Religion?

I was recently asked if the Heaven Path was a religion.

My immediate answer was that it was instead a philosophy, but it occurred to me that that wasn't really an accurate answer.

The Heaven Path, or more properly Sub-ascetics, is actually a framework for religion. Adherrants of Sub-ascetics could rightly call themselves Sub-ascetic Catholics, or Sub-ascetic Mormons or Sub-ascetic Episcopalians if they approached their religion of choice with the following understandings:

That there can be no objective proof of God's existence.

That fundamental structure of the world and everything in it is necessary and sufficient if God does exist, and is simply the way it is if no God exists and it isn't possible to prove which it is.

That each individual person is necessarily of equal intrinsic and extrinsic value because God, if such exists, chose to create that which is not created by God and therefore cannot know the means of fulfillment of the Great Work, and that each individual person is necessarily of equal intrinsic and extrinsic value because if no God exists there is no way for any person to determine the value of the fulfillment of any other person in terms of our own or others future.

And that it is the responsibility of each person to fulfill his or her own unique potential without interfering with any other person's responsibility to fulfill their potential, for the same reason as noted directly above.

So, a logical question to ask now is "Where does that leave religion?"

Religion qua religion has always been the means of integrating the religious feelings that we all experience. There have been, across time, those persons who through their unique potential have been able to convey their religious perspective in a way that, when experienced by others sets up a more or less harmonic resonance with the religious feeling apparatus of others.

This created resonance serves those with less of the particular potential for religious integration to find a greater degree of religious integration than would otherwise be possible, and the state of being that accompanies religious integration is generally perceived to be fulfilling.

The problem is that there are always those opportunistic ones that can create the resonance, but are not satisfied with having aided others to higher resonance and so seek to also profit in one manner or another from the practice of the resonance creation. And once profitability becomes the objective, marketing is never far behind.

And what better product could one market than "Grace Directly from the Pneuma of God-brand Scripture".

It's enough to make you want to corner the market.

Hysteria and Manipulation

I wonder if anyone remembers the hysteria that resulted over the ozone holes above the poles. It hasn't been that long ago that the ozone holes occupied the same pinnacle of concern that global warming does now.

Did the ozone holes get subsumed by the greater but related issue of global warming?

No, they didn't.

For those who don't remember, the ozone holes were opening up over the poles of earth due to ozone interaction with and subsequent destuction by man-made chemicals in the atmosphere. The holes were getting bigger and the ozone was what protected our delicate skin from damage by the sun's rays that were blocked by ozone.

The hysteria was on, and the world cried out for prohibition on the use of the chemicals that were causing the destuction of the ozone layer over the poles before the holes got so big that us humans were cooked by the unblocked rays, and consequences be damned.

How did we ever survive.

Well. One of the things that was widely known in the scientific community was that ozone was a molecule consisting of three atoms of oxygen. Basically, regular oxygen molecules with an extra oxygen atom thrown in.

And it was also known that ozone was made by regular oxygen being exposed to those very rays that ozone prevented from hitting the surface of the earth.

So. As the ozone holes got bigger, more and more regular oxygen molecules were exposed to the rays that cause an extra oxygen atom to attach to the regular oxygen molecule, creating ozone.

In other words, the problem was self-correcting.

And this information was readily available BEFORE the hysteria began.

Why, then, did so many people become hysterical about it?

Because, it dawned on someone that most people didn't know the above information, and that the idea of dying of exposure to these intractable rays would scare those very same 'most' people.

Those 'someones' ran with the idea.

As we follow our Heaven Path, we will be exposed to ideas that may frighten us.

But if that fright is sufficient to deflect you from fulfilling your Heaven Path, it is in your best interest to take some time and study up on the subject before you start crying out for someone to save you.

This is because, on the one hand, the people that step up to save you are probably not actually interested in saving you, and, on the other hand, you may not actually need saving to begin with.

Turn the other cheek?

