Transcendental Meditation (and Mantra Meditation)
People sometimes ask me my opinion of Transcendental Meditation. This is what I have to say about it:
People sometimes ask me my opinion of Transcendental Meditation. This is what I have to say about it:
If you want to understand “enlightenment” not just as a concept, but actually learn how it feels to disidentify with yourself as a finite human being, and to instead experience yourself as an expressive action of the entire universe, then this may be the perfect book for you. Nisargadatta’s teachings are relentlessly confrontational and cosmically mind-blowing. If you are ready for them, the words in this book can take every belief (and perceptual) system that you have, and blow them out of the water, stretching you wider than you could have conceived possible. Some times in reading it, I have felt that this book is IT, the end point of the whole journey.
With the “Who am I?” part of the mantra, I dissolved whatever felt solid in me. I noticed all the definitions of self that my mind kept coming up with – some of them superior to the people around me, some inferior to the people around me, many neither. As my defining mind did its thing, I felt the heaviness tired constrainedness of those definitions – “I’m this kind of person, and that fact means that”. As they came up and I got caught by them, I kept asking “Who am I?” – i.e, “who is the I that believes this?”, “is this definition of self who *I* am?”.