After this short opening, the essay has three parts, and each one has a different job. Here is what to expect from them, so you can set your own pace. The aim of the whole essay is to convey ideas. It isn’t a course, and it doesn’t try to teach you a method from the page.
Part one is the rational part, and I’ve kept it deliberately earthly. It uses no spiritual vocabulary and asks for no belief. It is about two things you can check in your own life, how much you make things happen and how much you let go of whatever holds you back, and why almost nobody works on both. And if someone handed it to you, it was written with you in mind as well. If you have practiced for years, it may feel light, with sitcom characters and everyday chores in it. That is on purpose, and there are two reasons to read it anyway. DO and BE are the words Parts two and three use, so everything after rests on them. And it is the part you can hand to someone who has never meditated: a partner, a colleague, a friend who rolls their eyes at the word spiritual. It gives you a way to say what you do and why, with nothing they’d need to take on trust.
Part two is the spiritual part, and it has its own role: it says where all of this comes from and where it leads. It starts from a view of reality that I call an assumption, it quotes many traditions as witnesses, and it says plainly where the reading is mine. You can disagree with it and still use the rest.
Part three is the practical side: what the method of conscious development I share looks like in the reality of the 21st century. It starts with one thing you can try alone tonight and goes on to what needs other people, a team and a guide.
You can stop after any part, and each one makes the next easier to judge.
Who is talking, and who taught me
I’m Alex. In my teens I had a lot of questions: why things are the way they are, and why I am the way I am. Over time those questions led to a spiritual search. I have worked with computers for about ten years, eight of them in cyber security, which I still do. My spiritual journey is much longer, more than fourteen years.
Everything in this essay rests on what I learned from my teacher, Genadiy Givin, and the method in Part three is the one he teaches. Where the reading is mine, I say so. Part three says more about him, and about why I trust him.
