The very experience of life itself exerts a hypnotic influence upon you, and that is why you are confused. You are simply out of control. The meditation exercise that follows, should you elect to practice it, will give you back the conscious control you need in order to be a poised, calm, healthy, happy, self-motivated person. A new energy must emanate from the center of your being, and this life force, directed by an infallible reason, will project a new order upon your entire life, including your family and your business affairs.
The key to this new order is objectivity. It is essential that you discover how to become objective, in order that you may be free from the prejudice and confusion inherent in your thinking, so that you can perceive clearly, with patient, unmoving, immovable certainty, things and people as they really are. Here, in this objective state, is where self-control and the mastery of life begin for you.
The unique method of meditation that assists in leading you to this enlightened state of consciousness is compatible, however, only with a very special attitude—a spirit of humble inquiry coupled with a burning desire to realize the truth. Without this pure longing to know, that highly desirable blessed state will be denied to you.
If you learn to meditate with the proper attitude, you may spontaneously experience a falling away of nagging personal problems, release from habits and compulsions, freedom from neurotic fears, and a renewal of good health, but it is a perversion of the meditation to attempt to use it for achieving such ends or any other goals you may set for your-self. Meditation is not a way of getting what you want; it is a way of knowing what is right.
There are two possible approaches to meditation—the right way and the wrong way—although there seem to be many more, since the wrong way takes many forms, and these are by far the most popular. Just why anyone in his right mind would reach for something alien and far-out is an interesting question. In fact, an expose is an interesting place to begin a discussion of meditation; the contrast will make true meditation easier to grasp.
There are really two factors to be considered here, and the first has to do with the “powers that be” wanting to remain the “powers that be.”
Over the centuries the true technique of meditation was either lost or suppressed, and even though it has been revealed again and again to some of our greatest mystics, the church itself has made no concerted effort to nurture and teach this fundamental approach to wisdom to its members.
Governments and ruling classes generally find little ad-vantage in a populace that is self-controlled, healthy and truly happy. Who would follow mere mortals, having once been led by an indwelling Spirit? Who would need such a pro-fusion of problem solvers if there were no problems to be solved? A majority of political leaders, doctors, lawyers, ministers, generals and locksmiths, as well as others I’m sure you could name, would be dead set against the idea of not being needed. People whose egos aspire to glory and great-ness need to be needed. The entire idea of promoting needs and answering to those needs becomes a source of life to the leader; it makes him feel like God. But victims must be sacrificed to satisfy this growing need to be needed; people must be debilitated, crippled, reduced to the status of whimpering animals for the glory of the leader.
Consider the principle: if your ego is dependent on being needed, then it must surely follow that your beloved has to be weakened in order to provide the security that you require. Once it begins, this entire system of answering to needs is self-perpetuating and self-promoting. While he is pretending to promote the good of the people, the power and glory of the leader is built at the expense of the people.
Whenever a relationship with external authority replaces the proper bond between a human being and the indwelling self, then all answers and all actions, humanly speaking, are always wrong, even if they are technically, technologically or morally correct. So long as man remains separated from his true identity, corruption will take its toll, causing the mass mind to cry out for a champion.
Recognizing this need, the aspiring leader sees that simply by keeping people from the truth he can become that champion of what appears to be the public good. And so the leech who profits and revels in the glory of leading is going to do his damnedest to keep light from coming into the world, whereas the true leader leads all men back to themselves.
Man is a religious creature; the very nature of his separation from reality—his guilt, in other words—demands religion; and here again we have leaders rising to the occasion of man’s need for righteousness. The fact is, man cannot exist without some form of relationship either to the in-dwelling Spirit or else to the external environment. And true life is the proper relationship; it is not a system of beliefs or a series of actions, however correct. No belief, no thought, no deed has any value unless it is motivated by being in a true relationship with the indwelling Spirit.
