On 11/22/2016 09:23 AM, Archer Angel archonan...@yahoo.com
[FairfieldLife] 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.
Philosophically maybe but this gets to complicated for the neophyte.
What I noticed was I stopped "coming out of meditation". IOW saying the
experience of "the transcendent" in activity is merely a way of
communicating with other meditators about the experience be it just
silence in activity. It is probably easier for them to imagine what
having that quiet transcendent feeling in activity is like than
imagining silence in activity (confusing).
Indian gurus have through time simplified terms of the experience as
much as possible because intellect seemed to have little to do with
whether one might develop enlightenment or not. In fact the intellect
might often be barrier to such develop because one can develop
expectations that actually don't reflect the experience. I swear some
think it's like going to be on LSD all the time and that would not be
very practical. And intellectualizing about it too much tends to bog
things down.
