7.3 ‘For one hundred days I have practised meditation with full commitment, yet I don’t feel enlightened – why not?’

There are many reasons why this may be your experience. None of them are lasting or very important. The key activity is to continue committed daily practice of the meditation.

If you have genuinely meditated, for a minimum of fifteen minutes daily, for one hundred consecutive days, you will undoubtedly have experienced considerable benefit. You will feel more aware of your strengths and weaknesses, more in touch with the centre of your life and more able to deal with the daily pressures and problems of your life. Your life is enriched but still you do not feel enlightened.

One hundred days is only a guideline, nothing more. A healthy person, fully committed, can attain the first stage of enlightenment in well under one hundred days; a sick person may require longer to develop the whole organism’s natural capacity for enlightenment. What counts above all is the intensity of effort and the degree of seriousness with which you apply yourself to the meditation and the teachings.

It may be that, although you have enriched your life, you have given up any hope of enlightenment for yourself. You have contented yourself with the knowledge that enlightenment can be attained by ordinary, intelligent people. However, for some reason not at all clear to you, your karma seems to be that you will not attain what is accessible to others more fortunate than yourself.

This is a natural feeling and a very good sign. Maintain or even increase your efforts and put all thoughts of enlightenment out of your mind. Focus your thoughts on the meditation and its effects on your life.

The Implicate Technology path to enlightenment entails a gentle, gradual and wholly natural progression along the path of understanding through experience. There is no sudden burst of enlightenment with this method. Simply, one day soon, you will look back and realise that you have been psychologically enlightened for a week or two.

7.5 ‘I am unconvinced that this book is anything more than words; how do I know if it is genuine or not?’

The answer to this question will be developed by use of a simple analogy. A child comes up to you and holds out a bag of sweets. The child asks you a simple question: how do you like the taste of the sweets?

The child, in this analogy, is this Implicate Technology teaching of the clear setting face to face with reality. The sweets offered are the fruits of meditation. The real question is: are these fruits genuine and attainable by you?

You could look at the wrapping on the sweets to see if the flavour is similar to something you have tried before. Equally, you could compare this book for similarities with any other books you may have read on meditation. In both cases, the response is intellectual only and fails to deal with the issue: how do you like the taste of the sweets?

You might be suspicious that the child is somehow trying to trick you, for a joke perhaps, and that the sweets are very bitter. You might be suspicious that this book is a hoax, and that the Implicate Technology Centre is trying to ensnare you in some elaborate trick. In each case you might be right- life can be full of nasty surprises. But how are you going to know for sure, and what might you miss if the offer is genuine? You could ask the child if the sweets taste nice, just as you could find someone who has practised this or other meditation techniques and ask such a person about his or her own experience. How would that help you decide if you like the taste of the sweets?

You could take a principled stance and protest that sweets are bad for the teeth. You could stand on whatever principles you judge are relevant and say that meditation is not the sort of thing you believe in or approve of. You are only being asked to taste a sweet; you are only being asked, as a minimum commitment over a limited number of days, to sit down, look at the bridge of your nose and count your breathing. What are you afraid of?

You could react with a greater or lesser degree of emotional or intellectual aversion to either simple offer. If you are honest, such a response should make you question yourself. Why such a reaction to a very simple offer, with no strings attached?

There is, of course, only one way to find out if you like the taste of the sweets. There is only one way to find out if the fruits of meditation are genuine and attainable by you. Try it for yourself and observe what happens.

7.6.1 ‘How am I to recognise and deal with my own failure to face up to reality?’

Begin with an evaluation of your life as it is now. Lay aside all thoughts of whom you do, or do not, hold to be responsible for your current situation. In your quest for enlightenment, it will not help you, now or at any other time, to apportion blame for your conditions to yourself or to others.

As you proceed with this self-evaluation, there is one preliminary activity which it is essential to undertake if you are to be successful.

Learn to lay aside the bluff you have been running, the pretence you maintain to fool yourself and others that you understand and are in control of your life. Unless you conduct this evaluation honestly, you will fail and continue to incur the miserable consequences of negative karma.

