Anyone can meditate.
Including you.
It’s not a secret science
or a mystical esoteric process,
although you may have heard that it was.
And it doesn’t involve a lot of discipline
or a lot of discomfort.
All it takes
is a little commitment,
a little practice,
and a little development
to learn to use this fundamental tool
for self-expansion and personal growth.

Meditation is easier
than walking across a meadow,
driving your car through traffic,
or cutting a peanut butter sandwich in half.

All those things
and everything else that you do
require an incredibly complex degree
of coordination
between mind and body.

Millions of neural, muscular, and cellular
connections
must be made and maintained.
And the degree of energy control
and precise channeling of your life-force
into action
is almost impossible to imagine.

Yet,
you’ve learned to do
everything that you do
almost automatically.

To meditate,
you don’t have to learn to do anything.
You simply have to be.
In fact,
the whole idea
is to stop doing whatever you are already doing,
consciously or unconsciously,
and focus completely
on the subject of your meditation
in a relaxed, flowing, noncontrolling way.
Until you actually become it.
And it actually becomes you.

That’s all complete meditation is.
It’s the most natural thing in the world.
And you’re no stranger to it.
You’ve already been meditating for years.
Although you may not have known
that was what you were doing.

For instance,
when you watch television
or hem a pair of slacks
or lose yourself
in a spontaneous race between two raindrops
down a windowpane,
you are meditating.
In each case,
you are totally immersed in a process
that takes you out of yourself
and your normal stream of consciousness
and beyond your ordinary sense of time.

The problem is,
what you meditate on
can profoundly influence, program, and direct
your energy, your life cycle,
and all the space around you.

So when you focus on a tv show
that’s excessively violent, morbid, or vapid,
you end up
limp and fatigued.
When you focus on your breath,
a leaf, a stone, the jewel in your ring,
a sound or a positive thought,
you end the experience
more perceptive and more alert.
And when you focus on your own energy
and state of being,
you re-enter
completely refreshed, revitalized, and recharged.

In the beginning,
when you were a baby,
you spent all your time meditating
on your growth and development
and expansiveness.
That’s why time
was so much more timeless then.
You were in a state of harmony
with the universe around you.
And when you needed something,
you knew just how to materialize it.

You began to lose your meditational harmony
as you began
to develop your sense of self,
which separated and differentiated
you
from everything else.

And you lost even more of it
as you developed a rational analytical ego,
which kept trying to find
logical ways to shield and protect you
from your inner sense
of alienation and dissociation
from everything else that is.
And which hooked you
into books, television, newspapers,
teachers, and other authorities
as the only way to gain
knowledge and understanding of your self
and your universe.

All of this came about
in a perfectly normal and natural way.
And it’s all
a necessary part of the process
of growing up as a human
being.
But growing never stops.
And just because you’ve grown
to wherever you are right now,
it doesn’t mean you’re done.

There’s more.
A whole lot more.
Just as trees grow continuously
and change with each passing season,
all cellular beings
grow continuously too.
Including you.
And for you and for the person
you are in the process of becoming
on a physical level,
life ends when growth ends.

The point is,
now that you’ve grown
as separated from your universe as you are,
the next phase of growing
needs to include
reintegrating and reharmonizing yourself
with all that is
all around you.

Opening channels to that process,
gaining intuitive knowledge
and inner understanding,
and creating expansiveness
out of anxiety and chaos
through complete meditation
are the results you can expect from this book.

Taking it a step further:
Meditation is the word
that describes your state of consciousness
when you have become
so totally immersed
in an object, an event, or a thought
that your level of awareness shifts
and you lose your sense of separateness
from that object, event or thought.

You become
so completely involved and centered
in what and where you are
that your mental chatter fades away,
your body tension and emotional anxieties melt,
sensory distractions in your environment disappear,
and time flows at an altered rate of speed.

A cozy fireplace,
all aglow while snowflakes dance
and the wind whistles outside,
is a meditation.
As you watch the everchanging
hypnotic images within the flames,
you respond to the soothing, healing warmth.

Separateness disappears
as you enter into the experience of the fire.
You become intimately in tune with the fire.
And finally, you become one with the fire.
And it becomes one with you.

The chatter in your mind
and the tension in your body
are lulled away.
As you enter into
a state of luminous clarity and well-being
and your consciousness expands
to fill more reality
than your ordinary experience.
Making love,
weeding your garden,
playing a musical instrument,
wandering along a deserted tropical beach,
and looking up unexpectedly on a starry night
and being overcome by the vastness and gloriousness,
are all meditations
if you fully enter into them.

Each can lift you
from yesterday’s problems
and tomorrow’s goal-directedness.

Each can undercut
your habitual image of yourself.

Each can change
your ordinary frame of reference
by centering you in the moment
that you are in.
And offer simple gates and pathways
into the all-expansive moment of now,
where you encounter
lower stress and higher awareness,
enlightenment, clarity and peace.

Whenever one of these simple gates or
pathways
almost accidentally
leads you into complete meditation,
the experience is so powerful and positive
that everyone usually wants more of it.
And through the years,
in response to the wanting,
a wide variety of meditation techniques
have been created
to capture at will
these rare spontaneous moments of bliss
and build them into
volitional patterns for everyday life.

There are meditations for active people.
Meditations for quiet people.
Meditations to enrich your body and your health.
Meditations to calm your emotions and stress.
Meditations to increase your mental power.
Meditations to develop your latent psychic heritage,
explore your dreams, and cross into past and future lives.
Meditations to bring you money and affluence.
Meditations to surround you with love, success,
serenity, and whatever else you desire.

You’ll find these techniques
written as explorations
in this book,
so that you can read them
and try them from memory.
Or tape them
to play for yourself.
Or take turns
reading them and experiencing them
with a friend
or a small meditative group of friends.

Some of the meditative explorations
will work for you all of the time
and become standbys on a daily basis.
Most of them
will work for you some of the time
depending upon your degree of responsiveness
and the flexibility of your
personal belief systems.
But none of them
will work for you
unless you agree not to work too hard at them.
You see,
you can’t work at meditation.
You just open up to the idea of it.
And allow any one of the techniques to carry you
into it.
Meditation
really isn’t done
by doing anything.
It’s done by being.
Especially by being
open to newness and change.

So if you try and try and try
and get mad at yourself
for doing it wrong or not getting it,
nothing will happen.
But if you can drift and flow into it
with an interested, expectant detachment
like a witness or an outside observer
instead of a student or a seeker,
you will quickly be overcome by it
and soon become very good at it.

To enter into complete meditation,
all you need to do is
set aside enough time to consider and try
each exploration that you respond to,
keep an open and receptive mind,
and begin to see how it feels
to believe that you can be.
Without having to do a single thing about it.

Other than that,
just expect the unexpected.
Complete meditation
will take you on a voyage of discovery
into many different moods,
uncharted attitudes and beliefs,
and unexplored layers
of consciousness and awareness.

As you begin to more fully experience
who you are,
where you are,
how you are feeling,
when you are tense and blocked,
and what you are asking for out of life,
you will develop more and more control.
Over your health.
Over your wants.
Over your creativity and self-expression.
And over your actual physical environment.
By practicing meditation
and being
completely who you are,
you will become more than you are now.
You will be
able to cross the next evolutionary bridge
and begin to develop the full potential
of the person you are
in the process of becoming.

It is the most exciting journey there is.
And this book will make it easier.
By helping you discover the inner avenues
that can take you
all the way you choose to go.
From wherever you are coming from
To here. And now.