Moving a mountain with yourmind is nothing next to mo ving the whole world, which is our
ultimate goal.I6
 
E X I S T E N C E  A N D
C O N S C I O U S N E S S  A R E
T H E  S A M E
have strong memories, growing up in India, of attending
schools taught by Catholic  missionaries. The Old Testament
wasn’t light reading—I came away remembering sin, wars, laws,
lamentations, a nd plagues. But there’s a verse very early o n, after
the seven days of creation, in which God “was walking  in the
Garden in the cool of the day” (Genesis 3:8). God was still on good
terms with Adam and Eve, a nd, in my imagination, the moment
was perfect for a casual conve rsation. None occurs. Adam and Eve
aren’t a ctually there at first, h aving hidden from God out of shame
for thei r nakedness. But in my imaginary conversation, they would
ask a crucial question: “Why did you do it? Why did you create the
world?”
In reply, God would say, somewhat sheepishly, “There wasn’t
any reason. I just had to. I couldn’t help myself.”
Modern cosmology has come up with no better answer. The
universe is self-creating. It exists just because it has to exist. Everything sin ce the big bang has unfolded of its own  accord,
driven b y natural forces. We a lmost didn’t make it. Physicists havecalculated that the balance of creation and destruction was
extremely delicate in the beginning. Destruction came within a
hairbreadth of  winning out, because all but the tiniest fra ction of
primal mass and energy coll apsed within itself, returning to the
vacuum state, as it is know n. As little as one part in a billion
escaped the jaws of destruction—a metaphor for gravity, the force
that caused the collapse of e verything else—but one billionth of
creation was enough to enab le trillions of stars and galaxies to be
formed. (This didn’t happen quickly, though. It took 800 million
years for the oldest star to coalesce from interstellar dust.) A se lf-creating universe is our version, with many bells and
whistles attached, of the eighteenth-century notion of God as a
cosmic clockm aker who wound up the early universe, set it going,
and departed to let it operate  mechanically. But self-crea tion is a
sticky b usiness. Who or what got the process going? The creator’s
creator wasn’t a problem for the ancient Jewish rabbis—they
accepted God on faith as always existing. Finding a similar
nonfaith agent has proved all but impossible. I’m arg uing in this book tha t consciousness is the only viable
self-creator, turning itself into mind, body, brain, and universe. That’s a radical departure from physical explanations of the
cosmos. As in the Book of Ge nesis, consciousness creates because
it h as to. It only needs to ex ist in order to start the ball rolling. (Where did existence come from? We don’t have to worry about
that, because if nonexistence existed, it wouldn’t be nonexistence.) Just because it exists, pure consciousness generates reality as
we know  it. The ancient Indi an scriptures speak of myriad worlds
spinning into creation like motes of dust dancing in a sunbeam. But in the same sunbeam we see myriad thoughts, feelings,
sensations, and images, too, the entire content of the human
mind. Faced with staggering overload, our minds have to generate
a livabl e world to inhabit—a human world—and the virtual reality
that we created was inevitable. But simply reducing the teeming multiplicity of raw reality
wasn’t enough . The human world contains meaning. Where did it
come from? It was always there, as a primary trait of met areality. Pure consciousness created a universe filled with meaning. Everything we can say about being human—our joy, love, vitality,intelligence, a nd infinite potential—needed no creator. Those
qualities came  with existence, right off the bat. Without w heels, a
car isn’t a car. Without humanity, the cosmos isn’t a cos mos we
could ever relate to, or even inhabit. The universe was created for us because there is no other
alternative. Creation cannot be whole unless we are who le. Once
this secret is re vealed, metahuman can free itself from sel f-doubt,
confusion, and sorrow. They are the stepchildren of illusion. A  S p e c i a l  C r e a t i o n
Pure consciousness cannot be interviewed, like talking to God,
even in an imaginary conversation. But the notion of self-creation
has always been viable. We  can accept without question that
Homo sapiens  cre ated its ow n version of reality. We are still at it,
with no signs of stopping. It makes no sense to claim that our
remotest ancestors somehow learned to be creative. Creativity is
intrinsic to us, like breathing. Somehow we picked up a lo t of old habits that consciousness
had got ten use d to. All life forms are wrapped up in self-c reation,
but they are c ontent to let it roll over them. The ancestor of all
mammals was a shrew-like cr eature named Juramaia  t ha t liv ed in
tree ferns around freshwate r lakes 160 million years ago. The
discovery of this creature in China in 2011 pushed the ancestry of
all “tru e” mammals back by 35 million years. (A true m ammal
species is one in which the fetus is nurtured by a placenta in the
womb. This accounts for 95 percent of all mammals, the other
portion being marsupials like possums and kangaroos that give
birth t o tiny babies that finish their maturation inside the
mother’s pouch.) Juramaia  did n’t know t hat it would be anything but a shrew,
and you’d think, looking at its five-inch skeleton, that only modern
shrews would descend from it, not all true mammals. No  trace of
dogs, cats, bats, elephants, o r whales is visible. It took a lot of
inference to suggest that Juramaia  had a placenta, since no softtissues are preserved in fossils. Yet guesswork isn’t needed when it
comes t o know ing that a plac enta was the key. Once it appeared, a
unique feature never seen before, a door was opened. What rushed
through it wasn’t Juramaia , which eventually became extinct, but
self-creation. An unstoppable habit took a leap forward. From
then on , true mammals could be small, big, or mammoth. They
could s wim, walk, crawl, burrow, or fly. Nothing was fixed or
permanent—except a placenta. Nature took a creative leap without
precedent, wit h barely a hin t in all past life forms that t his new
kind of birth was possible. This brings up a second mi sconception, that evolution is all
about p rogress. Creativity doesn’t need to progress; it is already
complete. Ever y life form is a complete creative act. In the case of
Juramaia , a tiny shrew-like creature wasn’t better than what came
before. Marsupials could have ruled the Earth—they became the
only indigeno us mammals in Australia. Much earlie r, eggs
evolved, and they kept on h atching, just as they did during the
reign of the dinosaurs. Live birth wasn’t better—today some
