Here is a simple but vital morning ten-step meditation for achieving total self-knowledge and mastery within 30 days. It involves nothing more than a smartphone, your pocket or purse, and an active brain.

  1. Upon rising in the morning, place your smartphone in your pocket, purse, or whatever other way it stays attached to you. Make sure it is on, online and fully capable of disturbing you (vibrate is okay).
  2. Go about your morning pre-occupational routine. This must include at least twenty minutes of some mindful activity, such as sitting quietly, horseback riding, praying, standing on your head, calmly eating breakfast, and/or talking with your spouse and/or kids with your mind engaged. Activities that don’t count include: watching the morning news, driving to work, gulping down a smoothie and protein bar and/or screaming mindlessly at spouse and/or kids.
  3. While involved in your morning activities, you will sense an urge to check your e‑mail/messages/stocks/weather/Facebook/Tweets/photostream/nothing-in-particular etc. Feel how that urge radiates through your nervous system, generating palpitations of the heart and twitching of the muscles of the arm and hand. Feel how your hand has already moved towards the smartphone without even asking permission. Be aware of all this as a detached, nonresponsive party. Return to your activity.
  4. Your smartphone will begin to buzz, tweet, sing, chime and otherwise actively make itself audibly present. Be aware of these sounds and vibrations. Be aware of the reactions throughout your biosystem, auto-responding to those stimuli. Feel how this smartphone resides not only in your pocket, but has embedded elements of itself within your nervous, cardiovascular, endocrine, motor and metabolic systems.
  5. Now focus your mental powers and visualize the smartphone’s official embassy residing in a portion of your brain. Most likely, this is somewhere in the vicinity of your Bluetooth earpiece. Invisibly enter the offices of that embassy. Observe its staff busy at their consoles, dispatching communications to various centers of your brain, glands, heart, kishkes (including stomach, liver and adrenal glands) and hand. Be aware of those messages radiating throughout your body. Enter the boardroom of that embassy and listen in on the discussion of strategies to bypass your newfound meditation. Observe the sense of frustration and desperation of the staff executives.
  6. Visualize yourself quietly leaving that office. Gently close the door behind you. Continue your morning activity.
  7. Continue to ignore smartphone sensations as necessary, until your work time arrives.
  8. Once you are at your place of work, close your eyes, focus your mind again, and visualize that smartphone embassy once more. As you walk in, the staff rises to their feet in recognition and awe of you, their master.
  9. You may now commence use of your smartphone.
  10. The above meditation should be repeated on a regular basis over a period of 30 days. At that point, you may print and post this diploma at your place of work:

This is to certify that ________ has completed thirty days of intense, self-mastery meditation, achieving true self-knowledge, and is now a liberated human being.