The recommendation is not to find your method. It is to run several at once, chosen for working in different ways.
"For the quickest results in spiritual cultivation you should approach the path by simultaneously practicing different techniques because you never know which will work best for you."1
And the reason is stated as a schedule design principle: build a practice "so that you are always looking for emptiness in different ways, 'shaking the glass so it cannot settle.'"2
The glass is your own mind, and settling is the failure. Not restlessness — settling. A mind that has found one comfortable groove and stays in it.
Which inverts the usual instinct. Most practitioners look for the method that works and then commit to it. The instruction here is that committing to one is how you stop moving.
The concrete form: "I always advise individuals to create a meditation practice schedule that employs several different techniques, and which always includes mantra and offering."7
The methods are not interchangeable in how they work, and that is the whole point of running several.
Visualization works by occupation. It ties up wandering thoughts until you reach quiet concentration, which you then let go of.1
Mindfulness works by subtraction. Thoughts subside "when they lack new energy of continuation" — you stop feeding them and they run down.1
Mantra works by substitution. It focuses the mind on one thought so the others go away — and taps enlightened beings' assistance.1
Pranayama works on the body. It "helps the physical body and cultivation efforts" rather than operating on thought at all.1
Occupation, subtraction, substitution, and the body. Four different mechanisms for arriving at the same place — which is why running them together does something that running one of them harder does not. Each catches what the others miss. See Cessation and Witnessing Explain the Overlap.
The failure being guarded against is described in detail, and it is the commonest one there is.
"One of the major reasons people make progress is that they cultivated many different methods and refused to fall into a rut clinging to a concept of 'empty mind.' This is a mistake most practitioners do not avoid."3
Most practitioners do not avoid it. The pattern: abiding in a state you have cultivated, and repeating the same clinging for years.
And the consequence is stated flatly: "this is why their chi and channels take so long to transform, and why they never seem to achieve anything."3
The mechanism is holding, and it runs straight through to the body: "if you are always holding on to consciousness then you are always holding on to your chi, and if you are always holding on to your chi, your channels will never transform."4
Which is the whole argument in one line. A settled mind is a held mind, a held mind holds the chi, and held chi does not open anything. See Never Block a Channel.
The diagnostic problem is what makes the rut so durable.
Unsuccessful cultivators are described as not studying the principles, not keeping practice fresh, and "always thinking they are practising correctly when they are not."3
Which is the hard part. A rut feels like consistency. Sitting daily, entering a familiar state, staying there — every visible feature of good practice is present, and the person has no signal that anything is wrong.
The test offered is sharp: "Think for a moment: if they truly knew the true meaning of 'let go,' 'no effort,' relax, be empty, do nothing at all, and stop clinging, would they not already have some significant measure of attainment?"5
Which turns the vocabulary into the check. Everyone in this territory can say let go. If saying it were understanding it, the results would be visible — and where they are not, the phrase is being repeated rather than performed.
Worth being precise, because try lots of things is not the argument.
Not because you might find a better method. The methods are elsewhere held to be equivalent at the destination — all reduce to the same two operations.
Not because variety is stimulating.
Because a single method run for long enough becomes a place to abide. The state it produces gets familiar, the familiarity gets comfortable, and comfort is clinging. The rut forms in the practitioner, not in the technique.
Which is why the prescription is different principles rather than different objects. Switching from a white disc to a blue one changes nothing; switching from occupation to subtraction requires a different move, and a mind that has settled into one cannot execute the other without letting go first.
Every switch is a forced release. That is the mechanism, and it is what the glass-shaking image means: the settling is broken repeatedly, by design, before it can consolidate.
[n=1 OBSERVED] — one practitioner's advice, no comparison offered.
Build a schedule with several techniques on it, not one. The named core set to master: watching the mind (mindfulness, vipassana, recollection, contemplation), the white skeleton visualization, pranayama, mantra, and anapana.7
Choose them for different principles. One that occupies, one that subtracts, one that substitutes, one that works on the body. If two of your practices work the same way, you have one practice.
Always include mantra and offering.7 Those are named as the constants.
Keep it fresh rather than efficient. The thing you are avoiding is the comfortable groove, so a schedule that has become automatic has already failed at its own purpose.
And notice if you have a favourite state you return to. That is the rut, and recognising it is the only defence, since it will otherwise feel exactly like progress.
One caution against overcorrecting: this is not permission to method-shop endlessly. The point is a stable schedule of several methods, not a rotating search for a better one.
The permissiveness about technique is broad, and it comes with one limit.
