The Rains Method

AN INSTRUCTION MANUAL

The Art of

Perfection Meditation  

Actionable Meditation Instructions 

for the Practice of Jesism

Jes

Edited by Julie Armstrong

SYNOPSIS

Perfection Meditation is the whole effort of a meditator to apprehend and become perfection.  Perfection Meditation is broken down into six “tuning” efforts and Three Rewards that result.

Success in embodying the meditation results in perfect understanding of the Five Laws of Liberation, which includes the ability to strive for, cultivate, and embody perfect morality, the power to strive for, cultivate, and embody perfect tranquility, and the ability to strive for, cultivate, possess perfect wisdom.  The ability to perform perfectly within reality in any situation naturally follows.

In short, the central activity which solves the verifiable problems of humanity is Perfection Meditation.  Without Perfection Meditation, humanity’s problems of immorality and lack of wisdom will worsen, and this applies to every living human being right now and in the future.  With this meditation we are directly addressing the most important consideration of the human species in the most effective possible way, no less.

Nothing in Jesism will truly make sense without meditation, such as Perfection Meditation.  Everything in Jesism, all the teachings, trace their roots to Perfection Meditation.  Perfection Meditation ultimately teaches the laws of nature better than Jes or Jesism.  The findings of Jesism and Jes have been found many times before, though they are lost within a generation or two due to opportunism and genuine misinterpretation.  With this meditation the first hand experience might finally endure.

The Teachings of Jesism, derived from nature as examined in deep Perfection Meditation, in combination with the learner practicing Perfection Meditation and Jesism is the most direct and expedient way to recognize and become the perfection that life already is.  That awakening is the most we can ask for in this life.  It’s all we need to ask for.  And what Jesism points to is the only way to truly resolve our impurities on every level of society.  Everything else is child’s play.  Jesism points to the dream that contains our every victory and defeat.

MEDITATION METHOD

Perfection Meditation is a grounded six step process of maintaining “tuning” or adjusting six elements.  It is more like an athletic activity than a philosophy or ponderance.  The elements are the:

  1. Environment
  2. Body
  3. Posture
  4. Breath
  5. Breath-Posture
  6. View

“Tuned” means like a guitarist tunes a guitar string, a painter mixes blue and white for the perfect baby blue, a seamstress adjusts the position of a needle in a sheet of fabric to and fro, a fencer pushes his blade down the shaft of his opponents blade, a kisser attends to the force of his own lips, a race car driver applies and withdraws pressure to the throttle in a tight squeeze.  

Commitment is a huge part of Perfection Meditation.  We commit to the pose, the breath, and the state that is prescribed by the six elements of meditation.  We do not stray.  Meditation is a discipline.  Ultimately this meditation provides the greatest mental and physical comfort, however, it is not always comfortable.  New meditators usually have to walk through a little fire – if they’re lucky.

Tuning is nine hundred ninety nine parts listening and one part acting – same with every great performance.

In short, tuning means “regulating wisely.”  Wisely means with the appropriate education, diligence, and understanding.  That is the education of Jesism, the diligence of wanting the results of Jesism, and acquiring the understandings indicated by Jesism including the Five Laws of Liberation.

Wisdom may be acquired in many ways.  Through practice or outrageous luck, wisdom is at the heart of every great performance ever.  It is time we take our luck back into our own hands.  Sometimes the faculty is your own reason, sometimes the faculty is trusting someone else’s experience, but as the art matures, the Six Elements of Perfection Meditation become more or less fully governed by intuition.  “Your’s.”

I teach the reasonable aspects of tuning the six elements, and I teach the reasonable approaches to awakening one’s unreasonable intuition as someone who has attained the benefits pointed towards by Jesism.  For those I know more closely, I can help to develop the intuition as well.  But the final ninety nine percept of the quest is almost all up to you, except for an occasional pit stop my way, perhaps.  

By living according to delusion, so few people notice or heed of the wrong way signs posted all over their lives – all the way to their graves.  I am just here to point out the obvious that will one day become obvious to you.

