WHAT IS MEDITATION?

I have been an avid practitioner of meditation all throughout the course of this particular lifetime.  Over the years, I have encountered numerous styles of meditation from books, from persons and on my own.  I am a very creative person and tend to improvise.  I developed these styles on my own, guided by an Internal Guide.  I gradually developed a number of methods that enabled me to find what I call “Deep Space”, a deeper state of consciousness than the usual everyday consciousness where one is simply tending to activities of daily living.  I became inspired to share these methods with the public at large, even to the extent of offering this absolutely free on the public internet.  I hope that these do something for you.
The first question one might have is:  Why bother?  What good is it to just sit still for a prescribed period?  This does not seem to “accomplish” anything.  We are used to doing a number of activities every day.  Just sitting is the very opposite of this.  Is there any practical reason to meditate?  In this action-based culture, meditation seems to be a complete waste of time!
On a very basic level, sitting still and breathing deeply is very good for your health.  It lowers your adrenaline level, it makes you calmer, it slows down your heart rate and blood pressure.  Once you get the hang of it, it is a much safer alternative than tranquilizers such as Valium, without the danger of addiction.  Indeed, once you get good at this, you will find this a pleasantly “addictive” activity in itself!
Meditation is excellent therapy for those with anxiety disorders and other forms of mental imbalance.  It enables one to calm down and sort out some of the problems which usually cause stress and depression.
As you learn to go within, you may spontaneously experience “insights”, creative solutions to your day to day problems or problems you are trying to solve in your workplace, your relationships, problems in society as a whole.  By calming down and letting go of your problems, you may discover solutions that you may had never discovered otherwise.  That “lightbulb” flashes in your brain, that magical moment of “AHA!”
Finally you may discover altered states of consciousness where you feel detached and blissful.  You may feel a special connection to everyone and everything, a unity with All That Is Some may call this“ God”, not that somber Man in the Sky judging everyone, but a kind of Androgynous Cosmic Intelligence which resides within all beings.  Indeed, many persons who have tried psychedelic drugs and experienced visions galore, have been drawn to the practice of meditation and found you can get even higher without the risk of overdose or bad trips.
You do not have to renounce anything.  You do not have to be a saint.  You do not have to make any radical change in your personal lifestyle.  I would prescribe a certain moderation in whatever you do.  You do not have to feel guilty about anything.  All people have something which obsesses them (even myself!).  There is a practice here where you observe that obsession rather than struggle against it.  As you get into this, you may discover a certain detachment.
The exercises here go a bit beyond simply sitting still and watching your breath, which is the general method of the popular practice of Vispassna meditation.  Some of these exercises teach you to go beyond the usual boundaries of who you usually consider yourself to be.  There is a kind of playfulness here, where you may put on and take off different identifications.  Other exercises train you to expand your usual perceptions and look at what is “out there” in a completely new way.  
Over the years I have developed these exercises as an offshoot of certain exercises I picked elsewhere.  I will say many of these exercises are not completely original, is there is truly such a thing as “originality”.  They are. influenced by Gurdjieff and that mysterious man Don Juan in the Castenada series.  (There is some on-going debate whether Carlos Castenada made up his tales, nevertheless there are grains of wisdom there.)  
I am re-creating a lot of that.  A few of these exercises are akin to Zen Koans, completely paradoxical questions designed to trip up the logical mind and break through to another level.  (One good example would be:  “At what instant did you come into existence?”) Also, many of these exercises are based on Kundalini yoga, the transformation of sensuality into spirituality; these are simply different wavelengths of the same Primordial Energy.   
Over the course of my lifetime, I have checked out numerous teachings:  Eastern mysticism, Theosophy, G.I. Gurdjieff, Carlos Castenada, Meher Baba, Krishnamurti, Gnosticism, Transpersonal Psychology (John Lilly, Ken Wilbur, Carl Jung, Charles Tart (my brother-in-law), etc.), Paganism, Robert Anton Wilson, Alan Watts, Zen, Buddhism, Taoism, anything esoteric and mystical.  I have always been attracted to what is odd and relatively unknown to the greater public.  In spite of all that, I would define myself as an “independent mystic”.  I make up my Path as I go along, and I encourage you to do the same.
G..I. Gurdjieff maintains that most human beings are in a state of “sleep”.  He insists that this is literal sleep, that humans are sleepwalking machines.  I would not go quite that far, but when one begins to sense other dimensions of reality, one will realize that the usual state of consciousness that we take for granted in day-to-day life is like “sleep” in comparison.  In our ordinary state of consciousness, we are constantly distracted by one thing or the other.  
You may walk down Main Street on a specific important errand, and wind up window shopping, then checking out something that interests you, then wind up shopping for other items, comparing and contrasting them.  Meanwhile, time passes, and you completely lost track of where you were trying to go in the first place.  
In recent times, television and the internet have become ultimate sources of distraction.  You may start the net searching for some piece of information, then see some blinking web page, go there, then see another link, and so on.  An hour later, you will find yourself far away from whatever it is you were originally trying to find out about.  In all corners of each web page, there are countless blinking links and related commercials to draw your attention elsewhere.
This is how our usual thinking process works, hopping from one thing to another.  The Zen Masters make the metaphor “monkey mind”, a monkey swinging from one branch to another – or tracing larger branches to smaller branches, then winding up way out on a limb that goes nowhere.  The monkey then scratches its head and wonders how it got there; the final step would be to leap off into space!  
One of the primary benefits of meditation is to learn to ignore those distractions – or simply watch them without getting caught up in them.  The aim of meditation is to learn how to focus on one thing or theme at a time.  By becoming better focused, one becomes far more efficient in day-to-day activities.  You just finish cleaning your house, and do it thoroughly, instead of watching what’s on TV.  In this way, meditation can have very practical applications, it helps you do a better job of whatever you are doing.  (Employers should offer meditation rooms; they do this in Japan where meditation is a traditional activity.)



THE DILEMMA OF THINKING

One common misconception about meditation is one is supposed to “stop thinking”, i.e., to just “blank out”.  It is impossible for the brain to stop thinking – just as it is impossible to stop breathing.  Instead, one “shifts gears” to let go of the usual thinking and go within to a deeper level of thought, slower, more focused.  
Right now – Stop thinking!  Just try it and see if you can do it.  There may be seconds where you see a space between one thought and the next.  You may succeed in “smothering” the thoughts, but even then you’re probably thinking about how to do it, how you are doing, trying to prove to yourself and others you can stop thinking.  Then you will see how futile it is to stop thinking.
I experience it a bit like a “shifting of gears”.  Usually it takes about 15-20 minutes for the usual mind to settle down.  The “surface mind” (probably located in the forebrain) begins to become more distant, and your sense of being “shifts” into the “deep mind”.  Those “surface thoughts” are still doing their thing, but you cease to be caught up in them.  Then a “deep mind” takes over, and the thoughts become slower, more profound.  So you never really “stop thinking”.  There may be those brief intervals of “No-Thought”.  As you gain experience, those spaces of “No-Thought” may be vaster.  Although that space is merely a few seconds, it will be as if you had a glimpse of Eternity.
We are not trying to cease to think so much as to get into a state where we are observing our thoughts, letting go rather than struggling against it.  In this process, we turn within and discover a vast space.  In this space, our mind slows down, and perhaps settles down.  The spaces between thoughts grow vaster and vaster.  It would be more accurate to say that it is not so much that the mind “vanishes” as it is to say the mind becomes far more subtle, deeper rather than shallow.  It is like deep sea diving;  the deeper one goes, the stranger and more interesting becomes the sea life.  And, of course, there are those marvelous pearls of insight!
The dilemma of FALLING ASLEEP

It is very common for newcomers to fall asleep when first attempting meditation.  Sometimes you may find yourself drifting off into some sort of odd dream state.  This particular dream state is very interesting.  One part of yourself may be awake and the other part dreaming, while that first part is observing and perhaps controlling the dream.  You may be prone to having occasional intuitive flashes and experiences of other dimensions of existence..
You may have a sense of guilt to drift off like this.  To fall asleep seems contrary to what meditation is all about - which is to become awake.  However, this dream state can be food for meditation in itself.  A Zen teacher has suggested to me that rather than fighting it, I can become aware of that general feeling of tiredness and study the sensations connected with it.
One interesting side effect of dozing off while meditating is I often find myself feeling far better rested afterwards than ordinary sleeping.  I’ve learned that if I am tired I can momentarily meditate while in this dream state for just a couple of minutes and come out of it feeling well rested.  Perhaps what happens is you assimilate what is in your subconscious better than you would do in ordinary sleep.
Some Masters have suggested that in deep sleep we return to the Cosmic Unity, to our True Internal Identity.  This is a way of “spiritually recharging”.     When we are deluded into believing these various pseudo identities are who we really are, this drains our energy  It takes a lot of work to maintain the masks we put on both for ourselves and others.  Eventually we need to take a break, so we feel sleepy.  In the process of meditation, we are also letting go of these identities we believe we are, so we may automatically feel tired.  
Dreams are a kind of “half-way” point to the state of absolute unconsciousness.  In normal sleep dreams are a way of processing all that stuff in our day-to-day lives  Dreams are far more flexible and surreal than they are in our current dimension, chockfull of symbols and archetypes, as Carl Jung pointed out.  
One interesting side effect while meditating is we may become able to control our dreams rather than being tossed hither and thither.  This is what is known as ‘lucid dreaming’ and it can actually be a gateway to gaining more control over things in our current dimension (which is actually another kind of dream but far more “solid”.)
In meditation, we are approaching this same dimension through a different way.  Thus, we are vulnerable to falling asleep.  This is one of the reasons it is suggestive to sit spine straight up so we don’t fall completely unconscious.  Then we may discover a part of ourselves that is watching while it happens.
Of course, I would suggest that you choose your sitting time at a time of day when you are particularly wide awake.  Different people have different diurnal rhythms of awakeness and tiredness.  A cup of coffee or tea helps, too.  Bright light tends to help, especially sunlight.  Keep that time consistent, so your mind/body is trained to be in that special state at that time, just like your eyes open at a certain time in the morning, and you fall asleep at a certain time in the evening.
As you gain experience in meditation, you will discover that you can control this tendency better and better as your inner Watcher becomes more awakened.
 BREATHING

It all starts with breathing.  Breathing is one of the most vital automatic activities the body does.  We breathe in air, take the vital molecule oxygen out of the air, the heart pumps that oxygen to all parts of the body, and all the cells that make up this miraculous organism use that oxygen to metabolize and generate energy to keep us in a state of “aliveness”.  This state of being alive increases our level of awareness.  Then the waste product of this celluar metabolism is pumped back into the lungs, and we breathe it out.
We can get along just fine without paying attention to whether we are breathing or not.  It just happens by itself, even when we are fast asleep.  However, unlike other automatic activities such as heartbeat or digestion, we can CONTROL the pace of our breathing.  (There are some advanced yogis who are said to be able to control the rate of heartbeat, though certain styles of breathing can speed up or slow down the heartbeat, the two are synchronized together.)  You can choose to breathe faster and shallower (not recommended) or you can choose to breathe deeply and slowly.
Usually in day-to-day activities, we are breathing in very irregular rhythms.  We may be breathing out too much, not breathing in enough to take in that oxygen.  Or we breathe out too quickly not holding the breath in long enough for the lungs to capture that vital oxygen.  Often we might just take shallow breaths very quickly, not getting the oxygen energy we need to function.  When others are around (or even to ourselves), we tend to talk about anything and everything, and talking is mostly outbreathing with very quick inbreaths.  Thus our brain and body is not getting enough oxygen and we are stressed, tired, adrenaline increases and we become easily angry.  We could call this an “energy crisis”.  On the other hand, when we are doing something more relaxing like reading a book, watching TV, or having sex, we are breathing more deeply and slowly.  All of this is largely unconscious, but we can train ourselves to pay attention to it.
(This also implies that we may need to make sure there is enough oxygen where we are meditating.  Smoking certainly is not a good idea and second-hand smoke does not work very well.  Fresh air can be helpful, open your window a crack.  We may not be aware of it, but by spending so much time in tightly enclosed spaces, we are literally suffocating in our own waste air!)
The most common meditative exercise is to sit still and breathe very deeply.  It is advised to sit up straight; this enables the lungs and brain to process the oxygen more fully.  If you are bent over you are obstructing the abdomen from sucking in air.  Westerners may be more apt to sit in a chair – or you may take the more traditional Eastern method of sitting crosslegged on a mat or cushion.  Find a position which makes you feel simultaneously comfortable and at a state of attention.  I would suggest a straight backed chair with your feet flat on the floor.  You could also meditate standing up.
Right now, find that position and take note of how you are breathing.  Feel the breathing.  Note how a long deep breath increases your state of being alert.  Feel the oxygen pulsing throughout your body.  Find the pace of breathing that feels “right” to you.  During the course of the day, take a moment to breathe deeper.  Also take note of situations where your breath is more shallow and quicker.



Ok, now let us try out a breathing exercise; you can do this while reading these sentences.  Suck your breath in and expand your abdomen, as if you were filling up a balloon.   Count:  1… 2… 3… 4…  (My own experience has been multiples of four work best.)
Now hold that breath, as if you were holding the balloon tightly.  One good way to hold your breath would be to put the tip of your tongue on the roof of your mouth, and/or swallow slightly to cover your trachea with that muscular flap (how you keep from choking when swallowing your food or water).  Count:  1… 2… 3… 4… 
Next, release that breath in a very long sigh, almost as if you were taking a sigh of relief.  Don’t force the breath out, let it out by letting your abdominal muscles completely relax.  Count: 1… 2… 3… 4…
Take a brief pause between the breaths, then renew the cycle.  Count:  1… 2… 3… 4…  This is a bit tricky, I myself have problems with it sometimes, but it is not like keeping the air pushed out, it is more like a complete relaxation.
This is a very basic cycle:  Breathing in (expansion)…  Hold (peak)… Breathing out (letting go)…  Pause (bottom)…  This corresponds with basic patterns of the universe such as the four seasons, for example:  Breathing in (Spring)…  Hold (Summer)…  Letting go (Fall)… Pause (Winter).
It is very important to get the hang of this at the outset.  This is the primary basis for the various exercises in this book.

Chanting “MMMMMM” on the out breath is useful to breath out more slowly.  You could do it loudly, but I do it silently.  I inwardly hum it as a resonating vibration in the back of my head.  I actually hear it as a tone deep in the bowels of my brain, right in the cerebellum, the top of the spinal chord where the basic autonomic functions such as breath and heartbeat are controlled.  It takes awhile to get to this point, but it creates a very nice feeling once you get there.
One thing I’ve tried is to breathe as though I am in love with somebody.  You will observe that there is a certain way one breathes when one is in love.  You breathe in deeply and sigh out gradually.  Try it and you will see what I mean.  If you are not currently in love with someone, just pretend that there is.  When you breathe in, say “I”, when you hold the breath, say “love”, and when you breathe out, say “her, him, it, or whatever”.  (It could even be something like ice cream or your pet.)  Another benefit of this exercise is you will become a very loving person.
Another variation of this is to focus on the mantra “OM” or “AUM” which is the basic vibration of the universe.  On the inbreath, focus on the first vowel “AH”, hold it on “U” on holding, then focus on “MMMMMMM” on the outbreath.   Picture “AH” as the rising of a sine wave curve.  Picture “U” as the crest of the curve.  Then picture “MMM” as the falling away of the sine wave curve.  This wave is more stretched out on the “MMM” side.  Following the “MMM”, there is a brief pause as the wave builds up again.  Picture an ocean wave rising and falling.  (Perhaps this is why people like to go to the beach so much.)  This kind of wave is a primal vibration of the universe.
If you like, you can make variations of the above breathing exercises and combine them.  There is absolutely nothing wrong with being creative about it.  As a matter of fact, I would encourage it.  (Ex.:  You can even make in and out rhythm of the sex act in synchrony with your breathing!  If nothing else works, that would certainly keep your undivided attention!)
G.I. Gurdjieff once said that it takes years to learn how to breathe right.  Yogis spend a lifetime just trying to master the art of breathing.  It is peculiar that so basic an autonomic function as breathing should take so much practice.  The reason there is so much emphasis on breathing is breathing is both autonomous, but to some extent deliberate.  We can take reins of the horse and direct it where to go, rather than allow it to roam randomly hither and thither.  Once you get the hang of it, you’ll find yourself feeling more tranquil and relaxed in general.

OXYGEN

Breathe deeply inwards.  Push the breath into your belly.  Feel the molecules of oxygen going into your blood.  Push those oxygen molecules inside you.  Imagine you have a huge bellows you are using to fan a fire inside your belly.  As you hold the breath, feel that fire in your belly go ‘whoosh’ as it erupts and becomes hotter.
Then breathe slowly outwards, enjoying that rush of energy, saying “Ahhhhh…”  Imagine the blood bringing the ‘smoke’ of the fire in the form of carbon dioxide, the product of your metabolism and breathing it out.  Make sure you get it all out of your system.
Feel your heart pumping the oxygen in, feel your blood cells carrying it to every cell in your body, feel each cell become alive and conscious.  Feel the metabolism burning in each cell, especially in your brain as you become more alive and conscious.  Feel how alive it makes you.
Imagine how each oxygen molecule, each carbon molecule, each atom of hydrogen was originally manufactured in the great factory within the stars, how one of those stars exploded to bring that particular oxygen molecule, that particular carbon molecule, that particular hydrogen atom to become a part of what you are.  Feel how your own being is identical to the being of that star.  Feel how all those stars share the same being with their galaxy, how all the galaxies share their being with the being of the universe.  This means nothing more or less that your own being is identical to the being of the universe.
Feel the energy of the star, the energy of the universe pounding through your blood as you breathe it in, as you push it inside yourself.  Feel the vitality that gives you.
Breathing out, feel the carbon dioxide drifting away into the air around you.  Feel it drifting over towards the plants in your vicinity.  Feel the plants breathing in the carbon dioxide which vitalizes their own metabolism.  Feel them photosynthesizing that carbon dioxide, breaking off the carbon to make hydrocarbons which is ultimately food for us, and breaking off the oxygen to breathe outwards.  Feel the plants giving us pure oxygen to breathe in as we give them carbon dioxide to breathe in.
Feel what a wonderful exchange of energy we as animals share with the plants.  Feel how the being of ourselves and the being of plants are identical, how the being of all living things is identical, how we are all giving and receiving the same energy.
This is an exercise that will give you a remarkable burst of energy.  Not only that, but it will enable you to experience the unity of the universe as a fact, not merely a belief.

I… AM… THIS… NOW


This is very basic.  It could be said to be the Primary Theme::  

I (breathe in)… AM (hold breath)… THIS (breathe out)… … NOW (hold out)…

	While I do this, I focus on each of these aspects.  For example, I ponder on who is this “I”?  Is there actually an “I” here?  If so, what do I define as “I”? Why is there this “I”?  Where did this “I” come from?  Am “I” this body?  Am “I” this brain?  Which part of the brain?  In the right hemisphere, the cerebellum, the forebrain?  When I say “I”, where do I feel the “I” to be?  Perhaps this “I” is located in different places at different times.  For example, if I am about to engage in sexual intercourse, I would feel “I” to be completely in my penis.  Or as I am eating, “I” would be my mouth.  Is there any “I” beyond the boundaries of this body?  Where do “I” end and “Not-I” begin?
	What does “AM” mean?  Is “AM” this state of consciousness?  What IS consciousness?  When I am, that means I exist.  If it is consciousness, does that mean when I am asleep, there ceases to be consciousness – or is it some other kind of consciousness, a kind of “unconscious consciousness” .Does consciousness cease to exist when the body is dead?  Or does consciousness transcend the boundaries of this body?  Is consciousness a primary property of the universe?  How do we know whether a bird, a cat, a squirrel, a tree, a rock, a mountain is conscious or not-conscious?
	What is “THIS”?  Is “THIS” simply a point in space, with a latitude and longitude?  Is this my body?  Is this the room I am sitting in.  Is this the town I live in?  Or is it the Planet Earth, this solar system, this galaxy, this universe.  Where does “THIS” end and “NOT THIS” begin?
	Is “NOW” this particular microsecond that is no longer there as soon as I think “NOW”?  Is it this particular session of meditation time?  When I think about the past, I am doing it NOW.  The same goes for when I consider the future and its possibilities.  I spend so much energy into considering which future I want to manifest and which future I do not want to manifest.  Or I am remembering various scenes from the past, whether I enjoyed it or did not enjoy it.  All of this is happening NOW.  So perhaps NOW is ALL points in time, not just this particular instant.  NOW is never stable, settled, finished – NOW is always changing.
the wave exercise

Here is a very basic exercise.  As you breathe in, picture a wave rising with your breath.  Hold your breath, picture this wave at its peak.  Letting out your breath, picture this wave crashing on the shore.  Between breaths, picture the remains of the wave merging back into the ocean.  Then a new wave is born.
As an extension of the previous exercise, imagine yourself as being this wave rising, peaking, falling, dispersing.  These are four basic universal stages:  Some phenomena comes into being.  Then it maintains an identity, a separateness from ALL.  It is impossible for any separate identity to last forever, so eventually it must disintegrate.  Finally it merges back into the ALL.
Feel yourself rising, peaking, and falling again and again.  Again and again, you form into a wave.  At each peak, you are determined to be the biggest wave on the ocean, you hold your breath trying to stay there, but alas, time wears you down, and with the release of breath, you crash back into the shore, to be pulled back into the Great Ocean that spawned you.
Breathing in, focus on “I”.  The wave coming into existence is your new born identity.  Holding your breath, focus on “AM”.  You are now this wave, you now exist, you are riding high at your ultimate peak.  Letting your breath out, focus on “THIS”, resigning yourself to letting go of this wave identity, dissipating, dissolving away, dying.  At the pause between breaths, focus on “NOW”.  Feel yourself to be the Totality of the Great Ocean.
We could call this “surfing”.  You are surfing on the current wave of who you are, hanging in there as long as possible right there on the peak – until it is time to find another wave to ride.


the in and out exercise

This is daring to include in a book that is supposedly “spiritual”, but here we are focusing on the act of sex.  As we all know, sex has the same kind of rhythm as a wave.  You may even “layer” the rising, peaking, and falling of the wave with this.  
If you are male, breathe in and picture yourself penetrating into your partner.  Focus on “I”.  Hold your breath, and picture yourself deep into the interior of your partner, reaching a peak of pleasure, perhaps orgasming.  Focus on “AM”.  Letting your breath out, picture yourself pulling out of your partner, perhaps having achieved the release of sperm.  Focus on “THIS”.  Then as the breath is completely released, picture that wonderful sense of gratification, holding your partner in your arms, becoming completely relaxed.  Focus on “NOW”.  Then start this over again.  
If you choose, you could reverse the above, pulling out on the inbreath, holding at the entrance at that wonderful moment where the sensitive foreskin is brushing with woman’s clit, which is usually the height of pleasure, then letting the breath out while sliding in.  This may make more sense since pulling out is a tightening of abdominal muscles and sliding in is a relaxation of those muscles.
For the woman, all of the above would be reversed.  Breathe in as you are being penetrated, focus on “I”.   Hold your breath as you are fully penetrated, perhaps reaching your orgasm, focus on “AM”.  As your partner pulls out of you, let out a sign and focus on “ THIS”.  Then between breaths, experience that wonderful moment of full gratification, holding your lover, and focus on “NOW”.
It could be an interesting twist on this exercise for the male to imagine himself as the woman being penetrated – and the female to imagine herself as the penetrator.  Of course, this can be applied appropriately by gay persons.  
You may even go so far as to attempt this in the midst of actual intercourse (or oral/anal).  If you can manage to achieve a smooth flow of breath at the right times, this may intensify both your meditative and sexual experiences.  That is incidentally what is called “Tantric Yoga”, using sexual energy to transform it into spiritual energy.  We will get into that more thoroughly when we study Kundalini.  
If you are having difficulties focusing on meditation at all, or having a “bad day”, this may be something that would hold your attention.  This exercise would not be recommended for those with extreme sexual issues or feel sexual enjoyment is forbidden.  
energy rising and falling

Here is another cyclical meditation exercise.  As you breathe in, feel energy rising up the base of your spine.  Focus on “I”.  Hold your breath for an interval of at least four seconds, feel that energy concentrating in the base/center of your brain.  Focus on “AM”.  Let your breath out, feel that energy simultaneously sinking back to the base of your spine, the coccyx – and releasing out of the crown of your head like fireworks, which then burn out on all sides of you.  Focus on “THIS”.  Between the breaths, picture this energy concentrating in the base of your spine, sucking in the remnants of that energy from the crown of your head.  Focus on “NOW”.
A special note on this:  There have been Kirlian photographs that show that there is literally an energy field which rises and falls with our breath cycle as described above.  This energy field is called a “Torus” by physicists.  (Illustration?)   There is also speculation on whether this is akin of perpetual motion and could be a model of how the universe(s?) is created, maintained, and destroyed. 
This energy pattern has also been called a “morphogenic field” by a biologist/physicist Rupert Sheldrake.  His theory is that this field is how life organizes itself and redesigns itself in new conditions, constructive mutation.  This energy field is shaped like an egg, and some propose that this may be a scientific basis for a “soul” or “astral body” which can survive the death of the physical body.  This may also be a scientific basis for what seers call the “aura”.
One variation of this:  As you breathe in, picture your brain “sucking in” that energy from the base of your spine, as if sipping through a straw.  Hold your breath and feel that energy becoming intensified in the back/center of your brain. Then as you breathe out, picture your brain “pushing out” the energy from the crown of your head, a bit like having a mouthful of water and squirting it out.  On the pause, picture that energy circulating back to the base of your spine. My own personal experience is this intensifies the experience.  You then may feel it as a continuous upward movement going around in a cycle.
Another important note: If you take a look at a picture of the brain, you may note there is a central location called the “thalamus”, and the cerebellum.  The pineal gland, the scientific basis for a “third eye” happens to be in front of that region.  The thalamus is a more primitive brain where more vital bodily functions are processed such as heartbeat, breathing and digestion.  An interesting note here is when we consciously control our breathing, we also control the flow of this energy.
When we are thinking a lot, that is all happening in our greatly expanded cerebral matrix, a new development in mammals, and very pronounced in our own species.  This thinking is mostly happening in the forebrain, though the left cerebral lobe does the math and logic, and the right cerebral lobe does the imagery and intuition.  When we make that switch of consciousness to the bottom/center of the brain, we are entering a more primordial region that is present centered consciousness, and could account for that wordless spaced out mystical experience. 
This also is the physical basis of Kundalini which we’ll get into more detail later.  I have heard warnings from Yogi Teachers that this could be potentially dangerous, it could kill you or make you crazy, though I personally see no basis for this.  In my personal experience, this can be very “consciousness-altering” in a very quick way.
pRANA NOSTRIL BREATHING the opposites

This is an ancient Hindu yoga technique.  Hold your right nostril closed with your thumb.  Hold your breath for an instant with thumb and forefinger.  Let your breath go through your right nostril, holding your left nostril closed.  Rest for an instant, then repeat the cycle.
While breathing in your left nostril, focus on the phrase/word on the left.  While breathing out through your right nostril, focus in the phrase/word on the right.

Breathe in left side			Breathe out right side
Finite					Infinite
There is no god			But God
There is no reality			But the Source
“I” am an illusion			God alone is Real
Negation				Affirmation
Illusion				Reality
Hell					Heaven
Contraction				Expansion		
Dispersion				Surrender
Lunar					Solar
Yin					Yang
Darkness				Light
Logic					Intuition
Confusion				Illumination
Conditioned				Free
		Asleep					Awake

To make things even more interesting, try switching the right column with the left column, and switch nostrils.  You may also simply breathe in, focusing on left column – then breathe out, focusing on the right column.




	
AAAAAUUUUUMMMMM

Breathe in.  Concentrate on the letter “A”.  Intone inwardly “Ahhhh…”  See the letter “A” like this:  “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA”.  See it like a horizontal zig-zag line.  At the beginning of the in-breath, see the “A” rising, growing taller bit by bit.
Hold your breath.  Concentrate on the letter “U”.  Intone inwardly “U” as in “You”.  See the letter “U” like this:  “UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU”.  Picture it like a horizontal sine wave.  Hold it there.
Breathe out.  Watch the “U” become transformed into the letter “M”.  Inwardly or outwardly intone “MMMMM”.  See it like:  “MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM”.  See a series of “M’s” connected by horizontal lines.  Watch it fall away towards the end of your breathe, the M’s getting smaller and smaller.
As your breath ends, hold it there.  Observe silence.  Just visualize a horizontal line.  Visualize nothingness.  Stay there as long as you can and start all over again.
You will note that this spells out “AUM” or “OM”.  The “A” signifies Creation.  The “U” signifies Preservation.  The “M” signifies Destruction.  After awhile, the shape of the lines will be indistinguishable from one another, just one kind of wave transforming into the next.

Another way to do this exercise would be to intone the three vowels outwardly.  Hum them outloud.  Since you could not do this on the inhale, you would do it on the outbreath.  Hum AAAAA like “Ah” being hummed out as long as you can do it.  Then listen to the intervening silence within as you breathe in.  Hum UUUUU as long as you can.  Feel how each syllable feels in your mouth.  Be aware of how your mouth and teeth say the vowels.  Then finally hum MMMMM as long as you can.  Hum each vowel on the same note.  It would be usual to pick a bell that you can resonate your humming with.
If you do this for a half hour, you will notice very strange alterations in your consciousness.  You will especially be aware of the effect the vibrations of the humming have inwardly as you breathe inwardly to say the next vowel.  As you keep doing it, you may find yourself breathing in more slowly to make the silence last longer.  You can also experiment with various paces to do the humming.  One thing that could be helpful is to add a fourth breath to intervene between every series of A U M.

A kind of focus on color could be another variation as you do the humming.  On AAAAA, inwardly visualize red and orange.  On UUUUU, inwardly visualize yellow and green.  On MMMMM, inwardly visualize deep shades of blue and purple.  Think of how these colors correspond to creation, preservation, and dissolution.


PERMUTATION:

I… AM… THIS… IS… ALL…

THIS… IS… ALL… I… AM…

ALL… I… AM… IS… THIS…


	Take a deep inbreath on “I”.   Focus intently on your sense of identity.  Hold this breath on “AM”.  Focus upon your sense of being alive, conscious, aware.  Breathe slowly outward on “THIS”.  Focus on this present moment, what is here.  As your breath continues to expend, focus on the “IS”, the existence of that which is around you, this general environment, geographical location, time/space, the various beings “out there” who also have varying degrees of awareness as you do.  For four seconds between breaths, focus on “ALL”.  Feel in the Root of your Being, the unity of all that is, infinite hereness, infinite nowness.  
As you move to the next inbreath, focus on:  “THIS IS ALL I AM”.  Do this in five stages (four seconds apart), inbreath, hold, peak, outbreath, pause.  Next do a similar cycle with:  “ALL I AM IS THIS.”  Continue to make permutations of the above, the creative effort will keep you more focused.

CONTEMPLATION OF A SCENE

Looking out the window can be an interesting form of meditation.  The object is to simply look outwards and observe precisely what is happening in the scene in front of you.  You can also pay attention to what other senses tell you.  Listen to sounds.  Smell the scents.  Feel the variations in the wind.
I would suggest starting out with a very specific part of the scene.  Watch a tree branch waving in the wind.  See a squirrel running up and down a branch.  Look at where the bird flies.  Listen to the variations in the bird songs.  Watch a person walking up the street. 
Try to note every detail.  Look at the lines in the trees and the rocks.  Look at the colors in the bird’s feathers.  Look at the way the branches grow hither and thither.  Look at what a person is wearing down to the finest threads.
One thing I would try to refrain from is labeling what you pay attention to.  For example, if you hear a car go by, just hear the sound rather than saying “Oh, that’s a car.”  Rather try to just hear the noise of it.  Or don’t say, “Hmmm, that’s a goldfinch.  I wonder what that’s doing here?”  Just see it as what it is.  When we give something a word or name, that limits it.  This may be why mystics or visionaries may say the experience of complete present-centeredness is “wordless” “beyond words”. 
As you get into it, you can actually become what you are watching.  What is happening in the mind of that squirrel running up and down?  Where is the bird trying to go to?  What are the birds saying to each other?  What is going on in that person’s mind?  What is the tree experiencing?  You will find yourself experiencing what you are contemplating, rather than just being some kind of uninvolved observer.
This is incidentally a pathway to learning extrasensory perception.  Practice this and you will get better and better at it.
Sitting by your window at home is not necessarily the only place you can practice this kind of exercise.  You could sit on a park bench or in a coffee shop.  It is nice to sit out in some natural setting such as by a pond or in the forest.  In a natural setting, you will be amazed at the wealth of detail you will see.  My own preference is a 360 degree view from the peak of a high mountain.
One thing I would point out is to try not to react to an abrupt or unpleasant sensation.  A thing that irritates the hell out of me, for example, is a roaring car going by or some raucous person yelling.  That kind of thing tends to throw me out of my meditative state and gets me into a whole chain of angry thoughts:  “Why don’t they make those cars illegal?  What’s that asshole doing here?  Etc.”
Another way to deal with that is to simply take note of that sound, listening to it like it was a big wave crashing on the beach or a monkey hooting in the forest.  Let it pass through you.  For example, I’ve simply sat still calmly letting a mosquito bite me rather than smacking at it.  Or watch the itch rather than scratching it.  It actually doesn’t itch as much that way.  Go beyond labeling a sensation as “pleasant” or “unpleasant”.  Our pain becomes magnified when we get emotional about it.
Contemplation of a scene can be a very pleasant and useful form of meditation.  You can learn a lot about what is happening within things that way.
WHERE DOES IT ALL COME FROM?

An interesting variation of the contemplation exercise is to focus on a particular object or living being.  It doesn’t matter just what that is.  It could be a rock, a tree, a person, a civilized implement.
A tree would be a good start.  In our ancient primate-hood we have a special connection to trees, having lived in them so long.  That may be why we have such an affinity for trees and find them pleasant to have around.
Take a good look at the tree.  Observe its branches and the various living creatures that tend to be inhabitants of this tree.  Feel the pulse of its photosynthesis in the sun as its various leaves produce stored energy for the tree to live on.  Note the sexuality of this tree as its flowers use bees to spread their gametes to one another.  Get inside its trunk and feel the juices of the tree flowing up and down like a kind of sticky blood.  Go down into its roots and feel it sucking water and nutrients from the soil.
It could be useful in an exercise like this to have a bit of scientific knowledge about this tree.  Study a bit of botany and understand where trees lie in the general scheme of living things.  Read an encyclopedic excerpt about trees and the species of tree you are meditating upon.  However, I would point out in this exercise it is not so much objective knowledge you are focusing upon (though this is a useful backbone), but to attempt to be the tree.  Feel the tree, not just know about the tree.  See the tree as a conscious living being, not some object to be dissected in a laboratory.
Imagine being that tree in various phases of its life.  Feel being the tree in the depths of winter as it hibernates in its roots.  Feel being the tree as its juices flow upwards in spring to greet the slowly warming sun, as it ecstatically bears flowers and sprouts leaves.  Feel being that tree at the height of summer as its huge green leaves sunbathe and manufacture food out of solar energy.  Be that tree as autumn comes and it mournfully prepares for winter, shedding its leaves in the process.
Be that tree in different parts of its life.  Imagine it sprouting out of its initial seed, tossed into the dirt by whoever its parent was.  Be that seed as it patiently waits for just the right conditions for it to grow as some older tree falls to let sunlight fall in its direction.  Gradually grow as a vulnerable sprout, getting a bit higher and a bit thicker as each year passes.  Experimentally extend your roots and your branches to see how far you can reach.  Become more stable in your particular spot as other trees around you fall giving you the opportunity to become one of the big trees.  Feel your trunk becoming thicker and thicker.  Mate with other trees around you and throw out seeds of yourself in all directions, giving you a kind of immortality.  Become a huge aged tree bigger than all the others around you, a massive mountain of what you once were.  Become more vulnerable as you age, termites biting into your interior, lightning striking your high branches, other trees moving into your space.  Finally collapse and bite the dust, the wood of what you once were rotting into the ground to become fertilizer for your progeny.
Thus you have explored that tree in all its aspects from birth to death.  You become intimately aware of a profound truth:  All things are created and all things are destroyed.  All things are composed and all things are decomposed.  Nothing is immortal and yet all flows into everything else.  It is as if we are riding one wave or the other.
This exercise can be done with virtually any object you choose.  You might hold a cup in your hand and imagine the different phases of that cup from when the clay was taken from the earth to where it is manufactured through a process of ceramics to where it was shipped to some store somewhere to where you bought it to when it winds up on your cupboard to the day when it falls off your table to shatter into dozens of fragments and you sweep it up to toss in the trash and it winds up decomposing in some dump somewhere to become a kind of clay again.  Amazing, isn’t it?
You can even do it on yourself.  Imagine your body coming into being from the sperm and egg from your mommy and daddy, gestating in the womb, when you were a curious little child, learning to walk, your first word, when you learned what the word “I” means, and so on.  Go through elementary school, college, your first kiss, your first sexual experience, marriage, children of your own, getting a job, purchasing a house, all that stuff, the whole gamut of life.  Then see your first gray hairs, retirement, the nursing home, your last breath, rotting in the grave, eventually merging back into the biosphere.  The latter can be a little scary, but if you can look at it from beyond, you realize all that you believe you are is just another wave on the vast ocean of the universe.  And, once you understand what that means, that can really be very liberating.
THE SEED OF ALL THAT IS

Hold a seed in your hand or between your thumb and forefinger, such as a apple seed or the core of a peach.  Gaze intently at this seed and contemplate the fact that there is a whole potential tree that could emerge from this seed, if given proper conditions such as good soil, plenty of water, warmth, and sunshine.  This seed IS that plant that can emerge.  Furthermore, reflect on the fact this seed is from the fruit of a real tree that gave birth to it.  
That fruit is made to be nourishment for other living beings.  Chew on the fruit where the seed came from.  Consider how it being digested in your body to become one with you.  This seed will emerge from your body or some other living body,  The excrement will merge with the topsoil and provide nourishment for it to grow in.  The plant growing from this seed you are holding will go on to produce more fruit with more seeds.  Contemplate this Great Cycle which goes on endlessly, mutating from one form into another, yourself included.
You could even go further to merge with  your own seed, that of the human species within your genitals.  This seed yearns to merge with the seed of another of your own kind.  Consider how this seed going from generation to generation could mutate into a New and Wiser Humanity.  Feel the eagerness of this Supreme Life Force within all living beings to make more of  their kind.
All new things begin with an idea, a mental construct.  The idea which flashes in your mind today can be the seed of some new form, some new invention, some new work of art, a new way of interacting, a new way of Be-ing.
This very instant NOW is the potential seed of countless futures which can emerge from this moment.  And this moment is the result of endless past points in time from which there are countless possibilities.  Focus on the potential of All That Is.  Consider how once upon a time the BIG BANG resulted in this vast Universe and all its myriad forms and living beings achieving greater and greater heights of consciousness.
An idea you have can be the seed of some new form, some new invention, some new work of art, a new way of interacting, a new way of Be-ing.




