Great rap, I just read it, I might actually have read it before. Also the other posts in this thread are really good.
To ramble on a bit: Even the Maharishi, in one particular lecture, made it clear, that socalled TC or PC is NOT the source of thought. So he actually lied! But he, admitting to that, justified it that way: At one point, people would realize that everything is Brahman, and in a way, this Brahman is the source of everything, so in that sense it would be true again, and justified. He also had said, in a different lecture, that TC is not pure TC but, as he called it hazy TC, but it just sounds better if you say: transcendental consciousness instead of hazy transcendental consciousness. In the Beacon light of the Himalayas, which he credits for being the origin of TM, there is no mention at all for the transcending process described later at the second intro lecture. He mentions Atman and bliss, but no mention of refining the mantra. Instead he answers to people who have no experiences, to just repeat the Mantra more and longer, then the bliss of the Atma would come! So here clearly, one particular ontological item, transcendence, or Brahman if you prefer, gets connected with one particular experience, and people are told, this is that. I have one problem with this: if you get into a real very different form of Samadhi, like I did, and when you see, that these two experiences are totally unconnected, because it is the nature of this Samadhi to be very unconnected with anything, then you have two types of transcendence. Or experiences of the same ontological state, but they are not at all similar. For the one state, people told you that this is the state of beingness, for the other, you have virtually no explanation at all. So you might reject the first state, TM transcendence, as something lower, because you haven't yet managed to disconnect the actualy state you experienced, with the explanation given. Because it is one thing to change a practice or your experience, and it is yet another thing, to free yourself from all the ideological packaging. And to be honest, it took me years to see through this somehow, to break through the original conditioning, and I still may work on this. So here something is called, 'transcendence' and is sliced up into small packages of momentary glimpses, which are supposed to somehow add up later. They are momentary by definition, because, when you notice them, by definition, you already have a thought. So you can only have it by coming out of a half-conscious state. Transcending (in TM) is really forgetting, forgetting the mantra, and forgetting thought, but the moment you become aware, you have a thought. But as you said, of course, transcendence has nothing to do with either having a thought, or having no thought. It is not a physiological signature, as some keep telling here, a physiological signature, can only relate to a particular experience, and any experience is by the mind. So in that sense, it is really like the Kinder surprise egg, the experience of TC is like the chocolate you get, and the transcendence which it is supposedly contained in this experience, is like the little toy in the void of it.
