--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "authfriend" <authfriend@...> wrote:
> ... I simply wanted to make the point that TM is not > taught as a devotional practice... I think this is correct. While within the TMO itself, there is a lot of devotion, and was (to MMY when he was living), exactly what makes something devotional is rather complex. When I was at Maharishi Nagar some time ago, a young Indian boy asked me 'Who is your god?', and I had no idea at the time, what he was talking about. Later I presumed he meant something connected with the mantra. I think there has to be a conscious sense of devotion. Say a guy, Dick, is attracted to a gal, Jane, falls head over heels for her, and becomes devoted to her welfare. That to me is something different from someone telling Dick that he ought to repeat the name 'Jane' quietly to himself every day, 2x, for 20 minutes. That practice does not necessarily stir up any devotion. Suppose Dick does not know Jane, or he is not an English speaker, then Jane may mean nothing to him even as a name. If Dick knows Jane and is smitten, and is asked to repeat the name of Jane, then that might be a devotional practice for Dick. I never felt devotional regarding TM. And while there are subtle and not so subtle pressures in and around the movement that nudge one to be of a devotional nature, i n particular to MMY and the 'knowledge', I think you are right that TM is not taught as a devotional practice, even if that was in fact a clandestine intent, because something more, a natural attraction and emotional attitude toward something - a focus - is needed in addition to be devotional. Simply being 'devoted' in a superficial sense, i.e., regular in practice because it feels good, does not supply that added mental and emotional attention needed to be devotional, in the sense that you KNOW what the object of devotion really is. If you meditate because you have the idea there is something called 'enlightenment' that you think is real, but entertain 'enlightenment' as an abstract idea whose nature is not actually known, that is, is hypothetical at that point, this does not stir up the kind of feelings that are typically associated with the word devotion when one is emotionally bound to an object or idea. This is how I practiced TM, always wondering if it would actually do the job. The closer I seemed to be getting, there always was some sense of a setback, that the damn thing really was not working, or had stopped working, or maybe I should try something else etc. That was because I did not believe it was going to do the job, rather I hoped it might, always a hypothetical element intruded. At that point, after having tried a number of things over the years, the possible variety of techniques had settled down to a very few, less than a handful of generic categories, and so if I wanted to proceed, I had just a small choice of things to do. Because my nature is not naturally devotional in the way people with religious feelings are, the practice of TM, and my relationship with any teacher of spirituality simply did not go down that avenue.
