TM

TM procedure:

1. Sit erect

2. Close your eyes

3. Wait for about 30 secs

4. Start mantra

Mantra translates to mind (man) instrument (tra). A tool to traverse the mental realm.

Starting mantra once is enough. Whatever happens in the next 20 minutes is not important. You have completed the meditation successfully. 

The subjective experience of meditation will change every time. Don't worry about it. 

Take it as it comes. Here goes nothing attitude. 

The sign of success during meditation is effortlessness. If meditation becomes effortfull, focus on the body. See if there is any stress in the body. 'Feel the body' technique says be aware of the part of the body where there is stress. Don't try to control it or change it. Just be with it. And whenever appropriate, innocently come back to mantra.

If you feel sleepy during meditation, the guidance is to sleep rather than continue with meditation. The wisdom is to listen to the body.

Cool down period - rest after meditation is important for integration. It's like dust settling down after you remove dirt from bottom of a fish tank. You need to give it time.

There is a relation between mind and body. During TM, you go into both local brain hemisphere alpha coherence and whole frontal coherence. This is seen uniquely with TM method. When mind settles, coheres, body settles. Sometimes you become aware after the moment there was no mantra, no thought. Sometimes you don't breathe during those deep moments. And then you gasp for breath, this is normal during TM. As part of stress release, body activates and then thoughts arise. The only agency you need to exercise during meditation is when you find you are off the mantra, innocently come back to it.

We all incur a lot of sleep debt. We push through with caffeine. TM retreat helps remove some of this debt. During a retreat, we do something called rounding to enhance the effect of the practice. It includes this sequence - yoga, pranayama, TM and rest. You do many rounds every day in a retreat. You do longer duration of TM and rest.

Recommendation is :

1. Do TM twice a day - right after you wake up and in the middle of your day

2. Naturally reduce caffeine - this usually happens over time for TM practitioners. Caffeine is a simulant you shouldn't need to go through life. 

3. Get sufficient sleep and don't let sleep debt build up. Try to not set alarm. Take naps if needed. 

Yogastha kuru karmani

This translates to 'established in yoga, perform action'.

TM is a spiritual practice to get a taste of Enlightenment. Enlightenment is a one way door. Once you attain it, you are established in Yoga and nothing external can shake your unity with non-dual Being. Your actions are naturally authentic and spontaneous.

There are no absolute answers to moral questions - what is good, bad etc. An enlightened being performs actions authentically and spontaneously. But most people are not enlightened. TM gives us a tool to transcend the best we can twice a day and engage with life after that in the most integrated way possible.

Morality without an organized religious belief

How can you get to morality without organized religion?

According to Non-duality - everything is really one thing.

The one thing appears as “matter” and “mind/consciousness” - these are concepts. Nevertheless, they are experiential to us and makes us come up with doctrinal extremes of materialism and idealism. Some choose to reject these extremes.

The ground of being can’t be named or captured in a concept. Best to leave it unsaid.

In this situation, you are that ground experiencing itself from a point of view. So is everyone else.

So, in a way, every thing is okay. Good and evil exist. They are what these egos do and experience.

When you glimpse the truth of non-duality, three qualities naturally unfold. First, life is seen as play — a dance where you participate sincerely but without the crushing weight of seriousness. Yet play on its own can become shallow, so out of the same vision arises compassionate love — the recognition that all forms, all beings, are yourself in disguise, and thus to be treated with tenderness. And alongside play and love comes harmony, what the Gita calls dharma: the intuition to strike the note that fits the music, to move in rhythm with the whole rather than in discord. True action, then, is a weaving of these three: playful, compassionate, and harmonious — light as a dance, warm as love, and tuned to the song of the cosmos.

Therefore, the answer is you don’t get top-down morality without organized religion. But what you do get is authentic, kind, inspiring life.

Don't look for ontology in science

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🌊 Alan Watts’ View

Alan Watts repeatedly warned against confusing science with ontology:

Science is descriptive, not ultimate.

It’s like a map: wonderfully useful, precise, and practical — but not the territory itself.

Symbols ≠ Reality.

Numbers, equations, and models are abstractions. They’re tools the mind uses to handle reality, but they are not reality.

💬 Watts:

> “The whole point of science is to describe what’s going on. It doesn’t explain why it goes on. It never gets to the ground of being — because the ground is not a concept, but the happening itself.”

So for Watts, science is a form of play, part of the lila (the divine game). It gives us marvelous patterns and technology, but it can’t tell us what existence is.

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🌌 Bernardo Kastrup’s View (Analytic Idealism)

Kastrup comes from a more technical, philosophical angle:

Science is epistemic, not ontological.

It tells us how phenomena behave, not what they are.

The mistake of materialism is treating the models of science (fields, particles, space-time) as if they are the furniture of reality. But they are just representations in consciousness.

For Kastrup, the ontological ground is consciousness. Science then becomes a way consciousness organizes and studies its own patterns, but not a window into “things-in-themselves.”

💬 Kastrup:

> “Science doesn’t tell us what reality is. It only describes the regularities of appearances, which unfold in consciousness. To ask science for ontology is to mistake a description for the thing described.”

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🧩 Where They Converge

Watts says: science is a marvelous dance of symbols, not the ground of being.

Kastrup says: science describes appearances in consciousness, but ontology is consciousness itself.

Both would say: don’t look for ultimate reality in science.

Use it as a tool — but remember, the ground of being isn’t in equations. It’s in this — the lived experience of awareness itself.