There's no monitoring required to "do" TM. In fact, you can get lost for hours in thought if you have mental health problems as I do, and still be "doing" TM correctly.
L ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <dhamiltony2k5@...> wrote : Vipassana and TM interwoven, Mindful Notes of a Fairfield meditating satsang: Vipassanaic TM: [Once upon a time at a meeting a few years ago in Fairfield, Iowa ] ".. We’re going to talk about transcendence in relation to vaipassana. These two practices are interwoven for me. What has meshed? TM is a non-concentrative practice. Do you understand what that means? KG: You don’t focus on staying on the mantra, you can relax your mind. DG: The practice does require doing. When you notice you’re off the mantra, you come back to it. It’s not continuous repetition, but it does require monitoring. There is concentration to that degree. H: Effortless effort. JS: Vaipassana is in the same genre as TM, it’s a non-concentrative practice. However, it involves a little more doing than TM. We don’t normally practice meditation with the goal of gaining insight, whereas vaipassana does involve insight, insight into everything. It’s not limited to you. Anything can be an object of observation. H: Is it like ritam? JS: When you merge these two practices together, you will transcend, you won’t stop yourself from transcending. A lot of Buddhist practitioners feel they have to stay in the present, so they keep themselves from transcending. They don’t differentiate between transcending and spacing out. We understand the difference. We know what it feels like to space out in meditation. So in this process I want you to favor transcending. It involves not favoring silence, not favoring thoughts. If you get in the transcendent and come up, you don’t say, I want to go back right away. You notice where you are on the elevator. You ask, where am I? Normally we don’t do this. C: Unless you have advanced techniques. JS: True, but these skills have gotten rusty. When we come back, we don’t often know where we are. Vaipassana is the subtle level of observation. The first thing you observe is the mechanics of consciousness. Buddhists don’t talk about this, but this is my experience. When you notice that you’re distracted from meditating, running your shopping list, you don’t want to be there, but you observe where you are on the elevator. What you learn about is tracing these subtle levels of observation through the levels of the transcendent, the roads that are built in the transcendent. The floating technique is based on this knowledge. When you’re working with intuition you need to be awake to the subtle levels of the transcendent. I was reluctant to go here because I’ve merged the two practices. I want you to practice vaipassana, 5-10 minutes, ideally with someone else from this group, even on the phone. I want you to talk about your experiences in order to ground it. I don’t want you to use your mantra. If it comes up, don’t force it out of the way, but treat it like another thought. But I don’t want you to come back to the mantra like in TM, because that has a different effect. You are going to come back to pure awareness. Everyone is capable of this after so many years of TM. I want you to use pure awareness as its own still point. Go in, start meditating, let go of the mantra if it comes up, go back to that pure awareness. It will have a quality of silence, but I want you to not hold to the silence. The silence will pull you down into it. With TM, we want to go into it. But now I want you to not be attached to the silence. An effect will happen. DG: You’ll be awake to yourself. JS: Exactly. When you’re not holding to the mantra or the silence, an awakening takes place inside, an openness to the self, a lucidity. You will awake to the meditation process. After that awakening occurs, you’re going to ask yourself, where am I in the elevator? Most likely you’re going to be at level 3 or 4 above the transcendent. I want you to notice the feeling of that in your body, what it feels like to wake up to that level of the transcendent. There will be a felt sense in the body. Right there, I want you to start observing your thoughts. Thoughts have components of consciousness built into them. Some are more refined, some more gross. Sensations in the body also have levels. Emotions also have levels. I want you to notice your thoughts, not just the content, but the subtlety of the thought. Is it gross or refined? First you meditate, then you transcend, allow that to happen, but don’t use your mantra. When you come to the point of stillness, it’s like when the sun comes out. You’ll wake up to the inner life. Notice where you are in the elevator. Then wake up to the sensation level. It has to do with thought and the level out of which it arises. What makes thought more refined is when it’s closer to the transcendent. Most likely the emotion will be refined. But if you do have grosser emotion, just let it be. There are more parts, but this is enough for today. If you practice this way, you will encounter the other parts naturally. You will start to see the content of thoughts. Don’t push them away or ignore the thoughts and feelings. Observe them, but don’t indulge them. You have to do this as a formal practice. You can’t do this in activity at first. You need to establish the silence. L: Expect nothing, notice everything. Noticing builds a particular frequency. When you notice that sensation, track that. It will start unraveling the conditioning. You’re clearing the disturbances out. JS: L is describing the effect, and it will happen naturally. M: Is it the same as the floating technique? JS: The floating technique is a specific healing technique that will always have the same effect in your body, the rising up. They’re two different things, although they’re interwoven. When you observe with vaipassana, you can take that into the floating technique. That requires practice, practice in the mechanics. H: It sounds like what we’re told to do when we have an overpowering thought in meditation, only not waiting for the thought to subside. JS: It’s different. DD: It’s parallel. It’s like when you consciously return to the sutras. JS: There’s an awakening into something that differentiates it from other techniques. Normally in TM we don’t examine content. In this process you do a lot of examination, but not on the level of thinking. We think of contemplative meditation as just thinking, but it’s not. You can do it any time you like, any time you have 10-15 minutes. Half an hour would be ideal. You don’t have to do it every day, a couple of times a week is fine. I just want you to have a tool to gain insight into yourself. When you go through the mechanics of this and see where you are, observing sensations, observing thoughts, which will have content, whether imagistic or felt. Rather than pushing them away, when a thought comes up, be happy about it because this thought is going to be a helper. Observe the content of it. Is it anger, an insight, an image from the past, see it and know it for what it is. I don’t want you to go off on a big tangent about the thought. Just notice it and then return to the Self, but not come back to the mantra. If the mantra comes up, don’t push it away, just return to the Self. Insight will come up, an aha experience. We don’t normally have that with TM because it’s not insight oriented. It might not be a thought, it might be a sensation or an emotion. Is that clear? Let’s see how it goes. # # On FFL emptybill writes: Mindfulness versus Vedantic awakening - the difference Here is a discussion by James Swartz about the difference between the practice of Buddhist Vipassana and its relationship to the Vedanta teachings about awakening to one’s invariant witness-awareness. Hope this helps clarify our discussion about distinguishing between the practices of original Vedanta, TM meditation and Buddhist Vipassana. http://www.shiningworld.com/top/images/stories/Sat_F2014/Buddhism_and_Vedanta.pdf http://www.shiningworld.com/top/images/stories/Sat_F2014/Buddhism_and_Vedanta.pdf Here is a discussion by James Swartz about the difference between the practice of Buddhist Vipassana and its relationship to the Vedanta teachings about awakening to one’s invariant witness-awareness. Hope this helps clarify our discussion about distinguishing between the practices of original Vedanta, TM meditation and Buddhist Vipassana. http://www.shiningworld.com/top/images/stories/Sat_F2014/Buddhism_and_Vedanta.pdf http://www.shiningworld.com/top/images/stories/Sat_F2014/Buddhism_and_Vedanta.pdf
