Heavily Meditated or Heavily Educated? Why Feeling Better Isn’t Enough (Revised)
Meditation can calm the mind—but clarity is the real prize. From biohacking to brainwaves, this is a look at what happens when feeling better isn’t enough.
This is a revised essay, as I practice my writing and finding my voice! Here I’ve attempted to avoid the deeper mathematical nuances that I find fascinating, but aren’t necessary to understand the benefits of becoming clearer, more coherent thinkers.
About a decade ago, when my thoughts began to slow and the world felt half a second behind, I found Dave Asprey. He was one of the first to insist that decline isn’t destiny—that you can measure, experiment, and hack your biology. That word, biohacking, reshaped everything. It reframed the body and brain not as sealed mysteries but as open systems, responsive to feedback, data, and intent. If you could read the signal, you could change the code.
Note to reader: Biohacking, as Asprey first framed it, simply means applying the mindset of an engineer to the human system—using data, feedback, and experimentation to improve energy, focus, and longevity. In short: upgrade your biology.
What began as a quest to optimize performance slowly revealed something larger: that the brain isn’t just a machine—it’s the interface through which mind itself becomes visible.
It was a thrilling idea: biology as software, and consciousness as something editable. And it arrived at exactly the right moment, when I was starting to suspect that my mind wasn’t firing on all cylinders. Asprey’s work became a bridge—a path out of resignation and into curiosity. He showed that you could bring the scientific method into the interior life: use measurement not as a cold instrument but as a form of self-discovery.
It felt like opening a hidden control panel inside myself—the same curiosity that drives engineers to build machines, redirected toward the invisible circuits of thought and feeling.
That mindset changed my trajectory. I began training in QEEG brain mapping and neurofeedback—quantitative electroencephalography, a way of recording and analyzing the brain’s electrical activity across multiple regions to identify patterns of imbalance—while studying functional nutrition and learning to read the brain’s rhythms the way a musician learns to read sound. And the deeper I went, the more familiar it all felt.
Note to reader: neurofeedback works much the same way. By showing the brain its own electrical patterns in real time, it lets the nervous system learn new rhythms—like holding up a mirror until balance returns.)
Somewhere inside the data and the graphs, I could hear older voices whispering—Tibetan Dzogchen on balance and awareness, Ayurveda mapping elemental patterns of mind and body, and Hermetic traditions speaking of harmony and correspondence. Science and spirituality, it seemed, weren’t opposites at all. They were describing the same structure from different sides of a mirror.
Weird Brains and Pattern Machines
Asprey calls himself an “event correlation machine”—his “weird brain” spots links others miss. There’s even a subhead in his book titled Unique Genius. I had to smile. It takes a certain confidence to write that!
My own brain has its quirks too, likely the residue of an early-life injury—possibly even a minor stroke as an infant—that left subtle but lasting asymmetries. Brain imaging shows under-functioning in the left fronto-temporal region, compensatory strength on the right. The result is a strange hybrid of analytic and intuitive processing—not strictly logical, not purely emotional, something woven between.
It’s like having one foot in geometry and the other in jazz.
Over time, I stopped seeing it as a deficit and started seeing it as a signature—a bias toward synthesis. Maybe that’s why I never fit neatly into either world: the contemplative or the clinical. My mind keeps saying, yes, and… what’s underneath all this?
Asprey’s genius, and perhaps his audacity, is turning personal peculiarity into cultural permission. He reminds us that the things that make us “weird” are often the very traits that make us capable of pattern recognition—the kind that bridges ideas most people don’t think to connect.
The Limits of Feeling Better
I’ve read most of Asprey’s work over the years, but I especially enjoyed Heavily Meditated, his latest. It’s a surprisingly vulnerable book from someone known for hardware, not heart—and I found it refreshing.
He argues that what most people truly seek isn’t success or even happiness, but peace—the quieting of inner noise. He’s right. Most of us begin meditating because we’re hurting. Meditation slows the storm, builds resilience, and gives us that precious pause between stimulus and response.
