The Myth of Progress and How Meditation Changes the Brain Now

We often find ourselves caught in a peculiar game, a sort of spiritual hide-and-seek where we are both the one hiding and the one looking. It is like the old story of the person searching frantically for their donkey while they are already sitting on its back. We look for peace, for clarity, or for some grand event called awakening, failing to notice that the looking itself is happening within the very thing we seek. There is a common idea that we must go somewhere, that we must transform into something better, but who is it that would achieve this? When we talk about how meditation changes the brain, we are speaking of the horizontal dimension of life. It is undeniable that the body-mind undergoes shifts. We see it in the way the nervous system settles. When we allow the body-mind to relax, the physiology responds. Blood vessels dilate, carrying more oxygen to the tissues. Chronic tensions, those tight knots we have carried for years without even realizing it, begin to soften. This is simply the biology of relaxation. It is a functional improvement, much like learning to play the piano or solving a complex mathematical equation. We start with the complicated mess of our habitual contractions and move toward a simpler, more spontaneous way of functioning. In this sense, understanding how meditation changes the brain is useful for the living organism. It may lead to a more harmonious relationship with others, a more effective use of language, and a reduction in the frantic, useless thoughts that serve only to discharge anxiety about a future that never arrives. But here is the trap: we begin to think that these biological changes are the way to the absolute. We imagine that by purifying the mind or quieting the brain, we are building a bridge to enlightenment. But how can a finite, limited body-mind reach the infinite? If the absolute is truly total, it must already include the seeker, the seeking, and even the "un-transformed" brain. If you are excluded from the totality right now, then it isn't the totality. We are already riding the donkey. The idea of a gradual path is a way of postponing the reality of what is. We wait for a "future now" to be free, not seeing that freedom is the very space in which this moment is appearing. In our shared silence, we might notice that the separate self is not a solid entity but a function, a relational mode of the body-mind. It is a way the organism tries to navigate the environment. Sometimes this function is healthy, and sometimes it is dysfunctional, but both are expressions of the totality. There is a liberation that is not *of* the separate self, but *from* the separate self. It is the realization that the character in the dream was never the one who needed to wake up. When the dreamer wakes, they realize they were the doctor, the patient, and the hospital all at once. We often get fascinated by the "special states" that occur when we look into how meditation changes the brain.