It is interesting being in a position to see a continuous sequence of different people in a setting that lends itself to watching their behavior.

It amazes me to see how many people set themselves up for difficulty and conflict over what is essentially nothing.

Here's how it frequently goes.

A person will choose to occupy a location that blocks a pedestrian thoroughfare and then ignore the people around them.

The flow of pedestrian traffic will start to back up and someone will politely ask the blocking person to excuse them, and that person will look at them but then ignore them.

The traffic flow will continue to back up as more and more people have to wait for the oportunity to get around the blocking person.

The blocking person knows that they are interfering with the flow of traffic but chooses to assert themselves and their imagined right to interfere with the traffic flow.

Then someone comes along and points out that the person is obstructing the flow of traffic and request that the person move along, to which the blocking person responds to the advising person by telling them to mind their own business.

The advising person then wisely contacts whoever is in authority for the area being blocked, and the authority comes and tells the blocking person to move, to which the blocking person asserts their imagined right to be where they are. If this is happening on private property the authority will typically try to convince the blocking person to move along. But if the blocking person refuses to move along, the authority will (in Nevada, anyway) eventually Trespass Warn the person and then about five minutes later handcuff the person and turn them over to the police. The police will then generally cite or arrest the person, but either way they are now forced to leave the premisses and never come back under threat of immediate arrest, and are now in an un-winnable situation where they have to pay fines or pay lawyers to prevent them from paying fines.

And this is the best case scenario.

A more likely outcome is that someone that is being blocked will wait until they are right beside the blocking person and then beat them like a bad dog, and then walk away. And someone else will hang around long enough to tell the responding authorities what it was that led up to the beating, but will mysteriously be unable to provide any description of the person who did the beating.

So what exactly does this all have to do with turning the other cheek?

As with the admonishment that 'should your left eye offend you, pluck it out', it is unlikely that it was meant literally.

You should, instead, adopt a behavior pattern on your Heaven Path travels that assumes that when you are struck you will have no other recourse but to turn the other cheek.

In other words, if you behave in a manner that will provoke people to hit you, assume that your only reward will be that you will have to now lead with the other side for the next hit to avoid the significantly greater damage that will come with taking a second hit on the cheek that is already been injured.

Confronting fear

In your hosts other life his occupation requires that he frequently engage in physical confrontation.

Contrary to popular myth, doing this often does not go very far in reducing the fear associated with physical confrontation. That is to say, every time I must draw the line, I experience the same amount of fear that I faced the first time some 3 decades ago.

I know now that fear is valuable in that it keeps you paying attention when you're about to get hurt.

There are some related differences, though.

One difference is that I know from long experience that if it comes down to it I will stand there and go for it.

I remember the first time I was in the situation and didn't really have the option of running away because I was being paid to be there and if I ran away the income would be discontinued.

I was quaking in my proverbial boots and I was concerned that this might be because I was ultimately a coward or worse.

I stood there and went for it, and came out of it OK.

But that didn't seem to stop the quaking on subsequent occasions.

Sometime later it came to my attention that on the occasions that I was required to run to the scene of confrontation, I didn't experience the quaking, and later still I discovered that if my body was still within the window of elevated readiness that follows physical exertion I wouldn't quake.

Eventually it dawned on me that the fearful quaking wasn't directly a result of the fear but was instead a result of the adrenalin dump that accompanies fear, and if your body is ready for the adrenalin it gets used efficiently (wargasm), but if it isn't it results in random uncontrolable nerve discharges (quaking.)

So I found that two steps could be taken to control this aspect of the fear. Step 1 is to bring my body to adrenalin readiness prior to going to work. Any exercise will do this, but morning tai chi sessions seem to be particularly efficacious, and step two, whenever possible I try to reactivate the readiness by running to the action.

