The path

Campbell's meditation instructions are in chapter twenty-three of the first My Big TOE book, and they are shorter and more mechanical than people expect. Sit somewhere comfortable and quiet where you will not be disturbed, close your eyes, and fill your mind with something that has no meaning in it. That is most of the setup.

What goes in your mind is a mantra — but in a strictly practical sense, and not necessarily a sound. He gives three sense-variants and tells you to pick whichever suits how you take information in. This stage is about finding yours and learning the one control that makes it work.

The point, he writes, is to learn to control your thoughts and your operative mind so that you can experience your consciousness — and that this is a first and necessary step, with everything else waiting behind it.

There is a practical reason as well as a developmental one. Your mind must be calm and steady without unruly chatter, he says, or you cannot tell the difference between what your mind creates and what exists independently of it. Everything later in this course depends on that distinction.

Campbell separates who you think you are from who you are, and says growth happens only in the second one. Knowledge on its own cannot raise the quality of a consciousness — if it stays at the intellectual level, in his words, it is just so much theory and talk and good ideas.

This stage also introduces the half of his practice that most retellings omit entirely: a daily review of your own intent. He treats it as taking up as much of the thirty minutes as the sitting does.

He places fear work inside the progression as a step, not as a side quest, and is blunt about the timescale: it may take you a decade to get rid of your fears, but work on them.

The method itself is small enough to do in five minutes. Notice something negative. Recognise it as ego. Trace it back to the fear underneath. Look at that fear directly, and let it go — at which point, he claims, you generally find it was a paper tiger. One at a time.

Only now does the metaphysics turn up, and the lateness is the point. Taking on a picture of reality before you have any evidence of your own is exactly the belief-forming move the model spends its time arguing against.

Entropy as the measure of a consciousness, with low as the good end. Physical reality as a computed reality frame with a very tight ruleset. Your body as the character you are playing. And a larger system that will neither override your free will nor rescue you from it.

The end of a beginner's course should make itself unnecessary. This stage reaches the state he actually points people at, gives you his method for not fooling yourself once things start happening, and then hands the practice back to you.

It also gives you his timeline without softening it: three to six months of twice-daily practice before you are entitled to an opinion about whether it is working, and after six months, ask people close to you whether they have noticed a change in you.