Seven Masters, One Path ~ Meditation Program

Since its release three years ago, John Selby's SEVEN MASTERS, ONE PATH has become a primary meditation book the world over - because it combines and compresses the wisdom and techniques of all the great meditation traditions, into one short powerful daily meditation. You can do this meditation in just one to two minutes on the run - or settle into a full half-hour practice once a day - whatever your needs, this core meditation practice will become a life-long companion and help-mate.

Buy the book: SEVEN MASTERS, ONE PATH

 

Click below to hear a 5 minute excerpt from the hour-long New Dimensions interview - and click in the NPR-SF website to access the online version of the national broadcast - plus stations in your area with the interview in late May-Early June:

Hear Gramps/Krishnamurti Interview Excerpt ~ Now!

Access online braodcast of the New Dimensions Interview

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(Excerpts from the book)

Seven Masters, One Path (John Selby)

INTRODUCTION: Succeeding with Meditation

Look within - and be still
Free from fear and attachment
Know the sweet joy of the way…
(Buddha)
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The Ojai valley, nestled quietly at the foot of the Topa Topa mountains about thirty miles inland from Santa Barbara, is said to have been the spiritual heartland of the ancient Chumash civilization that once thrived along the California coast.

As fate would have it, the Spanish invasion in the 1600s wiped out the Chumash, and for a couple hundred years the Ojai valley was mostly unoccupied except for a few faltering Spanish Land-grant families and the usual proliferation of native wildlife.

In 1906, at the age of 17, my grandfather (also named John Selby) moved from his birthplace nearby in Ventura, into the solitary Ojai valley – and became one of the first cattle ranchers of the area.

• Over the ensuing years, the unique combination of lingering Native American spiritual energies, Gramps’ natural mystic propensities, and the earthly intensity of such a remarkably-beautiful natural setting, somehow evoked a special quality of consciousness in Gramps.

As more settlers moved in during the first part of the new century, he became recognized throughout the region as a rancher packing a special spiritual charge. During the 1940’s and 50’s more and more people came to know and love him as the valley’s indigenous spiritual master. In the 60’s CBS television even sent a film crew up to the ranch to shoot a half-hour Network special on the silent sage of the valley.

• Gramps of course just laughed at such attention and went on about his quiet way, teaching almost entirely through example rather than words. I had the good fortune to live with my family on Grandad’s ranch throughout much of my childhood, and spent most of my free time helping him with his daily chores and ranch projects.

... walking behind him quietly along game trails, learning to laugh rather than curse when upsetting difficulties arose, riding our horses through oak woods and open meadows, sitting half an hour at a time without speaking beside swift-running streams … I discovered by osmosis how this man purposefully kept his thinking mind mostly quiet as he observed the world without judgment, treated every one of God’s creatures with respect and compassion, and held his focus on being loving and receptive rather than slipping into all the various human fears and ego-games.

Later I would study with a number of the world’s recognized masters, and learn their formal meditation techniques. However, in all honesty, most of the meditative understandings I’ll be sharing with you in this book were first experienced quite beyond any organized format, through what I learned early in life via this simple man’s depthless spiritual example.

• Gramps truly lived in Spirit, and showed me that the spiritual path was to be found beyond all dogmas and separatist religious belief systems.

Perhaps most importantly for this book, the meditative lesson that Gramps imprinted on my soul was that meditation is not something to be done once or twice a day – it’s a full-time spiritual ambiance that ideally permeates every moment of our lives. Gramps regularly would pause when things got too hectic, lean against a fence post or sit down for just a few minutes, and allow his usual radiant demeanor to return to him. Such short meditative breaks seemed an integral part of his daily life.

Gramps also had a formal meditation routine of sorts, in that he almost always got up at dawn and was out sitting under his favorite oak tree, weather permitting, when the sun rose. I would often get up in time to sit with him quietly as the sun came up, enjoying the special state of mind that came to me when we were quiet together for fifteen or twenty minutes.

• He also regularly paused at sunset to sit down, relax … and simply “be” as the sun disappeared.

After the sun would set, I remember sometimes becoming impatient as Gramps continued sitting calmly. I’d glance at his face and he’d meet my eyes with patience and peace. He didn’t “go off” anywhere during his sun meditations, in fact one of his strongest characteristics was an intense continual involvement with the present moment.

