This new (2018.09.21) One Minute Meditation is getting rave reviews. So …

TYPE: Equanimity

PURPOSE: This Audio-visual Meditation teaches how to include and transcend perturbing communications. The trick is to catch the speaker’s under-voice and continue attending to it even as the voice changes and creates meaning.

CONTEXT:

The opposite of hear-and-react is not hear-and-resist, but to hear the initial grunt that initiates the command and stay with it. This requires practice. Hence this video.

Communication is invasive, commands especially so. And it seems to most of us that the force of the imperative mood is the energy (amplitude) generated by the speaker. That is to say, because the meaning and the power have the same source, they enjoy a necessary unity, which is the command’s persuasive power. But, as Hume reminds us,

whatever objects are different are distinguishable, and . . . whatever objects are distinguishable are separable by the thought and imagination.

The first step to neutralizing a command is recognizing that the meaning and the amplitude are separable. But, per Anselm, it is better to exist in the mind and in reality, than to exist in the mind alone. Placebos that have you focus your attention on a real empirical content rather than a merely posited one are more effective. Placebos simply work better when they make some contact with reality.

There is implanted herein the echo of “Sheriff Joe’s” grunt prior to his saying, “Before he shoots you!” What the preceding remark says is irrelevant to the practice. All that matters is that there is something—a grunt, a breath, a gurgle—that precedes the command. By keeping your attention on it, and repeatedly keeping your attention on it each time the command is given, you will find that the official directive loses all meaning.

METHOD:

1. Focus only on the low grunt breath echo subliminally intoned at the very start of the clip, from 0 – 0.39 seconds.
2. You are there, only there, always there, and always only there. That is, each time the loop repeats, you are always and only aware of the breath-moment that precedes the command.
3. Stay with it. After 4 or 5 iterations, gone. Your mind will be gone, into a very somber place. You will be transported, in fact, the bathroom scene where Jack is granted audience with Delbert Grady in the men’s room.

The idea that this sequence will propel you into a higher gear of self-mastery seems preposterous. But the joke’s on you, my friend, when you hit 0:23 seconds. All I can say is,

Cookery Crock with Angus Crock!

… it works. No joke.

After 4 or 5 iterations, you will find yourself in the men’s room with Delbert Grady.

This is the pivotal scene in the film. The message to Jack is clear: Jack is God.

Oh to be Jack in that moment of revelation! To know that your true home has been elsewhere, all along. Your whole shitty life—your relations, your self-concept, your body, your space—was just a bad dream. And now you are waking up, waking up to your true relations, your true self-concept, your true habitat. Oh, and by the way, you are waking up inside a body made of a different substance. To realize that you are a ghost is to realize not only that you are immortal, but also that nature itself is false.

You realize that the irritating hunch that things are basically wrong, that life is something that should not have been, was correct all along. You really have been a stranger in a strange land.

According to polls, this is everyone’s favorite scene from the movie. People love it for (1) the lighting, and (2) the special quality of the silence, during the gaps in the conversation. Oh to be there with them in that holy moment!

TIMESTAMP: 2:09