I like computers. I’ve got a few of them, and I keep them around the house. Sometimes they’re turned on, sometimes they’re turned off. I like them as much when they’re off as when they’re on. I just like computers. They’re like pets—but you don’t have to feed them too much, a little electricity once in a while. But they’re nice. Sometimes I get different ones just because I like the way they look. They’re just fun to have around the house. I like their aura. I like their energy. I like the energy of computers.
Computer science is very interesting from an occultist’s point of view because it has to do with zeros and ones—it has to do with analysis. In order to experience enlightenment, in order to be enlightened, to be enlightenment, in order to raise into upper gradients of pure celestial light, it is necessary to refine the mind completely. The issue is style.
There is style in fashion, but there is style in states of mind. Some people are connoisseurs of states of mind, just as some people are connoisseurs of wine, food, countries, lovers. Buddhists are connoisseurs of states of mind. We savor certain states of mind. States of mind always exist. They’re always there, unlike the old Beaujolais, which this is the last bottle of. The state of mind will always be there. And when you’ve been around the universe for lots and lots of incarnations and experienced lots of states of mind, there are certain states of mind you learn to particularly appreciate.
The trick is getting to them. There may be some wonderful wine but it’s very expensive and you don’t have the money. So there are certain states of mind—the most beautiful ones are very hard to get to. They’re like places on earth that are beautiful. You have to travel a long way these days because the earth is very populated and the most beautiful places are very inaccessible these days. So, if you are a true lover of natural beauty, you have to travel a long way.
The states of mind that we seek are inside ourselves. They’re inside our mind. Our mind is a databank—not the brain, but the mind, the consciousness principle that we are. That which is the existence in us, is infinite. It contains many things, as it does infinity, as it is infinity. But in particular it contains what we call the ten thousand states of mind. Ten thousand is a symbolic number in Buddhism which just suggests that there’s a lot—a tremendous amount, more than ten thousand, more than ten billion, beyond counting is what ten thousand symbolizes.
That’s good, and it’s nice those states of mind are there, and it’s wonderful that there are enlightened states of mind and ecstasy and knowledge that human beings don’t know about. But how does one get there? How does one get to this paradise of mind?
It’s through refinement. It’s by developing a sense of style. I would say that style is the opposite of mediocrity. Mediocrity implies a lack of exactness—colors run together and get kind of gray, you see? Style, on the other hand, implicit in it is a certain awareness of not only what style is, but an ability to extract from the vast multitude of things, those things which are brightest.
So what becomes necessary is a process of extraction. How can we extract from all of infinity, and the various infinite states of mind, those that are the most bright? In order to do that, we have to become very exact. We have to make our minds very sharp so that out of millions of possible states of mind, we can feel intuitively and select those states of mind which are the most bright and the most beautiful. Buddhists spend a great deal of time working on and refining their minds. Because once the mind is properly refined, it will automatically select the right states of mind. It just happens by itself. What’s necessary is just to refine the mind.
In the West, people work. They get up in the morning and they go to work and they spend the day working. The primary energy that they have in their lives is directed towards their work. The work that most people do in the world tends to deaden them, deadens their mind, uses up their energy and they get a paycheck and old age—and not much energy, not much aliveness. They’re paying you for your energy. You get the check and they get your energy. That energy is translated into corporate dollars. Your energy causes things to occur which someone wants done, which they reap a profit from. You’re trading energy for dollars, and that’s all you’re getting—exhaustion, very often deadness. You’re being put in situations that your body would normally wish to veer away from because it feels the auras in those situations are not good for you. You go sit in a situation doing things that you normally wouldn’t do—because it’s not your vibratory level—because you’re getting paid. This is not a good situation if you’re trying to refine your mind. You can’t be deadening it eight hours a day and losing all your energy and life force; you’re never going to get to anything enlightened at all.
Computer programming is a field in which you use, particularly in its intermediate and advanced states, certain analytic techniques that are very similar to techniques that Buddhists have used for thousands and thousands of years to refine the mind. As a computer programmer, particularly working with higher level topics—artificial intelligence, relational database and things like that—one tends to use certain interactive skills, methods of logical analysis that refine the mind. Essentially, if you’re a computer programmer, you’re getting paid to refine your mind. Even though that’s not someone’s intention, it’s happening.
Computer science is interesting for a lot of reasons. It’s electronic. What you focus on you become. You’re tapping the electronic network. You’re dealing with a higher level, more volatile energy than is present. Whenever we’re dealing with anything that’s electronic, we’re tuning into a different spectrum. It’s a faster spectrum, and it has a higher and faster aura. That’s why I like the stock exchange. The stock exchange is a real interesting place because it’s a fast energy. Currency exchanges also—very quick energy. It’s a faster processing. And we process very, very quickly as we move into upper gradient states of mind. It’s natural for a person who meditates to want to be around something fast.
Fast is not frenetic. When I say fast, I don’t mean rushed, in a mess, chaotic. That’s not what I mean by fast. Electricity is fast; it’s faster than steam—the aura is more rapid. We try and put ourselves in conjunction with as many fast auras as possible since that’s the nature of our own aura, so we experience less coefficient auric drag.
The world of computer science and data processing is a very fast field, even the way it’s growing. It’s probably the fastest growing field in the world. Data processing, for example, also generates America’s largest volumes of dollars of any industry now, more than automotive, more than steel, more than oil—the big three. And it’s clean energy; it’s nonpolluting basically. You’re dealing with high-process-curve informational accesses, the distribution of information and its analysis. As you engage your mind in computer programming, you’re moving into a high auric field that has a very low coefficient drag in terms of energy output.