Another difference is that I'm also a lot less squeamish about trying to avoid going beyond threat-level confrontation to physical confrontation when I can even if the unenlightened may chalk it up to fear, not because of any fear aspect so much as because I know how tenuous victory can be and even winning is no guarantee that you will not be walking around in pain for a good long time, if not for the rest of your life.

Also, no matter how justified you are in the confrontation, after the wargasm disipates you inevitably think about the other person(s) involved and ask youself if you couldn't have done more to head the situation off.

Also, having long sense lost any desire to harm, I find that my selection of non-harmful techniques are inherently safer to operate with than techniques used to acheive unambiguous victories through damage to the other parties confrontation suite.

But that isn't the only circumstance that fear arrises in.

For the last couple of weeks I've had to stand up in front of strangers and expound on subjects that I'm familiar with but have no desire to discuss under those circumstances.

Having spoken publicly on a few previous occasions I knew that, as with confrontation, I would stand there and go for it, but that didn't mean that I wouldn't experience the fear associated with public speaking.

I did try to pay attention to the fear aspects while they were happening so that I could share my findings with my guests here at the Heaven Path Diner.

One unforseen, or otherwise purposefully forgotten, effect of the fear on the first engagement was that my voice sounded scared when I started talking. That is to say it was rather quavery. No one seemed to notice, so either it wasn't too bad, or the strangers I was talking to didn't recognize what the quality meant, or my audience was very enlightened and concealed their recognition to allow me to save face (and if this is the case, thank you one and all). Fortunately as soon as I found my stride the problem went away.

On the second occasion I was able to take two effective steps. Step 1 was to begin exercising my vocal cords through single pitch humming for about 10 minutes before I started talking (to prepare them for the adrenalin if nothing else), and second, when I started talking I advised everyone that I been on the phone most of the morning so my voice was already about gone. Turns out the second step wasn't necessary because my earlier problem was apparently based on not having prepared myself to talk at the volume that is required for public (adrenalized) speaking, so the adrenalin effect made my voice quavery.

It is useful to confront your fears. They should be your friends, and by confronting them, and adjusting your behavior to minimally accommodate and harmonize with their foibles, you can make them so.

Tai Chi Chuan

I have previously described Yang Style Tai Chi Chuan as an excellent sub-ascetic practice. That is to say Tai Chi gives alot of bang for ones buck.

However, the benefits accumulate in the oposite way from the more common Greek exercise systems such as calesthenics and weight training.

In the Greek exercise paradigm, a given execise routine will take you to a certain level of impovement at a fast rate, but once that improvement has been achieved the improvement rate goes flat and the routine merely maintains that new level. To go to a higher level of improvement, one must increase the difficulty or duration of the routine.

Tai Chi, because of the different approach to developement used, initially provides improvement at a much flatter rate. It takes several months to learn a practice routine that will ultimately only take up a 15-20 minutes per set, with a total exercise period of about 1/2 hour a day.

Once you have learned the proctice routine and can perform it without interuption, you will have achieved the full benefit of the Greek paradigm for that series of movements. That is to say, you will have gotten the full contractive muscular benefit from it and continued inattentive practice will maintain the level of developement that you acquired from just learning the moves.

Tai Chi is not, however, a greek exercise.

Once you have learned the practice routine, you will begin bringing more and more concentration into the different structural aspects of the exercise and in doing so you will find that you have a very different and much more intimate relationship between your mind and body than you ever imagined possible. In essence, intead of adding weight or duration to improve developement as in the Greek paradigm, you will be adding concentration.

And as you ingrain the interaction of concentration and body movement over a few years you will find that while still doing essentially the same physical exercise that you were doing from the time that you successfully learned the practice routine, you will find that you are accumulating a wide variety of unforeseen benefits at a steeper and steeper rate.

The loneliness of the path.

In a way, this will be a warning, and an admonishment against adopting the Heaven Path philosophy.

As with so many courses of action that fall under the heading of 'taking the road less traveled,' traveling ones Heaven Path will frequently be a lonely trip.

