3.10 What is the outcome of a sustained period of undistracted witnessing of stimuli as they occur?

Through sustained practice of samadhi, your psycho-physiological system will spontaneously re-align and re-balance its energy flows. Your body will become calmer, your sleep pattern will be less disturbed, and you will learn to recognise your thought process as simply another phenomenon occurring as part of this. You will learn to recognise that thoughts occur in the mind as a result of stimuli, and that the mind and thoughts are not identical.

For the moment, as a result of your practice of the previous exercises, you have trained your mind to a state of intense alertness. You are now so keenly aware of the relationship between thoughts and stimuli that, sometimes, this seems overwhelming. Just as you experienced an apparent instability in conditions before realising the first stage of enlightenment, you may undergo a similar experience at this stage as a temporary function of your heightened sensitivity to the effects of stimuli.

When the awareness is focused through the intrinsic emptiness and silence of samadhi, the mind experiences stimuli as the rising and falling away of thoughts. When distracted, and so absorbed in the flow of thoughts, the mind loses awareness of its inherent stillness. The key to the next exercise is to keep the mind still, by remaining unresponsive to the endless interplay of stimulus and thought-response.

Sixth exercise

During samadhi, the state of awareness transcending and encompassing the thought process, one becomes conscious of thoughts the instant they arise. Trained to an extraordinary degree of alertness by these advanced meditative practices, your mind has developed the ability to be aware instantly of the birth of a thought, and the ability to inhibit the development of any train of thought. This practice of inhibiting thoughts at birth, in the instant they arise, should be sustained until, quite naturally and spontaneously, you become indifferent and unresponsive to the rising and passing away of thoughts.

When you have been successful in this meditation, you will be able, without great effort, to maintain your mind in its natural state – still, serene and inherently devoid of thoughts. Thoughts will still occur in your mind; but now, you will be able to treat them with the same detachment with which you view the scene passing outside the windows of a train on a long journey. You will experience the thought process as an endless flow of stimuli, and you will simultaneously transcend the thought process through realising the inherent emptiness and stillness of your mind.

You will become capable of living the ordinary, everyday events of your life while both fully participating in these events, and silently, serenely witnessing the events, both inner and outer. The ability to witness this, including your own thought process, without inhibition or reaction will occur effortlessly and spontaneously. The state of still, thought-free witnessing is a continuous, unbroken consciousness that this comprises physical and mental stimuli.

In samadhi, the ability to recognise and transcend your mind’s instinctive reactions to the stimuli of this is an essential precondition for breaking free of the illusion that this is an objective reality comprising separate people, places and things. Only the mind in its natural state, calm and free of thoughts, can undertake the task of exploring and transcending the nature of space and time. Characteristic of deepest samadhi is the ability to witness this with the serene, unfailing acceptance of what is.

The remaining Implicate Technology meditative practices will bring you to realisation of the absolute truth about your original and ever-present nature. In the moment of knowing the truth, your mind will become free – beyond time, space, karma and the constraints of life and death. To achieve this, all you have to do is continue with committed daily practice of meditation as instructed.