Selby - Seven masters, one path: meditation secrets from the worlds greatest teachers

T he Ojai Valley, nestled quietly at the foot of the Topa Topa Mountains about thirty miles inland from Santa Barbara, is said to have been the spiritual heartland of the ancient Chumash civilization that once thrived along the California coast. As fate would have it, the Spanish invasion in the 1600s wiped out the Chumash, and for a couple hundred years the Ojai Valley was mostly unoccupied except for a few faltering Spanish land-grant families and the usual proliferation of native wildlife.

In 1906, at the age of seventeen, my grandfather (also named John Selby) moved from his birthplace nearby in Ventura into the solitary Ojai Valley and became one of the first cattle ranchers of the area. Over the ensuing years the unique combination of lingering Native American spiritual energies, my grandfathers natural mystic propensities, and the earthly intensity of such a remarkably beautiful natural setting somehow evoked a special quality of consciousness in Gramps. As more settlers moved in during the first part of the new century, he became recognized throughout the region as a rancher packing a special spiritual charge. During the 1940s and 1950s more and more people came to know and love him as the valleys indigenous spiritual master. In the 1960s CBS television even sent a film crew up to the ranch to shoot a half-hour network special on the silent sage of the valley.

Gramps, of course, just laughed at such attention and went on about his quiet way, teaching almost entirely through example rather than words. I had the good fortune to live with my family on my grandfathers ranch throughout much of my childhood and spent most of my free time helping him with his daily chores and ranch projectswalking behind him quietly along game trails, learning to laugh rather than curse when upsetting difficulties arose, riding our horses through oak woods and open meadows, sitting half an hour at a time without speaking beside swift-running streamsand discovering by osmosis how this man purposefully kept his thinking mind mostly quiet as he observed the world without judgment, treated every one of Gods creatures with respect and compassion, and held his focus on being loving and receptive rather than slipping into all the various human fears and ego-games.

Later I would study with a number of the worlds recognized masters and learn their formal meditation techniques. However, in all honesty, most of the meditative understandings Ill be sharing with you in this book were ones I first experienced early in life and quite beyond any organized format, through this simple mans depthless spiritual example. Gramps truly lived in Spirit and showed me that the spiritual path is to be found beyond all dogmas and separatist religious belief systems.

Perhaps most important for this book, the meditative lesson that Gramps imprinted on my soul was that meditation is not something to be done once or twice a dayits a full-time spiritual ambiance that ideally permeates every moment of our lives. Gramps regularly would pause when things got too hectic, lean against a fence post or sit down for just a few minutes, and allow his usual radiant demeanor to return to him. Such short meditative breaks seemed an integral part of his daily life.

Gramps also had a formal meditation routine of sorts, in that he almost always got up at dawn and was out sitting under his favorite oak tree, weather permitting, when the sun rose. I would often get up in time to sit with him quietly as the sun came up, enjoying the special state of mind that came to me when we were quiet together for fifteen or twenty minutes. He also regularly paused at sunset to sit down, relaxand simply be as the sun disappeared. He didnt go off anywhere during his sun meditations; in fact, one of his strongest characteristics was an intense and continual involvement with the present moment.

Pause and Reflect

You might want to pause a moment here to reflect upon any childhood influences who deeply moved you spiritually as you were growing up. Who were they? What did you learn from them? Are they still with you in spirit?

Cognitive Liberation

A few decades after Gramps moved into the Ojai Valley, a number of spiritual communities migrated to this peaceful region to establish their various schools and teachings. One of these was the Theosophical Society, which shortly after the turn of the last century searched through India and identified a young boy there as the next world messiah, the living incarnation of Jesus and Lord Krishna. The Theosophists took Jiddhu Krishnamurti to Europe and then in 1921 brought him on over to Ojai to mature spiritually and physically into manhood.

While living a few miles up into the orange groves from Ojai, Krishnamurti had his first awakening experienceand soon thereafter shocked the thousands of his devout followers by rejecting his identity as the new messiah. I myself was touched to the core when, as a young boy, I first heard him speaking in the oak groves of Ojai. I could sense that here was someone expressing in words what my grandfather expressed through his actionsthat to attain peace of mind and clarity of vision, we must learn to master our own minds and tune in to our inner center beyond our cultural conditioning and religious beliefs.

Since that first encounter with Krishnamurti, I had many informal chats with him and attended formal gatherings with him; right up to our last meeting in Switzerland just before his death, I found his cut-to-the-bone teachings the clearest of any spiritual teacher in the world. In many ways, this book is my new expression, in a format the present generation can readily access, of the meditative wisdom and cognitive liberation that Krishnamurti taught to all those who had ears to hear. These insights ring with the veracity of the ancient masters and the immediate example of my own grandfather, in a new conceptual format to inspire our emerging world society.

Living Teachers

O ne of Krishnamurtis primary teachings was that we do best on the spiritual path, not by becoming a worshipful devotee of any particular guru, but rather by seeking our own inner center and thus tapping the perennial wisdom directly. However, he did encourage me as a young man to get out into the world and explore firsthand the techniques and teachings of the worlds vast meditative traditionin order to see clearly the need for genuine revolution in our society. When out in the world, he said, It becomes obvious that there must be a total revolution. A different kind of culture must come into being. Unless there is deep psychological revolution, mere reformation on the periphery will have little effect. And this psychological revolutionwhich I think is the only revolutionis possible through meditation.

With such encouragement, I began at the age of nineteen to seek out and study with a number of prominent teachers, each of whom held a particular key to the secrets of successful meditation, rooted in the teachings of the ancient masters and also in their own insights and inspirations. This book is a direct outcome of that lifelong exploration.

At the same time, I became very curious about the scientific aspects of the meditative experience and spent many years studying the formal psychological and neurological understandings of the spiritual experience. In this realm of inquiry, one of my teachers, the admittedly flawed but brilliant Zen scholar Alan Watts challenged me to continue working on a key project he had initiated: identifying the fundamental psychological principle and procedure common to all the worlds great meditative traditions, and then teaching this procedure to the world.