The analogy holds together in this way.

If you walk on main street you will be surounded by other travelers, and the opportunity for companionship will come often, but if you walk on a back road you will seldom find company.

In the case of the Heaven Path, you will still often travel on main street and often be surrounded by other people, but you may find that opportunities for companionship are more consistent with traveling the back road because you will likely be the only person around you that is on the road you are on. Your path takes up the same physical space as the path of the others, but they are nevertheless traveling a very different road.

This will first be noticable when you give up certainty. Giving up certainty will make you a much less outwardly vocal person just because you will begin to recognize the inherent falsity of so much that is said. You will be ever tempted to try to shake those around you out of their own false certainty, and this will not be popular with them. Most people desparately need their certainty, false or not, to keep themselves going.

Then you will recognize the error of trying to wake other people up, but as the crowd closes back in you will find that their company no longer satisfies you.

You will seek others who have given up their certainty, but then you will find that most of them are merely cynical,and assume that all positions are simply false rather than limited in the scope of the aplicability of their truthfulness. They are no longer seeking their own fulfillment, because they no longer believe that ther is such a thing.

But if you are aware and receptive and persistent, you may find that there are a very small number of people who have either explicitly or implicitly adopted the Heaven Path, and whose Heaven Paths may run parallel with yours. And these travelers will also be seeking you.

This is the nature of travel on the Heaven Path.

Consider yourself warned.

The Host’s Optimum-Minimum Meditation Method

Well, everyone has probably had time to determine that they would be better off if they were actually controlling their minds, instead of the other way around, so here is the basic meditation method that provides the basis for all of the more directed forms of meditation.

If you practice this method religiously for fifteen minutes a day when you get out of bed, you will receive, in some measure, every benefit derivable from meditation. How diligently you practice will determine how quickly you will derive the benefits, but you will be able to stop the thought process (which is extremely enjoyable when you get to where it lasts for more than about two minutes) within about three months.

Sit in a cross-legged position or in a straight-backed chair that allows your thighs to be approximately horizontal with your feet flat on the floor.

In either position, sit on your tailbone with your back straight and vertical, and your head gently extended upward as though you have a puppet-string attached to the top of your head and it is gently being pulled upward.

Close your eyelids, but continue to look at the inside of your eyelids as though you were staring at something a little above the level of your eyes and about one hundred yards away. This will be weird for a while but once you get the hang of it, it is quite relaxing. The point is to keep the visual signals coming in, but with nothing being seen.

Now, concentrate on the sensation of breathing and the blank visual signals your receiving. Any time you catch yourself thinking about anything, gently return your concentration to your sensation of breathing and seeing-but-not-seeing.

At first, you will continually find that you have been daydreaming since you sat down. Don’t be discouraged. Just lead your attention back to where it is supposed to be.

After about four weeks, you will probably find that you can maintain concentration for two or three breaths but then lose it at the top or bottom of a breathing cycle. This is good progress, and you just have to keep going until you find the balance of attention that allows you to increase the time that you are properly focused.

At about six-weeks of continuous daily practice, most people will have a no-thought experience that will last for several minutes. Once you hit that point you will not have to make yourself do the fifteen minutes-a-day anymore, because you will find yourself spending time you used to devote to watching TV and other things you thought were fun in meditation.

The Third Category of Sub-ascetics

So far we have looked at two of the three sub-ascetic practices in the Heaven Path philosophy. The first, meditation, is self-control of ones mind. The second, Tai Chi Chuan, is self-control of ones body.

The third is the most ascetic of the sub-ascetic practices in that it should be practiced all the time rather than for a few minutes a day as in the case of the other two.

I call this third sub-ascetic practice the Formal Observance.

In Formal Observance, one maintains self-control of ones outward relationship with the world by obeying the laws of justice, displaying good manners, being respectful to those who deserve through their actions to be treated respectfully, and also to those who don’t necessarily deserve to be treated respectfully, and where it is not possible to leave a situation better than one found it, leave no sign of ones passing. That is to say, one observes the form.

