One Year Manual
A quest to improve my spirituality.
I’m not sure how many entries I’ll make about this, but I hope to make more than this one. One of my New Year’s Resolutions is to improve my spiritual life. Right now, I pray almost every morning and read from a daily devotional every morning. When I do pray in the morning, I use Judeo-Christian prayer with a Buddhist mala, which is a set of prayer beads. I don’t attend church, nor do I plan to in the near future. I just don’t have much use for organized religion on that scale these days. Of course, that may change. That’s all well and good, but I still feel like my personal spirituality is lacking.
So, a friend of mine suggested that I keep a prayer journal, or spirituality journal. He suggested that I write just things of a spiritual nature in that journal. Nothing about work, or family, or any other concern other than my spirituality. I mulled that over for a couple of weeks this year and somewhere in there remembered a book I’d read by Israel Regardie called The One Year Manual. Unfortunately, according to Amazon.com, it’s now out of print. (Though, RedWheel/Weiser, the publisher, says that it’s still available. ISBN: 0-87728-489-X) It’s a book of twelve exercises that are meant to improve one’s spiritual health. A book for starting to “walk the Path” as Regardie puts it. Obviously, each exercise is meant to be practiced about a month before moving on to the next exercise and each exercise builds on the last one. Also, Regardie suggests that praying four times a day, at the start of the student’s day, noon, the end of the student’s day and before retiring, is essential to the overall program. He lists four prayers, but I don’t particularly like them, so I’m finding my own. I have some I’m working with now, but I may change them further down the line. Regardie also suggests that the student keep a journal tracking their progress through the exercises. So, I’m going to do that.
The first exercise is about “body awareness”. The student is to sit or lay in a comfortable position and simply get in touch with what their body and surroundings are doing. The student should be as perfectly still as possible during this time, not responding to any thing, not even to scratch an itch. Simply to be aware of and acknowlege their body and surroundings. At first, these sessions should only last about 10 mintues, but they will eventually be up to thirty minutes. This should be done at least twice a day, no matter how long it’s being done. The purpose of this exercise is to develop both awareness and concentration. The goal is to be able be totaly aware of one’s surroundings and internal processes. Regardie says that it’s the first step toward “mindful living”, which sounds very comfortably Buddhist to me.
So, we’ll see how it goes. I’ll try to be brave enough to keep the Diary of a Network Geek updated with my progress.