This meditation is not magical or even that interesting.  “Tuning” the elements is the name of the game.  I’ll be more specific in a moment. 

TUNING THE ENVIRONMENT

Generally, the environment should be neither too stimulating, nor too unstimulating – to you.  A dark room with no sound for most people will either provoke internal sensory or mental activity or cause sedation.  Therefore, for most people, darkness is “out of tune” for Perfection Meditation environment.  

A very bright environment like a hospital or in the sweltering sun, for most people, will create a feeling of oppression, claustrophobia, potentially over-self exposure, etc.  Therefore, the very bright environment is an environment out of tune for most.  It must be tuned with action to become darker, if possible.

This usually takes me about one to five minutes, but as a beginner, take your time and enjoy the art of getting to know your surroundings and tuning your environment – enough.  Start slowly from the beginning.

Each person receives each environment and environmental component differently, what matters is that the environment is tuned to you, your mind – but not your thoughts or even your preferences.

So it goes for all aspects of each of the five senses:

  • Vision: bright/dark, detailed/homogenous, open/constrained, etc.
  • Hearing: loud/quiet, catchy (like gossip)/washy (white noise), high notes/low notes, etc.
  • Smell: smelly/not smelly, pleasing/not pleasing, etc.
  • Taste: usually not a thing but containing taste/lacking taste, strong/faint, pleasing/not pleasing, etc.
  • Touch: smooth/texturous, drafty/still, cold/hot, stiff/soft, etc.

Looking at it now, arranging the proper meditation space is a bit of an art.  Each of the five senses should be freed from agitating elements or numbing elements with reasonable efforts.  The task of regulating the environment should never interfere with the amount of time you spend meditating in the long run.  

Get the environment as right as you can and sit down.  This isn’t interior design.  Strangely, you may think, you’ll get just as much from having the whole meditation out of tune as in tune!  Nonetheless we make a diligent practice out of this tuning.  

You can always go back to change it tomorrow.  Obviously, having a place to regularly meditate will certainly help make the process more efficient and the atmosphere better tuned.  For an idea of the way I tune spaces look no further than footage of my apartment, patio, or how I set the table at the various bars I meditate at on YouTube/@JesismMeditationJournal.

Do not change the environment after Element 1, even if it is uncomfortable, unless there is a lot to lose like a fire occurs.

Last, do not let the task of arranging a good meditation environment stop you from catching meditation in waiting rooms, your friends place when they’re using the bathroom, and everywhere the environment is “out of ideal tune,” etc.

You will learn by the Second Reward of this meditation: Samadhi that every environment is imperfect.

TUNING THE BODY

Just as the environment must be influenced to become balanced and non-intrusive, so too must be the body.  This usually takes me zero to five minutes, but getting to know your body, take your time and enjoy the intimacy with yourself now and at all times as you “tune” your body.

We could break the Body Element down like this, the:

  • Stomach: not very full, not too empty; not thirsty, not parched
  • Bladder: evacuated.  Don’t balance it, evacuate it before meditating, or make sure it’s empty.
  • Bowels: there should be no impulse to defecate while at rest.  Meaning if not working or otherwise preoccupied, there must be no impulse at all to defecate.  Otherwise defecate before meditating.  Note: removing waste from within the system will indeed clarify your meditation.
  • Skin: agitations like itches, socks bunching up and stimulating your toes, any restrictive clothing (try to minimize clothing in meditation and in general, anyway), drafts, day in and day out sores and cuts and such should be treated (not necessarily to heal but to reduce stimulation to your mind while meditation.  Note: orienting your self care, work, and relationships around meditation leads to good decisions.  If it benefits your meditation, it tends to be a good life move, by the way.
  • The body may need to be tuned for dry eyes, pains, muscle tensions, etc.
    • Tuning your body each day for one minute during meditation will do wonders for your long term physical health

The idea is you want to quiet the body down before you sit to quiet your mind down, since the various messages of the body will proliferate in your mind during meditation, best to do what we can to quiet these bodily demands before formally starting meditation… from the beginning.