This seems like a rather mundane activity, but it is the practice that will have the greatest effect on the world, and on ones fulfillment in that world.

The purpose of this sub-ascetic practice is two-fold. The first purpose is to get in the habit of using ones own decision-making process and will to make the world a more peaceful and harmonious place. By observing the form, we are able, on the one hand, to avoid introducing, through our actions, angst and unhappiness into the world, and also actually set an example that, if followed by so much as a single additional person, will reduce the strife in the world beyond that reduction brought about by your own self-control. And on the other hand will, through conscious control of our behavior, prevent us from creating obstructions to our own fulfillment.

Let us consider a mundane example of the former.

A person has a car and a favorite song on some medium that allows the song to be replayed, on demand, in the car.

This person has a friend that looks up to, and admires, this person, and also likes the song.

This person picks up the friend in the car, and as they drive around they listen to the song in the car.

Now, you are this person. And you are now pulling into the apartment complex that your friend lives in to drop the friend off.

In the non-sub-ascetic approach, you drive up to your friend’s apartment complex with the song playing at a volume level that, while acceptable while driving down the road because it is drowned out by engine noise of the other vehicles and the distance separating it from residences, is unacceptable in an apartment complex because it will be heard by everyone in the complex, and because even the subset of dwellers therein that may also like the song will be further reduced by those who are engaged by other activities the likes of which being forced to hear the song coming from your car will constitute a disruption to their activities. (Sleeping comes to mind as an activity that even a fan of the song would find disrupted by being forced to hear it.) Your friend who, for whatever reason, looks up to you is going to admire, or at least fail to find abhorrent, this behavior for no other reason that the fact that they look up to you, and will likely mimic the behavior in the future.

The question then becomes “How much disruption have you introduced into the world by this single action?”

And it is unquestionable that, had been you been actively controlling your behavior with the objective of not introducing angst and unhappiness into the world, you would have recognized that leaving the music blaring was inconsiderate at the very least, and would have turned it down as you approached the apartment complex.

And your friend that admires you so may very well have, at that very moment, adopted a policy of being considerate based on your example.

One never knows when one is being admired from afar, nor does one know when ones behavior will determine the behavior of others for a long time to come.

Now let us consider the effects of the above scenario on your fulfillment.

When we follow our own path to fulfillment we are enjoined from obstructing others path because we don’t know whether our own fulfillment will ultimately serve the larger work, nor do we know whether another’s fulfillment will serve the larger work to a greater degree. In both cases, believing that you know is mere vanity.

Beyond this, as we approach the time when we will most desire that how we spent our physicality will satisfy our desire for fulfillment, we will not want the memories that loom largest to be those that stem from having done harm to others, and their pursuit of fulfillment. In other words, a given level of fulfillment will seem much less fulfilling if we did a lot of harm to others to achieve it.

Moreover, the effects of doing harm to someone will often have the effect of shifting us off of a particular groove of our Heaven Path, onto a groove that is less direct and less cost-effective.

It is odd, but the world seems to be shaped in such a way that causing harm does not lead to fulfillment, even when it leads to success. We see this in those who cause harm as they become older. They become desperately self- protective, as though they must preserve every possible moment left to them so they can continue to pursue whatever it is that they are after. It becomes particularly obvious in those whose harm of others has led to their own great financial or political success. As all the things they are going to do fall by the wayside, and all that is left is the things they have done, they experience a progressively less avoidable self-loathing that they desperately try to bury with the feelings of exaltation they had previously felt during their moments of conquest. But as they get closer and closer to the end, the exaltation itself feels more and more loathsome.

On the other hand, those who have pursued their own fulfillment but have habitually detoured around circumstances that would have resulted in their actions causing harm to others find that although they may not be famous or rich, they are able to accept their impending passing into the next world because the fulfillment they did achieve did not hinder the fulfillment of others.

