Machines help, but don’t create

So many machines are being developed around the world, pretending that they can give you meditation; you just have to put on earphones and relax, and within ten minutes you will reach the state of meditation. This is utter stupidity, but there is a reason why such an idea has come to the minds of technical people. Mind functions on a certain wavelength when it is awake. When it is dreaming it functions on another wavelength. When it is fast asleep it functions on a different wavelength. But none of these are meditation. For thousands of years we have called meditation turiya, ‘the fourth.’ When you go beyond the deepest sleep and still you are aware, that awareness is meditation. It is not an experience; it is you, your very being. But these hi-tech mechanisms can be of tremendous use in the right hands. They can help to create the kind of waves in your mind so that you start feeling relaxed, as if half asleep…thoughts are disappearing and a moment comes that everything becomes silent in you. That is the moment when the waves are those of deep sleep. You will not be aware of this deep sleep, but after ten minutes, when you are unplugged from the machine, you will see the effects: you are calm, quiet, peaceful, no worry, no tension; life seems to be more playful and
joyous. One feels as if one has had an inner bath. Your whole being is calm and
cool. But if you think this is meditation then you are wrong. I will say this is a good experience, and while you are in that moment of deep sleep, if you can also be aware from the very beginning, as the mind starts changing its waves…. You have to be more alert, more awake, more watchful—what is happening?—and you will see that mind is by and by falling asleep. And if you can see the mind falling asleep…the one who is seeing the mind falling asleep is your being, and that is the purpose of all authentic meditation. These machines cannot create that l awareness. That awareness you will have to create, but these machines can certainly create within ten minutes a possibility that you may not be able to create in years of effort. So I am not against these hi-tech instruments, I am all for them. It is just that I want the people who are spreading those machines around the world to know that they are doing good work, but it is incomplete. It will be complete only when the person in the deepest silence is also alert, like a small flame of awareness which goes on burning. Everything disappears, all around is darkness, and silence, and peace—but an unwavering flame of awareness. So if the machine is in the right hands and people can be taught that the real thing will come not through the machine, the machine can create the very essential ground in which that flame can grow. But that flame depends on you, not on the machine.