The Essence of Meditation – Reclaiming the Empty Heart

In part one of this article, The Invisible Matrix of Our Digital World – How Brainwashing Conceals Itself, we exposed the largely unconscious forces that shape the cultural paradigm in which we live and that inform our perception of reality.

If we are truly puppets, who then are the puppeteers, who has the authority, power and legitimacy to define and influence our individual realities? Who controls the narrative of our lives?

A subsequent question will be:

Why are we letting would be puppeteers pull our strings – how can we break free of this cycle and counter the self-concealing mechanisms of our conditionings?

As to the first question, every rung of the hierarchical ladder of society plays a complicit role. Every situation where there is a power differential becomes an opening for the infiltration of a cultural message. It starts very early indeed, before we are even born, with “gender reveal parties” that set the child on the path of binary identification.

But fundamentally, this power differential is embedded in the very structure of patriarchy and is so internalized and embodied that it continually recreates inequalities across race, class, ethnicity, sexuality and generations.

If we are to equate reality with the sum total of all of our imprints and look carefully into the sequence of who we end up “being” through those imprints, it becomes impossible to separate the identification with who we are from every step of our conditioning. And it becomes even more strenuous to find a defining line between normal conditioning and brainwashing, no matter what dictionaries may say.

Osho:

Conditioning is nothing but a process of hypnotizing people:

“Go on repeating from the very childhood, in the church, in the Sunday school… You have been told about God and prayer and you have been told by your parents and teachers and priests and all the authoritative people. That small child has learned how to imitate those who are in power. Now you have completely forgotten the beginning of conditioning.”¹

The line-up is impressive: parents, teachers, priests, politicians, the media they control or that controls them, and more recently, as to add insult to injury, the techies of Silicon Valley, their willing Chinese doppelgängers in tow. Weren’t these educated digital nerds meant to find with their sophisticated tools solutions to the world’s most pressing problems? Instead, they ended up, the immature male privileged kids that they were – and still apparently are –, inventing the likes of Instagram and Tik Tok and other infantilizing playgrounds for their puerile entertainment and satisfy their greed while willfully stressing our nervous system, disrupting our cognitive functions and preying on our built-in unconscious reward mechanism to create addiction.

As to the second, subsequent question, for all its alarming implications, the central paradox contained in self-concealment, when closely examined, contains the solution of its own undoing.

Blind spots are just another name for lack of awareness.

They are symptomatic of our atrophied capacity for critical thinking that is the end result of a lifetime of stealthy manipulation, of brainwashing.

We may be blind to our own blind spots but more often than not, others may easily observe our own biases or self-deceptive behaviors.

The then obvious remedy to our predicament is turning our gaze inward.

The first step in the shift from being passive victims in denial of our own imprisonment to an empowered self is recognizing and understanding the nature of our identification. A sense of self based on an association with a group’s norms, values and beliefs is the root cause of all prejudice and discrimination.

Osho:

“It is a very strange phenomenon, that you are identified with something which you are not, and you have forgotten that which you are, have always been, will always be. There is no way to be anything else. Your being belongs to the existential. But there are layers and layers of conditioning – of parents, of teachers, of priests, of politicians. Between you, the real you, and you, the unreal you, there is a great line of people.”²

This inability to differentiate that which we truly are, our essence, from that which has been given, imprinted, enforced in us can only be broken by creating what Osho calls a state of de-hypnosis:

“We have first to create a state of dehypnotherapy – because every child is being hypnotized, from the very childhood. That’s how conditioning happens; that’s how you get your mind. Your parents may not know, your teachers may not know, your priests may not know what they are doing: they are practicing hypnotic techniques. By the time you leave the university, you know all the techniques for conditioning others. So whoever comes to me is already conditioned.”³

Once identified and recognized as such, our belief systems need to be put through the rigorous test of doubt and self-inquiry:

Osho again:

“You can persuade a little child just by giving him a toy – and you have given him the whole paradise. If you have succeeded in persuading him to believe, you have not done a great miracle. It is very simple exploitation. Perhaps you are doing it unknowingly; you have also been passed through the same process. And once you close the doors of doubt you have closed the doors of reason, thinking, asking, inquiring. You are no more a human being, really. The doors of doubt closed…you are just a zombie – hypnotized, conditioned, persuaded out of fear, out of greed, to believe in things which no normal child is going to believe in unless all these things are arranged. And once you stop doubting and thinking, then you can believe anything whatsoever. Then there is no question.”⁴

And:

Unless you become aware, you will not be able to see that you are a conditioned human being, that you are living with borrowed ideas – ideas which have been imposed by others on you against your will, that you are almost a prisoner.

