--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "authfriend" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Vaj <vajranatha@> wrote:
> >
[...]
> >
> > And, no, of course that's not what the fourth is. The fourth
> > is not taught in TM or the TM siddhi program, nor have they
> > identified it correctly in research that is published. Of
> > course they want you to believe they have.
>
> Hard to imagine a better example of Vaj not knowing
> what the hell he's talking about.
>
> Nobody said it was taught in TM or the TM-Sidhi
> program, of course. Rather, it *happens* during
> TM, i.e., spontaneously. That's the point Lawson
> is making. And I seriously doubt Kesterton
> mentioned 2:50-51 in his research, or even made
> the connection in his own mind.
>
Correct. In fact, Kesterson originally was trying to see if oxygen consumption
was driving
the breath suspension episodes during TC. What he found was that during these
periods,,
there was no significant change in O2 consumption (which threw out MMY's
original
intuition that O2 consumption was directly related to depth of meditation
practice), but
that there was a slight change in CO2 sensitivity, which led to this apparent
breath-
suspension where the mediator apparently stopped breathing for up to 72 seconds
yet
didn't need much, if any, compensatory breathing at theend of the suspension. A
closer
look at what was going on showed that there was a very slow inhalation over the
entire
time. If you look at the actual charts that Kesterson published, you'll see a
minute
fluctuation of inhalation and exhalation during the entire "suspension" period,
which I take
to mean that the heart is involved in circulating the air, rather than the
diaphragm.
Nowhere does Kesterson mention the Yoga Sutras, though he DOES mention that
these
periods are associated with transcendental consciousness during TM in earlier
research.
Fred Travis has been looking at stuff far more closely in the past few years,
and he and
Kieth Wallace and Alarik Arenander have devised a description of how TM and
samadhi
works at the level of interaction of various parts of the brain, especially the
limbic system.
The thalamus feedback thing I was talking about is, as I understand it, the
primary
information-processing/thinking aspect of their theory, but its considerably
more
complicated since you have to explain not only how thought-quiesence ("Yoga"
according
to Patanjali) works, but how the brain is able to sustain this state. It all
neatly wraps up
with MMY's description of inward stroke and outward stroke of meditation and
his
descriptionof the mantra as an attractive thought in the mind.
Of course, this doesn't preclude "pranayama," as in breathing *exercises*, from
being able
to induce the same state (samadhi) since the limbic system is tied up with
states of
consciousness AND with breathing itself, but it seems obvious that no matter
how the
state is arrived at, whether via dyhan (TM) or pranayama or whatever, the same
basic
neurological circuits end up being involved...
...and THAT state is the "fourth pranayama."
