3.9 How do you attune yourself to the experience of mind uncoupled from involvement in thoughts?

 

As a result of successful completion of the previous meditative exercise, you have developed the capacity to enter into the state of mind known as samadhi. Be clear: you are, as yet, but a novice in the practice of samadhi. You still have a long, long way to travel before your journey is ended – beyond yourself as an individual, beyond space, time and karma, beyond the restrictions of all conditions.

 

You have begun to experience the intrinsic emptiness and silence of the mind in its natural state. This is an experience of inner serenity which you will learn to enter and explore for longer and longer periods. Committed daily practice of the remaining exercises in this book will keep you on the well-trodden and reliable path to realisation of the final stage of enlightenment.

 

Over the next period of practice, you will come to realise just how far you have drifted from involvement in your everyday life. You will recognise that you have been unable to give your full attention to your ordinary life, owing to your intense efforts to control, to master and to transcend the thought process. Whatever consequences you have incurred as a result of this involuntary withdrawal are, as you well understand by now, the workings of karma in its balancing and harmonising aspects.

 

Banal as it may appear to be, the meditation taught in this section will bring you back to a full involvement in everyday life. As you will have come to expect by now, the meditation will be intensely demanding. What you may not expect is how clear, vivid, intense and all-absorbing you will find ordinary life, as a result of this meditation.

 

It is with this exercise that Implicate Technology diverges significantly, in terms of the results of its meditative practices, from the traditional Eastern models of reality. Within the frameworks of traditional spiritual systems, the start of samadhi heralds a period of ever-increasing withdrawal from everyday life; a withdrawal into an intensely and exclusively inward contemplation of the transcendental nature of reality. This results in an intermediate stage of consciousness, often mistaken for the final stage of enlightenment, which is characterised by the temporary ability to understand  the transcendental nature of reality – and accompanied by the temporary absence of bodyconsciousness.

 

Such experiences, involving as they do temporary loss of awareness through the senses, and the temporary loss of the ability to function in the world, have no place in our busy, pressurised Western cultures. Consider the implications of explaining to your boss that your work is late because you were in a profound meditative trance. How could you meet your everyday commitments when, at any time, you might slip into a profound state of meditative unconsciousness of the world?

 

Eastern meditative systems teach how to realise that the world is the product of the one mind through renouncing everyday life. This Western meditative system teaches the realisation of the transcendental nature of reality – that this is that – through embracing everyday life. The same eternal truth is taught in both cases; only the outer form of the path varies according to the cultural needs of place and time.

 

This Western model of reality directs the meditator’s attention simultaneously inwards towards realising the transcendental nature of this, and outwards towards witnessing and participating in ordinary, everyday life. Implicate Technology teaches a path involving the constant intertwining of everyday life with the growing understanding of the inherently transcendental nature of that life. Implicate Technology teaches, through meditative practices based on the experiences of ordinary life, that this and that are one and the same.

 

As a result of this process of balancing inner development and outer involvement, the loss of bodily awareness, and the consequent temporary inability to function in ordinary life, are avoided. The meditator continuously interacts with, and learns from, the immediate cultural environment. Through constantly balancing and harmonising inner awareness and outer activity, the process of samadhic consciousness is experienced with ever-increasing alertness – the world is witnessed, and acted in, with an ever-growing awareness of its true and transcendental nature.

 

The technique used for this meditative exercise is to practise detachment from rich and varied stimuli by keeping awareness uncoupled from your thought process. This fifth exercise is simply an extended form of the previous meditative technique. Committed daily practice will extend and strengthen your capacity to sustain samadhi.

 

The material for this meditation is your ordinary environment. According to your personal taste, choose a suitable source of stimuli as the basis for meditation. This source can be anything, so long as it is readily available to you – television, radio, cinema, music, watching what goes on in the street.

 

Fifth exercise

Begin your meditation practice: choose a rich, varied and easily accessible source of stimuli. Witness your chosen stimuli with an intense, keen alertness. Simultaneously, keep your awareness located in the stillness of samadhi, not in your thought process.

 

Witness your chosen source of stimuli without participating. That is to say, become absorbed in what is presented to you, but avoid distraction through becoming absorbed in the contents of your thoughts. Practice observing this, in all its richness and variety, with undistracted alertness, while remaining detached from any of the stimuli you experience.

 

As a result of your sustained efforts in this meditation, the inherent sexual energy flowing round your system will spontaneously and harmoniously settle down. The great surges of unrefined energy you have been experiencing will channel themselves into the body’s natural, self-balancing energy system. This energy system can be formally studied through the teachings on prana or chi to be found in Eastern implicate technology systems; or you can allow nature to take its course while you concentrate on your meditation.

 

The inherent implicate energy, flowing spontaneously into its natural channels through practice of this exercise, brings with it experiences entirely outside the range of normal consciousness. You will probably be hungry for these as proof of your advancement, and as evidence of the truth of some particular view of reality which you cherish. All such attitudes are impediments on the path, and must be outgrown through sustained committed practice of meditation.

 

The most common form of supernormal experience is to have visions. Visions are seen with the inner eye and heard with the inner ear, in a manner of speaking. Visions can encompass any aspect of this, past or present or future.

 

Be clear: visions are neither enlightenment nor an experience of universal truth. Visions are simply another experience along the way, and properly understood they can be of great value to you in understanding the nature of reality. Like any other aspect of this, visions are part of the educational and enlightening process which this truly is.

 

Be very cautious in talking to others about your visions. As a culture, we in the West know little of such experiences. We know even less how to derive benefit from the visionary experience.

 

Visions are best understood as a spontaneously occurring self-tuition course on aspects of reality relevant to the development of the experiencer. Your visions will probably occur as a self-refining series of spontaneous image/experiences. They will draw your attention to an aspect of reality, that is to say they will teach you about an aspect of your own nature, which you need to understand before you can proceed along the path.

 

Neither inhibit nor encourage whatever supernormal image/experiences may arise. Be neither glad nor afraid, however pleasant or unpleasant these experiences may be. Simply witness the vision, the complex of inner image and experience, without participating – and so extend your experience of samadhi.