I was back with Ramaswami at the Christian Science Center a few weeks later, and it was clear that there was something specific he wanted to teach me. I was still working two jobs and was hoping this would be an interesting break in my recently very stressful life.

"The reason you're studying with me, " he started as we started pacing along the length of the pool, "is because you think that I can teach you something that will help with your career. That's OK - in our culture, everything needs to begin with self-interest. But your career is more than just a career, it is the key to happiness in your life - what percentage of your waking hours would you say you spend at work?"

His question brought me back to the present, and I did a quick calculation.

"Well, eight hours a day, five days a week, begins to add up ... "

"Yes, that's right. In fact, the two things we spend the most amount of time doing in our lives are sleep and work. Freud once said that life consisted of work and love - but in reality, it consists mostly of work and sleep, with a little bit of love thrown in from time to time."

"The path of meditation that I teach is part and parcel of you becoming intimately familiar with both of those aspects of your life." He stopped and paused as if ready to make a point. "As far as love goes, you're on your own for now!" he chuckled and then started walking again

"Today, we'll talk about work - once you've mastered these basic techniques, we'll spend a lot more time on what happens when you sleep... but your mastery of the world of sleep is, believe it or not, tied directly to your mastery of the world around you."

"What do you mean? Are you referring to dreams? " I asked.

"Yes, dreams are very important. But dreams are tied directly to what happens in the waking world. If your time in the working world is disjointed and frazzled, then your dreams will be frazzled. I'm going to teach you today about a different kind of meditation technique ... one that will help you take an important step on this path."

"There are, as you might have guessed, many, many different kinds of meditation - chanting, sitting, visualizing, walking, with eyes open, with eyes closed, breath meditation, object meditation, insight meditation, and on and on ... "

"I've heard of some of those, " I replied, "isn't chanting what the Hare Krishnas do?"

"Yes, that's right. They chant and dance ... losing themselves in the moment, in the song, and even in their group energy ... " He closed his eyes as if recalling the feeling. "After chanting for some time, it is possible to lose yourself completely in the chant ... you are in a place without self without ego ... you don't have to think about being in the moment ... you become the moment!"

"Wait a minute, " I interrupted. "Are you telling me that you chant just like the Hare Krishnas??" It came as a shock to me. Standing next to me was a successful businessman, dressed in proper business attire, who had started and run several companies; I could not see him out in Harvard Square with shaved head dancing around in circles clad in white cloth.

"Do you find that hard to believe? " he asked.

"Extremely."

"Well, as you've probably guessed I haven't done that in a long time. You see, I tried most of these techniques in my teens and my early 20's. It wasn't until the age of 29 when I started to focus on the business world. I've spent the last 12 years working in the high tech industry and teaching meditation, and assembling a spiritual path that integrates these two worlds into one."

"So you haven't done that recently? " I asked, still curious and a bit repulsed. To my scientific way of thinking, the world of the Hare Krishna's was one that the rest of us pointed to and laughed. It was inconceivable that someone from that world could be so successful in the arena that I wanted to play, the business world. He might as well have told me that he had been abducted by aliens, and this helped him succeed in the business world!

He laughed. "Oh, I still chant ... sometimes it's the only way to quiet your thoughts. You should try it sometime..." He was smiling and goading me, as he could clearly see my distaste for the practice.

"What type of meditation or path do you teach?" I asked. I had been looking at various books on meditation and had seen references to a number of different religions, paths, and philosophies, and wanted to understand where he fit in.

"Not an ordinary one, " he replied quickly, as if he had been asked this many times before. "The teachings are probably closest to some forms of Buddhism, but I have tried out techniques from many different philosophies. Some are variations of eastern religions, and some are based on Native American shamanic practices.

"The point, though, is not which religion we are studying. The real point is understanding your path in your work and in your life.

"Most gurus and meditation cronies will tell you one of two things: either 1) there are many paths up the mountain and it makes no difference which one you take, you still get to the top of the mountain. Or 2) they will tell you that theirs is the best meditation technique and every other way is inferior.

"I know they'll tell you this because when I was a young man I searched long and hard and that's all I could find. My teaching is a bit different. We actually will try multiple meditation techniques. Let me ask you a question: if there was a mountain, and one side of the mountain was covered with snow, and the other side was rainforest, which would you climb?"

