On Sep 21, 2007, at 8:10 AM, TurquoiseB wrote:
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.
I think you're confusing Patanjali with Shankara, who set out to restore what he felt was the original, more unified POV of the Upanishads and the Veda, and so set himself to travelling over India and attempting to defeat more dualistic schools in debate (e.g. yoga- darshana, samkhya, etc.). This was largely in reaction to the Buddhist realizer Nagarjuna and the increasing popularity of Buddhism in India, another system of awakening with a very unified and "competing" POV.
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, 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."
The TM model/map of the seven states of consciousness really springs from Shankara's commentary of the Badarayana sutra, aka, the Brahma sutras and that traditions slant on the many other (non-Advaita- vedantic) commentaries on the same sutras. The important thing to realize with this map is that it views progress thru the higher states from the POV of advaita-vedanta even when it is largely dealing with yoga-darshana. And thus it ignores the POV of realization in most other darshanas or ways-of-seeing.
Thus is is slanted towards the advaita View (drsti) and tends to ignore the POV of the "lower" vehices and Views, as it believes it's view is superior.
Because of this somewhat elitist POV, numerous schools and numerous realizers did view Shankara as a fanatic of demon. The dvaita master Madhava called Shankara "a deceitful demon who had perverted the teachings of the Brahma-sutra to lead souls astray."
