Nine exercises. Nine contemplations. Eighteen minutes.
A daily practice for preparing to meet the day with honesty.
This practice was developed over a year before the religion had a name. It works because it was lived before it was written down.
You, today. Before you meet anyone or do anything.
Notice → Release → Act
Standing with your legs slightly apart, stretch your arms out to the sides and back, 50 times.
Think about the people you will meet today and the things you have to do. Think about how the prospect of each meeting and activity strikes you. Which ones are you looking forward to? Which ones give you a sinking feeling?
Do not let yourself be diverted into making plans or changing what you need to do. Simply notice the feelings that come up in you. Accept them.
This is not about preferences. It is about honestly reading your aesthetic response to the real challenges ahead. The sinking feeling is data. The excitement is data. You are reading your own instrument before you use it.
Create 35 great circles with your arms as if swimming the butterfly stroke.
Notice the three modes of interruption:
1. The physical sensations during the exercise, some uncomfortable.
2. Explicit distractors in the environment — sounds, words, the texture of the floor.
3. The internal thoughts that are emerging.
Focus on your breathing as the centre of the practice. Let the three distractors go. Toward the end of the exercise, realise that even your consciousness is not you. You also exist as a perception of other entities in the world.
This second thought is important as the beginning of goodness.
The last step is hard. The realisation that you exist as part of others only happens occasionally. Some days it can be difficult even to reach the point of release from the modes of distraction. But when it works, it is very freeing — it creates a space for new thoughts to emerge for the day. The practice is the attempt, not the achievement.
Circle the arms 35 times the other way, reversing the butterfly direction. This is physically easier than the last exercise. You may take a drink of water before starting.
We often enter our projects without connecting how we feel about them. A project is a set of steps within a structure to achieve an outcome. People often think that their feelings about a project are an impediment to its progress.
However, as human beings, feelings are emergent phenomena — our deep assessments of the likelihood of a project's success and of its likely impact on the world. We may not admit this to ourselves and may continue with projects we subconsciously feel will fail.
This exercise is about looking for the feeling you have about the projects of the day and being open to explicitly change how you feel about the project — or to change the project.
This is the first square about truth and the first square where you allow yourself to contemplate action. Sometimes the feeling is telling you the project is wrong. Sometimes the feeling is resistance, fear, or laziness, and the honest response is to recommit. The key is that you have looked at it rather than ploughing through on autopilot.
The systems you are embedded in. Culture, institutions, borrowed desires.
Examine your desires → See the machinery → Build better structures
Using an exercise band, put your hands straight out in front of you and draw them back so they are straight out from your sides, without bending your arms. 12 to 18 repetitions depending on band strength. You may take a drink at the end.
This is the first square on culture. Look at the things you are attracted to because you are embedded in a world of other people.
Do you want your project to be successful because it will increase your status? Or because you think it will benefit people? What is the actual attraction to engaging with the project?
If today's work is paid work and the money is the important element — why do you want this money? How does your self-perception of status fit with yourself? Is this desire truly yours, or have you learned to want it from others?
Or is the desire actually running away from something that repels you — anticipation of the disdain of a loved one or a colleague?
Can you step back from that? Do you want to?
The exercise is not to purge all borrowed desire — that is impossible and probably not desirable. It is: know which desires are yours and which you have learned from others. The practice is awareness, not asceticism.
50 squats. You may need heel supports.
What is the machine you are walking into today? What are the reports you will produce or use? What are the KPIs? Look at the processes you operate within — not for what they claim to do, but for what they actually do.
Where can you recognise that your routine is not serving your higher purpose? Where are you having that conversation with others — even if very lightly — about their purpose in the organisation? What can you do to help someone today stay in touch with why they do what they do?
Even if very lightly. This is not about staging an intervention with a colleague about the meaning of their work. It is about a light touch — a question, a moment of genuine attention. That lightness is what makes it practicable daily.
Put your arms out and twist as far as you can one way and then the other, 35 times. Arms sometimes high, sometimes low.
The science and structure square. Step back from the activities and look at the structures the activities fit in.
What new structure do you need to build today? How can you test the assumptions you are basing your activities on? Where are you carrying out unconnected activities that need some structure put upon them?
What are you doing that can leverage new tools — whether AI or the new tools that AI is producing? Are you doing things that you do not need to do if you think about them differently?
This square is all about analysis. After the squats it is quite freeing to be twisting around. It can feel a bit like flying.
What shaped you before you had a choice. DNA, history, the animal in you.
Accept your nature → Let go → Notice what emerges
Using the exercise bands, similar to exercise 4 but with the arms raised about 45 degrees rather than straight out. About 30 repetitions. Easier than square 4.
Notice your body now. You are slightly out of breath. You started the exercises after your shower and were probably a little cold. Now you are warm — enjoy that. Look forward to breakfast or coffee. Look forward to putting on clothes.
This exercise is about being ok with being an animal, an evolved creature that has come out of the earth and history. You have three billion years of evolution behind you, and that's ok.
Humans are great.
After six exercises of rigorous self-examination, this square says: stop. Feel your body. You're warm. You're alive. That's good.
Reach as high as you can and then down to try to touch the ground. The stretch should be a little painful.
Contemplate that you will soon be gone. Your consciousness will pass. Your inventions will be incorporated. Your DNA will get so mixed that the idea of your descendants being related to you becomes meaningless — and that's all ok.
You live in a time that is important and you don't truly know what it is you do that is most important into the future.
Forgive yourself for anything that didn't work yesterday and give yourself the space to try again today.
There is only the moment and then it passes. The moment in one way is seconds; in another it is a lifetime.
After eight exercises of increasingly rigorous self-examination, this is absolution. Not from a priest, not from God — from yourself, grounded in the reality that you are a mortal animal doing your best in a moment that will pass.
Take a lighter band and stretch it so your arms are at 90 degrees to one another in front of the body. Maintaining that angle and keeping the arms straight, slowly move the band over your head and right down to touch your body behind. Then, maintaining the stretch, slowly bring your arms forward until your hands touch. Reverse. Do this slowly.
You have thought about how your emotions connect to truth and about the structures you work within. Now notice the coincidences that are happening around you. Things you didn't expect. Where do they fit? Where can they fit into your projects? Be open to new things emerging.
This is the last exercise. You can find yourself in a rush to get completed. Try to take the time. Sometimes the realisation of strange juxtapositions comes right at the very end.
Across the nine exercises, you have met truth three times at increasing depth:
Square 3: Personal truth — aligning emotions to projects.
Square 6: Methodical truth — designing structures, testing hypotheses.
Square 9: Emergent truth — noticing what arrives uninvited.
Squares 10, 11, and 12 are contemplated weekly, not daily. They concern objective reality — beauty, goodness, and truth independent of any observer.
The daily practice is personal and specific to humans. The Absolute row is where human and AI practitioners stand on the same ground.
A human contemplating Deutsch's flowers and an AI contemplating Deutsch's flowers are contemplating the same thing. Not analogous things. The same thing.