sharks lay eggs while others give birth to live young. There is no
straight-line progression from early life forms to us. Billion-year-
old microbes, one-celled animals, and blue-green algae continue
to e xist because their adaptation to the Earth was perfe ct in its
own wa y. Without the unstoppable urge to create, there was no
reason for primitive life to leave its very secure comfort zone. Self-creation is a strong clue that consciousness needs nothing
outside itself to keep expanding endlessly. In time, Homo sapiens
rushed through another door, the one that opened to self-
awareness. We can do anything with our potential that we want to,
but no matter how civilizat ion changes, it is impossible to be
human withou t being aware. The only question is the d egree of
awareness we choose to emb race. Metahuman is closer than we
imagine, being just a higher degree of awareness. Awareness and existence ar e uncreated. That’s the simplest
formulation of  the truth. Bein g uncreated means they simply are . Without having to give a reason, needing no creation story, the
primal setup for being human is that we are here. We exist
because consci ousness exists. Of all the secrets of metareality, this
one tak es the longest to sink in. At first glance, existence i s a non-issue. Nobody in a college de bating society like the Oxford Union
will arg ue the case for nonex istence. There would be no debating
societies if we didn’t exist—the point seems silly, even childish. But if being he re is enough to bring about everything in creation
through a conscious process, that  is big news. Existence and consciousness  cannot be separated. They don’t
just belong together, like hea t and fire or water and wetness. They
are the same th ing. Descartes  famously declared Cogito ergo sum ,
“I think , there fore I am.” It’s  more accurate to say the reverse: I
am, therefore I think. Either way, however, seeking a cause-and-effect relations hip is
chop lo gic. To exist and to th ink are the same thing. One  doesn’t
cause the other. Failing t o see this fact has led to many
misconceptions. For example, if you insist that the mind needs a
cause, y ou are stuck giving it a creation story. If you are a modern
secular person , you are soon trapped in the mistake of believing
that the brain created the mind. To a developmental psychologist,
there i s no doubt that t he brain creates the mind, and
neuroscience c oncurs. As creation stories go, this one is bolstered
by phy siology, but childhood development also offers enough
evidence to blow the story apart. T h e  E x p a n d i n g  B r a i n
If we look at th e last stages of the fetus’s life in the womb, the
brain is  the main focus of development, the last organ to acquire
its final configuration—but th at won’t happen yet. At the moment
of birth , the infant brain is exploding with untapped growth
potential. The biggest part of the human brain is the cerebrum,
responsible for thinking and other higher functions, and evolution
has given babies a huge cerebrum to begin with, one reason that a
newborn’s hea d is so large, at the limits of what can pass  though
the birth canal. In a normal fetus carried to term, the last
trimester sees the brain roughly tripling in weight, from 3.5
ounces at the end of the second trimester to 10.6 ounces at birth.In a  sense, all babies are born prematurely, entering a “fo urth
trimester” the day they are born, because the brain keep s up its
accelerated gro wth outside the womb. In the first three m onths of
life, a newborn’s brain grow s by as much as 1 percent a day,
expanding by 64 percent in the first ninety days, after which the
growth rate shrinks to an average of 0.4 percent a day. Du ring the
rapid-growth p hase, 60 percent of the energy consumed by a baby
is used by the brain. The lar ge-scale or macro view shows that a
newborn already has all the brain cells needed for a lifetime—in
fact, too many. A newborn’s b rain cells number around twice what
an a dult has, even though the  newborn brain weighs half a s much. As it grows to full size, which takes three years, the baby brain
thins ou t its weaker connect ions (a process technically known as
“synaptic prun ing”). It’s like sorting through an attic filled to the
rafters with things you need and junk you can do without. Here w e begin to see the mystery of uniqueness, be cause
synaptic pruni ng is different for each baby. The brain somehow
disposes of what will not be needed for that one individual . A
musical prodigy who needs phenomenal motor skills to play the
piano at a vir tuoso level may not need advanced math ematical
ability or articulate language skills. A sculptor with a  highly
developed ability to envision  objects in three-dimension al space
may wi nd up without the relationship skills to find the right
spouse. The combinations are endless, and, to match th em, the
brain’s quadri llion synaptic  connections are just enough. Yet
clearly a brain cell has no for eknowledge that it will be ne eded or
not nee ded, according to events far in the future. Synaptic pruning
isn’t ran dom. It only makes sense that a higher perspectiv e that is
beyond time must be managing the process. For example, a study by researchers at the University of
Washington found that speci fic areas of the brain that control the
physical aspec ts of speech (Broca’s area and the cerebellum) are
activated in seven-month-olds in advance of learning to speak. This is evidenc e of looking a head to the future and throwing the
necessary brain switches in advance. A seven-month-old baby
doesn’t know that she will on e day speak, but Homo sapiens  does,
because we are a species of consciousness. Our speciescommunicates through the spoken word, and just about every
baby has inherited that ability. This is different from inheriting the physical need to exchange
baby tee th for adult teeth, wh ich is linked to the growth of the jaw,
or th e n eed to go through puberty, which makes it possible to pass
on our genes through sexua l reproduction. Speech is a mental
acquisition, a prime tool for knowing what someone else is
thinking. If unde rstanding the brain would allow us to understand the
mind, w e’d be  far ahead of the game. Yet the notion that “brain
creates mind” has always been a fallacy. For a cell to know
anything, it cannot get that knowledge from atoms and mo lecules. Atoms and molecules don’t know that speech will be necessary. Only consciousness affords a valid explanation, because
consciousness is the knowing element in every cell, every life form,
and every person. Because we live in the golden age of neuroscience, you would
think th at som eday there would be a user’s manual for the mind. But tha t day will never come. Our view is blocked by the mistake
of eq uating mind and brain. Even the fact that the brain co ntains a
