P: To begin preparing for meditation use the following set of guidelines. The are greatly oversimplified--but will serve as a "starter kit" for altering, or "jump starting" the present state of your very excellent, but Spiritually limited mind.

Q: So this is going to teach me the great secret for developing this Spiritual Consciousness?

P: It will tell you what needs to be done. It is no secret. Examine this figure [left] to place your capacity for meditative competence on that hierarchy.  Notice that you begin at the bottom left, and the developing discipline moves up the diagonal line to the right.

The Path begins with bringing your normal state of attention under control by eliminating any intellectual or emotional distraction.
The repetitive speaking of denials, affirmations and chants have no Mystical properties in and of themselves.  They are simply mind focusing techniques.  They prepare the alter of your mind.
As you surrender and release all external distractions, your body begins to relax.  Your heart and blood pressure become calm and steady
When you enter into a complete state of tranquility your concentration becomes focused in your inner being.  All external distractions recede until they no longer make any impression on your senses
Now the focus of your concentration has moved from external conditions to internal conditions.  The chants, denials and affirmations are silent.  You are a person suspended in a state of peaceful but total inner concentration, calmly listening, looking, and feeling for you know not what.  This peaceful inner focus and state of mind initially last only for seconds, but as you develop it can last for minutes and hours.  Adepts can manage it for days on end.  Deepak Chopra provides an exquisite summary of this idea in closing a speech, The Great Mystery,  when he says:

"So I'd like to end with a little quote from Franz Kafka, whom everyone remembers as more or less a writer whose literary reputation rests on his portrayal of acute suffering. But he said something which is a brilliant affirmation of the path to enlightenment. He said, 'You do not need to do anything, just remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, just wait. Do not even wait, just be quiet, still and solitary, and the universe will expose itself to you. It has no choice. It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.'"  [Speech,  Seattle Center, May 19, 1991;  this original source removed from the Internet, see secondary source,  Chopra, Seven Laws of Success]

Then you progress through several levels culminating in the ultimate experience of UNITY, BLISS, SAMADHI as described at the top of the figure.  We cannot discuss these advanced states during our dialogues.  Sufficient for you to pass beyond external distractions and become focused on your inner essence.

P: The greater your meditative competence, the higher on the scale you will find yourself. There are no shortcuts to the discipline of meditation. Using this little flier of very elementary instructions, you must develop The Art of Meditation that works for you. That consists of the following elements that I recommend now as "starter yeast," but there are many routes to find The Path. A technique such as this should accompany the 12 Step process for healing (As in Alcoholics Anonymous.) Spiritual Consciousness can be developed by a recipe that incorporates the following sequence:

(1) Giving Thanks,
(2) Feeling or Becoming Love ,
(3) Relaxing,
(4) Focusing the Mind and
(5) Combining all of the above to empower a mental surrender and an intense and focused "listening" as though for a still small voice. I have diagrammed the steps in the progression it for you.  [Above figure]...

"There is always one thing to remember: our "lower self" [the ego intellect as] the instrument of the real Self [Spiritual Self], which consists of the mental body or mind, its emotional body of feelings, desires and passions, and its physical body which is more often the victim than the originator of  wrong ways of thought and living, for it is not generally the body which is the real tempter of man, but the thought-pictures evoked by the passions; these three bodies are, all of them, creatures of habit.  If we persevere, they will become as willingly habituated to good habits as they are now accustomed to evil ones.  So, as the Bhagavad Gita says, that "which at first is as venom, but in the end is as nectar" comes to the man who can bravely persevere."  [Codd, 1958, pp 22-23, brackets added]

P: These ingredients when put together are called meditation. We do not have time to focus on meditation at length because I have other objectives for the brief time we shall spend together. This "First Lesson" provides only a summary overview of guidelines. But your reward if you take further steps to achieve meditative accomplishments, is to lead you to the complete experience of Samadhi, or bliss and rapture through UNITY with the ONE.

