On Jun 5, 2011, at 3:33 PM, turquoiseb wrote:
Just for the fun of it, you understand. :-) The first: I bailed from the TMO early on, in 1978 or so. To my memory, at that point Maharishi had not really ever talked about anything "beyond" UC, his vision of Unity Consciousness. I have heard since that he later hypothesized BC, Brahman Consciousness, but I honestly don't remember him ever talking about it when I was around. For those who were, what exactly (in your opinion, of course, and welcomed as the opinion it is) was the distinction that Maharishi was trying to draw between UC and BC? I'm serious in this, and will try my best not to dump on anyone who replies with an opinion. I honestly don't know, or don't remember. And it would help me with a writing project if I were to know the distinction he was drawing, or attempting to draw. Thanks in advance.
I believe it was on the transcripts of one of the Washington courses that was the first time most people saw the actual Sanskrit names for the 7 states. It's always helpful to know the Sanskrit equivalents of TM buzz-phrases, as then you have some sort of idea what the hell he was talking about in terms of the tradition he claims to come from. It qualifies the buzzwords, in terms of perspective. And in this case of Unity Consciousness, it's Sanskrit name is brahma-chetana, or Brahman Consciousness. So they are one and the same.
Within the realization of brahman there are four different experiential levels of appreciation of brahman in terms of deepening integration.
In the first style of integration, unity is relies on awareness. One no longer meditates because there is no thing (no object) to meditate "on" but instead meditation, really "non-meditation" at this point, becomes more a type of contemplation of brahman, of which there are four distinctions made.
Shankara actually describes an eight-fold "ladder" of brahman, kind of his version of Patanjali's eighfold path, the last of which is that even the vritti of brahman is dropped and dissolved and "forgotten".