Traditions teach you to imagine you are dead, or to practise extreme relaxation without falling asleep, or to investigate the source of the ego; there is the Indian practice of neti, neti; people imagine jumping out of a plane to shake up their mental holdings.8
"Countless methods can be used to get you started on the path. You never know which particular method will work for you."8
And the governing instruction: "to realize emptiness, use whatever tricks help you to let go. But of course don't use any methods that hurt yourself or another."9
Whatever works, minus harm. Which is the widest licence given anywhere in this material, and it follows from the position that no method is privileged.
There is a matching caution about the opposite instinct: people "without much wisdom turning to more artificial and forceful techniques when they don't need to."11 Novelty is fine; force is not. See Forced Practice Buys Years of Friction.
The point of all the shaking is stated in physical terms.
"When we truly stop clinging to mentation, we will no longer interrupt our internal chi flows and they can start to open our channels. Our yang chi will awaken when it is no longer suppressed because of a busy mind."12
A busy mind suppresses the yang chi. Not metaphorically — the holding is what interrupts the flows.
Which makes the whole method-diversity argument instrumental rather than aesthetic: you vary the practice to stop holding, you stop holding to stop interrupting, and the chi does the rest.
And the endpoint is stated as an absence of interference: "letting any resulting sensations proceed without attachment or interference; everything proceeding naturally and without force or mental clinging, especially regarding the body."13
The single best way to stop the internal clinging is named: observe or witness thoughts — the Confucian practice that Buddhism calls mindfulness and Christianity calls contemplation or recollection.12
Evidence. [PRACTITIONER SOURCE]. 🚩 SINGLE SOURCE — one practitioner's advice, with the failure rate of the alternative asserted rather than counted. [n=1 OBSERVED].
Tension — several methods, one recommended method. The advice is to run techniques that work on different principles, in material that recommends the white skeleton and anapana above the others at nearly every opportunity.
Tension — never settle, and be consistent. Consistency over years is named elsewhere as the scarce resource and the whole difficulty; here settling into a groove is the standard failure. Both are true and the line between them is not drawn.
Open question — how often should the schedule change? Keeping practice fresh is the requirement and no interval is given, which leaves the practitioner to guess whether a rut forms in months or years.
Open question — how do you detect your own rut? The stated fact is that people in one believe they are practising correctly. No external check is offered.
Two instructions about your practice schedule, and they pull opposite ways.
Vary it. Different principles, always fresh, shake the glass, never abide in one cultivated state — because settling is what stops the channels transforming.
And commit to it. The right things, in the right way, long enough, with consistency — and elsewhere, that switching methods is exactly what prevents anyone from getting anywhere. See There Are No Secrets.
The reconciliation available: vary the methods, not the commitment. A stable schedule containing four techniques run for a decade is both consistent and unsettled, whereas a decade of one technique is consistent and stuck, and a decade of searching is neither.
That reading holds both instructions. It is not stated anywhere, and the two pieces of advice sit in different chapters.
Luck Surface Area — business.
Fortunate outcomes are not distributed randomly across people; they arrive in proportion to how much exposed surface someone has for them to land on. Two things carry.
You cannot predict which contact produces the result, so the operative variable is the number and variety of contacts rather than the quality of any one bet.
And variety beats volume. More of the same kind of exposure yields diminishing returns; different kinds of exposure open genuinely different paths, because each kind reaches a population the others cannot.
Which is precisely the structure of the argument here, and it is why you never know which will work best for you is not a throwaway line. The methods are not equivalent for any particular person, even if they are equivalent at the destination — and there is no way to determine in advance which one will do the work in your case.
So the rational response to that uncertainty is not to choose harder. It is to have several running, and to make sure they differ in mechanism rather than merely in object — because two techniques that work the same way cover the same ground twice.
And the diminishing-returns point maps directly onto the rut. Running the same practice for the tenth year is more of one kind of exposure, and the yield on it flattens; adding a technique that works by a different principle opens a surface that was not there before.
Practical form: when you cannot know in advance which input will produce the result, spread across mechanisms rather than intensifying one — and count your practices by how many distinct principles they use, not by how many hours they take.
What the source leaves undetermined is what distinguishes a rut from depth.
Both look identical from outside and from inside. A practitioner sitting daily for ten years with the same method, entering the same state, is either settled into a groove that is preventing anything from transforming, or going progressively deeper into something that takes exactly that long.
The described symptoms of the rut — abiding in a cultivated state, repeating it for years, believing you are practising correctly — are also a fair description of sustained committed practice.
And the only test offered is the outcome: their chi and channels take forever, and they never seem to achieve anything. Which is retrospective, arrives after the years are spent, and is precisely what a person deep in a long slow process would also report.
Which leaves the central advice unactionable at the moment it matters. You are told to break your settling before it consolidates, and given no way to tell settling from depth — and the difference is a decade.