Idle Activeness

We modern humans often find ourselves frenetically engaging in one activity after another. Modern life pushes us to multitask and be constantly on the go. Our smart phones keep us ceaselessly in touch with a wide variety of people and events, threatening to rob us of any “down time” or quiet time, during which we can rest our mind and rejuvenate. Thus many of us go to great efforts to take a break to come down from our high alert state.

This is one reason why yoga and meditation have come to have so much appeal to moderns. People consider these practices to be of value to them, because the mind is considered to be doing nothing when we meditate; to become idle, to become blank, to rest. Once we go into mental idle mode for a while, both body and mind become refreshed and we're ready to jump back into the fray. It's as if our brain is connected to an on/off switch, that either allows it to be busy or renders it dormant. We flip from one mode to the other, as if our mind is polarized—it's either doing everything or nothing. There seems to be no gray area (sort of like American politics: it's either right wing or left wing, with no middle ground). Our life continues in either case, but nothing changes; no progress can occur, because we can't escape inhabiting and getting stuck in either extreme.

Modern neuroscience is bringing us a new understanding of what's going on in our mind while we rest it in meditation (or sleep). Even when we believe we've entered a blank, meditative state, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines show that certain parts of the brain (those that are mostly below the level of consciousness) actually become more active during meditation. These various regions of the brain do their own kinds of business and problem solving, autonomously, so that when we reengage with the world, we may find ourselves more creative, happier, and more effective.

But it's not that we've allowed the whole mind to “veg out” and recharge; we've let the conscious part of it become idle, as the unconscious part cranks up to do some work on its own. So we have more than just the binary on/off situation in our brain; it has other modes wherein the subconscious part automatically keeps chugging away, even during meditation, sleep, or idle times.

Creative people know that some of their biggest insights come when they are on idle, or even while daydreaming. Many of them have found that, after actively banging their heads against a wall, trying to figure out a problem, the solution comes unbidden after they go into idle mode.

So meditation is not just a process of turning the mind off, so we can let go our stress for a while—then jump back in, refreshed and ready to do battle again, just as we did before. It's more a process of getting the conscious “higher” part of the brain to turn activities over to other regions that can engage with life's issues and concerns, find ways to connect those regions and get them collaborating, so we can bring insightful and fresh ways to manage life.