The Thing It Landed OnAt the back6 min
Where this came from
The practice underneath this book is Raja Yoga as taught by the Brahma Kumaris, followed by the author for more than ten years.
They did not write this. They have not seen it. It is one person's reading of what he was taught, put to a use nobody asked him to put it to, and where it is wrong, the fault is his and not theirs. It is not an official publication of the Brahma Kumaris and should not be taken for one.
And this book owes you one more thing than the other books do, because of what it is about.
Everything in these fourteen chapters works without believing anything. That was the point of writing it this way. But it would be dishonest to let you finish it thinking that the tradition it comes from means by soul roughly what this book has been careful to leave undefined.
They mean it literally. Not a metaphor, not a way of speaking about the part of you that is hard to name. A soul is a point of conscious light — the size of a star seen from here — and it is the thing reading this sentence, and the body is what it is driving. They hold that it is eternal, that it was never created and does not end, and that what you have been calling your personality is the record it is carrying.
And they do it in connection with God. The practice in chapter eight is, in the tradition, not a solitary act of noticing. It is remembrance, directed at a being they hold to be real, particular, and currently present. Everything about the state described in chapter seven, they would say, comes from that connection and not from the noticing.
And it changes what you are looking at when you look at somebody else. Chapter ten is already about this, and of the fourteen it is the one that comes nearest the tradition without saying so. Theo sees what Gavin's move is for; the cost of it drops from an afternoon to about twenty minutes; and the chapter is careful to say that this is a guess made from outside, held loosely, never a finding.
The tradition goes further than that chapter could, and in a particular direction. What it has a practised person see in Gavin is not the position Gavin is defending. It is not Gavin at his best, either, or Gavin as he might have turned out. It is Gavin's original condition — what they hold was there before any of it, and is there still, under everything he has acquired since.
They are specific about this in a way the book is not. The whole of Gavin's difficulty — the small refinement, the needing to have been in the room, the two years of it — is on their account something picked up, not something he is. What he is, they would say, is the thing chapter two leaves unnamed in Theo, and it is the same in both men, and it is unharmed. They would add that it is not from here: that souls come from somewhere and go back, and the word they use for that place is a home.
So they would not call this thinking better of Gavin than he deserves, or being generous about him. They would call it looking at the older thing rather than the newer one — and they would say the irritation thins of its own accord when you do, rather than being risen above or managed down.
That is not in these fourteen chapters, and not by accident. Chapter ten's version can be checked, which is why it is the one that is here: it asks you to notice what that person costs you over the next few weeks, and the number either falls or it does not. The other version cannot be checked at all. A reader who tried it and felt nothing would have no way of telling whether the claim was false or they had simply not got there, and that is the exact shape of every spiritual promise this book was written to avoid making.
What is in this book is the smaller thing. The same practice with the metaphysics set aside and the connection left out — which works, and which the author has found worth doing, and which is not what they teach. If what you have read here was useful, you should know that it is the reduced version, and that the people it came from would say the reduction is exactly where the power went.
It has been left out rather than argued with. It was not his to carry across.
And one last thing, which is about a sentence you may have finished for yourself.
This book leaves something unnamed on purpose. Chapter two says that something was there that the remark did not reach — and then it stops, and across thirteen more chapters it never says what that something is.
Most readers finish the sentence anyway. In English the word that arrives first is usually awareness: you are the awareness that watches. It arrives because it is the nearest word lying about, and because a great many books have left it lying there.
It is not this book's word. It is not theirs either.
They do not say you are awareness. They say the thing set out above — a point of conscious light, particular, countable, driving a body — which is a far stranger claim and a much more specific one. Awareness is close enough to sound like agreement and far enough away to be a different teaching, from a different place, with different consequences. Having spent fourteen chapters not saying what the thing is, it would be a poor ending to let the handiest word say it on my behalf.
So the gap is still open, and you are not missing a word that was kept from you. Chapter two says as much as can honestly be said from a Tuesday evening: that something was there which was not standing in the spot that got hit. Everything past that is either what they say, which is theirs, or a word that belongs to somebody else.
What was taken, then, is a habit rather than a doctrine: that a person is not the positions they occupy, and that this can be checked in an ordinary week rather than believed. Everything else was left where it was found.
There is no address for the tradition anywhere in this book: no centre, nothing to send off for and no next step. If you want to look into it, you are perfectly capable of doing that without help from here.
Om Shanti.
It is how the people who taught him say hello, and goodbye. What they mean by it is I am a peaceful soul — that peace is not somewhere a person gets to, but what is there underneath when nothing has been added.