Heavily Meditated or Heavily Educated? Why Feeling Better Isn’t Enough
About a decade ago, when brain fog thickened and I realized my mind wasn’t running at full power, I found Dave Asprey. He was one of the first voices to say: you don’t have to accept decline. You can experiment. You can measure. You can hack.
That idea was revolutionary. It reframed the body and brain not as sealed mysteries but as dashboards with dials. If you could read the metrics, you could change the system. That promise—control, empowerment, hope—was intoxicating.
Asprey’s work introduced me to neurofeedback and personalized nutrition, two practices that reshaped my path. I dove deep: training in QEEG brain mapping, studying functional nutrition, and working with world-class mentors.
What I found surprised me. The deeper I went into neuroscience, the more it resonated with ancient traditions I’d once set aside. Tibetan Dzogchen, for instance, insists meditation isn’t one method but a toolkit, with the practitioner responsible for knowing their own mind and choosing wisely. That’s remarkably similar to QEEG: assess the brain, select the right training. Ayurveda and nutrigenomics? Same rhyme: personalized diet and supplements, tailored to individual patterns.
Science and spirituality, it seemed, were circling toward the same insight from opposite directions.
Weird Brains and Pattern Machines
Asprey calls himself an “event correlation machine”—his “weird brain” spots links others miss. I love that he owns this.
And—I relate. My brain shows quirks too. QEEG scans suggest under-functioning in the left fronto-temporal region and extension into the entire left hemisphere (possibly from early life injury, possibly a stroke) and compensatory strength in the right hemisphere. The effect? A strange hybrid of analytic and intuitive processing. Not strictly logical. Not purely emotional. Something woven between.
This may sound like deficit. I’ve come to see it as style. A unique orientation toward synthesis. Perhaps that’s why I never fully swallowed Buddhism’s mysticism or neuroscience’s scientific materialism. My mind kept saying: yes, and…??
Like Dave, I think many of our so-called deficits are actually forms of unique genius—biases that tilt us toward certain kinds of insight.
The Limits of Feeling Better
In Heavily Meditated, Asprey writes that what people truly seek is peace—energetic calm, freedom from anxiety. He’s not wrong. Most of us stumble into meditation, therapy, or brain training because we’re hurting. Buddhism begins with this too: the First Noble Truth of suffering.
And meditation does help. It trains present awareness. It anchors us in the moment. It builds resilience so we don’t collapse at every challenge. Imagine if everyone learned to meditate—even just a little. We’d live in a calmer world, one where people had more space between stimulus and response. That would be extraordinary.
And—what if we went further? Meditation helps us handle suffering better. Education helps us understand suffering at its roots, and perhaps even build systems where needless suffering is less likely to arise at all. One path allows us to navigate life more gracefully; the other allows us to reshape the conditions of life itself. Both are useful. Both are essential.
If suffering is the doorway, then feeling better is a threshold. Necessary, valuable… but not the whole house. Relief can be mistaken for progress. In fact, dissociation often feels like peace, but is it the answer?
Here’s the bigger question: do we want to be heavily meditated… or heavily educated? Meditation gives us experience—valuable, yes. But education in the deepest sense—rational understanding of how the universe works—takes us further. Without that, we may calm ourselves while still moving in circles, taking wrong turns, chasing illusions.
Education in this context means knowing the laws of reality so we can live in accordance with them. Knowledge is freedom: freedom from doubt, from superstition, from blind belief. Freedom from wandering endlessly without a map.
The Soul as Mathematics
Meditation can deliver extraordinary states of consciousness. But states are not explanations. Experience isn’t the same as knowledge. That’s the difference between being heavily meditated and heavily educated.
Asprey offers his “MeatOS” model—our primal drives, ego, and instincts as operating-system processes. It’s clever, and it helps people visualize their inner programming.
And—it’s still a model. Like Buddhism’s frameworks, or the neuroscientist’s diagrams of the default mode network, it’s built on empiricism: observe behavior, measure correlates, and propose metaphors. Useful, yes. But empirical observation can only describe appearances. It never reveals the structure underneath.
That’s where Ontological Mathematics is different. It doesn’t start from observation at all. It starts from necessity—from what must be true in order for existence itself to be possible. From first principles, it builds outward into everything we see. Here are its core commitments:
Dual-aspect monism
Reality has two expressions—mental (the frequency domain) and material (the spacetime domain). These aren’t two separate substances but two sides of the same mathematics.
Monads
Each of us is a dimensionless singularity—a mathematical point of pure frequency. Timeless, spaceless, and eternal.
