The question is, how can the balance be accomplished? The traditional Buddhist approaches to the restoration of free will and conscious awareness require a long and arduous discipline of meditation over the span of many years.

As the results of transcranial magnetic stimulation with experienced meditators suggest, these techniques do indeed work. The data collected at the E.M. Keck Laboratory for Functional Brain Imaging and Behavior on the Madison campus of the University of Wisconsin, USA, demonstrate as much.

The draw-back is, in the past, these techniques were invented, taught and elucidated upon mainly by monks and other people who were in a position to live a life of seclusion and contemplation. In other words, in their old approaches these techniques are time-consuming and require years of dedicated effort.

The question now is, can we accomplish the same?

Can the average person achieve comparable levels of mastership and conscious awareness as Buddhist masters after twenty or more years of meditation practice?

Is this achievement possible for an individual living in the modern world, going about his or her business, and taking care of the many obligations that are taken for granted by any ordinary socially active person?

The answer is, yes, with the right motivation and commitment, it is possible. There are approaches to conscious awareness and emotional intelligence that are geared toward direct recognition of what is so in the moment which bypass the mental processing via memory.

One pertinent example is the Core Empowerment Training, developed by Dr. Paula Horan and based on several time-tested meditative techniques.

In the Core Empowerment Training, destructive emotions and unconscious behavior patterns themselves become the object of our exploration.

They are not judged, and neither are they rejected. No effort is made to push them away. Instead, participants are guided to directly feel them, and to cultivate a sense of exploration about every circumstance that arises, whether seemingly "comfortable" or "uncomfortable", "happy" or "sad", "good" or "bad".

This direct feeling and recognition brings about a sudden shift in perception. We cease to identify with the latest destructive emotion or behavior pattern. Although we can notice and sense its presence clearly, we also know without a shadow of a doubt that this is not who we are, but only a conditioned response with which we sometimes identify.

Subsequently, once the link of identification is broken through noticing and most of all feeling from the Heart, the same old destructive emotion or behavior pattern can no longer rule us.

Depending on the individual, 15 years of experience on the part of the facilitator has shown that participation in three to five, 5-day seminars over a two or three year period can help to stabilize one’s ability to transcend the filter of memory and live a true present.

This fast track is made possible through a combination of fine-tuned techniques and extensive meditative experience on the part of the facilitators.

"I have investigated and tried many different trainings and seminars around the globe for the last five years but have come across little that could compare with the astounding success in terms of boosting emotional intelligence and intellectual flexibility that the Core Empowerment Training can facilitate in its participants", says Leadership and Emotional Intelligence consultant for Holistic Training Scotland, Irene Speirs-Caskie.