--- In [email protected], "curtisdeltablues" <curtisdeltablues@...> wrote: <snip> > I believe Vaj's contributions here are more sincere than that. > If you accept the premise that there really IS a tradition of > knowledge of yoga, and if you believe that Maharishi has > corrupted it, then it all makes sense why Vaj would care. It > comes from taking the knowledge very seriously.
Being sincere about one's own tradition is one thing; being intellectually honest in comparing it to another tradition is something else again. Two points: One, Vaj never addresses the question of whether MMY "corrupted" the tradition, or whether he *reformed* it after it had been corrupted by others. There's a good case to be made for the latter, but Vaj won't even acknowledge it, let alone debate it. Two, what does not make sense is why Vaj misrepresents, in very specific and documentable ways, the basic instructions for practicing TM when he claims to have been a TM teacher. It's not just a matter of not using TM lingo, it's misrepresentation of the mechanics. (Extensive documentation on request.) Neither of these smacks of intellectual honesty. How can a "sincere" comparison between teachings be made when one of them is consistently and willfully shortchanged? Again, it's like a devout Roman Catholic scholar putting down Martin Luther because his teachings didn't accord with those of the Vatican, rather than making a reasoned case for the Vatican's teachings being more authentic and for why Luther's were a corruption. One may be sincere in one's beliefs about the value of a tradition, but when the sole basis for the negative judgment of a different tradition is that it's different from the tradition one favors, it's hard to accept it as a serious argument. Vaj might as well be a fundamentalist Christian arguing that Jesus is the only way to salvation because the Bible says so and that TM is demonic because that isn't what *it* teaches.
