Xeno, though it has been over 40 years, I have been drunk. In fact, I would say for about 1 month, I was addicted to alcohol. I was newly separated from my husband of 6 years. I was 26 and living alone for the first time in my life. I never passed out. I think I got sick only once. Plus I had experienced the very different high of marijuana. Then all that addiction dropped away. About a month later I saw a TM poster. Very soon afterwards I was initiated, a week before the first Merv Griffin Show.
Transcending for me is very different than being drunk or being high. It really did not, and does not, allow for escape from any aspect of one's self. What it nudges one towards is the realization that no escape is needed from anything. Because of what you call continuity and intimacy with all things. In my experience being drunk does not support such a sublime but ordinary experience. Being high does, a little bit. But nothing nudges like transcendence that is natural, not dependent on any substance or on any harmful behavior, such as gamboling. And I agree that at a certain point, words and phrases are too limiting to adequately describe what is indescribable. But I guess words give us the illusion that we've lassoed life. When really we're the ones who have been lassoed. Over and over again. On Friday, January 31, 2014 1:42 PM, "anartax...@yahoo.com" <anartax...@yahoo.com> wrote: People drink to transcend self, to get away from the image of themselves. So in that sense, that activity is the same as transcending in TM. The small self is transcended when you pass out, the activity of drinking ceases. If an automobile comes to rest and stops moving, does that make it more self sufficient? The whole idea of an automobile is self-sufficiency in motion. This play on words has limits. Self-sufficiency on an individual level is defined as the condition or quality of being adequate or sufficient on the level of a person's essential being that distinguishes them from others. When talking about enlightenment, this is not what it means, though independence may be a by product of changes in experience. With the big E the sense of individuality is reduced or eliminated and the small self is replaced with the experience of continuity and intimacy of all things, a practical death of the ego-sense. The small self may also be extinguished by being a drunk which often leads to death, but that is probably not such a cool experience, the part leading up to death, that is. Turq's comments about those über expensive whiskeys reveals a caste system for drunkeness. The super rich drunk can afford to wall themselves away from the world, private and in posh style, maybe in a fifty room mansion, and pass out on only the finest rarest forms of alcohol, while the lowest caste drunk has to publicly pass out on the sidewalk, often in very unpleasant weather, using only the cheapest of wine. In a way the latter is in a better position spiritually if he does not die because he has nothing to lose, having lost all possessions, self respect, and care for what others think of him (or her). The super rich drunk has a lot more to lose.
