Comment below: **
--- In [email protected], Bronte Baxter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: **snip** > If you say you don't need it, you simply find it useful, I challenge you to give up mantra meditation, chanting sessions and all other devotional activities for two weeks. I'll bet you can't do it without tremendous effort. Your ability to take it or leave it would prove or disprove my theory that you are already part-possessed. > > You say your realized friends are dynamic and independent thinkers who still respect their former teachers. Maybe some are, but I'll bet not those who namahed their way to where they're at. My dear friends who follow devotional paths have trouble making decisions, trouble taking control of situations. They take the attitude that life will happen to them according to God's will, and have difficulty taking action toward a desire or goal. They tell me they feel stuck in the routine of their lives much of the time. Their tendency is to wait for God to do things for them, so life happens to them rather than life being something they dynamically create. They tend to accept what they're told as true, rather than examine the root issues at the base of their assumptions. This is very different from the enlightened people I know who don't follow devotional paths or gurus in general. **snip to end** Bronte, this position (above) doesn't comport with my experience at all and I suspect others would find it equally contradictory to their own. Sometime in the early or mid-90s, after some 20+ years of TM meditation and assorted TMO techniques I discontinued the practice entirely, gave up being a vegetarian and pretty much just gave up the whole spiritual lifestyle, at least as I had been living it up to that time. Never noticed a difference; no tremendous effort, no DTs while I purged the energy-sucking gods from my system, no headaches or anything. However, sometime at the beginning of 2001 I got the impulse to start meditation again and was pleased with how excellent and enjoyable it was. After some period of time I got all Hindu again and have for some time engaged in devotional behavior within that framework and even constant repetition of mantra as I believe I mentioned in an earlier post. It's all fine; I'm active, both physically and mentally, maintain relationships, both familial and otherwise, work well with others in a demanding environment (criminal trial lawyer), exhibit appropriate behavior in most situations and enjoy life tremendously. And yet, it does seem difficult to actually entertain a 'me'. Life feels much like it did when I was a very young child; it does feel very automatic and goes along all on its own. Don't claim to be enlightened but can't honestly claim that that's not the case, either. Bharitu's suggestion that not paying attention to enlightenment as either one's own goal or as some metric in the evaluation of others, might actually facilitate its dawn more easily would be my position on the subject as well. The dynamic you propose (above and in earlier posts) just isn't my experience whatsoever. Just throwing that into the hopper for your consideration. Marek
