If you do not make an effort to know truth, to perceive it beneath the veils that hide it, you will not discover your own real nature and will therefore remain at the mercy of outside forces of “circumstances.” In Meditation behold the start of divine wisdom, that its rays disclose the truth ever within yourself. -Paramahansa Yogananda
---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <dhamiltony...@yahoo.com> wrote : Cultivating Spirituality in Collective Meditation.. “If therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light” (Matthew 6:22). Long before the TM movement ever came to Iowa there came a preceding movement of transcendentalism. This was a recognized and practiced group by its own long line in history, practiced in the cultivation of transcendent spirituality by group meditation. During the time of the Iowa 1830's and 1840's pioneer settlement there came old Quakers as a peculiar spiritual people who were then disciplined in cultivating spiritual experience by the practice of silent meditation in facilitated groups or collective meditation as the Quaker “Meeting for Worship”. Some thousands of Quakers came to Iowa in the early settlement period. Across the Iowa landscape 'group meditation' arrived in the Quaker settlement of frontier Iowa then with the laying out and building of their Quaker Meeting Houses to facilitate their silent group meditation that was the common Quaker silent practice of a cultivated Quietism. As a larger spiritual regeneration movement coming to Iowa in that settlement period this was in a time just prior to when an older Society of Friends as a spiritual practice group was overtaken and overthrown by evangelical 'believer' ideology that came along in America during the 19th Century. That takedown in form is its own recurring story as 'the loss of spiritual Knowledge' in time. In sequence of time the spiritual Quakers subsequently tended to move further on to the West on to other places supporting their group cultivation of transcendent spirituality. ..Birds of a feather flock together in diaspora. However, there is a map of the Quaker group meditations planted in Iowa during the frontier period of time. This map does not represent the whole of Quaker Meeting Houses as the group who had overtaken the Society of Friends Iowa Yearly Meeting later in the 19th Century was not recognizing on their drawn map some of the old meetings in the State who had continued on separately with the original silent meditating practice of the old Quaker spiritual practice as heritage going way back. The map is noteworthy because it indicates the extent of what was the old Society of Friends at an earlier time. Evidently what we see presently in present day Iowa as the group practice of Quietism in a cultivating transcendental meditation is not a recent phenomena of spiritual practice in Iowa. Map: http://www.icelandichorse.info/salemfugitiveslaves/friendsmeetingsiowa1870.jpg http://www.icelandichorse.info/salemfugitiveslaves/friendsmeetingsiowa1870.jpg The note about the map made on http://www.icelandichorse.info/salemfugitiveslaves.html http://www.icelandichorse.info/salemfugitiveslaves.html ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <dhamiltony...@yahoo.com> wrote : Long before Swami Vivkananda, Yogananda and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi came along to the West came others as teaching transcendentalists, preceding them in a sequence. In Europe there was a long lineage of the equivalent in European transcendentalist spiritual satsanga and ashram-like spiritual practice communities coming out of what was then called Quietism in spiritual practice. An earlier post on FairfieldLife copied in the European lineage. In the historical stories a lot of those groups came in settlement to America fleeing persecution of the formal beliefs of religious ideologies. Transcendentalism as a spiritual teaching and practice is a common story in the settlement of America. It could seem that transcendentalism as it has come along is very American. See FFL post# 385441 385441RE: In Quiet, European ancestral genealogy of transcendentalism https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/FairfieldLife/conversations/messages/385441 https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/FairfieldLife/conversations/messages/385441 ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <dhamiltony...@yahoo.com> wrote : On December 31, 1957, celebrating the Conference of Spiritual Luminaries of India, Maharishi inaugurated the Spiritual Regeneration Movement in Madras, India, to spiritually regenerate the world. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <dhamiltony...