Rather than drifting off into thoughts or memories or imaginations, he was almost constantly living here in the present moment, highly alert yet almost never tense, perceptive without being judgmental of what was happening around him.

• You might want to pause a moment here, to reflect upon any childhood influences who deeply moved you spiritually as you were growing up … who were they, what did you learn from them, and are they still with you in spirit?

Pause & Reflect

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COGNITIVE LIBERATION

Shortly after Gramps moved into the Ojai valley, just as the 20th century dawned, the natural solitude of the region began to be altered as a small town took root in the valley about 10 miles away from where Gramps had settled. Quite early on, a number of spiritual communities migrated to this peaceful community to establish their various schools and teachings.

Of special note in my life was the Theosophical Society, which shortly after the turn of the century searched through India – and identified a young boy there as being the next world messiah, the living incarnation of Jesus and Lord Krishna.

The Theosophists took Jiddhu Krishnamurti to Europe and then in 1921 brought him on over to Ojai to mature spiritually and physically into manhood. While living a few miles up into the orange groves from Ojai, Krishnamurti had his first “awakening” experience – and soon thereafter shocked his thousands of devout followers by rejecting his identity as the new messiah.

In 1929 he formally declared to the world that no human being, including himself, should be worshipped. He continued teaching, however, and moved forward as a thoroughly human Master who ultimately moved millions with his teachings.

• I myself was touched to the core when, as a young boy, I first heard him speaking in the oak groves of Ojai.

I could sense that here was someone expressing in words what my Grandfather expressed through his actions – that we must learn to master our own minds, and tune into our inner center beyond our cultural conditioning and religious beliefs, if we’re to attain peace of mind and clarity of vision.

• Ever since that first encounter with Krishnamurti, all the way through many informal chats and formal gatherings with him, right up to our last meeting in Switzerland just before his death, I found his cut-to-the-bone teachings the clearest of any spiritual teacher in the world.

In many ways, this present book is my new-generation expression, in a format everyone can readily access, of the meditative wisdom and cognitive liberation that Krishnamurti taught to all those who had ears to hear – insights that rang with the veracity of the ancient masters and the immediate example of my own grandfather, in a new conceptual format ready to inspire our emerging world society.

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LIVING TEACHERS

One of Krishnamurti’s primary teachings was that on the spiritual path we do best not to become a worshipful devotee of any particular guru, but rather to seek our own inner center and thus tap the perennial wisdom directly. However, he did encourage me as a young man to get out into the world and explore first-hand the techniques and teachings of the world’s vast meditative tradition – in order to see clearly the need for genuine revolution in our society.

In his words, “it becomes obvious that there must be a total revolution – a different kind of culture must come into being. Unless there is deep psychological revolution, mere reformation on the periphery will have little effect. And this psychological revolution – which I think is the only revolution – is possible through meditation.”

With such encouragement to get out in the world and discover for myself what such a psychological revolution might consist of, I began at the age of nineteen to seek out and study with a number of prominent living teachers, each of whom held particular keys to the secrets of successful meditation, rooted in the teachings of the ancient masters and also in their own insights and inspirations. This book is a direct outcome of that long-term exploration.

• At the same time, my intellectual curiosity became heated regarding an exploration of scientific aspects of the meditative experience, and toward this aim I spent considerable years studying the formal psychological and neurological understanding of the spiritual experience.

In this general realm of inquiry one of my teachers along the way, the admittedly-flawed but still-brilliant Zen scholar Alan Watts, challenged me to continue with and hopefully manifest a key project he had initiated – that of identifying the fundamental psychological principle and procedure common to all the world’s great meditative traditions, and then teaching this procedure to the world.

Accepting this challenge, I soon found myself engaged in mind research for the National Institute of Mental Health, participating in seminal meditation studies in the sixties and seventies that helped shed increasing light on our scientific comprehension of the meditative experience.

After considerable years of research in this direction, it slowly became more and more clear that indeed, all of the world’s great meditation techniques are grounded together in a unified psychological understanding of how the mind works, and how we can best act to expand consciousness toward the deeper realms of spiritual awareness.

• This book offers the essential realizations of those studies, showing that the seven great masters of the world spiritual community were all teaching key aspects or phases of the same underlying meditative process.

