After this short opening, the book 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 book 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. 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. And if someone handed this book to you, Part one was written with you in mind.
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, 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: the conditions that make it realistic to walk the whole road in one life, in the reality of the 21st century, from the ones you can start alone tonight to the ones that need other people.
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 book rests on what I learned from my teacher, Genadiy Givin. He was born in Riga and studied at Riga Technical University. In his teens he met people who had something he wanted, and what he saw in them gave him a huge wish to know what they knew. That wish led him to the man who became his teacher. He describes the people who handed this on to him, himself included, as ordinary people without titles. He adapted what they handed on to life in the 21st century. For him the knowledge is what matters.