@yahoo.com> wrote : Yep, in a line of transcendentalists Elias Hicks carried the banner in satsang a generation before Emerson. In their day actually they were widely heard and followed penetrating the contemporary thought. Considering the size and population of America then they were in about as far as Maharishi penetrated culture with transcendentalism in the 20th Century. Elias Hicks and Emerson along with Henry Thoreau and others traveled widely as speakers, they wrote extensively, they published and were widely read at the time. At the time America was quite literate and people followed the religious convolutions of those times. Transcendentalism as a spirituality seems to provide critique to the ideologies of materialism and formality of religions generation by generation, by experience. In the transcendentalist line running through time here is an interesting inter-generational monograph by Walt Whitman about Elias Hicks.. Anecdotes about Elias Hicks - Wikisource, the free online library https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Anecdotes_about_Elias_Hicks Anecdotes about Elias Hicks - Wikisource, the free online library https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Anecdotes_about_Elias_Hicks AS MYSELF A LITTLE BOY hearing so much of Elias Hicks, at that time—and more than once personally seeing the old man—and my dear, dear father and mother faithful listeners to him at the meetings— View on en.wikisource.org https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Anecdotes_about_Elias_Hicks Preview by Yahoo ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <olliesed...@yahoo.com> wrote : Thanks - I like this broader context of the transcendental wave running through time and consciousness, with some of us picking it up (again and again) as it comes by. Perhaps the efficiency of the TM technique (diving deeply, precisely, and quickly, 2 x 20) speaks to this age, where we don't have a lot of time to learn about transcending. Nature's balance for fast-paced modern life, and with any luck, some progress in the meantime. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <dhamiltony2k5@...> wrote : Well, in a line Maharishi's transcendentalism message a hundred years before was carried forward as American Transcendentalism by Emerson and the American transcendentalist satsanga at the time. Same message of populist transcendentalism was carried then as seems always has been carried in somewhat of a line through time. Transcendentalism evidently has long lineage. Evidently Transcending as experience and then transcendentalism as satsanga are a story-line to read that runs through out time. For instance, Quaker Meeting here in Fairfield starts in a little while. George Fox, founder of the historic Society of Friends satsanga, he like Maharishi was another mystic in the line of transcendentalism. And, you and we are in that line too, transcendentalists in time. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <olliesedwuz@...> wrote : I wonder if little Mahesh ever got the inkling as he was sitting in school, for example, that he would one day grow up to become a famous spiritual teacher? The times have definitely favored his message, and so many of us have been influenced by this one man. It could have been anybody (though probably Indian) that popularized TM, and yet it just happened to be Maharishi. Even a hundred years ago, his mission would have been impossible. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <dhamiltony2k5@...> wrote : From the MVS Thesaurus: Spirituality Description In 1957, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi said that: 'Spiritual development is the birthright of everyone, for it is the unfoldment of the essential nature of the soul, or inner consciousness…. Soul is the individual property of everybody. It is the natural and inseparable possession, nay, the very existence, of every man. Everybody has the right to enjoy his own possession. Everybody has the right to enjoy the sat [truth] chit [Being] ananda [bliss] nature of his own soul. In the most natural manner, everybody has every right to enjoy permanent peace, bliss eternal, which is the nature of his own soul.' -- Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Thirty Years Around the World—Dawn of the Age of Enlightenment, Volume One 1957-1964 (Netherlands: MVU Press, 1986), p. 195. Some people feel that the outer or material joys of life are opposed to, or diminish, the spiritual value, and that one has to give up, or become detached, from material values in order to achieve inner fulfillment. Below is a short video of Maharishi reflecting on the topic of spirituality. Here Maharishi points out that inner spirituality does not conflict with the outer material value of life: See video onhttp://www.enlightenmentforeveryone.com/spirituality/. http://www.enlightenmentforeveryone.com/spirituality/ Maharishi always said we should enjoy 200% of life—100% of the inner spiritual value along with 100% of the outer material value. He offered Transcendental Meditation as a simple way to integrate abstract absolute being with the concrete details of the relative.