This realization leads us to the second part of our discussion, which has to do with the proclivity of the egocentric human mind to shy away from seeing the truth about itself. It is the nature of pride to demand to seem right even when it is not. Out of such a need, on a widespread basis, come the mental giants, the geniuses of an age—and they seem to come out of the bosom of God to recognize the god of their creation and to say what God wants to hear, but it is our egocentric need that creates these giants who appear to serve us.
It is a curious yet discernible fact that the hypnotized person always escapes into his hypnotic state to avoid seeing the embarrassing truth that concerns it. The same is true of the hypnotic influence that life has on us. No matter how low a man sinks as a result of life’s hypnotic pressures, he always identifies with his failing in order to avoid facing it. If a man is a pervert, he will excuse perversion; indeed, he will even seek to evangelize it. Drug addicts, alcoholics, murderers, thieves will all rationalize their conditions in order to make everything seem quite normal to themselves. Such forms of behavior are the evidence of debilitating and degrading influences; but in order to save face, the victim always escapes into the condition itself. He becomes more of a pervert to escape from the knowledge that there is something wrong with perversion—and the process repeats itself endlessly.
There are, in reality, only two factors that cause all of your problems: one is the weakness that allows hypnotic pressures to get under your skin, and the other is the compulsion to rationalize everything that happens to you. This second error arises from the first weakness and leads back to it, leaving you exposed to yet another round of pressure, so that in the end you will not be living your own life at all, but rather a miserable excuse for a life, which has been imposed upon you from outside. You will not be your real self, the self that you were created to be. You will suffer guilt, anxiety and fear, but you will not understand why, because you have always escaped from awareness into the problem itself, and then you have excused everything you ever did. Now, if what I am saying is true—and it is—you need only reverse this process: stop responding and stop excusing your responses. Let us now consider how you can stop this process of dying.
Have you ever made an excuse? Of course you have. But just what is an excuse? Surely it must be some kind of shield to protect your ego against being made aware, for through the mechanism of the excuse you can avoid seeing that you have failed. You can remain unaware that somehow you have been hypnotized into working against your own best interests. At each point along the way you tend to see the truth, but should your ego desire to avoid that guilt experience, it will employ the excuse and related devices to preserve the ego face. This very need of yours brings into existence certain types of people who cater to your ego need for concocting answers at various levels of pain and suffering. The mere presence of an excuse in your mind is the certain evidence that something is wrong with you.
Dishonest politicians, doctors, lawyers, preachers, lovers and friends have a lot going for them. In the first place, the more they comfort, soothe and justify you, the more deeply involved in error you are likely to become, and the more you will be in need of their gratifying services; furthermore, there is little chance that you will see what they are up to, simply because the way in which they help you reduces your awareness, so that by losing sight of your failings you also lose sight of what is wrong with them and their methods. Once they fasten their vampire teeth into you, their entire existence is related to needing you, so they will not let you go. Drugs, marijuana, alcohol and cigarettes afford the ego some relief by reducing the soul’s awareness of its guilt. The by-product of this process is a kind of false innocence that gives rise to a false peace and even a false salvation, and these all make for a false type of happiness. The kind of mind that permits the ego to aim at preserving its own emotional security will always prefer the false meditation to the true one; therefore, we can see that the question we posed earlier, having to do with why anyone would choose the false meditation, relates to the proclivity of the ego itself.
To the ambitious, self-justifying ego, false meditation is the ultimate high. It is a means of seeking peace apart from God—a way of following the selfish course to its ultimate conclusion without regret, remorse, conflict or guilt. But peace apart from God is not peace at all; rather, it is a state of no awareness, which comes from avoiding the knowledge of what is wrong with us. False meditation is simply a spiritual analgesic; it merely anesthetizes the pain instead of curing what is wrong. Stilling disturbing thoughts is a far cry from having a still soul that stands apart from thought. Peace apart from God is really a movement away from reality and toward illusion and death. If you can block or sever enough nerves that carry the message of pain from the cancer that is killing you, you will have a kind of peace, but you will not preserve your life.