Relief, though, can masquerade as transformation. You can become calm and still live inside the same distortion. It’s like polishing a mirror without realizing it’s warped; everything looks smooth but still comes out distorted.
Peace without understanding is elegant confusion.
Meditation helps us cope with suffering. Education—by which I mean real, rational understanding of ourselves and the world—helps us transform it. One gives us the grace to navigate life; the other gives us the tools to redesign it. Both are necessary; they serve different masters.
Feeling better is valuable, but it’s not the destination. It’s the doorway. The aim isn’t simply to soothe the mind; it’s to align it with reality—to bring perception into phase with the logic of existence itself.
The Mind as a Wavefield
I’ve studied Pythagorean philosophy in one form or another since my early twenties. What drew me wasn’t the numerology or mysticism, but the precision of its claim: that reality itself is mathematical. Long before physics existed as a science, the Pythagoreans said that number is not a human invention—it’s the language of existence. To them, harmony, proportion, and resonance weren’t metaphors for beauty; they were the architecture of being.
At first, that sounded abstract—maybe even sterile. But as I began studying the brain’s electrical rhythms decades later, those ancient ideas started to sound like plain sense. The same laws that organize light and sound seemed to be organizing thought.
If we could zoom out far enough—past the surface of neurons, past the atoms themselves—we’d see that everything hums. Matter isn’t static; it’s music slowed down into form.
In that light, what we call “the soul” isn’t poetry; it’s architecture: an immaterial center of thought with its own frequency signature. You don’t have to buy the metaphysics to see the usefulness of the metaphor. The same principles—harmony, balance, resonance—apply whether we’re talking about neurons, emotions, or consciousness itself.
Coherence, in this sense, simply means alignment: when the parts of a system begin to work together as one, each oscillation supporting rather than resisting the others. It’s the opposite of fragmentation.
Seen through that lens, biohacking and neurofeedback become more than body optimization—they’re ways of tuning the instrument that reflects a deeper, measurable mind.
But why speak of waves at all? Because the wave is nature’s most fundamental pattern. Every form of energy we know—light, sound, magnetism, even the brain’s oscillations—follows that same undulating logic. The mind, too, appears to operate through rhythmic change, with thought emerging not from static states but from relationships between frequencies.
This wave-structure of mind exists outside space and time. Think of it as a frequency domain: a realm of pure, immaterial relations where patterns evolve without moving anywhere at all. What we call “before” and “after” are simply changing relationships among frequencies—no clocks, no rulers, just mathematics in motion.
Those invisible frequencies become visible when projected into spacetime—just as complex signals appear as moving waves once translated into time. What we experience as “matter” is simply the visible side of these interactions: stable patterns of frequency locked in relationship, like standing waves forming the shapes of our world.
The natural world performs these translations constantly. Every photon, every atom, every heartbeat is a negotiation of frequencies resolving into temporary coherence. In that sense, physics is already echoing metaphysics; it’s simply measuring the shadows of something older and deeper.
Imagine two dancers moving to the same beat. When they’re in step, motion flows. When they fall out of time, the dance becomes struggle. Phase is timing; coherence is grace.
When waves align, they amplify each other—resonance, creativity, flow. When they oppose, the signal collapses—resistance, tension, paralysis.
Between them lies the living field of experience: thoughts, emotions, relationships—learning to find balance.
Seen this way, the psyche itself is a field of overlapping signals—thoughts, emotions, memories—constantly combining and recombining. Our moods, relationships, even cultures emerge from this shared field. Sometimes the overlap produces harmony—insight, love, shared purpose. Sometimes it produces noise. The work of consciousness is to bring these inner signals into phase: to turn distortion back into coherence, to convert chaos into clarity.
Rational Thinking as Spiritual Work
Asprey celebrates calm as the prize of meditation. I think the higher prize is clarity. Rational thinking isn’t mechanical; it’s coherence—the mind no longer fighting itself, no longer bent by trauma, conditioning, or fear.
