Lawson, I think Maharishi once defined stress as any chemical or structural abnormality in the system. As such I think of it as non wholeness rather than anti spiritual.
On Sunday, July 6, 2014 2:07 PM, "lengli...@cox.net [FairfieldLife]" <FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com> wrote: Stress is the ultimate anti-spiritual thing. In fact, I would argue that it is the ONLY anti-spiritual thing. "Yoga is the subsidence of mind fluctuations." and mind-flutuations are brought about by past experience that interferes with our ability to deal with the present moment -that is, stress. L ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <anartaxius@...> wrote : Somehow all this research stuff seems like comparing apples and goats, because the parameters measured in meditation are not correlated with spiritual goals. Based on my reading, etc., I would say that the spiritual goals as defined by a number of different schools of spiritual development (TM, Tao, Vedanta, Zen I am including here, but there are others, particularly other forms of Buddhism with which I am not so familiar) the spiritual goal would correspond to what Maharishi called Brahman Consciousness (BC). Nothing less than this would correspond to what the others schools call 'enlightenment'. As an example, CC and GC are not considered enlightenment in Zen, the former is an indication of progress near the bottom of the spiritual ladder, and GC is considered hallucinatory, visual and auditory delusions. Unity is also below the upper rung on the ladder, because the concept and idea and experience of unity also has to go by the way. So we dump CC, GC, and UC, and have to establish some kind of parameters for BC. Do we have any data from the TM camp as to the correlates of BC? There are changes in the overall character of experience a person has, but there are also important changes in mental perspective. It does not seem however there is a specific persistent experience that is enlightenment, it is a combination of experiential and knowledge changes together that constitute enlightenment, but there seems to be no useful information that correlates with this across spiritual platforms, or disparate research groups. By the way Lawson, the state of least excitation of the brain is called death. Enlightenment however requires that whatever it may be defined as eventually, it is known while the brain is engaged in practical activity in daily life. Lawson, you always seem to be talking about the earlier stages that lead to enlightenment, and are basing your arguments on that. For example, what percentage of those who learn a meditative technique achieve BC? Since it is known, approximately, that 10 to 20 percent of TM practitioners continue with the practice, at best only 10 to 20 percent could achieve enlightenment via TM. The actual value seems as if it would be considerably lower. Maybe 0.5% or less? I am defining enlightenment as BC, nothing less (this is the 'highest first' principle, though you know there is an incredible joke involved here in calling enlightenment the 'highest'), and there is no scientific correlates to BC I am aware of. What have you got? I recall Maharishi saying if anything resulted in enlightenment, then the way that happened was by 'transcendental meditation', but he seemed to be using the word as a broad category rather than his specific technology. In other words, there is a principle involved, and there are different ways to for that principle to be put into practice. Maharishi said he did not 'round much' when he was with Guru Dev, he just did things for him, and that was basically his practice. The formulation of the specific technique came later. So it appears Maharishi did not get enlightened, if you consider him enlightened, by way of the Transcendental Meditation® Technique. I would think, If 'enlightenment' exists, it would not matter at all how you got there as long as you got there. Nisargadatta took three years, and he did not practice TM. It took Adyashanti about twelve years and then some, and he did not practice TM. There are TM practitioners who have practised over forty years, who seem completely in the dark as to enlightenment, and there are some TM practitioners who have practised considerably less but have come to a much greater level of clarity about this matter. This matter does not seem resolved at all concerning superiority of methods. ---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.
