Learn to Meditate

You will find on these pages some basic instructions on how to meditate, which you can use right away to begin experiencing the peace and communion with the Divine that meditation brings.

Part 1: Correct Posture

The Power of Affirmations

Scott Adams is the famous creator of comic strip Dilbert, and he is also a great fan of self affirmations. In this following video segment, it is told that Scott has used affirmations to achieve great things in his life, including winning in the stock market, getting into a great university, becoming a successful cartoonist, and writing more than one New York Times bestsellers.

Basically, what he did was to wake up every morning and wrote down his goal dozens of times, and in present tense. For example, at one point he wanted to make money in the stock market, so he wrote, “I, Scott, have made money in the stock market.” And sure enough, one night the name of a big winner came to him, and all he had to do was to buy it.

Bidding Craze

Barry Diller is one of the most famous personalities in American media. The Time magazine called him the Miracle Mogul because he had phenomenal achievements in various media companies such as Paramount Pictures and Fox Television. In addition to this, he also mentored a significant number of executives who later became successful businessmen themselves, and as the media dubbed, they were collectively known as the “Killer Dillers”.

The Wine Formula

Orley Clark Ashenfelter is a professor of economics at Princeton University. Even though his academic interests are in labour economics, econometrics, and law and economics, he is also an amateur wine lover who spends a lot of time studying it and even published a research paper on wine prices. Later it occurred to him that this “amateurish” study of his would soon become his most famous discovery which upset the entire wine community for over a decade. (Ayres, 2006)

The Silva Method

José Silva (1914-1999) is one of the pioneers in the field of self-help psychology. Although he was an electronic repairman by training, he had an insatiable appetite for the study of psychology like hypnosis. Initially, he hoped to use his skill to increase the IQ of his children, but he decided to go even further in the development of psychic abilities after he became convinced that one of his daughters was a clairvoyant. (Stone, 1991)

The Hero’s Journey

Joseph Campbell is an American mythologist who is famous for his study in ancient stories around the world. He discovered that all famous stories, no matter which part of the world it originates, share a very similar structure. Campbell also found that all characters in those stories fall into comparable archetypes which tend to repeat and again. In 1949, he published his masterpiece, Hero of a Thousand Faces, to disclose his findings, and many believe this to be one of the most influential books in the century.

Seeing the Unseen

Abraham Wald was a Jewish mathematician in the early twentieth century who was born in Austria-Hungary (now Romania). He later immigrated to the United States and started a new life there. One of his greatest contributions to the United States was helping the U.S. military to design their planes. During the Second World War, the B-29 bombers of the Allied were being shot down from time to time. They would like to fortify their aircraft, but if they did, it would sacrifice the mobility of the planes by adding weight to them. Therefore, the additional armour must be added to only the most fatal areas so that they could keep the increase in weight to a minimum.

Meditate for Profit

Vishen Lakhiani is a successful businessman, philanthropist and expert in meditation. He owes much of his success to his ability to communicate with his subconscious mind and tap into his unknown potential. His new book shares a very interesting story about his early career when he was working in telesales (Lakhiani, 2015). With the use of meditation, he tripled his productivity by just changing one simple thing in his habit.

The “Recovery Oil”

Cryotherapy, or “cold bath therapy”, is a popular recovery method among athletes. According to experts, coldness constricts blood vessels and decreases metabolic activity, which reduces swelling and tissue breakdown. “Ice baths don't only suppress inflammation, but help to flush harmful metabolic debris out of your muscles,” says David Terry, M.D., a runner who has finished both the Western States 100-Mile Endurance Run and the Wasatch Front 100-Mile Endurance Run 10 consecutive times.

Bullish or Bearish?

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a famous writer and statistician as well as a former financial trader and hedge fund manager. Many of his books are bestsellers which are praised by well-known figures in the business world (e.g. Gladwell, 2002), and one of them was even picked by the Sunday Times as “one of the best twelve books since the Second World War” (Appleyard, 2009). In the first book, Fooled by Randomness (Taleb, 2005), Taleb shared a story which shaped his entire philosophy of investing.