When you deal with people, it tends to drag your energy down, if those people are in a lower auric state than you. If you meditate and they don’t, then by the end of the day you tend to be more drained. On the other hand, when you deal with a terminal, when you’re dealing with programming and using your mind in very challenging ways, at the end of the day you do not tend to have picked up a lot of people’s auras. Consequently, you have not polluted yourself as much and it’s much easier to meditate and to get into higher levels of attention. In other words, it’s a job in which you can actually gain energy, not lose it.
There’s a normal physical exhaustion that occurs when we work, always. But [with computer science] our mental energy can increase and we don’t really get as involved in other people’s auras as we do in a lot of other jobs. Also, economically, there’s a very high-curve economic situation, and if one practices meditation, it’s necessary to create a level of insulation from the world. If you don’t live in a Buddhist monastery in the Far East, then the next best thing in the West is to have enough money to insulate yourself from those aspects of life that drain your energy—energy you’d rather keep to bring into your mind to move yourself into higher mental states. You need a lot of energy to move into higher mental states. And while we access energy in the process of meditation by meditating on the chakras and raising the kundalini, in addition to that, we need to not lose energy.
It isn’t even just a question about—it’s a kind of energy. In other words, you can talk with one person for five minutes and be sick afterwards. You can be totally physically drained because their aura was so low. You can talk to someone else for an hour and just feel fine. You can talk to somebody who’s very advanced and after just a few minutes you’ll glow. It’s aura.
When we deal with programming, we’re dealing essentially with our own aura. A project—sometimes there are other people on the project, the team leaders, but mainly we’re working with a screen and with a discipline that develops the mind in a very specific way, which lends itself to furthering our ability to meditate and live in higher mind states. You are able to make a lot of money in a very clean way, in a way that doesn’t injure anyone, in a way that, as a matter of fact, often helps others. So it’s a very clean field to be in. It enables you to conserve energy and at the same time develop your analytic tools and abilities so that you can select different mind states.
Programming, initially for most people, is a real bitch. When you start to program it’s just really hard because you don’t think that way, which is logically. But after you’ve programmed for—initially there’s a tremendous resistance to programming, but as you get into it further and further, once you develop your muscles a little bit, it’s really fun. And people who are drawn to meditation innately make excellent programmers, often exquisite programmers. You might say it’s just an innate ability that people who meditate have. The kind of person who would be drawn to meditation is the kind of person who, in most situations, makes an excellent programmer because the two skills are very similar, the natures are very similar.
A person who meditates, who becomes a programmer, is like a duck in a happy pond. You’re in the right situation for many, many reasons. But the reason I like computer programming the most is that it has to do with visualization and creation. When we’re programming, we’re extending ourselves into a series of planes of mind in which we have to, in a very creative way, interact with data and create pathways through things, particularly when we get into the world of complicated relational databases and mainframe systems. We’re creating, kind of, neural pathways. We’re mirroring the mind as best we can. It’s necessary in complex programming to make jumps that are nonlinear—to get to a point of understanding as to how the data pathways should flow. I mean, data pathways are God in advanced programming, essentially.
In order to create data pathways, we have to get to them before they exist, in our mind. That’s the real secret. In other words, there’s a place for a data pathway that cannot be directly seen because it’s nonlinear, it’s not logical. And in meditation we develop an intuitive skill whereby we enter into nothingness, the voidness of existence. And within that voidness are all possibilities, but they’re not necessarily built upon human logic. In other words, it’s intuitive.
We learn to use the nothingness of infinity to create things that we could not get to in a straight line. In other words, the shortest distance between two points is your mind. It’s not a straight line, it’s your mind. If we go into the mind, we can see data structures in other worlds, in other universes, in other infinities. We can bring those data structures into this world, and then we create data pathways that we could not have conceived of in a logical linear sequence, but we can just assess their there-ness. Then those data structures become binding realities in which we entwine data pathways, and so on and so forth. That’s computer programming at a higher level—other than AI, which is a little different, it’s not that different.
That’s kind of what we do in advanced meditation. We are going into nonsequential universes of mind and creating pathways between the parts of us that exist. And we interphase different parts of ourself and our being in different time/space structures and beyond time/space structures in different gradients of auric light in order to transmute our consciousness.
Advanced meditation is not just stopping your thought. It’s very technical. The process of eliminating the samskaras and reaching complete enlightenment is a very technical, wonderful—mystical of course—process. As you do very advanced queries in computer science, as you create data structures and data pathways in a more advanced way, what you’re doing is pushing the envelope of mind significantly in a way that will then assist you later on when you do more advanced meditation.
So I suggest that people become programmers, even though they may be initially bored by programming and the initial phases of programming, just to create a logical discipline of the mind, which is a helpful and necessary stepping stone later. But later, when you start to get up there, as you advance, you will find if you meditate that you will probably be an outstanding programmer further up. It’s like you have to learn the grammar of the language and you might even learn the grammar more slowly than somebody else. But once you get into the language, you may be very fluent. You may do well with the literature. Whereas the person, maybe, who learned the grammar quickly, that’s as far as they could get. But when it comes to the ideas within literature, they don’t have the mind-state to really deal with them.
People who meditate have the mind-state to deal with advanced concepts. Sometimes it takes them, if they were raised without a lot of mental discipline, a while to pick up those disciplines. But once you get those disciplines down and you get up there, your mind will take over. And if you’re willing to be patient enough to get yourself through the basics of computer science, even though it may take you three times as long as someone else, once you’ve done that, if you’re patient, once you start to get up into higher level programming, then you rock and roll—a person who meditates.
Your mind and the abilities you developed in past lives—you will access those states of mind to create advanced data structures and advanced data pathways. And it works really well, and it’s a wonderful workout, basically, for the mind, which is what we’re looking for in preparation for the enlightenment experience.