I AM, THEREFORE I AM

This exercise is more of a “thinking” meditation.  In this exercise, it is perfectly ok to think and even engage in imagery all you want - as long as you stick to the general theme.  If you find your mind wandering off the topic and getting into personal stuff, try to stop it before it gets out of hand, and think about how that applies to this theme.  To focus on one topic for the entire length of your session is a challenge in itself.
We’ll start with the French philosopher Rene Descartes’ most quoted saying:  “I think, therefore I am.”  Your job is to really think about that and take it apart every way you can.  Approach it like one of those Zen koans that don’t make a lot of sense, but somehow by working through it enough, you’ll attain satori.  
How much sense does that statement really make?  Descartes seems to be implying that the sheer act of thinking is what makes one exist.  Now, Descartes was a philosopher, and philosophers do a lot of thinking, and thinking must have really been this man’s favorite activity, so it is only natural that it is while thinking, that he feels that he is existing.  Would that mean that by stopping thinking, Mr. Descartes would cease to be?  Did he stop existing if he fell asleep or he passed out from indulging too heavily in his favorite alcoholic brew while thinking so intently about his existence?
How true is this statement for you?  Do you feel that thinking is what makes you exist?  If you happen to be the sort of intellectual type that Mr. Descartes obviously was, thinking would indeed be the basic fulcrum of your existence.  
            But what if you prefer to feel?  You tend to feel a lot of intense emotions such as love, happiness, sadness, fear, pain, etc.  Then you would be far more likely to say, “I feel, therefore I am.”   Would the lack of feeling make you feel as though you had ceased to exist?
Maybe you are a pretty active person, and just don’t feel ‘alive’ unless you are doing something, taking action, grabbing the world with your hands and feet.  You would probably come to the conclusion, “I act, therefore I am.”  And should you become absolutely paralyzed all over, you would probably feel there was no basis for your existence and die of despair.
One could just as well say things like:  “I walk, therefore I am.”  “I weep, therefore I am.”  “I drive, therefore I am”.  “I wash dishes, therefore I am.”  “I sex (verb), therefore I am.”  “I orgasm, therefore I am.”  “I eat, therefore I am.”  “I dream, therefore I am.”  “I meditate, therefore I am.”  “I see, therefore I am.”  “I hear, therefore I am.”  
Feel in the blank:  “I ______ , therefore I am.”  Feel it in with various activities that you normally engage in, and see how it makes you feel.  Think about being unable to do those activities and see how that makes you feel.   It would be especially educational to catch yourself in the act of those things and ponder on this.  (This would be what G.I. Gurdjieff would call “Self-Remembering”.
At this stage, you may start to wonder if it is doing/feeling/thinking something or not is what in fact defines this “I”.  If you eliminated all of these, you’d be stripped down to:  “I am, therefore I am.”  There is something a bit silly about this statement.  You’re saying you exist because you exist.  Like saying, “I think, therefore I think.”  Or:  “I _______, therefore I ________.”  Try filling in the blanks and see where it puts you.
Here is another exercise:

Singular:

I  AM…	(Just as it is)
I AM ME…   	(Consider who or what that is)
I AM YOU…	(Think of someone right in front of you)
I AM HIM…	(Think of someone you frequently interact with)
I AM HER…	(Think of someone you frequently interact with)
I AM THAT…(Think of some object or living being “out there”)
I AM THIS…  (Think of some object or living being “here”)

Plural:

I AM US…		(Think of a group you are involved with)
I AM EACH
ONE OF YOU…	(Think of each person in group you are addressing)
I AM ALL OF YOU…(Think of that group as a whole)
I AM THEM…	(Think of a group you have little or no interaction with)
I AM THOSE…	(Think of a group of objects or living beings “out there”)
I AM THESE…	(Think of a group of objects or living beings “in here”)
I AM ALL…		(Think of all and everything that is)

I AM NO THING	(Consider what that is)
I AM NO BODY	(See yourself as not having a body)
I AM NO ONE	(See yourself as not having an identity)

Most of you will remember the teacher writing that schematic of “singular person” vs. “plural person” (or singular object vs. plural objects).  Then under each category she wrote first person, second person, and third person.  The purpose of this exercise is to go beyond your usual conception of being “I” and “me” exclusively.  Here you are altering your identity to identify with someone or something else.
It is useful here to visualize someone or something you are actually involved with.  For example, you may think of a good friend as either “you” or “him/her”.  It is even more liberating to consider someone who you are antagonistic to; this will help set the stage for forgiveness.
In the plural mode, it is useful to consider a group you identify with, at a job, in a gathering, a poltical or religious group, a town, a nation, etc.  It will also expand your point of view to consider those you identify as “enemies”.  This will set the stage for peace.
When you are in the midst of your day-to-day interactions, attempt to do this.  For example, identify with someone passing by.  When you are talking to an individual or group, do this exercise in your head.
At the end, you let go of identifications.  Just be.
In the above, which could be called “flexible identification”, there are many interesting possibilities to explore.  
In the first person, singular and plural, “I AM ME” and “I AM US”, there is complete identification.  “I” and “WE” are subjective.  
Then in the second person, singular and plural “I AM YOU”, you are with someone, addressing that particular person or group of people.  This level creates a separation between you and the other.  However, on this level, there is relationship, the two are talking to one another, sharing thoughts and feelings, planning together, attempting to understand one another.  This level can be intimate or it could be some kind of argument, but it is relationship.  
In the third person, singular or plural, “HIM, SHE, IT” or “THEM”, there is complete separation.  Now you are talking about someone over there, either to yourself or with another in 2nd person mode.  I am here and they are over there.  This is the objective mode, where there is separation between you and who or what you are studying, doing experiments on; this is the mode that scientists and philosophers tend to be in.  You can also put a distance between you and some part of yourself, observing programmed reactions and thoughts.  
(Pure objectivity is rare; there always tend to be implicit assumptions which may blind the person to other possibilities.  Also, in this mode of separation, one becomes alienated from what one is studying; the universe then becomes full of separate objects and people.)
The difference between “THIS” and “THAT” is useful to take a closer look at.  This implies there is a boundary between “HERE” and “THERE”.  As we discussed before, where is this boundary.  For example, all the objects in your home are “THESE”; all the objects in someone else’s home are “THOSE”.  The chair you are sitting in is “this” chair.  The chair next to you is “that” chair.  Or “this” town or “that” town, “this” country and “that” country, “we” and “them”.  This boundary can be as close or far as you choose.  The boundary does not exist in reality; it is a figment of your imagination.
This “flexible identification” exercise can be performed in other ways.  For example, in each mode, we start with “WE ARE” instead of “I AM”.  This could be perfectly adaptable to every exercise in this book.  For example:
WE ARE ME…			WE ARE US…
WE ARE YOU…			WE ARE ALL OF YOU…
WE ARE HIM/HER/IT…		WE ARE THEM…
The above in each mode could start with the affirmations:  “YOU ARE”, “SHE IS”, “ALL OF YOU ARE”, “THEY ARE”.  Try each of these, play around with them, allow your innate creativity to create possibilites.  And, as suggested before, do it in your day-to-day life.
In any case, this should liberate you from what you usually consider yourself to be.  It will also make you more creative.
Here is an exercise I would call “selective perception”.  This is a method of picking out a certain zone of perception, then shutting out everything around it.  Let us begin:
From the vantage point of your meditation position, pick out some particular object right in the center of your field of vision.  An example would be a coffee cup.  Look exclusively at this coffee cup.  Don’t move your eyes, keep them frozen in that position.  (This takes some training, since our eyes are instinctively programmed to keep shifting around to make sure we’re not missing something.)
Shut out everything around that coffee cup until it becomes the only thing you see.  After a few minutes, everything will become blurry and appear to be melting away.  Keep looking at it, take note of all the details on it, every stain, every crack, every color, the light, the shadows.
Now do the very opposite – see everything around the coffee cup, but utterly avoid seeing it.  Do it as if the cup is something you don’t want to see, you refuse to acknowledge its existence, it is some hallucination and it is not real.  Make your vision peripheral.  If you do this intently enough, the coffee cup will actually disappear.  One way to achieve this is to move the focus of your eyes.  Either zoom in or zoom out.
This does not necessarily need to be done with eyesight.  You might focus on a particular sound, and shut out all the other sounds.  We do this all the time, when talking in a noisy environment, such as a restaurant or a party.  Or try focusing exclusively on the sensations in your right kneecap.  An itchy sensation is a good one, just focus on that single itch and your urge to scratch it.
One cool thing to try out is sit on a low wall on the street or  on the floor out in a dance.  Now just watch people’s feet by keeping your gaze at that level.  Just see walking or dancing feet.  Watch how those feet interact with each other.  Now keep your gaze on chest level, just look at people’s chests.  Then just watch those talking heads.  Movie-makers and photographers play with this sort of thing all the time.  You are just creating your own kind of experimental movie.  You are the film-maker and you are making your own film.

WHO AM I?

OK, so what is this “I” anyway?  For that matter, what does the “am” mean?  When you think about “I”, what does that do for you.  Is it your body, your name, your personality, your feelings, your reputation, your possessions?  Will loss of any one of those things mean you cease to be?  Or is there some consciousness that continues to survive.
But those are merely extensions of what “I” am; they are not this “I”.  Try as it may, the “I” cannot see itself, simply because the “I” is that which is doing the seeing.  But because the “I” can’t be concretely nailed down or defined in any way, does that mean “I” cease to exist?  I will let you tussle with that one for yourself.
Ditto for the “AM” part.  Does it mean the state of existing?  Is it kind of like the “=” sign in math, denoting an equivalence.  Usually you use “AM” as in “I = _____”.  Or is it the state of awareness, consciousness.  Consciousness is what you can be, not a thing, not something ‘out there’.  You can only experience it.  Do you?
A useful exercise to top this all off with would be to breathe in deeply intoning, “I”.  Then breathe outwards slowly intoning, “AM”.  Silently ponder on the meaning of these words as you breathe in and out.  Do not so much do such an intense linguistic analysis of their meanings or engage in acute intellectual dissection.  Attempt to go beyond that to experience your “I-ness” and your “AM-ness”.  Simply be pure consciousness.
Throughout the course of the day, if you can remember to do it, do this exercise.
SEARCHING FOR THE ELUSIVE “I”

The previous exercise is a take off on the “Who Am I?”  query.  A good way to start it is to breath deeply intoning “I” on the inbreath and “AM” on the outbreath.   Do that for approximately five minutes and try to clear your mind for what is to come.  Attempt to do this while you are reading these words.
What you will do next is continue to breathe deeply and rhythmically as possible, continuing with the “I AM” mantra.  Meanwhile you will ponder on just what your “I” is.  When you say “I”,  just where do you picture it?
It probably depends on what kind of person you are.  If you feel your sense of “I-ness” in your brain, you are undoubtedly a pretty intellectual person.  You do lots of thinking over things before making any decisions.  If you feel your sense of “I-ness” in your chest or gut, you are likely a rather emotional person, given to flights of one emotion or the other.  If you tend to feel your sense of “I-ness” in your body, you are probably a physically active person and are very much into athletics of one sort or the other; you tend to react to situations with immediate physical action.
We are usually taught that our “I” is some kind of central controller that lies within our brains and most people in this society would probably tend to see the “I” there, limited within the confines of our skull.  If you believe this, just make a good attempt to find that “I” there.  What part of the brain do you think this “little person” is?  My own tendency is to picture this “I” as a little driver in my forebrain right behind the eyes; this driver is very busy attempting to make sense of what is going on “out there”, making decisions, then directing the body what to do.  And if there is a “little person” there, just where is the “I” in there?
Where do you feel the boundaries of yourself are?  Does it end with your skin?  Just take a minute to feel your skin.  It might help to close your eyes so what your eyes and mind tell you – and what your skin tells you – do not confuse you.  Just where does the boundary between the air outside, between the cushion you are sitting on, between whatever your arms are resting on, and this skin that is you lie?  Do you actually feel this boundary?  If you sense very carefully, you may discover it is very difficult to sense just where the boundary is.
When you say “’I’ am hungry”, just what is it that is hungry?  Is it actually you who are hungry or is it your stomach.  Does that mean you are your stomach now?  When you feel pain, do you feel pain or is it just that section of skin?  Who is it that feels sexually aroused, this “I” or your genitals?  Try feeling your sole identity right in your little finger.  Are you sitting or are you sitting on yourself?  Are you breathing yourself now?  When you look outwards are you looking at yourself instead of something “out there”?  Attempt to imagine everything “out there” as “in here”.
What is it do you mean when you say “mine” or “my”?  Is that object a part of your being because it belongs to you?  Are you in pain when that object is hurt or taken away from you?  What is it that makes that object so special rather than merely another object?  Why don’t you just lay claim to the blue sky or the whole world?  Just say:  “I hereby declare that this entire world belongs to me, and everyone must evict by the end of the day.”  See the birds in the sky and everyone else as “trespassers”, then realize how psychotic that is.  
Are you your name, rank, and social security number?  Are you your insurance policy?  Are you your reputation?  Are you your personality?  Look carefully and see just what degree of identification you give to these things.  Think about how odd you would feel with a different name, a completely different nationality, or a sex change.  As a thought/imagination exercise, pretend you are a completely different person with a different name and a different set of circumstances.  Get so much into the act, that you ARE the act!  This is actually not very different from what each of us is currently doing.
After spending a certain amount of time with this (and hopefully not going crazy in the meantime), return to the “I AM” mantra and silence all these thoughts.  Just be whatever you are stripped of all these other attributes.  The purpose of this exercise is to delve beneath all the outward trappings of who you believe yourself to be and find your true essence within.

I AM ALL THERE IS

Now we go a bit deeper with the “identity crisis”.  Pick any given object, plant, animal, or even person in your immediate surroundings.  Gaze at it, him, or her, fully taking this into your being.  Then say to yourself “I am THAT.”  Open the boundaries of what you suppose yourself to be and make-believe that other being is also you.
Example:  There is a huge tree out my window.  I penetrate into its being.  I feel myself to be the roots, the trunk, the branches, the flowers, the leaves.  I feel myself rooted there, absorbing solar energy with my leaves.  I expand it so that I am simultaneously in two bodies, one that is the tree, and the other that is this human looking out the window trying to be the tree.
If you have a cat or a dog, that can be an interesting format for this exercise.  I like to observe my cat prowling around, perking up her ears at an interesting sound, gazing slowly around at what could be potential prey.  Or I watch her sitting very still like a perfect meditator, purring on a piece of furniture or the rug, feeling perfectly content with the state of her existence in that posture.  I feel myself as that cat, her concerns, her needs.  Often pet-owners unconsciously do this, it brings them into a more primal state of existence.
If you are a bird-watcher, a bird could serve well for this exercise.  Watch them closely, and pick out a bird for yourself to be.  Fly from branch to branch, look around you for bits and pieces of food to peck at.  Watch how you interact with other birds, how you may be part of the flock.  Sing your heart out at the presence of the sun when it rises, and sing an adieu to the sun as it sinks away into the darkness.  Ruffle your feathers and go to sleep on a branch for the night.
Hold a rock in your hand.  Feel yourself to be that rock.  Feel all the changes you have gone over throughout the ages.  Feel it when you were part of a vast mountain, when you broke off, when you were carried away by a glacier, when you lay at the bottom of a vast ocean, when you traveled through space, the remains of a shattered planet.
You may be surprised at the results you may get.  You will see how malleable the boundaries of identity actually are.  You can be whoever or whatever you want to be.  You may experience a unique liberation as a result of this.
Finally you may meditate upon the following formula:  “I AM ALL THERE IS.”  Feel how everything around you is but an extension of you.  Feel how this bulk of flesh you have been taught that you are is actually an extension of everything around you.  Feel how everything flows with everything else, how all forms are infinitely changing, one into the other.  What seems to be absolutely set boundaries are only that way in this instance of time but may be something entirely different in a future instance.  Think about this not so much in the abstract, but think of specific examples which would empirically prove this.  
For example, that car that went by will be a piece of rusted metal in a junk yard eventually.  And that will become metamorphosed into some piece of iron ore in ages to come.  That building will be but rubble and scrap in the eventual future.  Your basic concepts you have today may be something entirely different ten years from now - and it will happen so subtly, you won’t even know it!
Look carefully and see what is actually there, not what you conceive to be there.
DISIDENTIFICATION

The next stage of this is a meditation which focuses on disidentification.  Look at this person you believe yourself to be as a complete stranger.  Feel yourself to be utterly trapped within this mass of flesh.  Feel its weight, how it drags you down.  Feel yourself to be an utter slave to its desires, its appetites, its ambitions, its aspirations.  Feel how day in, day out you must work so hard to give it what it needs.  No matter how much you satisfy it, it just wants more and more.  Feel how dragged down you are by the circumstances this body is put in, not only such things as your status or economic level which stubbornly refuses to budge, but the fact that you must breathe air, fill your belly, brush your teeth, visit the doctor, masturbate, get around from one place to another.  Or you have to have that cup of coffee, that drink, that cigarette, that pill, that high, whatever chemical addiction it is.  Feel how dreary it is to serve all those various crying needs of this body you are in.  
Consider how even should you be in better circumstances, there would only be something else you would desperately need, but just can’t have.  Should you be a rich tycoon, you would be a slave to your fortune, terrified day by day the stock market would crash and you would lose every cent of it.  Should you be someone very famous, you would be very dependent on your audience, scared that they would one day reject you.
Then consider what it would be like if you didn’t need this body, if you didn’t need any of these things.  Feel a sense of lightness that you’re in this body, but you’re just going along for the ride.  Wonder what it be like if you were truly free of all these trappings and needs.
GETTING INSIDE YOUR SKIN

Here is an interesting perspective.  It is best to do this stark naked if you are in a situation where you can do this.  Otherwise, simply take note of your skin rubbing against your clothes.
Feel your skin.  Just feel the sense of being inside this skin and what that is like.  Feel the various sensations on all parts of the skin, the itches, the pains, the discomforts, the sense of temperature, whether its cold or hot.  Feel this skin as though it were some sort of weird costume you were wearing.  Feel your face as a mask.
Try this:  Put an ice cube on your skin.  Notice the sensation.  Try to stay with that sensation.  Don’t allow yourself to get used to it.  Keep feeling it as acutely as if you just applied the ice cube.  Similarly, apply something hot to your skin.  Make it as hot as you can without actually causing harm to your skin.
If it is winter, open your windows wide open for a few minutes.  Feel the cold creeping into the room.  Feel the reaction of your skin.  Note how your muscles start to tighten.  Keep feeling it.  Then close the windows and turn the heat up all the way.  See how your skin reacts.
Apply a needle or sharp nail to some part of your skin.  One of your fingers is a good choice, because your hands are most sensitive to these sensations.  Gradually push the needle inwards taking care not to actually pierce the skin.  Be aware of the sensation of pain.  Keep feeling it.
Feel the muscles.  Feel the twitches.  Feel the foot tapping or the fingers rattling.  Feel the heat of the muscles.  Feel the blood pounding through them.
Feel your skeleton.  Feel like some spooky Halloween apparition.  Feel your head as a skull, teeth always grinning eerily.  Feel your spine holding you upright.  Feel your bones giving you your basic shape.
Feel your guts.  Feel your stomach churning, your intestines pushing shit towards their destination, your kidneys squirting out piss into your bladder.  Feel your sex organs squirming between your legs.  Feel your heart pumping and feel yourself as full of blood ready to burst anywhere there’s a cut.  Feel your lungs breathing and gasping in and out, frantically grasping air to maintain the body.  Feel your throat swallowing, your mouth salivating, your nose running.  Feel your eyeballs rolling around in their sockets.  Feel the vibrations of the air pounding on your eardrums.  Feel your brains inside your skull, as if it were a gland secreting thoughts and images.
Feel your basic sense of fleshiness.  Feel your basic body-ness. Feel your entire body contained within your skin holding it all together.  Feel like a bag full of blood and guts and bones and muscles slithering from one spot to another.
You can do this, not only while sitting in a meditative stance, but in the midst of your daily activities.  Whenever you can remember, ask yourself:  “What sensations am I feeling now?”  Then keep feeling those sensations.  Since there are countless sensations going on at any one time, it may be better initially to watch one particular part of your body, your face or your hands, for instance.  When you get better at it, you will be able to achieve complete bodily awareness.
THOUGHT TRACKING

Do you find your mind wandering all over the place?  Do you find it hard to focus on one particular thing?  You start out thinking about one thing, then five minutes later you are thinking about something entirely different.  How did you get there?

Our minds work a lot like surfing on the net.  We do a search for one item, then see another page that catches our eye and we click on that.  Then we go from that to something else that is somewhat related.  An hour later, we are surfing for something that has nothing to do with what we started out with.

Let’s say you started out thinking about errands you need to run.  One of your more pressing problems is you need to go to the grocery store for some vegetables.  Then you wonder if it would be better to get vegetables locally even if it meant a separate trip.  You start thinking about the price of vegetables these days.  Then you start thinking about the price of gas and wondering when they will stop rising.  You start thinking about that funny rattling sound coming from your engine.  You wish you could buy a better car, but you don’t have the money.  You wish you had a better job that is more fulfilling and paid more.  You feel resentful that your employer doesn’t recognize how talented you are.  You start thinking about where you could find another job and feeling how hopeless it is, you’ve tried so many times.  Maybe you should move to another part of the country; it is always so hot around here.  You have a relative who lives in California, maybe she would put you up, while you try to set yourself up.  It would be nice to take a trip to Europe.  What is the political situation over there?  How would dollars convert into euros?  You get on the computer and start looking up air fares, then compare them with shipping fares.  What should you take along with you?

STOP!  Look at this chain of thoughts.  Somehow you got from vegetables to a trip to Europe.  Can you rewind your thoughts and see how that happened?  One way to do this exercise is to set an alarm that goes off every five minutes.  Every five minutes, scribble on a piece of paper what you happen to be thinking about at that time.  Consider whether these have any logical connection with what you were thinking five minutes ago.

It is almost as if different lines of thought push one another to the side to grab hold of your steering wheel.  A lot of these thoughts are thoughts you’ve been thinking over and over before.  Not very much is new; you are spinning your wheels in one direction or another, depending on whatever catches your attention at the time.  It is as if your brain is scared to stop thinking, there has to be a continuous current of thoughts that flow down the most convenient opening at that time.

Do this and you will find out interesting things about yourself.  To become self-aware, you must first know yourself.
SURFING THE MIND-NET

Here is an exercise to attempt next time you go surfing the internet.  Just do what you usually do, start by entering some item or the other on the search engine (usually Google).  On the forefront of your mind, there is something you really want to know about or there is some item you want to buy and get the best possible price and quality.  
Ok, you get on Amazon to shop for a good camera.  Then there is something you notice on the side about a very unique camcorder.  Then you look for reviews about this camcorder and you see one even better with more features for a little more money.  So you start wondering about storage capacity and you start looking for super SDHC cards.  You click on one that’s only $10 and holds 10 gigabytes of memory.  Then you see something about a hard drive that will hold 1000 gigabytes for only $100.  You click there and see something about a great laptop computer that is a compact size between a handheld and the usual size laptop.  You see something about a trip to Bermuda for only $100 for three nights, you need to take a vacation and that laptop would be handy to take along.  So you start clicking on airfares.  You get hypnotized by images of an exotic land.  Then you click on your email to see if there’s anything good and you notice somone answered your personal ad, so you wonder what that’s all about.  You see something in Faces about an old friend you knew from high school.
After an hour of doing this, open up your history to see where you’ve been.  Somehow you got from looking for a camera to considering looking up an old friend.  Note that they have very little to do with one another.
If you don’t have a computer, do this when you go shopping.  Notice how you go from one thing to another.  Take a note of each place you visit, write it or speak into a recorder.  After an hour, compare where you are with what you were looking for originally.  Did you stick with more or less the same thing – or are you somewhere completely different?
This is a good way to observe how our minds are going from one thing to another, forking off into another direction every couple of minutes.  Write down on a piece of paper what you are thinking about now.  An hour from now, using an alarm clock if necessary, stop and write down what you are thinking about now.  Compare them.  Normally, you will see you have diverged quite away from where you were.
Now here is something else to try.  Start thinking about a particular topic.  Keep thinking about it for the next hour.  Don’t think about anything else.  Note how your mind wants to go in other directions.  Bring your attention back to that topic.  Do this on the internet too, stick with a particular topic for one hour.  When you are shopping, only shop for one particular thing and nothing else.
The internet is a particularly good example of how our attention spans are limited, because we can so readily click on something else that grabs our attention.  This will train you to increase your attention span.
PAIN – THE WINDOW OF OPPORTUNITY

There are certain situations which are a unique window of opportunity, what Don Juan called “The Crack Between the Worlds”, a cosmic alarm, Dorothy’s magic shoes.  (The Wizard of Oz is a mystic fable in disquise – all the time, Dorothy had the means right at her feet to go HOME.)  One of these situations is intense excitement and stimulation.  Another of these situations is pain.
Pain is an interesting thing to fasten your attention onto.  Next time, you’ve had an accident and are lying in the hospital with serious pain is a chance to do this exercise.  Or if you just burned yourself on the stove.  Or even if it is some throbbing headache that simply will not go away.  Any kind of constant pain will do.  For beginners, it is best to do this with relatively minor pains.  Then you can work your way up to the life-threatening pains.
Sit still in your usual meditation position at your usual time – and just focus on the pain.  Actually BE the pain.  As you breathe do:

Inbreath:  	I…
Peak:        	AM…
Outbreath:  	THIS (Pain)…
In-Between:  	NOW.

Identify with the pain.  Rather than repress it or deny it, get right into it.  Accept the pain as it is.  It has something to teach you.
You can also use this exercise in a very pragmatic way.  Substitute “Healing” for “This” as in:  “I….  AM… HEALING… NOW”.  Picture the injury fixing itself.  Be right there with those cells rebuilding themselves.  Have faith that your body knows exactly what to do.  I’ve tried this and it actually works!
(To prevent liability, I would also recommend that you go to a doctor and do the usual medical treatment – with a grain of salt, of course!)

Incidentally, this is also applicable to emotional pains.  Try this next time, you break up with someone or have had a falling-out at work.  Or just feel in a bad mood.

OBSERVING THE INTERNAL SCHEDULE BOOK

It can be an interesting meditation to simply observe how much energy you spend in planning things out.  We tend to spend quite a bit of time dwelling in the future.  This is probably because we are conditioned to be this way, especially as we grow up in school and at work.  (Note how much discussion is allotted on a job, where workers or managers discuss planning how to do things, actions, deadlines, etc.)
Watch how you tend to live your life according to some kind of on-going schedule.  You have a schedule for things like when to take out the garbage, when to have your meals, when you’ll go to bed, when to go get groceries, when to do the laundry, when to change the oil in your car, all that stuff you just have to do.  Of course, there’s the job schedule, but that’s not really anything you can do something about - unless you want to quit the job.  This gets to a point where you never do anything spontaneously.  You don’t just eat when you’re actually hungry; you wait until lunchtime or dinnertime for the “proper time” to eat.  You may not even be particularly hungry.  You take the garbage out whether it is full or not until a time you’ve set aside for housecleaning.
You may even schedule your pleasurable activities. You plan when to take your vacation, where you will take your vacation, what you will take with you on your vacation, how things will be maintained at home when you take your vacation.  You have a whole list of what places you will visit, how long you will stay at each place on what day.  You have made just as much “work” out of that vacation as if you were going to your job.  And if it rains or you get sick, your whole vacation is a flop!
You know exactly when you’re going to have sex - right before bedtime on Friday and Saturday nights.  And what if you can’t get particularly worked up for it at those particular times.  You fake it.  How about having sex exactly when you’re feeling horny?  How about having it in the closet or the kitchen in broad daylight, not just the bedroom?
Or on given nights, you have a time scheduled for leisure.  For these hours, you sit down and read.  Or you will watch television or a video.  Or you will go out to a dance or some kind of support group.  You do these things on the same nights for years and years, until you fall asleep halfway through the thing.  You get tired of doing these same things over and over, but you find yourself locked into it from force of habit.  Would it be possible to NOT automatically turn the TV, computer, radio, music, pick up a book or magazine?  Make a serious attempt to pause, ask yourself why you need something to occupy yourself at every moment of the day.
You’ve set up a certain time to sleep, usually for eight hours a night because that’s what you were told is the right amount of time.  Then you become disturbed if you either have insomnia or fall asleep at the “wrong time”.
How about not trying to do anything?  Why don’t you just sit quietly and doing nothing?  Pause before you just go and habitually do something you usually do.  Ask yourself:  “What do I really want to do this very moment?”  Do you actually want to do that or feel you are obligated to do that?  Or are you just doing it out of habit, that’s what you’ve been doing for years.
This exercise is to take note of how you plan out each moment of the day and what a slave that makes you to this abstraction called the “future”.  Look at that internal schedule-book you have in your head, as if there were a list of “check-marks” you click once this is done.  Consider what your life would be like if you lived your life spontaneously, with no schedule at all.

This particular exercise can be done in the midst of everyday life, not just sitting on a cushion in rapt meditation.  In fact, it is better that way.  The trick is to “catch yourself in the act”.  Also, hide your watch and your clocks from yourself.  Notice when you have an urge to check the time, then deliberately don’t do it. 
JUST DO ONE THING AT A TIME

We are constantly distracting ourselves with all the things we have to do all the time.  While we are doing one thing, we are thinking about what we need to do next.  Then we consider what we will do after that – and so on.  We usually have a hundred things going on in this endlessly revised “THINGS TO DO” list.  Check off one, go on to the next.  It goes a little like this:
You get up, thinking about all the things you plan to do that day.  While brushing your teeth, you think about the errands you need to run.  Then you take your pills and run for the coffee, thinking about what you need to do to the computer.  While downloading one thing, you’re reading the email and then turning on the weather report, while thinking about how you should be dressed.  You suddently remember a bill you have to pay while making up your bed.  You wipe down the countertop while thinking about what you should have for dinner that night.   You dress to go outside, while thinking about picking up milk on the way back home.  You’re driving to work while thinking about something you didn’t finish yesterday.
Whatever you are doing, be completely there.  Be in the moment as you are doing it.  Attempt to refrain from thinking about what you are going to be doing next.  Catch yourself in the act of planning the next thing, and stop it.  
There are certain activities which are conducive to this.  Any activity that is long and repetitious tends to be one of those times when you are planning things.  Driving, for example, is an excellent opportunity for being in the moment.  Simply watch the road and be aware of the present situation.  Do your meditation in that moment constantly remembering “I AM HERE NOW”.  Breathe deeply and say:  
“I am driving right now.  I see an intersection, now I am putting my foot on the brake.  I am waiting for the light to change.  I need to slow down for that truck making a left turn.  I am putting on my turn signal to turn right on that road there.  I am making sure nothing is coming from either way.  I am right here driving miles and miles along this long stretch of highway.”  
This will have the additional benefit of being a very safe driver.  All accidents occur when either you or the other driver are not being in the present moment.
This is actually true of all activites.  We cut ourselves with a knife on the chopping block when we are planning to do something else.  Or we burn ourselves with scalding water.  Or we trip over the stairs.
Play it safe.  Just do one thing at a time.  There is no hurry.  You have plenty of time to do all the things you need to do.  And if you don’t get to do all those things, so what?  It is more important to do one thing with full attention and completely than to do hundreds of things half-heartedly and incompletely. 

DON’T MAKE IT HAPPEN…
LET IT HAPPEN!

This is a good meditation to complement the “NO PLAN” meditation:  Don’t MAKE it happen; LET it happen.  We spend a lot of psychic energy approaching situations with the attitude we have to force something to occur.  We have to convince someone to see things our way.  We have to spend a lot of energy to get what we want from someone.  We have to really WORK to get this problem fixed.  We do it with an attitude that it’s going to be a real hassle – and somehow this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
We approach it as if we are trying to pick up a very heavy rock, breaking our back over it.  It’s much easier to use of lever, to work with gravity instead of against it,   Or wait until the ground is loose enough; do it after a good rainfall.
Guys:  I’m sure you can appreciate this analogy.  We want to make a good impression on this very attractive woman or our ongoing mate; we want to show her a good time – and have a good time ourselves while we’re at it.  We want to remember this as a nice experience.  So we’re very anxious about it.  We’re very careful to push the right buttons, to get her worked up and breathing hard, moaning and calling out your name.  Then:
Drats!  The damn thing just won’t get hard!  We yell at it, we curse it, we frantically stroke it to get it going.  She offers oral or hand stimulation to make it work, it just won’t go no matter what you or she does.
The irony is:  That kind of effort never works.  If we just relax, expecting nothing, being open to it, it happens of its own accord.  If we just say it’s no big deal, it was a good time, no need to have an orgasm everytime – then we get good and hard again.  We no longer need to try to make it last exactly ten minutes, it just does it at its own pace.
(Incidentally, I’m sure the same kind of thing happens to the girls out there.  You’re anxious to get turned on and have a great orgasm, then your effort keeps it from happening.  You’d hate to be “frigid”.  Instead of being right in that moment, perhaps you’re remembering you got hurt by someone in the past, you’re worried this is going to be a repeat, so you just can’t get into it.)
A useful visualization would be to fantasize things coming your way.  Someone approaches you and offers you something.  The situation becomes ripe to happen.  You stumble upon just what you were looking for when you just forget about it and give up your attachment to results.  Experiment with this and see what it does to your actual life situation.
This same thing is applicable to the process of meditation itself.  It’s impossible to go into that magical space within, by saying:  “OK, I have 30 minutes to meditate now.  I have to stop all my usual thought patterns NOW.”  It’s not like that.  Instead, you have to let it go, just allow your thoughts to do whatever they want to do, settle down.  Then you find yourself right here in the moment, breathing deeply, in perfect focus.  Just be there.  It is the very opposite of making effort, let it be effortless, stop clinging to that branch on the side of the river and go with the flow.
CONSCIOUS WAITING

We usually picture the practice of meditation as a special time, a special place, a given number of minutes to stay still, do nothing, think nothing.  Most introductory books and courses on meditation prescribe sitting crosslegged with a straight back, sitting on a special meditation cushion, keeping a special corner of your room, perhaps with an alter of the sitting Buddha and a burning stick of incense (to keep the time?).  Breathe deeply, focus on your breath, repeat a mantra.  The more introductory versions prescribe 20 minutes; this is for the jet-set who are always in a hurry and 20 minutes is a tremendous challenge to sit still that long.  I myself would prescribe at least 45 to 60 minutes.  I know it takes me twenty minutes just to quieten down and start really getting into it.  Doing it first thing when you get up and last thing before you go to bed are particularly good times.
All of these are useful for developing a steady practice, but I don’t think any of that is absolutely necessary.  If your feet start falling asleep, go ahead and find another comfortable position.  Sit back in a cushy armchair.  Do it anywhere you feel like it.  Take as much time as you feel you can spare.  Do it different times of the day, see what works for you.
There are many situations in the course of our busy lives when we find ourselves held up, prevented from going on to the next thing.  Time-spaces like that are ideal to STOP, breathe very deeply and go into it.  Waiting in line at the grocery store is a great place; while that customer with a stacked basket full of 5 for the price of 1 items is loading that stuff on the conveyor belt and the girl is pecking away at the keys, making a mistake so she has to call the manager to re-type it – NOW you can say:  I AM RIGHT HERE WAITING.  You may have five or ten minutes here, so instead of fuming with impatience because it’s taking so long, you’ve got this window of opportunity to MEDITATE!
Traffic jams, especially where they are doing some kind of construction work, are an ideal spot.  Turn off that stereo player, mute your cell phone, and just be there.  Those visits to the MD are notorious for time-consumption, while you’re waiting about 20 or 30 minutes for the nurse to finally call your name, just sit still, close your eyes, and BE HERE NOW.
Lately, I find my computer taking forever to boot up, minutes where it used to be seconds, probably because of increasing quantities of data and increasing complex programs to process.  I would find myself losing my temper, gritting my teeth, wishing the damn thing would hurry up, I want to see my e-mail or write this book.  Now I realize it’s a lot better to just sit and be in that moment – instead of frantically hitting keys, looking at my manual and making calls to the computer manager.
You will undoubtably find numerous opportunities to do this practice of CONSCIOUS WAITING.