Perhaps an example might drive this point home. One might compare a love of mathematics with the passion for the true life, for it is easy to see the value of objectivity in mathematics. The mathematician is glad to see where he went wrong because only then will he be able to solve his problem. You cannot possibly teach mathematics to the student who wants to excuse his failures and never admit his errors. He will fight your admonition and even denounce you with vehement and elaborate arguments pro-viding that it is wrong to see his wrong. Such people are so well-skilled at this game they play all of their lives that you might very well be persuaded to their point of view unless you are well-grounded.
It would be wise to follow the road map outlined in this book; your aim should be diametrically opposed to glory-bound meditators and their power-happy gurus. To the degree that you shrink from all image-building processes, to that degree will you discover the prize of objectivity. THE AWARENESS THAT COMES FROM OBJECTIVITY IS THE KEY TO EVERYTHING THAT YOU SHOULD BE SEEKING. Objectivity is true understanding and innocence, and through it comes love, patience, self-control, true identity, education, development of sound judgment, success, prosperity, happiness, health—and even eternal life.
Since objective awareness is a progressive experience, you must be content to let it unfold in gradual stages. If, in an instant, you could be as objective as it is ultimately possible to become, you would vaporize like a snowflake in a furnace. It would be impossible for you to cope with what you saw. Be grateful, then, for the opportunity to thread your way slowly out of the environment of your world of imagination. It will not always be easy to hold to your objective state. The spirit that inhabits the imaginative life now has a claim on you, and it will endeavor to hold you. Each time you wrench free from its grasping, however, you will gain a little more perspective and a little more freedom from compulsive thoughts, words and deeds.
Until now, what you have been doing all of your life is simply running away from the fact that you have had no choice. When you begin to practice meditation properly, you will, for the first time, taste true freedom: you will be aware that you have been provided with an alternative course of action. Your journey will be in two directions at once— inward and onward. To the degree that you come closer to reality, to that same degree you will see what to aim toward in the tangible world. This onward movement will always reflect externally your inward journey toward the Light.
The only real peace you will ever find has to do with awareness itself being still, separate from the dream-like stream of illusion and fantasy. False tranquility arising from improper techniques of meditation, on the other hand, in-volves blocking or stopping thoughts and finding a euphoric quiet by dulling the mind and the mental processes. When you are in this state, there is no error to observe, nothing embarrassing to realize, because the soul will have become oblivious to its failing.
One of the most effective ways to this kind of oblivious peace, joy and happiness is the use of the mantra. The mantra is a meaningless word or phrase, which may be shouted, spoken or merely repeated silently in the mind in such a way that it blocks awareness. The use of the mantra is a master technology, which, in brief, reduces the screaming, writhing hell inside your head to a meaningless, harm-less sound. It must be meaningless to be meaningful, since it is designed to dull the thinking process. In the mind of the meditator who uses this technique, any unintelligible non-sense appears to be the Word coming directly from the mouth of God. At first glance it seems harmless to go along with this perfectly distracting sound; it hardly seems to be a movement away from God. Instead, in the mind of the meditator it becomes like a movement from the stillness of the Logos, and it seems glorious and creative. In fact, we are witnessing a counterfeit motion and rest, which duplicates, in pride’s way, the purposeful motion that emanates from the stillness of God. The vibrating mantra outshouts and stills the Word of God. In this silence the sound then appears to come from the only remaining source of relative stillness, and you move out of yourself as if moving out of the still-ness of God.
There can be no awareness of guilt here, only a false peace and the dubious joy of being the only aware-ness left in the universe with a creative word pulsating out to fill the cosmos with your own glory. There is indeed a surrogate peace that follows such activity, and there is never a trace of shame. The mental blocks of conscience vanish, and in their place you will discover the perfect “freedom” for “God” to do whatever pleases him.
