Comment below: --- In [email protected], Vaj <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > On Nov 17, 2006, at 10:46 AM, sparaig wrote: > > > Neither simple nor complex. > > > > And you keep claiming that shamatha is the same as TM. Here's what > > an apparently > > famous Shamatha advocate says about shamatha. He, at least, has the > > excuse that he > > never learned TM: > <gracious snip> > > No that's NOT what I claim. I merely said TM is a *form* of Shamatha. > That's certainly not to imply that all forms of Shamatha are the same > as TM, they are not. > > There are literally hundreds of different styles of Shamatha. > **End**
Reading Sparaig's excerpt from the Shamatha teacher, it seemed to me to be, in essence, a verbose description of what Maharishi was able to succinctly capture in his teaching of an effortless meditation. But even Maharishi described his meditation, in the beginning days of his mission, as a form of mind control. That conceptual paradigm was/is a long-established one and, reading that description (of Shamatha) from the vantage point of a long-time TMer, it seems to be describing (albeit kind of complicatedly) correct meditation to me. The problem for the person being presented with that description of meditation would seem to be how to figure out, from all that wordage, that all you need to do is effortlessly think/use the object of meditation (whatever that would be in the Shamatha tradition) and whenever you were aware that you were no longer thinking/using the object of meditation, to quietly come back to it in the same, natural way that you think any other thought. Just effortless thinking. Effortless effort. It's a situation somewhat parallel to reading Nisargadatta. All his books are just transcriptions of questions and answers from his satsangs. His words and teachings are so clear to me (as a long-time meditator), but you read how the people posing the questions (oftentimes) just don't seem to understand what it is he's telling them to do. When I started practicing his instructions re self- inquiry it was like turning on a light -- so easy, so simple, so Self evident. But I wouldn't have gotten any of that (I don't believe) unless I had the experiential background that Maharishi and my meditation practice has provided.
