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Dr Sy Migdal says that his experiences in the Transcendental Meditation Technique made him aware that great authors like Emerson were just expressing their own experiences in their writings and not expounding some theoretical belief system.
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by Global Good News staff writer
12 June 2011
Students have long been inspired by great writers and philosophers. College Literature and Philosophy courses are pivotal in the lives of many young people, shaping their beliefs and actions throughout their adult life. Others may wonder what significance the time-honoured works have in their everyday experience.
Writers throughout the ages have described transcendental experiences, or deep inner experiences. In an interview, Dr Sy Migdal, retired professor of English from San Diego, CA, says, ‘You could look at what they wrote as theoretical—and that’s the way I looked at it, as theoretical—until I began to have the same experiences myself, or similar experiences.’
Says Dr Migdal, ‘You could look at it simply as another belief system. But when you begin to experience it yourself, it isn’t really a belief system in the sense that it’s something you inherited from someone else, or something that you attached onto to give your life some meaning; It’s a belief system in the sense that it grows out of some deep inner experience that you get—that I got—through Transcendental Meditation.’
He continues, ‘Once I began to experience those feelings of inner bliss and coherence, I could read someone like, for example Whitman or philosophers like Plato, or prose writers like Emerson, and . . . relate those experiences to the experiences [I was] having.' The Transcendental Meditation Technique ‘deepens your experience of Literature,’ says Dr Migdal. ‘It makes you understand what the writers and sages were talking about. It makes you understand it, and it makes you appreciate the coherence with which they expressed those feelings.’
‘What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us.’ —Ralph Waldo Emerson
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