--- In [email protected], "Nelson" <nelsonriddle2...@...> wrote: > > With all the knowledge and experience here assembled, > have there been many cases of someone having "a > meaningless sound" come to them which produced the > same results as official initiation?
Not to be insulting, but I think your question is a bit too TM-centric in that it assumes a mantra as a mechanism for meditation. I would guess that out of the many tech- niques of meditation designed to produce transcendence I've learned, less than a third of them used a mantra. So, in answer to your question, I have found "on my own" (not as a result of being taught these things by a teacher or in a class) many different focuses or "mechanisms" for meditation that pro- duced samadhi or transcendence. None of them involved a mantra. Some involved sound. I once transcended for hours late at night in an office on Wall Street in New York by opening the window and meditating on the sounds of the city. Go figure. Was the sound of the city somehow "special?" Was it a "mantra?" I kinda doubt it, or more people in New York would be nicer. :-) But it "worked," in the sense that by allow- ing it to become the focus of my attention for some time, what it "led to" was trans- cendence. Long, sustained transcendence, not just a blip followed by "lost-in- thoughts-ness." I guess that my only point is that "meditation" is a broader term than many TMers assume. It can involve many methods and non-methods, sounds or sights, closed eyes or open eyes, sitting or walking or even having sex. But transcendence (samadhi) can be the result of all of them. Are any of these "triggers" somehow "better" or "more effective" than any other? Not in my opinion. YMMV.
