Technological Grace: Just When We Needed You Most

While I was meditating today, I was thinking about all the breakthroughs people are having doing this practice of using brain entrainment and biofield technology while meditating. If you could sit where I sit, hear, and read all of the testimonials from people that are using the iAwake technology—from our beta testers, from the students that have worked with me here residentially, or the clients that I work with via Skype all over the world—well, it’s really amazing. I was thinking today, a good term for this technology would be “technological grace.”

I see people who, even when they’re going through the most difficult stuff and dealing with really hard issues, are able to get to a place where there’s a flow and a spaciousness created by doing the practice and the meditation. This is not a phony state. It’s not like a drug-induced state that comes and goes but a real, transforming reorganization of how we function in the world.

It’s like being at a hospital when we know about germs and antiobiotics, but everybody else doesn’t, so people are dying from little scratches, or dying from doctors using dirty scalpels, or getting infections and not knowing what to do about it. But we who know how to use antibiotics are used to a different life—it’s just the air we breathe and the water we swim in. Today I sort of stepped out of how I usually just accept the practice and take it as a given. (“Oh, that’s just how it goes when you do this.”) And I realized how radically transformative and amazing this meditation technology really is.

Grace is like undeserved mercy—something you feel you didn’t really earn. It’s as if the goodness of the universe kicks in and healing happens, or whatever needs to be happening happens. And technological grace seems to be happening at a time when we desperately need help for more of us to wake up; and not just to wake up in temporary states of “Aha! I get it!” and then go back to sleep, but a stabilized ongoing process of awakening: increasing our compassion, increasing our intelligence, increasing our emotional healing, increasing our creativity.

Like the song from the 70s says, “Just When I Needed You Most.” Who would have thought that by putting on headphones and listening to sounds you could call up such a profound, evolutionary burst of growth in a way that is so stable and so healthy? It’s hard to predict complexity and creativity. It’s really just amazing.

What we have to do is use it; we have to use the tools. Like I used to say to my students, “Having a gym membership card in your wallet is not really going to do anything unless you go to the gym and work out.” It’s the same thing with our meditation practice. We can have these technologies, but if we don’t use them, it’s not going to do much. It’s actually not going to do anything for us, so we have to develop the commitment to practice and the commitment to work on ourselves.

Often, our egos, our old messages, say, “Oh, I don’t have time. I’m so busy…” It’s like saying, “Oh, I don’t have time to exercise.” Well, if we don’t have time to exercise, that’s going to cut about 15 years off our life, at least at a functional level, or vital level, or maybe more. So how could we not do this in the half hour, or the hour, or whatever we’re willing to commit to in the beginning, when it will change things to such an extraordinary, dramatic degree? How could we not do it? That’s what has kept me so rigorously faithful with the practice.

I’ve had times when I still do the practice, but haven’t really practiced as much as at other times; maybe I just listen but am not really working at it. However, my practice has been consistent, and that’s made all the difference.

When you begin to discover the depth of your own interiors doing this ongoing practice, it’s amazing. It’s almost infinite, because it is in our deepest selves where we connect to everything. We have the kind of unitive experience that mystics are always talking about: “Oh my gosh! There is only One, and I am part and parcel of that, always have been, and always will be. That’s pretty exciting stuff. To go back to the old way—after having visited or lived in this kind of territory with the depth it brings on—and live a very shallow kind of flatland existence is really not very appealing anymore. I mean, yuck.

This may be the great sin of Americans (speaking as an American, I get to talk about my own countrymen like this)—our shallowness. We’re not lazy; we’re very energetic, we’re creative, and we do all kinds of things. But I think the worst part of America comes out when we just live on the surface and don’t go deep. I think that’s true for our country and definitely true of us as individuals.

When we go deep—when we’re willing to do the healing work, do the psychic archaeology, go through deeper and deeper levels of our own wounding, conditioning, and dysfunction, and get to our deepest self—then our light really begins to shine, and we can be that light on the hill and light up the landscape around us through our own waking up, both individually and collectively.

The more of us who can actually take the challenge, do the work, and use this in an ongoing way, the greater will be the hope that bursts into the world, and the greater the creativity, and the greater the goodness that we will bring to whatever we’re doing, both on the micro level and on the macro level. So we should definitely stick with it. Once you’ve really tasted it, I don’t think there’s any going back.

Maybe sometimes we’ll fall off the wagon, too, and we won’t practice, but I think eventually we’ll be called back into it. Just like when you’ve been working out and going to the gym a lot—there’s something called muscle memory, where if you do fall off because of events, when you finally go back and pick it up again, the body remembers and gets back into shape much more quickly than if you had never worked out at all.

The same thing is true with the Profound Meditation Program. The changes that are going on in the brain really stick around; they’re not just temporary. We can pick up that ever-evolving journey to a more highly evolved, functional brain even just in the physical sense. And that changes everything in all the other dimensions—in our interior lives, our relational lives, and our relationship to the world around us. I’m just amazed to see the level of healing that happens.

When you’re working with your therapist, or you’re working with your coach, or you’re working with your family, or in your job, meditation technology just puts it into a whole new dimension. If we can get those around us to also practice with us, then, collectively, it starts taking on a much more evolutionary, real, compassionate, flowing presence in all that we do. It’s good stuff.

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Adapted from iAwake Technologies’ free, weekly teleconference call on May 8, 2013.

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John Dupuy is the CEO of iAwake Technologies and the founder of Integral Recovery, a holistic addiction treatment approach inspired by Ken Wilber’s Integral Model. He is also the author of Integral Recovery: A Revolutionary Approach to Alcoholism and Addiction, recently published by SUNY Press. As a pioneer in the use of brainwave entrainment in therapy and personal development, John has dedicated his life to helping others deepen their spiritual practice and transform their lives.

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