Consciousness: A User's Manual

 Update!!! I've written a book you might find interesting.  It is titled Sanshindo: Integrating the Three Minds.  It is available in print on Amazon, soon to be an e-book and an audio book.  The website supporting the book with guided exercises is here: Integratingthethreeminds.com.     

This website exists so I have something to put on my business card.  My business cards exist so I have something to hand to people who express an interest in meditation.  I hand people my business card so they have a way to contact me if they want to get serious about contemplative practice, which I teach.

 
 Although I am writing these words, you cannot read your way to freedom.  All the books and talks in the world will not bring you closer to realizing your true nature.  Words can be motivational, interesting, fun, soothing, and diverting.  Words can give you a way to articulate your experiences, although no matter how articulate you become, words cannot communicate your experience to anyone who has not already had the experience.  Try describing the taste of a strawberry to someone who has never tasted one.  And the taste of consciousness is much more complicated and subtle than the taste of fruit. 

 And yet I am writing these words.  Perhaps as an invitation?  Perhaps as a warning?  Perhaps so the website on my business card doesn't lead to a blank page, although that would be highly appropriate.    

 I often teach “mindfulness for stress management” to attorneys, government employees, college students, anyone who is concerned about their stress levels.  And mindfulness is indeed very good for stress, anxiety, restlessness, depression, alienation, and most of the other maladies that plague modern humanity.  But I sometimes feel a bit disingenuous when teaching these classes because treating stress and anxiety with mindfulness is just a parlor trick.  It is like studying the secrets of nuclear science  so you can make your watch face glow in the dark.  Meditation works wonders for stress and anxiety but not for the reasons most people believe.  It is not a way to relax.  It is not a bandaid to put on at the end of a stressful day.  Meditation digs down to the roots of stress and those roots are also the roots of the way we process our experience of self and world.    

 But reading this isn't going to help you.  The best that can be hoped for from this jumble of lines is that you will be motivated and empowered to practice methods of contemplation, meditation, mindfulness, (pick a word) that can and will transform your experience of this life in ways that words cannot convey and imagination cannot fabricate.   

 So if words won't help, what will?  Developing the three skills of mindfulness through practice.     

 
 This website provides instruction and recorded guidance for the effective practice of meditation. And that is all you need – actual practice in transforming the way you process your experience of self and world.  Skip all the blah blah blah and go directly to the practice section and begin.  Start your practice now and don't ever stop.  You will not regret it.     
 

So onward to where there is no place to stand.  You'll know it when you don't get there.