I enjoy the clarity in/of your posts. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <archonangel@...> wrote :
Transcendentalism and Quietism have philosophically at their basis, withdrawal. That is a recessive quality, a retreat, and that cannot stand up to more forceful attitudes such as ramming a dogma down someone's throat. Quietism was condemned as a heresy in the Catholic Church, wrongly elevating contemplation over meditation, intellectual stillness over vocal prayer, and interior passivity over pious action. (Note the words here are used in a different sense than in TM.) This problem cannot be overcome unless it is realized that transcendence and stillness are techniques to expand experience, to expand the nature of the mind. They are not ends in themselves, they are methods. Also these methods become objectified. Moving from a state of experience not previously known to a state of knowing is a transcendence, a going beyond, but just for the moment. Once you have the result, it is in hand. It is not transcendent. Thus it is improper to say you are experiencing "the Transcendent," because any state transcendent to what you are experiencing is not experienced. Transcendence is a method to get from A to B, a state of experience, not a state of objects. First you just have A. Then B, and finally AB. You are looking for a state of experience, not a thing. In TM this would be A, B (TC), A|B (CC), and AB (UC). So ultimately transcendence comes to an end because there is no further to go, the method, having established a unified experience, no longer has anything to do. If there is success in the pursuit of unity, you cannot be a Transcendentalist because there is nothing transcendent to what your experience is. You might be quiet, but not a Quietist. The word transcendence thought of objectively symbolizes the goal in a somewhat inaccurate way, but is not the goal itself but the path to it. The goal itself has no name and no definable qualities and is not located anywhere in particular. It is as if nothing at all, making approach a thorny problem except for the fact that it is your own experience. Thus it is close at hand at all times, which removes the problem of distance. Because it is at hand, the problem is not where it is, but your own ignorance of it. The lack is therefore in your own mind in the form of beliefs, opinions, conditioned behavior, and general inattention to the nature of experience as an aspect of living. This is why introspective methods, such as inward contemplation, and non-verbal meditation methods, and meditation methods that result in pure silence (like TM) are useful to illuminate and allow the mind's faults, which revolve around the way it thinks and feels, to dissipate. Unlike warfare, these methods represent, as said, a retreat from your current situation, not a battle with it. Perhaps this is why they lose out in the marketplace, they do not appear to meet a problem head on. Once dissipated, things are clear as day for what you sought is not something different from what you have always been, or is somewhere else than where you are. Knowledge replaces ignorance, but it is not knowledge as something learned. What you had learned was the problem. You need to lose an awful lot, to experience what is called enlightenment. Loss is not what people tend to aim for in their lives. You have to lie a lot to induce people to consider enlightenment as a valid goal in life, to make it seem as if they are going to get something out of it when in fact they will lose everything that is currently preventing them from the experience.
