strong bias against yogic science in the West. Possibly even a racial prejudice. Yoga did not evolve out of either the Western sciences or religions, and as such, is considered suspect by many. No, I have no bias against "yogic" science because there is no such division between east and west in my mind. There is simply science that works, and science that doesn't work. If two apparently different disciplines come to different conclusions about the same thing then one of them is wrong. And there's no need for the race card as I have no prejudice, we are brothers under the skin that are brought up in different cultures. That is all. In terms of Western science, there is certainly no justification to spend billions to send space probes to other celestial bodies and planets. Whoa! Who says there's no justification and what would that have to do with the argument anyway? Perhaps we can read this as a pre-emptive admission that "yogic" science wouldn't be able to achieve sustained flight due to its obvious confusion about hopping and gravity, let alone escaping the Earth's atmosphere. When asked, the people involved mention some fantasy about colonizing other planets. Excuse me? That is easily as far-fetched as the Maharishi Effect, in terms of technology's ability to fulfill such an undertaking. Perhaps in several centuries, but not any time soon, given the magnitude of such an undertaking. Yet, because we can send a robot to Mars, no one questions the veracity of such a fantasy, and the continued billions spent. It isn't really as far fetched as the Marshy effect because space travel is actually possible - we've already done it - and travel to other stars is clearly permitted by the laws of physics - there's no mysterious power stopping us doing it. The ME on the other hand, is lacking both the evidence for it's claimed efficacy and an explanation of how it might possibly work. Especially an explanation that isn't in flat contradiction of everything else we know. The only justification for space travel we need is that it's human nature to explore. And that's all the justification we need for meditation too. What we lack in the TMO is a realistic explanation for what these altered states mean and whether they are actually of any real benefit and whether they do actually lead to some sort of promised land. And I'm not writing this as a mere passing cynic, if we were playing States of Consciousness Bingo I would have called full house decades ago. Equally so, we can have awareness, so why not investigate it further? Perhaps some of the initiatives of the TMO have not apparently borne fruit. Still, it is painting with an awfully broad and arrogant brush, to extend this reasoning to include all branches of yogic science. Don't worry, I'm an equal opportunities sceptic. Every belief or practise will stand or fall on its own merits and I think that Marshy's "meditation is all you need" has fallen as Buck's story of dying people being depressed that they didn't get to the goal is one of the saddest things I ever heard. Hence my anger at the perpetual folie a deux of the TMO in it's refusal to admit mistakes. It's most unscientific, yogic or otherwise. Yogic science is the study of consciousness. The emphasis on flash is so misguided. Flashy experiences can be very encouraging, but to set a program up to encourage them, is like passing around a doob and the highest one wins. wtf? And I forgot to collect my prize! ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <no_re...@yahoogroups.com> wrote : I think it demonstrates how much TM has failed as a spiritual teaching if people are still so attached to their ego's that they compare themselves to others for a sense of self worth. The very fact that the dome keeps records of people having "Grade 1" experiences helps to perpetuate the myth of failure and indeed, the myth of success. But this idea that the flashy experiences some people get are an indication of spiritual advancement is what always kept the cash rolling in to the TMO, the myth of the seven states of consciousness that gradually unveils the reality of the world to you and suddenly - after releasing all the stress "trapped in your nervous system" - you will emerge into a wonderland of bliss and perfect health and total knowledge. And all the while lowering crime rates and creating world peace! Jesus, it's no wonder people are depressed. How likely was any of that? But we all fell for it - myself included - and who can blame us? All anybody wants is better health and more happiness but you've got to wake up out of the daydream sooner or later, and I don't mean awakened like the greedy saps Rick interviews, they're just yet more self-obsessed karma peddlers with books or DVD's to promote. More promises and thus more disappointments. This isn't enlightenment and the secret of getting there once one path has failed isn't to start on another path and then another. Get some smarts for crying out loud. There is no unified field of pure awareness, ayurveda is a bunch of untested folk remedies some of which are demonstrably dangerous, your house isn't magical because the front door faces the rising sun on two days of the year, people chanting prayers to Hindu gods does not influence your day in any way whatsoever, you will not sidestep the laws of physics by hopping up and down, your body is not made from Hindu scriptures, the planets don't know anything about your life that you don't, the shadow of the moon is nothing to be scared of. The real reason "the knowledge" gets lost is that it's a load of bollocks and - like all religious teaching - will not lead you to a perfect society if you follow it to the letter because setting limits to inquiry and holding impossible goals as the purpose of life is only going to end in tears. If there wasn't so much money in exploiting sincere seekers I'd honestly wonder how the TMO lasted this long. Once people started to realise that the crock of gold at the end of the rainbow is actually a crock of shit you'd think word would get round. But the longer you've been in a cult situation the more your life is defined by people who share your beliefs, so it becomes an echo chamber reinforcing what it is you think you know and are striving for and thus reinforcing the inevitable disappointment - one more course, one more yagya, one more session of Marshy vedic light and aroma therapy (patent pending). There will always be another "modality" for your consumption - that I can guarantee - and none of them will do any more for you than anything else has. Because you've already got all the enlightenment you're going to get. There is no world of bliss waiting for you if you persevere. If you're "lucky" you might get some nice trips along the way to make your foam mates envious and get a gold star from the dome-keepers but that isn't indicative of spiritual advancement, I get them all the time. Some people just do, like we get a lot out of acid and everything else we do. It's just genes, probably too much dopamine in my brain. IT MEANS NOTHING. So does that mean it's all pointless? No, there are things to learn, mostly how to make the best of a bad situation. You moved to a small town in the middle of nowhere and now you are depressed because you never met god? Try enjoying the local scenery. Jealous of your friends and their flashy highs? Try liking them for who they are and how they make you laugh. Sorry that it's me who has to break it to you after all these decades but enlightenment is when you stop striving, it's when you stop being jealous or depressed because you think your neighbour got fresher Kool-aid. Enlightenment is when you accept who you are and where you are and just make the best of it. No thanks required. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <dhamiltony2k5@...> wrote : Awakening? But some pity too on the poor feelings of the unawakened spiritual midget. Emptybill & Bhairitu you both seem learnt in your ways, could you give some advice or consoling to non-meditators here or any long-term practicing meditators reading your exchanges here who may themselves not have come to 'wakening'? I received this excerpt below in an e-mail on the side which makes me wonder how people feel if they are not yet wakened and reconcile what they are hearing from others talking about 'awakening'? “..at a retreat I attended in Ladysmith on Vancouver island.. Rick Archer was there, interviewing. It was quite the gathering of people; you may have met or heard .. was on Purusha for a long time.. and now conducts gatherings on Vancouver Island. Most of the people were Awake. I felt like a spiritual midget.” ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <dhamiltony2k5@...> wrote : Apertures. Good comment in this and that other thread here you are having with Bhairitu, Empty. Even for the illumined on the path these are always good 'checking' as to help keep from being fooled. A friend of mine attended a residence course recently with a bunch of 'awakened' folks and came away feeling small for lack of an experience that evidently others were having saying, “..Most of the people were Awake. (I felt like a spiritual midget.) “ ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <emptybill@...> wrote : Although we know that a frozen pond is entirely water, the sun’s heat is necessary to melt it. Although we awaken to the fact that an ordinary man is fully awakened, the power of true teaching is necessary to make it permeate our cultivation. When that pond has melted, the water flows freely and can be used for irrigation and cleaning. When falsity is extinguished, the mind will be numinous and dynamic and then its function of penetrating brightness will manifest. Chinul
