--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "sparaig" <sparaig@> wrote: > > > > My point is simply: you have no idea why people didn't get to > > enlightenment in 5-7 years. > > Absolutely true. But neither does Maharishi. But I'd > be willing to say, based on my experience and that of > hundreds of other seekers I've met and interacted with > over the years, that "stress" has nothing to do with it. > Conditioning, yes. Stress, no.
Actually, stress is the ONLY thing that prevents enlightenment. Stress is defined by Hans Selye as a "stereotypical response of the nervous system." In other words, rather than dealing with the situation, the nervous system punts and works on (generally) inappropriate instinct, aka "fight or flight." MMY's insight, that Hans Selye's term was a very good approximation of the sanskrit term "samskara," leads to misunderstands, but it IS probably the best single word in English to describe samskara. > > > For some reason. MMY probably DID expect people to get > > enlightened faster than they did. > > I agree. > > > This makes his time-line mistaken... > > Either that or it makes him guilty of expressing his > hopes -- founded on nothing -- not only as fact, but > as ad copy. > As I said, I was having signs of CC within weeks and months of learning TM. Fred Travis' most recent studies on meditation say that the EEG changes that TM evokes level out within a few months, which suggests that its just a matter of practice: alternating the gold dye with exposure to sunlight, in order to colorfast the cloth. That Westerners are ludicrously stressed and live ever-more-stressful lives may have escaped him at first. I mean, he was dealing with Ozzie and Harriet Nelson ( people like the Olsen Family) when he first arrived here, and they are hardly a typical American family 50 years, or even 20 years later. The Olsen daughter who learned TM when she was 10 still holds the world record for longest and most consistent episodes of samadhi during TM, at least as measured by episodes of breath suspension (periods of up to 72 seconds for about 60% of her meditation period, total). There's no reason to assume that he wasn't extrapolating from experience.
