2.5 What you will learn, stage by stage, from this book.

The premise on which you will be taught to base your way of life is this: your sense of being separate and an individual is entirely an illusion. Naturally, this premise accords neither with common sense, legal structures or your own personal experience. Nonetheless the premise is true, as you will gradually come to understand through your own experience.

Through practice of the meditations taught in this book you will come to understand the relative, and therefore illusory, nature of what seems to be individual and separate experience. These teachings form a graded series of practical exercises which will develop and strengthen your awareness and understanding of the processes of your mind. You will come to understand through experience that all of reality, no matter how tangible and apparently separate from yourself, is a product of the mental processes of the one, unified, all-embracing mind.

Firstly, in chapter 2, you will learn a way of adapting, a way of living, which sets you in harmony with the flow of reality. It is essential that you learn to understand, accept and act in accord with the flow of reality. A mind pre-occupied with its own needs and desires is incapable of receiving the gift of samadhi.

Secondly, in chapter 3, you will learn the preliminary mental exercises which will accustom you to working with the thought process itself. Your experience of samadhi will be refined and purified, until you experience the stillness and serenity at the core of your mind. Simultaneously with experiencing the mind’s natural stillness, you will develop a one-pointed mind, a mind fit to explore the true nature of reality.

Thirdly, in chapter 4, you will develop direct intuitive experience of the transcendental nature of this. You will meditate intensively on one thought at a time, for as long as you need to, until your mind develops understanding. You will experience an unshakeable shift in understanding – from experiencing everyday life as this to experiencing everyday life as that.

Fourthly, in chapter 5, you will experience through simple meditations, accessible only to the most developed of minds, the true, final and absolute nature of reality. You will come to understand that all apparently separate things are in reality one and undivided. You will also come to experience that all things unfold as the endless perfection and harmony of that.

Fifthly, in chapter 6, you will learn to explore reality from the basis of mind in its enlightened state. You will learn to explore this from a viewpoint which embraces and transcends space, time and karma. You will learn that you are an ordinary person, no different from anyone else; and the struggle to overcome your ignorance will be over.