A couple of days ago I was visiting the campus of a just completed junior college not far from my home to see some people and as I was walking thru the buildings noticing all the brand new stuff that had been installed – furniture, windows, water fountains, stair railings, vending machines it struck me that every class room and office also had a shiny new computer. I started thinking about it – how ubiquitous computers have become in our lives. They’re basically another appliance like a refrigerator or a dishwasher, it occurred to me, but instead of keeping the milk cool or washing the dishes this appliance “thinks”.
It also occurred to me that the computer is essentially a model of our own brain – that we have invented it to enhance and enlarge what goes on inside our own noggin – we instruct it to remember, calculate, send and receive data and do a myriad of tasks quickly and accurately.
In fact the argument could be made that our mind too is a digital device. It operates by comparing and contrasting. There are always two things – life and death, yes and no, light and dark, day and night and of course all the shades of conditionality in between.
We can’t think about something without contrasting it with something else because our brain has itself been created by this space/time matrix called “the world” and this world is certainly about conditionality. That may have been what the big bang was all about come to think of it – a segue from singularity to duality. I digress.
The next thought that occurred to me was if the computer is analogous to the human brain – then what have we created that would be analogous to the human heart? Cars obviously are an extension of the human body – don’t know if you’ve ever looked at it that way but they are also ubiquitous and have been created by us humans to extend our range increase our power and make life easier.
I started posing this question to the people I encountered. If computers are analogous to the human mind what then have we created that is analogous to the human heart? I got some interesting answers.
art
hammocks and rocking chairs
soap operas
Why are you asking me that question?
television
The “heart” and the “mind” are part of the same circuitry (Biology professor)
I don’t know but it’s good critical thinking – I’m going to spring that on my students. (Philosophy professor)
Later driving home looking at all the cars – hundreds and hundreds of them on the road and in the parking lots. I found myself commenting to myself – all these cars have human beings sitting inside going somewhere, all these cars are built to enhance what we are and what we can do, that’s why they have been manufactured and that’s why somebody bought them. At that moment the question re-emerged and with a tantalizing hint of an answer.
Something analogous to the human heart? Something that models it perfectly and increases our range? Something that exists to make our lives easier and more enjoyable? Forgive me for being bold because if you don’t know about this person it might sound strange but I think I know the answer to the question. That would be Prem Rawat – he fits the bill perfectly.
I have seen him at events and heard him speak many times – I have learned much from him. The more I hear him speak and the more I learn the more I appreciate how synched he is with my own heart and the more enabled I am to “use” my heart for what it was intended – to feel good. The more I feel good the more I appreciate and on and on it goes.
I was recently at an event where he spoke and it felt to me like he was doing a “show”. It wasn’t like a concert and it wasn’t like theatre but it was definitely art. It was the art of touching the human heart and eliciting the sweet music that lies within it. As I watched the show I felt my heart being touched and I felt the love and appreciation open up and grow inside me. Even now as I write this something is still resonating from that event. And now as I’m sitting here at my computer an email arrives announcing more events. He’s taking his show on the road!
Don’t want to gush but he’s here, and he’s the manifestation of a human heart. Beautiful, simple, funny, glorious, amazing, kind and generous – everything I am as well, on display not hidden or suppressed. The perfect reflection of a human heart, the perfect “device’ to help me enjoy this most essential gift of being human happens to be another human being. That makes sense to me, some kind of logic there.