Interesting post.
On Mar 23, 2007, at 4:38 AM, TurquoiseB wrote:
What if Maharishi was just never any *good* at effort
and intent? What if the only way that *he* ever
found to meditate was to sit there, occasionally
thinking the mantra, but mainly lost in thoughts,
in his case near-obsessive bhakti thoughts about
Guru Dev? Knowing him as we do from working with
him all these years and from his lectures, would
it ever have occurred to him that there was anything
*wrong* with sitting there for a whole meditation
period lost in thoughts, with only a few scattered
moments of transcendence and a few scattered "come
back to the mantra" periods? I don't think it would.
He would have found some way to *interpret* the
near-constant thoughts as "something good is
happening," because, after all, they were thoughts
about his beloved guru.
Maybe he wasn't good at samadhi? After all one of the observable
external hallmarks of genuine samadhi is that one can go into samadhi
for as long as one wishes, hours, days or weeks. Yet no such
externally observed state has been observed. Slapping the word "yogi"
onto a name is one thing, but being a real yogi is quite another.
What if the whole genesis of the patented "effortless"
technique of TM is that Maharishi was just never very
good at effort? Other monks in the ashram could prob-
ably sit for hours without a thought, lost in samadhi,
but he couldn't.
Exactly.
I would expect if the teacher was capable of samadhi, we would see
evidence of that in the technique and thus, in his students. Or we'd
see signature high amplitude gamma wave activity. But at best, what
we see in TM is mental blankness for a few minutes--not a sign of
samadhi, but merely a basic mental absorbtion (shakti manifestions of
course can still occur with any mantra).
What is interesting to me is the sleight of hand that suggested this
mental absorption was pure consciousness or samadhi. It fooled a lot
of people.