When meditation is used as a means of gaining such ego assurance, it is the most dangerous of all human practices; it is worse than any drug because it seems so holy and innocent. The practitioners of such meditation chatter like a gaggle of geese about peace, brotherly love, oneness and joy, but these empty noises cannot fool you if you are sincere in your search for reality; you are equipped with an aware-ness to detect deception. It will be just as difficult for you to practice fantasy as it is for the self-deceived to practice reality. When a fool speaks of discovering himself and God, what he is really saying is that he has discovered that he is God, and he will tempt you to follow, somehow sensing that once you are caught in this trap you too will be obligated out of guilt to go on being “God” just as he does, and then he will have support and justification for continuing his own way of being. When such people speak of living forever, it is because they have finally found the way to recognize themselves as deities. If you believe that you are God, it follows that you cannot die. People who get high on drugs often similarly identify themselves as ultimate beings, and they believe themselves to be so invulnerable that they attempt to perform dangerous feats to prove that they cannot be harmed.
Almost any daily newspaper reports the results of these tragic delusions. When they speak of being one with nature and the universe, they have merely projected their puny egos into the enormous mass of creation and, neatly slipping away from the humiliating awareness of their actual nothingness, they aspire to the greatness of creation itself. Like God, they are identified with the infinite vast-ness of creation, but all that actually has happened is that they have left behind the awareness that they are nothing. Just at this point, at the farthest remove from reality, the ego discovers yet another reality—the father of all deception. Here there is either the shock of horror or a mad whoop of delight as the identification with the demon god is completed, for he is the only god with whom the ego can identify without repentance.
Another reason why escape meditations are so extremely dangerous is that they are so easily confused with a true meditation, just as “churchianity” has often been confused with Christianity. The true Christian mystic has ever been persecuted for heresy by that that stood unholy in the place of the Holy—the false Christian church in the place of the true Christ. The human perception of reality is often a very delicate thing, so that when “churchianity” is confused with Christianity, the true seeker may rebel against religion entirely and become afraid of the very thing that could save him. I do not want you to become confused about the true key to Christianity, which is found only through the true meditation.
It is the nature of obstinate pride to avoid the experience of repentance and to perpetuate a sense of its own eternal innocence. It is the nature of the evil one to lead his unconscious quarry away from the seeming hell of true self-knowing.
The truth, as it applies to us, is very simple: if you want to find reality, you need only give up struggling; the writhing within your soul is symbolic of running away. Objectivity is quite a natural thing, but once you have be-come involved in the process that leads to unawareness, you become bogged down through your efforts to extricate yourself. This preoccupation with the losing battle—the struggle itself—becomes another subtle form of distraction. You need special guidance, precise knowledge to lead you from the prison of your mind up to the threshold of the Light. You need the vital clues contained in this book. You need to meditate.
The conscious can only begin to exert an effective influence over the unconscious when it ceases to be a part of the thinking-feeling process. When the real you becomes separate from the unconscious processes, the perceiving you becomes free and clear of distortion and the cause of your problems is seen to be as it really is. Understanding, then, exerts an influence upon the thinking process that is ex-pressed as meaningful direction and self-control. The calm-ness of detachment becomes patience; the harmony with reason, true peace and joy, and the foundation of all of these is the certainty of the outcome, which is faith and confidence.
Let us consider just one facet—awareness—and see how it becomes patience. Look carefully at patience and see how it is also love. Patience is self-control and, therefore, happiness. Since patience is calm, unresponsive and disobedient to evil pressure, it is also peace and joy. Patience is waiting without anxiety; therefore, patience is timeless. The list of joys is endless.
Can you see how simple it all is? Only find that magical viewpoint of objective awareness, and you have everything.
Pride is only willing to be made aware in the subjective sense, that is to say it becomes involved with glorifying illusion stuff. You see, there are two kinds of awareness, and each of them arises from a different attitude; and these two attitudes are diametrically opposed to each other, moving as they do in opposite directions toward different realms of self-knowing. The movement of the proud mind away from the awareness of guilt adds even more guilt to what was there originally, because of its movement away from the truth; whereas the movement toward awareness of guilt adds innocence to innocence by means of the sorrow that we experience on seeing the truth about ourselves. The quality of life that each soul receives in its searching has to do with the type of hunger it has. Do you reach for the glorious illusion or for the humble reality? To reach for illusion awareness is to reject reality awareness. To reach for reality is to be able to reject illusion. For this reason, it is impossible to instruct the wrongly-inclined soul properly.