At the heart of every monad is Euler’s formula:
Wave structure
The mind is a six-dimensional interference pattern of sinusoidal waves. Its base state is perfect symmetry: sine and cosine, orthogonal like light’s electric and magnetic fields. Thought as we know it arises when these waves shift phase, creating interference patterns.
Syntax and semantics
The sinusoidal syntax is the raw mathematical structure of thought. Semantics is the story we experience riding on top of it. The more coherent the syntax, the clearer and less distorted the story.
Fourier mathematics
This is the bridge between domains. The forward transform projects frequencies into space and time (mind → brain). The inverse transform retrieves them (brain → mind). This is why the brain’s electromagnetic oscillations so closely mirror the architecture of thought itself.
The Map Is The Territory
Here’s the radical part: Ontological Mathematics isn’t a model layered on top of reality. It is reality. The math is the ontology. The map is the territory.
You haven’t heard of it because it was released quietly, by a secret society you’d never guess, and promptly ignored by the world—as if there were a “reality distortion field” surrounding it. They admit they weren’t writing for the general public. Everyone already has a “theory of everything,” and Ont Math doesn’t fit the script. But Ont Math isn’t a theory. It isn’t interpretation. It’s the deduced logic of existence itself.
And a caution here: Ont Math has been co-opted by opportunistic influencers on the Internet looking to build their own followings. The personalities may distract. The system itself is what matters, and it stands or falls on its rational coherence. If you go looking, use discernment.
This is what separates rationalism from empiricism. Empiricism starts with appearances and tries to reason backward to causes. Rationalism begins with necessary truths—principles that cannot be otherwise—and reasons forward, showing why appearances must be the way they are.
That’s why Ont Math doesn’t generate paradoxes. It doesn’t leave consciousness as a mystery or shrug with “emergence.” It provides a continuous logical chain from first principles to lived experience.
So yes, models like MeatOS are useful ways to navigate experience. And—if we want to be not only heavily meditated but also heavily educated, Ontological Mathematics can teach us the grammar of reality itself.
Rational Thinking as Spiritual Work
Asprey celebrates calm as the prize of meditation. Yes. Peace matters.
And—clarity matters even more. Rational thinking is not robotic thinking. It’s clear thinking, free of distortion. The clearer the signal, the more aligned the mind is with its own mathematical nature. That’s not only intellectual hygiene—it’s spiritual progress.
This is the deeper meaning of education: freedom. Freedom from doubt. Freedom from superstition. Freedom from wandering through one failed belief system after another. Education is the work of cutting away illusion until only clarity remains. And once you can think clearly, you can live freely.
And here’s the beauty: these aren’t abstractions. Rational clarity shows up physically. We can literally see distortions of thought in the EEG—the brain’s oscillations. Excessive slow-wave activity, unstable beta, chaotic synchrony: these aren’t just “brain quirks,” they can be signatures of distortion in the wavefield of thought itself.
That’s why neurofeedback, whether a $20,000 intensive or a simple home protocol, is not just “brain training.” It’s soul training. Every session can be a small act of alignment, a reduction of interference, a nudge back toward coherence.
So yes, meditate for calm. And also educate the mind toward clarity. Rational coherence is one of the most direct spiritual practices available today.
No Single Ego, No Default Center
Asprey’s book also tackles the ego, exploring where it hides and how it sabotages calm. Neuroscience often tags the default mode network as the ego’s seat. That’s a useful starting point.
And—the picture according to Ont Math is even more interesting. The mind has no fixed center. It is a field. Pockets of coherence emerge—sometimes multiple. Dissociative identity disorder is one extreme; Internal Family Systems therapy maps the everyday version. Most of us are less singular than we think.
Another way to think of ego is as the stories we tell ourselves. One of the clever things about Ont Math is that it allows us to abstract form from content. Syntax from semantics. If we ignore the story and just focus on shaping the syntax of our thought—the wave pattern itself—we can train our thinking without being dragged around by the drama of our inner narratives.
This is worth reflecting on if you follow popular methods of self-inquiry. If you notice that a thought arises from “nowhere” or “not you,” have you considered it might still come from a hidden corner of your psyche? That it may still be “you,” just not the part you usually identify with?
If the ego itself is a shifting pattern, then so is everything else. The same logic that applies to the individual mind applies to the cosmic mind.
The universe itself is an interference field, composed of all monads interacting. At the beginning—what science calls the Big Bang—the system was in maximum chaos, maximum phase difference. The purpose of evolution is to harmonize those differences, to bring the interference into coherence, until the whole cosmos returns to light. That’s why we’re here. The universe exists not as a pointless accident, but as a grand project of minds learning to synchronize.
