THE
ENLIGHTENMENT MACHINE
I take back
everything I said
in my book and in this web page about the Zen process being long and
difficult,
requiring years of practice and a will to face the truth no matter how
hard you
may want to resist. A guy who reads this webpage kindly sent me a copy
of Andrew Cohen's
magazine What Is Enlightenment? so
I could check out their review of my book (they thought it sucked ass).
And
while leafing through the rag and chuckling over the dialogue between
Andy and
his pal Ken Wilber I came across an ad headlined "How to Meditate
Deeper Than a
Zen Monk!"
According to the
ad, a
powerful new audio technology called Holosync¨ will allow you to
reach the same
rarified state of enlightened uber-consciousness as the great Zen monks
of old
in minutes. It's based, they say, "in part on Nobel Prize winning
research on
how complex systems (human beings, for instance) evolve to higher
levels of
functioning." Wow. Nobel Prize winning research! Complex systems!
Higher levels
of functioning! "A precise combination of audio signals gives the brain
a very
specific stimulus that creates states of deep meditation." And here I've wasted decades
staring at
blank walls for hours on end when all I had to do was slap on a pair of
headphones and "achieve super deep meditation at the touch of a
button!"
There's even a toll free number you can call to receive the tape for
free (a
$19.95 value!).
Yeah, well, if
you're the
type to fall for that kind of pitch you're definitely reading the wrong
web
page. There is no Enlightenment Machine. Never has been and never will
be. It's
a real shame people believe this kind of stuff. But they do.
It's easy to see
how this
sort of thinking works. Technology can be a wonderful thing. Look at
all the
stuff science has given us. Lap top computers, iPods, swivel rotary
wankel engines. Technology has improved so many aspects of our lives it
doesn't take
much to suppose that technology may one day enhance meditation to the
point
where we can find Enlightenment at the touch of a button.
But makes
assumptions about
technology and about meditation that simply are not true. Technology
works like
this. You got a problem. Say you want to listen to music while you ride
the
train to work. But you're never sure just what you're gonna want to
hear any
given morning and you don't want to carry your whole CD collection
around with
you everywhere you go. So you develop a portable hard disc capable of
storing a
couple hundred CDs on it and voila! iPod! All your troubles solved!
So to come up with
a
technical solution you look at a problem, you think about it a lot, you
manipulate lots of symbols around in your head, you test your symbolic
logic
against the hard facts of the real world, and you come up with an
invention
that fixes what was bothering you. It's a very good way to deal with
things.
But meditation
comes from a
completely different place. It's not about thought at all. All
machines, no
matter what they do, are human thought solidified. They can only ever
function
within the boundaries of the thoughts that went into their creation.
Meditation
is about seeing past the limitations of thought, going to places
thought cannot
possibly reach.
Now the idea of
going beyond
all thought may sound exotic. But that's only because we tend to place
way too
much faith in thought. Thought really doesn't go very far. It's nothing
more
than electrical impulses bouncing around in that three pound lump of
meat you
carry around in your head. Nothing more. The place beyond all thought
is right
here. Nothing the least bit exotic about it at all. Thought can never
hope to
capture what is right in front of you and within you right this very
moment.
A machine can only
ever
operate within the limits that thought has set for it. Say you think
that using
bio-feedback might be a good way to enhance your Zen practice. Maybe
you've
decided that Zen meditation is all about increasing your theta brain
waves and
decreasing your delta brain waves (or whatever, I never paid a lot of
attention
to that stuff). You hook yourself up to your bio-feedback thingy and
you train
yourself to bliss out on all those delicious theta waves. Bing! Instant
Zen,
right?
Wrong. Zen practice
has
nothing to do with setting up some goal in your mind and then trying to
use the
practice to achieve that goal. It don't work like that. Real Zen
practice is
purely choiceless. It's all about seeing what is at this moment. If a
clear
mind comes, a clear mind comes. If a cloudy mind comes, a cloudy mind
comes.
Now if you believe
a machine
— the product of thought made into matter — can take you beyond all
thought, well, feel free to call that toll free number and get your
tape. As
for me, I'll stick with staring at walls, thank you very much.