If your motive is wrong, you are bound to be caught up and carried away by the very technique that is designed to bring you back to yourself. You will be “hung up” on the technique, in other words. You are afforded protection only through true intent, and it is an infallible safeguard. Your true desire carries you forward in a credible sequence of events so that you confront problems with perfect scrutiny, and so long as you move by the Light, strange experiences cease to be terrifying to you. Beyond them you will find new joys and fearless adventuring.
Do not set up a pattern of expectations when you meditate. Expect only the unexpected. There is really no way to predict in advance what the experience of any individual might be. Perhaps an old illness that you thought was cured will reappear.
You may be confronted by something from your past; you might even encounter presences or see spirits. But don’t worry; your true desire will see you safely through. There comes with this perfect attitude an ac-companying rule of thumb that the sincere seeker can readily comprehend. Whenever you encounter anything at all that you don’t understand, regardless of what it might be, just wonder and watch from the neutral zone just beyond thought until you do understand or until the problem ceases to exist for you. Certainly you may be concerned, but don’t worry, and, above all, don’t decide what to do. Just watch quietly from a meditative, neutral, observing, non-judgmental state of awareness. Make no evaluation of the experience that is before you. Just observe it and wonder; that’s all. Do nothing more or less, for nothing else is needed here. There is something magical that operates through the soul of one who wants to do good and yet suffers from the stark realization that he is incapable of determining exactly what that good is. The true desire within the soul is alone qualified to experience such a realization. Such a soul already knows the basic truth that will carry him through all threats: SOMETHING, not nothing, must cause a soul to realize, and the seeking soul recognizes this fact. There is a mystical abandon, an indefinable comfort in being shown the negative truth that you can do nothing, of yourself. Do you see the importance of such a revelation and why this basic knowing will carry you through otherwise dangerous experiences? There is nothing more terrifying to the enemy than a soul who truly knows that he knows nothing at all and who, when tested, is never tempted to decide what to do.
If your desire is not absolutely pure, however, you will not have this kind of confidence and protection, and when various forces make their approach—and they will, even in meditation—you will most certainly be panicked into the activity of decision, and you will be confounded. It will be your destiny to go from bad to worse until you are willing to realize that folly that is born of pride. Don’t you see that if your aim is imperfect you will not be able even to see, let alone rely on what is greater than you are? That imperfect desire itself will block out the light of revelation so that the proud you will be forced to grapple alone with complicated things that will engulf, involve, torment and destroy you at the end of your lonely battle. If you are able to see this truth, you already have the quality of healthy abandon that allows you to know that you need not worry about not knowing.
This is an extremely important point and one that bears restatement. To realize that you do not know means that something has made you realize it and that is the same as knowing the Truth greater than you are when you know by a Truth greater than you are, because you love or yearn to know the Truth that is greater than you.
In this state of consciousness one does not have a valid reason to fear anything at all. Fear will belong to the enemy and to the realm of the blind and faithless. There is nothing so terrifying to evil forces as a soul who does not judge, one who simply discerns what is before it. Simply defined, the stages of giving up judgment and struggling amount to humility in the making, and this is the state of consciousness that allows the Light to pass through. It is the Light, not the will, that acts on the problem before you, and at that point you either know what to do or the temptation simply melts before you and ceases to pose a problem or even a question.
For the faithless soul there is nothing greater than it-self to rely on, and so the moment it encounters something mysterious beyond its comprehension, it is challenged to worry and to decide the issue for itself. Consequently, the problem invades such a soul, and as the problems become greater, so does the temptation to solve them. Simply stated, the soul being drawn away from the Light finds it more difficult to discern and easier to judge. Indeed, the tendency toward confounding judgment becomes a terrifying compulsion, and so the soul is damned if it judges and struggles and just as damned if it doesn’t. For even if such a soul does give up judgment, it will do so only from guilt and fear and out of the stark terror of what another forced judgment will bring. Such resignation of the ego at this point is not the result of love for God; it is only capitulation to the tormenting hell that lurks in the hypnotic, dehumanizing pressure.