BEING IN UNCOMFORTABLE SITUATION

One interesting thing to do is to put yourself in a public situation and spend your meditation session there, preferably somewhere that makes you somewhat uncomfortable.  At the risk of looking sort of weird, sit crosslegged on a sidewalk or something like that.  Somewhere like a bus stop or a subway would be ideal for this.  Normally when we go out in public, we are constantly hurrying from one place to another.  This is an opportunity to watch other people scurrying around in their busy lives.
Pick out certain people and observe them discreetly.  Try to put yourself in their place and be in their minds, as if you were that person.  (Incidentally, this is an initial introduction to learning how to read minds.)  Look at all those people in their cars, wondering where they are going, all tucked away in their comfortable steel shells, oblivious to the world outside, talking on their cell phones, having a conversation with the person next to them.  What kind of life has that old woman lived; what were her hopes and dreams, what held her back?  What happened with that guy sleeping on the bench?
I know for myself that being in a public place makes me very uncomfortable.  There is always an underlying paranoia that people are looking at me, wondering who I am, thinking I am weird because I am doing something a bit strange.  I’m not sure if others feel the same thing; I suspect that is true.  Perhaps all those people are too concerned about their public image to be particularly concerned about what you are doing.  If you sit still enough, you somehow become invisible.  People simply bounce off you, because you seem so withdrawn, deep in thought.
I have had the experience of seeing the current civilization before my eyes and then visualizing where all this is going to be hundreds of years from now.  Will these buildings be even more elaborate and higher?  Or will there be a complete collapse of this present civilization?  Will all this be rubble in a growing forest all around?  Or time travel into the past, visualizing when there were horses and a dirt road instead of cars and pavement?  Go to when this was all a forest, a glacier, deep under water, whatever.  Ponder on how it all goes in a circle.  Then notice sprigs of plants growing between the cracks of sidewalk here and there.
One way to play with this is to deliberately dress in a somewhat odd way, completely out of character for you.  Or walk in a peculiar way, swaying from side to side.  Stop walking, turn in a complete circle, then go on walking.  Do this in a very subtle way.
Observe your self-consciousness.  Try to objectify whether anyone is actually paying any attention to this – or are they giving you a wide berth figuring you’re some mentally ill person that got let out prematurely from closing hospitals.  Perhaps they don’t even notice, they are too busy worrying about whether they are dressed properly for the occasion, trying to make themselves inconspicous, hoping they won’t stand out somehow.
Watch your discomfort.  This is the way to finding out who you are.
EXPERIENCE YOUR EMOTIONS

Many of us are trained to be intellectual, looking at things objectively, repressing emotions.  Our education is geared to this; only the mind is exercised and trained to take things apart, compare/contrast those parts, and then put them together in a new combination.  There is physical education, to exercise our bodies by doing athletic activities.  Yet, strangely enough, there is no education for emotions.
	The emotions do not go away.  They are lingering in the background as we plan and do our calculations, constantly balancing some budget in our heads.  We feel pain, fear, anguish, love, ecstasy, anger, relief and such.  Blatant expression of those emotions are implicitely forbidden, considered uncool.
	Women are usually better at feeling and expressing their emotions, though even they are attempting to appear more “objective” in their attempts to fit into a man’s world.  The following exercise would be particularly good for men or people who are over-intellectual.
	Breathe deeply and take note of what emotions you happen to be feeling.  Are you feeling sad, happy, angry?  Get into feeling that emotion, dig into it, express that emotion.  One approach to this is to conjure up certain emotions and blatantly express them:
	Anger:  Remember the things that really piss you off.  Growl, shout, pound your fist on the floor, tear out your hair, have a pillow and hit it as you would at the person or thing that makes you angry.
	Hate:  This is a version of anger.  Think of someone you hate, how you wish that person were dead, how you want to take revenge.  Gnash your teeth, tense the muscles in your face while you feel that hate.
	Sadness:  Get into something that makes you unhappy or depressed.  Be completely in that depression.  Try to cry.  This may be difficult to conjure up, but make the motions of crying as if you were an actor making it look convincing.  Or lay on the floor in abject hopelessness, wanting to end it all.
	Fear:  Cover your eyes.  Tense up your body.  Bite your fingernails.  Scream in terror.  Think of the thing that makes you feel very afraid, your worst fears.  Run as fast you can, trying to get away from something or someone who will kill or maim you.
	Happiness:  Think of something that made you very happy.  Smile, sigh in relief that you finally go this thing you want, you finally united with someone you wanted to be with, laugh out loud, jump for joy, weep with ecstasy!
	Love:  Think of someone you love.  Get into the feeling of loving that person.  What is it about this person that makes you cherish/value him/her?  Pay attention to your breathing when you love someone, the way tears come to your eyes or the way you smile as you feel that love.
	Calmness:  Feel that sense of complete equanamity when you feel balanced, in a state of freedom from fear and anger, a wonderful feeling of bliss at reaching the state where you no longer need anything or anybody.  At last, you can completely relax and be right in the moment, you are carefree, contented to just be.


I…  LOVE…  ALL… THAT… IS…

This is a somewhat different twist.  For all the preceding exercises, substitute the word “LOVE” for “AM”.  Feel a sense of compassion for the entire universe, in particular to the human race and this planet.  Let that sense of compassion create an expansion of consciousness – like the rays of the sun illuminating this planet and providing enery and nourishment for all biological beings.
Love is an emotion with different levels.  There is a personal kind of love, more egocentric, such as:  “I love chocolate cheese cake after a juicy pastrami sandwich.”  “I love to read this kind of book or watch this kind of movie or listen to this kind of music.”  “I love this person who gives me so much pleasure (usually sexual).”  “I love this person who is so generous to me.”  “I love all my possessions which give me such an identity of being myself.”  “I love having this house or this apartment.”  “I love this job which pays me so much money so I can spend it on all the things I love”.  “I love my children who are an extension of myself who will live on after I die.”  “I love my spouse who shares his/her life with me.”  “I love my friends who are there for me when I need them.”  You may experiment with focus on these kinds of love; you may discover things about yourself that you hadn’t noticed before.  This is what people mean when they use the word love and the sort of love that pop tunes refer to.
Then you can attempt to make this love more expansive, going beyond the boundaries of your self.  Try to love the stranger you see passing in the street.  Try to love the squirrel you see gathering nuts.  Try to love the ancient tree that grows and provides fruit and nuts for animals who live in it.  Love the wind.  Love the water.  Love the planet.
Another twist to this would be to attempt to love those who are not so nice to you.  Love the businessman who ripped you off.  Love the employer who fired you.  Love the person who rejected you and wouldn’t give you what you needed.  Love the enemy who fired upon you.  Love the person who raped you.  Love the people who make war on others.  Love the people who do harm to this planet.  This is very difficult to do, start with loving persons who did relatively minor injuries to you.  For example, love the person who insulted you or refused to share your point of view.  Or just love the people who you can’t relate to.   This is the art of forgiveness. 
One way to do this would be to attempt to see that person’s point of view.  This person had some compelling reason, some mismatch of circumstances who led him or her to do this bad thing to you.  Maybe he was short of cash and no one would hire him.  Maybe he was pressured by his government to drop bombs on you.  Maybe he had someone to support.  Maybe he couldn’t pay his rent and was in danger of being homeless.  Or perhaps this person is simply at a low level of evolution – but given time, he or she will learn from mistakes in the past – and will become a better person in the future.
Finally love all people on this planet.  Love all beings.  Love all life.  Love the totality of the universe.  Love all consciousness.  Love being exactly who you are now.

BIRTH-DAY

This day happens to be my birth-day.  This physical body which is writing these words is 57 years old.  This means that the planet Earth has revolved 57 times around our home star since this physical body emerged out of the womb in which it developed.  I have a vague memory of resisting this event; they tell me my mother spent 3 days having me.  Perhaps I saw some pre-view of this lifetime and did not want to go through with it.
Perhaps I was getting tired of being born again and again.
For some reason, this event, the counting of years since we were born is a special event.  We count number of years to define our status, whether we are permitted to drive, whether we are defined as adults or minors, whether we are young or not, whether we are able to get social security and retire.  There is usually some kind of ritual connected with it:  the singing of a song, candles on a birthcake, presents, a special greeting, and such.
The birthday is considered to be where we began to come into existence.  As soon as we take our first breath, we are a separate being from our mother.  For nine months, we were like a separate organ within the body of our mother.  It was very cozy in there, being fed through a fleshy tube, listening to the breathing and heartbeat of our mothers while she went about her daily activities.  Being born was extremely traumatic, being kicked out of this situation, forced to be in a strange world of lights and sounds.
Is it really true that this is where we began?  Didn’t we really begin when our mother and father were having a very nice time with each other, when our father’s sperm united with our mother’s egg?  Once we were two, male and female, now we are one, another being.
We can go even further back with this.  Two persons formed our mother on one side, our father on the other side.  And so on.  It is as if the person you are is formed by an infinite number of roots, all our ancestors going through the ages of history.  
Or did you begin when that chimpanzee frowned and started playing around with sticks and stones.  That clever chimp discovered he could dig up tasty roots with a sharp stick, dig into an anthill for those delicious ants.  She could throw a rock and kill a predator.  The chimps discovered they could become predators themselves.  Did it begin when that initial mutation of chimp into human?
Did it begin with the first mammals scrurrying beneath the feet of the giant reptiles?  Did it begin when the frog decided to move away from water?  Did it begin when the first fish climbed out of the water?  Did it begin when single cells united to form organisms?  Or did it begin with that first chain of DNA among organic molecules in the ocean?
Perhaps our true birth is when the planet Earth came together from rocks floating in space attracted to become something bigger than they originally were.  Or was it when the sun formed?
Ultimately as we go back in time, it could be our birth began with the BIG BANG!  The BIG BANG was akin to a cosmic orgasm that gave birth to all the matter and energy in this universe.  Logically, we could say we are 15-20 billion years old!
But what was there before the BIG BANG?  Why did this momentous event happen just then?  There must have been something before that.  And before that.  And so on.
Perhaps we have no beginning.  Perhaps we have no end.  We are endlessly reforming from one thing into another.

PUT IT ALL ON HOLD

	Take a break, for God’s sake!  God wants you to take a break now, not to get so crazy on all those things that usually bug you.  Turn off that damned computer!  Take your phone off the hook!  Lock your door.  Tell everyone not to disturb you for the next twenty four hours.  Take a whole day being completely in the moment.
Altering your location is useful here.  Spend the night somewhere else by yourself or with someone else who is doing this with you.  Going camping somewhere is a good thing to do.  Or just spend the night in a motel somewhere.  Housesit at someone’s place.  Just be away from your usual stuff and all those routines associated with it.
Maintain an inner silence during this period.  Ignore your thoughts about what you “ought” to be doing.  You do not need to do anything.  Be right here.  Get into the strangeness of your temporary location.
You can even do this at home, but clean your place thoroughly and put everything away.  When you put something away, do not think about what you were doing with it or plan to do with it.  If you can, make a special room with absolutely the bare minimum of furniture.  The bedroom is a better spot for this; if you want to do it in the living room, make sure it is absolutely distraction-free – as if you were inviting a very special guest there.
During this time, be thoroughly in the present moment.  Be very satisfied with where you are now.

ACHIEVING BODILY AWARENESS


Here is a good exercise for increasing bodily awareness.   This is an extension of the “skin exercise” mentioned earlier.  Focusing on bodily awareness is a very basic method of attaining a tight focus on this moment here and now.  After all, our most basic sense of “here-ness” starts with the body.
First of all, be aware of yourself as a body – or, if you feel more dissociated from your body, picture yourself as a being within a body.  Pay careful attention to the boundary of your body, starting with your skin.  Focus on different parts of your bodily boundary.  Within this boundary is “you”; outside of this boundary is “not-you”.   That is the general assumption we tend to have.
Feel the weight of your body on your buttocks if you are sitting or on your feet if you are standing.  Take very careful notice of the sensations you feel there.  Feel how your clothes rub against your body.  Observe the difference in sensation between the part of your body that is clothed and the part of your body which is unclothed.  Pay heed to any itchy sensations.  Notice the temperature, are you a bit cool, are you feeling hot, or what.  It can be particularly useful to do this exercise unclothed.
You can also do this in the midst of activity.  For example, as I am typing these words, I am feeling the sensations on the tips of my fingers, my thumb hitting the space bar whenever I come to the end of a word, and so on.  You may be holding this page or seeing it on the screen.  Notice your sensations.
Whenever you are handling something, feel the sensations in your palms, the pressure of your palms on what you are holding.  Try holding different objects – compare the difference between holding an orange or holding a rock or holding a tool.
Let us move to sensations within the body.  Feel your internal organs, what they are doing.  Notice sensations in your stomach and intestines – such as a subtle churning or digested food moving through your intestines.  After having a meal, feel the sensations of your digestive system at work.  Attempt to feel your liver, your pancreas, your gall bladder.  Next time you take a pee, feel the sensation of your urine moving through the tube, the relief in the pressure in your bladder.  Do the same when you are doing a BM.
Now let’s move to the circulatory system.  Feel the beating of your heart.  Notice when it beats harder and when it beats slower.  Feel the blood moving through your major veins.  Feel that insistent throbbing in all parts of your body.  Attempt to feel all of it operating at once.  See if you can feel your blood pressure.  (If you achieve sufficient concentration, there is the possibility of control.)
Feel your breathing.  This is what we have been doing in meditation all along, paying attention to the rate of your breath, consciously slowing it down, being aware of this rise and fall.  Feel the oxygen pulsing through your body as you take a deep breath; feel the CO2 waste as you allow your breath to fall in a long sigh.  Feel that moment of oxygen deprivation between your breaths, the urgency in taking another breath.
Feel the sensations of your muscles moving.  Try clenching and unclenching various muscles (without actually moving).  When you are in a state of exercising, feel your muscles moving.  Pay close attention to the tendons between limbs.
Feel your skeleton.  Notice how it gives your body shape.  If you have a broken bone or dislocated joint, pay attention to it.  You may even note that this will reduce the perception of “pain” as you accept it for what it is.
Now feel your nervous system.  Feel the neural impulses shooting throughout your body, giving subtle shocks to stimulate muscles. Notice how your nerves give you sensations in your skin.  Barely stick the tip of a needle on your skin and notice that shock of your nerve impulse.  Or pay attention to your sexual sensations as you feel aroused by some stimuli or person in your presence.
Listen very carefully to the sound of your auditory nerves in an absolutely silent environment, you may note a ringing or distinct buzz akin the humming of an electrical generator.  (This is often called “The Sound of Silence”).  
Close your eyes and watch the darkness behind your eyelids; you will probably see patterns, bubbles moving.  Take a deep breath through your nostrils and notice what you smell deep inside your nose, at the peak of your sinus cavity .  (This is right next door to the pineal gland, said to be the site of the “third eye”.)  You may notice some very subtle scents, akin to the smell of electrical discharge.  Taste your tongue, the saliva being generated.
The advantage of the above exercises is you can either do them sitting still or in the act of motion.  Next time you get up and walk somewhere, feel the sensation of your legs moving.  Pay attention to subtle sensations, not the obvious sensations without, but the sensations within.  
This may even open the door for you to become aware of extrasensory phenomena.  While you are paying attention to the sound of your auditory nerves, for example, you may hear the thoughts of another person or you may hear an internal voice guiding you to achieve a state of more intense awareness.  You may see interesting geometrical patterns behind your eyelids, energy patterns in the room, from the tips of the fingers, from the crown of a person’s head..  Just give it a try and see what it does for you.



Facial Yoga
Position yourself in front of a mirror.  Look very carefully at this physical body you consider to be yourself.  This the face-mask you constantly present to others.  When you go out in public, you are constantly positioning the muscles of your face in synchrony with others.  When someone smiles at you, you automatically smile back, because this is what you have been trained to do.  When someone frowns at you, you frown back.  There is a certain game with eye-contact.  When you are afraid of someone, you do not make eye-contact.  You do not make eye-contact with total strangers; both of you look away.  When you are in the presence of a friend, eye-contact comes more readily.
	Make eye-contact with yourself in the mirror.  How does that feel?  Stare continously at your own eyes, do not avert your eyes.  If you do this steadily enough, your face will begin to melt away and your eyes will start shining as if there were two brilliant supernovae.
Experiment with facial expressions.  Frown, look deep in thought, pull your eyes apart, stick your tongue out at yourself, smile broadly, look depressed.  When you make these facial expressions, how does this make you feel?  Ask yourself if your moods determine your facial expressions – or do your facial expressions determine your mood.
Breathe in.  As you breath in, let the corners of your mouth gradually expand outwards until you have wide smile on your face.  As you breathe outwards, expose your teeth into a smile of ecstasy as if the most wonderful thing you can imagine just happened to you.  You just won a million dollars!  You just got laid with the most beautiful person you can possibly desire.  You finally got that promotion you wanted.  You just bought a great new house and you are moving in.  You are driving a brand new car out of the parking lot.  You have finally achieved enlightenment!
Now let the muscles of your face droop.  Let go of all those muscles.  Look as sad as you possibly can.  You are at the end of your rope.  Your wife has just left you.  You lost your job.  You wrecked your car.  A tornado has just destroyed your beautiful new home.  Someone you loved just died.  You’ve been told that you have a terminal illness.  You’ve had it and you are ready to kill yourself.
Frown, scrunch up those muscles in your forehead.  You have forgotten something very important.  You have a problem before you and you are trying very hard to understand it.  Something on your computer is not working right.  Your car just died and you can’t figure out why.
Now look what you imagine your face would look like if you were totally detached.  Have an expression of utter equanamity.  You are completely centered.  What is that like?
Now do a thing which I call “facial yoga”  Experiment with different muscles on your face.  For example,  move the right side of your mouth in a half-smile, then do the same thing on your right..  Close and open one eye at a time.  Let your mouth hang completely open.  Roll your eyes in a complete circle.
Our facial muscles are proably the most complex muscles in our body.  They take quite a beating making all those expressions we present to the outer world.  As you look at thse expressions you will learn how utterly arbitrary these expressions are.  And you wll achieve a certain detachment from who you once thought you were.
REHEARSING YOUR ACT

This is a continuation of the above.  This meditation focuses on your tendency to “rehearse your lines” before you say something to somebody, especially if it is something especially important such as a marriage proposal or a job interview.  Perhaps you do this all the time, either overtly or unconsciously.  Perhaps you tend to automatically say the same lines in the same situation such as:  “Hi, nice weather we’re having today, aren’t we?”.  “Hello, how are you doing?” seems to be standard when passing people in your neighborhood or at work.  
It is not necessary to stop doing this, but try it if you can.  Just observe when this is happening.  Do you find yourself “editing” what you’re going to say before you say it, going over it all day, refining it bit by bit, making sure every word counts, nothing may inadvertently offend that person.  The ironic thing is you may finally have finally worked your speech out, but somehow the situation is not quite where you planned it, the person is not quite in the receptive state for what you were about to say, the general situation for this act has entirely altered, so the lines you had planned are no longer appropriate at all.  This can be embarrassing.  It was the wrong time, wrong place, wrong person.
Many people tend to put a lot of energy in how they dress for a situation.  They want to make just the right impression on someone at a given event.  It can be a bit embarrassing to go to that event and find everyone else dressed an entirely different way.  (For example, you thought something was going to be somewhat formal, so you dress up in either tie or fancy skirt, only to find everyone else dressed in jeans and t-shirts.)
You might be one of those who put lots of energy in decorating your space when you expect a visitor.  You might fix it up very nicely, only to have this visitor turn out to be a real slob who walks around in muddied boots and tosses trash out on the floor and puts cigarettes out on the plate.  Then you are somewhat resentful while the visitor doesn’t know what’s getting into you.  Or the visitor does not show up at all, so you feel like you wasted your time.
Have you ever been in one of those situations where everyone is trying to impress everyone else just to make a good impression - when it’s obvious everyone present would rather just let that go and be a bit more natural?  Everyone is acting very stiff as if they were playing a chess game, trying to predict what reaction(s) may result.   Have you ever wanted to laugh out loud, but stifled your giggles, because it wouldn’t be the right thing to do?  
Imagine what it would be like to simply say what you feel like saying or be what you feel like being.  Try to be “un-rehearsed” without rehearsing it.  (A prime paradox that one is!)  How much free will do we actually have?  Can we be spontaneous beings?  Check it out for yourself!
‘US’ VS. ‘THEM’

Are your belief systems and opinions really yours - or are they someone else’s?  Take a good look at your belief systems and how those define who you believe yourself to be.  Let’s look at those belief systems that no one dares to bring up at a polite dinner party - for fear that there will be a violent argument, and someone might storm out of the room.
What is your basic political stance?  Are you a Democrat, a Republican, a Socialist, a Marxist, a Libertarian, or what?  Are you a Nazi, a KKK member, a Black Power member, a Rastafarian, an Anarchist, a Terrorist, or none or all of the above?  Do you support or condemn gun control, abortion, gay marriage, birth control, the war in some country, legalization of marijuana, public housing, taxation without representation, or what?  What does your bumper sticker say?  Perhaps you are a political agnostic with no definite political beliefs at all.  (And, believe me, someone will get on your case about that, too!)
Did you get these belief systems because you actually thought it out for yourself or because you were hanging around some people you wanted to be accepted by - and those were their beliefs, too.  Maybe you became a Socialist or an Anarchist because that was a cool thing to do.  Maybe you became a Republican because that was the safe thing to do.  Or maybe you’re one of those rare people who got to thinking about it very carefully and came up with some utopian ideal, convinced that if you convinced enough others, you may actually start something.  (Then winding up being disappointed because no one would listen to you – or argue why this could never be done.)
The same thing goes for religions.  Are you a born-again Christian, a Zen Buddhist, a Muslim, a libertarian drug user, into “altered states of consciousness”, a New Age person, a Jew, an agnostic, an atheist, an objective scientist, or what?  Did you wind up in these because your family and friends put you there - or did you explore a number of prospects and come to the conclusion that one, all, or none of these were the right thing for you.  Perhaps you actually have developed your own religion or spiritual practice.  It might be best to keep that to yourself.   People have been tortured, jailed, crucified, or committed to psychiatric institutions for that.
When it comes to religion and politics, people are especially sensitive.  You might take note how you and others are very careful what they say about these topics in what company.
The particularly interesting thing about the above is there is always an “us”, the “good” guys, and a “them”, the “bad” guys.  “They” may be outright evil, misinformed, not-so-evolved, not very human, animals.  The usual assumption here is:  “They” are  not as good as “Us”.  “We” are always “better” than “Them”.  (Even if you believe you transcend these dichotomies, you could fall into this trap by setting yourself up as “more evolved” – and everybody else are deluded jerks.)  
The tragedy is that these issues result in wars and massacres.  Since those people on the other side of the boundary are considered a lesser breed than us, we have every justification to bomb them to smithereens.  They are hardly more than animals, so there is no need to feel pangs of conscience.  
The main point of this exercise is to carefully look at these tendencies within yourself.  Who do you consider “Them” to you?  Who are the “bad guys” in relation to you and those in the group you identify with?  Are your beliefs original?  Or are you going along with the crowd?  Who do you feel “ok” with?  Who do you feel “not-ok” with?


One related exercise here would be to try to express the very opposite political belief system of your own political inclinations.  Attempt to say it as though you really believe in it - and not with the slightest hint of sarcasm.  Keep doing it until you finally get it, as if you were some kind of method actor.
For example, if you are an avid anti-war person, you would say something like:
“I think it is a very good idea to keep this war going.  I think the people over there need our help and we’re doing a good thing to liberate them from that nasty dictator who is committing such atrocities.  And after all the horrible things they’ve done to our soldiers, we really need to fight back to defend our honor.  Plus look at the good things this war is doing to stimulate our economy.  Many people are being employed in the service of fighting this war for our freedom.”
If you are a Republican who believes we should cut back on taxation, that heavy taxation has gone on long enough, you could say something like:
“I think it would be a great thing to increase the public benefits in this society.  Why don’t we have socialized medicine like other countries do?  And I think it would be wonderful to have public transportation everywhere so we wouldn’t be so dependent on our cars.  Think about all the employment more government spending would cause!  For example, we could have countless projects to improve things in this society.  And, despite the taxation, we would get so much back for our money!”
Anyway, you see the picture.  After you have done this exercise, note how different you feel afterwards.  Perhaps you start to see bits and pieces of the “other side”.  Perhaps you start to see a way two opposing points of view can begin to be integrated.

Get a number of people in the same room with radically differing points of view.  Everyone would be on the “other side”, and attempt to convince or convert the other.  They would actually argue with one another, each in their opposite viewpoint.
There may come a point hours later they may start to break down and see a certain humor in the whole thing.  They may arrive at the stage where they cease to argue and discuss how these points of view could be integrated somehow.

One thing I would like to say here:  Nobody “wins” an argument.  It is impossible to convince or convert the other.  What usually happens is each participant is usually trying to say the “last word”.  It is far less a drain of energy to either “pretend” to agree with the other, cease to argue, or just walk away.  Arguing is a kind of “negative feedback loop” which gets intensified the longer the argument goes on.  It can lead to shouting, fights, breaks in important relationships, and all kinds of other dire consequences.
It is better to forgive the other person.  Forgiveness is letting go of the controversy.  Jesus was a Master of this technique; this is one of his strongest points.  The way to ending violence (intellectual, emotional, or physical) is through the Path of Forgiveness.
Think of others who have hurt you and forgive them.  To go on and on about how they hurt you only increases your pain.  Forgiving is akin to letting the abscess out of a wound.  Going on and on increases the infection, as if you were stabbing it again and again.  Just let it go.
MINDS ARE MUTABLE

An interesting visualization exercise would be to picture a person you are interacting with in a somewhat altered point of view.  The “other side” is not immutable.  They are living, breathing beings like you.  They are not mindless, thoughtless machines who are dedicated to opposing everything you say or do.  Even if they were machines, they are perfectly capable of breaking down eventually.  They eat and have sex.  They digest food and have bowel movements.  They have good days and bad days.
Let us say there is a particular law you would like to see passed or a particular change you would like to see in society, ideally a positive one.  However, there is some governor or president in office who tends to veto any suggestion along that line that comes his way.  Normally, your reaction to that is to get this jerk out of office and replace him with someone more enlightened, that as long as he lives, he will never change his mind.
Picture this one as changing his mind, waking up, coming to his senses.  Get inside his head and picture yourself as the voice of his conscience suggesting to him that there is a better way things could be.  There is a way to work it out so everyone is more satisfied, not one group vs. another group.  Perhaps you could make it like a religious transformation; he suddenly realizes the absurdity of going on fighting it.  He becomes genuinely remorseful about the way he had been doing things and wants to be more helpful to those who have been left out of the system.  The trick is to get inside this person’s head, then alter him/her from within.
Picture something very similar happening to society as a whole.  Rather than seeing this system as a mindless system, picture it as being made up as it goes along by persons who are just as confused as you often are.  Somehow along the way, it got so complex, it got stuck in the dilemma it is in now.  No one is to blame for this mess.
Picture this social system coming out of all that.  Picture people entrapped in this as coming to their senses.  They make a genuine effort to find a better way to do things.  Picture everyone getting together and pooling in their ideas and resources, willingly volunteering their efforts for a better way – rather than just fighting one another.
For example, if you are concerned about global warming and limited petroleum resources, you might picture people suddenly deciding to get smaller cars, to carpool to work, to ride bicycles or little mopeds, to be using public transportation more, to seek non-oil-burning modes of getting around, to be demanding that work, shopping, and living space be close together.  Just see it as happening.  Perhaps you could make it so people feel it is somehow “American” or “patriotic” to do this.  Big businesses might see that there is profit to be made in electric cars, mopeds, bicycles, magnetic trains, etc.  Constructors may find it a boon to re-build society in this way.
The trick is to get into the other’s mind and smoothly win them over using their own terms and their own value systems.  Ex., you might make it a point that people with unusual sexual orientations or people who use hallucinogenic drugs should be perfectly free to do so, since this is what real freedom is.  After all, isn’t freedom one of the primary values of this nation?
The main orientation of this exercise is to perceive mental constructions as perfectly changeable, nothing is always the same as it has been, it does change eventually.  And the general tendency of evolution is for us to get brighter and more awakened.  The seeds of thought you throw out along this line will make it change.

ALL BELIEF SYSTEMS ARE ARBITRARY

All belief systems are true in some ways and untrue in other ways.  No belief system is absolutely true and absolutely false.  This includes the statement above.  There is no “right” way to believe and there is no “wrong” way to believe.  Belief systems can be adapted like putting on hats on and off.  There are many people who believe what their friends, peers and family believe simply to fit in.  If the fashionable belief system changes, they change without hesitation, and immediately reject the previous belief system as if they had never believed it in the first place.  From anyone’s point of view, the belief systems they’ve adopted is absolutely true for them at that time.
A person may switch from Christianity to atheism to anarchy to libertarianism to Buddhism without a beat in the course of a lifetime.  One may even have the belief that all belief systems are equally arbitrary and embrace them all – or reject them all.
Let us look at an example.  Let’s compare fundamental Christianity with the pervasive modern dogma of Scientism.  The average person in America is usually programmed with one of these or the other from early childhood onward.
Christianity and other religions assert there is some Profound Meaning to life.  Scientism asserts that life is fundamentally meaningless;  there is no reason at all for the universe to come into existence and the phenomena of life is a complete accident.  The Christians believe that the world was created in seven days only five or six thousand years ago, if you take the creation myth in the bible literally.  Christians take all their data word for word from the Bible.  Scientists look at evidence and do experiments to arrive at their theories.  If the evidence shows contrary, they change their theories – only after a lot of bickering about whose theory fits the data the best.  Few people believe anymore that the world was literally created in just seven days; now they twist that around to mean seven ages or something like that.  There are Christians who do not believe in dinosaurs or early versions of homo sapiens.  (Or perhaps homo stupidious would be a better title?)  They maintain that the fossils are hoaxes and that scientists are being controlled by the devil.
Scientists on the other hand ignore some very important things.  For one thing, life is incredibly organized.  There seems to be a process of intelligence in evolution, how species get smarter and smarter, and explore environments that are dangerous.  Why would fish come out of the ocean, for example.  They were very well adapted in the ocean.  Why would single cells grow into multicelluar organisms?  Most matter tends to become disoraanized over a period of time.  It is easier to be disorganized and it takes a lot of energy to become organized.  Life contradicts this.  No scientist has created a complete living organism in the laboratory.  (Actually they tried that by simulating conditions as they were a few billion years ago, but only got a couple of very simple hydrocarbons; no life formed.)  They get around this by assuming that over such long periods of time, eventually something as complicated as what we now have would arise by sheer accident.
Thus there are some serious flaws in both belief systems.  If you examine any two or more belief systems you will find something similarly screwy in all of them.  One very good exercise is to put yourself in the position of the opposing party and make arguments against your own belief – and really believe it is true.  Try to believe in the opposite of what you believe now.  
PLAYING WITH OPINIONS

We value our opinions and beliefs very much.  Our opinions determine our relationship to one another.  When we meet someone who shares our opinions and beliefs, we are in tune, we like each other, we become friends.  When we meet someone who does not share our opinions, we argue, we do not like each other, we become enemies.
This is particularly evident in the arena of political and religious beliefs.  When there is disagreement, our voices raise, we go out on the streets attempting to convert people to our beliefs.  We form into separate groups who are against one another and spend years trying to make things happen one way or the other.  There have been wars lasting for centuries because we disagree with the other side;  a good example would be the Muslims vs. the Christians, the Crusades, the Jihads, even now in the current battle in the Middle East.  People have been burned at the stake and put into prison because they disagree with the major belief system of the time.
Obviously, our opinions and beliefs mean a lot to us if we actually kill each other because of disagreement.  We spend a lot of time defending and rationalizing our beliefs.  If our beliefs do not click with the current belief system of that society at that time, we are careful not to express them, for fear of rejection, fear that we may not be employed or engage in some economic relationship with someone.  Persons who are to be married are cautious to make sure belief systems are in relative harmony.
The purpose of this exercise is to play with our opinions, to agree with what we disagree with.  Think of something you feel particularly strong about, then take the opposite stance as if you really believe it.  It goes a bit like this:

If you are a strong environmentalist trying to prevent global warming, switch to:

“I think the whole idea of global warming is ridiculous: the planet has been warming up long before our industrialization.  The atmosphere is vast; there is no way we can pollute it.  Besides, who wouldn’t enjoy a warmer planet?  We can increase our agricultural production by moving north.  After the ice melts on Greenfield, think of all the oil we could drill for that lies beneath that land!  Investors can make trillions of dollars from that!”

If you believe people should not have guns because of the violence they cause:

“The right to bear arms is a constitutional  right!  If we give up our guns, how are we going to protect ourselves against violence?  Guns provide us the opportunity to have meat to eat – and who cares about extinction of species.  It is all survival of the fittest; they would probably go extinct anyway!  I want to have a gun, lots of them, in case the society collapses,so I can shoot those who want to take away my property.”

LEFT:  “I believe we need to have national health insurance.  The United States is the only industrialized country in the world that does not have.  Every year medical costs rise and premiums grow, and more and more people cannot afford it.  The major insurance companies are putting about half of it in their pockets.”

RIGHT:  “To have national health insurance would be a real economic disaster for America.  Insurance companies which employ massive numbers of people would go bankrupt, and we would have to pay twice the tasex to fund it.  Why should all the poor people get free insurance while the rick people get taxed most of their income.  Is that fair?”

LEFT:  “I believe we need to have a more equitable society.  Why should one group of people get paid low wages while others get enough money to buy mansions?  We need to share our resources so no on is lacking for anything.  It is a crime to let thouse without srarve.”

RIGHT:  “Commnism is a stupid idea.   If we shared all our resources, everyone would be poor and no one would be motivated to work.  Everything would go downhill.  Captialism is the only logical way to conduct our economy.  As some people grow rick, they spread their wealth around by investing, thus creating more jobs, then everyone benefits.  And those who don’t want to work deserve to starve.”

Do this convincingly enough and you will find that it is difficult to switch back to what you originally believed.  Our opinions enslave us, therefore let go of them.  If you cannot do this, take note of how frantically you tend to hold onto them.
IN MONEY WE TRUST

(Warning: This exercise can be very harmful to your money.  Don’t do it too often; it is a very expensive exercise.)

Take a dollar bill out of your wallet or purse.  Breathing very deeply, initially spend five minutes clearing your mind with the “I AM HERE” exercise.  After you are centered, hold that dollar bill in your hands and contemplate it.
Consider what that dollar bill means to you.  Think about all the hands that dollar has passed through to come into your hands, what you did to acquire that dollar.  Say:  “THIS IS MY DOLLAR”.  Do that for awhile.
Reflect upon the fact that this dollar is only a piece of paper with ink printed in it in a certain pattern.  We are passing pieces of paper around as a medium of exchange.  That piece of paper was once part of a tree in the forest, the ink came from petroleum products, fossil plants deep in the ground.  This dollar and others were manufactured in a factory.  Bundles of it went to banks to be released into the public.  It is all pieces of paper, figures on an accountant’s sheet, ink scribbled or printed on checks, and in recent decades it is digital information in bank computers.  We used pieces of plastic to transmit this digital information and to convert it into pieces of paper again.  This digital information is all pulses in silicon (which were once sand on the beach).  It is some complicated pattern of 0’s and 1’s.
How much is this piece of paper worth to you.  What material objects can we exchange for this piece of paper?  Let’s see:  this dollar will buy you a half, perhaps a third a cup of coffee in a coffeeshop.  It might be good for a local bus fare.  A bum would appreciate it.  It would come in handy to give back to customers when they give you a ten for that cup of coffee.  You would like having an extra dollar per hour in your paycheck.
Thirty years ago that piece of paper could get you three gallons of gas; now it will only get you a half a gallon.  Several decades ago, that dollar could get you an entire meal and would be considered reasonable pay for an hour of work.
Look at both sides of this dollar.  That eye in the pyramid is pretty cool; it is an occult symbol used as far back as the Egyptians.  It has sympbolized the the third eye, the chakra of enlightenment.  What is it doing on a dollar bill?  Then there is that big work:  “ONE”.  Do:  “I AM ONE” and see what that does to you.
Now:  Rip that dollar bill in half.  Can you get yourself to do that?  It’s only one dollar, go ahead, it will be worthless in a few years.  Now, bingo, you have two pieces of paper.  Try to go to a cashier and see if they will take that piece of paper.  Or just present both halves as one dollar.  Will it go back into the River of Money?
Consider how it would horrify you if that was twenty dollar bill, a hundred dollar bill.  You would do the best you can to prevent it.  Consider in the 1930’s, money suddenly became absolutely worthless, and people who had millions of those pieces of paper jumped from windows of high buildings.  It meant that much to them!
We spend a consider amount of psychic energy every day worrying about this stuff.  Will I have enough of it to pay my bills?  What can I do to get more of it?  I am jealous of that man with millions of it and the bum is jealous that I have any money at all!
Look at this attachment and try to transcend it.  This is freedom.

A PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE TO THE WORLD

Here would be an interesting twist on the “Pledge of Allegiance”:

I pledge allegiance to the World…
And all living beings who dwell upon It…
I pledge allegiance to all peoples…
Of whatever culture, religion, race, origin…
May harmonious synthesis reign between all peoples…
Of whatever type or preference…
May all peoples and living beings find a Way…
To work their problems and differences out…
With maximum provision for All…
I pledge allegiance to full peace upon this Planet…
Both peace without and within…
Every day I vow to do whatever I can…
To make a Unified World a reality…
May all people have the necessities they need…
And no one exploit people or the planet…
I visualize One Planet…
Within the Universe…
With freedom, justice and provision for All!

Try doing that every day at the start of the day with your hands over your heart or with arms outstretched.  You might get a World Flag, the one that has a picture of the Planet Earth upon it.  Or you could do it to a picture of the Planet on your wall, with a number of pictures of peoples of various cultures around the world.  Or you could close your eyes and visualize the Earth as if you were in a spaceship high above.
It is important not to say this mindlessly or automatically.  This is why those laws/customs/rituals requiring people to say such allegiances, prayers, or vows are utterly ineffectual.  They are merely mindless rituals   Once something has become a rote ritual or custom, it is time to change the tune.  That includes these exercises. 
Think about “maximum provision for all” for example.  Does this mean a simple compromise?  Does this mean passing a law?  Does this mean one body of peoples getting most of it while the other body only gets a little.  Or do they feel equally satisfied?  Think about arguments you have been in or are currently in, how they could had been resolved “with maximum provision for all”.  You could set aside an entire meditation session just to that!
Or just what does “freedom, justice, and provision for all” mean?  What would absolute freedom entail?  Would it mean that people could smoke pot in the streets or that people could get guns and do target practice on one another?  How would you deal with that - and still keep a reasonable freedom?  Or “provision for all”, what does that imply?  Does it mean all people are entitled to the necessities of life such as food, shelter, health care, clothing, and the such?  Now somebody might come along and say he is entitled to a lion’s share.  Do we provide for this one at the cost of everyone else?  
For now, just focus on the large picture and those other things will work themselves out in due time.
PICTURING THE PAST

This is a meditation to picture the past.  We all fall into patterns of reminiscing certain phases of the past.  Just what is it that you tend to remember, reminisce, ponder, wishing you had done something different?  Is it your high school years?  Is it your marriage day?  Is it that moment when you were asked to leave a job or a relationship?  Is it that vacation you took?  Is it your baby’s first word?  Where do you fall into when your inner eye starts to gaze into the past?
Meditate upon a certain area of the past that has tended to obsess you.  (If you happen to had suffered some kind of rejection or some kind of extraordinary good fortune recently, this is a particularly good time for this meditation.)  Visualize that moment, see it, feel it in all its details.  How does that moment make you feel?  Does it leave you laughing or weeping?  Does it hit you in the gut whenever you think about it?  Is it impossible for you to stop reacting to it - whether it occurred yesterday or ten years ago?  Does it keep you awake at night?  Does it make you depressed?  Does it make you sad that moment or period of your life is long gone?  This becomes particularly acute as you get older.
Some part of you thinks it is silly to keep bringing it up over and over, yet you keep at it.  You can’t stop reacting to it even if you tried.  Go ahead and react to it.  That is what this is all about.  Watch your reaction.  Don’t fight it.
Note how a particular moment like this gives you a certain part of your identity.  If you were rejected countless times in relationships or jobs that you know perfectly well you could had done, it gives you a basic sense of inferiority which seems to set the trap for future likewise rejections.  On the other hand, if you were always supported in whatever you set out to do and you were accepted from an early time onwards, you feel you were made for success and nothing can stop you from going even further.  Does your past make you feel joyful or bitter?  Or maybe you have had an odd mixture of both kinds of experiences.  Most people do, but in some there is a preponderance of one or the other.
Think about experiences in your past that you feel somewhat neutral about.  These experiences just don’t do anything for you in terms of reaction.  Notice how you don’t tend to “store” these as avidly and may have a hard time conjuring up memories about.  Why is it that this does not seem to be worth remembering.  Then attempt to act “as if” this moment were important to you.
Try to think of an experience that was an utter bummer to you.  Notice how this experience leads to other memories of experiences of a likewise nature.  Observe how you identify with the emotions they bring up and how you are terribly depressed and despise your whole life.  You may then assume that is how it has always been, and this is how it will always be.  Finally, you are at a point where you might throw up your hands in despair saying “Nothing good will ever happen to me!”  See if you can let go of this.
Now try to think of an experience that was joyful to you.  Be in that moment of joy.  Think of other instances where something went right for you.
This will be hard to do but react completely neutrally to both kinds of experiences.  Just see them “in neutral”.  Probably the best way to do this is to see these experiences as though they happened to someone else.  Put yourself in “third person”.  Make up a name, make it a fictional character as if in a story you were writing as a book, play or movie (where you are the star actor).
Look at your past life and mentally or actually re-write your own history.  Where things went wrong, make them right.  Make up a completely new person for yourself.  How would a different past affect your basic identity?
Note how your past binds you to the past.  Consider what it would be like to be free of this burden of memories piled upon others.  Attempt to quit thinking about it.  Breathe deeply, be present-centered.
The past keeps us from being in the present.  But keep in mind that whenever you dwell upon the past you are doing that RIGHT NOW!  In a sense, that “past” is only happening NOW.  (I hate to dissapont science fiction fans, that time travel is impossible because the past is non-existent and the future is only a conjecture in our minds.  So it is illusory that there is a “past” at all.  It is merely memories you conjure up – and most likely altered.  It is simply neural imprints.  Or it is preserved by people talking about it and continuing to alter it as it goes back and forth.  If the memories were not there, there would be no past.  Feel the feeling of ‘presence’ as you look at those memories.  Be in the nowness of your memories.  Then finally you can cease to react to them and be in the nowness of this moment.
This is actually what happens in the process of history.  Nobody knows that REALLY happened.  It is all ink on paper, tales told from one generation to the next, carvings on stone, paintings/photos which gradually deteriorate.  Who cares about that ancient caveman who died a million years ago being eaten by a Sabertooth Tiger?  What difference would the assassination of Abraham Lincoln be a million years from now?  Even the richest and most famous will be long forgotten, thus non-existent by then.
If you look at your life from that perspective, perhaps you will achieve a blissful detachment from those day to day problems that seem so important to you now.
WORSHIPPING NATURE

This meditation is very pagan.  What we do here is worship nature in all her various forms.
This is a good meditation for a lunatic.  Go out in the evening when the moon is waxing or completely full.  Go somewhere far away from street lights, preferably in a field that is by itself, away from streets and cars.  Look upwards longingly at the moon as though she were a long lost lover.  Stretch your arms out to the moon and hold them that way for a couple of minutes.  Reach the tips of your fingers to the moon as though you were some odd plant that grows well in moonlight.  Hold your palms out and receive the gift of moonlight.  Feel yourself basking in the rays of the moon, take note of how weird the glow of colors are in moonlight.  Perhaps you might sing a song to the moon.  Perhaps you may like to dance in circles.  Go ahead - be as much of a lunatic as you care to be.  No one sees what you are doing.  Then, when you are finished, slowly pull your arms down, holding your hands over your heart, then your stomach, then your genitals.  Feel the moonlight being pulled inward toward your being.
Another similar form is to worship the sun.  The best times for this are at sunrise, noon, and sunset.  If you can get up early enough, meditation in the dawn time is an especially favorable time.  It is when all the civilized stuff is settled down and most humans are snug in bed.  It is very quiet and peaceful.  When the sun rises, chant “Ommm” or some dawn song of your composition.  Express joy at the arising of the light.  Hold your hands out and feel the rays growing warmer.  It is especially good to do this in the late spring or early summer.
Noon is a good time to do the worship of the sun in the height of summer.  Feel the strength of the energy of the solar rays bringing everything to the height of existence.  Feel the glory of it.
Sunset is a good time to do this worship in the autumn.  Feel the burst of colors in the evening, the grand climax of the passing of all things.  Chant a poignant song at the setting of the sun.  Feel the shifting of energies as night falls.
Worshipping the stars can be a glorious form.  Lay down in a distant field and gaze upwards at the home galaxy, the stretching of the stars across the universe.  Imagine the countless worlds, countless forms of life we have in the universe.  Worship the universe itself.  Take the vastness of the universe into your own being.  BE the universe!
A tree is a good thing to worship.  Dance around the tree, dance in circles around the tree holding hands with others, sing a song of praise to the tree.  Hug the tree and take its being into yourself while giving yourself completely to its being.  I have discovered that it has the same pleasurable feeling as hugging a human being.  Feel yourself in the roots penetrating deep into the earth.  Feel yourself growing through the tips of the branches, your leaves taking in that solar energy that feeds all things.  As primates, we have a deep affinity for trees, after all, they used to be our home once upon a time.  That’s why they are so nice to have around.
Stand on top of a high mountain and, with arms outstretched, turn slowly around in a 360’ circle, pausing at each of the four directions.  Facing east, breathe in, saying “I AM”.  Facing the south, hold your breath, say “AM”.  Facing the west, let out a long sigh, and say “THIS”.  Facing the north, pause, say “NOW”.  Give your regards to all the lands, to the entire planet.  Bless this world you stand upon.
Anyway, you get the drift of all this.  The point is to exchange energies between yourself and that which you worship.  It can be any form of nature.  It can be a potted plant, a flower in the park, a bird in the sky, the human body, a rock.
The American Indians, the British Druids,  and various aboriginals throughout the world were particularly adept at this form of meditation.  Perhaps it would be of use to you to study these people and the methods they used.  Nature was their whole life and being - and it can be yours as well.   We have lost touch with Nature in this civilized world, surrounding ourselves with that which is “human-made”.  Be in Nature, know that it is Sacred.
PANSEXUAL – ULTIMATE LIBERATION

Let’s face it – sex occupies a tremendous amount of our psychic energy for men and women alike.  We are always feeling embarrassing underlying pulses of sexaul attraction towards everyone we meet.  All of us are comparing and contrasting potential sex-mates.  If we are attracted, we start plotting how we might approach that person and get that person interested in us.  If that person indicates no interest in us, it’s a bummer.  If it happens, it’s the best thing that could happen!
Contrary to other meditative practices, you can do anything that turns you on:  homosexual, bisexual, heterosexual, transexual, orgies, s/m, vibrators, sexual media, prostitution, whatever we humans are always creatively inventing.  For a long time, I’ve never understood why all the world religions make such a big “no-no” about sex.
The reason for this may be the fact that sex is so damned distracting!  How can you sit and meditate if you are constantly peeking at other people there and considering how attractive they are.  Also, there’s a lot of emotional stuff that goes with sex, it comes with the package.  That emotional stuff tends to get you stuck into something that is very difficult to get out of.  As pointed out previously, sexual relationships have a certain tendency to absorb your identity into the other person.  These kind of relationships always end at one point or another.  After the initial encounters, it becomes boring.  In marriages, after the first couple of years, sex is occasionally done just to seal the relationship.  After awhile, hugging or simply interacting once in a while is enough.
Sex is terribly embarrassing.  One of the reasons for that might be that our sex organs where we feel these wonderful sensations leading to orgasm – happen to be where we piss and shit.  A man’s penis that ejects semen is the same organ that takes a piss.  We experience sexual sensations from poking sex organs and special devices up our anuses, where we shit and fart, which is repulsive and smelly.  Women are a bit lucky, at least they have their vaginas as a separate organ; it wouldn’t do to have babies growing in the anus (though I’ve heard of species where this is done).  But their clits are exactly where they take a pee.  This probably has to do with why sex is considered to be “dirty”, and why there are such raucous jokes about it.
It is embarrassing for such civilized beings as ourselves to be compelled to do this thing.  It is so distracting we would be able to farm, build houses, construct roads and such.  This is why we wear clothes to cover our puberty regions; we don’t want to be compelled to drop everything and fuck on the spot.
It is interesting how people have eating rituals as a way to interact socially.  Eating is also an important biological necessity to maintain the existence of our bodies.  There are picnics, potlucks, dinner parties, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and such.  Yet there is never just one big orgy to define our relationship as a group.
Have you ever felt sexual impulses to someone you’ve been enculturated not to?  I know I have!  My own generation was brought up to consider homosexuals as “fags” or “dykes”.  There were always deriding jokes about such people.  As a result those who exclusively felt impulses of sexuality toward their own sex, hid it from others – until gay liberation came along.
As you go into your meditation, watch this stuff inside you.  It may be a bit uncomfortable and yet enticing.  Particularly observe whatever really embarrasses you.  
Do you find yourself uncomfortable when members of your own sex are naked?  Have you ever felt sexually attracted to your sister, your mother?  Have you ever felt attracted to a child?  Does a certain form of sexual interaction intrigue you?  Notice how you have built a wall against these forbidden impulses.
What kind of emotions do you experience when all this is going on?  Note those dark strange emotions that boil within you as you contemplate your sexuality.  Contemplate your sexual interactions in the past, how did you feel as you were doing it?  Have you ever noticed how after doing it, there is an odd feeling of embarrassment that you got so carried away, a little how you feel when you got very drunk the night before and start remembering all the foolish things you said or did under the influence.
Now try to observe it with a kind of detachment.  Say:  “I have these impulses, but it is not necessary to act upon them.  I accept the fact that I have such impulses from time to time.  These impulses do not necessarily define me.”  Just watch those impulses as you breath deeply saying “I AM THIS”.
One form of meditation I have tried is to watch the act of intercourse as I breathe deeply, using that imagery as a kind of mantra.  As a male, I am going in and pulling out.  Breathing in, I pull out very slowly.  Holding my breath, I feel the sensations being there right at the entrance which is the most stimulating part of the experience.  Breathing slowly outwards, I go deep within.  Perhaps between the breaths, I cum.  And so on.  A woman may visualize a similar thing, either passively or actively.  Meanwhile, I am doing:  “I (pulling outwards)….  AM (right at the entrace)…  HERE (going within)… NOW (orgasm).”
One of the reasons there tends to be a recommendation to refrain from sex, both with someone or by yourself, is as time goes by during this period, you get more and more aroused.  After a couple of weeks like that, I have found myself being attracted to everyone I interact with, to animals, to trees, to butterflies, to the blue sky, to the water, to the entire universe!  The sexual impulses blend into an intense energy where sensations become more intense, feelings become more intense, you feel love and compassion towards all beings.  It does get to be a little too much, so if you can stand it, just go ahead and do it.  God is not going to get mad at you; you’re not going to be stuck in hundreds of terrible lifetimes.
Anyway, I call this “Pansexual” – the Ulimate Liberation.  Try it, you just might like it!

PRAYER

This exercise will appeal more to people who are brought up in more Western-style traditions, particularly Jews, Christians, and Moslems.  What we will do here is make prayer a form of meditation.  Inwardly invoke Yahweh, God, the Lord, Allah, Jehovah, Great Spirit, Krishna, Osiris - or whatever name you choose to give this entity.  See this entity as intensely personal, as someone who is intimately concerned with your own development in all ways.
Perhaps you may have some difficulty picturing some Great Being “out there” or “up there” which is the usual connotation of some kind of God.  If this bothers you, you may pray to your Inner or Higher Self to help you.
In any case, what you do is pray to this entity to give you the proper qualities you need to attain your ultimate spiritual enlightenment.  Ex.:
“Oh Great Being who has given rise to this Universe, please hear me, a mere mortal in the totality of it all.  Enable me to achieve one-pointedness as I meditate.  Help me to focus efficiently upon the tasks I must do.  Help me to find what or who it is I need - and enable me to know when I have just what I need.  Help me to be utterly contented with just what I have and to achieve pleasure in just that and no more.  Help me to contain my appetites and to achieve moderation in all I consume.  Help me to find contentedness with just what I am.
Let all things fall in my path just as I need them.  Help me to become healed in all ways, mentally, emotionally, and physically.
Help me to know who I am.  Help me to penetrate into the depth of my true being.  Help me to achieve a happiness without dependence on physical things just in being my true self.”
You may also pray for others or the entire human species.  Ex.:
“Oh, Great One who penetrates all that is, I beseech you to pay heed to the needs of this planet and the beings upon it.  Please enable the dominant species on this world to come to its senses before it destroys its own environment and before it wipes itself out.  Help them to know what they are doing and to come to a state of moderation where all people have just what they really need and no more.  Help them to value inward development more than acquisition of physical possessions.  Help them to know what is important and what is merely a passing thing.  Help them to see what is real and help them to see the illusory nature of their boundaries.”
Anyway, you get the drift.  It is useful here to pray for qualities not quantities.  Perhaps you may not be this far along.  It would be perfectly okay to pray rather selfishly or for your immediate friends and loved ones:
“Oh, God, please help me to get over this awful cold I have.  Help Aunt Jenina become healed of her cancer.  Help my friend Tom with his drinking problem.  I beseech you to let me be able to start my car this morning.  Please enable me to take a good bowel movement and help my digestion today.   Please let the date I have tonight be a successful one and let me get laid at last.  Help me to get a good promotion this year so I may be able to pull a bank loan to buy a house.”
And so on.  Even at this level, the point of the meditation is to feel the presence of some higher being who is there to help you, not so much whether you will get those things or not (though we can all use a few miracles here and there).  When you come to the end of this meditation and have said your respectful farewell to the higher being, silently be aware of an inner or higher presence.
BE AWARE OF FEAR AND ANGER

Focus upon the things that scare you.  Focus on the fact of your mortality, your impending old age, the deterioration of your health.  Focus on the fact that you could get cancer, develop a brain tumor, have a heart attack.  Or someone may shoot you or bomb you.  Or you may have a serious accident.  See the fear that you may not be able to afford the things you have been used to, that you may not even be able to afford enough food, pay your rent, your bills, your loan payments.  Feel the fear that you may wind up on the streets, a beggar dependent on whatever handouts or crumbs you can find.
Feel your resentment against those who have power over you, how anytime they can arbitrarily make things worse for you.  You could get laid off from your job, your boss could fire you for your failure to do some trifling detail.  Your spouse could leave you for someone else should your looks or fortune dwindle.  The government could cut off certain benefits which you have been dependent upon.  Your taxes or bills could go up.  And there is not a damn thing you can do about it.  They have the upper hand.  Be aware of your hatred towards them, how you would like to put them in their place.  Notice how fantasies of violence cross your mind, even though you are not normally a violent person.
Feel how fear and hatred are related, how they are basically the same thing, though opposite sides of the coin from one another.  Be intensely aware of the basic fear that something could go wrong, how this fear defines your feeling of limitedness. 

Next stage:  Say to yourself:  “I am an unlimited being and none of these things can touch who I really am.  These are only outer trappings and are destined to pass away anyway.  But I cannot be affected by these things.  Since I penetrate all that is, I am immortal and invincible.  Though the worst could happen, this does not affect me.”
Say this a couple of times and think about the implications of it.  At the end of the meditation, take note of how this makes you feel.
PROBLEMS, PROBLEMS, PROBLEMS…

Buddha once made a remark that each of us has a total of 84 ongoing problems to solve.  As soon as one problem is solved, another problem takes its place.  I don’t know how he came up with the number 84, but each of us all has a lot of problems going on.

The usual approach is to attempt to “time-share” fixing all these problems, going from one problem to the other.  This is happening in our minds all the time.  While we’re working on fixing one of the problems, we’re simultaneously worrying about the next problem(s) to solve.  Needless to say, this causes a lot of stress.

I’m not talking so much as the Big Problems such as you’ve lost your job and you need to find another one fast before the money runs out.  Or your spouse walked out on you.  Or you can’t afford to pay your bills and the mortgage on your home is about to be foreclosed.  Or you’re getting evicted.

The problems can also be more trifling such as why doesn’t this computer program do what I’m trying to make it do?  My car won’t start.  I’m running late for work and I have to grab everything I need.  I need to do laundry today and I don’t have enough quarters to put in the machine.  I need to wipe up that spill on the floor.  Or just day to day chores:
I need to shave.  I need to put my clothes on.  I need to make my coffee.  Usually those daily chores are done unconsciously and automatically.  Meanwhile you’re trying to figure out how to get to work on time, or you might lose your job, or you might miss the train.

Sure enough, as soon as you solve one of these problems, something else pops up in its place.  There’s always some kind of problem going on.  It can get quite overwhelming when lots of them are happening at once; one could get a nervous breakdown trying to solve all of them at once.  Or you might throw up your hands and come to the conclusion that:  “Life Sucks!”  It’s all suffering on this planet, what’s the use?, and you might even consider suicide.  (But who knows?, the problems may continue somehow afterwards.)

One method for handling this would be to just solve one problem at a time.  Just focus completely on that problem, be with it.  Be present, breathe deeply.  If the solution seems to elude you, take a break and return to it later; exasperation just seems to make it worse, causing more problems.

When this problem is solved, sit back and say:  “There!  I have just solved this problem.” Take a five minute break and feel good that you have accomplished this task.  Breathe deeply and focus on this.  Don’t just run off to fix something else.  Let go of that feeling of perpetual busyness.

It might be useful to sit down and write out a list of all the problems you are currently trying to solve.  Who knows, there might actually be 84 of them, more or less.  Then you might look at this list and attempt to prioritize them.  Which problem is “more important” than the other?  What makes you believe it’s more important?


A useful form of meditation would be to look at a particular problem, large or small.  Just contemplate the problem.  Don’t worry about how to solve it.  Perhaps you might ask yourself why this problem is so important to you.  If you look at it more objectively, you might realize that you are obsessing about something that isn’t really a problem.  Perhaps rather than trying to fix the problem, you may accept the problem, and adapt to it.

One good example would be what I’d call “consumer addiction”.  You are not satisfied with the computer you’ve had for years.  It is not running fast enough.  It keeps breaking down.  So you trash your old computer, and get that brand new one you keep seeing ads about that has ten times the memory and speed of your old computer, and does ten times as many things.  And it looks a lot prettier and more professional than that old piece of junk you were working with.

You had to pay 10 times as much for this computer than you did the old one.  When you take it out of the box, you notice a slight crack in the plastic casing.  This really aggravates you, you actually complain to the company and demand they send you a crack free casing.  You spend hours and hours on the phone.  You go to a hardware store and see if there’s some kind of glue and paint that would cover it up.

If you were to really look at this “problem”, you might discover that you have made it a much bigger problem than it is.  Your new computer works fine.  Or maybe it doesn’t, maybe you can’t install your old programs on it and need to get more expensive upgrades.  Things that came to you naturally on the old computer are a big pain in the ass and you’re constantly calling the technicians, spending hours how to learn to just reformat some text, for example.

If you took a good look at all this, you might realize that you have spent more time working with this new computer than you did with that old computer.  Despite it’s flaws and setbacks, it was doing everything for you that you actually needed.  Or you may get disappointed with the capabilities of this new computer, and get the coming new model – which you spend even more time trying to figure it out.

The problem is:  We are always making problems bigger than they actually are.  Perhaps you might spend a half hour affirming to yourself:  “I have no problems at all.  There is nothing I need to fix.”  Or:  “I have plenty of time to solve these problems.  A solution will eventually come.”

There are certain problems that seem to be eternal problems in the background.  Perhaps you are not as successful as you would had liked to be.  For some reason, a change in your circumstances never seems to occur.  There are major problems going on in the world.  There is always war.  There is always poverty.  There is always corruption.  There are always things you have no personal control over.

It is better to focus on problems you have a reasonable expectation you can solve.  You can pretty much take it for granted you will succeed in taking out the garbage, do that, and feel good about it.

Anyway, now I can lay back and feel satisfied I’ve written this essay.  It says more or less everything I wanted to say.  Now it’s no longer a problem.
WALKING MEDITATION

A good meditative practice to do is walking meditation.  Walk a bit more slowly than usual, preferably upon smooth, level ground.  It is best to find a place where there is little traffic in a distraction-free environment.  Be care-full in any case that you don’t run into anything and observe all traffic lights.  
As you breathe in, count “1… 2… 3… 4…”  On each count, take a step.  Take four more steps while holding in your breath.  You will need to fill your lungs very fully so you don’t get out of breath.  While you breathe out, count “1… 2… 3… 4…” one count on each step.  Then attempt to hold your breath at that point for four steps.  You may need to find the right pace that will enable you to do this.
Get the rhythm of this for awhile, then while you walk, look at an angle slightly downwards, observing what you are walking through.  Try not to blink your eyes too much.  Just look at where you are walking within the next 25 feet.  Observe all that you see in your field of vision.  Watch the changing scenery unfold as if you were in a camera gradually zooming in.
Hear the sounds in the background, birds singing, leaves rustling, crickets chirping, or whatever it is.  Feel the temperature and movement of the air, whether it be cold, cool, temperate, or hot.  Feel how your skin reacts whether it is shivering or sweltering.  Feel the sensations of your clothes moving against your skin.
In any case, don’t neglect to focus on the count.  That is the most important thing.  Maintain your pace as steady as you can, even if the grade of what you are walking on changes somewhat.  If you have to walk more slowly to go over rocks, obstacles, or a steeper grade, do that.
An excellent place to do this kind of meditative exercise would be in a specially designed labyrinth which spirals into the center then spirals outward.  Feel this as a metaphor for life, how you become entangled in situations, then disentangled.

THE DRIVING EXERCISE

You could also do this kind of exercise while driving, but I would advise doing this only when you know the drive very well, it is generally traffic free, and it goes on for a long time with no traffic lights.  Later, when you become more advanced at it, you could attempt more traffic-ridden situations.  It is probably best to do this when you are out of town and on the road.
Do exactly the same thing.  Breathe in on a count of four.  Hold it for a count of four.  Breathe out for a count of four.  Hold for a count of four.  Breathe at precisely the rhythm that enables you to do this. 
Focus on the road.  Don’t get distracted by things off the road.  Keep your gaze precisely within the zone that you could brake within at the speed you are traveling.  Keep your speed as steady as you can for the conditions you are within.   Always be ready to slow down or brake for a sudden situation in the road.  Maintain that state of intense alertness that they taught you in driving school.
Take note of the details of the road.  Listen to the sound of the engine.  Feel the wind against your face, if you have the windows open or are on a motorcycle.  Feel the steering wheel and how slight motions control the vehicle.
You may discover that, contrary to what you might think, this kind of exercise can make you a better, safer driver.  It is certainly safer to be focused on what you are doing than to have your mind daydreaming somewhere else (which is how most accidents occur).  And, to your delight, you will find the long drive quicker and refreshing to your mind, rather than a long drudge. 
MEDITATING ON SACRED TEXTS
Jesus said to them, "When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, and the upper like the lower, and when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female, when you make eyes in place of an eye, a hand in place of a hand, a foot in place of a foot, an image in place of an image, then you will enter the Kingdom of Heaven." 
The above is a famous saying of Jesus that is from the “Gospel of Thomas” (A Gnostic text, suppressed in the ‘Dark Ages’).  The meditation here is to think about the inner meaning of this text and just what it implies to you.  What did Jesus mean by this?  What validity does this text have to you?
This saying would seem to imply that Jesus, like certain Chinese mystics, is implying that it is very important to unify the opposites within you.  Think about the opposites you have.  Whatever you are, become the opposite of that.
The turning of male into female, and vice-versa, is particularly interesting.  If you are a man, contemplate the woman within you, the woman who has been repressed, the feminine qualities you suppress to seem more masculine.  If you are a woman, contemplate the man within you, the man who has been repressed, the masculine qualities you suppress to be appear more feminine.  Unify the male and the female within you.  See what that does to you psychologically.
If you are an introverted person, think about the extraverted qualities you suppress.  If you are an extraverted person, think about the introverted qualities you suppress.  Make the active and the passive one.
If you are on a higher scale of development consider the lower qualities you suppress.  If you are on a lower scale of development consider the higher qualities you suppress.  Make the refined and the gross one.  Make the spiritual and the animal one.
I am not sure what he was getting at about the “eyes in place of an eye, a hand in place of a hand, a foot in place of a foot, and image in place of an image”.  This would seem to imply that you need to see things in a new way, see what is familiar replaced with something different from what you have experienced before.
Finally, just what is this “Kingdom of Heaven” all about?  We see it repeated over and over in the Gospels.  Is this literally some domain ruled over by some beneficial King who cares personally about each and every being?  Is this the Heaven promised as a life after physical death, as a kind of reward for being a good person?  
I personally am inclined to believe this is what is called “satori”, “Samadhi”, or “Enlightenment” by the Eastern mystics.  Perhaps we could look at the “Kingdom of Heaven” as some altered consciousness where you see things with new eyes.  But it is up to you to consider your own interpretation.
This is a kind of meditation that can be used on any particular saying by any Great Mystic, no matter what the religion.  Take what is considered to be a Sacred Book and take a line out of it that somehow resonates with you.  Spend at least a half hour with that line, repeating it to yourself, and meditate upon just what are the implications of that statement.
FOCUS ON QUALITIES

The main point of this exercise is to focus upon the qualities a certain object, being, or person has.  As objectively as you can, take note of a certain object.  Hold it in your hands.
What color or colors does it have?  What is the sensation of that object?  How heavy does it feel in your hands?  Does it feel hard or soft?  Notice all its angles.  Does it feel cool or warm?  Does it have any motion or sound?  Is it dynamic or static?
Don’t just generalize about its qualities.  If it has a multitude of colors, take note of all those colors, even though you may not have an accurate name for those colors.  If you look very carefully, you will note there is not any one quality an object has but innumerable qualities.  For example, our tendency is to “write off” grass as “green”, but if you look a bit more in depth, you will see countless shades and varieties of what you have generalized as “green”.  There is “yellow green”, “light yellow green”, “dark yellow green”, a kind of “brownish green”,  “blue green”, and thus forth.
One interesting variation of this exercise would be to wear blindfolds and randomly pick up a particular object in your range - or assign someone to put this object in your hands.  What can you gather from that object as though you were seemingly blind?
Note your tendency to name things.  It is as though if you can name it, you have some kind of “hold” on it.  Try to find qualities about something that you do not have any definite name for?  Does that feel a little bit bewildering to you?  Try to sense things without labeling them.  Be as a baby and look at the world with no names, no labels.
Go a little further with this.  In your day-to-day interactions with people, observe your tendency to lump them in some category.  You do this by the way the person is dressed, by their mannerisms, their manner of speaking, and thus forth.  You attach a certain name to a person after you have been introduced to them, and if you know them better, you have certain associations about that person.  The ironic thing is you could be completely wrong!  Perhaps you base that person on very limited interactions with him or her; if you were to spend more time exploring the depth of that person, you may discover more than you had thought you would.  Try to observe a person with no categories in particular, simply note the qualities.
What qualities do you feel are important?  When you see a flower, what do you think is important about it?  Is it the color?  Is it the smell?  The shape?  Do you automatically lump all that you note about that object you call “a flower” as something “beautiful”?  What does beautiful mean?  What does ugly mean?  Why is a flower more appealing than a garbage bin?  Just what is it that makes one thing more preferable than another?
The basic point of this exercise is to attempt to sense what is actually there (or here), no more, no less.  Go beyond all associations and labels.  The interesting thing about this exercise is one can practice it not just during a half hour of sitting still doing nothing, but one can do it in the midst of everyday life.  Try it and see what you can do.  Even if you get it in momentary glimpses, you are doing well.
THE SEVEN BASIC CHAKRAS

This is a meditative exercise which focuses on the charkas.  I assume that you know what the charkas are, but they are said to be spiritual organs of perception on a psychic level.  They are actually said to be whirling disks up and down the spiritual body.  The charkas do have a perfectly physical connection with certain primary areas of the body you are used to.  In fact, they correspond to specific nerve centers and hormonal glands which control our general moods, level of being, growth, and the such.  So it doesn’t particularly matter whether you literally believe they are there or not; the inner reality is more important than the literal reality.  However, in this connection, it may be useful to find a couple of books about the subject, which you will find numerously in New Age bookstores.  But what is ultimately important is not so much what someone else said (not even me!), but what you find to be true for yourself.
There are generally said to be seven charkas.  My own personal designation is:

1.The survival charka which is around the butt or on the lower base of the spine.  
2.The sex charka which is in the genital region. 
3.The power charka which is in the belly region.
4.The emotion charka which is in the heart region.
5.The expression charka which is in the throat region.
6.The inner eye charka which is right between the eyes.
7.The Samadhi charka which is on the crest of the head towards the back.

There are seven levels connected with these seven charkas:

1.The survival charka has to do with basic physical survival.
2.The sex charka has to do with sex, lust, reproduction, male/female designations.
3.The power charka has to do with who has power or who is empowered.
4.The emotion charka has to do with love (or its antithesis fear/hate), the emotional zone.
5.The expression charka has to do with creativity in all forms and with communication.
6.The inner eye charka is the mind center, controlling both logical, discursive thought (left brain) and intuitive, holistic thought (right brain).
7.The Samadhi charka is the point of unity, of going beyond mind, feeling, and body, of spiritual knowing.