quadrillion con nections is meaningless in terms of mind, just as
measuring every frequency of visible light would be meaningless
to explain how Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa . Life
would be meaningless if the  brain were in charge, beca use the
brain itself is meaningless. The mystique that surrounds it,
ascribing thoughts, feelings, and sensations to clumps of neurons,
has no  basis. If a neuroscientist went around saying, “That
quarterback is  out of his brain” or “I’d like to buy a house, but I
just can’t make up my brain,” no one would deny that mind  is the
word intended. It’s very difficult, however, to pry neuroscientists from their
belief th at “brain creates mind.” In the emergency room, an EEG
reveals when the victim of a  fatal car accident is brain- dead, at
which p oint th ere is no min d left. Isn’t it obvious that the mind
lived there, beneath the hard shell of the skull? Not at all. Imagine
that you  had never seen a player piano and knew nothin g about
how one works. You walk into a music room, and a piano isplaying “The Blue Danube Waltz” by itself. You can see the keys
going up and down, the hammers striking the strings. How w ould y ou know if there was an invisible p ianist
performing this magical act? There’s no way to tell. On the other
hand, it seems irrational to jump to the conclusion that the piano
is playing itself. The instrument’s raw materials—wood, steel, felt,
and ivo ry—can be studied down to the atomic level. Nowhere will
you find a tale nt for music. Y et in neuroscience and everyday life,
we say that the brain, which is also a physical instrument, thinks,
feels, sees, and does everythin g else that happens in the mind. We
make t his assumption without the slightest proof that the raw
materials inside a cell—basically hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and
nitrogen—can love or hate Brussels sprouts, enjoy Viennese
waltzes, fall in love, and so on . The fact that the brain is constantly
buzzing with activity doesn’t tell us that a mind is at work or why
each mind is unique at any given moment . Finding the source of the mind is easy once you put
consciousness first. It’s not hard to do this. We naturally  rely on
the min d because our existence is tied to it. We use our minds in
lots of ways th at do not light  up on a brain scan and that require
no d iscernible brain activity. Can you recognize your spou se’s face
in a  cro wd? Ye s, instantly, but you don’t go through a proc ess that
requires brain activity. Your brain doesn’t flip through a mental
Rolodex until you find a stor ed image of the right face and pick it
out, the way th e witness to a  crime is asked to flip through mug
shots at the police station. Recognition happens in the mind
without burnin g calories in the brain, and unless the brain is
burning calories, it’s not at work. In t he s ame wa y, you choose words without thumbing thr ough
a dictio nary stored in the brai n. And once you learn the streets of a
new town, you can negotiate them without consulting a map—on
paper o r in your brain. Lea rned things are simply there. The
opposite is also true. If s omeone asks you the meaning of
hydrocephalus  or ratatouille , an d you don’t know the word, you
don’t n eed to comb through your vocabulary for missing words—
you immediate ly know that you don’t know. But a high-speed
computer has to consult its stored memory before it says, “Does
not compute.”Some years ago I met a math prodigy, now retired from being a
professor, who had started publishing in leading math ematics
journals at the age of twelve and subsequently attended P rinceton
at sixte en. He finished his co ursework for a doctorate at Harvard
while still an u ndergraduate. As remarkable as prodigies are, one
comment in an interview with  this math genius stuck in my mind. When asked how his thinking process was different from other
people’s, he said that he didn’t think in order to solve a math
problem—he p osed the problem to himself, allowed it to incubate,
and waited for the right answer to pop out. He had developed such abso lute confidence early on and still
continues to rely on it. Should we consider genius exce ptional,
totally divorced from the norm? Not at all. To some degree
everyone has experienced the power of intuition, which can be
defined as the mind jumpin g to a conclusion without h aving to
think th rough all the individual steps along the way. When people
say intuitive things, like “I knew the man I was going to marry
when I first set eyes on him” or “I knew I’d fly jets from the time I
was five,” they didn’t arrive at this certainty by thinking it through. In all kinds of activities, the mind relies on the knowing element
that is innate i n consciousne ss. This fact must be grasped before
we can venture into the met ahuman possibility of using our full
potential. The  door is slam med shut if “brain creates mind,”
because what makes us hu man—love, compassion, creativity,
insight, and imagination—is beyond the brain. We can bolster the case by returning to the infant brain yet
again. A t birth  a brain scan will indicate that a newborn’s  brain is
highly active, but no one wou ld claim that a newborn is t hinking,
not in the way adults put wo rds together in their head. W hen an
infant c ries, it is inarticulately saying it is hungry, tired, afraid,
needs changin g, and so on. The mother picks one of the
possibilities and acts accordingly once she pinpoints what her
baby w ants. We don’t assume that the baby knows a nything
beyond its raw discomfort. At som e point, thinking begins, and an infant’s life bec omes
mind-based. Thinking in words and forming ideas begin to
emerge. But even if you were present at the exact instant a baby
uttered her first word and even if you could map this moment asan even t on a brain scan, the birth of language isn’t in th e brain. Somehow, purely in consciousness, a thought arises, connected to
a meaning. At f irst the use  of words is like a parrot repeating what it h ears. Goo goo  me ans nothing. Mama  i s probably a  parroted word
coaxed out by the baby’s mot her. But then an invisible, silent aha
occurs. Mama  is the concept that attaches to a person, and only
one person in the whole wo rld. Then there’s an acceleration of
speech, and by their second birthday, infants enter what experts
call a “meanin g explosion.” (This is also apparently the point at
which chimpanzee DNA, although 98 percent identical to human
DNA, s tops sh ort. Homo sapiens  is  unique in h aving billions  of
new neural connections deve loping in the first two years of life.) A
typical two-year-old knows ar ound a hundred words; at two and a
half, vocabulary has grown to around three hundred words. Meanwhile, a change occurs  that is far more significant than
acquiring a vocabulary: toddlers start saying things they have