After completing Element 2, if the body presents demands such as the desire to urinate or itch, I recommend that you do not act on these desires, and remain seated.  Those of you who want to get the most out of Perfection Meditation, I would say to not satisfy these impulses even if they would “tune” the body.  Maintain commitment to Element 3: the Posture.

Do what you can and need to in about 1-5 or so minutes – usually.

TUNING THE POSTURE

At this time, I allow the people I work with who are learning meditation with me a great deal of freedom in how they compose their postures during meditation, but I am still learning how to teach, and I am not sure it will always be this way.  Freeform or strict, posture must be tuned according to these aspects, the:

  • Skeleton
  • Muscles
  • Seat (“seat” means objects contacting the body other than clothes)

And these make up the Pose (the pre-specified configuration of the body) during that particular meditation.  The pose addresses where every part of the body belongs from the tongue to the toes to the eyebrow muscles.

Since we don’t all have OCD, many of these body regions are left unspecified or given a range like “not too upright, not too slouchy; eyes open but not jacked open.”

As I said, all of this specificity I am leaving alone for now, except this:

Whatever the pose committed to being at the beginning you must maintain.  So if the pose is just sit, then sit any way you want, but if the pose you assign yourself is sit with eyes open, you must sit with your eyes open.  And as I said the prescription for poses can and sometimes should get very very specific (like tongue on the roof of the mouth with mild suction and thumbs placed so gently together “as if suspending a piece of paper.”)  I’ll explain.  I was once taught how to catch my mucus in a pool in my hands when I had a cold (and not sniff) as proper form.

At this time, the pose I assign is “non-formal” meaning do whatever – lacking in form; just as you adhere to this non-formal pose, whatever pose or configuration you determine for yourself you must abide by no matter how uncomfortable, from my point of view.  Meditation posture is often an extremely rigorous physical discipline, but there is a tranquility on the other side of that intensity – just as in life.

Without going into it too much, the reason for this rigidity is that shifting positions in meditations is the very essence of seeking satisfaction and avoiding dissatisfaction, which I suggest with the First Law of Liberation is a fool’s errand and more or less the root of all of our problems.  I teach that life is unsatisfactory through and through.  To place effort to make it otherwise is effort that inflames the problem and makes perfection even more obscured.

Going through the difficulty of the pose with absolute devotion and specific choreographic commitment – almost paternal like commitment – is a living, down to earth embodiment of the Laws of Liberation, which I claim are freedom.  The posture is also a living embodiment of your whole life.  Discipline and commitment are indispensable features of any real meditation practice, any performance.

I use these terms to indicate the level of strictness for the pose:

  1. Non-Formal (this is like maintain mental alertness and relaxation, but hold yourself however – what we usually do at this time, maybe a tiny bit of occasional movement)
  2. Informal (this is like a simple guy sitting in a chair being aware of his body kinda like, for example knees are at right angle, head inline with the shoulders, learning back gently)
  3. Semi-Formal (this is like when I am sitting Indian style leaned back generally erect with hands in a specific configuration, more or less unmoving)
  4. Formal (This like quarter, half, or full lotus, or sitting in a manner that concentrates the entire upper body weight on the perineum, such as on a bar stool, all of the body regions have an assigned position from the tongue to fingers to toes, with special emphasis on the body core/perineum, no movement)

In my videos and such you usually see me do the first three.  I would say about one out of every 12 meditations I personally do meditation formally.

The main takeaway on posture is that you are giving up a significant amount of choice: you aren’t getting up, you aren’t moving (certainly not much), you aren’t talking, you are committed fervently to the pose whether non-formal or formal.  You are physically denying your body and soul’s urge to make life satisfactory.  It’s exactly the times when you want to break form that you have the most to gain by maintaining the form.