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Native Wisdom

Being a lover of traditional cultures and their spiritual practices, every two or three years I also found myself dropping temporarily out of academic and therapy routines altogether, in order to shift my attention in more “primitive” directions – doing fieldwork on shamanistic practices with the Pima, Papago and Huichole Indians, and later with two tribes in highland Guatemala. Several crucial answers to the meditation mystery were resolved through these rather unusual explorations.

• And although no Native American masters appear on the “list of seven” in this book, I do want to deeply acknowledge the vast wisdom and pragmatic approaches of America’s own native spiritual teachers.

It’s true that none of them gathered enough followers or developed a religious structure that generated a formal worldwide spiritual movement – perhaps that’s not the Indian way. But their pervading wisdom and spiritual practices have certainly influenced the American culture at its core, and in extension the whole world.

There are likewise, for complex reasons, no women on my short-list of spiritual masters. The world has surely been radically moved throughout history by the feminine spiritual force. Several of my deepest spiritual instructors have been women, and there are a great many women right now packing remarkable spiritual leadership. Yet (both because of injustnce and sometimes surely by choice) thusfar most of them have not participated in the historic process that would bring millions into their meditative circle. Who knows what the future will bring!

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SEVEN MASTERS

So how then did I choose from all the spiritual teachers of all time, the seven masters from whom we’ll be formally drawing insights and techniques in this book? Clearly the first five masters on the list represent those remarkable world teachers who not only touched my own soul with their teachings and techniques, but who stand eternally at the center of the largest spiritual movements continuing to touch our world culture with their teachings and techniques.

The last two on the list, Gurdjieff and Krishnamurti, are on the list because along with their special impact on my understanding of meditation, they have made a particular new contribution and example to provoke our world community’s ongoing spiritual advancement - and round off our meditation process quite perfectly.

• As we’ll discover in action here, all true spiritual teachers are leading their students toward the same ultimate realization and experience – that of full immersion in the spiritual core of being that we all share together, and from which we all draw our deeper sustenance, wisdom, vitality and insight.
  

Let me introduce briefly seven masters who, through the ages or more recently, have powerfully awakened special spiritual realms of consciousness in a great many hearts throughout the world, and who continue to touch us directly through meditation. Indeed, perhaps the main reason these particular teachers are on my meditation short list is that their living presence helped me explore the depths of these seven meditations, and inspired the insights which fill this book.

Each of them taught how to make direct contact with the Source of our being – and they continue to help each and all of us merge our souls, in meditation, with the Source …

Let me present these seven remarkable teachers briefly here – we’ll get to know them in more intimate depth later on.

• I’ll also introduce to you at this time, in italics, the seven primary “focus phrases” that you’ll be learning and using during your meditations, as potent verbal cues to point your mind’s attention immediately in the specific direction of each of the seven meditations.

These elicitor phrases will be all you need remember, after your training period, for fully moving through the entire meditation process. And so, here are our seven guides:

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Patanjali

Nearly four thousand years ago in India, the formal study of meditation was initiated by ancient yogic masters who advanced step by step, through inward inquiry and exploration, toward a concise understanding of how our minds work, and how we can employ meditation to awaken our deeper spiritual consciousness.

After two thousand years of such development, a remarkable sage named Patanjali (accent on the second “a”) brought all these teachings and insights together, and wrote detailed instructions on the art of meditation and devotion in his “Yoga Sutras.”

• Central to Patanjali’s teaching was the insistence that dedicated awareness of one’s own breathing is central to all meditation, and furthermore that particular breathing techniques can alter consciousness in quite specific spiritual directions.

The Sanskrit term prana, meaning breath or life-force, has throughout Hindu devotional history been a central concept. In fact, as we’ll see, almost all meditation traditions focus upon a deep inner exploration of the life experience of breathing. Drawing from Patanjali’s seminal teachings on pranayama (breath awareness and control) meditation, we’ll learn our essential beginning meditation for turning the mind’s full attention to the breath experience.

The verbal expression of this first expansion of our seven-step meditation will be:

“I am breathing freely.”

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Lao Tzu

Also almost four thousand years ago, over the mountains in China, the Taoist meditative tradition came into being, step by step developing primal insights regarding how to contact the divine directly through inner experience.

• At the very center of the Chinese thrust toward spiritual realization we find the ancient Taoist teacher Lao Tzu, author of one of the most-read spiritual texts of humankind, the Tao Te Ching.

