--- In [email protected], "Marek Reavis" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: <snip> > Vaj, first of all, though Maharishi was snubbing > tradition in his willingness to leave the yamas > and niyamas of Patanjali out of his teachings and > techniques, it was that revolutionary aspect of his > teaching that brought even the idea of meditation > into the Western world and made it part of popular > Western culture.
It's also inherent in MMY's insight about the technique itself. If transcendence is indeed effortless, it's easy to see how, as MMY claims, the steps on Patanjali's eight-fold path became reversed, with transcendence held to be the effect of mastery of the yamas and niyamas rather than the cause. If that insight about effortlessness, and the understanding of how to "teach" it, is lost, then transcendence becomes *difficult*, and if it's difficult, practitioners need all the help they can get. This must be what mastery of the yamas and niyamas is for, goes the reasoning: to make it less difficult to transcend. Given his very different understanding, of course MMY would not have taught mastery of the yamas and niyamas as a prerequisite to samadhi, even to the most religiously devoted Hindu practitioners; it would have been counterproductive, in his view. He wasn't "snubbing" the yamas and niyamas, he was putting them in what he believed to be their proper context.
