Hi anonymousff,
I have responded to your remarks below from my personal experience, interleaving your remakrks as appropriate: > > to wit, the snake and the string, again... > > ? The author seems to be building great castles and huge monuments of assumptions, illusions that he can then rail against. > > The only times I've gotten into an uncomfortable place regarding > > meditation is when I blindly attempted to follow a routine based on > > someone else's definition of what I needed for enlightenment. > > you mean like following a Guru's advice? apparantly many (not you) > did excatly that and got into trouble. I guess this is one of the > issues the author of the article is raising. > I am not referring to the practice of TM per se, but rather the 'side dishes': When I learned the Sidhis in 1980, I had excellent experiences, including the flying sutra. I was bouncing so high when I learned them that I would go from a sitting position to standing upright, and would then drop back down to the foam. I also recall once after doing them for awhile lifting up to about 3.5 feet and speeding forward about 10 feet in the air. I had to stop myself lest I crash into a shelf in the room. Also turning into pure golden white light within while 'flying' (this was common). Also liked the sutra where you can see into your body. Used to do that one and watch my body operate, with blood in veins and biochemical transfer processes within my body, muscles under the skin, etc. etc. Fascinating stuff! I then began to have very clear experiences of GC, perceiving the Celestial and Divine which I won't go into here. After that the Sidhis didn't seem useful anymore. When I would do them it almost seemed distracting. Also as I am typically very active mentally, I would not feel grounded after the experience and didn't get much benefit from it. So I stopped that, and now just do my daily routine of meditation 2x a day, 20 minutes per. Now I enjoy all the 'mundane' stuff like watching TV, shopping, being with my family, washing dishes, excelling at my career, just as magical and exciting and fulfilling as I ever did with the Sidhis. So that's what I meant when I said the only time I've gotten into trouble was to follow a practice blindly. It wasn't a criticism of TM. In fact TM and the Sidhis work very very well, its just that one has to adjust the practice to what is comfortable. That is just common sense. > secondly how you can aplly critical thinking on something totaly new > to you that you don't have any experience of. I think we have a tendency to follow this stuff blindly because we aren't used to it this time around. It is as if driving a car were a rare thing and teachers on how to drive the car were few and far between. Then if a teacher didn't explicitly cover every possibility of how to drive and you mistakenly thought that applying the accelerator all the time was the right way to drive, you might have an accident. Same thing. > > well that's only part of the story, There some responsibility on > the Guru's teaching as well, don't you think? > So yes, it is partly the guru's responsibility. However given the task at hand, Guru Dev is doing an outstanding job!!! Thanks, Jim To subscribe, send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Or go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ and click 'Join This Group!' Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
