--- In [email protected], Vaj <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Nov 23, 2008, at 3:12 PM, Bhairitu wrote: > > > Unfortunately the movement often pushed meditating when > > people should have stopped for a while because they were > > burning out. Stopping would have allowed more progress. > > A crucial but often missed insight.
Also, it is not to be overlooked that the *reason* the only advice the TMO gave was "Something good is happening" and "Keep meditating," or "Meditate more" is that they had *no other advice to give*. There was no mechanism in place (or even, as far as I could tell) with dealing with issues that commonly arise among meditators. The reason there was no such mechanism is that the dogma promoted about TM (that it was "100% life supporting" and could not *possibly* have any neg- ative side effects) made it counter-intuitive to have any remedy when those statements were proven false. The reason no such advice *would* have been offered is that *everything* in the "meditator support" arsenal was aimed at *keeping the meditator meditating*. That was the "be all and end all* of the TM credo. It would have been seen as heresy to suggest that they stop the thing that seemed to be causing the problems for a while, because everyone "knew" that TM couldn't possibly be the cause. It must have been something that the person having the issues was doing "wrong." Vaj, I, and several others here have been part of groups that DID have effective means at their dis- posal for dealing with issues that come up along the spiritual path. The reason they had them is that they had no dogma in place claiming that they "couldn't" come up. And these means often worked to ease the symptoms that people were experiencing, or to give them a slightly different path to follow for a while. (This also wasn't possible with TM because they really had only one product. They couldn't very well tell a student to switch to walking meditation for a while, or focus on selfless service for a while, or just do something else; there *was* no "else." Instead, the approach used by far too many TM teachers was to do the Nabby thing and tell them to "get a checking," during which procedure it was clear that the TM teacher had no interest in hearing what the problem might actually be. Students were discouraged from even talking about it. Instead, it was assumed that the magical checking procedure would fix what- ever it was that *the student* was doing "wrong."