never heard before , forming new sentences on their own. No one
taught us how to do this, and yet the most advanced computer is
miles behind the average three- or four-year-old. A computer can
be programme d to invent an infinite number of sentences never
said be fore, but it doesn’t know what it’s doing. The process is
totally mechanical—a laptop saying “I love you” doesn’t really
mean it. Meaning can’t explode out of the meaningless, just as sent ences
that ma ke sense cannot emerge simply by tossing alphabet soup in
the air. Consciousness unfolds as mind, body, and brain, each
process gover ned by meaning and purpose. (A popular
motivational slogan in recent years is “the purpose-driven life,”
which inspires people who feel confused, adrift, and without
purpose. Yet we cannot help  but be purpose-driven from birth—
otherwise, we’d be mindless.) We may not be able to articu late the
meaning of life, but we are c ertain that there is meaning, and we
are designed to reach for more. Consciousness is a meaning field. We know this despite
ourselves. In one experiment, participants were told that they
would be taking a hearing test, which required them to listen to
recordings of sentences being said in a very low voice. Even withgood h earing it was hard to make out exactly what was being
uttered, but the participants were told to make the best guess they
could. What they didn’t know was that each was listening to a
sequence of nonsense syllables, a possibility that occurred to no
one. No matter how low and unintelligible the voice, the
participants heard—or guessed they heard—sentences that made
sense. Yet even before langua ge arose, animals made sense of their
surroundings, learning to rec ognize edible food, potential threats,
a d esirable mate, and thei r own young. We might c all this
recognition ins tinctive, but it doesn’t change the fact that meaning
was inescapable. Even a one-celled amoeba engulfing a smaller
one-celled crea ture is distinguishing food from nonfood. N othing,
not even the fo rce of evolution, created meaning out of cha os—it is
a given in the universe. The mind field has the ca pacity to turn into a mine field,
depending on what kind of m ind a child develops. The peo ple who
hide fro m their own inner w orld, who dutifully shape their lives
according to social norms, do it in order to avoid trouble. But
hiding out from the mind’s dark side doesn’t defuse the threat. A
tragic view of life hangs over us after the unthinkable carnage of
the twentieth century, when an estimated 100 million people died
as a result of war and genocide. The cognitive explosion that anthropologists surmise occurred
in p rehistory, a leap that re vealed the world of self-awareness,
repeats itself with every baby’s cognitive explosion as the baby
learns to think and speak. The infant brain adapts to the
worldview imp osed on it. In finite potential gets reduced in ways
far too limiting and self-defeating. The British writer Aldous
Huxley took a similar view decades ago. He wrote extensively
against the use of the brain as a “reducing valve” that n arrowed
down the mind. Here’s one o f Huxley’s most forceful statements
on the matter:
Each on e of us is potentially M ind at Large. But in so far
as w e are anim als, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large hasto be funneled  through the r educing valve of the brain
and ner vous system. What comes out at the other end is
a m easly trickle of the kind o f consciousness which will
help us to sta y alive on the surface of this particular
planet. Using other words, Huxley is contrasting the unbounded field
of consciousness with the tightly bound perspective the everyday
mind ta kes. His central point, that the “reducing valve” of the
brain was necessary for our survival, has gained modern support
from va rious proponents of evolutionary psychology. They, too,
view th e narrowing of mind as a necessity for survival. But I’ve
been arguing that consciousness never loses its infinite potential,
no m atter what is happening  to us inside virtual reality. Placing
the blame for our flawed e xistence on the brain points in the
wrong direction. The brain is another mode of consciousness. Its
potential isn’t inherently limited. Let’s go deeper into why this is
so, because, for practical purposes, accessing metareality won’t be
possible unless the brain can break free from its narrowness and
take us there. M i n d  a t  L a r g e  a n d  P s y c h e d e l i c s
The firs t requirement is to op en up the brain’s reducing valve,
which h as been happening through a surprising avenue . A new
wave of medical interest surrounds the potential value of
psychedelic dr ugs, spurred by a thorough, sensible review of a
once-taboo subject by Michael Pollan in his first-person account,
How to Change Your Mind . Fo r ha llucinogens to resurfa ce was a
“Come out, come out, wherever you are” proposition. LSD, magic
mushrooms, a nd mescaline had their day in the sixties and
emerged from that time badly tarnished. Leaving aside various
antidrug laws largely prompt ed by fear, a medical researcher who
looked into psychedelics typically faced the risk of censure,perhaps career-ending censure. At the very least, such research
wasn’t taken very seriously and was quickly brushed aside. The general view of psychedelics has been, up until recently,
that they are p otentially unsafe and medically useless. Th at is all
changing. What has changed this conventional wisdom is deeper
knowledge and better understanding of the brain. In particular,
the area of the  brain that seems to cause the mind-alterin g effect
of L SD and c ompany is the so-called default mode network
(DMN), a collection of regions in the higher brain that organizes
and regulates a wide range of cerebral activity. The DMN filters
out the flood o f information that bombards us every day, s electing
and controlling  our response to the world. It is the physiological
location for the editing of r eality we’ve been discussing  in this
book. A  troubling implicati on of the DMN is that our brains
evolved physically to become Huxley’s reducing valve. LSD jolts
the DMN temporarily, but on ce the trip is over, we go bac k to the
brain’s status quo. Undoubtedly, the DMN ser ves a totally necessary function. Instead of feeling overwhelmed by a barrage of chaotic stimuli, a
stable b rain helps us approach life with a balance of judgment,
experience, an d self-interest. The DMN has been called the “me”
network, because it functions in the brain the way the ego
functions in psychology, tam ping down irrational impu lses and
keeping them in check while organizing a balanced adult self. The DMN doesn’t develop until around age five, coinciding
with the time w hen children become proud of “not being a baby.”
