You can only measure what y ou have the equipment to measure. However, it's a truism that just because two things can be described teh same way at one level, doesn't mean that they are identifical.
My favorite example is what happened to some British friends many decades ago... They got a sweetheart travel package to visit Nashville. Nashville, Florida, that is. Just because you can describe a city as "Nashville" doesn't mean it is the Nashville you were hoping to visit. Unfortunately, they actually got on the plane and landed before they discovered their mistake. The moral is: a label, "pure awareness," that is described as being "without thought," might not be referring to the same thing between two different meditation traditions. A two-word phrase may not provide you enough info to make a rationale choice any more than just knowing the name of the city without knowing the state it is in is enough to make rationale travel plans. L ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <dhamiltony2k5@...> wrote : Great quotes. The TM researchers and movement seem quite desperate to prove a negative, even if they don't experience it. So, they co-opt the discussion by defining their particular alpha-coherence as the definition of a transcendence. That makes it real easy to win an argument between meditation practices. The question remains still as to whether the TM'ers with all their investment in fancy equipment are close to measuring the right thing. Evidently spirituality is way more than alpha-wave-coherence. They obviously are not able to measure what all is going on with a spirituality of a soul in the whole body-mind complex, commonly referred to as embodying the spiritual heart-being. Is that why TM'er are commonly thought of as heartless and in the head? 'Spock-like'? There was a longer thread on this over at The_Peak recently. The Peak https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/the_peak/conversations/messages/3393 https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/the_peak/conversations/messages/3393 The Peak https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/the_peak/conversations/messages/3393 The Peak is an ongoing conversation about our journey as human beings, upwards towards the pinnacle, and fulfillment of our existence; Enlightenm... View on groups.yahoo.com https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/the_peak/conversations/messages/3393 Preview by Yahoo From The_Peak, Thanks, good discernment extending this aspect of souls incarnating to 'origin of awareness' and a why or implication of incarnational life. Deferring here to my wife's experience with this from her career work with people as 'the Heart Field in addition to the Mental Field'.. She is quite eloquent on this from her experience with it. The Divine qualities of the Heart evidently are not linear like mental fields of the mind. In the mind those values are linear and thoughts. In the heart they are inward divine fields that extend out as field effects in life. Long-term meditators may have bright open upper mental fields but as a cultivated awakened super-mental purity which can be dry, calm and not blissful. An implication by contrast is that spiritually people die as they have lived, either in the head or heart. As people die you can feel the cultivated value in balance of what is mental and heart being. Meditators can be peaceful but also cold or dry simply in how people have lived their lives. This speaks to what is spiritually possible from cold and calm to expansive and open to a bliss experience as what can be done to cultivate larger spiritual values. For instance, Divine Friendliness, Compassion or Happiness is a relationship which is luscious in the energy field where it is activated. ..where the transcending happens in the heart. You can find this in some meditators as they have lived their lives. More than peace it is love. Brain waves do not necessarily translate in to heart-being but when 'calm' gets activated by the mechanism of the heart chakra. You can see super developed mental fields that are cold and serene but without a lusciousness or love. Soul-self is bliss-self in the incarnational light body. The soul in life wants to 'dip its toe' in to incarnation. The spark of jivan is in the heart chakra and when the heart stops the soul heads out. You can feel it as it happens when you are there. It is phenomenon as it happens while it happens if you are open to it. It is a miraculous coming and going in life. Some people are naturally cultivated in divine qualities of the heart, some have cultivated in life divine qualities of friendliness, compassion and happiness in the living of their lives. So people are afraid when without a fullness of the field of love there this is not cultivated in capacity the experience of love in the heart. Without activation of the divine qualities in the heart people are lonely otherwise and suffer spiritual grief. That can be worked with. It is that simple. In the heart of the matter: “In life know the glorious and in death just take the vale away.” Evidently there is more to spiritual life than just transcending. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <LEnglish5@...> wrote : Rolls eyes. You can force silence by distracting the mind and diverting resources away from the verbal centers or you can allow the mind to become more calm until silence is everywhere. Pure consciousness during TM is no mantra, no thought, no body awareness, no intuition, no emotion, no memory, no sensory awareness of any kind, not just "no verbal thoughts." It occurs spontaneously, not at beck and call, and is accompanies by higher levels of alpha coherence in the frontal lobes, along with increased skin resistance, abrupt decrease i heart rate as well as an apparent cessation of breathing or at least abrupt drop in breath rate. It's hard to miss when you hook someone up to the right equipment, but what they found when the examined the woman who most consistently showed these signs, while using the most sophisticated eqiupment, was that she didn't notice the existence of the state, only the transition *out of* the state. L ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <dhamiltony2k5@...> wrote : No mantra-No thought Sounds the same. It is a correct experience of the practice of TM (second night checking) and evidently Mindfulness too Pure Awareness. # ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <LEnglish5@...> wrote : What they call pure awareness is not what TMers call pure awareness. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <yifuxero@...> wrote : [Scientific American article by Matthieu Ricard, Antoine Lutz, and Richard J. Davidson, Nov. 2014, p. 43] "In our Wisconsin lab, we have studied experienced practioners while they performed an advanced form of mindfulness meditation called open presence. In open presence, sometimes called "pure awareness", the mind is calm and relaxed, not focused on anything in particular yet vividly clear, free from excitation or dullness. The meditator observes and is open to experience without making any attempt to interpret, change, reject or ignore painful sensation" ...[the experimenters somehow induced some pain to experienced meditators, then compared the results to novices.] ."We found that the intensity o0f the pain was not reduced in meditators, but it bothered them less than it did members of a control group". . "Compared with novices, expert meditators' brain activity diminished in anxiety related regions - the insular cortex and the amygdala - in the period preceding the painful stimulus." . "Other tests in our lab have shown that meditation training increases one's ability to better control and buffer basic physiological responses - inflammation or levels of a stress hormone - to a socially stressful task such as giving a public speech or doing mental arithmetic in front of a harsh jury." . ".