--- In [email protected], TurquoiseB <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > --- In [email protected], Vaj <vajranatha@> wrote: > > > > On Jan 14, 2007, at 5:56 PM, TurquoiseB wrote: > > > > > It all depends on your definition for what meditation > > > is. If you define it as encompassing all the stages > > > of sitting and thinking, leading up to and including > > > samadhi, then TM is meditation. > > > > Even if they never "transcend"? > > Yup. There may be some benefit to just sitting > and relaxing. But also, I have met many people > who didn't think they *were* transcending until > they had a clear, several-minutes-long experience > of samadhi. With that clear experience under their > belts, they realized they'd been having brief > moments of samadhi all along, but had never > noticed them because they were looking for > something other than what they are. >
Recent research on transcending changed how the researchers were trying to detect it. Originally, they asked people to press a button when they noticed it. They found episodes of transcending associated with the button press from about 15 seconds to over a minute. They decided that asking people to "atch out for" transcending might be interfering with the process and instead ran a bell 3 times at random during a meditatio session, and then asked people to describe what was going on when they heard the bell, and compared it to the physiological measures. Using THIS strategy they isolated periods of transcending as brief as 2 or 3 seconds. MMY's description of transcending suggests that it occurs constantly, whether you are meditating or not, but is too brief and too "cloudy" for most people to ever notice. This latest research seems to support this idea.
