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February 2008 Newsletter: Journey to
the absolute
I took a pragmatic decision to settle down and get on with the rest of my life in 1979 after many adventures including getting caught up in the Iranian revolution, touring in America, and teaching TM to over 200 people (insignificant compared with the thousands taught over decades by some of my contemporaries). However history remembers him, I and millions of others who discovered unknown depths inside ourselves through meditation owe a great personal debt to Maharishi’s intervention in our lives.
It was quite something to be in his presence. With his iridescent face and pure brown eyes Maharishi looked to me for all the world like a diminutive Father Christmas. He was tiny like Gandhi and always dressed very simply like him in a white silk wrap over a loincloth. He spoke cheerfully of the infinite power of creative intelligence which is the basis of everything in his philosophy and is at the core of our being. Most particularly it also underpins our human consciousness and thus our thinking processes. The TM technique is a way of accessing our silent core of thinking, and thereby directly experiencing this absolute basis of being. He gave us access to an experience of ourselves that we probably otherwise would never have had.
In my five years of dedicated involvement I did many hundreds of hours of meditation. Mostly it was very restful and occasionally it was profound. On two occasions I am convinced that I had pure and clear experience of my own infinite and absolute core. On the first of these I “became” a bodiless point of consciousness floating about 18 inches above a still and unbroken ocean surface which spread out to infinity in all directions. I felt I was witnessing an infinite expanse of something, and that I was of it rather than in it.
On the other occasion I was practicing a yogic breathing exercise (the “monkey breathing” I put into Building Self-Confidence for Dummies). Asking nobody’s advice or permission I decided that it would be interesting to do this for a solid hour before meditation (normally it was 5 minutes and 15 minutes max). I don’t think I ever got to the meditation; transcending normal waking state and going into orbit. I had a view of our part of the solar system like the final sequence in Kubrick’s 2001 Space Odyssey. My mind probably dredged up the image as the nearest memory to represent what I was experiencing: a most profound sense that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
It isn’t difficult to rationalise such experiences but that doesn’t seem to affect their impact. I was changed by these two events; they have helped as much as anything else in my life to make me who I am today. Although I am not religious in any conventional sense I have the same conviction as many people who are that I have experienced something close to the heart of creation. I am left with a profound sense that life isn’t broken and it doesn’t need fixing; that despite appearances, nothing and nobody is beyond redemption. Ultimately, that life is what we make it, and when it is over we’ll return somehow back into the infinite, silent field of pure potential from which our conscious awareness appeared. Nobody wins and nobody loses. Nothing changes.
Of course I still get caught up in the struggles of life, but I always return to this sense of infinity. It’s difficult to take yourself and anyone else too seriously for very long with this knowing. Maharishi never tired of reminding us: “life is bliss!” To echo The beatles, why not Let it Be?
Best wishes
Brinley & Kate
Building Self-Confidence for Dummies by Kate Burton
and Brinley Platts
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