Dharma Metrics: Meditate to Change the World

The Asian Classics Institute Meditation Timer

The Asian Classics Institute has a goal of providing students and friends with a toolbox of applications to help in their spiritual practice, and the ACI Meditation Timer is one of them. These tools, and the practices they support, help to fix every problem we could have in our lives. The ACI Meditation Timer is a helpful tool--it means, "I am doing my meditation practice," whether it be for five minutes or an hour. Doing regular meditation has many positive life implications.

The ACI Meditation Timer has a tracking function. This is very important when someone is doing a practice. It helps keep track of how much time you've been spending on meditation. You can add comments on how your meditation was. It will give you an overview of this week, this month, or even this day. You know how much meditating you are doing.

When you look back over time, the changes in your meditation practice are amazing. You see how it was, how you felt about meditating, and what problems and joys came up. Looking backward, it's amazing how deep the change you will see in yourself is.

"I know myself much better now." This is a frequent comment from users of the ACI Meditation Timer. It can help you understand why you may be having afflictions. Or why unexpected good things may show up in your life. Even five to ten minutes of meditation practice a day can bring big realizations. It's a continuous job of slow but definite spiritual work.

The Asian Classics Institute, for the first time in 2023, is offering a program called Traveling to the Diamond World. And the ACI Meditation Timer is a crucial part of that program. It's a year-long project from January to December. In January, participants in this free monthly program started with personal meditations of eight minutes, helped and supported by guided meditation classes given by ACI teachers. 

ACI was motivated to offer the program because our students needed this support. When teachers offer dharma classes, they choose what and how to teach based on what their students need. We asked ourselves, what can we do to help students the most? One of the answers was, a Traveling to the Diamond World program that will help students learn more about meditation and more particularly, learn easily and with lots of support how to meditate for longer and longer periods of time.

Geshe Michael Roach, who founded ACI and inspires all the work we do and offerings we make, always says that in order to see emptiness directly you must have a meditation practice of an hour a day. Yet this is very difficult for modern people to achieve, with their busy lives and distracting, over-full schedules. For many people, the idea of sitting on the cushion for a full hour in a state of meditation is both scary and impossible to imagine.  Geshe Michael frequently tells the story of one of his yoga teachers, who advised him to use an old-fashioned telephone book--a very thick book comprised of very thin sheets of paper.  "Take one page every day and do your yoga pose leaning on that page.  Every day, add one more page. Before you know it, you will be able to do your pose leaning on the full three-inch book."  

It's the same with meditation. Starting with an eight-minute meditation, which is reasonable for most people, Traveling to the Diamond World adds one minute each week. And the ACI Meditation Timer tracks that effort. At the end of the year, each person will reach 60 minutes of meditation in each session. We want all our students to get enlightened, and learning to meditate for one hour is a crucial step in achieving that.

ACI students told us they needed a better meditation practice. They needed help to build their practices. The students asked for Traveling to the Diamond World to help them start, build, understand, and succeed in meditation. 

So ACI developed and offered a two-part response: 1) we are offering monthly meditations, with help and support, through Traveling to the Diamond World; and 2) we are offering a tool to track students' practices, the ACI Meditation Timer.

For many students, even the eight-minute starting point is challenging.  ACI staffer Francisco Miranda, who is helping with the Meditation Timer and also participating in the program says, "For me, five minutes of meditation is very long. If you don't have the habit of meditating, it's very hard to sit for even eight minutes!  I feel like I'm going crazy. My body wants to move every second. It's hard!"

So we are helping students to build a practice where we add one minute per week. We start with a short period of time so our bodies will accustom themselves to sitting still. It's not so hard to add one minute a week. But if you try to start with one hour, says Francisco, it's likely you will never do it again!

When you add one minute a week, Francisco says, amazing things will happen in no time at all. Don't start with one hour.  But when you add only one minute...

"Time goes crazy, but in a good way," Francisco tells us. "You will have more than one hour to give to your meditation. Meditating like this, adding one minute per week, actually creates space and time. What seemed impossible becomes a reality. I don't know how it happened, I can't explain it, but I suddenly seem to have plenty of time to meditate now, even though my schedule is as demanding as it always was."

The Traveling to the Diamond World participants are up to more than 45 minutes now. 

Our goal is that as a group, the Traveling to the Diamond World participants will achieve ten million minutes of meditation collectively in 2023. ACI believes that this achievement will change the world. There is a cumulative effect when so many people meditate together like this, with a common goal and a common tracking of time spent meditating. 

ACI christened the project Traveling to the Diamond World because the thing which is most like experiencing emptiness in the conventional, deceptive world is seeing a diamond. Since one hour of meditation a day will help us all see emptiness directly, we wanted to include diamonds in the project name.

The ACI Meditation Timer--which tracks and totals all participants' meditation minutes on an ongoing basis, so we'll be able to tell when we reach ten million collective minutes--can be found on the ACI Online Learning Platform. To access it, go the ACI website (https://asianclassicsinstitute.org/), choose Study>Study Online, and sign in to the platform (or register to sign up for an account). You will find a tab for the Meditation Timer in the left-hand sidebar.

When you choose "Meditation Timer," you will go straight to the tool:

And you can begin!

The ACI Meditation Timer is free and easy to use. All minutes meditated go into a pool on a database. Toward the end of the year, we will begin reporting on how close we are getting to ten million minutes. So we invite you to meditate with us.  Open the timer and begin adding your precious meditation minutes to the group's 2023 effort. Change the world with us.

You can start at any time during the year, whether you attend Traveling to the Diamond World or not. We invite you to use the ACI Meditation Timer. Without your using it, we may fall short of our goal. So if you are meditating, be sure to chip in. Every minute counts!