As Mark Landau told me, TM is actually a Hindu devotional practice, so I guess
it qualifies as japa. Marshy himself is quoted in the old Hermit inthe House
book as saying the mantras are the names of gods. He also equates TM with
prayer in the book Meditations of Maharish Mahesh Yogi and given the fact that
Marshy told hundreds of lies over decades of time, it ain't much of a stretch
to know that he lied about the mantras in many ways including in the early days
his claiming that each individual received a carefully chosen mantra when in
fact he was giving raam to everyone who came to him.
--------------------------------------------
On Tue, 3/25/14, emptyb...@yahoo.com <emptyb...@yahoo.com> wrote:
Subject: [FairfieldLife] No Mantra will cure willfully arrogant stupidity
To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com
Date: Tuesday, March 25, 2014, 12:02 PM
Recently I
have read here on FFL an argument professed by former
TM’ers who stopped
practicing because they claimed they were deceived about the
"meaning" of mantras.
Their
fundamental claim is that a mantra is the name of a Hindu
god. The claim is that
a mantra, by definition, encapsulates a method for
worshiping a Hindu god but
that this fact is withheld from practitioners. Within the
domain of this
argument, these claimants will often quote some text from a
Hindu Tantra. These
quotes are passages usually assigning a particular deity to
a particular mantra
and sometimes even assigning a set of deities to each of the
Sanskrit letters
composing the written forms of the mantra’s sound. This
textual assignment is often
done quite haphazardly but occasionally is done in the Vedic
format of
rishi-deva-chhanda.
Along with
the quoted Tantric text is sometimes a quoted statement by
MMY, declaring that
a mantra is a "sound whose effect is known". This
argument quotes the
TMO claim that a mantra is used in TM for the beneficial
effects it produces in
causing the spontaneous refinement of perception. This
explanation is then
paraded as an example of shameful exploitation of Western
ignorance of the
"Hindu" foundation of TM and of any other Indian
meditation that does
not confess itself as a form of "Hindu
devotionalism". This
devotionalist criticism is further paraded around by
pointing to various Indian
swamis and cross-eyed yogis who make these claims and
arguments themselves.
Here are some
considerations about these claims:
SBS taught
in India. MMY began teaching in India before coming to the
West. They both
taught within the context of the Indian Hindu cultural
model. Although they
taught in India, where there are many Muslims, they did not
present their
teaching within a Muslim cultural model. Although Buddhism
is from India and
many Indians consider Buddha as one of their own, neither
SBS nor MMY taught
within a Buddhist cultural model. Rather, they taught within
the cultural
context of their listeners.
After coming
to the West, MMY continued speaking and teaching within the
Indian cultural
model - for a while. It was the teaching model established
by Vivekananda and
Paramahansa Yogananda – partly religious, partly
philosophical and partly
yogic. However, the cultural context of this form of
teachings was the 19th
and 20th century paradigm of Western
Modernity.
When MMY
realized the limitations brought by this model and the
limitations of religious
language here in the West he took a left turn. That
divergence left some of his
teachers behind - Charlie Lutts being an example.
This is one
reason that pointing to early religious language by MMY or
SBS is an inaccurate
over-simplification.
As far as
the “it is all a deceit” claimants, the two groups that
are the most antagonist
and strident are the materialists and the religionists.
Materialists claim
mantras are the mumbo formulas of hindoo gods and that the
concept of gods/god
is a false idea propounded by power brokers to enslave the
masses. This is a
truncated Marxist view popular among the
half-educated.
Contrary to
this, the fundamentalist religions claim that mantras are
secret demonic traps
devised to enslave us to hindoo devils. This is the view of
true-believing
adherents of the Abrahamic religions – Jews, Christians
and Muslims. This is
not some fundamentalist diatribe from TV evangelicals. This
was the original
view of Christians from the second century C.E. forward and
was used as an ideological
propellant for killing polytheists after Constantine’s
ascent to Roman
power.
What is
obvious is that both groups are unable to rationally
consider the facts because
they are ideologues entrenched in a priori
conclusions. One example of this is a
clear demarcation
about the difference between yoga and religion. Materialists
dismiss such an
idea because yoga historically emerged within in a Hindu
cultural context.
Semitic monotheists condemn this idea for the same reason.
If we
consider the role of yoga, it is apparent that most
meditating Westerners are
functionally ignorant about the nature, range, depth and
complexity of yoga
lineages - whether Vedic, Hindu, Buddhist or Jain. Most of
them do not know the
difference between Vedic, Puranic and Tantric lineages of
practice. They also
do not understand how these three streams developed and then
intertwined into
Hindu temple rites. They don't know vidhi from
vedi.*
(*vidhi is a
specific method of puja. Vedi is the altar used in yajña.
)
Even more
surprising, most swamis and imported "yogis" are
not Pandits, Indologists,
or Sanskritists. Very few are formally educated in the yoga
traditions of the
Indian subcontinent. Most are only trained in asana,
pranayam and japa. A little bhakti here,
a few Upanishad
citations there and "om tat sat" - I’m a
guru.
Faced with
this, most of us Westerners who meditate are at a
disadvantage when presented
with claims that we are not educated to conceptualize within
an informed view.
To
counter-point this misunderstanding, I am providing a short
but authoritative
quotation from an impeccable Yogic source about the
difference between mantra
practice in both yogic and devotional sadhana
practice.
Baba Hari
Dass (the
upa-guru of Ram Dass)
On the
difference between Mantra practice and Japa
practice.
1.
Mantra
is the repetition of sounds or words which have power due
to the vibration
of the sound itself.
2.
Japa
is the rhythmic repetition of a name of
God.
It (Japa)
consists of
automatic Pranayama, concentration and meditation. The main
idea in doing Japa
is to make the mind thoughtless. Then automatically body
consciousness
disappears. If your body consciousness disappears, it means
your sadhana is
going well. The body is the medium of sadhana and the body
is the hindrance in
sadhana. Japa is a formal method of worshipping
God. It
should be done privately and preferably with a mala, or
rosary.
Silence
Speaks: from the chalkboard of Baba Hari Dass, 1977 (my
bolding).
*vidhi is a
specific method of puja. Vedi is the altar used in yajna.
Baba Hari Dass is an impeccable
yogin possessed of vairagya and
dispossessed of any agenda. He is the “yogin’s yogin”.
My point is to call
attention to an alternate authoritative source
- someone able to explain the distinction between
mantra-dhyana and mantra-japa.
The key is to recognize that a mantra can be used in
meditation simply for its
sound value, without any reference to meaning. While this
may seem over-obvious
to TM and Sahaj Samadhi meditators, this is what demarcates
it from ordinary
language.
Used in this
way, mantric sound is part of the human sensorium but is
self-generated in the
same way that speech is. This kind of bare sensoria is
non-conceptual and does
not require analysis to be perceived. Bija mantras are yogic
tools for just
this type of non-conceptual (nirvikalpa) direct
cognition.
The reality is that MMY told us
the truth about mantras and their
proper yogic use in TM. The cultural artifact that these
critics use as proof
is that Indians use mantras for Japa to a hindu deity. This
is just a datum of
the Indian mind set. No self-respecting “Hindu” conducts
their life without a
least 20-30 mantras on-hand at all times (except for Indian
communists).
TM/Sahaj Samadhi meditators do not engage in such a
practice, unless they
choose to engage in bhakti to a particular deva. Such a
practice then becomes a
mode of worship rather than meditation.
When someone claims that TM
meditation is by definition Hindu
worship then they are either misinformed, ignorant of basic
definitions or just
simple-minded ideologues.