Control your mind. Control your body. Control your behavior.

This is Sub-ascetics.

Health and Longevity and Physical Sub-ascetics

Our physicality is the intermediary between our will and our fulfillment.

Of course, it stands to reason that some people have their maximum point of fulfillment at the end of a Heaven Path that is primarily mental, such as the truly great philosophers and theoreticians, but for the vast majority of us, we will need our bodies to be in a good state of repair to achieve even a small portion of our potential fulfillment.

For this reason, we must consider the care of our bodies in order to plot a course that will allow the maximum amount of time as viable physical entities for us to work toward our fulfillment without having too much of that time in ensuring that maximization.

Beyond that, we must also consider all the other means besides failing to maintain ourselves that may result in premature loss of physicality.

Besides disease, we face such things as accidents and, of course, violence.

There are a very large number of people that spend a lot of time in daily exercise to maintain good health. This is admirable, but so much exercise serves only the purpose of keeping the body active, and possibly enhancing ones desirability.

Most exercise routines do very little towards protecting you from either accidents or violence.

One can enhance ones survivability from both accidents and violence by spending your exercise time in the study of a martial art. This is so because, on the one hand, virtually all martial arts systems will expose you to the strategy and tactics of personal violence, and on the other hand, practice of most martial arts systems will tend to condition your body and mind to work together without the slow decision-making process that so often gets in the way when confronted by the unexpected.

There are many martial arts systems and schools out there, and unfortunately, many of them are less than reputable.

As an aside, I should probably point out that my chosen profession for the last two decades or so involves frequent violence that comes in the form of a variety of people suddenly deciding to do harm to me, but I am not allowed, for several excellent reasons, to harm them back. That is to say, I have to confront the violence but when I’m done, those I have confronted should be gift-wrapped, but be none the worse for wear.

For my physical sub-ascetics, I advocate a single martial art. It is not the first one I’ve practiced, but it will be the last. As an exercise system, it is beneficial in so many ways and at so many levels that, for me, there is no other martial art.

The martial art is Yang-style Tai Chi Chuan.

Get sum!

Anger

The most difficult mindset to control is anger. Once it is unleashed, getting it back under control is very difficult.

Why is this?

As we learned from Yoda, or Daoism if you study such things, anger is part of an emotional cycle. Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hatred, and hatred leads to suffering, which then, in turn, leads to more fear.

The reason anger is so hard to get under control is because it is so much more preferable to fear.

As soon as we become angry we, out of long habit, nurture and strengthen the feeling in order to blot out our sensation of fear. Being afraid is socially unacceptable, and as such, is strongly humiliating, and whenever we feel fear, it is compounded by our humiliation at being afraid.

It is, perhaps, easier to see fear turn to anger in other people than it is to see it in ourselves for the vary reason that it so hard to get under control. When looking at ourselves, it is too easy to pretend that what we got angry about, we were not first afraid of.

So, the next time you see someone you know get angry, ask yourself what it was that made him or her angry, and why they had reason to be afraid. But don’t necessarily accept the easy answers, especially if it doesn’t seem on the surface that there was anything for them to be afraid of.

Look instead for the deeper answer.

And don’t try to point it out to the angered person. Instead, study it and see if it provides insight into your own fear and anger.

One purpose of sub-ascetics in general, and meditation in particular, is to help you overcome your fears, and also to accept your fears instead of hiding from them in a cloud of anger.

It is better to acknowledge to yourself that you are feeling fear, than it is to get angry so that you can pretend that you aren’t afraid. Once you become angry, it is such a small step to seeking out someone that you don’t fear, and then making that person afraid just so you can prove to yourself that you weren’t really afraid.

But you were, in fact, afraid, and your anger proves it.

Now!

There are arguments besides the ‘lack of control of ones own mind’ argument in favor of sub-ascetic practices, meditation in particular.

