Dear Diary,
All spiritual little books begin with the words that neither meditation nor the special states sought through them – enlightenments, nirvanas and satoris – will bring you anything tangible. Contrary to what many hope, you won’t learn to fly, shoot lightning bolts from your eyes, be immortal or at least predict the evening lottery numbers and football match results. However, they do keep quiet about one side of the transformation. Those special states are special in that 99% of your problems disappear in them.
What Buddha two and a half thousand years ago called nirvana, bliss and enlightenment, when viewed through the prism of neurophysiology, is simply the sensorimotor mode. It’s a brain activity mode that ordinary people experience in the nearest forest, while complex ones travel to other ends of the world for it. As the name suggests – it’s when you simply move and simply sense (see, hear, smell). The mode is special in that by directing attention to itself it deprives another wonderful mode of that same attention – ‘Default Mode Network’ (DMN).
The default mode is a mode that, with the help of several brain cortex zones, overlays a fine spatial world onto all the dance of sensations, smells, sound waves and light photons surrounding us. When we understand that here is me, here is the world that needs to be conquered, and here is the wall separating us with two holes through which I, sitting in my skull, peer at it, the ugly thing. Correspondingly, the default mode also overlays what? Correctly, the default 99% of our problems.
What is a problem in general? If briefly and simply (and complexly I didn’t even have the time or desire to understand :-)), a person, contrary to what it seems to us, is a rather dynamic process. Constantly changing, growing, degrading, shifting moods, opinions, convictions etc. The primary and innate function of DMN is to protect that person. But how do you protect them when they’re writhing like a greased eel in your hands. Therefore the DMN (dis)function – trying to completely assemble the person so they become finished, static and correspondingly susceptible to control. And while the person remains unfinished, DMN forms holes in them that the person desperately tries to fill in order to achieve that flawless completion.
You often wonder – why did this person act this way? Why did that one act that way? What on earth is going on around here? I’ll answer. Everything happening around us is for the most part based on people under various, sometimes even very bright, lofty and exalted slogans, patching their own ego’s holes. And the foundation of each hole is a simple “I’m not enough.” “Not loved enough,” “not rich enough,” “not famous enough,” “not productive enough” and in every other way unfinished. “When I finish my studies…” “when they raise my salary…” “when I buy that red Mazda…” “when I build a house…” “when I travel the whole world…” “when I find my other half…” they think… And we perfectly understand what happens after that “when”… After that “when” the DMN will drill several additional painful holes in the person. And now honestly answer yourself – what percentage of your problems is occupied by your own need and drive to patch your own ego’s holes. Your own belief in the illusion that somewhere, after acquiring and achieving something, you will finally become static, finished, the most loved by all, the most respected by all and fully self-controlled.
As for that remaining one percent, there always remain such inevitable things as pain, hunger, fatigue and situations requiring decisions here and now. Here you can meditate all you want, but you won’t be full from it.
p.s. there’s also a third mode, CEN, but… But it’s doubtful anyone even read this far… :-)