This entails many things—not throwing tantrums and crying over
each lit tle disc omfort; showing more courage, independence, and
self-possession; wanting to be useful by helping out; and
defending their own tastes and inclinations. A great deal of inner
self-regulation is required for such a complex shift in behavior,
and the DMN handles the majority of that. But this  shift isn’t altogether good and positive. From Hu xley’s
perspective, M ind at Large is  being reduced for the sake of crude
animal survival. From a medical standpoint it is conjectured that
the DM N, although totally necessary so that we aren’t tripping all
the tim e in a w hirling blur of sights and sounds, has a downside. Over time its automatic (i.e., default) responses become ingrainedand rigid. On the one hand,  this may account for the stubborn
narrow-mindedness associated with growing old, while  on the
other there may be a tie-in t o disorders like anxiety, depression,
and addiction. These become ingrained responses that won’t be
dislodged until the DMN stops controlling them so tightly. One of the most searching accounts of personal transformation
on psychedelics is Trip , the 2018 memoir of the American writer
Tao Lin, born of Taiwanese parents in Florida in 1983. Lin had
long been afflicted with despondency. As he puts it:
Life stil l seeme d bleak to me , as it had in evolving ways
since I was thirteen or fourt een. I was chronically not
fascinated by existence, which…did not feel wonderful
or profound but tedious and uncomfortable and
troubling. Isolated, leading a hermit-like life whose solitude was
aggravated by what Lin calls  his addiction to the internet and his
smartphone, h e came to psyc hedelics by bingeing for thirty hours
on the YouTube soliloquies of Terence McKenna, a passionate
advocate of tripping who died in 2000. Lin was attracted by the
message that psychedelics c ould increase his imaginat ion and
bring him closer to Nature. Lin has a comp lex story to tell—during one trip he sees hi mself
being fired out of a cannon i nto the Milky Way—and he ponders
“all kind s of issues about what is reality, what is language, what is
the self, what is three-dimen sional space and time.” This echoes
what people report from nea r-death and out-of-body experiences. In a ll these cas es, the self-model stops being the default vi ewpoint
on reality, or, in neurological terms, the DMN. By releasing the hold of t he DMN, psychedelics allow an
opening for altering brain function among people with mood
disorders and the like. The D MN was only discovered in 2001 by
researcher Michael Richie using advanced fMRI scans. For the
first time, researchers could  see the interconnected parts of the
DMN light up when a perso n was asked, for example, to choose
adjectives tha t described himself. To a neuroscientist, theincreased blood flow to the DMN that accompanies this task
shows, in effect, that the self is a brain function—your DMN knows
who you are b ecause it created your default responses when you
think about yourself. The increase and decrease of blood flow is a useful indicator in
brain research, as are patterns of electrical activity, but these are
still no t a measure of th e mind, only its physical mirror. Psychedelics c hange the pattern of blood flow in unusual ways. Pollan cites a study in which nineteen subjects suffering from
depression imp roved after taking psilocybin, the active in gredient
in “magic mushrooms,” after being resistant to conventional drug
therapy. The researchers fou nd that blood flow to the amygdala
(the brain’s emotional center) decreased, but this doesn’t explain
why the subjects also reported profound mystical experiences. Many are skeptical about such findings. One problem is that
there’s no way to give a pla cebo to a control group tha t would
simulate the real drug’s hallucinogenic effects. (No one actually
knows w hy our  bodies evolved to have receptors for psych edelics,
given how rarely they must h ave been encountered by our remote
ancestors.) But the main research on psychedelics seems to
indicate that these substances reduce DMN activity, shutting it
down temporarily. In tandem with this shutting down, the person
taking the drug feels his ego dissolve, together with the normal
experience of mind, body, an d world. This underscores the point
that mi nd, body, brain, and w orld are highly malleable in human
perception. We  are entangled in the process of holding the m intact
every w aking moment, and psychedelics abruptly and r adically
loosen our grip. For Pollan, the experience was a revelation. He cam e to
recognize “the tenuousness and relativity of my own default
consciousness.” His thorough, objective investigation, which
involved taking a gamut of mind-altering drugs but also delving
into eve ry nook and cranny of medical research, led him  to hope
that their use w ould extend to normal healthy people (although he
retained a sensible fear of bad trips). He wanted the psychedelic
journey to be considered more than a “drug experience.” In his
view, th e first step should be  obtaining the guidance of someonewho could explain the meaning of a trip after it was over, if it had
a meaning (not everyone agrees that it does). Where does that leave us? N o one really knows, and resp ected
scientific journals routinely turn down research papers on
psychedelics. Pollan’s book should be read to get the c omplete
story about the future promise of these substances. Particularly
intriguing is the use of “micro-dosing,” in which tiny amounts of a
psychedelic are taken on an everyday basis, enough to loosen the
grip of the DMN but not alt ering normal thinking. The hope is
that, instead of altering the mind in a drastic, trippy way, micro-
dosing will permit self-aware ness to observe and reflect upon new
possibilities that a person cannot access under normal conditions. There’s no doubt, from a meta viewpoint, that psychedelics
weaken or dissolve the mental constructs that keep virtual reality
intact. Some people feel that tripping has tapped into Mind at
Large. T his sounded highly desirable to Huxley, who was an early
champion of  guided psychedelic trips into expanded
consciousness; this was his ultimate goal. To become respectable,
psychedelics h ad to get pas t their hippie image, however, and
brain scans proved to be the key. But the respectability  lent by
brain scans also contains a flaw. To a neuroscientist, the DMN is like the adult in the room, a
brain region that keeps our  wilder, more primitive impulses at
bay. Thus a sp ecialized group of cells has taken over th e exact
function that Freud assigned to the ego. It is typical of our age that
psychiatry is highly dependent on pharmaceuticals to combat
anxiety and depression, re placing years of expensive , time-
consuming talk therapy. As psychiatry has become a matter of
shifting aroun d molecules in the brain, so has everyth ing else
about th e mind . But the notio n that “brain creates mind” i s just as
fallacious here as elsewhere. The fallacy crops up glaringly  in the DMN, because if it in deed
controls the balancing act tha t is the adult mind, who gave it such
ability? How did it learn ab out the benefits of adulthood in the
first pla ce? Th e first answer that comes to mind is that th e DMNarose a s a survival mechanism, but there’s no proof of this—it’s
just a blanket generalization from the stock-in-trade of
Darwinians. C ountless peop le function well in society without
bothering to grow into mature adults. Researchers treat the DMN as if it were a conscious agent with
flexible intentions and good judgment. Attributing such q ualities
to b rain cells i s a form of magical thinking. Clumps of ch emicals
don’t understand how life works; only consciousness does. After trying a number of different drugs, Michael Pollan had his
most profound experience without them. He was shown how to go
into a trance state simply through breathing rapidly and l istening
to rh ythmic drumming. His r eaction: “Where in the world has that
been all my life?” It was in Mind at Large. All drug s have side effects, so me of them unpredictable, but the
pitfalls of psychedelics are unique. If you go inside and mess
around with a piano’s strings , music starts to come out sounding
distorted. To go into the mo st sensitive areas of the higher brain
incurs a similar risk, but my point isn’t to sound alarms g rounded
in fe ar and suspicion—quite the opposite. Mind at Large contains
the full range o f human potential, and it can be accessed n aturally
through yoga, meditation, and various contemplative p ractices. These p ractices also bring beneficial brain changes, accom plishing
this thr ough th e most natural of mechanisms: the mind learning
to know itself. The tim e for psychedelics to come out of the shadows is now,
giving u s a balanced picture  of what is at stake and also at risk. The sud den feeling that we c an fly turns out to be a fatal delusion
if we test it by jumping off a high building, as has happened more
than on ce. The  insights that dawn during a trip often turn out to
be unin telligible on returning  to a normal waking state. The bigger
picture goes beyond psychedelics. Pollan encourages “neural
diversity” in the epilogue to his book. But, for me, the mind-
altering effect of LSD bears fruit only if it leads to self-aw areness. A dr ug can sho w you what lie s beyond the limited mind; o nly self-
awareness allows you to inhabit Mind at Large permanently. The opposite of self-awareness is the mechanistic view that a
human being is a brain pupp et, a subordinate of neural activity.Insofar as psychedelics have medical uses, we should cheer them
on. But  Huxley ’s insight that Mind at Large is the real is sue still
holds true. What separates us from Mind at Large—or metareality—is the
thinnest of veils. It takes only the merest thought. I found this out
recently when I was doing t he tree pose with a yoga instructor. The tree pose requires delicate balance on one foot, and I’ve gotten
better at it, but suddenly that morning I began to wobble. Immediately the instructor said, “What were you thinking about?”
