Excerpt from the Introduction
copyright © 2007. All rights reserved.

Because a moment is such a short thing ... unless you are already a master you might not even notice it. So this book begins - in Part One - with something easier to get your head around: a minute. A minute is like a moment with a handle on either side. You know where it begins and ends, so it's easier to grasp. With the first exercise, the Basic Minute, you will learn how to get in touch with a deep sense of stillness in just a minute.

Part Two - Intermediate Training - shows you how to make the Basic Minute more portable and versatile, becoming a tool that you can use wherever you are, no matter what is happening, even in an emergency. Part Three - The Moment in Time - is more philosophical, considering the nature of time and showing you just how flexible time can be. Part Four - Advanced Training - shows you how to reduce the length of a Basic Minute gradually, until you can experience its benefits in almost a moment. Part Five - Meeting the Moment - discusses the meaning of a moment in more depth, and provides some truly extraordinary examples of one. Part Six - Very Advanced Training - shows you how to find stillness all around you, all the time, in everything you do. Part Seven - The Miracle of the Moment - gives you some extra, more flexible, techniques that help you experience the miraculous potential of each moment. Finally, Part Eight - Mastering the Moment - challenges you to take one last little leap into mastery.

The chapters in this book are quite short, but there's a lot in them. They are distilled and highly concentrated so please don't gulp them down. (If you do, you might get spiritual indigestion, a common condition caused by reading too many big ideas without assimilating them.) The best way to read this book is very slowly, one short chapter at a time. Chew it over and then try reading it again. Practise the exercises. Live with them. When you've digested them fully and are hungry for more, go on to the next chapter.

If you do rush ahead to the end, you might not understand it. That's because the way I describe and define a moment deepens as the book progresses, and the book itself becomes a little more philosophical. Each chapter is written with the assumption that you've changed since practising the exercises in the previous chapter. In other words, the end of this book is written for a different you.

Do make a serious commitment to practising these exercises seriously, but please don't take them too seriously. Approach them as play rather than as penance, and feel free to adapt them to suit your life. There's just no telling what will work for you. Or when.

There is so much about the moment, and the nature of time, that is mysterious and paradoxical and impossible to explain or even understand. So you may want to put this book away for a while and then come back to it, sometime later, for another dip. You might see it completely differently.

If you have tried meditation before, I hope that you will open yourself to this different way. I've found that even people who are very experienced at meditation can benefit from this approach, for although this book is written for beginners, it is also written for advanced beginners. (Advanced beginners are people so advanced that they are always willing to begin again.)