"Where shall I begin, please your majesty?" she asked.
"Begin at the beginning," the king said, very gravely, "and go on till you come to the end: then stop."

When I was just in my teens, starting my mystical studies, a member of a purported mystical school keenly advised me that "Life is like buttoning a shirt: if it started wrong, it will be wrong all throughout."

He has a point. Eight years passed however, now on my late twenties, I came to think of a better analogy. And I came to think that life is like a game of dart: you may never hit the bullseye with the first shot, the second, the third, or the fourth maybe but that does not preclude the possibility of hitting it rightly with the next shot - even if it may be the last one.

Why this is so? Obviously because life is a journey to perfection. It is a journey towards  remembering our forgotten self - ever perfect, ever unchanging.

In ancient Japan, a samurai warrior's proficiency in arrow shooting is judged by the fact that he can shoot the target with eyes blindfolded. For to truly hit the target without even seeing it, the shooter must become One with his target. How this is made possible is through undertaking the rigorous mental discipline  of concentration and meditation where the practitioner merges with the Supreme life force ever flowing in every thing. They termed it "Zen" meditation, attributed to have been taught by Bodhidharma, the 28th patriarch in the line of transmission from Buddha's disciple Kasyapa and who was also credited to be the founder of Shao-lin martial arts in China.

This only proves that any material endeavor could be better facilitated if one undertakes spiritual practice. How do we become successful at something? How do we get something we want? What is our means to what we desire? POWER. We can get anything if we've got the needed power to get it.

If I like to eat some burger, I must have at least forty bucks to get one. That is the purchasing power which I must have. If I want to pass an exam, I must have the necessary knowledge to get it. If I want to have a harem, I at least must have the richness of a king.

But what if I want to hit the target without even seeing it? What if I want to see God face to face? Surely, a million bucks nor material knowledge is totally useless to drive me to where I want. What do I need then? I need special techniques that would enable me to control my life force in view of developing my fullest potential as a human created in the image, in the likeness of God.

Who are to be my role models then? Whose footsteps shall I follow? Whose life shall I seek to emulate? Surely, I have to look into the lives of the great masters and ancient mystics since I would like to attain to their heights, I seek to understand the way they understand this life.

If I seek to emulate them, I must inquire as to what kind of practices they performed that enabled Moses to part the sea, Daniel to walk through fire, Solomon to become wisest of all kings, Jesus to perform all the miracles. What is evident is that all these personages practiced meditative techniques which we term as "yoga", "kabbalah", "tantra", "zen", "chi-kung", and the like. What is also evident in all these mystical systems is that the overriding point is to awaken the force of KUNDALINI situated at the base of our spine, through which emanates all power, all wisdom, all bliss.

How do we come to know God then? Through going to church on Sundays? Through hearing the priest's sermon and hearsay talk of God whom he has not seen in the first place? Through vegetarianism? Through celibacy?

God's command and pronouncement was very clear and unequivocal when he said in Psalm __: "BE STILL and know that I am God." It is only when we learn to meditate that we can BE STILL. God is like saying: Ok, if you want to know ME, sit there in the corner, and focus all your attention, your heart, your breath upon Me. You can be vegetarian all your life, you can be celibate all your life, but without meditation communing with God is utterly impossible. 

How do we worship God? Should we belong to a particular religion? Should we religiously go to church? Again, God's command and pronouncement was very clear and unequivocal when he said in ___ "Worship Me in spirit and in truth." God is spirit. God is truth. God is love. God is all. There can be no argument about that. God cannot be bound in a single religion. He cannot be monopolized. For He is spirit. He is truth.       

And that Truth, that Spirit can be known, can be experienced, not in the afterlife, but right here, right now - and that is our goal. The key to knowing is in the chakras, in the kundalini. Thus, in all authentic mystical systems, students are taught techniques to awaken these. In yoga, zen, chi-kung, and kabbalah, students are taught breathing techniques for this purpose. Primarily because power is in the breath, life is in the breath - yes, life is breath.

As you will notice even in our mundane affairs, proper breathing is important and will illustrate the fact that breath is power. For example, in weight training, you must know when to breath, when to retain and expel it if you are lifting heavy barbells; otherwise, lifting is such an ordeal or impossible, even fatal. Likewise, when martial artists break bricks, they have to synchronize it with their breath; otherwise, they'll break their hands instead.

Evidently a great amount of concentration - involving mind control - is needed here. Energy follows thought. This means that upon whichever our thought or mind may be, there shall our energy will be -- for thought and energy are inseparable. Scientific experiments conducted in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology confirm this fact when scientists discovered that that the behavior of electrons which they observe are altered by the ones observing them - proving that thought is power. This also confirms the long-held mystical view that nothing, no man, or no phenomena is isolated from another - as every thing is related to everything else.

Since everything is a manifestation of energy vibrating at different levels - accounting for the differences in the manifestation of the phenomena - then it only follows that we can alter, modify our energy levels and that of others using mind control techniques.
   
Thus, going thru with our lessons, we can see that the most important point is in training how to breath properly and how to concentrate our mind and focus our thought. That could be a good start - the more important thing of course is to start doing.


According to a story, the wealthy banker Salomon Rothschild, who established banks throughout Europe, was once strolling down a crowded street in Vienna when he was jostled by a pickpocket.  "Watch out!" warned his companion. "That fellow's trying to steal your silk handkerchief."

"So what?" said Rothschild with a shrug. "We all had to start somewhere."