With regards to William Parkinson, Ravi Yogi, and Lawson --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "sparaig" <LEnglish5@...> wrote:
> --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, William Parkinson ameradian2@ wrote: > > Thank you so much for sharing with me what happened to you Ravi. I did not know that you are using something other than TM. The only reason why I practice TM is because having tried other meditations, TM, for better or worse, seems to allow me to transcend in the quickest manner I have ever experienced. It happened in the first day or two, and that was something I can't say for any other form of meditation I tried, including classical concentration (which I started when I was perhaps 12 years old following the guidelines in a book by Richard Hittleman on Yoga), or vipanassana, or meditating on my breath while using a simple form of pranayama. For me TM is simply an expedient tool-- I have no desire to reach GC or UG and right now I'm just trying to figure out if I should even allowed to go so far as CC 24/7. Frankly this entire notion of having so-called Cosmic Consciousness, this awareness of a silent inner level, during sleep is something that > > concerns me. I wonder if it will make sleep far more difficult. And I also worry about what I just read concerning what seems to be long-lasting, if not permanent changes to either neurophysiology or even neuroanatomy. Btw, what form of meditation were you practicing? And also, I love the comment by your Guru. That was a very perceptive comment!! > > Cheers > > Bill > > From: Ravi Yogi raviyogi@ > > To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com > > Sent: Wednesday, July 13, 2011 10:55 AM > > Subject: [FairfieldLife] Re: Sleep and TM (are youstill there RC?) > > Dear Bill, > > > > Not being familiar with TM, I can just share my experiences. > > > > In my experience not being aware during deep sleep state doesn't seem to hinder bliss and perfect awareness during the wakeful state. Most of the times I sleep like a log, if I'm too high I might feel like I'm aware of my sleep state but this happens rarely. > > > > However during a period of 3 months in 09 & 10, during this period that I refer to as the descension of divine I hardly slept and had full awareness even while asleep. But I believe this to be a side effect of the body trying to cope with energy than any natural state. My body treated this energy as an invasion and felt the need to be awake 24 hours a day to deal with this. > > > > So based on my experience it was just an interim state, after having integrated the energy and rising up higher in consciousness, so to speak I just sleep. > > > > TM is a path like many others, like my Guru would say once you reach the shore you leave the boat behind, you wouldn't carry it on your head. > > > > For me the further shore occasionally seems closer than at other times, but invariably a cleansing flood washes the boat back down stream, and the further shore seems at least as far away as ever, if not more. > > IOW, I haven't found an opportunity to carry the boat around on my head for any appreciable length of time, at least. > > To paraphrase MMY: as long as you have thoughts during meditation, you can still benefit from meditation... > > L. I do not think it has ever been determined that the sign posts or benchmarks that meditative traditions have are clearly experienced by everyone, or that there might be partial crossovers that are out of the sequence. Some people clearly never seem to experience them, others do. I experienced terrible insomnia for years during and after a CC-like experience. The CC-like experience disappeared but the insomnia did not. It felt like I went back to square one on the game board. Eventually the insomnia went away and a different kind of 'witnessing' experience developed which was different than the CC-like phenomenon, in that it seemed very diffuse; the earlier one was a definite sense of being awareness separate from sensory experience, and being awake all the time. Regarding that I think Ravi Yogi's comment about there being more energy manifesting as a sense of sleeplessness is correct. This other, later witnessing was not like that at all, it never felt defined, it was not like a concrete experience where I could say this or that about it. It was a bummer. I lost interest in spiritual descriptions and stopped reading about them. I switched to reading novels. I had very negative thoughts about 'my path' of progress for a long time - decades. Eventually everything seemed to get more relaxed and I just started to live life without thinking about spiritual progress. One day I went outside for some air and suddenly without warning, the farther shore and the nearer shore, as Lawson put it, were one and the same, and it had always been that way, no boat required as there was no river to traverse. There is no way to describe what this it like. Then things became completely ordinary. I read spiritual literature again to gain some kind of intellectual grasp of this. The whole thing is always in front of us all the time. It is not a big deal. The big deal is thinking that it is going to be a big deal, which results in creating an almost endless distraction. Whatever meditation you are doing, keep doing it. Mine was mostly TM though I started out with other things, and now meditation is peculiar because it has no place 'to go', but I still meditate, and sometimes just sit quietly in silence. Your experiences may be different, and it might be discouraging if, as I did, you seem to hit a road block (or a river blockade). Persistence is good, and depending on your mental makeup, it can be strong, that is, you are naturally focused on goals, in which case you might make faster progress, or in my case is was a continuous but quiet persistence, which may be why it took so long to get nowhere. The term 'support of all the laws of nature' takes on a whole new meaning, and it is not as if some fairy god-mother comes along with her magic wand and fulfills everything you think of or want (one actually does not think like that anymore). You see the whole as a process and see that the process of the whole supports the whole because that is the only thing that is. This is self sufficiency. This is what Maharishi meant by the title of a book called 'Creating Ideal Society' (1976). Everything in the whole fits together perfectly, the society of the pieces of the world fit together ideally because they are all the whole. It has nothing to do with utopian civilisations, though perhaps if enough were seeing the world this way, things might be a bit smoother on the human level of interaction, though if you look at this forum, maybe not. This forum is valuable because the people on it, or at least a goodly portion of them, are interested in getting the kinks out of their progress. Finding out that the nearer and farther shores were an illusion is a new beginning. Still gotta live and do stuff.