When I first began studying with Alan Watts, he happened to be engaged in completing his own translation of this original Mandarin text. While observing Alan pleasurably struggling with his translation work and attending his seminars on the Taoist text, I came to understand that the ultimate goal of the Taoist meditator is to simply quiet the flow of thoughts through the mind, so as to become conscious of the deeper “whole” nature of life.

Drawing from Lao Tzu’s words and suggestions, and the general Taoist and Zen approach to meditation, we’ll learn a very practical technique (a merger of ancient Taoist breath meditation with new scientific insights) for quieting the flow of thoughts through the mind at will, so as to discover experientially the core of meditation’s power and beauty.

The verbal expression of this second step in our seven-step meditation will be:

“My mind is now quiet.”

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Buddha

Siddhartha Gautama was born about a hundred years after Lao Tzu and around four hundred years before Jesus, into a wealthy Hindu family in India. He experienced his total awakening when he was twenty-nine.

• His primary teachings show how we are all caught up in judgmental and fearful thoughts and attitudes that generate chronic suffering, and that only through looking directly at these mental habits and taking control over how we use our minds, can we break free from generating more suffering.

His key meditative teaching in this light was that as long as we refuse to accept the reality of the present moment unequivocally, we create ongoing inner trauma – and thus keep ourselves separate from our true Buddha nature. Our chronic judgments and refusals to accept the world just as it is, turn life into living hell.

Through managing our minds and actions in more reality-based ways, we can transform our moment-to-moment experience from suffering, into joy.

The third meditation step we’ll be learning in this book focuses on learning to accept life just as it is, rather than judging the world or ourselves as somehow wrong, bad, incomplete or just not good enough. Through total acceptance of the truth of who we really are, we can approach and even attain … liberation from suffering.

The verbal expression of this third step in our seven-step meditation will be:

“I accept the world, just as it is.”

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Jesus

The teachings of Jesus can be seen from many different perspectives, and have been interpreted theologically by literally hundreds of quite varying sects and movements. For our meditative purposes here, we don’t have to assume any particular theological dogma in order to directly understand the fundamentals of awakening that Jesus taught.

In essence regarding the meditative path, Jesus agreed entirely with Buddha, Lao Tzu and Patanjali - that being in touch with the inner “breath of God” is an essential aspect of the spiritual path; that peace of mind and inner quiet are essential practices to nurture; that we must stop judging and accept God’s creation just as it is; and most importantly perhaps … that love is the epicenter of all spiritual life.

• The fourth expansion of our meditation path focuses on Jesus’ powerful teachings about love and the centrality of the heart in spiritual practice.

We’ll draw from his own words on the theme of unconditional love, and learn to put those words into practice as we discover how focusing directly on our own heart center enables us to become more radiant with love in all our relationships.

For more on my meditative approach to Jesus, see Jsus For The Rest Of Us.

The verbal expression of this fourth step in our seven-step meditation will be:

“I love myself just as I am.”

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Mohammed

The great gift that Mohammed brought beginning in the sixth century AD to his Islamic culture, meditatively-speaking, was the surety that there is only one infinite spiritual power, that this power is ultimately loving and forgiving, and that this power sees human beings as basically good and harmonious.

A primary root of the word Islam is “peace” … and this peace is attained in meditation through surrendering one’s whole being to Allah, allowing God’s love to heal all of life’s various conflicts and disappointments and confusions of the mind and emotions – so that the person, the family, and the community “dwell in God” and flourish in peace.

• The meditative expansion we now draw on for our fifth meditation is this process of fully surrendering to God (by whatever name) and opening our hearts to receive God’s healing touch, guidance and infinite love into our daily lives.

Such surrendering and “opening up to receive” takes us right to the core of spiritual awakening. Through this full surrender to God’s will and help, we experience a relaxation of our negative feelings of fear and anxiety, which in turn dissolves related hostilities and judgments. The result is an experience of deep emotional healing and peace.

The verbal expression of this expansion will be:

“My heart is open … to receive …God’s healing help.”

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Gurdjieff

Emerging in the eighth and ninth centuries from both Jewish, Christian and Muslim realms of the Middle East, with other mystic traditions also included, the Sufi spiritual movement spread throughout central Asia and eastern Europe, and also down into Africa.