The first and easier stage of this process of self-evaluation is to identify those areas of your personality in which you are aware that you refuse to face reality. The test to establish which are these areas in your personality is simple. Your usual response when an issue arises in such an area of your life is some variation on: ‘I don’t want to deal with this’.

Perhaps you find the aspect of life you don’t want to deal with frightening or unpleasant. This may well be a genuine and valid reaction; nonetheless, unless you face up to the reality of your life, you will continue to incur the karmically imposed penalty of recurring misery. To proceed along the path to enlightenment, you must find the strength, the determination and the resolve to deal effectively with all that occurs in your life.

The way to harness your innate determination, to gather together your energies with a firm resolve, is to be found by including the insights resulting from your self-evaluation into your practice of meditation. During your daily meditation, whenever your thoughts shift from counting the breaths, focus your thoughts on the aspect of your life that you would prefer not to have to deal with. With practice of this simple discipline, in time you will find that a new perspective on the problem emerges: you will see your difficulties in a wider context, where they will become understood as less important to you.

8.2 As you travel on this long inward journey to a complete realization of the inherent unity of all that exists, how are you to relate to others in your life?

The area of personal relationships is fraught with difficulty. It is the primary set of conditions through which karma tests the extent of your detachment from your own needs and desires. Pursuit of this secular spiritual path of Implicate Technology does not absolve you of responsibility for the general and specific welfare of others.

How this responsibility is interpreted is a matter of great cultural and personal significance. The spiritual life is passionately demanding, all-absorbing and all-fulfilling; yet your achievements along the path will have only limited value if they serve to benefit yourself alone. One of the central issues you will have to face, on this secular path, is how to adapt your awakening spiritual perception, through sustaining the practice of meditation, to the needs and demands others will make on your life.

The great and ancient Eastern civilizations have developed solutions to this problem appropriate to the needs and forms of expression of their cultures. They have understood the necessity for complete absorption in the inner process of spiritual development, and have articulated culturally relevant, that is to say generally acceptable, ways of aiding this process. In general, the solutions of the Eastern civilizations have involved an act of renunciation of the typical everyday concerns of home, family and earning a living.

This act of renunciation in order to follow a spiritual path is supported by an ancient Eastern tradition of supplying food daily to monks begging in the streets. The ordinary person, according to the values of the Eastern cultures, earns merit by assisting the beggar following a spiritual path, by providing such people with daily food. In this simple way the general culture acts to support those dedicated to the spiritual path. This act of renouncing family and friends, as well as material comforts, in pursuit of enlightenment is understood in the East as a positive act and not, as it seems to our Western scale of values, as a flight from responsibility. The Eastern paths to enlightenment usually involve single-minded dedication to the spiritual life alone. A spiritually dedicated person is understood, in a generally accepted sense, as contributing significantly to the quality of life in the Eastern cultures.

In our late-twentieth-century materialistic Western cultures, the situation faced by a person who aspires to the spiritual life is virtually the opposite of that found in the Eastern traditions. There are no generally acceptable cultural roles available for such people. In fact, in our Western societies, there is no widespread understanding of the spiritual path, either from a religious or a secular point of view.

In the face of this general and deep-rooted ignorance of the spiritual truths of life, the life of one who seeks to understand and experience the spiritual nature of reality can be beset with difficulties. The risk of incomprehension from friends, colleagues and loved ones is high. We in the West need to develop an entirely different approach from that worked out over millennia in the East to the issue of how to live a fulfilling and spiritually satisfying life.

The key to the Eastern approach is renunciation and separation: forsake home, family, friends and material comforts and mark yourself out by clothes and way of living as committed to a spiritual path. The key to this Western, secular Implicate Technology teaching is embracing and non-separation: absorb yourself in the needs of home, family, friends and wider social concerns and, in the day-to-day pressures of your life, learn to follow a spiritual path by living your ordinary life. The remainder of this chapter provides guidelines on how to mingle with the world and yet live in harmony with the inherent implicate laws governing our lives.