Not only did I not expect the question, I had never climbed a mountain through either snow or rainforest and told him so.

He looked up for a moment and then directly at me: "Never mind, Here's another analogy. Think of two different sports ... say running and tennis. Though they are both good exercise, and they will both help you to stay fit, your experience will be different depending on which one you choose. And, most importantly, the muscles that you develop will be different. Though all meditation techniques are similar, they develop different muscles..."

I was still a bit confused. "But what muscles do meditation techniques help you to strengthen...?"

"The eventual goal of all spiritual techniques, is always the same: awareness. Awareness of a greater part of yourself. But you will find that certain techniques gel with who you are right now better than others. For example, chanting is probably not something you can even see yourself doing right now. It's not a technique that's aligned with who you are at this moment."

"How will awareness of a greater part of myself help me in my career?" I asked, still looking for some practical advice on how to go about starting my business, which had stalled. So far, we had talked only of vague concepts like energetic patterns, past lives, future selves, and tracking of clues, but I wasn't sure if this brought me any closer to my goal.

"Significantly. First, we will build your ability to concentrate ... that is almost always the first mental muscle that is strengthened during meditation. This will also help you to visualize a goal and to stick with it through times of trouble. This is a mental muscle too. "

"Most importantly, though, awareness will help you to perform self-reflection, to be aware of your own patterns, tendencies and how they might be obstacles to either your career success or to your spiritual success. This is what I meant by your energetic patterns."

"I've heard that visualization is a key part of any goal setting, " I replied, excited that he had linked meditation back to something that I believed in. I didn't notice that he was shaking his head, as if I had missed the most important part of what he was saying.

We had by now walked out of the Christian Science Center area and were walking up Massachusetts Avenue towards the river and the bridge to Cambridge.

"In the hidden worlds, the same principle applies that is true here in the everyday world: practice makes perfect. Although the eventual goal of meditation is awareness, the immediate goal is concentration, or, in the words of a famous Yogi, one-pointedness of mind to the exclusion of all other considerations."

"If that's the initial goal, then it is not enough to concentrate for 10-15 minutes in the morning and 10-15 minutes at night and expect that to be enough. I want you to meditate for eight hours each day to really hone your skills of concentration!"

"Eight hours!" I yelled out, incredulously. I had found it difficult to sit still for more than 15 minutes at a time! "How can I do that- I'd have to quit my career and become a professional meditator!"

He laughed as if I had made a great joke. Just when I thought he had stopped, he started again, slapping his thighs. "Yes, that's it. I want you to become a professional meditator! "

The he became serious again and pointed to some students who had just come out of the Berkelee school of music, which was located right on Mass Ave. "Musicians have very good concentration - do you know why? Because they are forced to spend hours at a time focused in on one thing - to play their music. During that time, they become engrossed and do not worry about other things - back to Meher Baba, one-pointedness and the exclusion of all other considerations."

"If you were to go off to the Tibetan mountains and find a master, he would give you tasks to do all day long. These might include chopping some wood, carrying some water, cleaning the latrine, or some other such day to day routine, in addition to the meditation exercises you would do. The obvious reason for doing these things is to get them done, but like everything in life, there is a hidden purpose here. Do you remember the movie Karate Kid?"

Of course I had seen it, as most people my age had. "In that movie, Daniel had a taskmaster, Mr. Miyagi, who was to teach him Karate. What did he make Daniel do? He asked him to wax the car, paint the fence, and then sand the floor! Remember?"

I remembered the scene well. He continued. "The obvious reason for doing these things was to wax the car, paint the fence, and then sand the floor. The hidden reason was to teach Daniel about Karate, remember?" I nodded again.

"The taskmaster used these tasks as a way to teach the pupil something at a deeper level. Well, the essence of the path that I am teaching you is to use your life and most importantly, your work, as a taskmaster to teach yourself things that you wouldn't otherwise have grasped."

"You must learn to concentrate while at work on the task you are doing to the exclusion of all else. This way you will not even notice the passing of time and will be developing your concentration of mind."

This struck me as interesting. "Well, that sounds reasonable, " I started. "Sometimes, when I'm doing computer programming, I get so involved in my work that many hours pass by and I don't even notice."

"Exactly! But it's not just the programming - suppose you have some phone calls to do, a memo to write, etc. You start writing the memo, then the phone rings and what do you do?" He acted out the events in a comical manner. "You stop writing the memo, you pick up the phone and talk to someone for a number of minutes. " His exaggerated movements looked silly and made me smile.