All of these charkas have a lower center and a higher center.  They can all be turned to perverse, twisted purposes which hurt the user as much as the abused - or they can serve a higher level which works towards spiritual development.  
Depending on where you are, you will probably be drawn to one charka or the other.  Others will probably be more challenging to you.  It is the latter which will enable you to grow more.  For example, if you are a thinking person, you will find the inner eye charka far easier to master, but you will have to work at it to become aware of the lower more physical charkas which will seem somewhat foreign to you.
Since this is such an important study, it is best to meditate upon each of these aspects one by one.  This is a meditation which it is best to go a bit more slowly into and give a bit more time to.
THE SURVIVAL CHAKRA

The initial charka is the ass charka.  It is also called the “Root Charka”.  We place it in the base of the spine on the upper part of the ass, though the entire ass area is the general vicinity of this one.  It is where the vestigial tail bone of the human species is.  Animals all have this tail bone much more overtly and you will notice how your favorite pet expresses basic feelings of joy or discomfort with it.
The basis of the meditation here is to focus on the ass.  Sit right smack on your tailbone, sitting as straight as you can and feel your ass.  Notice the sensations which come from this part of the body.  Try to be aware of your tailbone and the base of your spine.
Think about any associations you have with this part of the body.  We all have certain associations of the ass area being “dirty”, “shitty”, “sexual”, “sensuous”, and the such.  It is not a part of the body we normally focus on, but it is interesting how we tend to use words connected with the ass when we are under a lot of stress or upset:  “You better get your ass in gear”.  “You’re full of shit!”  “He’s acting like a complete asshole!”  And so on.  You know what I am referring to. 
It is almost as if the ass is somehow connected with a kind of basic survival.  I often think of it as the “Survival Charka”.  This is the level where we eat, drink, shit, sleep, find food, and basic necessities having to do with physical survival. 
It is also interesting how the ass comes into a certain association with sexuality.  Anal intercourse is often considered one of the more perverse and stimulating of sexual activities,  and most people have something or other they’ve done along that line.
Probably the best way to meditate on this charka, aside from the above associations, is to visualize a kind of root at the bottom of your spine.  Picture that root growing deep into the earth.  Feel your connection with the fertility of the earth through this root.  Feel the potential here, the energy being absorbed from that which is base and being transformed into higher energies.  Every tree starts with a seed, a root.  Feel how this root is that which supports you, how it holds you up.
It is this charka which is the root from which the others proceed.  Thus we start with this.  As you go deeper and deeper into this, you will find your energies being pulled away from your day-to-day worries and ramifications, and experience a deep calm in your connection with the most earthy of the earth.
THE SEX CHAKRA

The next charka up is the sex charka.  For men, this would be in the penis/prostrate area, and for women, this would be in the vaginal/fallopian area.  It is important to remember that there are similarities between the sexes, such as women having a clitoris which is a vestigial penis (or men having an “enlarged clitoris”) or men having a kind of internal vaginal area where the prostrate is (or women having an “open prostrate”).  In a sense, we are all hermaphrodites and in the womb, we all started out as somewhat female.
Personally, I find that meditation upon this chakra  more productive if I have not had any kind of sexual orgasm for at least a week.  Then I am much more aware of this zone than usual.  If I just came last night, it doesn’t do much for me and it is more of an effort to tune into it.  This could be a pragmatic reason for why so many spiritual disciplines advocate abstaining from sexual activity during a period of spiritual training.
It is at this level, where we can contemplate our maleness, our femaleness, or a synthesis of both.  Feel your basic gender identity and try to incorporate it with its opposite.  Breathe in as male, breathe out as female.  At the peak of the breath, feel yourself as both.  At the end of the outbreath, feel yourself as neither.
You may want to recapitulate the breathing exercise I gave a while back that focuses on the act of sexual intercourse.  Breathe in as you penetrate, hold it as you are all the way in, breathe out as you pull out, hold it just at the entrance.  (Men and women may do this a different way; for women, the experience is more of being penetrated.  It will be useful to your perspective to exchange your inner role, regardless of what gender you are.)
There is a great energy in this particular chakra, especially as you abstain from sexual orgasm for awhile.  It is not necessarily just about being horny, but it is also about the union of male and female to produce the child.  It is about reproduction in general, the primal creative force in the universe.
At a higher level, you can learn to transform this creative energy into something which enables you to create more prodigiously at a number of different levels.  As we all know, lust can become transformed into love.  This energy can be transformed into that which will enable you to see things more clearly.  Colors and sounds will become more intense.  As it grows, you will be filled with energy in general and feel more alive. 
THE POWER CHAKRA

Now there is the Power Chakra.  We will picture this right in the upper part of the belly, about in the solar plexus region.  It is from this chakra which we generate energy and motivation.  It gives us power, power in general, power over people and things, and what I’d call a “submissive power”.
On a very crude level, this is the “Dominant/Submissive” chakra.  It is connected in a lower way with the sex chakra in the form of sado-masochistic behavior.  It is remarkable how popular this kind of behavior is in human sexuality.  In any case, it is tied in with this particular chakra.
General human behavior operates from this center in our day-to-day lives.  You are either the one who orders someone else around - or you are the one who humbly follows the orders.  There are usually punishments or reparations for the one who does not correctly follow the orders.  You are either on top of the situation or the situation is on top of you.
You may want to consider all the power structures in this society and in interpersonal behavior.  There is the boss/employee, husband/wife, general/private, Nazi/Jew (extreme), torturer/tortured, guru/disciple, priest/congregation, judge/judged, policeman/citizen, government/governed.  These power structures may be more obvious than in others.  
Consider the gut feeling you have when a policeman pulls you over.  Because that man carries a gun and wears a badge, he has absolute power over you.  He can accuse you of anything he wants to.  He can throw you in the back of the car if you show the slightest sign of disrespect.  Sound like a familiar feeling?  You feel terrified, don’t you?
Or how about that time when your boss ceases to be that nice person and “has a word with you” in the office.  He shuts the door and proceeds to chew you out for every little mistake you’ve made in the past six months.  Perhaps they are mistakes he himself often makes, but that doesn’t matter, he is the boss and you are the employee.  He yells at you that if you don’t shape up, he will fire you.  You leave, all shaken, frightened at your situation.
Or what if it is the other way around?  Consider the snug feeling you have when you can tell someone what to do.  Doesn’t it feel good to back that person in a corner?  You’re the one people look up to and they can’t mess with you.  However, in an odd way, you are very dependent on those people to look up at you.  Some part of you is afraid the tables may turn and you may lose that power.
For this reason, even the powerless can have a weird kind of power over the powerful one.  They can threaten not to give power to the powerful one.  They can throw monkey wrenches into the system when the powerful one is not looking.  They can get the powerful one all bent out of shape.
The power chakra need not be just on this level however.  It, like the other lower chakras can be transmuted into something higher.  For example, you can have power by being a master of your craft, whatever it is.  You can become a master of meditation.  You can have power over yourself.  You can give yourself power.  You can have the power to love, to express yourself, to know yourself, to become one with yourself.  And that is the highest power of all.
THE HEART CHAKRA

The next chakra is located in the area of the heart.  This zone is the center of the emotions in general.  There are higher and lower emotions.  Some of the lower emotions manifest as fear, hate, anger, irritation, discomfort, and the such.  You generally know these kinds of emotions by how bent out of shape they make you.  You usually feel bad having them.  Usually they are in regard to personal affairs and stem from desire, whether you could get something you wanted or not, whether there is some threat to your general well-being.
The higher emotions are what I’d call the “feel good” emotions.  There is love, pleasure, humor, delight, calm, and the such.  You tend to feel these when you are having an especially good day.  Again, these emotions can be in regard to personal affairs (and can very quickly switch to their opposites if the personal affairs are threatened).
The highest emotion is obviously love.  Love is interesting in that it is very malleable in who or what it can be directed to.  There is the more personal kind of love when you are “in love” with someone you want to be a mate with, or even a good friend.  You can love your friends, your wife, your family, your co-workers, your pet, your garden, nature, the people in the streets, the ripples on the water, yourself, your body, a good meal, and on and on.  You may have noted how when you are intensely in love with a particular person, that you tend to regard others in a more loving way.  (And note the reverse, when your attitude is one of hate, you hate just about anybody or anything that comes in your path.)
You might start out here by simply attempting to be aware of your emotions.  How do you feel right now?  Who is it in regard to?  Don’t do a lot of thinking about it, just try to feel the nitty-gritty emotion itself.
Men in general tend to have a harder time with this chakra, because they are taught from an early age “boys don’t cry and it they do, they’re sissies”.  So they grow up repressing any emotions they may feel.  They certainly don’t have trouble expressing emotions like anger, but they will tend to say they are being “rational” or some such thing.  I myself find that to feel my emotions is somewhat challenging.
Here is a suggestion:  We will do a breathing exercise again.  This time you breathe in and inwardly say “I”.  Hold your breath and inwardly invoke “love”.  Breathe out very slowly and inwardly say “you”.  Basically you are chanting “I… love… you…” over and over.  Try that for twenty minutes.  Don’t think too much about who this love is being directed to.  If you can think of a good friend or spouse or someone you would like to get to know, fine, but if you don’t have a specific object, don’t worry about it.
A rather profound form of love is compassion.  Compassion is different from personal love of immediate friends and family, though it can include them.  Compassion is for all beings - and their source, the Universal Being.  This is the level of saints who love God in all His/Her manifestations.  At the level of compassion, you love because you want to give all of yourself, not because you are trying to get something from that person.
Perhaps you can start by truly loving yourself.  I don’t mean in a selfish way, but more in a way where you completely and thoroughly accept yourself and who you are.  It is from here where you can begin to thoroughly accept others for who they are - even those who have done you wrong!
THE CREATIVE CHAKRA

The next chakra up located in the throat region is what I call the “Creative Chakra”.  When you consider that it is located where your voice is and your voice is the instrument by which you communicate and express yourself to the world, we can say that it is your voice which is the root of your creativity.  One of the initial forms of creativity in our species came from our voice, all the sounds we can make, the ability to make that voice rise and fall in pitch, to give syllables a rhythm.  With our voice we told tales around the campfire, and we sang songs and recited poetry.  When you consider the remarkable profusion of languages and regional accents, you can see a creativity here.
So we can say that it is this chakra which is the center of creative expression.  Perhaps you can consider all the forms of creative expression in the arts which are such an important part of our lives:  song, dance, poetry, literature, music, painting, drawing, sculpture, architecture, movies, computer graphics, and so on.  With the development of new forms of technology, we have new ways of creative expression.  Without the arts in some form or the other, our lives would be very dull indeed!  We do not live merely to eat, fuck, survive, climb the power latter, we also live to create and be the audience of forms of creativity.
Creative expression is not necessarily only what is normally called the arts.  It can also be a new recipe for a meal, a different way of programming a computer, a new design for a product, a different approach to making love, a different way of building a house, a different form of communication and mediation, a new way of interacting, a different kind of society, a version of a political bill which pleases everyone.  Creative expression can take place in the most mundane activities, even if it’s rearranging boxes in a warehouse or how to recycle the garbage.
This kind of expression need not be working on the new only.  It can be a different approach to working with what is already there.  Even when you are fixing something, this is a kind of creative expression, since you are not merely letting it lay as it is.
This chakra is very connected with the hands.  Our hands often help us as we talk to give emphasis to what we are talking about.  Our hands (or some extension thereof) are what we use to create things.
There are also ways in which this chakra connects with the others.  With the base chakra, we find a new way of surviving in order to do higher forms of creativity.  We can use the sexual chakra and power chakra for their respective energies to transform into higher creative expression.  We can express our love with a creative expression or form.  We can creatively find new ways of thinking about things.  We can merge with our creativity in a state of Samadhi.
Creativity is a basic force in the universe.  The universe was created and created itself because of this creative drive within it.  With merely a few forces of physics, we have all the manifold diversity of elements, forms, organisms, creative expressions of sentient beings that we see in it now.  Note the sheer variety of life forms we have on this planet and you will see this not as a theory, but as a fact!
Meditate on creativity.  Consider how you can serve the creative force the best you can with what you have.  Participate in the joyous dance of the universe!
THE MIND CHAKRA

The next step up on the ladder is the Inner Eye chakra.  This is the chakra between the eyes and in the forebrain.  It is here that we do our thinking.  Of all the chakras, it is this one that our education trains us for most intensively.  From day one in grade school, we are encouraged to think logically, to see how A precedes B which then goes on to C.
It is in this center that we see how effects are preceded by causes and causes are responsible for effects.  We learn that this or that action has this or that consequence.  We have maps in our heads of where north, east, south, and west are.  We do things according to whether they are left or right, clockwise or counterclockwise, how up is different from down.  We see the world hemmed in by boundaries, rules, laws.  We learn that if we step over a boundary, it has this or that particular cause.  We learn the boiling temperature and freezing temperature of water and what that does.
It is here that we examine things, take them apart in our minds.  We ask questions like:  how, why, when, who, or what.  We wonder the origin of things and where they are going.  We learn that things go on for a limited time until they decompose into something else.
We see the world in abstract.  We examine the world of sensory impressions and abstract some kind of guiding map or theory of what the sensory impressions have in common.  Eventually, the abstract becomes more real than the original sensory impressions.  The empirical becomes the Laws of Physics.
There is always this thinker thinking away in the thinking center.  It is at this level that Descartes was when he stated:  “I think, therefore I am.”  This is the level of philosophers and scientists as they try to abstract what is.
We tend to feel rather uncomfortable if our maps of the world are threatened or removed.  We feel bewildered if we don’t know which direction is which when we become lost.  Consider how you feel if you are lost in the woods or in a strange city.  Think about how you feel when your car or computer breaks down and you don’t know the first thing about how to remedy it.  Then consider the relief you feel when you turn the right knob, hit the right button, tighten the right screw, install the right program, or whatever it is.
We are always thinking to make sure we know where we are on the map of the world.  Observe how you do this, whether you are thinking about something very personal or something more abstract.
There is certainly room for a kind of creativity at this level.  Creative scientists and philosophers do it all the time.   The map of the world can always be reorganized to account for new data.  For example, once upon a time, people believed the sun circled around the earth because that’s how it looks.  Then someone figured that it is the earth turning around in a circle, and that’s why the sun rises and sets.  Initially, a lot of people were quite upset at this new way of looking at it, and declared the man a heretic.
It is useful as a meditative exercise to focus on a specific thing to think about, to give that persistent thinker something to do.  Think about how it can be thought of in a new way.  After all, this is what I have been doing with you all along in previous exercises.  Think about it.

THE SAMADHI CHAKRA

The final and topmost chakra is the Samadhi Chakra.  This one lies just on the top of the head, towards the back of the head.  It is in this chakra that we achieve the ultimate focus, the ultimate unity with that which we are meditating upon.  This is also the area where we achieve the ultimate unity with our inner self.
One quality about being in this chakra is a perfect inner silence.  One feels a sense of abiding peace while here.  It is here where one feels that sense of an Eternal Now.  One is no longer worried about anything, no longer agitated about anything.  It is like being in a peaceful meadow, upon a high mountaintop, far away from the troubles of the world.
There is a sense of vast spaciousness here.  One feels all boundaries slipping away.  One feels like one could go on forever and forever with no end.
One feels that ever-persistent personal ego slipping away here.  Somehow the problems of the personal ego do not matter in this realm.  The personal ego is seen as illusory.
The experience of being here is ineffable and one will find it difficult, if not impossible, to put the experience into words.  Indeed, as soon as you try to put it into words, it slips out of your grasp as if you were attempting to grasp air or water.
It is present when you cease to try to find it.  Like a very tricky animal, it dashes away as soon as you try to “achieve” it.  It cannot be “achieved” as if it were learning a new skill or area of knowledge.  It can only be experienced.  And it can only be experienced when the experiencer is no longer there.
There are innumerable spiritual books which attempt to point to it.  Try the “Upanishads”, “Bhagavad Gita”, Buddhist texts, the more esoteric gospels such as the “Book of Thomas”, the Kabbala, the “Tao Te Ching”, among others.  At least, you can get a taste of it by reading and reading between the lines of books such as these.  But there will be a point where you will have to toss these away, where you can only find it within yourself.
This experience is called by many names:  “Samadhi”, “Satori”, “Enlightenment”, “Nirvana”, “The Kingdom of Heaven”, “Paradise”, “Union with God”, “Tao”, among others.  Some deem it nameless.
One misconception about this experience is it is not necessarily permanent.  As one develops, one will get ever-so-brief flashes of it.  I think people, especially in the Eastern traditions, have the idea that you “attain” Nirvana, Enlightenment, Satori, or whatever - and, there it is, you’re “off the Wheel of Birth and Death”.
However, the brief flashes will become moments, and what long moments they are!  And the moments will become hours and the hours will become days, then years, and so on.  It is a long process, lasting lifetimes.  But, once you’ve had a taste of what this experience is like, it is unforgettable, and you will know what it is you are meditating for.  And, the things of this world will become increasingly less interesting to you as you experience more and more of it.
It is like a seed within you.  Each day, that seed will germinate and grow just a little bit more.  Have faith in the process and keep working on yourself.  The reward will be wonderful.
CORRELATING THE CHAKRAS

As you progress in the unity of the seven chakras, you will find it useful to see how they all correlate and the levels associated with them.  What I would suggest is to spend each day starting with the base chakra and gradually bringing your energy upward toward the crown chakra.  Spend approximately five minutes with each one, merging as thoroughly into it as you can.
It is my own observation that the three lower chakras, the base, the sexual and power chakras are more related to the bestial level.  This is the area where we are coming from in our long climb up the evolutionary ladder.  It is in these three that we act completely like animals.  Survival, sex, and power are the basic prerogatives of animals.  This is the lowest common denominator of human behavior.  You will observe this is pretty much the main interests of the majority of people, and you will observe this is pretty much where you spend a lot of time, whether you admit it or not.
When you pay the bills, when you are drawn to an attractive member of the opposite sex, when you are into some kind of sexual behavior, when you feel hungry, when you are wolfing down a good meal, when you feel in pain, when you feel smug when you can boss someone around, when you feel hurt that someone can boss you around, these are the levels you are on.  You will note that that feeling of detachment vanishes like a mirage when you are on these levels.  It’s hard to feel any sort of “spirituality” on these levels, and this is why spiritual teachers always recommend that you reach a level of detachment about these things.
Let’s face it.  You are not going to eradicate these levels and it is useless to attempt to pretend they are not there.  As long as we are physically incarnated, we have to deal with them.  If you get smart, you can learn to direct these energies upwards towards higher goals.  The energies of sexuality can be sublimated into love and creativity.  The power chakra can give us the energy to think more clearly and concentrate more fully.  The survival chakra can be directed towards others, even the entire human species and forms of life on this planet.
The heart chakra has two levels, a more personal level directed towards the lower chakras, and a more universal level directed towards the higher chakras.  You might say it is either focused downward or focused upward.  
If it is more personal, love can easily turn into its opposite, hate and fear.  The more personal kind of love is directed towards someone we feel sexually attracted to, towards vested power interests, towards ways of becoming more comfortable.  Needless to say, this love is directed towards the impermanent things of this world.  If something falls through, we can easily wind up hating someone we once loved, and this happens in relationships that break up all the time.
Or love can have a more expansive compassionate side.  We can love all beings.  We can love beauty and we can love ideas.  We can love the more subtle things.  We can love the Self of the Universe.  We can forgive all and accept all people just as they are.  We can see how all things are destined to grow and evolve far beyond where they now are.
The next three chakras are the higher chakras.  These levels are more likely to get us off this sphere and into more subtle realms of existence.

THE TWISTING OF THE HIGHER CHAKRAS

This is not always true, of course.  Like the heart chakra, these chakras can have a lower aspect.  Creativity and thought can simply serve the purposes of the body.  We can invent things to make our lives more comfortable, exciting, and pleasant.  Scientists can work on methods of mass destruction even more awesome for the power interests of this world.  Artists can sell out and work on advertising to sell more clothes, furniture, gadgets, and hamburgers.  Movies can addict people to fine homes and restaurants, so they are ever envious if they don’t have them.  Fashions are used to make people more attractive to the opposite sex.  Thinkers can completely exclude the concept of any kind of spiritual principle in this world and say it is all an accident.  Indeed, if you look carefully at the structure of this society, this is more or less the general consensus.
However, an artist can go further than this and create something more profound, a work of art that will give the audience a glimpse of the higher levels of existence.  A work of music can be composed that will put the listener into an altered state of consciousness.  The creative person is looking for some kind of new synthesis of what is above and what is below.
The thinker likewise can learn to perceive new ways of organizing the thought process.  The thinker can take a series of specifics and create some kind of new generalization of them.  The thinker sees the Archetypes behind the external forms of this world.
Even the crown chakra can have a more twisted aspect.  We are all of course familiar with the gurus, priests, spiritual leaders, who encourage people to give them all they have in order to be “saved” or “enlightened”.  The governments can use religions as a way to keep the people in line with what is a tyranny.  They can actually believe they are showing the people the way to heaven while they are actually exploiting those people.  How often do we hear about the skeletons in their closets!
The forces of spirituality can even be used for the ultimate forms of evil.  Take Nazism or Satanism, for example.  People actually use spiritual forces to advocate extremely sadistic forms of torture and sacrifice.
One interesting thing about the crown chakra is once you are there, you can note an odd relation to the base chakra.  The topmost part of the tree is related to the bottommost roots.
So it is important to sort out how these different levels can be mixed.  Every level can either be oriented towards higher levels or oriented towards lower levels.  The lowest levels can be oriented upwards and the highest levels can be oriented downwards.
The ultimate enlightenment would be to bring about within oneself a synthesis of the higher and lower.
When you are not meditating, you might want to catch yourself in your day-to-day activities.  Stop and ask yourself:  “From which chakra am I oriented right now?”  Think about whether this chakra is serving a higher level or a lower level.  For example, if someone with a lot of power just chewed you out, you would obviously be oriented on the power chakra.  If you feel sexually attracted or horny, you’re more on the sex chakra.  If you’re worried about how you will make ends meet, you’re on the survival chakra.  If you’re feeling fond of someone, you’re on the heart chakra.  If you are engaged in making a table, you’re on the creative chakra.  If you are trying to figure something out, you’re on the thinking chakra.  If you are feeling perfectly at peace and laid back, you’re more on the crown chakra.  Wherever you are, just take note of what level you are on.

FREEDOM VS. SECURITY

An interesting topic to focus on is the issue of freedom vs. security.  It is simply axiomatic that the more secure you are, the less free you are - and the more free you are, the less secure you are.
Ultimate security means a lot of locks and chains.  It means a lot of protection and insurance.  It means a lot of investment in everything you can think of.  It means having thicker walls.  It means looking ahead to every possible disaster that might hit you and taking measures to keep that from happening.  It means going with the majority consensus of things, since that is where the security is.
The more things you have, the more you have to lose.  Whenever you acquire some new possession, you take care not to let anything happen to it.  You don’t want thieves to take it or an accident to happen to destroy it.  When you find someone you love, you don’t want that person to get taken away from you.  You have nightmares that may happen.
Also to afford all this protection, you have to work.  You have to work around the clock to afford that mortgage for that huge house, to afford the insurance to pay for it, to afford the taxes you pay for police and military protection.  You are terrified that thieves and barbarians will invade your territory.
You are a slave to what you need.  The more you need, the more of a slave you are.
On the other hand, if you seek to be free of all of the above, that means going without a home to live in, going without a steady meal every day, not being bound to relationships of any sort.  In an odd way, the bum in the streets is very lucky.  He does not have to worry about getting to a job or paying bills.  He just lives on what he can scavenge.
That, of course, is a bit extreme, but you may discover that by cutting down on what you need, you have an increasing amount of freedom. But this also means you are going to be a lot more vulnerable to whatever may come up.
There is some medium between the two extremes; ultimate security would mean no freedom at all and ultimate freedom would mean no security at all.   Each person needs to decide for him or her self what this medium is.
The human species was never so free as when we wandered across the wide plains living on whatever we could hunt or pick.  The wandering gypsy is quite free to go where he chooses, but he has no idea where he will sleep the next night or where his next meal will come from.
What you may meditate upon is to think about what it is you need and how that need binds you.  Then consider how your life would be different if you didn’t need it.  Consider whether it is a nitty gritty need, the kind that keeps your physical body going - or whether it is a need that you somehow picked up along the way and now feel dependent on.  Consider what you do to make yourself secure and then ask yourself how much freedom you have left after taking that security measure.  Consider the price you pay for it.  Ask yourself which you prefer.
THE GOAL IS NO-GOAL

This meditation is upon the above statement:  “The Goal is No-Goal”.  When you think about it is a paradox.  To achieve the state of being without a goal is a goal in itself, yet once you are without a goal, you no longer have to do anything.
This is a very Zen-like saying known as a “koan”.  Zen Masters used to give their disciples “koans” as a way of knocking them on the head, so to speak, so they would transcend their usual rational modes of seeing the world and achieve a state known as “satori”.  Read some Zen parables and you will get the flavor of this style of enlightenment.
When you ponder upon this saying, you could first of all ask yourself:  “What is my goal in life?  What is my primary overriding concern that takes precedence over all else?  Just what is it that I am working towards?”
For the businessman, for example, perhaps his primary goal is to make money - and whatever it he or she desires to spend that money on.  The writer desires to write a bestselling novel that will blow away the audience.  The artist desires to paint a masterpiece.  The missionary desires to save the world and bring people closer to God.  The politician desires fame and power.  The chef desires to make a delicious meal.  The man desires to have sex with the woman and the woman desires to have babies.  The newly-wed couple desire to have a house.  The teenager desires to have his first car.
All of these goals have one thing in common.  If the goal is achieved, one is elated.  If the goal is not achieved, one is miserable.  The goal has the power to make one elated or miserable.  The goal is always keep one in a state of busy-ness; one can never rest until one has achieved the goal.
It may be the nature of the goal that once this goal is finally achieved, that you become addicted to that state of busy-ness that got you to this goal.  Only shortly afterwards, you go on to create an even higher goal.  Now that you have made a hundred thousand dollars, you would like to make a million dollars, and next you will want to make a billion dollars.  Now that you got laid, you want to lay someone even more beautiful and desirable.  Now that you made that masterpiece, you want to make a masterpiece ten times as good, that will assure your fame for generations.
So when you are setting your goal, are you ever going to know when and where to stop?  Will you ever be satisfied?  Can you imagine yourself ever being satisfied and laying back and saying,  “Yes, this is what I need at last.  Now I no longer have to do anything.”
Be honest with yourself when you examine your goals.  If you desire to create a masterpiece, do you wish to create merely the masterpiece - or do you actually desire the fame, fortune, people hanging onto you, and all that comes with it?  Are you trying to save the world - or are you trying to save yourself?  Are you trying to create business with a conscience - or is this just a new gimmick to make money?
The initial step towards being goal-less is to carefully examine the goals you now have.  Gradually you will come to regard them with increasing detachment.
SYMBOLS

Symbols are an interesting focal point for meditation.  Symbols can open you up to the Realm of Archetypes, the Seed-Thoughts for the things of this world.  At least, give them a try and see what they do for you.
Symbols are closely related to numerology.  A triangle or pyramid, for example, is obviously based on the number three.  You could meditate on the idea of a triangle or pyramid and consider what significance the number three has in the structure of this universe.  There are three forces, for example, positive, negative, and neutral-catalytic.  There is the father, mother, and child.  There are the opposites and there is the result.
The Jewish Star of David is of an interesting significance beyond the fact it symbolizes the Jewish religion.  One triangle points upwards.  This is the male principle, the positive force.  The other triangle points downwards.  This is the female principle, the negative force.  This is probably the most concise symbol akin to the Yang/Yin symbol that the Chinese have.  The other interesting thing is each of these interlinking symbols are triangles, each of which symbolize their own three forces.  One points to heaven; the other points to earth.  Thus the Star of David is a structure symbolizing the union of the heavenly and the earthly.
The Celtic Cross is also a symbol of the Union of Opposites.  One line is vertical symbolizing male/positive/active.  The other line is horizontal symbolizing female/negative/passive.  Their crossing at a 90 degree angle symbolizes their unity.  The Celtic Cross also symbolizes the four seasons:  fall, winter, spring, and summer.  Fall and spring are feminine, the time of changing.  Winter and summer are masculine, the time of stillness.  A further elaboration on this general pattern is the mandala and perhaps having a picture of one in front of you can aid your meditation.
I gather from the crescent moon and Venus in conjunction, the symbol of the Moslems, a homage to the feminine symbolized as a guiding star in the sky.  In this case, the Evening Star may be considered masculine the crescent moon feminine.  All I know, is it always does something strange within me when I see those two in conjunction in the sky at evening.
Sometimes this is what you are after when you meditate upon these symbols.  It is not so important what you have been told the symbols mean - but it is what the symbol makes you feel inside.  Does it give you a good feeling?  Does it make you feel queasy inside?  What associations does it give you as you focus on it?
Another good symbol is the pentacle, pentagram, pentagon, or five-pointed star.  Alternatively this has been associated with paganism or Satanism, take your pick.  Anyway, you will note many things in this universe are built upon the number five.  There are especially a large number of life-forms, including ourselves, which are five-shaped.  There is the four and the one.  We have four limbs and one head.  We have four fingers and one thumb.  There are an interesting variety of starfish which are five-pointed and you might have one in your hand while doing this meditation.
Other good symbols are:  the yang/yin symbol, the circle, the wheel, eight-pointed shapes, ten-pointed shapes, among many, many others.  If you find yourself lacking in inspiration, get a book on symbology or by Carl Jung or Joseph Campbell.
Be very one-pointed as you focus on the symbol.  It will open up a whole new world behind this world that you never suspected existed.
EXPLORING YOUR BRAIN

It is an interesting foray sometimes to explore different portions of your brain.  Now I know they say that there is no sensation in the brain and you can’t possibly feel your brain - but that is not quite true.  It takes quite a bit of one-pointed concentration and it is very subtle, but you can feel your brain.
Initially, it helps to know a thing or two about the brain and which parts do which.  There are numerous books about this topic written for the layperson and you don’t have to be an advanced specialist to know the basics.  However, it is interesting to dismiss all this and simply be aware of what is actually there despite whatever the specialists might tell you.
You may start perhaps with the frontal lobes.  These are usually the part that does the planning ahead and projecting.  You may notice a constant chattering here - it is the part of the brain that never seems to shut up.  It is an avid conversationalist and it is always going on about something:  the weather, your bank account, inflation, that movie you saw last night, whether she or he will put out for you, whether you should get your brakes fixed, what will you have for dinner tonight, and on and on, blah, blah, blah.  It is this part of the brain that gives the average person a sense of identity, though it is more a shallower self, not the deeper self.
You can go on to the left lobes, the temporal lobes, which are about where the left ear is.  This is the logical brain, the part you use when you are studying for a test or doing a mathematical equation.  It is usually calmer, somewhat cool, quieter, focused.  Of course, this may depend on how your brain is structured and where your sense of identity lies.  College professors and computer programmers are in this area a lot.  So are financial advisors.
The right temporal lobes are more messy and disorganized.  They are always rearranging things just out of curiosity or for fun.  They tend to be more manic-depressive, up and down.  If you are an artist, musician, or some sort of creative person, chances are this is the “noisiest” part of the brain for you, where you have your sense of self the most.
If you are an emotional type of person, you may feel your hippocampus and limbic center more acutely.  This is always where you may be if you tend to be sexually turned on a lot.
If you get very deeply into being aware of your breathing, you may gradually come to be aware of more primitive portions of the brain, the thalamus, at the base of the brain in the back of the head.  This is what controls your breathing, your heart beat, basic bodily functions.  If you get particularly deeply into it, you may become aware of a very low-pitched hum, feeling a sense of infinite space.  I personally experience some very mystical states of consciousness in this region and feel a deeper sense of self here.
Upon doing this exercise, it always makes me think of that saying of Jesus:  “In my Father’s House, there are many mansions”.  Each portion of the brain opens up a whole new dimension where there are worlds within worlds.  Try it and see what you find.

CREATIVITY

Engaging in some kind of creative activity can be a form of meditation.  Creativity can take numerous manifestations, not necessarily the artistic forms that we normally associate with the word “creativity”.  However, it can be useful to set aside a period of time in the day or week where you focus upon creating something.
It doesn’t have to be something you are necessarily good at.  In the realm of true creativity, the usual value judgments of good or bad do not apply.  Try out different things to see what it is that draws you in, what fascinates you.  Try writing a poem or a short story.  Try doodling around on paper to see what you can draw.  Get on a musical instrument and just experiment with different sounds and see which sounds go well together.  Try playing around with ingredients in a recipe, not following cookbooks at all.  Attempt to nail some boards together in a piece of furniture.  Completely rearrange the furniture in your living space.  Go out dancing somewhere there is no formal mode of dancing and just wiggle your arms and legs according to the rhythm and the tune.  Try going out for a play.  Take pictures and see what shots work best.  Get into computer editing; there are all kinds of creative computer editing programs for digital pictures, drawing, music synthesis and composition, word programs, movies, and so on.
You may have to hone your skills and do a bit of learning in whatever it is you apply yourself to.  It could be useful to take some classes just to see what are the range of skills you can use.  From the perspective of meditation, I think you would do better to teach yourself, however.  Ask questions and research, if you have to, but always keep thinking:  How can I creatively apply this technique in a way that is different from my usual associations?
The point is not so much in the product or having some particular applause from an audience.  It is more in becoming so fascinated with the act of creation itself, that you become lost in it and lose your usual sense of self.  When you are deeply engaged in it, you will find a sense that a higher creative power is channeling itself through you - and you will usually find that what you develop this way is better than what you may produce when you feel self-conscious about it. 
When you do this, you are manifesting a major purpose of this universe, which is to endlessly create numerous experiences and experiments to see what it can do next.   It is probably the most fun activity you can engage in and it’s nice to add to the major variety show of the universe.  
SEEING THROUGH THE DREAM

Another form of meditation is to attempt to see what you are now experiencing as a dream.  This is actually an old Tibetan Buddhist exercise.  Have you ever “woken up” in the middle of a dream and realized it was a dream, yet you are still in it?  This is what psychologists call “lucid dreaming”.  Another interesting form of this is when you wake up from a dream, then realize you are still dreaming, having only dreamed you were awake.  Then you “wake up” again only to discover that is another dream.  Perhaps you may go through several layers of this.  Finally when you “really” awaken, you may lie in bed for a moment wondering if this is the real thing yet.  That is what this meditation is like.
Sit on your cushion or your chair.  Note the thoughts and sensations you are having.  Now say to yourself:  “This is only a dream I am having.  None of this is actually real.  It only seems to be real, and it is doing a damn good job of seeming real, but it is only a dream.  Sooner or later, I will wake up and find that this whole existence I am having was only a dream.”
Look at the body you are in.  Note how real it seems to be, yet you know it is only a dream.  This whole experience of having a body with its various needs is only a dream.  Perhaps this whole notion of orienting yourself through three dimensions of space measured by intervals of time is utterly unreal, just part of the dream.  This whole sense of being inside a body surrounded by this “external world” is just a dream.  All the pleasures and pains you feel are just dreams.  All the good things that happen to you and the things that make you miserable are just dreams.  This whole lifetime with the inevitable death at the end is just a dream.  When you die, maybe that is when you will wake up.  Or maybe you will just have dreams of heaven or hell.  And you will go on to dream of being in other bodies.
Speculate on what it must be like when you actually do wake up from the dream.  Maybe what is outside this dream will be some utterly new dimension of existence, that you completely forgot about when you fell asleep and started dreaming.  Maybe you will find yourself utterly without a body, mind, or personality as you know it.  Perhaps you will wake up in some kind of dimensionless timeless space, feeling no boundaries to your self at all.  You will marvel at what an elaborate dream you became lost in like some vast labyrinth of experiences.
Or perhaps since you know you are dreaming, you will want to sort of “change channels”.  Perhaps you don’t like this dream you are now having very much.  Since it is a dream, maybe you can make things happen in it - rather than simply having things happen to you.  This, too, can be done and it is called “positive thinking” by some and “magic” by others.  But, you have to really and truly know you are dreaming before you can actually achieve anything.  It takes a lot of concentration and one-pointedness of mind to re-create the dream.
What would you like your dream to be now?  Would you like to make it so only good things happen to you or maybe you would like it so things are perfect for everyone.  Maybe you could make it so you no longer have the itch of desires to fulfill over and over again.  You could either have a vast mansion - or you could be a pure spirit with no needs, that never dies, where everything is pristine, and you need no clothes, food, sex, or shelter.  Take your pick.  After all, it is your dream.  You can change it - or wake up.
MEDITATION AND WORK

I have often felt frustrated when I may sit down for an interval in the deepest state of meditative bliss feeling a complete unity with the totality of the universe - and then I get up to start my day at work, get lost in the grindstone of one thing or another, paying bills, answering important business calls, and so on.  Somewhere in the midst of doing all that stuff, the various errands and tasks you have to do to maintain your physical existence, I’m certainly not feeling in a state of meditative bliss anymore and I’m dealing with things in a perfect state of non-unity with the universe.  In other words, I start getting pissed off, aggravated, feeling overwhelmed, and the such.
I would then ask myself what is the point of sitting still in some pristine state in meditative bliss if I’m going to just lose it in the midst of day-to-day activity?  I have often wondered if it is possible to be in a state of meditation in the midst of activity.  This would surely be of more value in the long run, than meditating in a relatively peaceful situation.
Obviously, this would take a lot more discipline.  The best way to do it would be to watch yourself in the midst of that activity and observe what you are doing at the present time.  It is probably a bit easier to do this with activities that are particularly routine and more physical in nature.  Cleaning work or yard work is an especially good place to practice. 
Try it with washing dishes, for example.  Watch your hands scrubbing the dishes.  Feel the sensation of the soapy water.  Smell the soap.  Breathe deeply as you work in a somewhat slower manner than you ordinarily would.  Work in slow motion, if you have to, until you get it.  Say to yourself:  “I am now washing the dishes.  I am scrubbing this plate until it is good and clean.  I am putting it under the water to rinse it off.  I am now putting it in the rack.  I am now wiping it dry.  I am now putting in the cupboard where other dishes of the same type are.”
You could do it with computer work.  Data entry is particularly amenable to this kind of thing.  “I am now hitting the “Shift” key.  I am now typing the name.  I am now typing the address.  I am now typing the city, the zip code, and the state.  I now need to type this password in. “  If that is too much, you can simply keep saying, “I am now typing data into the computer.  My fingers are moving across the keys.  I am doing this very automatically.  I am breathing very deeply while I do this.”
It gets a bit more difficult when you are answering the phone, especially when it comes out of the blue.  But, rather than automatically reacting, you pause a second, thinking,  “I am now answering this call.  I am wondering what I can do for this person.  Who is this person and how can I help him or her?”  Breathe deeply before replying, talk a bit more slowly than usual.  Meditating while talking to someone can be particularly challenging, especially if that person is upset about something or somehow pushing your buttons.  Simply be aware of that as well.
You may find that this discipline will actually make you a more effective worker, because you are really focused on what you are doing at the present time, rather than daydreaming or thinking about what else you have to do when you get this out of the way.  It will take some time to master, but well worth it in the long run.
SELF-HEALING

This particular kind of meditation is somewhat more “pragmatic” in its approach.  You have heard of the issue of “self-healing” or “alternative medical care”.  This could be very useful for you if you are currently having some kind of illness or pain.
Basically, what you do here is focus on whatever illness or pain you are having.  Rather than resist it, accept it and be right there with it.  Become one with it rather than feeling like you are fighting it or a helpless victim of it.  It is admittedly very difficult to do if it is especially intense or debilitating.  It is probably better to start with some kind of relatively minor pain, like a stomach ache, a minor cut, or burn.
Focus upon the pain as intently as you can.  While you are thus engaged, assert to yourself:  “This pain has no power over me.  I accept this pain just as it is.  I am not afraid or intimidated by it.  It is a part of my being and I accept it.”  
Perceive the pain as something that is trying to tell you something about how you are living your life.  Perhaps it is telling you to slow down a bit, to take stock of things, to re-examine your basic values.  See the pain as a messenger, not a curse.  Try to interpret what the message is.  Make a resolution to change your way of doing things to facilitate your healing.
This may be as obvious as quitting smoking, drinking, excess use of drugs, overeating, eating sweets or excess meat, and the such.  But perhaps it goes beyond even these addictions to why you have the addictions.  Perhaps you are doing things you don’t really believe in, that go against your sense of what is right.  Perhaps it is time to find the true path for yourself.
Then go deeper into it and try to relax as thoroughly as you can.  Incorporate the pain into your being and see it as no longer there.  Visualize the pain as gone.  If it is a cut, for example, picture smooth flawless skin without a scar, as it was before.  Picture your body taking care of it, patching things up, the white blood cells eating any germs or viruses, staving off any kind of infection.
Picture your heart as healed and pumping quite normally.  Picture your lungs as clear and breathing free.  Picture your metabolism as working efficiently and burning off any excess fat.  Picture your brain functioning at an optimum rate.  Whatever the problem is, picture yourself as perfectly healthy.  Have faith that the body knows what it is doing. 
Usually modern medicine pictures the illness as some kind of “enemy”, something to be “fought”.  The illness is usually pictured as something “foreign” or “alien”.  In this approach, a kind of chemical, biochemical, or even radioactive warfare is used to “wipe out” the disease, which usually is debilitating and dangerous to normal tissues as well.  And we are told we have no choice but to do this - and it involves the expenditure of thousands upon thousands of dollars.
This approach involves “making friends” with the illness.  It involves seeing what the illness wants and attempting to facilitate it.  Once this is done, then the stage is set so the illness can heal, often in a quite spontaneous way.  Best of all, this approach is absolutely free.
So sickness and pain can be a great opportunity for meditation.  And who knows, it might even heal it!  So it’s worth a try, you’ve tried everything else, haven’t you?
FLASHBACKS

