What is being measured · 20 of 24

Nobody is coming

Sit with the fact that this is not being supervised.

Free will is sacred, and that cuts both ways

The Larger Consciousness System is described as the evolving system all of this is part of — huge but finite, and explicitly neither infinite nor perfect. It is on its own evolutionary journey, with the same job as everyone in it: lowering its entropy.

It is not God, and the material rules that out on purpose. No perfection, no omniscience. It also rules out the machinery people expect to come with it: no karma points are collected, no reprimands issued, no punishment given — the stated reason being that inducing fear would hardly help anyone get rid of fear.

And it will not step in. Free will is sacred, the glossary says, and if the larger system dislikes what you are doing it is not going to come in and override you. There is no supervision, no correction, and nothing arriving to sort it out.

That cuts both ways, and the second way is more useful. Campbell's line on other people follows from it directly: you cannot force anybody else to change, because it has to happen from the inside out. What you can do is give somebody a better environment to grow in — and then they have to do the growing.

Which is also the answer to why your own work is not selfish. We are all netted together, he says; clean up your own act and everyone near you has a slightly better environment to grow up in. That is the whole of the available leverage, and it turns out to be enough.

Before you start

  • Lighten up. Do not be intense or serious about this.
  • Sit somewhere comfortable and quiet where you will not be disturbed. A chair is fine. He does not specify anything beyond that.
  • Close your eyes.
  • Pick a time when you are not already churning. First thing on waking or last thing before sleep tend to work; straight after a big meal, or while you are angry about something, tend not to.
  • Bring one person you have been trying to change.
How long

Campbell’s own instruction is twenty minutes, twice a day. The shorter lengths early on are ours, not his — starting at twenty is how most people stop after a week.

The two buttons during a sit

Campbell’s mantra is not a fixed thing you repeat for twenty minutes. Its size is a dial, and you move it during the sit against how much thinking is going on. His instruction is symmetrical: if intruding thoughts constantly stream into your awareness, give the mantra a more active form; as thoughts disappear and do not return, decrease the complexity.

Busier
Your mind keeps wandering off. Give it more to hold, so there is less room for anything else. At the busiest: fill your mind with the longer chant: ah-lum-bar-dee-dum · ah-lum-baa-dee-dum. no need to make an actual sound. let it be busy.
Simpler
Nothing much is intruding any more. Let it thin out — there is no point crowding a mind that has already gone quiet.

Keep going down and you reach the end of it: If the sound slips away and no thoughts come in behind it, let it go. Drift in the quiet blankness of your consciousness. That is the whole aim — the mantra is scaffolding, and you take scaffolding down when the building stands up. Arrow keys work too, if you have a keyboard to hand.

Keep this tab open. The screen stays awake and dims itself, so the phone can lie face down. On iPhone, locking the screen or switching apps stops the sound — a browser limitation rather than a setting.