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I just heard someone explain the biggest misconception about Transcendental Meditation: that you're supposed to stop thinking. In TM you silently repeat a word called a mantra, your mind wanders and you come back to it.
Show Notes
I just heard someone explain the biggest misconception about Transcendental Meditation: that you're supposed to stop thinking. In TM you silently repeat a word called a mantra, your mind wanders and you come back to it.
Featuring: Thomas Keating, Simone Weil, Swami Vivekananda
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Chapters:
(00:00) Vivekananda on concentration
(00:07) The biggest Transcendental Meditation misconception
(00:26) My two-and-a-half-hour morning work block
(00:43) Thomas Keating and the nun's ten thousand thoughts
(01:08) Simone Weil on attention as prayer
(01:15) Coming back each time
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"The power of concentration is the only key to the treasure-house of knowledge."
Swami Vivekananda
I just heard someone explain the biggest misconception about Transcendental Meditation: that you're supposed to stop thinking.
In TM you silently repeat a word called a mantra. Your mind wanders. When you notice you've wandered off the mantra, you come back to it.
Teachers tell students the wandering is part of the meditation.
Each morning after I meditate, I block off about two and a half hours for the work that matters most.
Distractions still pull me away during those hours.
Each time I notice, I bring my attention back to the work. Each return is a rep. Slowly, I'm getting better at it.
Thomas Keating, a Trappist monk, taught Christians to treat each distraction as a chance to come back.
He helped develop Centering Prayer. Each time a thought pulls you away, you return to a single word you chose.
A nun once finished her first session and told him she was a failure at it. "In twenty minutes I've had ten thousand thoughts!"
Keating answered, "How lovely. Ten thousand opportunities to return to God."
The French philosopher Simone Weil wrote, "Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer."
Some mornings, between distractions, I sink so far into the work that it feels like a trance.
Expect to get distracted during focused work. Come back each time.
What could you finish this year if you kept coming back to it?