In The Dream of Matter, I show how the immaterial interference pattern of the psyche casts its reflection in the brain—how thought leaves measurable traces in matter. “Clear” thinking, for instance, has signatures in the EEG. Trauma literally appears as interference in the brain’s signal. A disorganized mind looks like static, and the brain mirrors that. As healing happens, the static resolves. Chaotic oscillations begin to synchronize; regions that once fired out of step start communicating. Energy flows instead of fragmenting.
The more coherent the brain, the clearer the thought. The clearer the thought, the freer the person. Rationality, in this sense, isn’t dry logic; it’s emotional transparency. When clarity replaces chaos, you feel it: the noise drops, the signal sharpens, the world and the self move in rhythm again.
It’s the mental equivalent of static clearing on a radio—suddenly the song beneath the noise comes through.
Beyond the Brain
If consciousness is structured mathematically, then every brainwave is a translation of a deeper order. As our tools improve, neurofeedback could evolve beyond symptom relief into something more direct: measurable spiritual work.
Imagine being able to see the sheet music of your own consciousness—and learning, note by note, how to play it in tune.
We won’t be training in the dark. We’ll be learning to interface with mind itself. Not toward perfect symmetry—pure symmetry can’t function in human life—but toward flexibility and phase-smart balance. Most of us carry regions of mind that are out of sync with themselves; those dissonances often sit at the root of our symptoms. Identify them. Realign them. Shift from treating symptoms to cultivating coherence.
Love as Synchrony
Even love obeys these same laws. Asprey writes about discipline as mastery, and mastery matters—but not just for control. For connection.
From a wave perspective, love is phase alignment: two minds synchronizing until interference becomes harmony. In sexual union the harmony becomes literal—shared rhythm, shared frequency—and, at shared climax, something singular happens. Boundaries soften. Two nervous systems, two fields of consciousness, phase-lock into a single coherent signal. That isn’t mystical metaphor; it’s resonance. Energy, breath, attention—one waveform. It’s the same physics that turns dissonance into harmony; only here, the orchestra is two souls.
Discipline has its place, but the deeper invitation is coordination—holding one’s own frequency steady enough to harmonize with another. Out of sync internally, relationships distort. Aligned, communication feels effortless. That isn’t chemistry; it’s coherence.
What if we cultivated that deliberately? Not only for pleasure or reproduction, but for creation—for art, healing, evolution. Every act of synchrony radiates. Every harmonized mind refines the collective field. Love, at its highest, isn’t sentiment—it’s structure: the universe learning to synchronize with itself.
Clear Minds, Shared Worlds
Once we can think rationally—past the residues of trauma, past the inherited beliefs that ride down family lines—the world begins to clarify. From our current vantage point, that can be hard to imagine. Yet as distortion drops, values start to converge—not by decree, but by resonance. Personal coherence scales.
The same logic that restores order to a brain could restore order to a culture. Education could become cultivation rather than competition. Economies could reward contribution instead of extraction. Governance could be designed for coherence instead of control. If biohacking taught us to debug the body, perhaps the next evolution is collective mindhacking—the art of debugging civilization itself.
Tolerance is good; structural intelligence is better. Meditation helps us survive the world we have. Rational understanding helps us build one that doesn’t keep producing harm.
Beyond Relief
Calm is the foundation; clear thinking is the structure that rests on it. The real question is what our systems could become if we began to design with the nature of mind in mind.
Biohacking gave me empowerment. Buddhism offered peace. Asprey’s Heavily Meditated bridged both. The Dream of Matterwidens the lens: consciousness and matter as one continuous field of waves learning to align.
The goal isn’t only to feel better. It’s to think clearer. Understand phase, interference, coherence—and you stop fighting noise and start tuning the instrument. Do it together, and you don’t just calm a few minds; you reshape the soundscape we all live in.
If these ideas resonate—if you’re curious how working with the brain can become a way of working with the mind itself, even the soul—consider subscribing here or visiting thedreamofmatter.com.
And if you’re interested in working directly on your own brain—through neurofeedback, neurostimulation, and other biohacking techniques—but with the understanding that we’re really helping your mind evolve, your soul grow in coherence—visit Peak Mind. It’s where the science of neurotherapy meets the art of becoming whole.