In my understanding, the most powerful teacher to emerge from this expansive, joy-focused tradition was George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff, a Greek-Armenian mystic and teacher of sacred dances and meditations whose significance and impact on the world’s spiritual community is still just beginning to be recognized and integrated.

• One of the primary techniques to emerge from Gurdjieff’s teaching, called “Self-remembering,” fits perfectly into the advancement of our meditation program.

This deep awareness technique enables us to be more conscious and more fully alive in the present moment – building on what we’ve already learned in our five previous meditations, and expanding our meditation to include not only our inner experience, but at the same time our experience of interacting with the world around us.

The verbal expression of this sixth expansion will be:

“I know who I am ...”

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Krishnamurti

Krishnamurti takes us into the final expansion in our daily meditative journey where, with our minds quiet and fully attentive to the present moment, we allow thoughts to again flow through our minds – while we maintain a clear sense of being an observer watching our thoughts, rather than identifying with our thoughts.

• In such a state of expanded consciousness, we find that our thoughts are often inspired, of a mystic or insightful nature, leading to sudden realizations that can transform our lives.

And in the middle of such inspirations we often enter into a state of bliss where words fall away and we’re immersed in the bliss of pure existence in the present moment. Having now explored the full expansion of our meditation process, we are free to choose to enter into a pure state of oneness with the divine … and to do so each time we meditate, whether it be for five minutes or two hours … and as we complete the seventh expansion, we’ll find that we once again are at the beginning, simply being aware of our breathing … in bliss …

The verbal expression of this seventh expansion will be:

“I am … here … now … in bliss ...”

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SHORT-FORM MEDITATION

Traditionally, especially in the Hindu and Buddhist format, meditation was something you did once or twice a day for at least half an hour at a time. This framework is still highly recommended if you can manage in your busy life to set aside this length of time each day at a regular hour. Some people find this half-hour or hour-long framework ideally suited to both their day and their temperament.

• However, especially in our busy culture, many people find that they might have five short meditation opportunities to take advantage of every day, rather than one long meditation period. Also, there are certain people who like to hold still for long timeframes, while other people have different temperaments and prefer to be more on the go.

And there are people like myself who maintain a regular morning or evening meditation for half an hour to an hour, but also benefit greatly from pausing for just five to ten minutes a number of times during the day, to move through a shorter meditation that very rapidly brings one’s consciousness into a more peaceful, insightful and loving mode.

Having long ago found such “short-form” meditation experiences to be of great value, I’ve explored in recent research the most effective way to rapidly enter into meditation, so as to tap its rejuvenating powers in a short period of time.

The seven-step meditation program you have in hand is formally called a “modular meditation” process – modular because each of the meditations stands on its own as a short yet complete meditation, and at the same time, when put together in proper order, the seven meditations also work as a whole as you flow from theme to theme, being taken deeper and deeper with each modular addition.

We’ll explore in more depth later on, how you can develop your own ideal structure for meditation, while also keeping yourself free to focus on whatever meditative theme is most important for you, each new day. The aim is to make sure that wherever you are, no matter how little time you might have, you can always turn your mind toward your inner spiritual center, and receive the multitudinous benefits of the meditative experience.

• At the heart of this unique and perhaps traditionally quite radical approach to meditation, is the lesson I learned early on from my grandfather, and then from Krishnamurti as well – that our spiritual aim is not to retreat once or twice a day for meditation, but to learn how to live every moment of our lives in touch with our spiritual core.

NEW GUIDANCE FORMATS

Meditation, being the most powerful mind tool ever developed, has traditionally been passed on directly from one person to another, not through written formats but through word of mouth. We do tend to learn best when listening to a voice guiding us through a process, rather than just reading about it.

• The spoken voice of a teacher has vastly greater impact on stimulating inner experience than do the same words when delivered in written format.

I’m sure you’ve found for yourself that when you can close your eyes, turn off the linear word-by-word function of the mind, and open your heart to being guided effortlessly through an experience, you tend to enter into much deeper states of consciousness than when you’re trying to remember what to do as you actually do it.

Furthermore, to learn how to meditate, you’ll find that you need to move through the same basic inner focusing activity in your mind, a number of times … until you internalize the meditation process as a habit and can move through it without guidance.

• Most people resist reading the same instructions over and over so as to memorize them, but they’re quite happy to close their eyes, make no effort, and have a spoken voice guide them again and again through a meditative process, until they “get it” and no longer need the audio guidance.