As far as the current science goes, humans are the only species that are capable of engaging in any form of time-travel.

I know, this is news to you, but what I mean is that we are capable of thinking in the past, in the form of memory, and in the future, in the form of fantasizing. In fact, if we look at the average human, these two modes are very nearly all we are capable of.

It is the relatively rare human that ever ‘thinks’ in the present; that is to say, doesn’t actually think but merely maintains awareness of his or her environment, without running some sort of inner dialog or narrative that either leans toward the past or the future.

This points us to a benefit of meditation. Meditation, if practiced correctly and with diligence, prevents both remembering and fantasizing (or planning, which is really the same thing but with somewhat more discipline.) That is to say, it doesn’t eliminate it, but instead brings it under our control. We remember when we choose to remember, and fantasize (or plan) when we choose to fantasize. The rest of the time, we experience our existence as it is, now, now, now!

How does meditation accomplish this? It does so by conditioning the mind to not think.

Virtually all meditations are similar in the sense that a set of thought conditions are adopted mentally, and then every time the mental conditions collapse, the practitioner leads the mind back to the prescribed conditions. This is the nutshell explanation of meditation, and, like any other exercise, the more we practice, the more control we are able to have over the facility being exercised.

So what, exactly, is the point?

As I write this, I listen to music from my young adulthood. The music in question is quite capable of taking me back to a time and place that is quite exquisite in my memory. I wouldn’t trade these memories for any material gain that can be imagined. But! Due to the dependable exquisite-ness of these memories, it would be very easy to let them have there way with me, and in so doing, waste the present wallowing in the past.

Fortunately, having practiced sub-ascetics for a long time, I can tell you without qualm that the times these memories were acquired in were not times when I was saying “Boy, am I going to enjoy memories of this!”

Now is inevitably when valuable memories will be created, and the more time one spends experiencing ‘now,’ the more memories of value one will have when the past is all that is left to us.

In that time, the sub-ascetic practitioner will find their selves fulfilled.

Beginning sub-ascetics

Meditation and meditative practices have been around for several thousand years, and it is tempting to think that if they had any efficacy, everyone would be meditating. The reason this argument isn’t valid is because meditation, besides everything else it is, is hard work, and the benefits are subtle (at least at the lower levels of practice.)

Another problem with meditative practices is the fact that they have frequently been tied to doctrines of theology that were at odds with the prevailing norms, and with credulity.

My own doctrine being limited to accepting that which is, I would like to propose an eminently practical rationale for meditating; the vast majority of people alive today have more control over the muscles that control their toes than they have of their mind.

Here is a simple illustrative test you can take to see how much control you have of your mind.

Sit somewhere comfortable, in a place that has few distractions. Turn off the T.V, shut off the lights, and close the door.

For the next ten minutes resolve to think only about your breathing.

Breathe in fully but comfortably, and then breathe out slowly. As you breathe out, count in your mind ‘One.’

Breathe in fully but comfortably, and then breathe out slowly. As you breathe out, count in your mind ‘Two.’

Continue this sequence until you breathe out counting in your mind ‘Nine’, and then start over again at one. Do this for about 10 cycles.

The first time I did this, I remembered about a day later that I had started it, and was quite embarrassed to find that I couldn’t remember having gotten to four. When I tried it again later that day, I realized that it was because, as had just happened, I had never gotten to four. My mind had wandered off, as I was inhaling for the count of ‘Three.’

Go ahead and try it.

Your mind is not under your conscious control.

But it can be, and more importantly, it should be.

Let this breath-counting meditation be your introduction to Heaven Path sub-ascetics.

Make a New Years resolution to practice the breathe-counting meditation for 10 minutes-a-day until you can maintain the breath count for the whole 10 minutes.

At that point, you will be able to see whether your long-term fulfillment would be improved by adding meditative practices to your daily routine.