If you are in a spaceship and you want to travel to a star, what do you have to do?

Suppose you have a fusion power plant on your ship.  So you fire up the plant and make a bunch of energy. Will that accelerate your ship?

No.  Why?  What is the equation for work?  Work = Force times Distance.  What is the equation for force? Force = Mass times Acceleration.

So to do work, you have to accelerate a mass.  It doesn’t do you any good just to have energy.

That is the problem with people who take psycho-active substances, or do “spiritual exercises.”  It increases their energy, but then what?  What happens to them?  As with the power plant, they have used up some of their potential and increased entropy.

So what do you have to do? To accelerate your ship, you have to accelerate some mass away from you.  Newton’s third law, action = reaction.  You have to “throw something away.”  To change yourself, to become something different, you have to throw something away.  What will you throw away?  There are many possibilities.  Old behavior patterns, conditioning, friends who don’t want you to change, fixed ideas, negative emotions…

Now you have some acceleration.  But what if you randomly throw things out, what happens then? You will move, but you will move randomly.  Without a great deal of luck, you will move more or less in a circle.  This is like people who work just on healing.  You can work on healing for the rest of your life, there will always be more to heal.  They are throwing stuff out they don’t want, but then what?

So you need an aim, a direction.  If you don’t have an aim, you can use somebody else’s aim to start, until you find your own aim.  A coach may give you an aim for practice.

Now we’re getting somewhere.  You have energy, you are accelerating, and you have an aim.  But all this is no good without navigation.  What is navigation?  It starts with figuring out where you are, but that is not all.

When I was a sailor, I became a captain and mastered navigation.  Then I handed over the mantle to someone else who became the captain.  We were once in a channel, between Trinidad and Venezuela, if I remember rightly.  A strong current flows through there.  We were going against the current and there was also a headwind.  The captain was tacking back and forth, but the ship was making no progress.

I told him you have to navigate.  He said, I am navigating, and showed me on the chart that he knew where we were.  I said you are not navigating.  Knowing your position is not navigating.  Even though it is uncomfortable, you will have to take down the sails and motor directly against the wind.

Navigating is not just knowing your position – it is knowing what action to take in the given circumstances to move in the direction you want to go.  So you can’t just set up a procedure and apply it whatever the circumstances.  You have to evaluate, think, and do the necessary.

There is a teaching story to illustrate this.  Once a man set out to find a sage who lived high on a mountain, to ask him for directions in his life.  After many hardships and struggle he finally arrived at the sage’s home.  After introducing himself the sage invited him to sit outside his cave.  The sage was blowing on his fingers.  The man asked him why . He replied, my fingers are cold and I’m blowing on them to warm them.  That evening the sage built a fire and made some soup.  He poured it into cups for them.  Then he began to blow on his soup.  The man asked why he was doing that and he replied, the soup is too hot to drink and I am blowing on it to cool it.  The man thought to himself, I cannot rely on the wisdom of this sage, he is inconsistent.  First he blows for hot and then he blows for cold.

It helps to have a coach.  A coach cannot tell you what aim to have, that is individual.  Many students master navigation but never find their own aim.  But if you have an aim, the coach can help you figure out where you are and how to get from there to where you want to go.

Energy, throwing out mass, aim, navigation.

Back to work.  Work is force over distance.  Some people get hung up on force: look how hard I’m pushing!   So what? You can push on a stone wall all you want, you won’t be doing any work.

Some get hung up on work.  You can push a rock on the ground and move it a little – you’ve done some work.  But put the rock on wheels and you can move it with less force.  So you’ve done less work, but accomplished the same aim.  Or with the same work, you can do more.

It depends on your aim.  Many people do exercises.  Someone may be lifting weights.   Seems dumb. Pushing the weight up, letting it down.  Nothing accomplished.  But if your aim is to increase the size of your muscles, it makes sense.  To an observer, it may seem like a waste of time and energy.

If you are studying archery, you will shoot arrows into a target.  The target isn’t important, the point is to increase your skill so you can shoot and hit whatever you want.  The point of exercises like meditation is analogous.  The exercise is not the aim.