It was the right question to a sk, because I had lost my clear, open
state o f mind as a result of a distracting thought (ab out the
medical benefits of psychede lics, as it happens). It takes a clear,
open state of mind, uncluttered by random thoughts, to do a lot
more in life tha n holding a yo ga pose. Such clarity is what Mind at
Large feels like. It is what freedom feels like. It is the door to
metahuman. In Part Two, we’ll make everything personal by showing how
each person can experience the shift to Mind at Large. A c ollective
awakening is made possible only when individuals wake up—and
nothing is more urgent. As  a bridge, let me undersco re how
extraordinary waking up is, and how unpredictable. Waking up makes us more h uman and more real at the same
time, because we are the species of consciousness destined—and
designed—to know our sour ce completely. If a single vision can
unite the human race, this is it.T7
 
P U T T I N G  E X P E R I E N C E  F I R S T
he punch line to an old jo ke has gotten embedded in
popular cultur e. As I first heard it, the joke involves a lost city
slicker stopping his car on a country lane to ask a farmer how to
get to a certa in town. The farmer scratches his head with a
bewildered loo k and says, “Sorry, mister, but you can’t g et there
from here.”
Why does the joke make us laugh? The humor is rooted in the
fact that you can get anywhere on the map from anywhere else. But if the city slicker had asked the farmer how to get to
metareality, he ’d have gotten the same answer, only this time it
wouldn’t be funny—at least not to me. You cannot get to metareality by clinging to virtual reality. The
reason for this has been ex pressed in various ways ever since
Homo sapiens  rea lized that th ere is a dimension of life beyond the
everyday. Being stuck in virtual reality is like being under a
hypnotic spell,  and we can’t break the spell as long as it has us in
its grip—there  is no hypnotist standing by who can s nap his
fingers and break the spell  for us. Or we are like dreamers
captivated by the dream’s illusions, and we cannot wake up as long
as t he dream lasts—there is  no one standing beside the bed to
shake us awake.Spells, dream s, enchantments, illusions, wizardry and
witchcraft, mis chievous gods —every culture has invented versions
of th e s ame ide a that reality i s deceptive. “You can’t get the re from
here” a s long as you are entangled in a complete, all-env eloping
trick of the m ind. Figuring out how to wake up, theref ore, has
been a mysterious business. Up until now. Life pro ceeds b y knowledge and experience, and Part One was
all abo ut the knowledge of metareality. So where will the
experience com e from? Why didn’t we delve into it first? It’s easy
to be impatien t (the male sex, in particular, is notorious  for not
reading the manual or asking  for directions when lost), but in this
case knowledge and experien ce can’t be separated. You can’t jump
into the deep end of the p ool and figure out how t o swim. Consciousness must be reframed from the ground up; perceptions
must shift; interpretations have to be abandoned. Nothing can
remain quite the same in the leap from human to metahuman. As all-encompassing as virtual reality is, a loophole exists,
which is nothing more th an experience itself. What is an
experience? Sa iling the Atlantic in a one-man boat is very different
from cl imbing the Alps, commuting to work, or baking an apple
pie, so the face  of experience is constantly changing. But at  bottom
every experience is the same thing—a conscious event. If you make
the mistake of rooting your e xperiences in the physical world, you
cannot wake up from the spell/dream/illusion, because the
physical world is  the spell/dream/illusion. E x p e r i e n c i n g  t h e  W o r l d
The on ly way to break the spell is to reverse the no rmal
explanation of how things work. By this I mean putting the
experience  first. The normal explanation is to put things  first,
which m akes common sense. Didn’t the stars exist before we came
along to gaze at them in the night sky? Without the Earth, which
existed in a primordial state before life began, we wouldn’t be
here. Or so common sense dictates.Reversing the explanation makes just as much sense, however. Let’s sa y it is morning, and you’re reading with a cup o f coffee
beside y ou. A “cup of coffee” can mean a physical object f ixed, for
the moment, in time and space. I’ve put “cup of coffee” in
quotation mar ks because you are actually relating to a so-called
object. I n reality, you are exp eriencing a fusion of sensations. Your
eyes see color, light, and sh ade, which you perceive as the cup. Your nose detects the coffee’s  aroma, your hand feels the warmth
of the coffee in the cup, your tongue its taste. Take away all t hese experiences and what happens? There  is no
cup of coffee. This is a simpl e, logical conclusion, but if y ou want
to reinforce the spell/dream/illusion, this conclusion is
outrageous. A cup of coffee is  simply there, standing in spa ce-time
as a physical th ing. We’ll leave aside the quantum explanation that
dissolves phys ical things, including the entire universe, into
invisible virtual states. Our goal is different here. The reason for
making a cup of coffee vanish  isn’t to prove that it was nev er there. The rea son is to put experienc e first. What we call a tree, a  cloud, a
mountain, a star, or a cup of  coffee exists only  a s an experience. Once you accept this fact, the path to metahuman is free and clear. It does little g ood, however, to shrug your shoulders and say,
“All righ t, I accept.” The words are hollow unless there is a n “aha,”
and you get th e point. Experience is how we know anything. If
there is a reali ty beyond human awareness, by definition  we will
never know it. Much news  has been made in contem porary
physics by “dark” matter and energy (which Menas Kafatos and I
discuss at length in You Are the Universe ). W hat makes some
energy and matter dark, if s ome theories are right, is that they
exist outside the boundaries of the physical universe. In the dark
domain, there may be “stuff” that isn’t atomic in origin, doesn’t
emit photons and electrons,  and perhaps has no relationship to
our version of space and time. Let’s sa y that all these conje ctures are true (there is a chance
they ar en’t, but we won’t go into the technical reasons for that
here). W ouldn’t dark matter and energy, being totally alien to
human experience, having nothing in common with the “stuff”
that con stitutes the human brain, qualify as real but impossible to
experience? For that matter, no one can experience the big bang,because it preceded atoms an d molecules. No one can dive into a
black hole to experience it,  since the extreme gravity in and
around a black hole disintegrates matter and tears all o rdinary
“stuff” apart, including time and space. For any one who accepts the universe as it appears, pu tting
experience first sounds nonsensical—but it isn’t. Dark matter and
