"Pure" Awareness? ... So what is "Impure" Awareness? Awareness with a "content"? If so then such a definition would include the use of a mantra also.
Awareness (pure or impure) is neither an experience nor an experiencer. Awareness precedes the separation between these two. The mantra is vibrational speech (vac) that captures attention as a non-conceptual sensory experience. But more particularly, a mantra is uttered forth as speech and then entertained reflectively until it recedes into subtly. This utterance quality differentiates it from mere sound because it actualizes the cognizant agency (rather than sheer awareness) of the person. TM is thus demarcated from something like shamata-vipashyana (samata-vipassana). ---In [email protected], <jpgillam@...> wrote: A question occurred to me recently that I had never considered in all my years of being a student and teacher of TM: How can we tell whether TM's benefits result from an experience of pure consciousness or from some vibrational quality of the mantra?
