I’ve been getting some interesting email in response to the recent articles on TM and “the gods.” Some bring up some interesting objections that I’d like to respond to here.
· “The idea of vampire-like psychic forces feeding on humans seems, to say the least, a bit far-fetched.”
It’s only far-fetched if you believe two things: that humans are the end of the food chain and that all there is of reality is perceivable by the human senses.
Why would humans be the end of the food chain? Why would we assume the buck stops here?
Isn’t it somewhat arrogant to assume that something can’t exist just because our eyes can’t see it? That’s a little like the ostrich believing an approaching enemy has ceased to exist because when her head is stuck in the sand, the predator is invisible.
The human eye perceives only a small frequency range of the known electro-magnetic spectrum. We have no first-hand perception of anything that may exist in the ranges of infrared, x-ray, gamma ray, ultraviolet, or bands of energy beyond those that we aren’t even aware of. It’s ethnocentric to think life exists only within the range of visible light. That’s rather like saying you can’t believe life could exist on the trillions of other planets, that life is unique to Earth (just because you this is where you happen to live).
But back to the food-chain. The scriptures of every religion say, virtually or literally, that God/ the gods need humans for food. Every religion I’ve researched historically required blood sacrifice, including human sacrifice. Jehovah, in Leviticus, speaks of “the aroma of the sacrifice” being pleasing to God. I suggest that “aroma” is the suffering of the victim. While Jehovah did not require human sacrifice on a physical alter, he ordered the Jews to slay tens of thousands of men, women and children (plus all the people’s livestock) in bloody forrays, that included, at the high point, a second circumcision of the Jewish people. Spilled blood nourishes “the divine.”
The energy in blood is equated with the life force in Chinese medicine: the flow of the Chi is the flow of the blood. Blood sacrifice is required by the gods of every religion because spilling blood is releasing the Chi, the life energy, which they then can assimilate.
Soma is another form (other than blood) that the life force takes, and this, too, is courted by the gods. Maharishi explained Soma as the “ambrosia” or “nectar of the gods” generated in the body during meditation. According to Indian scriptures, it is also engendered through other forms of worship. The gods consume the sacrifice and the gods consume worship as well. Both transfer life energy from the physical dimension to entities dwelling in frequencies beyond the range of visible light.
The only way to call this “far-fetched” is to dismiss every scripture of every culture that’s ever been written as nonsense. You’d also have to trivialize all the evidence of possession and mental illness that exists, and all evidence of psychic phenomena. I realize some people do that, but to me it’s the ostrich again, afraid of looking at what’s going on around us and dealing with it.
· “TM works and you know it, or you wouldn’t have done it all those years. I think you’re just bitter.”
If it works, then why am I bitter? What would I have to be bitter about?
I don’t deny I felt benefits from TM in the beginning. It’s what kept me hanging on so many years. But in time I came to see that the initial pure consciousness TM gave me tastes of was being usurped by something else that was eating up my soul. I was losing “me.”
I had a healthy sense of personal self and recognized the subsuming of it as something negative, so I got out. Some of my dearest friends still see losing “the ego” as spiritual progress, and are tightly caught in the jaws of the invisible beast. There is little left of the people they used to be. They’ve been largely “assimilated.” I hope to help them see this someday and, in seeing, make a willful choice that cuts their link with the devic marauders and reclaims their lost personhood. An intentional rescinding of permission will free them. These friends are one big reason I do this writing.
· “I also quit TM and agree with most of what you write, but I never felt drained from meditation.”
That’s not surprising. How much you notice the siphoning depends largely on how much energy or life force you had to begin with. A farmer milking a cow can’t deplete it too badly, or it won’t provide milk. If you trim a plant down to the nubbins, it may not grow again. Likewise, “the gods” don’t take so much life force or Soma away that it is grossly noticeable in most cases. But the milking is real – it’s even discussed in the scriptures.
People who meditate many hours a day over a period of years (advanced meditators) are the ones most likely to notice negative changes in their lives. If they weren’t very strong to begin with, the life force depletion shows up over time as physical ailments and other maladies. I know one woman who used to be slightly eccentric when we were meditators together 20-plus years ago. As she continued to meditate, she became full-fledged psychotic. Now she spends her life in and out of mental hospitals. This is an example of how weaker people suffer most from the psychic predation.
People with strong, healthy egos are less likely to surrender their individuality to the gods, in spite of mantra-meditating for years. Such people are more or less “failures” in terms of Indianism standards: they don’t reach that “cosmic” state meditators yearn for, but neither do they transmogrify into zombies. Their strong sense of personal self protects them from being psychologically assimilated.
Assimilation, even more than energy siphoning, is the primary danger I perceive in mantra meditation and Eastern religion. It is also, I expect, the real purpose behind mantra meditation.
When a meditator relinquishes the authorship of action and ceases to identify with his thoughts and desires, he thinks he has reached oneness with the Infinite. In reality, he has abdicated his personhood and placed it on the “freebie shelf,” where outside entities are entitled to pick it up and work through it as their instrument. He now channels their will into this world, having given away personal rights to his body, heart and mind. This is called possession, in my book, and it accounts for the other-worldy charisma of “the enlightened.”
Bronte Baxter
Splinter in the Mind 