2.3.1 What is the tool for the transformation of awareness and how does one use it?

Just as each human body shares a common physical anatomy, so, too, do we share a common non-material anatomy. This common structure we share extends beyond our psychological make-up. This cannot be understood by reading about the subject, or by being told, it can only be understood by direct experience.

The purpose of any structured meditative system is to direct consciousness along the path towards understanding through experience.

Although there is a great deal of interest growing in the West about using, understanding and realising the benefits of Eastern meditative systems, they are not generally appreciated in terms of their full cultured potential. In part, this is because they are implicate technology products stemming from cultures which have developed expertise in articulating certain key aspects of reality far beyond the present level of understanding in our Western cultures. This is expressed most clearly in the uses of the terms chi and prana in the Hindu, Buddhist and Taoist implicate technologies.

Anyone who has even a cursory knowledge of Eastern meditative systems will have come across these terms generally translated as ‘breath’ or ‘life force’. The aspects of reality to which these words direct one’s awareness will gradually become clear through practice of the meditation taught in this chapter. To help in understanding, you should be aware that prana is also known as intuition.

In Tibetan Buddhist implicate technology, intuition can also be understood as ‘quick knowing’. The consistent daily practice of the meditation taught here, with a full commitment to understanding, will lead to the awakening of your intuitive faculties. As your intuition develops, so will your understanding of these teachings unfold.

To begin from the viewpoint of ordinary consciousness: we experience the material world through the five senses – to our senses, the material world is solid and real. For centuries, we in the West have relied on our sciences to aid us in understanding physical reality. In pursuing an understanding of physical reality, twentieth-century quantum physics sought to establish the existence of fundamental particles of matter. After all, everyone knows that matter is solid and so must be composed of particles uniting to form trees, bodies, hills, etc.

Here our science discovered a characteristic of material particles which is at odds with the everyday experience of our senses. Quantum physics has established that matter occurs both as particles and as waves – in other words, matter is both solid (as our five senses tell us) and not solid (which is not at all apparent to common sense).

On the one hand, we experience physical reality as actual and solid; on the other hand, our most advanced science tells us that matter is somehow both solid (particles) and a form of energy (waves). Our science has established that physical reality is not as it appears to our senses. How, then, are we to experience the true nature of reality if not through the five senses?

Each one of us possesses the latent capacity to understand the true nature of reality through the experience of a form of thought which we know in the West as intuition. This is also known in the West as the sixth sense. The function of meditation is to develop this sixth sense, a truer and more reliable experience of reality than that afforded by the other five.

To understand how meditation works to achieve this requires both continuous practice in meditation and a framework in which to place the experience as it unfolds through time.