This exercise is one of visualization.  Attempt to remember a particular scene you have seen and visualize it.  Pick a scene that particularly intrigues you or relaxes you.  Nature scenes are generally best for this, but you may choose other options.
It is probably best to pick a scene that you frequently visit and see a lot.  Try to remember every detail you can about that scene.  Visualize the details.  Try to remember any sounds, sensations, and smells that go with this scene.  Inwardly look at the scene and get into it - until you feel like you are actually there.  Even though it is a scene in the past, feel it as if you are really present there.
For example, you might pick a lake in a park.  See children playing around the lake.  See people rowing across the lake in a boat.  See the ducks swimming by.  Hear their quacking.  Watch them come towards you begging you for a piece of bread.  Watch the squirrels chase each other up and down the trees.  Hear the blue jays and crows squawking.  Smell the water evaporating from the lake.  See the colors of the various flowers growing along the lake.  Be totally present at this lake as if you are really there.
It could help to have some kind of snapshot of this scene to remind you of the general features.  Then close your eyes and attempt to see those details more thoroughly.  Be right there and feel like you are sitting there meditating absorbing everything in that scene.
Meanwhile, as you go about these scenes in real life, take in all details with the intention of remembering it later.  Make your mind a kind of camera and recorder of experience.  Later on, you will be surprised at how many details you can remember.
As you improve at this kind of skill, attempt to remember a scene from many years in the past, some key memory which particular affects you.  Look at the backyard of your childhood home and remember just how the flower beds are layed out, what kind of trees are growing, what the sidewalks look like, what the other houses on your childhood street look like.  Try to remember the different people who surrounded you in your childhood.  Try to picture your first grade teacher’s face.  Can you remember her name?  Though it is said, people cannot remember their childhood under six years of age, you may find yourself having flashbacks of when you were just a baby.
Another interesting thing to do is superimpose different scenes on top of each other, make a kind of collage of them.  For example, line up all your past lover’s faces in a row.  Just try and see if you can do it.  Try to remember all your closest friends at once.  Try to review your entire life flashing by in fast forward.  Remember the day you graduated from high school.  Remember your impressions of your first job.  What was it like for you the very first time you had sex?  Can you remember exactly what it was like for you the first time you got drunk (or high)?  Be completely there as if a movie camera were rolling by.
Be completely present in the past.  The past is only another form of the present.  You may find that when you seek a particular experience that rather than simply go repeat it, you can simply be there in one of your best times.  It is not the quantity of experience that matters, it is the quality.
ALL I HAVE NOW IS JUST WHAT I NEED

The point of this meditation is to simply affirm to yourself:  “I am satisfied with what I have.  I have just what I need right now.  I do not need anything more than what I now have.”  Just say that over and over in your mind in various ways.
We are always striving to have more material possessions than we really need.  When we actually attain those material possessions, we usually are only gratified for but an instant before we start seeing flaws in what we have only recently acquired.  We immediately begin to look around for something (or in some instances, someone) better.  
It is relatively easy to find flaws in our situation, but we do not usually take note of what we actually have to make maximum usage of it.  If we do not make maximum usage of our current situation, the chances are good that we will not make maximum usage of the situation we replace it with.  Oftentimes, the “flaws” we find in the situation we are in are more due to the fact that we have not taken the time to make maximum usage of the situation, possession, or person.  
A tool is only as good as you use it.  A simple shovel can often get into places the most expensive tractor cannot.  You may get the most elaborate up-to-date computer on the market with the fanciest software with all the bells and whistles you could possibly ask for.  If you do not know what to do with it, it will do you little more good than some old computer from ten years ago that you could had picked up for virtually free.  The computer you have now worked with for years and years is at least a tool you understand inside and out.  Usually when you replace something, you discover there are other irritations and complications that you never had before.
It is better to take stock of what you do have and consider what you can do with it.  Don’t fall for the commercials that tell you that you “need” something better to get by in today’s rapidly-moving world.  They may be moving rapidly, but they are basically moving nowhere, like rats scampering out-of-control on a flywheel.
The next time you find yourself feeling dissatisfied with something, stop to consider the good it is doing for you.  Think about if there is anything you have not yet explored with it.  You may find there is something very creative you can do with it in a way you had not considered before.  
FINDING A TEACHER

So far we have explored a variety of different meditation exercises.  With so many approaches to meditation, it is hard to know just which type of meditation to use at what time.  I myself often find myself sitting down and considering:  “Hmmm, how shall I meditate today?”  I then proceed to try and discard a couple of different approaches, until I discover what resonates with me.  Often I will simply waste the entire session doing this kind of trial and error.
This is one of the reasons it can help to have a teacher or guru.  A teacher who is knowledgeable can see you far more objectively than you can see yourself and direct you to work on your weaknesses.  A good teacher will tell you to do meditative exercises that are more challenging to you.
For example, if you are primarily an intellectual person, it will be relatively easy for you to do meditative exercises that relate to the mind.  If you simply do exercises that are intellectual, you will be wasting time; you’re already good at that!  Your teacher will probably tell you to do physical yoga or become more aware of your emotions.  This will help you become more balanced as a person.  You will grow accordingly.
You may have to explore different teachers to see which teacher works better for you.  I will give you a hint.  The teacher who gets you out of your rut and into something that strains you more is helping you more than the teacher who just has you do what you like.
Of course, teachers are often corrupt and you have to watch out for that.  You have to have your “BS detector” active.  If your teacher is obviously showing off for the public to be in the public eye, I suggest you look for someone else.  If your teacher is constantly hitting you up for money - to the extent of having you sign over all your worldly possessions - get out of there fast!  If your teacher is telling you his or her way is the ONLY way - quit!
A good teacher does not need fame, fortune, or delusions of grandeur.  This teacher has “been there” (i.e., in a particular altered state of consciousness) and KNOWS those things are absolutely unimportant.  Unfortunately, teachers like that are very rare, and I don’t think you are going to find them in those ads in New Age papers who guarantee you instant enlightenment for only a few hundred dollars!  The good ones tend to work with a smaller audience.  You will have to be thorough in your search.
If you are really looking hard, you may encounter your teacher by some odd synchronicity.  It may be someone you already know who doesn’t go around blabbing about it to everybody.  Nor does this person advertise him/her self as a teacher.  That person may reveal to you a profound truth.  This truth may be revealed in the person’s gestures or character.  Pay attention!
Of course, I am not saying you have to have a teacher.  If you are truly self-disciplined, you are capable of knowing exactly what you need to work on.  Simply ask yourself the question:  “What are my weaknesses?  How can I develop them?”  Be as honest as you can about this.  Then go for it.
WHAT IS HERE?  WHAT IS NOW?

An interesting thing to attempt is to simply focus on being here and now.  I know it sounds incredibly trite, but it is a good thing to do to ground yourself.  Try to let go of all past and future mentations, and see what is going on right here and now.
One thing that might make this exercise a bit more interesting is to ask yourself:  “What is this here?” or “What is this now?”  This will give you something to chew on, make it less abstruse.
For example, just what are the precise dimensions of “here”?  Is it everything within ten feet of you?  Is it the room you are in?  Is it the house?  The street you are on?  The town?  The country?  The planet?  The galaxy?  The whole universe?  So what are the dimensions of this universe?
Or maybe we might go the other way.  Maybe “here” is something a bit more microcosmic?  Perhaps it is your body?  Or is it your brain?  Which section of your brain do you think this “here” is?  Perhaps there is a very important neuron that controls the “here” mode.  Is it the same part of the brain that you also might define as “me”?  Maybe it is an atom?  A subatomic particle?  The primal particle that gave rise to the universe?  Maybe it is like this primal particle is the ultimate microcosm that is connected to the ultimate macrocosm the universe - like the archetypal serpent biting its own tail.
Maybe “here” is everywhere!  And simultaneously nowhere!
Now let’s see about “now” (if you will pardon the pun).  How do you “measure” it?  Look at your watch.  Try to “catch” that very moment of “now”.  Is it this very moment?  So where is it when that moment has gone by?  Is it this very second?  But look, that second has just gone by!  Then there are microseconds, nanoseconds, and so on.  There is no end to how short the intervals of time can be cut.  And they just flash by quicker and quicker!
Catching the interval of time is like trying to catch swift butterflies - or clouds in the sky.
It may be useful here to note that physicists do not see the dimension of “time” as so much an interval of clock measurement - but more as a change in the shape of space.  And space is the dimension that “here” corresponds to.  So space is time (and vice-versa) - and “here” is “now”.
As you penetrate into this kind of thing, it will finally come to you that it is useless to attempt to grasp it or define it.  This “here/now” is infinite.  There is nowhere it is not!
When this dawns on you, not as some kind of academic formula or philosophical musing, it will initiate a very profound shifting in the depths of your being.
ONE-POINTED VISION

A good exercise to increase your powers of concentration is to simply focus your eyesight upon a particular object for at least a half hour.  You must do this with your eyes as wide open as possible.  Try not to blink, though this will reflexively happen.  As you get more into it, you will find your eyes will blink less and less.
I have found one of the best things to look at is a spot on a blank wall.  You could even put some sort of sticky spot on the wall, which you can find at some office store.  Just stare at that spot very intensively and don’t let your eyes drift from that spot.  You may find that your eyes will reflexively drift momentarily but as you develop in this exercise, you will be able to keep your eyesight aligned with this spot.
If you are looking at nothing but a blank wall, after several moments, you may notice that the spot may disappear occasionally.  This is perfectly normal; you simply lined up with the blind spot on your retina.  You may have noted this happening if you are watching a particular star at night.
Another interesting thing which will happen is upon the periphery of your vision there will be a blur.  After awhile, the blur will turn to waves and the whole wall will seem to melt away into something breathing and dynamic.  (Users of LSD tend to see this kind of thing as well,)  If you keep at it, you may even begin to see overlapping patterns.  It can be a very mesmerizing and fascinating experience.
Scientists will tend to say that this is merely patterns in the cognitive structure of the brain and in the structure of the retinal layout.  But this experience is also attributed to be a glimpse of the astral world which many occultists speak about.  You may tend to experience floating sensations and other unearthly experiences.  It is nothing to worry about and can be quite fun.  
A candle flame is a good thing to try this kind of exercise out on.  Candle flames and fires are known to spontaneously put your brain into a kind of alpha/theta mode, where your brain waves are at a slower speed than usual.  One thing you may note about candle flames is as you gaze at it, you will see a kind of aura around it.  It looks a bit like a rainbow.  If you see this, it indicates that you are getting into it well.
Perhaps you have a poster, a picture, or even a computer graphic of a mandala.  Mandalas are a basic archetypal pattern and this is a good thing to focus your vision upon.  After a half hour of focusing upon a mandala, you will find yourself much more relaxed and able to maintain your concentration upon whatever task it is before you.
After you become more adept at focusing your vision on something absolutely still, you may want to try this with something moving and living.  Watch a bird or a squirrel in a tree for awhile.  Watch a duck in a pond.  Watch your cat or dog.  Watch people in the streets.  Or it could be something less organic.  Watch waves in a lake or a waterfall.  Watch wind in the trees.  Watch clouds moving across the sky.  The main thing when you do this, is keep your vision absolutely one-pointedly focused upon what you pick out.  Don’t move your eyes around from one thing to another.  Keep them wide open and keep the object right in the center of your vision.  Don’t blink.
You will eventually find this a very enjoyable exercise and choose to do it spontaneously throughout more slack moments of your day.

THE FINE ART OF EYE-GAZING

An interesting version of the above meditation would be to stand or sit in front of a mirror.  Keep your eyes focused upon your eyes in the mirror.  Remain in an erect posture and hold your head up.  Lock your gaze with yourself.  Neither move your eyes nor blink.
After a while, you will notice some very odd changes.  Your face will melt away.  You will see other faces interspersed with your original face.  You will see electrical patterns surrounding your face.  You may see faces of other people, the opposite gender, even the face of an ape or some kind of animal.  Hold it and you will go even further back.
It is possible this is a kind of genetic memory of remote ancestors, even those of pre-human stages.  Another possibility is you are experiencing faces you once had in past lives.  This is an interesting variation of experiencing that old Zen koan:  “What is your face before you were born?”
This is a unique way to experience self-awareness.  In the mirror, you are seeing yourself as you really are.  As you go deeper, you will cease to primp or fool yourself about your appearance as you may normally do when you look at yourself in the mirror.  You will see the person who is actually there.  Your layers of self-deception will melt away.
I have speculated that perhaps the electrical patterns that you see this way are your aura and it can be very fascinating to watch, a bit like the Aureala Borealis.  Low lighting tends to work best for witnessing this.
It is also interesting to do this kind of exercise with another person.  Make sure this is someone you feel very comfortable with, because this is an extremely intimate experience.  Pick a very good friend or lover.  This can be particularly fascinating between a bonded couple, because I can assure you this experience is even more of a turn-on than the sexual act itself.  (Doing it naked is a nice variation, but refrain from cuddling while you do it.)
As you look into the other’s eyes, you will see some surprising variations in the faces you see.  You will see all of what I have described above when you look at your own face.  It gets a bit scary as you go deeper into it, but stay with it, it gets heavier and heavier.  The mutual faces dissolve away into some kind of light and strange light beams shimmer outwards from the respective pupils of each person.
After awhile, if you stay with it, you will literally feel one with the other person.  It will be as if you are looking at your own face.  The two of you turn into one being.
You might practice this kind of exercise momentarily in your day-to-day life.  When you look at someone, see if you can get a glimpse of that person’s inner being through his or her eyes.  If you are a naturally shy person, this may be hard to do, but as you keep at it, you may find that you can relate more effectively to people in your on-going existence.
ONE-POINTED FOCUS ON THE SENSES

So far, I have been suggesting that you focus upon a visual phenomena to the exclusion of all else.  But you may also focus upon a sensation you are experiencing in your body.  It works better to close your eyes for this particular exercise.  It doesn’t especially matter just what the sensation is.  It could be an itch, a sore muscle, a taste in the back of the mouth, being sexually aroused, being hungry, whatever.
The main thing is once you zero in on that particular sensation, stay with it.  Just continually be where that sensation is.  Be one-pointed in your concentration.
You may find that as you get into it, that somehow the sensation loses its force or its definition.  You may find that an itch loses that sense of being “itchy” and you lose your desire to reach out and scratch it.  It becomes a mere objective phenomena, as if you were watching a cloud passing by.
Or it could happen the other way.  You may notice all kinds of subtle sensations you never noticed before.  You may experience hundreds of nagging itches all over your body, driving you crazy.  (Actually, this is happening all the time; we just aren’t aware of it.)  Stay with it and observe these.  Eventually they will cease to pull at your attention and you can simply watch them without needing to react to them.
Though you will start to be aware of zillions of sensations you didn’t consciously note before, stay with the particular one you chose in the first place.  If you can maintain your concentration upon that one sensation for even five minutes, believe me, you did very well.

You may also apply this exercise to the sense of hearing, of taste, and of smell.  Pick out a particular sound in your environment and listen unwaveringly to that sound to the exclusion of all others.  The same principals apply to this exercise as to the ones above.
Taste and smell could be a different variation.  Taste and smell tend to be very related to one another.  One exercise you could try is to eat a food with a number of different ingredients and attempt to be aware of one particular ingredient.  For example, if there are carrots in there, be aware of the taste of carrots on your tongue to the exclusion of all the other tastes.  Be aware of one particular spice.  It can be very interesting to do this when someone serves you something new and you have no idea what the different ingredients would be.  It will certainly make you more aware of what you are eating and tend to make you slow down while eating.
You can also develop your sense of smell by holding up a particular thing to your nose and smelling it for at least twenty minutes.  Slowly inhale and be really aware of that smell.  Savor it thoroughly.  You can also make an attempt to pick out a particular smell in your immediate environment.  Then concentrate on that particular smell to the exclusion of all else.
All of these exercises will make you much more aware.
REDISCOVERING YOUR INNOCENCE

In this next exercise, you will make an attempt to remember exactly where you lost your child-hood innocence.  There is a certain point where your child-hood fascination of awe and wonder about the beauty of life disappeared and a sense of drudgery about life set in.  Life became a chore, a bummer - whereas before you had a more playful attitude towards life.
There is no particular age limit where this may have happened and there is no strict dividing line.  It could be somewhere when you were five or six years old.  It could be somewhere in your teens - or even in your early twenties.  But there was a certain point where you experienced less of that more innocent, idealistic attitude and more of that jaded, cynical attitude.
Make an attempt to remember some particularly intense moment from your pre-adult years where you experienced something with a particularly intense quality.  Maybe it could be the taste of ice cream.  Maybe it’s noticing a patch of blue sky.  Maybe it’s the first time you saw the ocean or a high mountain.  Dig in and try to remember that moment - where you were utterly present in that moment and there was a sense of wonder.
You may note a certain aura around that experience, something like a subtle smell.  When you get hold of that experience, hold it in your mind and focus on it for the duration of your meditation period.
You may experience a sadness that you lost that child-hood sense of beauty and wonder.  Somehow, along the way, you lost it and become inured to what you experience, being thoroughly educated not to experience it anymore.  You found out that people don’t appreciate that idealism and reward cynicism instead.  You are taught that it is not a good idea to express wonder at the beauty of life or you will be put down for it.  You are taught that making money, fighting, and conquest is more important than being in the moment.
However, if you can find that moment when all was crystal clear and just right for you, and you accepted that moment with the totality of your being, there is a chance, just an inkling of a chance you can regain it.
CARE-FREE VS. CARE-WORN

Now we will look at the experiences you have had when you felt truly in the moment, when you accepted that moment completely as it was.  It will have a similar tone to the experience above when you felt that wonderful sense of innocence when nothing mattered and you felt utterly carefree.
To a somewhat less intense degree, you probably still experience those moments from time to time.  Perhaps it is during your vacation, your weekends, your days off.  Perhaps it is just when you punch out and you go home to kiss your wife and hug your children.  Maybe it is your first drink in the bar or lighting up that evening joint.  Maybe it is a particularly intense bout of lovemaking where you did something very exotic and non-routine with your partner.  Or maybe it is simply watching a good movie or reading a good book you can’t put down.  Whatever it is, you feel really there.
It need not be quite so “adult”.  Perhaps you are just sitting in your seat enjoying the sunshine, breathing in the air.  Maybe you are watching squirrels playing in the trees.  Maybe you are taking your dog for a walk and feeling his joy when you take off his leash to let him run wild in the woods.
Try to find one of those particular moments and thoroughly savor it.  You will find that you can actually flashback to that moment and re-experience it to the fullest.
Now the next part of this exercise is quite the opposite.  Try to feel those times when you don’t feel so in the moment, when you don’t feel so carefree, where things matter very much.  You’re good at that one, aren’t you?  That’s all the stuff that keeps bugging you and nagging at you when you are trying to focus on your meditation.
It’s when you are paying your bills and you are wondering if you’re making the money to make ends meet.  You are thinking about how to approach your boss to ask for a raise or a promotion.  You’re wondering if people will still find you attractive as you get older and fatter.  You’re waking up with a hangover and wondering if you are becoming an alcoholic.  You can’t stand your life and yet you go on.  There’s all those errands you have to do.  You’re always doing the same stupid stuff at your job every day and everybody acts like it’s a matter of life or death, even though it’s just bullshit.
It’s a beautiful day, but you don’t even notice it because you’re too busy.  Or you might say to someone that it’s a beautiful day, but you’re simply mouthing the words.  You have to take the damn dog for a walk again, but you have to paint the house today.  Or you have to call someone to saw down that oak tree outside your house, because it looks like it’s leaning dangerously in your direction.
Try to get “behind” these experiences.  What is going on that makes you lose your sense of wonder and innocence?  It’s like you somehow inadvertently slipped into a trap.  Ask yourself if any of this stuff is really important.  Is this what life is all about?  Just feel the tone of that gloomy drudgery, how basically sad it makes you.  Get to the root of it.  Don’t try to cover it up with distraction or a kind of false humor.  At just what point of your life did this start to happen?
Compare and contrast these experiences.  See which you prefer.  Is it possible to find a synthesis of the two?
SEEING YOUR OWN VIOLENCE

In this exercise, look at the violence within yourself.  See all the ways in which you are violent.  Perhaps you like to consider yourself a peaceful, easy-going person, but try to find the parts of yourself which are resentful, filled with hate, pissed off, whatever.
We tend to regard ourselves as the ones who are “right” and the ones who we are mad at as “wrong”.  We look at our own violence as “self-defense” or a “demonstration”.  We look at the other party’s violence as “malicious”, “evil”, “cruel”.  We see ourselves as “peaceful”, but the other party is a “trouble-maker”.  Our actions are justified, but the other party’s actions are not.
This is a very important thing to get into, because as a whole, we are a very violent species.  This shows in our history of war, torture, cruel punishments, and the such.  We are always arguing about one thing or another.  We are always concerned about what belongs to whom.  From very early stages, our kind has wiped out other potentially sapient species similar to ourselves.  Let’s face it.  We are the “killer ape”.  We have killed more of our own kind than any other species that has evolved on this planet.
So if you will take the time to look into it, you will find violence within yourself.  Try to remember when you had a particularly strong argument with someone.  Remember how you raised your voice.  Did you pound a table?  Did you slam a door?  Did you throw anything?  Did you go so far as to hit the person?
How did you feel afterwards?  Did you keep justifying your action to yourself, continuing to consider the other person wrong?  Or did you feel somewhat ashamed of yourself, knowing that you may have blown a perfectly good relationship with a friend, a spouse, your workplace?  Perhaps you tried to apologize, but now the other person regards you in a different light, not such a good person anymore, a violent person to be avoided.
Notice how shitty you felt about blowing your top like that.  We never feel good about expressing our anger.  The storm has broken open and the thunder roars and the lightening flashes.  Perhaps you had simply been going on your merry way and then this thing just happened out of the blue.
Did you feel in control while this happened?  Or were “you” somewhere else?  When you came out of it, did you wonder how you could do such a terrible thing?
I think we will all agree that violence is not a good thing and peaceful mediation is the preferable mode of working out disagreements and conflicts.  Yet we get violent anyway and the first step in overcoming it is to simply observe the violence and violent tendencies within yourself.
As animals, we are naturally violent.  We compete for food and space all the time.  Even plants are violent with one another, as their roots compete in the ground and their branches compete for sunlight.  There is no way around this and as long as we are living beings we will always tend to be violent.  To go beyond it in our next stage of evolution, we must see our own violence.  Then we can be objective about it.
QUESTION AUTHORITY

Why are the rules and laws the way they are?  That is the thing to meditate upon here.  What you do is take various rules, laws, and customs - and take them apart.  Is there any truly good justification for making them?  After all, if you break them you can get into some kind of serious legal trouble or be ousted from the society you are in.  Surely, this makes them important enough to examine.
Let us take something like what side of the road we are taught to drive on.  For some reason, in this particular country, we drive forwards on the right side of the road.  There is no particular reason why we couldn’t drive on the left side of the road or even the middle of the road.  But from the outset it worked out this way.  There are other countries where people drive on the left side of the road and even the steering wheel is positioned accordingly.  (We might ask why the steering wheel is generally positioned towards the middle of the road, but that’s another story.)  I’m not going to give you any answer here.  Just think about why people abide by this custom and why there is a law about it.
It makes a certain amount of sense why certain laws say that violent crimes cannot be committed.  After all, if people were killing one another and stealing from one another, nothing productive would get done, and there would be constant fear and chaos.  But why do we have to have police and courts and jails to deal with it?  Why don’t we trust people and their consciences?  The general assumption seems to be that if there were not these laws and if there were not these police, we would automatically have everyone stealing and killing, that no one at all has an intrinsic conscience.
Why are certain drugs which are extremely harmful allowed, but other drugs which may be less harmful not allowed.  Why does someone get a jail sentence for possession of a small amount of marijuana, but can smoke packs of cigarettes a day?  Why is it that someone can drink themselves to death, but cannot use opiates which do the job far better?
Why are there laws about acts of sexuality and what gender can have a sexual relationship with what gender?  There have been laws which define exactly which sexual position is permitted between a man and his wife.  Why is this?
Why are there certain customs about what clothes a person is supposed to wear?  In the office, you are expected to wear one thing, and at a wedding, you wear another thing.  In informal situations, you wear something else altogether.  In very warm weather, why do we have to wear clothes at all?  Why does how we dress and how we use makeup or wear our hair become such a political statement?
Why do people tend to greet one another in such a standard way?  Why do you say you are doing “fine” when actually a lot of bad stuff is going on?  Why do people chat about things like weather or food recipes, when there are more important things they’d rather talk about?
Why do things fall down rather than up?  Why is the area of a circle pi r2?  Why does light travel 186,000 miles a second?  Why is that way west and that other way east?  Why is this “good” and that “bad”?
In general, people in this society do not like people who ask too many questions.  Why is this?
A MEDITATIVE PARABLE

As you breathe deeply, imagine your breath rising and falling like waves on the ocean.  Breathing in, feel yourself as a wave rising up out of the ocean as it heads towards the shore.  Holding in your breath, feel yourself as the wave holding itself at the crest.  Breathing out, feel yourself as the wave gradually crashing upon the shore, losing its shape.  At the end of the breath, feel that loss of  your wave nature, just water merging back into the ocean.  At the outset of your next breath, feel yourself sucking in the water of the previous wave you were to become another wave.
As you do this, feel a sense of “I” connected with the wave you are now.  Feel a sense of how attached you are to this wave you are now.  Feel how you value it more than anything else in the world.  Feel yourself attempting to hold on to it, trying your best not to let it go.  But then the inevitable comes, you must let it go, you must crash upon the shore.  Feel yourself internally screaming with agony as you slowly fall from the great wave you were.  But finally, at the last second of your wave nature, you feel yourself surrendering back into the void, into the vast ocean all around you which is your source.
Perhaps you look around you at the other waves.  Some of the waves are bigger and grander than you.  You envy them.  You envy how they are able to collect so much water within them, how other waves cluster around them, how they can take over other waves.  Yet they crash, too.  Their collapse may be more grandiose and more destructive, but they also crash in the end.
Some of the waves are smaller, not so grand.  You sneer at them.  You brag to them about what a big wave you are.  They admire you and they are drawn to you.  Some of them are so worthless, you suck them up to become a bigger wave.  Your ambition is to become the biggest wave you can be.
There are good times and bad times for the waves.  Sometimes the wind is blowing strong picking you up, giving you lots of energy to become a more gigantic wave than your wildest dreams.  Sometimes, there are currents backing you up, other waves pushing you up.  You are in a wide open area, good for waves.
But there are times of poverty, too.  Sometimes you wind up in some cesspool shallow bay and there is no wind and no currents.  Neither yourself or other waves achieve very great heights.  You’re just the barest hint of a wave and you don’t even crash on the shore, you just flow a bit.
So you go through all this.  You are one kind of wave this time and you are another kind of wave another time.  Sometimes you are big and sometimes you are scattered.  Sometimes you get sucked up by another wave and sometimes you do the sucking up of waves.  Sometimes you hate your existence and other times you are proud of your existence.  But it all depends on the conditions you are in; it has nothing to do with you as a wave.  Your nature is to be a wave.
One day, as you surrender to the ocean, you realize you are more than just a wave.  What makes you up is the vast ocean all around you.  This makes up all the waves in the ocean, so essentially you are all the waves in the ocean, because you are the ocean.  The waves are only the surface of what you are.  With bliss, you plunge into the depths of your being.
 HABITUAL VS. WILL

What we do here is discern the intentional from the habitual.  With the intentional, you use will.  You will yourself to go beyond the routine.  You go somewhere or some time you don’t usually go to.  
With the habitual, you are simply drawn to do the usual everyday things you always do.  You are locked into a pattern you cannot break.  The average job is a lot like that.  It’s where you say “Same old same old.”  You make the usual conversations you always make and say the same things over and over.  You do the same things at the same time.  Watch these things while they happen; it can be very interesting.  It is like a movie of the same story playing the same way every day, every week, every year.
In the habitual, you are generally non-conscious.  Your awareness is so dim in this state, that it is practically sleep compared to other states you could be in.  Even your meditation and spiritual practices can get like that.  If you find yourself getting like that in your daily meditation, it is time to try something completely different!
The intentional takes will power.  It takes will power to go beyond usual habits.  If you usually sleep until noon, it would certainly take some effort to get up at dawn.  If you drink coffee, it would take some effort to suddenly stop.  If you have ever tried to quit smoking, assuming you were a smoker, you know what incredible will power that would take.  (In fact, I would suggest you take up the habit just to develop your will power in quitting.)  If you are apt to overeat, it takes will power to limit your intake of food.
Will power does not have to be something as drastic as altogether kicking a habit which is obviously bad for you.  For example, you could try eating dinner an hour earlier  or an hour later than you usually do.  You could not watch your favorite TV show for one night.  You could deliberately do something one weekend afternoon that utterly bores you.  You could meditate standing on your head or upside down.  You could stand for ten minutes just facing a blank wall.  You could try to walk backwards on an open field.  You could try to eat with your eyes closed.
If you do something like this, you will definitely find yourself more aware than you usually are.  Even if you wonder “What the hell am I doing this for?  What a nutty suggestion!”, you are more awake than usual.  In your routine activities, you tend to doze away, think the same thoughts, do the same stuff.  You become an automaton.
One useful way to do this is collaborate with a partner.  This partner will contact you at any given time and give you a suggestion to immediately do a non-routine activity.  For example, maybe he or she will come by and tell you to drop whatever you are doing and go out somewhere you don’t usually go.  At the same time, you will contact that partner at any given time to do something you know would be odd for him or her.  This is one of those cases where a guide would be useful.
If you try to just do it yourself, you will be apt to choose something that wouldn’t be especially difficult or wouldn’t break your usual routine too much.  Someone else can take you much further.  It doesn’t even have to be a chosen person.  Everybody you hang out with is occasionally going to want to do something you may not care for that much.  So rather than resist, just do it and see what it does to you.
In this sense, all unexpected events can be an opportunity for you.

QUESTIONS TO PONDER:


What do I ultimately want out of life?


What gives my life meaning?


What is the meaning of life in general?


If I had my life to live over, what would I do with it?


What ideals, if any, would I be willing to die for (or live for)?


What would bring me more happiness than anything else in the world?



PRAYER TO THE FIVE ELEMENTS

The following is based upon a traditional style of meditation done by Muslims:

Find a prayer rug (or meditation rug) with mystical labyrinthine pattern on it.  Bow your head toward pattern, then lay your head upon it.  Feel sense of surrender to God, the All, the Source.  Combine heart-surrender (as though you were giving yourself to beloved) with physical surrender.  
The prayer is a time to lay aside worldly cares, to focus upon the Unity of All That Is.  The prayer is done five times a day:  dawn, noon, afternoon, dusk, and midnight.  These are times to pause your usual activities and remember your True Self.  
Stand with your head hung, hands folded over mid-abdomen.  Slide your hands up to form them in a prayer position over your heart.  Raise your hands, look upwards, form a triangle with your hands with your inner eye (between your eyes).  Look to the sky with your eyes rolled upwards and outstretch your hands.  Then hold your hands straight in front of you, form your hands into a cup as if you were holding water.  

These five times represent an essence, an archetype:
Dawn = Re-birth, Spring, Earth
Noon = Peak, Adult, Fire
Dusk = Maturity, Water  
Evening = Aging, Air  
Midnight = Death, Winter Solstice, Etheric

Prayer:

O God!  You are the infinite open ray of light…
You alone are God, transcending everything.
You are all that Adam/Eve must become.
You are the tiny seed and the great universe.
You are the refuge.  You are the path.
You are the handhold.  You are the strength.
You are formlessness.  You are form.
You are the bud and the fully opened flower.
You are the jeweled light within the eye.

There is only God…
Only silence, compassion, and illumination remain.

Asleep or awake, working or playing, active or resting…
In every state, always remember your Self.
PARABLE OF THE DROP

Close your eyes.  As you breathe in picture yourself as a drop being drawn out of a vast infinite body of water all around.  Imagine a raindrop falling out of the sky, then hitting the infinite body of water with such force, a drop bounces from the surface.  (Go to a pond when it is raining sometime and watch this, to get a better idea how to visualize this).  
At first, you are partially attached to the source.   As you experience being a drop, you find you are having new experiences.  It feels interesting to be separate from the source of water, yet you are still comfortably attached to what feeds you and gives you water to be what you are. 
Then, at the peak of your breath, you become completely separated.  You are fascinated by the new experience of being a drop, no longer the origin of what you were.   There are countless experiences you can now have.
However, as you become more separated, you experience loneliness and frustration.  You find you have to make effort to maintain that separateness.  Hold your breath at this point, feel yourself running out of air, getting faint.  
There are millions of other drops around you who feel the same way.  All of you feel lonely and separate.  Sometimes you will encounter another drop who you can share your dwindling supply of water with.  Or maybe you will join a crowd of drops and you all get together to form a coalition of drops.  But as the sun glares, all of you evaporate away.  
Then, breathing outwards in a long sigh, weary of your existence as a drop, you find yourself drawn inevitably back to the source.  At first you fight it, hanging on to your “drop-ness”.  The loss of your individuality as a drop terrifies you more than anything else.
But then, as you let go of clinging to it, you feel joy to be reunited to the source.  Your sense of being a drop disappears and you feel such freedom in no longer having such limited boundaries when there is this infinite body of water all around.
But, you breathe in again, and the cycle happens again.  You are always becoming separate, then infinite, separate, then infinite, over and over again.  You are both finite and infinite at the same time.  Wonder how it is that can be.

BREATHING IN AND OUT THE SEASONAL CYCLE

Breathing in deeply and slowly, read and picture this in your mind:  A maple tree (or tree with leaves of your choice) is growing from a seed from the rot in the ground.  It is springtime and the warmth is gradually increasing.  Leaves are growing from the branches.  Flowers are popping out and bees are transporting pollen from one tree to another.

Now hold that breath, picture this:  It is blissfully warm.  Green leaves are on the summer trees everywhere.  The tree is fully grown and becoming strong with the heat.  Branches are reaching upwards toward the hot sun high in the blue sky.

Letting out the breath with a long sigh, picture:  It is getting cooler, then colder.  The sun is not staying in the sky as long.  The leaves are fading from green into yellow, red, purple, orange, and brown.  Wind is blowing the leaves off.  (Imagine your outgoing breath being that autumnal wind.)  Leaves dance around, then fall to the ground.  Rains and snows fall burying them.  The tree topples over, its wood rots away.

Relaxing the out-breath out, picture:  snow and ice covering everything.  Everything is rotting away beneath the ground.  Death is everywhere.  Picture rotting wood, skulls, skeletons, chaotic images of terrifying entities such as demons and golems.

Breathing in once again, begin the cycle anew.


GENEROSITY:  WHAT IS IT?