8.4 What are the Implicate Technology guidelines for using the abilities which will arise in you through the practice of meditation?

You will find yourself developing new abilities as you advance in your daily practice of meditation, particularly as you progress beyond the first stage of enlightenment. The follow-up work from the Implicate Technology Centre, The advanced guide to enlightenment, will discuss these abilities in a context which helps you to recognise the form and purpose of such experiences. The purpose of this section is to provide you with guidelines which will prepare you to use your abilities as they develop.

Throughout this book, you have been taught that the context within which you understand your experience of life is of prime importance. You will have given yourself totally to this Implicate Technology teaching of the clear setting face to face with reality if, throughout your life, you Live and Act. The context of this secular teaching encourages you to develop towards the final stage of enlightenment, the attainment of the unconditioned state, through the gradual realisation of your role in the culture you find yourself in.

In contrast with most Eastern paths to enlightenment, this Western secular path teaches you to absorb yourself in your immediate environment, both in the narrow personal and the wider cultural sense. The skills learnt from Implicate Technology disciplines direct you towards the final stage of enlightenment, through the understanding of the forces shaping your environment, and through integrating yourself with these forces. To achieve this, it is important to have a wide-ranging understanding of the stage of development at which our late-twentieth-century Western cultures have arrived.

We live in a culture which has been shaped by two thousand years of the Judeo-Christian code of ethics. That is to say, the standard by which it is culturally acceptable to us to judge behaviour is a code of values based on the Bible. Not everyone agrees with or adopts this standard of ethical behaviour, but the Bible has had an undoubted and marked influence on the development of Western ethical values.

Cultures go through phases of growth, maturity and decay, just like anything else. Occasionally it happens that cultures experience a qualitative upwards step, a quantum leap in development. Just as individuals can take unexpected leaps in their level of consciousness on the path to the final enlightenment, so too can whole cultures take evolutionary leaps.

In the late twentieth century, we in the West are living during a time of great cultural change. This is a period drained of the stability rooted in a firm belief in the Judeo-Christian code of ethics. At the same time, it is a period of immense potential – we are poised to take a leap from an ethically-based, to a spiritually-based, culture.

In the vanguard of this change will be those who have been enriched, in their own lives, by the natural progression towards the final stage of enlightenment. The first, or psychological, stage of enlightenment is accessible to any ordinary intelligent person through a hundred days of committed daily practice of meditation. As the number of people who understand the process of attaining enlightenment, and who become committed to their own progress along the path grows, they will come together, spontaneously, to create change for the good of all, according to the inherent implicate laws of reality.

For a person experiencing the path to enlightenment in our complex, stressful, ethically-based and spiritually-underdeveloped Western culture, the natural and instinctive goal is to seek out a role which allows the expression of one’s inherent healing abilities. Your latent abilities will awaken, as you progress in your meditation. Expect nothing, have no preconceptions and be open to accepting your experience. Be clear: you are free to use the abilities developed through the practice of meditation for either selfish or unselfish ends; but you are not free to dictate the karmic consequences of your thoughts or actions.

To choose the path of unselfishness is to continue developing towards the final stage of enlightenment. To use the fruits of meditation for selfish, self-serving ends is to deviate from the path and simultaneously to incur karmic consequences designed to alert you to the error of your way. As you choose, so your life will unfold for you to experience. Nothing in your life, whether you are on the path or not, is a product of meaningless chance.

Committed daily practice of meditation will awaken your inherent ability to heal others and to enhance and enrich their lives. The form which this takes is a function of the activity of karma, which develops the component parts of the process of reality so that, individually and collectively, the component consciousnesses move through time towards an understanding of their unified nature. The underlying form of all meditation-enhanced healing is an inherent impulse to assist others to move towards enlightenment.

As your healing skills unfold, you will be spontaneously drawn to those who will both benefit from your skills and assist you to progress along the path. This Implicate Technology teaching of reaching enlightenment through embracing the events of everyday life results in mutual enhancement through a realisation of mutual dependency. When you benefit or harm another person or thing, you inescapably incur appropriate positive or negative karmic consequences, according to the true nature of your action.