“Not that you live in a prison, but you live in an ideology which is a subtle prison.

“You are a Hindu – how can you be innocent? You are a Christian – how can you be innocent? The ideology keeps you away from innocence; it makes you knowledgeable, and knowledgeability is the only thing that destroys innocence. It takes all wonder away from you….

“Every day you pass by beautiful trees, birds singing in the early morning sun, flowers releasing their fragrance, but you are a robot. You go on chattering inside your mind, yakkety-yakkety-yak, you go on and on. And what you are chattering inside has been put inside you. Your mind has been used like a computer: just as they feed a computer they have fed you.”⁵

The delusion can be undone.

Osho points to something deeper than brainwashing that paradoxically has the power to reverse it, to bring us back to our original nature.

Osho calls it “mindwashing”, another name for meditation, or ***Xinao*, the empty heart:**

“It is mindwashing, not brainwashing. Brainwashing is very superficial. The brain is the mechanism that the mind uses. You can wash the brain very easily – just any mechanism can be washed and cleaned and lubricated. But if the mind which is behind the brain is polluted, is dirty, is full of repressed desires, is full of ugliness, soon the brain will be full of all those ugly things.

“And I don’t see that there is anything wrong in it – washing is always good. I believe in dry-cleaning. I don’t use old methods of washing.

“And yes, people will feel cheated that their mind has been taken away, and that was the only precious thing they had. This will be only in the beginning. Once the mind is taken away, they will be surprised that behind the mind is their real treasure. And the mind was only a mirror, it was reflecting the treasure, but it had no treasure in itself.

The treasure is behind the mind – that is your being. But a mirror can deceive you. It can give you the idea that what is reflected in it is a reality.

“So unless the mind is taken away – and that’s what meditation is, it is a state of no-mind. It is taking away the mind and giving you a chance to see not the reflection of the treasure of your being, but the treasure itself.”⁶

Looking ahead, could it be that, in a similarly paradoxical way, the same technological advances of the past twenty years that have taken our psychological enslavement to its ultimate algorithmic refinement, could also give us the tools we need to reclaim our individual freedom?

Could the digital age that held, you recall, the promise of helping us solve humanity’s problems but whose control fell in the hands of the power hungry, be retooled, repurposed, reclaimed to fulfill its original intent and bring humanity to a higher consciousness?

In an essay titled “Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence”, Princeton professor Graham Burnett sees in AI, naively perhaps, an unprecedented opportunity, reminding us, in his own words, to exert utter vigilance as we take up the task of “coming into ourselves as free beings responsible for world-making” and to have the fighting courage to confront these algorithms driving the systems that “instrumentalize people, brutalize them, squeeze their humanity into a sickly green trickle called money and leave only a ruinous residue….”

Burnett continues:

“We have, in a real sense, reached a kind of ‘singularity’—but not the long-anticipated awakening of machine consciousness.
“Rather, what we’re entering is a new consciousness of ourselves.
“This is the pivot where we turn from anxiety and despair to an exhilarating sense of promise. These systems have the power to return us to ourselves in new ways.”

Or, as Osho put it nearly forty years ago, when computers were still in their infancy, way before the concept of artificial intelligence had even entered our collective imagination:

“It will relieve millions of people from memorizing unnecessary things. It will keep millions of people from teaching and torturing students. Examinations and all kinds of stupid things will disappear. The computer can be one of the greatest phenomena that has ever happened.

It can become the quantum leap. It can break away from the past and all conditionings of the past.”⁷

The possibilities are more infinite than ever. The tools are in our hands. It is now all up to us to reimagine today what our future will be.

END