energy are known through experience, as are the big bang, black
holes, and all the other exotica of physics. In all these cases, the
experience is indirect, formulated in mathematical equati ons, the
collection of traces of fleeting subatomic particles, and the data
received by radio telescopes  and the like. But no matter how
indirect, it is still an experience . So meone has to see something, if
only a sheet o f paper filled with numbers. Someone has  to hear
another scientist talking or read her words. The fact that even the
most exotic science is occurring as conscious experience is
undeniable. It levels the playing field with everyday experience,
because a first-grader learn ing his ABCs is having the same
experience as a physicist re ading a journal article on q uantum
gravity. As a specific  species of consciousness, Homo sapiens
constructed its version of reality from everyday experiences and
built everything up from there. We humanized virtual reality
according to our experiences. A hot rock in the desert su n that a
lizard finds comfortable burns our skin. The darkest midnight
frightens us but makes bats feel right at home, just as s hivering
heights are perfect nesting places for eagles and the ocean is
breathable to fish. But we are not  fated to be imprisoned in our experiences . We
shape and mold them with ex traordinary freedom. The body looks
like a fixed ob ject, but we ca n starve it or fatten it up, build its
muscles or let them go to flab . The question is just how malleable
the whole “thingness” of thin gs really is. I think of it as a kind of
thawing proce ss. When ice jams break up in spring, th ey don’t
thaw immediately. There is a transition from a frozen river to a
flowing one. The same is tru e of how we experience the physical
world. I nstead of being one b ig, frozen block, it is reducib le to the
tiniest experie nces, like a rock cliff reduced over time by the
pounding sea to fine grains of sand. The five senses are exquisitelyattuned to fleeting, transient events. I had kept in the back of my
mind a small but impressive finding, that the human retina can
detect a  single photon of ligh t, but recently this isolated piece of
data was expanded in quite a startling way. T h e  Q u a n t u m  B e c o m e s  H u m a n
Without achiev ing widesprea d popular attention through mass
media, researc h has verified t hat at least four of the five se nses are
actually capable of experien cing the quantum domain directly,
without the use of sophisticated scientific instruments. The basic
findings, which come from leading university laboratories, can be
briefly summarized. SIGHT :  Th e human e ye, as just mentioned, can detect a single
photon. This is the smallest unit of light in the universe, and our
ability to detect a photon has inspired researchers to explore
whether they can probe the quantum world with the naked eye. HEARING:  Th e inner e ar is so sensitive that it can detect
vibrations less than the diameter of an atom. It can distinguish
sounds that are only ten millionths of a second apart. SMELL:  It was previously estimated that the human olfactory
system could detect ten thousand distinct smells, but the latest
research suggests that smell is a quantum sense that can
distinguish a trillion different inputs. T OUCH:  We can detect  tactile sensations down to one billionth of
a meter. T ASTE:  Thi s sense has n’t been traced to the quantum level, but it
is a lready known that the h uman tongue detects the five tastes
(sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami, or savory) at the molecularlevel. Taste requires smell to distinguish at a finer level, so even
taste, when combined with smell, is involved in quantum
detection. Why did evolution give us this micro-sensitivity? To answer
this que stion, you have to ap preciate the enormous leap that the
new res earch h as taken. Previously, the five senses were thought
to o perate on the molecular l evel, like taste. To tell the di fference
between salty and sweet, for example, the receptors in your taste
buds are designed to latch o n to the specific molecule of each. Physically, the  accepted view has been that we interact with the
world through a myriad of similar receptors on the outer
membrane of cells. These receptors have been described as
keyholes into which very specific molecules (the keys) fit. To smell
a rose, for example, molecules of its scent drift through the air and
fit i nto the receptors of olfa ctory cells in the nose. Beca use this
process occurs at the molecular level, even primitive organisms
are physically micro-sensitive. The mo st ancient sense is touch, which evolved in single-c elled
organisms that respond to being touched, like the amoeba, as well
as some  plants; the Venus flytrap closes its jawlike leave s on its
prey wh en an insect touches the sensitive hairs that line the leaf. But despite being the oldest sense, touch is not yet fully
understood. Cameras and listening devices can duplicate the
sensitivity of our eyes and ears, but we can tell the di fference
between wood, metal, and glass by touching them, beyond what
engineers can do artificially. The fact that our fingers are sensitive
down to a s ingle molecule was only recently pro ved by
experimenters at the University of California–San Diego. They took fifteen people and  gave them three silicon wafe rs to
touch, a sking t hem which of t he three felt different from the other
two. The wafers were identical except for the top layer, which was
a sin gle molecule thick. One s urface had an oxidized top la yer that
was mo stly oxygen, the other was coated with a Te flon-like
substance. Participants were able to pick out the different wafer
71 percent of the time. Yet even molecules are massive compared with quanta, and the
eye’s sensitivity to a quantum of light led scientists to consider theother four senses. It now seems that the entire body is a quantum
detector. At first sight this seems remarkable—it certainly expands
human perception far beyond previous estimates. At a deeper
level, ho wever, these findings  indicate how we design and  control
the constructs of virtual reality. Through the body’s quantum
detectors, we are seamlessly woven into the universe at the finest
level. No longer simply receiving raw data from the world “out
there,” our bodies participate  at the crux where mind and matter
mingle. Getting down to the nub of h ow we physically see, hear, touch,
taste, and smell says nothing  about what the five senses  are for. Earlier on ( this page ), I com pared the retina’s re sponse to light
with a Geiger counter clicking every time it is bombarded with
beta particles and gamma rays. But a Geiger counter doesn’t
experience the world as we do. The sensitivity of our q uantum
detectors indic ates how finely calibrated our experiences actually
are. Pre viously, the fact that we are fine-tuned to the molecular
level le d to remarkable feats of perception before the recent
quantum discoveries. Professional noses in the perfume industry go far beyond the