The actual Implicate Technology guidelines for integrating yourself into the process of developing your cultural environment are straightforward, simple and very demanding:

I ) Committed daily practice of meditation will develop your intuitive abilities (see chapter 2).

2) Become centred in the midst of conditions (see chapter 3).

3) Analyse the conditions of your life, in terms both of your developing abilities and the needs of those around you (see chapter 3).

4) Become sensitive to the direction in which karma is guiding your life (see chapter 4).

5) Act.

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8.6 What is the goal of this Implicate Technology teaching of the clear setting face to face with reality?

The goal of this teaching is the same as that offered by any fully developed model of’ reality. This goal is to teach you to experience the final and absolute truth about the nature of reality. This Implicate Technology teaching is simply a path to the eternal truth, couched in language and concepts appropriate to late-twentieth-century Western secular culture.

The ultimate truth is so simple. It is nothing more than being in the unconditioned state. Dedicated, intelligent practice of these Implicate Technology teachings will lead you to that state of being.

Once the unconditioned state is realised, all becomes simple and clear. Where it is necessary to know, knowledge is effortlessly acquired; when it is necessary to act, action is effortlessly achieved. In that state, there is no divisive individuality and no conflict- there is only clarity, wisdom and delight in what is.

All this can only be fully understood once the final stage of enlightenment has been realised through experience. This book, followed with dedication and a fully committed intelligence, will lead you a little way beyond the first stage of enlightenment. This preliminary teaching, followed carefully in the light of your experience, will take you a little way into the state of mind beyond the personality.

The follow-up book prepared by the Implicate Technology Centre, The advanced guide to enlightenment, provides a teaching which enables one who has experienced the first or psychological stage of enlightenment to advance to the final and absolute goal. That book provides detailed practical guidance on how to develop the necessary skills and mental states. It also provides a rounded and clear model of reality, describing the nature and purpose of conditioned existence.

The ultimate goal, realisation of the unconditioned state, is an experience impossible to convey in words. Any given path to attaining that pure and original state of mind can only express understandings and insights from one particular cultural point of view. The one incommunicable truth, knowable only by direct experience, can be expressed through many different models of reality.

To be guided in your practice of these teachings, be mindful that the goal is simple. It can be conveyed in these few words: learn to live in meditation. The meaning of this is all-embracing.

The practice of meditation, properly directed, is to develop a mind capable of understanding through experience the true nature of reality. This is achieved by extending the understanding gained by the sustained practice of meditation to embrace every aspect of your life. The culmination of the meditative process lies in the development of a mind capable of experiencing all it witnesses as illusorily separate aspects of an inherently unified whole.

There is no sense of individual separation in such a state of being. Loneliness, pain and all joys and sorrows fade in significance before unconditioned mind. All things remain but, when set face to face with the clarity, wisdom and delight in what is, which are the hallmarks of the unconditioned mind observing conditioned existence, they are experienced as the relative illusion which they truly are.

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Religions, in common with Implicate Technology, offer a path leading to the full understanding of reality. Our Western religions require belief, worship and faith in God; this secular Implicate Technology teaching requires practice, thought and faith in your own capacity to attain enlightenment. Religions teach: God created the world; Implicate Technology teaches: conditioned existence unfolds, now, in the face of one unified unconditioned mind.

Now, through a religious or a secular teaching, you have a choice of paths to understanding reality. Reality is one: a glorious, glorious, glorious unity. All religions, and this secular teaching of Implicate Technology, are models of the one reality.

All models of reality are relevant, to a greater or lesser degree, to particular cultures over particular time periods. The relevance of this Implicate Technology model of reality can only be measured in terms of its effect on people’s lives now. Your work with the Implicate Technology teachings, learning to live your life in harmony with the inherent implicate laws governing and informing all existence, will shape your contribution to the growth and development of our culture.