An interesting thing to ponder on is the meaning of generosity.  Generosity is obviously the opposite of selfishness.  You might think about just how generous are you in your day to day life.  How do you react when you receive something in the mail where some organization is asking you for a contribution for one thing or the other?  Do you automatically throw it away?  What is your thought when you get something like that?  Do you automatically have a cynical notion that the organization is simply funneling the money for its own existence?  The same thing might apply when you get a call from someone asking for a contribution to a good cause.  Do you simply hang up the phone without saying anything?  What is your reaction when someone comes to your door asking you for something?
I am not trying to make you feel guilty or anything like that.  This is not a church sermon where the minister cajoles the audience and everyone squirms with anxiety remembering how, oops, I should really have been nicer to this person or that.  I am asking you to simply observe your reaction.  Do you tend to write it off saying you have enough difficulty paying your own bills or you are just too tied up to tend to something like that?
Generosity does not necessarily mean writing out a check or charging it to your credit card.  It doesn’t necessarily mean volunteering for the Salvation Army or anything like that.  If you do it with a kind of grudging feeling or hoping maybe you’ll get “good credits” to get into heaven or have a better lifetime next time around, it’s not exactly generosity.  Then you are just expecting something in return.  Generosity is more an attitude, not an act.
It may be something as simply as making yourself immediately available if someone calls you and wants to talk about a problem he or she is having.  It could be saying “Hi, how are you?” to someone who seems lonely.  It could be allowing a car to make a left turn on a busy road.  But what is most important is when you give, you give with a sense of total surrender without calculating what you will get out of it.
It can be an interesting meditation to deliberately do something generous and simply observe your internal reaction to it.  You may be surprised.  You may discover that going a bit out of your way to help someone will give you a feeling of release from your own personal problems.  Generosity can be its own reward.
EXPERIMENT WITH POSTURES

Postures can be interesting to get into as a meditation format.  Just try different postures and see what they do to your inner state.  Do your thoughts or moods change as a result of altering your posture?
Try sitting very upright, preferably in a straight-backed chair, legs pressed together, hands folded primly on your lap or palms down on each of your knees, feet flat on the floor, shoulders straight, head held high.  Maintain this stiff posture for a few moments.  What does this do to you?
Now do somewhat the opposite.  On one of those cushy armchairs or couches, don’t try to sit straight in any way whatever.  Just slouch over and splay your arms out in the most chaotic arrangement you possibly can.  Throw one leg one way and the other leg the other way.  Try to make yourself look like one of those dolls that have their arms and legs twisted halfway off.  Assume this posture like you suddenly died there and are growing into rigor mortis there.  Let all your muscles loose, letting gravity pull you to the floor.  What does that do to you?
Then stand up very straight as if you were in military school.  Suck your chin in, hold your spine so rigid you could be picked up and held without bending.  Keep your feet and legs tightly together.  Hold your arms and hands tightly against the sides of your body.  Hold your gaze straight ahead, don’t move your pupils for anything.  Look like a store dummy.  Try that for 10 minutes, using a stopwatch with an alarm clock.
March around in a circle at least 50 feet in diameter.  You will need a large room or a flat space outdoors.  March with your arms and legs stiff.  When you throw out your right leg, throw out your right arm simultaneously - and vice-versa with the left side.  You will feel a bit silly, but do it and see what it does.  Then try walking as sloppily as possible, throw your arms and legs out in awkward directions as though you had some kind of spastic neurological disease.

It can be interesting to try different postures with the hands.  The hands are used to convey different emotions.  For example, make a tight fist with your right hand and see if that doesn’t make you angry.  Now open that fist and hold it out in a gesture of giving; you may feel a sense of kindness and generosity from that.
Stand straight.  With your right hand, point upwards to the heavens, leaning the arm at an angle slightly to the right.  With your left hand, point downwards to the earth, leaning that arm at an angle slightly to the left.  This can be a useful posture for meditation.  Breathe inwards, focusing on your right side, feeling the energies on your right side traveling upwards to the heavens, culminating that inbreath at the tip of your right forefinger.  Breathe outwards more on your left side, feeling the energies from heaven run like a current on that side of your body, downwards finally culminating at the tip of your left forefinger.  Do that for twenty minutes.  You will find this to give you a refreshing rush of energy.
A good posture to assume is to stand straight and have your right hand held high, palm open towards the front, as though you were greeting someone from afar.  You could combine this with your left hand held forward as though you were offering something to that same someone.  As you breathe in and out, maintain the internal attitude that you are greeting the world with positive energies and offering yourself to the world.
Another good one to do is to stand straight and hold your hands open towards the front at your side - a lot like those statues and stained glass frescoes you always see of Jesus or St. Francis.  Feel like you are offering enlightenment to all who are ready to accept it.  Or hold your hands, right hand folded over the left, directly over your heart.  Just see how this makes you feel.  Does it give you a feeling of deep respect for all things and beings?  Holding your hands in a gesture of prayer over your heart can get you in touch with your own internal sacredness and that of all beings.

A good exercise to do along this line is to sit crosslegged on a cushion on the floor, preferably in a room where that is set aside as a meditation room.  Visualize yourself as a vast mountain which towers over all the other mountains.  You are deeply rooted in the earth and many come from all over the world to climb you.  You are the home to numerous beasts, birds, plants, humans.  Parts of you are treacherous cliffs, but other parts of you are pleasant gradual pathways which grow grander and grander as climbers go upwards.  Ultimately, from the crest of you, is the most wondrous overlook from which the lucky climber can view the entire world, far above the cares and troubles of those miles and miles below.  The air is fine and pure way up here, and more subtle energies can be perceived up here than far below in the thick haze.
In this position, sit as though you were this mountain.  Form your body in the position of a mountain, your hands on your knees and arms straight.  Feel as dignified and powerful as that mountain.  You may find this visualization will make you automatically attain a position which is conducive for watchful awareness, like a jungle cat prowling in the bushes hunting for prey.

It can be interesting to experiment with different positions, postures, and ways of moving to see what they do to you.  Whatever it is, make it something you do not ordinarily do.  That has the best chance of waking you up.
For example, rather than walking in a straight line towards something, walk in a long roundabout manner.  Walk in a zig-zag manner.  Hop towards your destination like a frog.  Slither on the floor like a snake.   Or eat with your head held upwards and drop food into your mouth.
After awhile, you will realize there are infinite variations.  And that is the way towards creative consciousness.  You will find this is very useful to you in your daily life. 
THE ART OF ALERT DREAMING

You may observe as you penetrate into the deeper states of meditation, that you get flashbacks of dreams you’ve had the night before.  This meditation is specifically to attempt to remember those dreams.  You will find that initially you will see a “slice” of a series of dreams, like the frame of a film or your video on pause.  Focus upon this image that initially comes up, then slowly rewind it or go forward to see what other dreams were connected with this.  
You may find it helpful to have your eyes closed while you do this, but be sure to hold your body in an upright, alert position, so you don’t inadvertently fall asleep.  The point of this exercise is to be wide awake while you are in a dream state.  As you become better at this, you will gain the proficiency where you are able to have your eyes wide open and still be in this dream state.
You will be surprised at the sheer variety of dreams you had as you follow this initial thread of the original image.  Psychologists say that each night the dream state lasts but a few moments at a time, yet it is as though we experience a lifetime in those few moments.  You may want to consider this as you observe all these dreams, like the plot of a vast novel unfolding.
One thing you might want to note is those dreams that seemed to make a particular impression on you.  Were those dreams trying to tell you something?  Do they have any particular metaphorical meaning?  Or do you think they are merely random nonsense?  In time, you will discern the difference.  The dreams which are particularly emotionally evocative for you have a distinct difference from the ones which are simply “filler material” to kill time between scenes.
Once you are in the saddle with this technique, you can go a bit further:  Attempt to alter something in the dream and see what that does to alter the outcome.  For example, perhaps something or someone terrifying is chasing you.  What if, instead of running away, you stop and encounter that being fearlessly?  Talk to this entity; explain that you refuse to be intimidated and you would like to see what it has to say.  What does it then tell you.
Pay special attention to those dreams that make you feel uncomfortable.  For example, you may be in a situation that is connected with a sexual taboo to yourself.  Encounter those and assume you have no discomfort.  Make love to someone in the dream, see what that does.
Remember in the dream state, there are no limitations.  Try getting off the ground and flying.  Make a miracle happen, such as making a blind person see, a crippled person walk, or an ugly person beautiful.  Make yourself rich, famous, beautiful, young, whatever you want. 
Try taking the dream in different directions starting with a particular scene.  Be as creative as you can.  You will discover that this will increase your powers of creativity and problem-solving ability in all areas of your life.
As you get into this and practice it for awhile, you may find that it will creep into those times when you really are asleep and dreaming.  You will find it is possible to control your dreams and change their outcome.  This is known as “lucid dreaming”.

ALTERING THE PAST

This practice is specifically about altering the past.  The purpose of this exercise is to perceive that the past is infinitely flexible, rather than “written in stone” so to speak.  It would be interesting if our culture were to perceive the past as something you can change - as opposed to the current practice of blaming people for past mistakes, insults, actions, transgressions, and the such.  We tend to see once people have done something, there is no taking it back, so we remain permanently angered at someone for their transgressions which may had only been a thoughtless action rather than some kind of deliberate evil.  This is the kind of thing which causes blows to be exchanged back and forth, which can go down throughout generations.
Sit still and focus upon a certain moment in the past when things began to get botched up.  Try to look at this moment as objectively as possible without personal identification or emotional associations.  Let us suppose someone would not allow you to do something you wanted to do.  There does not seem to be any really logical reason, to you anyway, why you should be told not to do this action.  It seems to you that this person is being unreasonable and just making up this thing to aggravate you because it seemed like this person did not like you.  Anyway, whatever it is, this is the point where all kinds of repercussions were initiated.
Imagine, at this point, that you were simply allowed to do what it was you wanted to do.  The other person was perfectly willing and even welcomed you to go ahead and do it.  Imagine happily enjoying the action, having a good time, and everyone comes out fine, and we’re all friends.
You could also imagine at this point, and this would be take more effort on your part, that you simply accepted that person’s limitation of your action.  You did not resist or get upset, taking him to court, or whatever the outcome.  You took a deep breath at this point and considered, “OK, so it looks like I can’t do this here.  Well, this isn’t the only thing in the world.  Maybe I can find something else equally of pleasure, where there isn’t this limitation.”  You smile, wish the fellow a good day, and go on your way.
Or perhaps you could imagine that the encounter never took place.  There was something else going on that day that took your attention elsewhere.  Or you never had any interest in what you wanted to do at all; the desire just never developed.
Or perhaps there was some kind of argument, but somehow it never went very far.  Maybe you two came up with some kind of compromise, such as you could do it this time and go so far, but you can’t do it again.  Perhaps you succeeded in getting the fellow to see how unreasonable his limitation was.
At any point in time, there are an infinite number of forks in how else something could had occurred.  This actually applies to the future, as well as present and past.  It can get rather intense when you become aware of it.  You could apply this to history, for example, what if Abraham Lincoln or John F. Kennedy didn’t get assassinated?  What if Hitler had won the war or Jesus Christ had never become known?  In your personal life, there are also numerous primary junctures where secondary repercussions can take it in different directions.  Focus on these junctures and alter your life course -- as if you went back in a time machine and changed the outcome.  Who knows?  It might actually happen.
SLOW… DOWN… YOUR… THINKING

This exercise is to slow down your thinking process.  Do the thinking that you usually do and slow it down - as though you were playing a tape in slow motion.  Think each word, say it slowly in your mind, then pause a second, then go on to the next word.
A good way to start practicing this is to actually read a piece of writing and read it as though you were just learning to read, having difficulty with each word.  On each word, pause a second to actually see the meaning of the word in your mind.  Very short lines of poetry would be a good way to start this kind of thing, especially haiku which is particularly succinct and uses a minimum of words to convey a certain image to focus on.
It will be a bit awkward at first, but try something like this:
“IIIII… ammmm… thinnnkinnng… innnnn… slowwww… mmmoootiioonnnn…”  (Translation:  “I am thinking in slow motion”.)
“IIII… wwwwoouuulllddd… lllliiikkkeee… sssooommmeeettthhhiiinnnggg… tttooo….  eeeaaattt…”  (Translation:  “I would like something to eat.”)
“TTThhheeerrreee…  aaarrreee… bbbiiirrrdddsss… iiinnn… ttthhhaaattt… tttrrreeeeee…”  (Translation:  “There are birds in that tree”.)
You don’t necessarily have to draw each letter of each word out like that, but the main thing is to think it at a fraction of the speed you usually do.  As you do this, you may notice a very interesting thing begins to happen:  You begin to lose the context of each word because each word stands out by itself.  It’s a bit like if you just say a word over and over again, it’s meaning starts to fade and it just sounds like gibberish.
You may find it easier to just practice it with a single short sentence, such as:  “I… am… sitting… here… thinking… in… slow… motion.” Or simply:  “I… am… sitting.”  You will find with longer sentences you tend to lose the thread of the thought (which is ultimately what you’re trying to do!), so you find yourself forced to use short sentences to express a thought, or just single words, usually just nouns or verbs.  You will start to think as if you were a young child or a primitive or someone who barely knows the language.
For example, “There… are… birds… in… that… tree… over… there…” would become simply:  “Birds… tree…”.  “I… would… like… something… to… eat…maybe… a.. hamburger…” would be:  “Hungry… hamburger”.
So your thought processes would look like:  “Sitting… here… breathing… birds… tree… thinking… slow… girl… pretty… nice… work… later… cat… watching… birds… sitting… breathing… hungry… hamburger… slow… thought… thinking… nothing… sitting…”  You get the idea?
You could then try one word with the inbreath, another word with the pause, another word with the outbreath, and a fourth word with the pause.  A four word sentence would work best here, such as “I… am… sitting… here…”
One interesting thing you will note is as you do this, there is a very subtle undercurrent of quicker thoughts beneath the surface.  This is your subconscious mind which is planning out the next thought or thinking about what you thinking and its repercussions.  Maybe it’ll be a voice saying, “This is kind of stupid sitting here thinking slowly, I have work to do, hey, that’s a pretty girl there, I wonder if she lives around here, boy, I’d like to get into her pants, I’m hungry, I sure could use a cheeseburger with everything on it, what’s that stupid cat doing now?, those birds in that tree sure are cheeping up a storm, I guess I’m supposed to sit here for a half an hour, blah, blah, blah…”
Try to be aware of this.  This will help you learn to observe yourself, which is the way to disidentification.
Another thing to try to be aware of:  See/hear/feel the silence between each word.  Expand that silence and look at the background behind the thoughts, the void between.
DON’T LABEL THINGS

An extension of the above exercise would be to make an effort not to label things.  For example, if you see a tree in the yard out your window, don’t automatically call it a “tree”.  Act as though you have no idea what it is called and you’ve never seen anything like that “whatever it is”.  Behave as though it just popped out from another dimension and it’s so alien to anything else, you just don’t know where to begin to categorize it.  So you simply gape at it as if you were seeing it for the first time.  You are simply in awe observing all the details of it.  You don’t say, “Oh, those are branches and those are different from that thicker thing in the middle called a trunk and it’s made of some stuff called wood and those things on the branches are leaves.”  You don’t know how to label any of those things, so you see the whole thing as one connected thing rather than having all these separate parts each with their own name.
You see, we tend to look at the world through a veil of words.  When we have a label for something, it makes us feel more comfortable, at rest, with a label, it becomes more contained and familiar.  You see something in front of you and you say, “Oh, that’s just a _________ .”  And you give it the name you’ve been taught it is in your own language.  (Of course, there are hundreds of languages, all labeling these things with their own names, which adds to the complication; it can be interesting to visit a foreign country, having no idea how to communicate, since you don’t know what the hell to call that in their own language.  And they may label things, actions, feelings your own language doesn’t even bother with.)
We usually label things we see more than anything else, since our visual sense is unusually highly developed in our own species.  (If we were some other animal, we may tend to specialize in labeling smells or sounds beyond our frequency range.)  And usually when you say a word, you see an image of it more than anything else.  Even if it’s a sound or smell, you see what it is associated with.  The word “bark” would make you see either a dog or perhaps a tree.
We are so conditioned to label things, since we could not read, write, or talk without making sounds or scribbles on paper which stand for that thing.  Thus it is very difficult to shed this tendency.  The first step would be to observe how your mind automatically gives something a name.  Then you might question whether that is the right name for it.  
Maybe as a kind of mind game, you could make up names or give it the wrong name.  For example, you could call your cat a “hairy cow” or a “wok”.  You could consider your lamp an interesting kind of plant.  You could see the tree as some odd geological formation which grew out of the earth, maybe a volcano.  You could call “Susan” “Jack”, and call “Ted” “Cynthia”.  Doing this may break the ice.
Getting yourself in a state of deep meditation, begin to look at things, feel things, see actions happening, and avoid labeling them.  You have no idea what they are, so you can’t label them.  If you have to, just say “it” for everything.  It’s all it, see?  But go beyond that, too.
Once you get good at this, and it will take a while, you will begin to see everything fresh and new, seeing things just as they are, not how you have defined them.

JUST SIT, DO NOTHING

This is based on an old Zen saying,  “Just sitting, doing nothing.”  What you do here is simply sit.  Don’t try to do anything.  This is the very opposite of any kind of technique.  This is anti-technique.  Just sit there.
When you find yourself wondering what to do here, just sit.  Perhaps it will help to be aware of the various bodily sensations connected with sitting.  Be aware of how your back feels against the back of the chair.  Be aware of how your butt feels on the cushion.  Be aware of how your feet feel on the floor or sitting crosslegged.  Be aware of how your elbows feel resting on the arms of the chair.  Be aware of your forearms resting on your thighs.  Be aware of the sensations in your hands in whatever position you have them in.  But don’t get too caught up in any one particular sensation.  Be aware of the sitting as a whole.
Be aware of sounds, sights, smells - but don’t react to them.  Don’t make associations about them or start thinking about them.  Return your attention to your sitting.
Breathe perfectly naturally.  Do not attempt to control your breath.  Let your breath do just as it is.
Just be where you are.  Don’t go anywhere else.  You don’t have to do anything at all.  The idea here is to be absolutely disengaged, running in idle without giving any gas, you couldn’t go anywhere anyway.
Have you ever watched a cat curled up as though fast asleep?  Look a bit more carefully, though.  You will notice that one part of it is still awake, absolutely aware of what is going on in the outside world.  The cat’s ears catch the sound of a nearby bird and it is instantly awake.  That is what you should strive for, without striving at all - to be simultaneously thoroughly disengaged and thoroughly alert.
You don’t necessarily have to be sitting to be in this state.  You could be in this state while standing up, while walking, while driving, while riding a bicycle, while washing dishes, while raking leaves, while doing data entry, while eating, while whatever it is.  But it is generally easier for novices in either a still position or relatively repetitive action.
The beauty of this is there are numerous occasions during the day when one can be disengaged while alert.  How many times do you find yourself standing in a long line, for example?  How many times do you experience a break or downtime at work?  What about those times when you are waiting for someone to get on the phone?  Set aside just a couple of moments here and there; the trick is to remember that this is an occasion.  You will feel much better and refreshed than if you started grumbling about how impatient you are.
Just be there, that’s all you have to do.
BE AWARE OF YOUR INSIDE

This exercise will focus upon the involuntary nervous system of your body.  The voluntary nervous system is those physical activities and sensations you can either control or are aware of.  The involuntary nervous system is where you can neither control or be aware of.  What you do here is do your best to become aware of your internal bodily activities which ordinarily you do not pay attention to.
The best initial place to start would be with your breathing.  One of the major reasons all these exercises focus on the breath and so many systems go for the breath is that it is both voluntary and involuntary.  Normally, you don’t think very much about your breath - unless you are out of breath from some strenuous activity or you are choking on foul air.  However, you can easily be aware of your breath and you can easily control your rate of breathing.  Try breathing very rapidly.  Now try breathing very slowly.  Stop breathing until you have to breathe again.  That wasn’t very hard, was it?
The other internal organ which you can be relatively aware of is your heart.  Sit there and be aware of your heart pumping away.  Think of it pumping and pumping, never taking a break, except to slow down a bit when you are more relaxed.  Think of something which gets you excited, scared, or all riled up.  Now feel how your heart tends to pump a bit more rapidly, more forcefully.  Take note of what thoughts make your heart pump faster and which thoughts make your heart pump more slowly.  When your attention wanders, bring it back to your heart.
See the center of your body, your whole being as your heart.  Be with that.  In ancient times, people tended to think of the heart as the seat of the soul, not the brain as we tend to think now.
If your heart is pumping very quietly, it may be difficult to be aware of it.  At first, you may have to put your fingers on your wrist or right in the left center of your chest to feel your pulse.  It would be highly interesting to get hold of a stethoscope from a medical supplies store; spend a half hour just listening to your heartbeat.
See if you can slow your heartbeat down.  I cannot say whether it is possible or not.  Just try to do it.  It is said there are yogis who can stop their heartbeat, so maybe it can be done.
Another place is your digestive system and excretory system.  Normally, these just do their thing without your help.  But you can very easily be aware of your stomach.  After all, that’s that nagging organ you feed all the time.  Try making it shrink next time you are hungry rather than simply feeding it.
Can you feel your pancreas, your liver, your kidneys?  Just try to do it.  Can you feel your intestines at all?  Try to squeeze them.  Tell them to squeeze.  Be aware of any squishy feelings you sense in there.  You can control your esophagus ok.  See if you can do that to your intestines.
Can you make yourself get a hard-on (if you’re male) or get wet (if you’re female)?  Can you turn your sexuality on and off?
All of this may or may not be possible.  Be aware of everything going on in those internal organs in the hollow places in your body.  See what you can control.
I AM GRATEFUL FOR _______

This exercise is inspired by Thanksgiving Day, but it can be done anytime, anyday.   It is certainly nice to have a certain holiday where we can lay back and be thankful for the good things going on, but it does not have to be confined to that.
The idea here is to sit and think about all the things that you are grateful for.  If you are having a bad time in your life, that may be a bit difficult, but it can be done, and it would certainly be therapeutic at times like that.
Start with the most basic things.  Make affirmations:  “I am grateful for _______ (fill in the blank).”  It could be as simple as “I am grateful to be alive right here and now.”  “I am grateful to be sitting here breathing.”  “I am grateful to have a shelter to live in.”  “I am grateful that I have food to eat.”  “I am grateful I am free to move around.”  “I am grateful to be able to think about being grateful.” “I am grateful that my body is functioning ok.”  “I am grateful my computer started up this morning.”  “I am grateful my car is running now.”  Whatever it is you actually have, be grateful for it.
Even if some of those things aren’t going right, you could still express gratitude for the times they do go right.  “I am grateful for the times when I am well and not sick.”  “I am grateful for the times when I am sick so I have times to rest and allow my body build up its immune system.”  “I am grateful for the times when I have something to eat.”  “I am grateful when I don’t have anything to eat because it keeps me from gaining too much weight.”  “I am grateful when my computer doesn’t work, because it shows me there are other ways to enjoy life.”  “I am grateful that my car isn’t working because it forces me to walk more.”  Get the idea?
If you can’t think of anything right off, just go back and feel grateful that you are right here breathing and sitting.  Be grateful that you are alive.
You can make it more abstract:  “I am grateful to have all the things I do have, have had, and will have.  I am grateful for life and all the adventures and joys it offers.  I am grateful for the mystery of what is beyond.  I am grateful for the beauty on this world and grateful for the ugliness that gives it such a wonderful contrast.”  That should cover a lot.
Be sure to express gratitude for anything which may had occurred to you recently that you are particularly happy about.  “I am grateful I got that job.”  “I am grateful that this person has come into my life.”  “I am grateful that I found this place to live.”
Normally our tendency is to be overjoyed initially when something good happens, but after a brief period of celebration, it starts to wear and we immediately proceed to want something better and find fault with this novel event which just occurred to us.  You might observe your tendency to do that.  See what happens after you acquire some new possession, for example.  This exercise is the opposite of that - which is to appreciate it just as it is and to be as overjoyed with it as though it just happened.
Another interesting extension of this exercise is to be grateful for what is coming.  Even if things aren’t working out so well now, be grateful for the resolution which you know is surely coming.
Be open with gratitude for all that is.  This is the essence of enlightenment.  
WHAT CAN YOU CHANGE NOW?

This is more a visualization exercise, but thinking about it is involved.  Get into a relaxed meditative state first.  Now attempt to imagine exactly what it is you want out of life.  What is happening now that you would like to change.  Be utterly open to this.  
Don’t start getting into a state where you say, “Ah, that’s too good for me and there’s no way I could possibly have that anyway.”  Just go for it.  Perhaps you are used to living in a lower class situation, but if you want a country estate, picture it.  If you want an ideal spouse, imagine her or him.  If you would prefer to be doing meaningful work with a higher rate of pay, don’t stop it.  Just daydream away.  At this stage, nothing is too fantastic.
Now attempt to fill in the details.  What exactly are you doing day to day in your work?  What is the color of your spouse’s eyes and hair?  What dreams do you share together?  What do you have in common?  Just where is this dream house you would be living in?  Is it up in the mountains?  Is it by the ocean?
This is not so much a positive thinking exercise, though this kind of visualization, if done intensely enough, can alter your circumstances eventually.  However, it is not so much a matter of snapping your fingers like a magician and there it is.  All things involve work.  And what you put in is what you get back out.
You might want to think about another aspect of this.  What would you have to sacrifice to get some of these things?  Would this involve taking something away from someone else who would also like to have it?  Would you have to become a mean rascal to acquire the wealth to have these things?  You have to decide whether that is worth it.  Is there a way to have what you want without doing harm to someone or the environment?  Think carefully about the repercussions of each thing you want, then weigh it against what you have now.
Think about things you would like to change or do - which do not involve getting the consent of another person(s) or forcing yourself upon someone.  In other words, what can you start doing now?  Ex., if you’ve always wanted to write a book, go ahead and do it.  No one is stopping you from that, is there?  (Publishing it and getting people to read it is a different matter, but we won’t get into that here.)  Maybe you want to quit smoking, so do it!  Don’t dawdle around about it.  Perhaps you would like to change the decoration of your living space.  Go on that diet.  Do that exercise program.  Think about all the things you are perfectly free to do here and now.
Now here is a tricky one.  Let us suppose you are lonely and wish you knew more people.  To some extent, this involves getting the attention of those people and making yourself available to them.  But do they want to know you?  You have to win their consent to become your friend.  You might get rejected and that can be painful.  
However, on your end, there is absolutely nothing which could stop you from going up to people and attempt to start a conversation with them.  You will need to sort out just what it is which is of interest to them and see how it matches your own interests.  Or you may need to alter your own interests to match theirs.  If this gets to be too much for you, you pull out.  For example, if you are a pacifist and believe in the equality of all races, you certainly don’t want to make friends with someone who is in the Nazi Party!
The above considerations apply whether it is finding a better job, a beautiful lover, a good house, being a market success, or whatever.  Ex., if you want a really good job, you will have to start working hard, dressing up very professionally, going to all kinds of interviews, doing work search seminars, sucking up to people you otherwise can’t stand.  You must consider how much of yourself are you willing to sacrifice.  There is nothing to stop you from making that sacrifice.  What does your inner voice tell you about this?
The main point of this exercise is to sort out what involves getting others into your frame of reference, or getting yourself into theirs - or what you can do immediately without all that stuff.  Be aware of the freedom you do have - rather than bitching about the freedom you don’t have.
THE MOVIE CALLED “ME”

Look at the world outside of you like a big unfolding movie.  Somehow you are the main character of your own movie, and all these other characters are supporting cast.  The movie never has any particular beginning or ultimate resolution.  There are various tragedies, comedies, good times, bad times, and boring neutral times.  There is an ultimate beginning to it all called “birth” and ultimate ending called “death”.  You have no idea what lies beyond these.  
The plot of the movie revolves around attempting to increase the good times to the greatest extent you can and to simultaneously decrease the bad times to the greatest extent you can.  The worst thing that can happen to you is “death”; it is the most terrifying thing you can think of because that is where the film suddenly runs off the hub and the movie comes to an abrupt end.
Your interactions around the other supporting cast involve seeing how much pleasure you can get out of them for your own benefit and trying to ward off any pain which may come from them.  You want them to accept you, because this gives you pleasure and the possibility that more pleasure may come from them.  You either do not like or are afraid of the characters who reject you, this causes you pain or the possibility of pain.  Most of all, you don’t want anyone to kill you or limit your freedom; you would prefer to kill them or limit their freedom first.  This is called “power” and you want as much of it as you can possibly get.
Never does it occur to you that it is just a movie.  You are constantly in the process of making your own plot.  It feels so utterly real to you.  You are lost in your own story.  You are the maker and audience of this movie called “I”,“ME”, and “MINE”.  It is going to come to an end, but you prefer not to think about that.  You are too wrapped up in the drama of it and the plot is thickening.

Here is an exercise to try with this.  On some busy main street, watch people go by.  Be in some spot where it isn’t obvious you are staring at them outright.  Look carefully at the way they move.  Watch each gesture.  Watch each event taking place.  Observe all the mannerisms, all the costumes each actor and actress is wearing.
Look at this as some kind of video.  Try to slow the motion down somewhat by focusing very intently on each character.  Watch the way they interact.
One useful way to do this exercise would be to actually tape these scenes, in a way which would put you out of sight.  Then when you get home, actually run the playback in slow motion.  See the effect it has on you as you meditate on it.
You may also watch your own motions in this film.  In the middle of an important moment, catch yourself, and say “This is just a movie, a story unfolding, of no real ultimate importance because it will come to an end.”  Be the film critic; consider how the movie could had been made better.  Re-edit it.  Change the lighting, the color, the sound.
If you get into it enough, I assure you will get yourself into some very interesting spaces.
QUESTION YOURSELF

Question yourself.  Nothing is unthinkable.  Do not leave any stones unturned.  Are you in some situation that you find difficult to deal with?  Are you getting what you want or need from the situation you are in?  Should you continue doing something if it is merely a habit pattern?  Are you getting results from this particular expenditure of your energy?  Are you doing yourself any good?  Or are you harming yourself?  Is this the person you want to be today?
You need to pay close attention to yourself when you do this and you must be thoroughly and mercilessly honest with yourself.  Brainstorm about various alternative actions you might take and carefully consider the outcome of each of these actions.
Ex., you are even free to apply this to what particular meditation exercise you are doing.  Let us say you have been humming “OM” to yourself every morning at the crack of dawn for years and years.  How does it feel when you do that?  Do you feel liberated in anyway?  Are you chanting “OM” because someone told you that was how to meditate and now you are doing it as if it were some sort of investment, as it were, towards some future mythological Buddha heaven - but of no greater real importance than getting up and making your bed every morning.  Are you really getting into doing this?  Or are you bored stiff?  Maybe you’re not even bored; you’re just an automaton chanting “OM”.
Is the sky going to fall if you quit chanting “OM”?  Maybe you should just as well chant “Bubba, Bubble, Bubble” for about five years and see what that does.  Maybe you should just shut up and see what silence does to you.  Why don’t you sleep late and see what that does?  What aspects of yourself do you feel you need to develop more?  What are obvious deficiencies in your behavior?  What form of meditation would be supportive in this case to develop these?
What sort of life situation do you find yourself in right now?  Do you like the job you are in?  What don’t you like about this job?  What do you like about this job?  Why are you continuing to go to this job?  Why don’t you just walk out?  What else could you do?  Or what could you do which would enhance the job you are now in?
Ditto about relationships you are in.  Are you so inextricably entwined in this particular relationship you can’t pull out?  Maybe you are bored stiff with the relationship.  Maybe it worked well for you a few years ago, but now it just seems to go around in vicious circles.  Maybe that other person feels the same way, but is similarly afraid to bring it up.  Both of you are afraid to be alone, to risk the unknown, but it could probably be the best thing that could happen to both of you.  And you may turn out to be better friends that way.
This is not necessarily to advocate breaking off from everyone and everything.  In fact, in certain cases, it may be in your best interests to hang on to the situation and learn the most you possibly can from it.  But if it is becoming “Same old same old,” maybe it’s time to question it.  Either quit it or enhance it.
ALL IS TRUE, FALSE, AND MEANINGLESS

Meditate upon the following statement:
“Everything is true in some sense, false in some sense, and meaningless in another sense.”
	Is this statement true or false?  Or is it sheer nonsense?  Approach it a bit like a Zen koan.  It is not supposed to have logical sense and it does not have a definite answer.  There are an infinite number of answers and there are no answers.
Perhaps someone will say to you:  “You are a complete asshole!”  The average person will react to this statement by being utterly offended and usually buzz off with a retort such as “So are you!”
But rather than immediately react by getting either hurt or offended, look at it.  Gurdjieff once said that the best advice his father ever gave him was on his deathbed:  “Before you react to an insult, meditate for at least 24 hours on it to discern whether it is true or false.”
Are there any cases where you do indeed act like an asshole?  Surely, in any given person’s life, there is some instance or more where he or she has behaved like a complete asshole.  Jesus sure must have come off seeming like a complete asshole when he tossed out the money-changers.  
And, even if it were true in general, in every asshole’s life, there has been an instance where he or she was really a very nice person.  I’m sure even Hitler had his good days, where he was sweet to everyone and even did a Jew a favor or two.  
And there are also cases where someone is neither an asshole or a non-asshole to anyone at certain times.  When you brush your teeth, are you a complete asshole or not?  You are only an asshole in relation to someone else.  
Or the statement:  “You are a complete asshole!” is rather meaningless semantically, since we are composed of many more bodily parts than an asshole, and the asshole is a rather tiny part of the whole organism.  Why not say, “You are a complete mouth!” or “You are a complete stomach!”
Or let us take an obvious statement such as “The world is round.”  It was equally obvious to others once upon a time that the world was flat.  Is the world as round as we suppose it to be; there are certainly a lot of irregular perforations on its surface such as mountains and buildings.  Or maybe it’s not the world that is round, we exist inside a sphere in space!  (Which is actually Einstein’s idea!)   Or perhaps it is neither or both.  Do you define round as concave or convex?  When you dabble in these metaphysical ramblings, the statements becomes meaningless.
Anyway, try it out and see what it does to you.  At the very least, it will make you very philosophically adept.
TIME TRAVEL - PART I.

Travel back in time to a moment or period when you were feeling particularly happy or peaceful.  Experience it as if it is happening right now.  Stay with that and see where it goes.
For example, you could try going to your summer vacation.  Remember all the places you went to.  Attempt to remember as many details about it as you can.  What was it like where you stayed?  What were the people like?  What did you eat?  What was the weather like?  What did you explore?  Try to remember the places you had never been to before; were they like what you expected or were you surprised?  Did you like where you were?  Would you want to live there always?
Try to remember those moments when you felt particularly blissed-out.  What was it about that spot in time and space that made you feel that way?  Make an attempt to recollect that scene with photographic detail.  Try to remember all your physical sensations.  Be there in that moment just as if it were unfolding now.  You are no longer merely reminiscing about it; you are there!  Pause it right at that instant.
Interesting moments to focus on might be:  the instant you and your partner orgasmed in bed, the first time you got high, the first time you had sex, the first time you came to a land you thought was especially beautiful, the first time you tasted a new food, the first time you experienced anything.  Try to remember that instant when things were just right; you are not wanting for anything.
It does not necessarily have to be something good.  It could also be an especially horrible moment.  Let’s say, you find your partner cheating on you and you discover them in bed.  Or you hear the news that someone close to you has died or is going to die.  Or you got your draft notice.  You just had a bad accident.  You got busted.  You set out to have a nice vacation and everything went wrong to keep you from having a good time.  Those instances can be equally as intense.
An interesting exercise along this line could be to recollect a spot where you were deliberately meditating and went particularly deep into it.  Maybe it is a special room.  Maybe it is a place in the woods.  Maybe it is by the ocean.  Perhaps it is sitting in a cave while the rain is falling outside.  Go to that instant in time, space, and consciousness, then experience it just as it was happening right now.
It does not have to be an actual place where you have actually been.  It could be a very archetypal place.  For example, you might imagine a perfectly vast stretch of beach, absolutely untouched by mankind, where you and you alone are.  It could be sitting on top of the highest mountain in the world and you are able to see the entire planet from there.  It could be within a cave which is the entrance to the bowels of the earth - and you have sat there steadily meditating through all seasons and all kinds of weather.  It could be a special temple within the forest.
To develop your ability to experience the past as though it were happening now will enable you to experience this moment as if it is happening now.  It may get confusing, though - you might find yourself wondering if what you are experiencing now is already past!
TIME TRAVEL - PHASE II.

The next phase of this line of meditation is to develop the ability to experience the future as if it were happening now.  Since this hasn’t happened yet, it will require a bit more creative imagination.  You, in a sense, are playing God here.  
It must be clear here that the future is never absolutely predetermined.  There is no one outcome for the future.  There is nothing whatever that is absolutely inevitable.  There are only more probable outcomes and less probable outcomes - and these are changing, albeit ever so slightly, every moment!  At any given point of now, there are infinite alternative paths the future can go into.  (There may be infinite alternative pasts as well as infinite alternative presents, but that’s more than we can handle now.)
If you drink increasing amounts of alcohol and smoke increasing quantities of tobacco, it is very likely you will take a few decades off your lifespan.  Now you may happen to have a very strong bodily constitution and get around that, but it is not likely.  Nor is it a given your lifespan will increase if you don’t smoke or drink; a truck may hit you tomorrow!
If you make investments in a solid business with good returns, you may become wealthier in the long run.  Or that business may be caught cheating by the IRS and shut down - and you lost all that money you invested, ironically becoming poorer than you would had been if you never invested in anything at all.  There are no guarantees.
It may appear that you are a complete loser and your life is going downhill, and you have nothing to look forward to is more of the same.  But, suddenly someone might offer you a good job using abilities only you have, and you will live happily ever after.
This can be an interesting thing to cogitate upon.

