--- In [email protected], ruthsimplicity <no_re...@...> wrote: > > --- In [email protected], "authfriend" <jstein@> wrote: <snip> > > Unlike you, BTW, I grew up without faith. Sometimes > > I think it would be nice to have faith, but it doesn't > > seem to be anything I'm able to cultivate. So I go by > > my own experience and by what makes sense to my > > intellect. > > Yes, you have said this before. You do appear to have > enough faith in the potential of TM to continue with > your siddhi practices for a couple hours a day and > continue with your working hypothesis. Do you maintain > that you have no faith at all?
I believe I've also said before that I find the program rewarding to do, both at the time I'm doing it and in my daily life. That's more than enough for me to continue with it. Whatever happens beyond that, happens. <snip> > I agree that cultivating faith is next to impossible, > it is or isn't there. But faith occurs in little > ways all the time. We all have our little > rationalizations which are a kind of faith. Yes, we have faith that the sun will rise every day. But that, of course, isn't what I was talking about. > > Despite my lack of experience of faith, though, I > > don't look at those who do have it and assume they're > > just hysterical. Rather, I assume they are capable of > > having an experience for which, for whatever reason, > > I'm not wired. There are enough other things in my > > life that give me satisfaction that I don't miss it. > > We have no meeting of the minds here. Big surprise. > I never called people with faith hysterical. It's called an "analogy." I was merely refering to my experience with the siddhis. > Have you have been with people grunting, barking, > shouting, and twitching while doing yogic flying? Sure, in the beginning, when the folks in my class had just learned. Actually there was more laughter than anything else. If you had had the experiences they were having, chances are your body would have had the same response. There's a close parallel to a much more common experience, BTW, which I suspect you've had, or I hope you've had, during which there's a tendency to make noises. That's not all there is to the yogic flying experience by any means, but it's one component of it. My opinion is that it is not a > spiritual experience but a mental experience based > upon a number of factors, including group hysteria. > This is a different issue than faith. It is about > my impressions of what was going on at a course. Of > course, my impression can be wrong but as I said above, > I have found no reason change my conclusions. I did > my due diligence. The only due diligence you could possibly do in the case of yogic flying would be to become the person whose experience you want to evaluate. You may have a view of what spiritual experience is that's too limited. In any case, you can't possibly know what the experience is like unless you've had it. It's very easy to dismiss experiences you haven't had on the grounds that the mind can fool you and make patterns out of nothing. But it's not very intellectually honest. In fact, it sounds a lot as though that conclusion is your mind making a pattern that you're more comfortable with.
