Trick wrote:willie wrote:And what was the grand prize supposed to be for risking their Mental Health?
That is a very good and simple question that seem to always get vaguely answered.....com'on isn't it some DrStrange kind of powers you guys actually hope to gain
......Take a stroll in the woods or along a desolated beach(just beware of hurricanes) that's mind soothing.
The passion for meditation is not so different for the passion for TCMA. You have these old forms and practices, many of which have been debunked by modern forms of training. You have this kooky symbolism, which other people think is absurd, but you think is kind of cute for some reason. You have certain people elevated with rumours of mystical powers that are easily discounted.... Yet you love it, you don't know why, it isn't rational... and if you gave it up you'd loose something important in your life.
If you don't have a bug for mediation, kudos to you, there's little that anyone can say that would convert you... but some people have this itch, deep inside their soul, and the only way they can scratch that itch is by making the mind silent, truly silent... so silent that the discursive mind drops away, the identification of "self" drops away, and they only thing that's left is an experience of timeless vastness.
Now getting to experience these giant states of consciousness is not something that usually happens in a weekend, and maybe not even in a decade of practices. So just like in TCMA there's lots of low level students teaching something they don't really understand that well... and if their students hurts themselves, or stall in their practices, they don't know how to adjust the teaching to fix it. So in the end, just like in TCMA, the answer to nearly every question that comes up is "find a better teacher", because any help you can give from a public internet forum is limited.