This exercise goes in three parts:  Imagine a very happy outcome for your life.  Imagine a very miserable outcome for your life.  Imagine a very neutral outcome for your life.
Try to fill in as many details as you can.  Attempt to picture just at what instant the upward climb or slide downhill will begin.  Maybe someone offered you a job - or you were fired!  You inherited some money - or you had to pay a huge fine for some obscure law you didn’t even know you broke!  You go through life in great health and take care of yourself topnotch - or you find out you have inoperable cancer!  You find a wonderful mate you get along with personally, culturally, politically, and sexually - or you keep getting dumped!  With the neutral outcome, you imagine something in between such extremes.  Just same old ho-hum, just waddling along through existence.
With each of these three scenarios, attempt to be there as if it were happening.  While it is happening, say to yourself:  “This is only ­one possibility - among an infinite range.  At any instant, I can change this into something completely different.”  At this stage, don’t try to change it, just observe it unfolding.  Once you get good at this kind of time travel, then you can graduate to time-shifting.
When you arrive back in the present, then ask yourself:  “What can I do this very instant which would alter any given probable outcome of where my life is going?”



BEING HERENOW

When you focus on the formula:  “I am here now”, there is a different dimension of here-ness and now-ness.  HERE is constantly changing NOW.  

Time is a measurement of some form of regular change in the environment.   Probably the original unit of time for our ancestors is the day and the year.  When the sun rises and sets, that is a day.  When the sun sets, there is a period of darkness, and that is a night.  Then there is yesterday, today, and tomorrow.  Our ancestors undoubtedly noted that there is an annual pattern of seasonal change, one cycle of this is a year.  Years became a measurement of age.  Then along came clocks with minutes, hours, and seconds, making a somewhat more abstract more precise measurement of time.  In our modern civilization, we now consider the position of hands on a clock or a digital reading of hours, minutes, seconds as real as days and years.

If there was absolutely nothing but space, there would be no time.  Time is an illusion.  Our senses and our scientific deductions show there are quite a few things changing all the time.  Another aspect of this is the notion of “past” and “future”.  If we had no memories and no records, if we had instant amnesia every time something happened, the “past” would be non-existent.  The notion of a “past” makes us conclude there is some kind of “future” based on the current rate of change.  The “future” is a mystery, usually we can take it for granted that tomorrow will be more or less like yesterday, yet at every instant there are an infinite number of futures that may or may not happen.  Similarly, the past can be altered an infinite number of ways by changing our records or our memories.  And all of this is happening “NOW”, so today, yesterday, and tomorrow are happening simultaneously.  Everything that has occurred infinitely in the past and all the possibilities of what may occur are all happening NOW.  (This may be why Jesus meant by: “Before Solomon was, I AM.”)  It is impossible to measure NOW.  For example, if you said this event is happening now, as soon as you said it, a second ticked by and it already happened.

The notion of “here” is contingent on points in space.  I am “here”, but you are “there” – and we are “here” and they are “there”.  “Here” could be your body, your brain, where you are sitting now, the room you are in, the town, latitude and longitude, your state or country, the world, this solar system, the Milky Way, all the galaxies of the universe, the whole universe, and whatever is beyond the universe.  (For all we know, there are an infinite number of universes, mega-universes, and so on.)  Finally, we get to a point where “HERE’ is “ALL THAT IS”.

HERE and NOW are exactly the same.  Perhaps we need to invent some word “HERENOW”, pronounced “Here…In…Now”.
An exercise based on the above:  While you are breathing deeply and focusing on “I AM HERENOW”, do the following mind visualization.

First, focus on what you are experiencing now and here.  Next, backtrack to some particular event yesterday that stands out in your memory, some event that you were experiencing more fully than usual.  Experience that event as if it were happening HERENOW.  Really get into it.  Then switch back to what you are currently experiencing while you are sitting meditating.  Finally, experience BOTH of those events simultaneously.  Experience both of these events as if they were the same HERE and the same NOW.  This will take some doing, but it is well worth the effort when you finally “get it”.

When you have accomplished that, picture something you definitely plan to do later today.  Picture what that event will probably be like, based on past experiences.  Experience that simultaneous with the present event and the past event.  Picture these three events as going on right this moment, and right where you are sitting now.

As you get into this, you may experience reality in a more expansive way.  The past, the present, and the future are all happening now.  The fall of the dinosaurs and the emergence of mankind are happening this very moment.  Your birth and death are happening now.  Your childhood and old age are happening now.  Where you are now, where you are ten years ago, and where you are ten years from now, are the same HERE.

Once you have that focused, think about all the things you plan to do today.  The things you plan to do today will probably be exactly as you expected them to happen.  However, there are little variations about how you could accomplish these activities.  Which shortcut will you take to run that errand?  How will you line up your errands?  What will you do if there is a traffic jam?  Where will you park?  What stores will you go to?  At some level, there is uncertainty just what is going to happen.  You may spontaneously choose to go for a ride out of town and go exploring.  You may meet someone who will change your life.  You may get a phone call about some emergency you need to attend to.  As you do that, please remember that while you are thinking about these things, you are doing it right this moment.

So wherever you happen to be, there are an infinite number of futures, probable, possible, or utterly fantastic.  All those variations on the future are happening now.

This approach can also be applied to the past.  All we know of the past are our own memories, other people’s memories, and records (writings, pictures, recordings).  It is always possible that we may remember the past incorrectly, which happens to elderly people frequently.  We may remember the past as we WANT to remember it, not what “actually happened”.  We could even consciously edit the past to delude others, which you do when you are lying or making up a story.  (I’m sure this has been done to the bible, for example.)  We may make myths of the past, giving those events a flavor of grandiosity.  

Try going back to that past event yesterday.  Now attempt to remember it in an entirely different way, then act as if you really believe it.  Question whether you remembered it correctly.  (This happens particularly with dreams.)  Consider all the ways it COULD had happened.  Maybe you got granted a fortune and you are celebrating today.  Maybe you got laid off from your job and are now anxious about finding another job.  Now experience all these possible versions of the past SIMULTANEOUSLY!

If there infinite versions of the past, there are also infinite versions of this present moment.  Maybe you are vacationing in Hawaii instead of planning your agenda today.  Maybe you are on another planet and some other kind of species.  Maybe you are sitting on the other side of the room.  Maybe you are drinking tea instead of coffee.

There are infinite versions of the past, present, and future all happening HERENOW.  
THE BEGINNING OF THE WORLD

What is the beginning of the world?  Where did the world begin?  That is what this exercise is all about.
You can focus on two aspects of this question:
1.  Where did the universe begin?
2.  Where did the world begin for you?
If you dig deep enough into these two questions, you will ultimately find there is really no answer.  In essence this is like a Zen koan mind twister.
For example, it may be relatively easy to come up with a pat answer like "Oh, the universe began approximately 15 - 20 billion years ago with the Big Bang".  OK, so what was there before the Big Bang?  Where did the Big Bang come from?  And what was there before that?  And so on.  Or you could say God made the world.  So, where did God come from?  And why did God take so long just sitting around before making the world if God is forever and ever in the past?  What was going on back there?
You might find it fairly convenient to say you were born on your birthdate.  You may even have a record of the exact moment of your birth on some hospital record somewhere.  What is the definition of "birth" here?  Was it when your head just started to pop out of the womb or when you were all the way out?  Did it happen at the precise instant your umbilical cord was cut?  Was it when you opened your eyes?  Was it when you began to sense there was a world outside the womb?
Maybe you can't say you began until you were actually conceived, when your father's sperm just plunged into your mother's egg cell.  Was it when your father and your mother got the urge to have intercourse?  Your father undoubtably had an orgasm; did your mother?  What kind of night was it?  Where did they do it?  What position were they in?  Was it more intense than their usual sexual experiences?  Did they know it when it happened?  Were you deliberate, that is, they were just having intercourse to make a baby?  Or were they just having fun - and you happened to be, oops, an accident?
You could go even further back.  Perhaps it wasn't until your father met your mother that you came into existence.  Maybe your father met your mother at a dance or in a bar.  When their eyes met, they knew they were drawn to one another.  Your father got a hard-on and your mother got wet.  At the door, they kissed one another passionately good night.  Maybe that's when you came into existence.  
Think of all the other ancestors which gave birth to them.  Be aware that you are the result of the coming together of countless couples.  Eventually some of you are cave men and women sheltered within a cave, feeding the fire, wondering where they can find something to eat.
You can even go back to the first mammals.  Or the fish creatures that crawled out of the ocean.  Or the first cells.  Or the ocean of biochemicals that spawned the first DNA-like genetic material.  Or the beginning of the planet.  Or ultimately the beginning of the universe.  And thus we go back to right where we started from.  What came before then?
Try to time travel back to these particular instances.  It can get very interesting as you go back in time.  Attempt to experience these instances just as if they were happening now.  You may be surprised at how clearly you can remember them.

THE END OF THE WORLD

What would be the end of the world?  At what point of time would the world ultimately come to an end?  This is the other side of the coin from the previous exercise, the yin to accompany the yang.
There are two aspects of this question:
1.  What would be the end of this world as we know it?
2.  What would be the end of the world for you?
This is a difficult subject to meditate upon, because no one, of course, wants the world to end.  It would not be a nice thing to happen, yet every moment it is inevitable.  We can only function as we assume the world going on and on just as it is, despite all its flaws.
Picture the houses and buildings, both the one you are now in and all the ones around you, as sheer rubble.  See people in the streets lying around dying.  Imagine wandering in the streets weak with hunger, wounded and bleeding, stumbling along, collapsing, feeling gravity pull you down, gasping, the world spinning around, your final breath.
Imagine the worst scenarios you can.  Perhaps a major world war has proceeded, and they are using nuclear bombs and biochemical weapons all over the planet.  There is no where to escape from it.  The whole atmosphere is tainted with poison, and all life on the surface of the world is dying out.  The major coastal cities are going under the oceans from global warming, and millions of refugees are swarming inland.  Some major computer virus has wiped out all computerized operations, and nothing works, and no one knows how to function otherwise.  The pumps finally yield not a drop of oil, the gas pumps are empty, millions of cars and trucks lay abandoned on the streets, no one can go anywhere and all transportation of goods comes to a halt.  Everywhere there is sheer anarchy and gangs of people are shooting one another with the last bullets in the last guns.
If we don't do it to ourselves, there are always more astronomical disasters.  In a few billion years, our sun will blow up or burn out, then our planet will be fried or frozen to a lifeless chunk of rock.  The universe will gradually lose its energy, and all suns in the universe will burn out, then there will be no refuge anywhere left in the vastness of space!  Or perhaps a huge asteroid will smash the earth to smitherins. Or a major ice age that will change the planet to something like Antarctica will make it impossible for civilization or much life to thrive at all.
As you can see, there is not much hope at all.  It has to end somewhere.
Imagine the end of the world for you.  After all, even if everything else thrives happily ever after, if something happens to bring an end to your existence, that is basically the end of the world for you.  Picture various ways you might die and what that would be like.  All of us are doing that anyway, though normally we don't like to think about it, yet we are obsessed with it.  Why do you think books and movies filled with violence are so popular?
Perhaps someone will shoot you in some dark alley.  Maybe you will discover you have terminal cancer.  Perhaps you will keel over from a heart attack or a stroke.  Maybe you will die in an automobile accident.  There is no where you are safe and invulnerable.  No matter how many insurance policies or security measures you have are you invincible to some possibility of the dreaded end.
OK, so instead of running from it, face it!  Be right here with it.  Experience it as it is unfolding right now.  What is it about death that scares you the most?  Maybe the idea of having no sensations, no feelings, no mind, no thoughts, no consciousness is utterly terrifying to you.  So go ahead all the way and experience being nothing at all.  Play dead and be dead.  Try it, you might like it!  There, was that really so bad?
The Buddhists have a custom where they send their monks out into graveyards where corpses are openly rotting away.  Perhaps you could gaze at pictures of corpses and get to know death.  Make friends with it.
As you get into this, you may find yourself in a state where death has no terror for you and you fear nothing, because you know there is nothing to be afraid of.  
And always ask yourself this question:  After that, what happens next?  Because you know what?  After the thorough dissolution of this world or yourself or this universe, there are countless other worlds, selves, and universes.  And they are all composed of the same ultimate stuff that is shaped and re-shaped in countless forms.

HOW CAN IT BE RE-CREATED?

The point of this exercise is to attempt to see how any loss, both personal and to the human species as a whole, could be a blessing in disguise.
For example, let's take a worse case scenario that most people fear:  the loss of your job or your major source of income.  That is a tragedy indeed, but is there any way it could be a blessing?  Maybe you actually hated that job, knew it all along, and just pushed it in the background of your consciousness just to be able to function at it.  Perhaps you felt your true creative or intellectual potential was being repressed while working at that job.  Perhaps you got tired of being told to do numerous idiotic things and being forced to go through numerous idiotic rituals which you knew were not of any importance at all and could had easily been eliminated altogether - yet you could not openly say that for fear you might get fired.  Perhaps the way you were making that major source of income was something you knew was utterly corrupt and  forcing you to lose your innermost soul.  Is there not some part of yourself that is relieved to be rid of this thing?  Don't you feel a certain sense of freedom, despite the loss of security?
This can be approached as a kind of adventure, rather than getting all bummed out like it was the worst thing that could had happened to you.  Now you have a chance to make some major move in your life.  Although you may have to work a series of shit jobs to keep you going in the meantime, you could start trying to get into the kind of work and lifestyle you wanted all along.  Perhaps you will decide to pursue some other career.  You could go back to school.  You could chuck it all and live like some kind of monk.  This is a unique fork in your life path and anything could happen!  Now's your big chance to enhance it or blow it.
Similarly, you could face the loss of a partner or a relationship.  As much as you may had loved that person, perhaps there were at least a few things that aggravated the hell out of you about that person.  Undoubtably, this person did something to make you feel somewhat restrained in your personal tastes.  Perhaps you felt somewhat dominated.  Or you felt an obsessive need to change something about this person and he or she just kept destroying him or her self.  Undoubtably, you will go through either a period of grief or bitterness, but now you are free to be yourself again.  You are free to choose what you want to be or where you want to go or who you want to be with - without this person holding you back.  Perhaps you will find there are some things that you rather like about being alone.  Or you are free to choose someone else who may be a bit closer to your ideal of who you want to be with.
Supposing our civilization comes to an end, as it so inevitably will if no one bothers to make any major changes in their opulant lifestyle.  Although there is not much left as we sift through the rubble of what was, is there not something we can change for the better - so future generations will not make the same mistakes we did?  Now we are free of the restraints of governments which held us back before.  All of a sudden, there are no laws and no rules.  Now we can choose what direction we want this to all go in.  Admittedly, it will be difficult, extraordinarily difficult, but that will only add to the spice of adventure.  And what would an adventure be without a few setbacks here and there?
For example, perhaps you could think along the lines of "What if it did all come to an end?  Supposing myself and a few others are left?  What can we do to start re-building a version of civilization without all the mistakes we made before?  How can we pass on and preserve this knowledge for future generations?"  Those are good questions to start thinking about - because the ship is sinking and it's time to start getting into the lifeboats.
Or that other biggie - death.  It's admittedly a bummer to die, but weren't you getting just a wee bit tired of this life?  Wouldn't it be a relief to let go of this and be reborn in another form?  You may discover there is quite a bit of freedom no longer needing a body to maintain all the time.
In every loss, there is a blessing.  Focus on this one and you will no longer be obsessing over every possible loss all the time.  Free of this worry, you are free to make positive changes in your life.
IS THE BRAIN ALL YOU ARE?

The object of this exercise is to consider whether the totality of who you are and the totality of the reality you perceive and conceive is all locked up in approximately three pounds of grey matter called “the brain”.  We are taught that our selves are the brain and the brain is the sum total of who we are.  Do you think that is true?
Forget about everything you have been taught in school.  Look within yourself and consider what is going on.  Where do you feel yourself to be?  In your brain, in your head, in your heart, your stomach, your guts, your sex organ?  Do you feel yourself to be in different places at different times?
Psychologists and neurologists would say all that is going on in the brain.  The brain is some kind of master switchboard which coordinates all the movements and reactions of the body.  Your eyes are scanning over these words and translating them into imagery which makes sense to your own gestalt of reality.  We translate the “world out there” into language which is words which stand for images, sounds, tastes, smells, concepts, classes of things, feelings, emotions, sensations, and all of that stuff.  All of this, including the sky and the infinite universe, is all in this three pound piece of living meat consisting of seething neurons squirting out chemicals to one another which somehow become translated into something called “reality” and something else called “me”.
But think about this:  Even this three pound lump of grey matter itself is being generated in all those seething neurons.  So are you sure it’s out there?  Sure, you can dissect a dead person or surgically operate a living person, going so far as to put electrodes into different parts which generate certain experiences.  But you are still seeing it all in your mind.  There is no way to know what it really looks like!  Maybe it’s not even there!  Maybe we’re just lost in space dreaming this all up.
And if physicists are correct, ultimately this three pound lump of matter is nothing but a seething conglomeration of swirling particles and sub-particles, which themselves consist of pure energy, which itself is the spawn of vacuum.  Imagine your whole sense of reality and experience being naught but this!
And all these physicists are just playing with instruments and thinking thoughts with some hypothetical “brain” to explore whatever is “out there”.  So some seething conglomeration of energy is conceiving of itself.  But whatever it conceives may be completely off the mark!  Maybe we’re just making this up as we go along.  Maybe we’re not even in these separate bodies and all that; we’re just all one Big Universal Mind.
So get into this and see where it takes you.  If you get into it deep enough, you may get some inkling of what the Buddhists meant when they said this is all an illusion.  Ultimately, you realize:

There is no way you can know it or conceptualize it…
You can only be it!
ALL IS TRUE AND FALSE AND MEANINGLESS

Meditate upon this statement:

“All is true in some way, false in another way, and meaningless in some other way.”

Do you think this is true or false or meaningless?

Let’s take this one for a spin.  Consider the following statement:

“God exists.”

Now that statement would be very true and meaningful to someone who fervently believes that there is a God.  On the other hand, it would be quite false to an atheist or to an empiricist who insists that God must be something you could see, hear, touch, or be measurable in some way.  It would be meaningless to someone who prefers to believe in a Goddess rather than a God.  Then we can get rather nitpicking and start asking questions like:  “Where is this God?  Is God a He or a She or an It?   Is God a somewhat serious old man with a long beard who throws lightning bolts at us when He is displeased or puts us in Paradise when He is pleased with us?  Is God a Force?  Is God some kind of  Guiding Intelligence which has kept the universe from going into sheer Chaos?  So how do we account for the presence of Evil and Chaos; why did this Divine Intelligence allow such a thing?  But, without a God, how can we have such a wonderfully operating complex mechanism as life?  And how is it possible that we are conscious?”  To a person who speaks French or Goo-Boo, all of this would be quite meaningless.
Well, all of that is a bit philosophical and metaphysical.  One thing you can say about it or the other thing could be about as true or false or meaningless as the other.  Let’s try something more down-to-earth:

“The sky is blue.”

That seems very obvious, doesn’t it?  Just go out and take a look at the sky.  I’m sure the average person would say,  “Yeah, the sky sure looks blue today, doesn’t it?”  Well, not necessarily.  What if it happens to be a cloudy day?  Then it’s white, isn’t it?  But let’s look at what is really going on here.  Actually, what we are seeing is what the sky doesn’t absorb.  The sky is sucking in all the colors except blue and reflecting blue as an aftereffect.  So maybe the sky is actually orange or yellow or something like that, and the blue we see is simply a waste product, the color bouncing around that the sky is not.  Have you ever taken a really good look at the sky?  If you look at it carefully enough, you start seeing all kinds of swirling patterns in the depths.  It might look like a deep violet bordering on black mixed with shades of white and pink.  The sky isn’t very blue around sunrise and sunset is it?  At night, in my opinion the sky is black – except for when we get a lot of city lights blaring at it.  And think about this – to a person blind since birth, any references at all to color would be quite meaningless.  At least, I think it would.  Then again, I’m not blind since birth.  Maybe a blind person sees all kinds of colors.
The geist of this is it is impossible to make any kind of absolute statements at all, thus shooting down all Western logic.  Really get into thinking about this for yourself.  Test it out for yourself.  This is the ultimate Zen koan. 
EXPERIMENTING WITH LIGHT

There are certain situations which will automatically induce either a state of meditation or a state conducive to meditativeness.  One of these is fire.  Have you ever sat around a campfire at night gazing into the flickering of the flames and fell into an instant trance?  There is something about that fire which is akin to suckling at your momma’s breast, sweet and nurturing.  As the night grows darker and colder, you instinctively lean as close to that fire as you can, attaining warmth and light in front, shutting out the chilly creepy darkness at your back.  Having a fire is probably one of the greatest joys of camping out, because it is such a rare luxury which we don’t have in our more sedentary civilization of continuous electrical lights and automatic heating.
It is actually a proven matter that the flickering of flame will put one in an instant alpha state of consciousness.  The alpha state is what seasoned meditators get into as well; it has been measured in laboratories.  There are special gadgets with goggles which are specially designed to put one in this alpha state.  There are also biofeedback mechanisms which can help a meditator know when he or she is in this state.  By knowing what it is like, one can thus keep oneself in that state.
However, there are gadgets like that galore and rather than throw money away on such things, what is important is not what is measured externally; it is where you are internally that counts.  It could be possible for you to snap into the alpha or even theta or delta state at will, but only do so in a very mechanical way, without “getting it” at all!  It is the same thing as the idea that simply mouthing the words or imitating the actions of Buddha or Christ will make one an instantly enlightened God-Man.  (People have been following this delusion for thousands of years now.)
A candle flame can be a very useful device.  Just try staring into a candle flame for approximately a half hour and see what it does to you.  (Have you ever noted that laid back feeling you get at a Thanksgiving supper or Christmas rite when everyone lights the candles?)
Not quite as effective would be very low wattage colored lights.  Christmas lights can work particularly well.  In fact, it could not hurt to have a permanent Christmas tree all year long for meditative purposes.  You could look into special low wattage devices like a glowing crystal or one of those liquid things that glow and shift in the dark.  Something that moves or flickers in an unpredictable way could be helpful.
The ultimate thing would be to simply sit in absolute darkness.  With so many lights around us, this is rather difficult to attain.  This is why going out for a walk in the woods away from street lights at night can be useful.  Moonlight or starlight is nice when you can find it; it provides a more subtle illumination which is conducive to a dreamy state of consciousness.  One way you could achieve it is to sit in any room with no windows; the average closet or bathroom can be helpful.  You could also try to use blindfolds.  
What this will force you to do is to be with your self.  You cannot be as distracted as you would be if you were watching television, reading a book, doing stuff on your computer, puttering around with one thing or the other.  You would be forced to go inwards rather than being led outwards.
Try this, you might like it.
DO NOT EVALUATE MEDITATION

Meditation is not another task to accomplish.  It is not a competitive sport to see who can be a better meditator.  Nor are you competing with yourself to see if you can outdo yourself.  You are not trying to win something.  You are not trying to be someone.  There is no “gold star” to win for being a good meditator today.  Meditation is quite the opposite of these.
You may have those days when you sit to meditate and you simply cannot manage to focus on anything.  Your mind wanders from one thing to another incessantly.  You are just randomly daydreaming and have forgotten that you were sitting there to meditate.  But this does not mean you have “failed”.  There is no one to succeed and there is no one to fail.  In fact, there is no “meditator”. 
It’s not like washing the dishes or polishing the window.  You don’t get paid anything for it.  There is no reason to meditate at all.  No one is going to yell at you if you get up and say, “Fuck it!”  Meditation is like when you stop “trying” to do anything at all.  It’s when you are going along with the flow.  As soon as you “try” to do something, you blow it.
So go ahead and surf the internet of your mind all you like.  Daydream about someone you would like to have sex with or a favorite food you’d like to eat.  List off all the things you have to do that day.  Go over all the stuff you said to someone yesterday and she said and he said and so on.  There’s no one stopping you.  There’s no way to turn off all that stuff anyway.  If it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen.  Accept it for what it is.  It’s silly for being guilty about something you can’t control; it’s akin to being guilty because it’s raining today.  In fact, there is no one to control it.
Sure, you may have those days when you can really focus on your breathing, a mantra, a given image – and you can stay with it, not just a second, but 10 minutes, 15 minutes, a whole hour!  You have concentrated non-stop, not once has some trivializing thought entered your mind.  You have finally managed to be right here and now.  You have managed to enter a state of “no-thought”.  You are in a state of absolute blissful samadhi!
But does this mean you have “succeeded”?  Do you now say, “Hurry, now I can finally consider myself an advanced meditator!”  Does this put you in the same ranks as a Buddha or a saint?  Are you now ‘enlightened’?  Perhaps you list it as another ‘accomplishment’ like getting laid with someone you’ve had your eye on for a long time or getting a better job.  Perhaps now that you’ve ‘achieved’ this wondrous state, you can stop meditating now?
Then something happens.  The phone rings and it is someone you find very disruptive in your life.  You grouch and grumble.  There is some unpleasant business you have to attend to.  Your state of samadhi is all gone – as if a giant rock fell out of the sky to land right smack in the middle of the clear tranquil water you were floating in so peacefully and blissfully.
You see, there is no real “resting place”.  Life moves on and on.  Meditation never stops.  It is not some “practice” like going to the gym to work out.  It is what you are.  So whether it’s a “good” meditation or a “bad” meditation, it doesn’t really matter.  So don’t waste time trying to “evaluate” your meditation.  There’s no way to evaluate it anyway.
CONTEMPLATING DEATH

Meditate upon death and all that it means to you.  Death is probably the scariest thing which can happen to any of us.  Now is the time to come to grips with it and face it head-on.  There is no way to escape it, so you may as well get into it.
We put tremendous energy into avoiding death and putting it off every way we can.  If someone is dying of a terminal illness such as cancer or AIDS, one will use every medical means he or she can to live just a few months longer.  Old people go to great lengths to take numerous pills and visit numerous doctors just to live a year or two longer here or there.  In a way, this all seems futile and silly, considering that a few months or a few years longer really isn’t much longer when you compare it with the expanse of eternity that follows afterwards.
Obviously, implicit in such efforts and expenditures of money (which insurance companies and medical practitioners take great advantage of), is the idea that death is the BIG BLACKOUT - that nothing at all is there afterwards.  
Thus no expense or effort is unwarranted just to preserve that brief spark of life a little longer, however evanescent.  So even though the quality of life is obviously decreased, such as spending months with a bunch of tubes attached to a nearly dead body, being akin to a victim of a nuclear blast, or being virtually a corpse unable to think or speak, we continue to keep the nearly dead person alive.  It is almost as if it is forbidden to die!  In fact, it is “death”, not any of the words referring to sexual acts, that is the dirtiest word one can utter in this society.
In this society, the average person hardly ever sees someone who is actually dead or even dying.  We keep corpses safely out of sight in fancy caskets or they are made up to appear as alive as possible.  It is very different in third world countries, where people see someone dying all the time and corpses are simply thrown into pyres or buried straight into the ground.
Buddhists monks deliberately go to cemeteries or to places where corpses lie around rotting.  There they sit and contemplate death.  We don’t really have such opportunities, but one can always find pictures of dead people or animals which have been killed to ponder on the finality of physical death.
Of course, one does not need to go to such gruesome lengths.  We can simply contemplate the presence of death.  Picture a body gradually rotting away, merging into the elements of the earth.
What is it?  What occurs afterwards?  Is it as bad as it is made out to be?  Is it the most unbearable agony one can imagine?  Is there survival of any kind of senses?  Does one’s personality manage to survive?  Do you still have a mind to think with?  Can you feel emotions?  Last but not least, is there any survival of awareness?  For if you do not have awareness, you have nothing else.
This leads into the question of what is awareness?  Is awareness there as long as the brain is functioning, merely a by-product of our neurochemistry? Or is there something more to awareness?  Does awareness go beyond the boundaries of our skulls?  Try to be aware of this awareness and see where you can go with it.  Is this awareness more than all we conceive ourselves to be?  Perhaps awareness encompasses the universe!  Is it possible to “re-locate” this awareness elsewhere besides our bodies?  Try it and see what happens.
When you find yourself dying, which will happen to all of us, try to stay with that awareness and follow it where it goes.  But we don’t have to wait until then.  We can start right now this very moment!  For this point and this moment is all there is!
MEDITATION ON MUSIC

Try to meditate by humming inside your head.  Do it silently.  Try to hear the notes.  If you are familiar with music theory or music scores, it is all the better here.  One suggestion is to play various notes on a piano or some other music instrument you are familiar with.  Start with any note which resonates with you.  Then observe how different notes sound in relation to that note.  You will probably find there are certain notes which particularly resonate with that original basic note.
Now make an attempt to hear those notes inside your mind.  With each inbreath and outbreath, sing a note in your mind.  Usually a fifth, a fourth, a third, and octave work best for meditative purposes.  Perhaps it could be patterns such as:

Inbreath 
Base note 
A
Base Note 
A
Base Note
A
Base Note
A
Hold 
Fifth 
E
Third          
C
Fourth
F
Seventh
G
Outbreath 
Octave
A
Fifth            
E
Fifth
E
Upper Octave
A
Hold 
 Fifth   
E
Third           
C
Fourth
F
Seventh
G

On the above table, it does not particularly matter if you make the notes major or minor.  For most people, major resonates better and most popular tunes will be in major form.  But if you are a “minor person”, feel free to go ahead with that.
If you are familiar with the way notes look on music scores, it can add to your concentration to try to see the way the notes appear on a score in your head as you hum the notes.  Or you can attempt to see which keys on a keyboard are used for each note.  If you do this for a while, you will undoubtably make yourself a better musician or composer in the long run.
After you are familiar with some of the more basic notes, you are ready to start experimenting.  Just start making up tunes in your head.  Or listen to tunes from some piece of music you are familiar with.  “Sing” those tunes in your head.  Try to do it monophonically at first, then try to put the notes together into chords.
After awhile of doing this kind of thing, you may find that musical tunes will spontaneously arise in your mind.  It will be as if you are hearing angelic choruses in your mind, heavenly music from beyond.  It will be as though you were a passive listener, not a composer.  This is very common if you have a sensitive inner ear.  Some of the greatest musicians have heard these tunes and then tried to play them or write them down.  It is very real and you are very blessed indeed!  It is what used to be referred to as “Music of the Spheres”.
If you play an instrument or sing, this in itself can be a form of meditation.  Let yourself flow with the notes, randomly play what sounds good.  Do not play for any purpose whatever; just let the music play you.  Be utterly open to experimentation; try to redefine your ideas of what you think music is.  Be the music.  You will probably find that you will play far better than when you are playing with some particular motivation in mind.
Listening to music can also be a meditative experience.  I would suggest more slow repetitive forms of music for this, not music that is too complex or quick in tempo.  New Age music or more simple forms of classical music are good choices.  Vocal music may be a bit distracting since you may be getting more into what the words are saying than the music, unless it has something to do with spiritual themes.
Music is very basic, since the Cosmos is composed of vibrations in various harmonic patterns.  Meditation on this can help one come into tune with this.
FOCUS ON THE COLOR WHEEL

	This exercise is to visualize inwardly the basic colors of which there are eight:  black, red, orange, yellow, white, green, blue, purple.  The traditional color wheel usually denotes six basic colors:  red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple.  However, here I include black and white to denote various shades of illumination.  100% illumination is white.  0% illumination is black.  There are bright colors and dull colors.  Brown and gray, for example, are duller colors that are a “dirty mix” of low illuminated primary colors.
The way you do this is as you breathe in, you visualize:  Red… Orange… Yellow.  At the peak of your inbreath, you stop at:  White.  As you breathe out, you visualize:  Green…  Blue…  Purple.  At the peak of your outbreath, you pause at:  Black.  Try to visualize the colors flowing into one another, seeing the various grades of color transitions such as:  Reddish-Orange…Orange-Yellow…  Yellow-White (a very bright yellow)… White-Green (a very bright green)… Greenish-Blue… Blue-Purple…  Purple-Black (a very dark purple)…  Black-Red.
Go around and around the wheel.  As you breathe in, the colors are getting progressively brighter.  As you breathe out, the colors are getting progressively darker.  The brighter colors are more energizing, more exciting.  The darker colors are more relaxing, more spiritual.  
Observe the feeling you get from each color, what emotional tone you associate with that color.  Take note of colors you like more, as well as colors you dislike.  Search within yourself why you have those associations.  Why is one particular color a “favorite” color for you?
Take note that white and black are not actually colors, but simply the presence or absence of light.  They are like positive and negative, the yang and yin of the color wheel.
Look at the colors that are opposites of one another on the color wheel.  As you breathe in, focus on one; as you breathe out, focus on its opposite.  The opposites are:  Black-White, Red-Green, Orange-Blue, and Yellow-Purple.  Take note of what each of these does to you inwardly.
Next, you may want to apply this in your day-to-day observations of the world around you.  Look at anything in particular and ask yourself what color or what combination of colors is it?  The sky is obviously blue (depending on the time of day), but what color is the brown on a tree?  Or what is gray?  Is it a bright color or a dark color?  
Perhaps you may want to study art and mix colors to find out what primary colors do what?  For example, when you mix blue and yellow, you get green.  If you mix red and yellow, you get orange.  If you mix red and blue, you get purple.
Like combinations of musical harmonies, different combinations of light frequencies blend well together – or subvert each other.  You may want to take this a stage further and make different colors stand for different notes.  See if they correspond somehow.  Take the notes of the octave and give them each a color.  You may discover some fascinating things in the process.
There is nothing actually solid around us.  The entire universe is composed of frequencies.  The purpose of this exercise is to make you become more aware of this.
THE WORLD OF TASTES AND SMELLS

Meditate upon various kinds of smells.  Find things that smell unusually pungent and take deep breaths smelling them.  Try taking things from your spice rack and inhale them deeply.  Note the effect that a particular smell has on you.  Does it interest you?  Does it turn you on?  Does it make you hungry?  Does it repulse you?  Be open to smells that stink; what is it about that smell that makes you want to remove yourself from the source.  What is it about smells that you find pleasant?
Try this with perfumes, incense, spices, types of food.  Also try it with ammonia, piss, shit, sex juices, body odors, animal dung,   (Just don’t poison yourself; read the bottle carefully!)
Sit with a particular smell and deeply inhale it.  Focus on what your associations are with that particular smell.  Really be completely with that smell.
Take note of subtle differences between various smells that are very similar to one another.  Try to also take note of what makes those smells similar.
Don’t just observe these smells during a meditation session, but observe the whole world of smells in your daily life.  Breathe deeply and smell.
At an earlier stage of our evolution, we used to get around the world by smelling, not seeing and hearing.  You will notice how your pet dog or cat goes around sniffing at things to find out about them.  Once we also did that, but as we evolved and as we became more civilized, we began to eliminate strong sources of smell.  It actually became rude to openly sniff at one another.  
Smells activate a more primal part of our brains, and actually go hand in hand with our sexual sense and our emotional brain.  In fact, whether you feel attracted or repulsed by a particular person may have something to do with some body odor that you are unconsciously aware of.
Tastes are not dissimilar to smells.  In fact, the way something smells will also be similar to the way it tastes.  Many of our tastes are actually smells.  Like the sensors in our neural system that detect chemicals in the air, our taste buds are sensing chemicals in the food which comes in contact with our tongues.  Try putting a small piece of food with a particularly acute taste in your mouth.  Without swallowing it, swish it around in your mouth.  Just focus on the taste.  Sugars and spices are interesting to experiment with here.
We are always tasting something whether we are aware of it or not.  It may depend on what you have just eaten.  Or you may actually be “tasting” something you are breathing in the air.  Observe right now what taste is on your tongue.  Is it sweet, salty, sour, spicy, or something you can’t quite define?  (We don’t have the number of words for subtle variations of smells or tastes that we have for visual or aural impressions.)
Try opening your mouth and breathe through your mouth.  Try to taste whatever is in the air.  Do this in various places and situations and see what it is like.
Note what emotions a particular taste or smell arouses.  Does it bring back a particular memory?
Try getting into this and it will open an entirely different world for you.  We know the world by our senses and each sense is a filter by which we sift different aspects.  There are senses you don’t know you have, that we are about to evolve, but in order to be aware of them, it is a good preparation to be aware of the subtleties of the senses we do have.
I AM…

Contemplate the following.  Breathe in on “I”.  Hold on “AM”.  Breathe out on “______”, whatever the attribute of “I AM” is.  Be creative with this.  It is a bit like the Hundred Attributes of God, except you are applying it to “I”.  Center your entire being on “I”.  Go on to make up further similar attributes, if you like.

I… AM… INFINITE…
I… AM… ETERNAL…
I… AM… DIMENSIONLESS…
I… AM… TIMELESS…
I… AM… NOT SEEN, HEARD, TOUCHED, TASTED, OR SMELLED…
I …AM… ALL I SEE, HEAR, TOUCH, TASTE, AND SMELL…
I… AM… HERE…
I… AM… NOW…
I… AM… UNBOUND…
I… AM… ALL THAT IS BOUND…
I… AM… CREATIVE ENERGY…
I… AM… THE MIND OF THE UNIVERSE…
I… AM… PURE AWARENESS…
I… AM… NOT THIS BODY…
I …AM… NOT THIS MIND…
I… AM… NOT THIS PERSONALITY…
I… AM… NOT THESE FEELINGS…
I… AM… NAMELESS…
I… AM… WITHOUT LABEL OR NUMBER…
I… AM… NOT OF THIS WORLD…
I… AM… THIS WORLD…
I… AM…