I had a long time friend who was a TM teacher in Thailand, Malaysia and 
Singapore in the mid-70's who talked with Basil Pennington on ATR.
 

 Basil's concern was how to port over the TM technique to revive the Catholic 
contemplative tradition. He believed this could be done and was working with a 
few others who had learned the technique to make it happen. We now know who 
those others were. 

 

 This Rock Catholic Evangelical magazine (now called Catholic Answers) has 
repeatedly condemned the entry of "Hindu TM" along with Buddhist Vipassana into 
Catholic practice. They consider it all to be the devious subterfuge of the 
"Evil One" working to overthrow the "pure teachings" of Roman Catholicism.


I agree with their premise. TM and its Vedic roots are in contradiction to the 
Sin-Guilt-Redemption miasma of Roman Catholic and Protestant Christianity. 
These Western Christian lineages are an Augustinian deviation from original 
Christianity - which only still exists (to some extent) in the Eastern Orthodox 
church. 

However, the Eastern Orthodox teachings and contemplative practices are solely 
Christo-centric and have no place (nor need any) for TM practice or theories. 

 

 

 

---In fairfieldlife@yahoogroups.com, <authfriend@...> wrote:

 Buck wrote:
 
 > Dear Turq; to give credit where credit is due, actually Centering Prayer
 > was drawn from the range of Christian and Eastern mystics but to be
 > more honest and accurate was distilled from Transcendental Meditation
 > in the 1970's by the three monks and their brethren at St. Joseph's
 > Abbey in Spencer Massachusetts.
 > 
 > I know, I was there and watched them rip Transcendental Meditation [TM]
 > off for their own purposes.
 >
 > -Buck in the Dome 
 
 I'll confirm that the assumption among TMers that these three clerics' version
 of Centering Prayer was based on TM was current back in the late 1970s. It
 isn't something Buck made up. Photocopies of the chapter entitled "TM and
 Centering Prayer" from Pennington's 1977 book "Daily We Touch Him" were
 routinely passed around among TMers.
 
 Moreover, if Barry had any curiosity at all, or any desire to get his facts 
straight,
 he would have checked out the PDF that Xeno uploaded. It would be extremely
 difficult for anyone familiar with TM instruction to read those two pages on 
how 
 to do Centering Prayer and claim that it had "nothing to do with TM." It's
 obvious that the clerics did indeed "rip off" the instructions for TM, just as 
Buck
 says above.
 
 The mechanics of the techniques are virtually identical. The only two 
significant
 differences are (1) that TM uses a teacher-assigned Sanskrit mantra, whereas
 Centering Prayer uses a self-chosen "sacred word" from the Christian tradition;
 and (2) that the explicit context of Centering Prayer is Christian, whereas 
TM's is
 either secular, religious/nondenominational, or Hindu, depending on one's
 approach.
 
 --The Corrector
 
 
 
 Barry wrote:
 (snip) 
 > > I think we all know that The Corrector will probably rip Buck a new 
 > > asshole for
 > > running this tired and intentionally misleading routine again, but just on 
 > > the off
 > > chance that she doesn't, I will. The bolded section in brackets above comes
 > > only from Buck's fevered imagination. Anyone who reads the rest of the
 > > descriptions on that page knows that it has nothing to do with TM. 
 > > 
 > > Buck's as bad as Willytex at making shit up and presenting it as fact.  
 

Reply via email to