--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, nablusoss1008 <no_reply@...> wrote: > --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "Richard J. Williams" <richard@> wrote:
>>> Yaoshan, the great master Hongdao, was sitting. A >>>> monk asked him, "In steadfast sitting, what do you >>>> think?" >>>> >>>> Yaoshan said, "Think not thinking." >>>> >>>> The monk asked, "How do you think not thinking?" >>>> >>>> Yaoshan replied, "Beyond thinking." >>>> >> nablusoss1008: >>> This is exactly why I've never encountered a strong >>> and really healthy Buddhist. They're lost in gibberish >>> like this. >>> >> What is it about Lute's definition of TM that you do >> not understand? Is it the part about going beyond >> thinking, or the part about thinking? >> >> "'Transcendental' means to go beyond; 'meditation' means >> thinking. Hence, 'Transcendental Meditation' means to go >> beyond thinking." - Charlie Lutes >> >> http://www.maharishiphotos.com/tmintro.html > > At least Krishnamurthi, at the very end of his life had the guts to admit > that his teachings had been a failure because not a single soul had reached > transcendence from his lifelong teachings. > > Noone transcends by be being told to "just be" or "think not thinking". It's > useless. > > But for the Llamas with all their abbottery and students and schools in the > West and status it's probably impossible to muster the courage of a > enlightened soul like Krishamurthi. > These Llamas are like the americans say: "All hats no cattle" I saw Krishnamurti just once. I cannot remember a thing about what he said. I also used to know someone who worked for him. He tried to talk like Krishnamurti, but it seemed hollow compared to what I have read in Krishnamurti's books. Those who slip into unity without having had to go through what most of us go through seem to have a lot of trouble getting through to people. Another such one is Ekhart Tolle. He had a great experience, but he seems to have problems similar to Krishnamurti - he can talk about it but cannot guide people effectively in the 'proper' direction. Another person, Melvyn Wartella seems to have had a similar experience, enlightenment without a guru or tradition. He put up a web site 'Friends of Reality' describing his experience, and making some attempt to make the idea of enlightenment clear, but he chooses mostly to stay with his family and not interact with others, other than to put up this information. http://friendsofreality.org/friendsofreality.org_index.html/home.html In the case of Zen, the things you see in books only shows the tip of the iceberg. Zen students spend a lot of time meditating, so the exchanges you see between student and master represent the master attempting to apply a trigger to set off an experience. Undoubtedly most of the time this fails, and the reports in the books you see are just the ones that worked, but these moments were preceded by years of meditation and also perhaps, study of doctrine etc., so here the situation is different than for the rare individual that gets enlightened spontaneously without much in the way of discipline, study, or meditation, and spend their life trying to tell others about it. So just telling someone to not think probably would only work once in a billion times, in other words, worthless. My first experiences, before I learned TM involved some guided meditation, and an environment that was very hostile to conceptual thinking, and this was a very secular thing, zero religious overtones, and this resulted in some astounding experiences but they did not last more than a few days, but it gave me the sense of what unity might be like, and those experiences became a reference for sorting out the wheat from the chaff. It is possible to have the experience that goes under the label 'transcending' without reference to the word at all, and to have it not in meditation, but while engaged in activity if the environment is keyed to produce this. In cosmic consciousness (TM schema) transcending no longer really occurs in a technical sense, but as someone posted a while back, this state is a glorified ignorance (I had never heard MMY said this, but it sounds right). The methods in Zen talked about are basically dedicated to knock the mind into unity. CC is not discussed much from what I can discern, since it is regarded as a state of delusion in Zen. I have occasionally related Zen stories to TM meditators, and they simply do not get them (though a friend of mine, a TM meditator of about 40-plus years says she thinks Zen seems to have a Vedanta point of view). The conceptual framework in the TMO seems more geared to keeping the meditator in the conceputal system rather than to break the system to pieces, which is what is needed to experience unity. In other words any system geared to produce the enlightened state basically has to self-destruct because not only do you have to transcend thought, you have to transcend what these thoughts and concepts mean and signify when in activity, because unity is not on the level of meaning. And then they lose their grip on your mind. While I like reading about Zen, I am not a Buddhist. There is a phrase in Zen, if you meet the Buddha on the street, you should kill him. Now how many meditators, if they were hypothetically to meet Maharishi on the street, would tell him to f**k off? This is just an expression of life beyond conceptual thinking. It doesn't mean you will henceforth be some intractable bastard walking the streets of life insulting everyone and every concept about life you encounter (except perhaps if we are on the FFL forum).