The Brain as Reflection, Not Generator
Here’s where neuroscience loops back. If the mind is waves, then the brain’s electromagnetic oscillations are not accident. They’re the material side of the same system.
Ontological Mathematics is a dual-aspect monism: the brain doesn’t produce mind, it reflects it. Neurofeedback, then, isn’t “rewiring” meat. It’s fine-tuning the mirror of a deeper mathematics. Trauma and habit introduce noise; training nudges the signal toward symmetry.
Biohacking framed as hardware optimization is powerful. And—seen through this lens, it becomes something larger: cooperation with design.
The Quantified Soul
Asprey helped launch the quantified self movement: HRV, ketones, sleep scores. Useful, empowering.
And—I believe the next step is the quantified soul. What if coherence and clarity became the measure? What if the most important biomarker was not glucose or REM percentage but the optimization of phase differences, and the reduction in measurable distortions in the wavefield of thought?
This shifts everything. Psychedelics become coherence probes: which medicines bring alignment, which scatter the signal? Chakras become resonance bands in the frequency field. Neurofeedback becomes not just therapy but a path of spiritual training.
And coherence doesn’t just show up in our brainwaves or meditative states. It plays out most vividly in our relationships, especially in intimacy.
The quantified self matters. And the quantified soul is the next horizon.
Love as Synchrony
One thing I really appreciate about Dave and Heavily Meditatedspecifically is that he doesn’t shy away from sacred sexuality. This is important. Sex is not fringe. It intersects our lives everywhere: bodies, energy, relationships, creativity. To leave it out is to leave out life itself.
I love that he goes there. His emphasis on discipline—whether semen retention or learning mastery over desire—is valuable. Yes, self-mastery is a door.
And—beyond that door is synchrony.
From an ontological-mathematics view, the universe itself evolves by reducing phase differences. Waveforms harmonize. Interference resolves. That is love: the felt experience of resonance, minds aligning, syntax and meaning shared.
Sexual union is one of the most immediate ways we taste this—especially in the moment of shared climax. When both partners reach coherence simultaneously, the boundary between minds blurs. The waves lock into phase. It’s not only physical release but a momentary synchronization of the entire field: energy, rhythm, breath, and thought collapsing into unity. Like musicians resolving into a perfect chord, the resonance lingers. It imprints into the One Mind—the universal interference field that binds us all.
And it raises a question few traditions dare to ask: what might happen if this creative force were directed—consciously, coherently—toward something more than reproduction?
If two minds can synchronize so completely that matter itself responds, could that same alignment shape subtler domains? Could intention, focused through resonance rather than will, become a form of creation in its own right?
After all, every thought is a modulation in the field. Every act of coherence radiates. What we call conception may be only the most visible instance of a deeper law—the principle that harmonized minds generate new forms. Whether those forms appear as life, art, or insight may depend on where the energy is aimed.
So yes, discipline matters. And synchrony is the deeper power. The goal is not only self-control but harmony—two people learning to play in tune with each other, and with life itself.
Beyond Relief
That’s the rhythm I keep hearing. Biohacking gave me empowerment. Buddhism offered peace. Asprey’s Heavily Meditated blends both into practical pathways.
And—Ontological Mathematics expands the frame again. It says the project is not only to feel better, but to think clearer. Not only to master impulses, but to harmonize. Not only to optimize biological selves, but to optimize souls.
Meditation without education leaves us soothed but unknowing. Education without meditation risks being abstract and bloodless. The real task is both: calm experience and rational clarity. Heavily meditated, yes—and also heavily educated.
That is what I’m exploring in my upcoming book, The Dream of Matter: Neuroscience and Decoding the Mathematics of the Soul—how neuroscience, neurofeedback, and Ontological Mathematics weave together into a coherent framework for mind, soul, and reality. This essay is just a glimpse. If this resonates, I invite you to read along on my Substack, The Dream of Matter, where I’ll be sharing more essays and excerpts on the quantified soul, love as synchrony, and the mathematics of mind.
Because only together—experience and knowledge, meditation and education—do we not just soothe ourselves, but learn to live in alignment with reality. That is coherence. That is freedom. That is the music of the soul returning to light.
Another great article with much food for thought!
"If we ignore the story and just focus on shaping the syntax of our thought—the wave pattern itself—we can train our thinking without being dragged around by the drama of our inner narratives."
Golden.