According to the passage in Jay Latham's book quoted on FFL some years back (which is self-reported by Latham just as Robin self reports his experiences), Latham told Maharishi on a course that the whole thing of TC, CC, GC, and UC was a lie, and Maharishi seemed to agree with him on those points, saying that BC, Brahman Consciousness, was the only reality, and that its dawning, in what he reports as Maharishi's words 'knocks you flat on your back' and that it takes some time to begin to function in BC. I am not always sure Maharishi is entirely consistent in describing these end states of enlightenment because it is not really possible to do this. For example on one tape I heard years ago, he talked of the absolute in unity being on the level of knowledge (rather than experience like a state). That is you don't feel, it, see it, etc., but somehow you know it is there.
Because experience is always changing, does it even make sense that enlightenment is a state of experience? It always seems implied in the movement that enlightenment is some kind of continuous state of experience. On the other hand, if enlightenment is a particular kind of knowledge you have about experience, enlightenment does not have to be some kind of continuous experience, is rather a perspective one has about all kinds of experiences. In relation to what Latham reported, BC would not be an experience, the transition to BC would be an experience in which the perspective one has about experience 'permanently' shifts, that is, how the mind interprets experience in general, not what the experience is. So before this shift, you interpret experience in certain ways, and after the shift, 'you' interpret experience a different way, but the experiences are basically the same, nothing is changed otherwise. This is the seeing the rope as a snake and then seeing the rope as a rope kind of thing. It is on the level of knowledge about the experience. Until this, all this talk about states of consciousness is basically a scheme that presents enlightenment in terms of samsara, but these states are basically a description based in illusion or delusion, TC, CC, GC, UC are all just seeing a snake when only a rope is there; these states are a lie, and enlightenment is an all together different animal. We have Robin, who said everything was just as Maharishi said, and Latham, who said that all those states were basically untrue as far as enlightenment was concerned, Maharishi agreeing. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <authfriend@...> wrote : P.S.: According to Robin, his experience was not that he "fell out of Unity," but rather that he deliberately pulled himself out of it and back to waking state during the 25 years after he realized things had gone badly wrong. He never said anything about the Unity experience having gone away until he decided it was responsible for what had happened and set out to rid himself of it (a long, exceedingly torturous process, according to him). ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <authfriend@...> wrote : No, we can't be sure of that. Robin was something of a special case in many respects. Again, we simply aren't in a position to say what was going on with him. And as I just told you--and you have convenienly ignored--he never used the term "fully enlightened" to describe his state in his FFL posts, nor did he attribute it to Maharishi. Finally, there's no evidence that he stopped meditating until after things had fallen apart and he realized something was badly wrong. I told you that too, and you've ignored it as well. There doesn't seem to have been a "CC" stage for him in any case--his experience at Arosa was that of the sudden dawning of Unity consciousness (as described by Maharishi) without going through the intermediate stages. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <LEnglish5@...> wrote : Gee, if he's not enlightened now, then we can be sure he wasn't "fully enlightened" back then, either, eh? And as I said, Maharishi asking him to describe his legitimate Unity experiences says nothing about whether Robin would CONTINUE to have Unity experiences tomorrow or whatever. Maharishi made it explicit over and over again that meditation was vital during the awakening of CC, and by extension, as long as there was growth to be had along the CC axis, that meditation would always be useful or even necessary for further growth along that axis. And my impression of Robin is that he always had a bit of waking state ego that was constantly trying to get approval from Maharishi. Of course, the same could be said of Maharishi and Gurudev. L
