Beautifully expressed! Now let's see if the TM aficionados will revile you for saying so.
________________________________ From: "anartax...@yahoo.com [FairfieldLife]" <FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com> To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com Sent: Saturday, July 5, 2014 11:42 PM Subject: Re: [FairfieldLife] Re: YAS: Meditating has instant effect on reducing stress Mindfulness assumes that 'reality' is ever present at all levels rather than something you have to hunt for or contact. In other words, it is based on the end game of enlightenment. I believe Jim mentioned this was a cart before the horse approach once. In some sense I think that is correct, but my observation of those who practised mindfulness experience just as much or more unstressing as TM meditators, and has just as deep insights into experience as TM meditators. They did not seem however as blissful as TM meditators or made mood-making attempts to pretendm everything was just fine, they did not have the illusion that experience was always going to be just peachy, there are hard knots to get out of the system and things one must face, and you might as well get it over with as fast as possible. I actually find mindfulness meditation more effective now than TM, though that was not always the case. TM seems pretty much at the end of the line for me, but still is useful at times. I think this is a natural progression. However with so many years practise, it is likely that TM still slides in from time to time. I find mindfulness rather blissful these days, and TM often feels 'intrusive' because it requires more activity than mindfulness, if you want to get the mantra going. In other words, TM has nothing to do, and mindfulness is just that state of nothing to do. TM is better at 'controlling' a restless mind. My mind is no longer restless, and so the TM advantage in this situation is considerably diminished, like, to zero. So in this case mindfulness is really no longer a technique at all, and TM is superfluous. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <mjackson74@...> wrote : But mindfulness isn't the only other meditation out there. I used the mantras Chopra gave out after leaving TM (or rather that his teacher gave out, they who were originally taught by Roger Gabriel, a TM Governor who defected the Movement with Chopra). The mantras are different, chosen by one's birth chart and I think there are a hundred or so of them. The experience was quite good and no less "deep" than my experience of TM. And that is just one of the many other types of meditations. ________________________________ From: "fleetwood_macncheese@... [FairfieldLife]" <FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com> To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com Sent: Saturday, July 5, 2014 5:41 PM Subject: Re: [FairfieldLife] Re: YAS: Meditating has instant effect on reducing stress When examined for what it is, so called mindfulness, is not a mechanism for reliable transcendence, at all - more like meandering around on the surface of the mind. Something that clearly evolved, as a poor second best, after the knowledge of TM was lost. Those championing it have had very few, or no sustained, deep experiences of transcending, otherwise they would see it for the shallow practice that it is. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <LEnglish5@...> wrote : Eh, while the study in question by Rosenthal and company was tiny and had no control group, it was still a quite impressive finding. My point isn't so much that mindfulness doesn't have an effect on PTSD, but that the media hypes it as being very strong, while ignoring the evidence that TM's effects on stress are demonstrably far stronger. Stress isn't the only thing going on in the world, and isn't the only cause of mental and physical problems, and mindfulness' effects on the brain are quite different than TM's, so it is entirely possible that mindfulness will prove to be more therapeutic about many things in specific people than TM is. But on raw measures of stress-redection, my expectation is that TM will always prove superior, just because that is all TM is, really: Just stress reduction. Maharishi's description that the mind is allowed to wander in the direction of greater happiness, which also happens to be the state of least excitation of the brain, is very accurate, according to all the research. That's an important thing. It facilitates healing in nearly all situations. I saw "nearly all" because there are people who become more anxious, the more relaxed they get, and it may be due to a different mechanism than Maharishi's "stress release model" that he came up with to describe the cycle of activity during TM, and no doubt there are other exceptions. But for most people, TM's stress-reduction is a Very Good Thing that can help heal nearly any condition. L ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <turquoiseb@...> wrote : From: "LEnglish5@... [FairfieldLife]" <FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com> Norman Rosenthal led a study on TM and PTSD that found that in 2 of the 5 subjects, brain imaging showed that the abnormally active amygdala had reset after teh first meditation, and stayed that way for the rest of the study. People are desperate to find that mindfulness works, so they report even the most trivial findings as though they were important. TMers are so desperate to "prove" TM to be "the best" that they'll diss any study that involves a "competing" meditation technique, no matter how trivial they claim it is. :-) ALL "research" on TM will be forever tainted because of the indoctrination given those who conduct the research by Maharishi and his parrot-teachers. >From Day One of their exposure to TM they've been told that it's "the best," at the same time that they were told that all other techniques were garbage. That kind of indoctrination creates fanatics and cultists, not scientists. You *don't* see people doing research into other techniques of meditation wasting their time trying to prove them "superior" to TM, or to anything else. They're content to do real research to see whether the technique they're studying has some beneficial effect. It's only *TM* "researchers" who are so petty as to feel the need to constantly put down other techniques and the researchers who study them.
