On Jul 30, 2007, at 11:34 PM, authfriend wrote:
--- 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.
Insight? Oh puhleeze.
If transcendence is indeed effortless,
You must have missed the previous conversations on how "effortlessness" is defined in the Patanjali system. If there is support (Skt.: Alambana), there is effort.
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.
Yes and maybe if we read the Lord's Prayer backwards we'll find Jesus quicker.
Jaundiced-eyed Judy reports: the world is yellow.
If that insight about effortlessness, and the understanding of how to "teach" it, is lost,
But it's clearly evident that it never was lost. Reams of commentaries provide textual testimony that it was indeed never "lost". Oral traditions agrees.
However, having reviewed the comments and finding their conclusions experientially sound, it's clear Mahesh was either 'making it up as he went along' or simply distorting tradition all along. I bet the fact that he claimed he was restoring the purity of the tradition actually fooled you.
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.
If the prerequisites of samadhi are not met, even if you round a thousand years, you will never attain samadhi.
Given that we have no reliable scientific data on any TMer EVER showing signs of samadhi (ability to enter for desired length of time, increased pain threshold, high-amplitude coherence, etc.) Mahesh's distortion of tradition could be the cause. In fact, that's what some researchers are claiming.