"When you finish the phone call, you go back to your computer, but your email icon is blinking. You then check email and find that you have two - a joke from a friend and from your boss - you read the joke and laugh. Then you read the note from your boss and cry." He held up his hands to his face and imitated a crying baby, enjoying both the scenario and his ability to show off his (very forced) acting skills.

"Now, someone walks by and you talk to them. Then it's time for lunch. When you get back from lunch, you make a phone call, handle a few more interruptions, and maybe you get back to your memo, but then you remember your boss's memo and go to see him. Do you get the drift?"

"Are you saying that I'm not getting any work done?"

"Not exactly. You're getting some work done, but you are using your work inappropriately. You are fooling around with work, and not being nearly as efficient as you can be ... " I nodded in agreement. "But, that's not the point!" he finished.

"Huh?" I thought that was exactly the point.

"The point is that you are not developing any skills of concentration, focus, or push-back, which are critical skills in both the hidden worlds and in the business world."

"What should I do differently? " I asked.

"It's simple. In the same way that you sit down to meditate for a fixed number of minutes, and then try to exclude other thoughts, you need to focus on work on tasks.

"Otherwise you won't just feel frazzled, you'll appear frazzled too. In today's business world if you want to be an entrepreneur you are going to have thousands of things to take care of - unless you can allocate time to focus, you will just move from reacting to one crises after another."

He continued his immediate lesson. "So, start by saying that I will do a draft of this memo. Don't answer the phone - let it go to voicemail. If someone walks by, ask them to come by later. If your email beeps, bring your mind back to the element of focus. If your mind wanders to the cute girl in the cubicle across the hall, bring your mind back and focus. This is the essence of meditation!"

"But Ramaswami, I though that part of meditating was to stop thinking?"

"That's a common misconception about meditation. Some forms of meditation lead to a complete cessation of thought ... but that's not going to happen until you've been meditating for years and years ... so initially we want to train ourselves to concentrate on a single thought...

"This is extremely important ... because thoughts are things. When you learn to isolate each thought-form, you will learn the essence of manifestation. For now, think of every task you have to do at work as having a hidden purpose: to develop your ability to concentrate, capesh?"

"But what if I have to take a phone call or my boss interrupts me, or I can't concentrate?" I asked, worried that I wouldn't know how to follow-through on his tasks. "How will I know I'm doing the right thing?"

"You engineering types are always over-analyzing!" He sighed. "Here is the test - at the end of a day of work, how do you usually feel?" he asked.

"Sometimes I feel tired, sometimes frazzled, sometimes really good," I replied.

"OK, the test is this: you should leave work feeling more refreshed than when you arrived. If you did this, then you were using your work as meditation. If you leave frazzled, then you did not do a good job. Understood?"

I resolved to try this new "meditation technique" at work and practiced it whenever I could over the next few weeks.

Initially, my attempts at mastering this new meditation technique ended in failure, as I was unable to concentrate for any extended period of time.

I found it extremely difficult to not read my e-mail as soon as I heard the 'beep' indicating that it had arrived. When the phone rang, there was an uncontrollable urge for me to pick it up, no matter what I was working on at the moment.

It did, however, make me very conscious that my entire day consisted of a series of decisions of where to focus my attention, and this decision was being made unconsciously based upon when the phone rang.

Each of these decision of attention by themselves were not very meaningful, but taken together they had a profound impact on how much work I got done and more importantly how "frazzled" I felt at the end of the day.

In fact, I found that I often didn't get very much work done over a period of several hours, and more than once I had to stay late in order to "catch up".

Gradually, every time I made a decision to stay focused and to let the signal from the outside world pass by until I was ready to pay attention to it, I won a little victory. And with each little victory it became easier for me to choose the right "decision" when given a choice.

This process wasn't unlike what I did when I sat down to meditate. I was letting thoughts & distractions come and go, and gently refocusing on whatever the subject of the meditation was. It was as if there was, as Ramaswami described, a mental muscle that I had started to exercise regularly.

Years later I would visit top managers at many large corporations and noticed that they minimized interruptions and had an incredible ability to clear away distractions and focus on the task at hand. I was starting to use the mental muscles from my meditation for my work, and starting to use my work as a way to improve my ability to meditate.