• Is your boss rather arrogant? Touchy? Demanding?
• Are your co-workers prone to nervousness? To impatience and restlessness?
  Is this one a touch sad, and does that one have a penchant for slight exaggerations (or for great self-aggrandisements)?
• Is this person taken to frustrations and that one to annoyances?
• Is the person over here sitting with quiet fears, ones he or she dare not share?

Keep observing others. Then observe your own experience. See how there may be something just a little bit unsatisfactory about it. Was the workout somehow not good enough? Did you not quite connect with your girlfriend? Did you find yourself consoling her in the hopes that it might dissolve your own dis-ease (ill-at-easedness)? Were you worried about disappointing this person? Concerned with being a burden to that one And so on.

Keep observing.

The more you observe, the more you may discover that you are being pushed from behind. Toward what?

1.2. Being Pulled: Maybe you’ve had an experience that revealed to you an entirely different perspective on life. “Your mind was blown,” as it’s said. The first time I meditated turned out to be a mini-satori. Amazingly, the very first time there was This. And this non-ordinary experience, this heightened form of consciousness was, as it were, “pulling me” toward it.

Or perhaps you’ve not yet had even a little taste of a heightened way of being. Then perhaps you come upon someone you’ve never met and you find that he’s laughing a lot. And smiling. And pretty joyous. Who is this weirdo? Still, you cannot deny that being around this person introduces you to a new kind of energy. There’s something not to this person in particular but to this way of being.

Let’s cut to the quick and say: this person seems to be operating on a different wavelength. And this experience of being in the presence of such a one awakens something in you. You feel–somehow–pulled toward that which is not just “in” this fellow but may also be “in” you. Call that contentment or peace or ultimate fulfillment or abiding happiness. Or don’t call it anything. Just taste a bit of it.

Being so pulled, if only slightly at present, you start to feel something  stir within you. Awaken within you.

Step 2: Instrumental Reasons

Probably given your tech background, you think to yourself, “OK, it would be good to meditate in order, e.g., to feel calmer and to have greater powers of concentration (say, while at work).” OK, begin here: these, and others, are instrumental reasons you can take as your starting point.

True, they don’t quite speak to your growing sense that there is suffering (“pushed”) and that there is a kind of contentment (etc.) that is indeed much more than greater concentration (“pulled”).

Still, rest assured that such reasons are perhaps just post hoc justifications of an “impulse” or “desire” that’s growing within you. The latter is like a little yearning, a pianissimo yearning.

In any case, start with where you are, not with where you’re not.

Step 3: Concentration on a Single Object

Step 3.1–Scattered: See that almost all of your waking life can be regarded as a discontinuous series of fascinations with sundry objects. You’ve been absorbed in thoughts–be these startups or mathematical concepts; in feelings–be these anger, desire, or fear; in sensations–be the coldness or heat on your skin; or in perceptions–be these the sight of a beautiful looking person or the sound of someone sneezing. See how it’s seemed as if your life has been one drama after another, with unnoticed intervals between the last drama and this one. It has appeared to you that there is nothing but this, nothing more than this, nothing other than this.

Step 3.2–Concentrated on a Single Object: Let the mind be absorbed in a single object: a candle at which the eyes are softly gazing; a mantra recited time and again; a count to 10 of the kind recommended by Zen. Soon it becomes clear how wild the mind has become in terms of its haphazard involvement with sundry objects. After having assiduously developed focus on a single object, one sees that the mind has become less rowdy and, in turn, is able to gently focus its attention on this single object.

Step 4: Some Discoveries during and after Meditation