The second takeaway is that you are going to hold yourself in a pose that is “athletically” or “yogically” unintrusive to your mind.  Said somewhat differently, you are going to influence your emotions and thoughts by the sheer feedback of -holding- a certain pose (from a certain point of view this is literally done by the force of maintaining the pose).  And yes, this most definitely works according to modern science.  Look up “facial feedback,” ”NLP,” or “laughter therapy.”  So with fidelity to your pose you are going to set a physiological basis or foundation for an empty mind and thereby true happiness.

Between stillness and expressing mental emptiness in the stance of your body, there is absolutely nothing more of value to meditation in this entire world with all its books, videos, etc.  All of the tradition, lore, energies, yogas, superstitions, mysticisms, out of body experiences, and magic is just accents on the simple act of letting go – pretty, empty accents.  

I have worked hard to strip Jesism of these accents – even though people love them.  I hereby claim that all the levitation, tantric, kundalini, and telekinesis, while not necessarily not-real, are all parlor tricks and of more or less zero value.  I am giving you the golden heart of meditation with Perfection Meditation.  Everything else is just ancient cultural productizations of the real thing that have been resuscitated as corporate products in the West since the 1960s.  

Take heart, because throughout history there the real thing has always reasserted itself.  One day it fully will.

TUNING THE BREATH

The breath is a very subjective experience and activity that much has been written and taught about.  The breath is comprised of four phases: inhalation, inhalation-hold, exhalation, exhalation-hold.  The inhalation-hold is basically holding your breath, and the exhalation-hold is close to reaching a vacuum “without air” inside your body.  

Simply put, the breath must be tuned along the following features, the:

  • Duration of each of the four phases of the breath
    • Exhalation-hold is the longest
    • Exhalation is the next longest
    • Inhalation is the next longest
    • Inhalation-hold is the shortest 
  • The rhythm or relative durations of each of the four phases of the breath 
  • The rate of air exchange of the inhalation and exhalation
  • The stability of those rates (does the volume of air consumed/expelled change during the phase of the breath and how much)
    • The rate of rate of… and so on.
  • How the rhythm changes as the meditation goes from start to finish, say thirty minutes, for example
  • How clearly and openly the meditator views his emotions, thoughts, body, environment, etc
  • How sophisticatedly the mediator communicates this information to the regulating processors of the breath

TUNING THE BREATH-POSTURE

The tuned posture and tuned breath must be tuned to each other, and not just separately.  This takes place of course by first tuning the posture, then the breath, and then you will go back and forth listening to each and adjusting it to the other until you are attending to just one thing: the union of the breath and the posture (body).  The Breath-Posture is a lot like the child of the Breath and the Posture.  It is “separate” from them, but “of” them.

I think this is something you may have to learn after you have some experience with the first four Elements, most likely.  For now, mindfully tune the posture in Element 3 and then the breath in Element 4.  Finally, maintain that tune by allowing your attention to gently and freely glide back and forth between the posture and breath like eating dinner with two loved ones absorbing their conversation.  Let them “make love” and incorporate each other.

Practicing this will reveal in time that the breath and posture together make a super-organism just like when two people fall in love.  So not only does each member of the couple need their independent care, but the relationship needs care almost as a separate entity, if you will.

Allow yourself to understand this better as your meditation practice deepens.

TUNING THE VIEW

View means how the world meets your awareness.  Awareness means “the totality of your perceptions, both actuated and potentiated,” for now.  Said differently, awareness means “all that is available to be perceived by you.”  The spoiler is that’s everything, but that’s for a separate conversation about dogma.

So the view might be said to be like a fiber optic cable that has data passing in both directions.  This analogy is for the view of people with limited awareness, though.  Meditation is learning to annihilate this cable and view all things at all times (which includes incompletenesses of view).