Fear not, beloved of God, for the chances are that you will not experience such complicated dilemmas as these; but if you should, realize why! Then out of the light of that realization will come the purging sadness that allows you to go on—to continue to observe and to wonder, fearless in the face of those things you do not yet understand.
It should be clear by now that you must learn to reverse your present subjective state of consciousness, and that means doing just the opposite of what the escape meditator does in his devotion. The technique discussed in the following chapters will show you how to become separate from dream stuff, how to pull out of that tendency to fantasize, to excuse and worry your way out of every problem and to come up into the light of reality.
Everyone except the true seeker can practice the false meditation. It is quite easy to do, and one does achieve the desired state of peace almost instantly. The reason for such rapid results, however, is that nothing new is required of you. You simply do in a more sophisticated way what you have always done before without having sufficient knowledge to carry it to its ultimate limit. Fantasy and illusion are attractive to the soul’s need to escape reality, and as long as the soul’s inclination is to escape, it is impossible to teach it the true meditation. So the technology you are about to learn is compatible only with your proper attitude.
The central question is this: do you want to preserve and glorify an image of yourself, or do you want to find God? If your answer is the former, then you will encourage the involvement of your soul with the process of imagination. The path to reality will destroy the fantastic imagination that is the seat of the mad ego, and it will usher in an age of reason and peace on earth to men of good will.
The meditation technique described in the following pages is a more advanced version of the basic one that was presented in my book, How Your Mind Will Make You Well. I strongly recommend that beginners learn the original exercise first and then come gradually and with grace to this one. The first exercise is more elaborate in that it not only teaches you how to be objective, but also how to get in touch with your own feelings—and this is a most important factor. The meditation contained in this text proceeds from the assumption that you already know and have been practicing the basic exercise, and it is designed to build on that initial foundation. It will, however, do no harm for you to try the exercise in this book. If it works for you, go right ahead and practice it; if it doesn’t, then tape the exercise from the first book in your own voice and play it back to yourself. Then, after a while, proceed with this advanced lesson.
You may have some difficulty relating to your own voice on tape. If you do, I have prepared both versions of the meditation on records and in tape form. I believe that you will learn to meditate more efficiently by relying on my recordings, since the delivery and timing on the records are the result of twenty years of teaching and practice.
Elsewhere in this book you will find descriptions of various phenomena that you will encounter along the way. They have not been presented at an early point in the book out of a concern that your anticipation might precipitate them artificially. I strongly urge that you read this book in the order that the chapters are presented and not skip about. One of the main problems that we all share is our suggestibility. If we were not suggestible, we would have no problems of fear, confusion or guilt. All of us are externalized to some degree, so until you learn the principles of turning yourself on from the inside, the fewer details the better. Learn to meditate before reading beyond the next chapter. After all, yearning to know is a part of the meditative process, and your attempt to answer questions for yourself tends to stifle that process, particularly in the beginning.
Your emotions stimulate an energy flow similar to the electric current in a telephone line, thereby causing the brain to respond to and to dramatize messages from the outside. But when you learn to get in touch with your feelings, in-coming calls and demands are censored, and your body will respond only to what you know is right in your heart. At this point there is no longer conflict or nervousness; there is no more struggle against terrible desires and compulsions because they simply cease to exist for you. In other words, your body will begin to respond only to you; you will see, hear and feel with a difference; you will no longer be shocked, disturbed and upset by what you experience.
Those reactions will leave you, and as they do, you will be-come progressively more in control of yourself as well as of the circumstances about you. The most notable factor of this change is that it focuses upon the instant of emotional response. Once you have learned the principle of self-motivation, it is yours permanently. Once your body learns to respond only to you, an inner conditioning process is set up among your understanding mind, your feelings, and your body, and you will begin to answer less to external pressure and suggestion and more to what you perceive with a clear mind. As your emotions diminish it will become easier for you to perceive what is wise, and it will also become easier for your body to respond graciously from that seeing.
