The following is an excerpt from my book, “Chapter 5 TM Teacher Training”:
I never had any heavy unstressing in meditation or outside meditation. My experiences in meditation continued to be pretty much the same on my Teacher Training Course (TTC) as they were at the Science of Creative Intelligence (SCI) course.
I would take deep dives in meditation, perhaps reaching or getting close to Pure Consciousness and then my mental activity and breathing activity would increase.
There was a great contrast between the stillness at the door of Pure Consciousness and the mental activity of becoming aware of breathing, but in actuality I was in a very deep meditative state for the entire time.
I and other TM meditators were unsure if we ever really reached Pure Awareness because of the extreme vagueness in deep meditation and because the mind is necessarily not trying to keep track of experiences while practicing TM.
Sometimes I would sense a great power in the silence in deep meditation, but as I became aware of that great silence, I would be kicked out. Being kicked out of that deep silence was seemingly due to becoming aware that I was just about to totally transcend and also probably due to the natural urge to increase breathing.
Wanting to be aware of clear transcendence is seemingly a Catch 22 situation because wanting to watch what is going on is mental activity and transcendence requires a complete letting go.
*1973*: In my first year of TM, I don’t recall being concerned with whether or not I was experiencing Pure Consciousness which is also called transcendence, Pure Awareness, or samadhi. My concern would increase at TTC and in subsequent years after dwelling on the significance of transcendence.
*2017*: Concern for transcendence is not only an impediment to transcendence, but would also lead to being displeased with meditation in general. An analogous example: if you were taught that lots of burping was a sign of excellent health, you would be disappointed if you didn’t burp.
Thus, although the TM technique could be a healthy thing to do, the intellectual knowledge of transcendence could be counter-productive. For this and for other reasons, I now think that discussion of transcendence is intellectual blather in which very smart people fool themselves.
I think TM would be even more relaxing and beneficial if meditators didn’t have any intellectual understanding or expectation of Pure Awareness. Aside#13
There were 6 people in my small group. We memorized together and practiced lecturing together. We also developed a close relationship by discussing our experiences in meditation.
Some common worries of TTC participants were that they didn’t know for sure if they reached Pure Awareness in meditation, and if they did have very deep experiences, they didn’t know whether to describe their experience as being clear transcendence or cloudy transcendence. Our small group bonded over commiserating for each other’s lack of clear transcendence and for each other’s human frailties.
My Enlightenment Delusion 