---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <s3raphita@...> wrote:
Re Ann's "The transition between waking and sleeping is not transcendence in my book. It is full of thoughts and awareness that do not feel transcendental at all.": So you are *not* doing what Maharshi says. You have to hold your awareness at the point you wake up *before* thoughts arise. I have always found this funny. And I find it funny because the line between being conscious of something and having a thought about that something is very fine if not non-existent. You say MMY wants us to hold our awareness at the point you wake up before thoughts arise. Let me just say that realizing you are just waking and that thoughts have not yet arisen is a thought. Realizations are thoughts. Thoughts are not words, are not sentences, they are something one is conscious of having because they contain content of some form, they are subtle and they come out of nowhere. So, one can be floating around in some thoughtless ether that you only become aware that you were in once you are out of it. But being able to have this intention (which is a thought) to hold oneself at some "point" involves thought. I think it's all gobbeldy gook semantics myself. But then I was never someone who found meditation any better than good old sleep or a walk in the warm rain. Presumably it worked for Ramana because he was in a state of Unity already; his suggestion is that it could work for others also. I mention him as his ideas rather nicely dovetail with Lynch's description of transcending during meditation. And I mention Lynch and the commentator on the article as their take on TM as an intermediate state between sleep and waking is more helpful than the Official TM approach using bubble diagrams. Re Richard's "Meditation means "to think things over". So, TM meditation is based on thinking. Anyone who can think is probably already practising a basic meditation.": If "meditation" means thinking then "Transcendental Meditation" suggests "going beyond thinking". But "meditation" only means thinking in western contexts. Easterners use whatever word they use in their language for "meditation" in a sense closer to western ideas of "contemplation".