A diminishing response to people is the evidence of response and obedience to your inner self. On the other hand, an increasing response to people is the evidence of a failing. Your body does not obey you; it learns to obey the pressure, and it is there that the problems begin to grow up inside you. That Power that separates the soul and makes it still and quiet also gives it knowing. It is the same cogent force that will act upon the body internally to make it obey. Since inner response is obedience to what is good and disobedience to what is wrong, it follows that guilt and tension will simply disappear from your life. Learn the principle of patience, and you will be free.
Let me emphasize that the meditation set forth in this book is no plaything, so be consistent with your practice of meditation from the outset. It is very unwise to stop meditating once you begin, for this is not an entertainment to be toyed with in moments of leisure or boredom.
Do not begin meditating until you are prepared to continue it, for it may be impossible to start meditating again after you have once stopped. Furthermore, a number of unpleasant complications may arise, and you would be well-advised to avoid such experiences by making a sincere commitment in the very beginning.
It is best to learn meditation sitting upright in a straight-backed chair, preferably one without arms. You can meditate, however, lying on your back with your hands at your sides. You should start your practice in the chair in order to avoid falling asleep, but once you have mastered the technique, the prone position may be a more desirable and comfortable one for meditating over a longer period of time. Remember, you are not trying to lose consciousness; you are seeking a greater level of awareness.
Sleep is the enemy of meditation, and sleep is certainly not meditation. A fool who goes to sleep awakens just as he was—a fool—but the fool who “awakens” out of meditation is a wiser man. If you should find yourself nodding off to sleep, go ahead and get all the sleep you appear to need. When you are certain that you have had enough, again try meditating in earnest. Sleep is a common means of escaping from reality, and it is especially compelling during at-tempts to meditate, so sleep until it becomes obvious that your natural needs have been met. Then, if you find your-self dozing, you can be sure that the reason is that you are not yet ready to face yourself. Often the full realization of this lack of commitment is sufficient to change your next meditative experience.
Another fact you should take into consideration as a beginning meditator is that there are two basic types of physical dispositions: the one may be highly motivated all of his life and the other undermotivated. Perhaps the reason for the lethargic, undermotivated state is a fear of motivation itself. If this is the case, a defensive shell surrounds that individual. Usually the undermotivated person is more fortunate than the achiever, for he is not burned out and run down like his overstimulated, enervated, debilitated counterpart. The effect of meditation on this so-called “lazy” type is usually quite profound. Suddenly he or she becomes a bee-hive of activity, full of zest for life and prepared for action. The overmotivated, on the other hand, will go into reverse gear, as it were, experiencing a period of convalescence and recovery. The achiever must be prepared to experience long periods of lethargy and listlessness. His overworked mind and run-down body need time to rest and become re-stored. The kinds of diseases that often make sudden and dramatic appearances in the lives of such types are always preceded by unrecognized but devastating stresses. Meditation takes such a person out of high gear, so to speak, and lets him recover. If you happen to be one of these energetic, productive persons, you simply can’t work as hard as is your custom. What of it? Perhaps you can’t drive a shiny, big new car and live in a mansion. Does it really matter? Can’t you drive a small, dull, rusty, old car, live in a hut and pull your belt tight for a year or so? Isn’t that better than a wooden box or a living death in a wheelchair or charity hospital ward? Who will pay the exaggerated bills for your high standard of living when you are sick and dis-abled? How can you work when you are sick? Surely, prevention is better than cure.
Sooner or later you will have to stop, and better sooner than late. You need a great deal of extra time to ponder and examine your errors. You need time to become acquainted with your family again. In fact, your family will very likely be grateful to see you slow down; if not, the chances are it is you who have conditioned them to expect such a great deal from you. If that is the case, it will be good for you to understand their compulsion to help you and to worry about you. In any event, remain calm; it will probably be good for them to feel a little insecurity about not being able to push you in order to get their own way.
Enough details. You are as ready as this book can make you. So find yourself a hard chair or a nice soft bed, de-pending on your state of proficiency, and begin to meditate.
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