With this reality in mind, over the last decade my colleagues and I have been busy developing a new system for delivering spoken meditative guidance at a distance – thanks to the instant streamed-audio capabilities of the internet.

Our intent has been not to eliminate the written word through our online audio guidance, but to expand the concept of “learning from a distance” to include audio guidance where needed.

Thus you’ll find at the end of each chapter of this book, a specific free internet address that you can go to on your computer, www.7masters.com, allowing you to immediately bring my voice into your home – so you have instant free access to the spoken guidance that makes learning these meditations more effortless and effective. Of course, many of you will find the written directions more than adequate, as you master the meditations without audio support.

But for those who want more help, just turn to your computer, get online at our website, and I’ll be there. You’ll also have the opportunity at 7masters.com to join chat rooms with other people reading this book at the same time, so you can share your new experiences. And a great deal of background information on each of the seven masters will be available as well. For those of you who don’t have a computer, the seven audio meditations are also available on an inexpensive audio CD (see page _ in back of book).

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THE SEVEN MEDITATIONS

I’d like to move quickly with you through a short introduction to each of the actual meditations you’ll be mastering in this program, so you have already in your mind the full flow of experiences that make up the complete meditation process. Through this quick overview, you’ll see that there’s a natural progression from the first to the second, the second to the third, and so forth to the seventh theme.

• There is in fact an extremely tight logic for the particular order and progression of these meditative-expansion experiences:

Breath Awareness

Almost all meditative traditions begin (and sometimes, as in Zen, also end) with the primal experience of focusing our mind’s attention directly toward the present-moment happening of our own breathing. The physiological process of breathing is without question our most vital and immediate life activity.

• We possess the power to control our breathing at will, and also to totally set our breathing free … as we become fully conscious of the infinite depths of consciousness that spring into being when we hold our breathing as a primary spiritual focus.

Quieting The Mind

Many people confuse praying, in which we’re “talking to God”, with meditation, in which our talking, thinking minds become quiet, and we enter the universe of consciousness that exists only when the flow of thoughts through our minds temporarily stops. Likewise meditation is often confused with contemplation, in which we reflect (often with very active cognitive minds) on the theme of the contemplation.

• Quieting our minds involves distancing ourselves from, and then gently quieting altogether, the flow of thoughts through the mind. This is the second essential step in a complete meditative practice – and luckily, recent mind research has shown us new ways to readily achieve this ancient goal.

Accepting The Truth

One of the great abilities and equally one of the main curses of the human mind, is its capacity to continually be judging what’s happening ourselves and the world around us. We inherit and create beliefs about how we think the world should be, and then we reject anything that doesn’t fit into our belief system.

• Meditation requires temporarily putting aside that judgmental activity of the mind, so that we can see the truth clearly, accept reality as it is – and thus set ourselves free from the blinding effect of chronic judgment and all its resultant heart-aches.

Heart Awakening

Directly in the middle of our “list of seven” is the remarkable quality of love – the ability of the heart to awaken to deeper spiritual levels of compassion. Meditation without a central focus on love is no meditation at all. Each and every spiritual tradition of the world holds love as crucial, and direct awareness of one’s heart center as primary. The universal equation “God is Love” stands as the foundation of meditation.

• Our challenge is to master a simple yet ultimate meditation that regularly amplifies our own capacity to both receive and spread love in the world.

Emotional Healing

Psychologically, human beings are always either in a state of fear (contraction), or a state of love (expansion). From our habitual contractions of anxiety, dread and apprehension emerge all the other negative emotions such as anger, hatred, depression, confusion, foreboding, and so forth. Furthermore, when we’re gripped by fear, we simply cannot feel love. Understanding this, all great religions teach that we must learn to trust God, let go of fear, live in faith, and ultimately stop worrying about the future, and about death itself.

• No meditation program is complete that doesn’t regularly turn our focus toward our emotions, especially our thoughts that generate fearful feelings – and show us how to let go our fears through spiritual awakening, and enter into the greater state of unconditional love. Our fifth meditation will do just this.

Self Remembering

The aim of all meditation is to become more self aware, to remember experientially who we really are deepdown. The sixth meditation you’ll be learning specifically focuses your attention so that you are aware at the same time, of the outside world, and your inside presence. This quality of inner-outer awareness can be directly encouraged by a special focusing meditation that leads to a sudden expansion of consciousness.

