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Arpana posted an update 5 years, 4 months ago
That’s what TM is doing to many people in the West — and that is the appeal of transcendental meditation, because Maharishi Mahesh Yogi goes on saying, ”It will make you more efficient in your work, it will make you more successful. If you are a salesman, you will become a more successful salesman. It will give you efficiency.” And American people are almost crazy about efficiency. You can lose everything just for being efficient. Hence, the appeal.
Yes, it can help you. It can relax you a little — it is a tranquillizer. By constantly repeating a mantra, by continuously repeating a certain word, it changes your brain chemistry. It is a tranquillizer! a sound-tranquillizer. It helps you to lessen your stress so tomorrow in the marketplace you can be more efficient, more capable to compete — but it doesn’t change you. it is not a transformation.
Just the other day, a small sannyasin asked me — whenever he comes he asks beautiful questions — very small, maybe seven years old. When he took sannyas… he must be courageous — he took sannyas before his mother decided to take sannyas; he took sannyas before his father decided to take sannyas. Has an individuality of his own. He took sannyas and I asked him. ”Have you something to say?”He said, ”Yes, what group should I do?”
And the other night he came and I asked, ”Now, what do you have to say?”
He said, ”What do you think about Maharishi?” A seven year-old child!
I told him, ”Maharishi is a good man, a very nice guy — but doing very ordinary work.”Osho.
A Sudden Clash of Thunder
Chapter #7
Chapter title: Only the Gold
I used a TM mantra in the year leading up to finding out about Bhagwan. Certainly didn’t tranquilise me. On the contrary. I went though hell that year, but I had so much else going on would have been a difficult year anyway I guess.
Pretty convinced helped preare the ground for Osho though
Are the mantra’s he gave traditional mantras?
They hand out seed mantras, related to the chakras.
I went through a period of listening to seed, or ’beej’ mantras , pretty much everyday.
I went through a long phase, after coming across Osho mentioning Ohm mani padme hum in a book repeatedly, of using that mantra to short circuit being in my head; so as soon as I became aware I was in my head, getting analytical I would chant the mantra. Worked as well, and that went on until the practise dropped by itself, and I just never get in my head like that these days , and haven’t for years.
I also chanted that one for a while.
More recently I used to listen to a Vedic bija mantra, and the vibration it produced was very powerfull and also had a soothing and nourishing effect
When I was last in India, I realised that part of the special vibrations there is not just from dead enlightened people, but also from the large amount of chanting of sanskrit mantras which is going on.
I should have said the large amount of playing mantras which is going on, as well as chanting.
As they are broadcasting them everywhere.
The one I got (in early ’68) was really very simple, and it wasn’t so much a question of deliberately repeating it time after time, as people might imagine, but of allowing it to be, changing its ’sound shape’, as it were. Intimately connected to the breath, which became extremely slow. Ultimately it became effortless and very pleasant, a wonderful antidote to stress. Worth its weight in gold during the three periods I used it..
I’ve come across Osho dismissing mantra chanting and saying he’s not infavour of using them and then in other passages actually come across him actively giving people a mantra.
Definitely have their place if used sensitively and as I said, which seems to have disappeared suit some people better than others in my view. (I have no idea where this comes from but I have wondered if the more into music you are the more use they are, but I can’t justify the remark.)
’’68. That was the the the year I discovered dope. Meditation not till late ’’74, although I had experiences that gave me more that psychotherapy a year or so earlier.
That was my initial (and only) ’dope etc. year’ (well, 3 months in the Stares in fact). Being committed to TM made me cautious about getting too much into drugs though, thankfully. But even TM didn’t prevent a mojor depression, lasting well over 4 years, so I soon learned its limitations, reinforced when Osho and his active meditations arrived like a gift from God.