My mother was a spiritualist, and I've always been aware of "something" that lies just outside our own physical experience. Science has a tendency to tell us that if we can't see and measure something, then it can't exist - yet this seems to be a very restricting point of view. I've had a scientific upbringing, and I think that science has transformed our lives dramatically - it has been enormously successful, and I have a lot of respect for the scientific method. Science has given us the ability to extend our five senses - we can "see" stars that emit radio waves instead of light, for instance. Scientific method has given us the tools we need to distinguish between flights of fancy and ideas that have practical applications - and just look at the applications that science has given us, both positive and negative, that would have seemed like pure magic to anyone alive a hundred years ago: the Internet, television, nuclear weapons that could wipe out the human species, people in space and on the moon, mass communication, genetic engineering, heart pacemakers... the list is endless.

In some ways, though, science has been too successful. It has been such a powerful tool that anything that lies outside its realm is seen as being either inferior, or non-existent. This is a controversial statement, but I think it's true; any kind of psychic phenomenon is rejected by science, because phenomena are supposed to be the remit of science - so if science can't explain it, it can't be happening. Science does accept that some things do lie beyond its jurisdiction - music, art and literature for example - and so isn't threatened by these; it simply devalues them. This may seem an unfair statement - I know lots of scientists who love music or art and have a huge interest in it, but subjects like these tend to be underfunded in our schools, and musicians, writers and artists are, with a few notable exceptions, not generally very well rewarded in our society.

And yet there really are phenomena that lie outside the realm of science. Even the most "rationalist" scientist would admit that people fall in love, for example; it can't be explained, it can only be experienced. Similarly, meditation opens us up to experiences that lie beyond our normal perceptions and for me, it has been these experiences that have shaped my ideas and beliefs. This has never been in conflict with my scientific upbringing - these experiences add to the universe that I experience, they don't detract from anything that science has also taught me about this universe.

This site has a number of practical meditation exercises. I haven't included them on this page, because there are many different types of meditation, and I've tried to associate each sephira on this site with a different meditation. Click on the Site Map icon below, and then click on any sephira (except for the top three); at the bottom of each page relating to the sephira is a practical exercise - each of these exercises is a form of meditation. Try them out and see which ones work for you best.