It is very important to completely liberate our View.  View is the passageway between our mind and the senses.  Once your View is liberated, you won’t need to meditate (you just will).  This is where the Laws of Liberation actually meet in daily life with the people and things we contact.  This is where meditation helps us work, gain, love, befriend, and be at peace.  When the View is being tuned, most likely later in your meditation practice, it will clarify your practice of the first five Elements and your practice will clarify your View.  Then your mind is a perfectly functional family at last.  This perfect functionality is the Three Rewards: Morality, Samadhi, Wisdom.  

When the view is truly liberated, whatever information we encounter either internally or externally, we will be clear and free of unnecessary anxiety and anger, and we will know we can handle it to make our world – the world – a better place.

So in meditation we learn to tune the view.  How do we do this?  It’s simple.  Start from the beginning.  First:

  1. We tune the environment
  2. We tune the body
  3. We tune the posture
  4. We tune the breath
  5. We tune the breath-posture

Each of these things must be in relatively balanced order in order to truly access the states of concentration that allow us to tune our view without having to juggle the previous five stages, so this is also something to learn more about with experience meditating with Perfection Meditation.

For now, it can be said that just as the environment can be made hotter or colder by adjusting the AC, the manner in which we absorb, process, and excrete information can be adjusted, using the breath-posture and other elements, but also through direct episodes of adjusting the View with developed levels of meditative skill.

GENERAL NOTES

During Perfection Meditation you will naturally shift from one element to the next.  This is natural throughout the meditation.  It’s not exactly linear.  Do not “play an arcade game with the elements.’  Dial them in briefly and then stay put and sit out the meditation.  It’s about the staying.  The commitment.

Everyone is different, but I would say 25 minutes of consecutive sitting in the morning before work and doing stuff and 25 minutes in the evening when all productivity is complete.  Talk to me about the specifics of your meditation practice.

Without doing this at least 15 minutes a day, every day, you are wasting your time being involved with Jesism to say nothing of life.

As we go down the list of Six Elements, the level of volition must drop in order to tune the element.  Volition means “motivation corrupted by the self illusion.”  As we go down the list from Element One to Six, intuition takes command of the tuning.  Intuition means “motivation without self.”  The Environment can be pretty well tamed by reason, judgement, science.  If you apply those methods to your View you will go crazy.  Exactly that actually does make many people crazy.  

For example, setting up your apartment as an environment for meditation can be highly volitional (put this here, put that there), but tuning the breath in Element 4 requires an amazing amount of letting go (of ourselves, of volition, of ambition).  The breath is more tuned by listening than actually tuning.  By the time our view is the subject of tuning in this meditation, there is only a trace of the self remaining active – and in Perfection Meditation, even that trace is actively diminishing.

Spend a lot of time and attention on the earlier stages at first, because they are the ones that are most accessible to master, but more so because having the right environment is the great great grandfather of View, so you are most likely to get the full results if you fully cultivate the beginning.  As I always say, “we start from the beginning.”  Then the later stages will tell you how to improve the earlier stages and vice versa.

What results from dedicating to this meditation is an eventual round table of your best friends and advisors lovingly communing with you every day.  The advisors aren’t me or Jesism or even the Jesism Junkies, they’re the Six Elements – they’re who you really are – nothing.

The bedrock of what I am teaching will stay the same throughout my teaching career.  This is new so, the structure and names and stuff of this meditation will all change.  The essence does not change.

GREATER JESISM

Three Rewards of Perfection Meditation

  1. Morality
  2. Samadhi
  3. Wisdom

Also the “real life” love, money, etc. disciplines.  More another time.

How Jesism Drives it Home

The Three Rewards are then cultivated in the soil of your love lives, money, and all the stuff that you are attached to as of now until the harmony and equanimity of your mind pervades the world.  If you’re reading this, friend… the time is now.

What is Jesism

The Teachings of Jesism are the first hand account and transmitted explanation of the natural laws I have discovered through a lifelong practice of examining life – and the dumb luck of actually discovering life as-it-is – which is fundamentally the same as the process of discovery I outline for you and everyone I love.

Final Result 

“Jevani”

More another time.