Watch What People Do

A great investor does not only have to know about finance, but must also understand psychology and be good at observation. Legendary speculator Jesse Livermore once told a story of successful investor known by the nickname “Pennsylvania Dutchman” (in Lefèvre, 1923). According to Livermore, the Pennsylvania Dutchman was an “indefatigable Missourian”. He was a great investor who believed in hearing answers with his own ears and seeing things with his own eyes. He valued the information that others gave him, but he would not believe it until it was personally verified by him.

Zen in the Art of Archery

The German professor Eugen Herrigel (1884-1955) was one of the first people who brought the Oriental philosophy of Zen to public attention in the West. Inspired by his love of Eastern philosophy, he travelled to Japan and taught at Tohoku Imperial University in Sendai. Under the mentorship of master archer Awa Kenzô, Herrigel studied traditional Japanese archery, or “kyudo”, from 1924 to 1929 before returning to Germany. After the conclusion of the Second World War, he published a book called Zen in the Art of Archery (Herrigel, 1948), which recounts his enlightenment through the process of learning kyudo, and it soon became one of the most famous works on Zen Buddhism of all time.

The Master Key Exercises

American businessman, philosopher and visionary Charles F. Haanel (1866-1949) is the most well-known thinker in the field of New Thought movement. His most famous book, The Master Key System (Haanel, 1916), had allegedly sold over twenty hundred thousand copies worldwide fifteen years since its publication. The book is rumoured to be the source which encouraged Bill Gates to drop out of Harvard and began his company known as Microsoft. It is also the origin of inspiration of many other famous classics of later generations, like Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill (1937) and The Secret by Rhonda Byrne (2006).

As a Man Thinketh So Is He

“We ourselves are the makers of ourselves,” wrote British philosophical writer James Allen more than a hundred years ago. Allen was a successful publisher during his time, and also one of the earliest exponents of positive psychology. His most famous work, As a Man Thinketh (Allen, 1903) is a pioneering work on the personal growth genre. The title of the book was borrowed from Proverbs 23:7 of the Bible, “For as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.” Just as the bible quote suggests, the circumstances experienced by a man is highly dependent on the beliefs and attitudes he holds in his mind.

Brainwashing to Win

A large part of success does not come from your skills or knowledge, but from your psychology. Tom Gullikson is an American tennis player who has won sixteen top-level doubles titles in his professional life. At one point in his career, Gullikson had great trouble playing in tie-breakers. For those who have no idea, a tie-breaker in a tennis match is a kind of “sudden-death” play-off when the score is tied, and Gullikson always did poorly because of the tension it brings, which costed him many important matches. Practising tie-breakers does not help, because it can’t simulate the pressure in a real competition.

Phone Call Robbery

It is ironic that the greatest bank heist in history was accomplished without using a single weapon. Stanley Mark Rifkin was a computer contractor who worked for the Security Pacific National Bank in Los Angeles, which gave him access to the transfer procedures inside the bank. He learnt that bank officers who were authorised to order wire transfers would be given a daily code each morning for their orders, but to save the trouble of remembering it, they would write down the code on a slip of paper and posted it where they could see it easily. This serious loophole in security let Rifkin run away with a large sum of money, which he later recalled that he felt “as if he had just won the lottery”.

Scientific Forecasting

When it comes to the science of making predictions, no one could ignore the brilliant studies conducted by Canadian-American political scientist Philip E. Tetlock. His book, Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction (Tetlock & Gardner, 2015),  is one of the best books on decision-making that I have ever read. It studies our mental process in making predictions of various events in sports, economics, international affairs, climates, etcetera. It was recommended by many biggest names in finance and economics like Eurasia Group founder Ian Bremmer, Deutsche Bank Chief U.S. Economist Joe LaVorgna, and Citigroup Vice Chairman Peter Orszag.