--- In [email protected], TurquoiseB <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: <snip> > I think that what may be going on is that a number > of people who paid their dues in the TM movement > don't realize how heavily they have been influenced > by Patanjali and his hangups. He may have *been* > enlightened. But he was also a Class A religious > fanatic. Given the politics of his day, he lobbied > heavily to "prove" Hinduism superior to any other > "competing" religions, and also to "prove" his > particular sect of it superior to all others. He > traveled around challenging others to verbal "duels" > to "prove" such things.
Uh, no. You mean Shankara, of course, not Patanjali. In any case, a penchant for debate about the validity of Advaita Vedanta hardly justifies labeling Shankara as a "religious fanatic." Such a label is a function of modern Western culture in which the nature and role of religion are very different from what they were in Shankara's culture: essentially, religion *was* the culture, not a subset of it. There was no such thing as not being religious. Moreover, there was no clear distinction between religion and philosophy, or metaphysics. Furthermore, debate of the kind in which Shankara engaged was a *tradition* in that culture, much as debate is a tradition in Buddhism and Judaism, among many others. To call Shankara a "religious fanatic" because he engaged in debate about the superiority of Advaita Vedanta is like calling candidates for office in the West "political fanatics" because they engage in debates about the superiority of their policies. > In my opinion, that is one of the major reasons that > TMers tend to believe that the descriptions they have > been given of higher states of consciousness are > accurate, or that such descriptions *can* be accurate. > TM springs very much from the Patanjali tradition, TM "springs from" (i.e., MMY's teaching is based on) both Patanjali and Shankara, the former in terms of practice and experiences of consciousness, the latter in terms of metaphysics. > with its hangups about being "best," and about having > every word that the teacher utters be believed as > gospel, and as if it represents "truth." Naah. Shankara couldn't have engaged in debate, obviously, without *opponents* from other metaphysical traditions who were trying to prove *their* tradition represented truth, and whose followers believed every word their teachers spoke was gospel. That's what adherents of most philosophies or metaphysical systems or religions *do*. TM's insistence on the correctness of its metaphysics could have come from any one of the systems whose validity Shankara challenged, and many others besides. Bottom line: There's no unique linkage between TM's tendency toward dogmatism and Shankara's penchant for debate. > I honestly believe that NO words attempting to > describe enlightenment are true. The most that they > can *ever* be is someone trying to give a rough > approximation of an impression of what it's all > about. The map is *not* the territory. The words > used to describe enlightenment are *not* enlight- > enment. I don't believe anyone here suggested they were. That's a pretty, uh, elementary principle, after all (and, incidentally, a principle Shankara was very insistent on). Tom didn't say enlightenment became words, he said words became enlightenment through the discrimination of the intellect, "when the translucent intellect is as clear as the Self." That's a quote from Patanjali, of course, not Shankara. However, Shankara's most famous work (at least in the West) is titled "The Crest Jewel of Discrimination."
