Beautifully and cogently expressed - yet if these things are true, how do you account for the fact that the behavior of the long term TM practitioners who run and administrate the TM movement does not reflect the energy or essence of the purity of consciousness that is supposedly expressed by the enlightened or near enlightened? How do you account for people like Mark Landau and Rory Goff who report what many would feel are fabulous experience of awareness in essence falling back to a normal "waking state" of consciousness?
I have gotten to the point that I think even just the plain old TM technique doesn't do what it is hyped to do - just my opinion. But I think it is a valid and necessary step to look at the results of a technique or practice in those who do it. The TMO consistently says this is the glory to come, pay no attention to what reality actually is, pay attention to what we SAY reality is. They have always dealt in futures and never delivered promised results. ________________________________ From: Xenophaneros Anartaxius <anartax...@yahoo.com> To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com Sent: Saturday, December 29, 2012 2:36 PM Subject: [FairfieldLife] Re: What is the TMO's concept of 'Heaven on Earth'? --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "seekliberation" <seekliberation@...> wrote: > > Once again, your post tends to remain rather vague in describing exactly what > HoE is supposed to be like. First off, yes religions have had the aspiration > to create heaven on earth. Given what I know, and what i've read from your > posts, i'm convinced that neither of us really know in depth the process of > souls incarnating in this world and the reason why ignorant and undeveloped > souls are sent here. > > From what little I do know, All religions teach that our consciousness has to > be fully developed for HoE to be a reality, just like you say. But that's the > problem. From what i've learned, the reason we're incarnated here is BECAUSE > our consciousness ISN'T fully awake. If our consciousness was fully awake, we > wouldn't be here. It's just like a prison, if someone wasn't a criminal, they > wouldn't be there. So creating a perfect prison is futile. Only Hinduism > seems to contain the information of how and why our souls are incarnated > here, and i'm convinced that Hinduism has branched off enough to where the > information is very diluted. Western (Abrahamic) religions fall very short of > understanding this cycle of birth and death (they believe life is a one-shot > deal, heaven or hell, etc..). Bhuddism contains only the bare essentials to > reach CC. Therefore, we have only fragmented ideas of perfection that are > entirely out of context with the big picture of our soul's situation here on earth. > > What i've noticed with many TM'ers and Siddhas is that they are a lot of the > nicest people i've ever met, but they are very mild. They have to limit their > experiences in life to mild experiences. The really deep and heavy > experiences that help lead to our consciousness becoming fully awake.....they > tend to avoid. Then they use their supreme logic to label those experiences > as being negative or ignorant. As a result, their consciousness doesn't > become fully awake, and the possibility of HoE is null. > > The whole reason of creating this post in the first place anyway, was because > i'm convinced that the conception of HoE that exists in the TMO is a reality > that is not achievable, particularly in this lifetime (unless the HoE concept > is different from what I perceived). I am convinced that the concept of HoE > in the TMO is a paradigm that is based on limiting our experiences only to > what we can already handle, which is very limited in terms of the full > spectrum of life which our creator expects us to become accustomed to. > Before the TM movement got really going and became the weird 'TMO' of today, and before the teaching became more bizarre, it was originally in many ways more in line with other traditions in the expression what enlightenment is. MMY said in the 1960s that 'The attainment of union is often described as the expansion of consciousness, but consciousness, as consciousness, never expands. The individual mind expands and in expanding becomes pure consciousness. So "expansion of consciousness" is really a contradiction in terms. Consciousness is already universal and and absolute and cannot expand, but the abilities of the mind can expand...' It is that processing unit in our head that messes things up. It interprets raw experience and manufactures representations of it which we then think are 'true'. That we think these representations are real, is what is real, is the part that is called 'ignorance'. There is a sliding scale of utility to our thoughts. The mind is a tool for getting around in the world. The representations and manipulations of the mind can be very useful. It can enable us to know where and how to put food in our face. Its main drawback is the way it gets programmed when we grow up creates the idea we are an individual 'person' that is distinct and real in comparison to the other representations of the world it creates, and that those other representations are also distinct entities in the field of experience. This cracks the unity of raw experience into fragments, which the mind interprets as reality. Processes like transcendental deep meditation (as MMY called it early on), mindfulness meditation in various forms, contemplation in various forms, and sometimes even concentration in various forms are methods for attempting to reset the mind to a more pristine state by undoing the formation of the boundaries that have already occurred. This does not mean the mind becomes a mush of indistinction as a result. We still can remember the boundries. But we no longer think of them as reality. The entire field of experience in aggregate is taken as reality, and the fragmentation is seen as arbitrary, but with utility. The sense of our individuality is a mental process, not an entity. The mistake is we assume this process of the mind is an entity. It makes other mistaken interpretations of experience in the same way. For example the idea of rebirth. The mind's fracturing of the unity of raw experience into entities and time and process is rebirth. The unity of experience is thought to be a collection of separate things and of relations and of actions between them. Thus the unity is 'reborn' into separate objects of perception, and as a result the unity is not experienced. Note that in describing this, I am using concepts that fracture the unity of experience into seeming entities and processes, if you were to take what I say here and believe it to be true. The degree that our minds fractures experience creates a sliding scale of heaven and hell. The more the raw experience is broken into believed entities and processes, and the more intransigent the mind is in holding these interpretations as true, the more we live in hell. The 'process of enlightenment' is thus a deception of a special kind. It is a collection of mental concepts and processes that initially are believed as true, and as soon as the mind takes this in and believes it, the 'path of enlightenment' is born. But for a spiritual tradition that has any utility, this path of enlightenment contains a poison pill, like a computer virus that wipes data from a hard drive. Somewhere along the illusory path, the techniques practiced, and the ideas that have been rolling around in our head about these practices, have been wearing down the boundaries programmed in our perception, and spontaneously at some unpredictable moment comes the realisation that the whole thing was a total fraud, that in fact, the unbroken state of unity was there all the time. In Indian culture, this is called removing a thorn with a thorn. Ignorance is like a thorn stuck in our hand or somewhere. The thorn (ignorance) causes pain. We do not want to live in pain. We naturally want to get rid of it. We dig it out with another thorn (called the 'teaching', the 'knowledge', the 'creed', whatever it is called), and then eventually when the original thorn is extracted, we throw *both* of them away, for they are both the same. What happens, because of the tendency of the mind to fall into this state of ignorance, is a teaching always seems to end up in the hands of those who have not realised the true nature of the poison pill in the teaching, and references to it get massaged out of the teaching. Notice that religions, some of which at one time may have had something to do with enlightenment, become all about belief, and have little to do with direct experience of reality. Even MMY thought that this is what happens, with time, the teaching loses its force because of this decay. The TM movement is already in need of a revival, though it does have the power to get some enlightened still. Seeking liberation is the process of moving from hell to heaven, while in fact, heaven is there all the time. Kinda weird. The difference between hell and heaven is in perception, not in place or time.