All of our mental errors occur when our focus is exclusively external, on only those things the sensual mind can see and work with. Meditation will help heal that kind of error. Have at it. In our next Dialogue we being to examine three traps of the mind that interfere with the unfoldment of human C/consciousness. Remember dedication to these exercises may present the most frustrating, unpromising, difficult, and discouraging "Dark Night of the Soul" [Hall, 1998] experiences during the first 1000 hours. (I'm sure that your mind will quickly "figure out" that at about 30 minutes a day, your facing a 5.479 year struggle.)

Q: I'm still wondering why I should submit to all this, my life was so peaceful before I came here.

First Practice at Meditation

P: Part of the challenge in studying a holistic system like the Mystical Paradigm, is the mental "effort" required to create an intentionally imposed peace and tranquility described as "no thought--no feeling." First bring your questions or problems to the alter of your mind. Then prepare to leave them there. Take a moment to become mentally silent. Make your body comfortable. Relax. Breath slowly--deeply for a few minutes. Say to yourself, and speak directly to your heart, words to the effect that: "I am Peace. I am relaxing myself into perfect Peace. I breath deeply and easily. All stress is flowing downward through me, into the chair, into my feet, into the floor, away--I am left with Peace, my heart is Peace, becoming ever more peaceful and relaxed...filling with Love...I breath deep and easy"

Then after you feel relaxed, frame each of the parables or ideas in these Dialogues (or your questions or problems) as you understand them. Reflect on the conceptual parts and units of your thoughts that are becoming integrated with the whole that you are. Once relaxed, direct forgiveness and Love to all those who fill your life. Then "turn off" your mind. Stop thinking and adopt an attitude of expectant listening where all interpretive thought or analysis is stilled, where all thought is still. Adopt the attitude of intent listening, peacefully, but as though you heard a familiar sound when you did not expect it, and you listen to hear it again. Have you suddenly seen a friend's face in a distant crowd? Adopt the attitude as though you are calmly, peacefully looking intently to see the face again, looking and listening such that there are no thoughts, nothing to disturb the wakeful but relaxed focus on "nothing," just looking and listening for...what?

After each section of these Dialogue, take a few moments to try this exercise. Try it with the Dialogue material or with practical problems and concerns of the day. It only takes a few minutes. Before long you will notice a difference in what you remember and how you think. Options will arise that you had not imagined before. The elements begin to link together. Be patient, peaceful and persistent. Then your concentration time will lengthen. Development of this disciplined attitude of expectant, focused, concentrated and peaceful attention on "no thought" in the Presence of Love is one major secret of meditation. There are many techniques for developing Mystical discipline. By means of this devotion, you can reach the Path to enlightenment empowered by your inner well springs of Cosmic truth. Nothing of the world in which you presently invest yourself is important--except that your mind makes it so. You will be amazed, then, to experience the peace that enters and defines your life, and the variety of interpretations of reality that come to mind with practice, and the Wisdom that affects your life.

P: Because you are growing up and are prepared to fulfill your adult responsibilities as a positive force in our world. I am telling you that were you able to see current events and interpret them for what they are, far from experiencing peace, you would have consternation. Reality Always Wins!! The future of the United States is in peril.

But with our nation's standard education, however otherwise excellent and acclaimed, it is mostly devoid of Spiritual depth and empowerment, especially when attention is paid to religious dogma. The values that rise from these undeveloped models and theories are steadily ruining our nation's ability to even be honest with itself. As many as possible of us need to see things and call them for what they are, not only the actions of Congress and the Administration, but the behavior of corporate megaliths in the marketplace.

Soon I will introduce you to the power mongers who are exploiting this deficiency. See how peaceful you are then compared to now. Spiritual Consciousness is the only capacity that will adequately identify and resolve our problems. There are many reasonable intellectual interpretations of our problems. There are many intellectually founded social theories and political solutions, and many intellectually grounded economic strategies intended to resolve the problems of our world.

But they are all doomed to failure because their proponents and opponents are all subject to the three traps of the mind that I will begin to share with you in our next dialogue. Only Spiritually grounded Wisdom can empower our intelligentsia to create Holistic theories, models, and strategies that transcend their intellectual limits and really resolve our problems and stabilize the solutions. 

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