--- In [email protected], Vaj <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Nov 24, 2008, at 8:40 AM, TurquoiseB wrote: > > > --- In [email protected], Vaj <vajradhatu@> 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.
Actually, that's not true. It's true that the standard bottom-line advice is to keep meditating, but there certainly are mechanisms to deal with individual issues. *By far* the largest portion of the checking notes, just for one example, have to do with such issues, contained within an incredibly complex algorithm for determining which advice was applicable to which meditator. And I never had any problem getting individual attention from a teacher outside the context of checking. <snip> > While > canned or mechanical learning can often cover a > majority of student meditators, there will always > be a subset who could miss the correct instruction. > Less important when you're teaching just a few > people, but vitally important when your goal is to > mass-produce meditators who keep meditating. But this is a catch-22, isn't it? If your goal is to mass-produce meditators, there's no way you can give each one individual attention. Your only option is to devise a "mechanical" method of instruction and follow-up that will work for as great a percentage of meditators as possible. > It's also the reason there is an advantage to > learning from an experienced meditation master or > someone with a lot of experience: they don't need > to give pat answers from a memorized list, they > give answers based on the road they've already > travelled. Duh. *Of course* that's an advantage. But again, it's not possible when you're mass-producing meditators. What MMY did was to devise a method simple enough that most could learn it easily from mass-produced teachers, and effective enough that it would yield positive results for most. And he wouldn't have been able to mass-produce teachers in the first place if the method itself weren't pretty darned effective. People wanted to become teachers because they'd had such good results themselves. You can argue that mass-production is a bad idea in and of itself, but it's pretty difficult to argue that MMY's *approach* to mass-production was seriously flawed. Nobody, of course, had ever tried such a thing. Maybe in the future somebody will figure out an even better way to do it, but his was and is remarkably effective given the inherent disadvantages of the mass-production concept. The biggest flaw is the inability to keep people from dropping out. This is largely a function of the hands-off policy, of letting meditators go off on their own to practice after the basic course, and only provide additional instruction and advice if the meditators seek it out. But hands-on policies have their own disadvantages, especially when you're doing mass-production in which most meditators have not begun to practice out of a deep commitment to a spiritual path but are simply looking for a basic tool to enrich their everyday lives. Even more are likely to drop out if they feel pressured, so again it's a bit of a catch-22.