• The meditation is also especially valuable in maintaining a meditative state throughout our busy day, regardless of what we might be doing.

Experiencing Bliss

Ultimately, when we let go our worries, when we quiet our minds, when we tune into our breathing and wholebody awareness, when we stop judging and enter into intimate communion with the eternal present moment, we discover first-hand what the term bliss actually means as an experience, not just a lofty idea. Yes, we do meditate in order to feel better, in order to feel absolutely blissful, on a regular basis.

• The final meditation of our seven encourages an entering into total surrender to the eternal present moment – the ultimate inner act required for attaining bliss.

THE PAYOFF

No one does anything without motivation, and meditation needs to be honestly approached with a clear understanding of the value of disciplining yourself toward a spiritual focus in your life. Our special intent with this new approach to meditation is to enable you, each and every day, to direct your full attention toward all seven of the vital qualities of life, so that you regularly shine the light of your deeper spiritual presence upon all the life themes.

• The direct and most beautiful result of regularly turning your focus of attention toward these meditative themes will be a beautiful balancing and re-energizing of your entire being.

Especially when used in the particular order being taught herein, you’ll find that a most remarkable expansion of consciousness can be experienced almost every time you do the full meditation, be it in short format for two minutes, or longer formats of ten minutes, half an hour or an hour.

What’s most important is remembering to make the conscious mental act of turning your full attention in each of these directions, at least once a day, so that your mind, heart and soul continually meditate upon and thus help balance and activate these seven most vital dimensions of your life.

As we’ll explore in depth, attention is energy, and purposefully-focused attention is manifest power. Developing the mental habit of regularly focusing your mind’s full meditative attention toward the most important spiritual themes can very definitely transform all dimensions of your life.

• All you have to do is memorize and become intimately familiar with the meditations (which takes a couple weeks at most, especially with the audio guidance help provided) and then find time each day to move through the expansions and further awaken these dimensions of your life.

To help you integrate this meditation program into your daily life, the accompanying 7masters.com streamed-audio and CD programs will provide you with not just one but three different time-frame scenarios to choose from. When you have a full half-hour, I’ll guide you through a program that devotes four minutes to each of the seven expansions in turn. When you have only ten minutes, there’s a guided program that spends seven breaths on each of the meditations – which you’ll find, once you get practiced, can elicit a very deep experience.

• And even when you have just two minutes, you’ll find it deeply rewarding to spend just a short time (two breaths each) with your full being focused on each of the seven themes in turn, as you move through the seven focus phrases and gently point your total attention, however briefly … first to your breathing … then to quieting your mind … then to accepting the world around you … then to loving yourself just as you are … then to opening your heart to receive … then to knowing who you really are … and then to experiencing fully the final breaths that leave you in present-moment bliss …

The bottom line is this – these seven meditations, however you find time to focus on them, will help you feel better, help you be more loving, more alert, more harmonious and successful. As you devote yourself to spending time with the meditations, they will begin to become an essential part of your every moment … and you will become more and more … your own true self.

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EXPERIENCING THIS DIRECTLY

Even before beginning the first chapter, to initiate the special learning process we’re now going to delve into together, let’s explore the simple yet ultimate procedure of aiming your mind’s all-powerful focus of attention away from words and ideas, toward the most immediate life experience possible to a human being … that of your moment-to-moment breathing. The coming chapters will delve more fully into this theme – this is just a beginning taste of what it feels like to consciously redirect your power of attention in directions that encourage spiritual experience:

First of all, without any effort, become consciously aware that right now, you’re focusing your mind’s attention upon reading these words on this page, bringing the words into your mind and generating a sense of meaning through the flow of words …

Now, while continuing to read these instructions, allow your awareness to also include the immediate sensations you’re feeling, of the air flowing in … and flowing out … your nose or mouth as you breathe …

And as you remain aware of the air flowing in and out your nose or mouth, also be aware of the breathing movements happening naturally in your chest and belly, as you breathe …

Say to yourself, “I’m aware of my breathing …”

• And after reading this final paragraph, you can close your eyes, and continue holding your mind’s focus of attention to your breathing … and your heart …don’t judge your experience or lack of experience … just be open to a new experience, coming to you directly from the infinite spiritual potential of the present moment …
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