Comment below: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "authfriend" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: **SNIP** > > > > For the record, my experience is that the realization > > > > that I was off on a thought is enough to evoke the mantra; > > > > there's no intervening intention to think it. > > > > > > My own belief is that this is ALWAYS the case, but we may not be > > > aware of it, at least at first, due to our inexperience with > > > subtler states of the thinking process. > > > > That's *exactly* what I think. > > To elaborate a bit: I don't think one ever "receives" > a mantra (at least a bija mantra of the kind TM uses). > I think the bija mantras are something like resonant > frequencies of the "sound" of paying attention (or the > "process of observation"), which are always present on > subtle levels of the mind; and that one's attention is > called to one of these frequencies on the gross level > of speech by the teacher when one is initiated. > > To put one's attention on the mantra is thus, in effect, > to pay attention *to the paying of attention*. Or to > put it another way, one is observing the process of > observation itself; the process of observation becomes > the object of observation. > **END**
Very nicely put. And, once one becomes familiar with paying attention to attention (either vis-a-vis this type of meditation or, undoubtedly, many other methods), attention itself (consciousness itself) becomes dominant; or more exactly, becomes consciously dominant. It was dominant all the time, anyway, because without it nothing is. There is a Russian philosopher from the late 19th century (whose name I haven't been able to remember for some time now -- he wasn't translated into English until the early 60s and I didn't read him until sometime in the late 80s and then promptly lost track of the one book of his I had) who, speaking about painting, made the observation that "perception" itself gave pleasure but that the habits of ordinary life dulled the individual's appreciation of their own perception. Painting, he argued, -- Art -- brought the individual into contact with their own act of perception through the intermediary of the artist and the artist's abstraction of the ordinary world perceived. The painting existed in a different reality than the quotidian world of experience and (ideally, at least) forced the viewer into the experience of his own experiencing by the fact that it was different, even though it depicted ordinary objects. Some art can transport the viewer into a more refined awareness, definitely. At some point it seems almost anything and everything can. The Sanskrit term "nilimpa" means "painted one" -- a God. "Yadvare nikhila nilimpa parishad . . ." ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Join modern day disciples reach the disfigured and poor with hope and healing http://us.click.yahoo.com/lMct6A/Vp3LAA/i1hLAA/UlWolB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> To subscribe, send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Or go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ and click 'Join This Group!' Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