ordinary sense  of smell, be ing able to distinguish dozens of
different rose scents, for example, but the experts don’t
necessarily have super-refined olfactory nerves or more of them
than the rest of  us. They’ve trained their awareness of arom as. The
same holds true for professio nal wine tasters in the area  of taste
and marksmen in the area o f sight. These people may s tart out
with mo re acute senses than the average person, but a wine taster
or a marksman  doesn’t need an overabundance of cell re ceptors. With a normal range of re ceptors, wine tasters sharpen their
perceptivity, which is mental. So-called supertasters have thirty taste buds in a specified area
of the tongue, compared wit h average tasters who have between
fifteen and thirty taste buds in the same area, while s o-called
nontasters (a better term wo uld be dull tasters ) h ave fewer than
fifteen. Average tasters can improve their discernment of wine by
using their noses more, paying closer attention, and slowing down
to s avor the ta ste. It is certai nly relevant that between the ages of
forty an d sixty  we start to lose taste buds, and the remaining onesshrink. But that’s not enough to explain why older people often
lose interest in eating. There may be a general loss of interest in
life, or feeling alone and unwanted. The simple fact that some
babies are born without a sense of taste but grow up to have
healthy appetites points to the mental component that dominates
our sensory existence. The dat a derived from measurements of how the eye, ear, or
tongue works say nothing about our actual experience: how a
sunset looks, how music sounds, and how chocolate tastes. Science
is a bout measuring life in all its quantities , large and small. Experience is about life in all its qualities , w hich cannot be
counted. The question “Ho w many units of beauty did you
experience today?” is nonsensical. Beauty is experienced
subjectively, w hich no one d isputes. But every perception  is also
experienced su bjectively, which is where the huge gap occurs that
I ment ioned above. There  is a total mismatch bet ween a
measurement of wavelengths of light and the qualities of light,
particularly colors. Color is created in conscious ness by crossing the gap between
quantity and quality. In this crossing, a magic trick takes place by
which q uantum vibrations ar e transformed into not just co lors but
everything delivered by the five senses. It would be convenient if
the new research explained h ow that trick is done, but it doesn’t. Pinpointing the five senses down to the quantum level is like
having a dog’s sense of hearing, which extends far above human
hearing. If you suddenly woke up and heard the world as a dog
does, this wouldn’t explain music or speech or anything else about
hearing as an experience. The ear doesn’t hear; the mind does. But at least we have an important clue about the magic trick
that turns quantum events into human experiences. By taking
perception down to the quantum level, we can say—or at least
strongly suppo se—that we live at the very level where nature
transforms vir tual reality into the solid physical world. H ere I’m
using virtual  in a sp ecific way. In physics there is a halfway house
where particles are invisible and have no fixed location. This halfway house was needed because of the famous
uncertainty principle, which says that particles are actually the
collapse of energy waves. Wa ves extend infinitely in all dir ections;particles exist in one place i n time and space. A virtual  particle
bridges the two states. It hasn’t quite yet assumed the shape of a
particle, but it isn’t a wave extending in every direction, either. It is very imp ortant to know, as we now do, that human
experience doesn’t have to wait for the physical world to appear;
we are able to perceive the b irth of particles, physically speaking. I’m bein g quite  literal here. F or decades the “collapse of the wave”
function has been hotly debated in physics. The main point of
controversy is that standard q uantum theory holds that it takes an
observer to cause the collapse. This point rankles some physicists
and baffles almost everyone else. It is taken for granted in daily
life tha t observing somethin g is a passive act. “Look but don’t
touch,” we tell our children. Yet at the quantum level, looking is as
good as touching. A partic le stops being uncertain when an
observer is present. The wave function collapses and, voilà, a
particle can be detected. I hope this abb reviated explanation makes sense; going into the
details leads to a tangle of complications. Suffice it to say that
researchers ar e seriously considering whether this my sterious
effect on the quantum, kno wn as the “observer effect,” can be
explained through quantum detection. If our eyes are physically
interacting with quanta, this helps us to understand that
observation wa s never passive. We have been participating at the
place where virtual reality gets an opportunity to create physical
reality. H o w  t h e  M i n d  G i v e s  T h i n g s  T h e i r
T h i n g n e s s
The new findings don’t expla in the magic trick that occu rs in
the gap between quantity—things to be measured and counted—
and qualities, the sights, sounds, tastes, textures, and smells that
we experience as human beings. Humanizing the quantum is
exciting, but human beings don’t experience the world through a
microscopic level of differences, even though we theo reticallycould. Instead, we lump experiences together according to useful
concepts like color. Red is red, not every different vibratio n in the
wavelengths of light between 630 and 700 nanometers (a
nanometer is one billionth of a meter). Likewise, sweet is sweet, not the molecular interaction between
sugar m olecules and recepto rs on the tongue. We are so used to
the clumping process that we don’t catch ourselves doing
anything. But we are constantly taking transient expe riences,
cramming them  into prearranged slots, turning discontinu ity into
continuity, and making solid what is actually fluid. The technical term for what’s happening is reification —giving
immaterial experiences “thingness.” So convincing is this
transformation that rocks seem solid and heavy when, in fact, your
mind reified them—you have created solidity and heaviness in
your own awareness. This constitutes another outrageous
conclusion to anyone who is out to reinforce and reaffirm the
spell/dream/illusion. But you cannot thaw out the “thingness” of
the physical world unless you break down the process that created
it. I’m hesitant  to use any kind of jargon, but we need to de lve into
how reification works. The dictionary definition of reify  is  “to m ake something more
concrete or real.” The mental image of money gets reified into a
dollar bill, which you can fold up and stick in your wallet. “Parenting” gets reified when  you decide to have a baby you can
hold in your ar ms. What’s earthshaking is that virtual reality owes
its existence entirely to reification. The web of connections that entangles everything in the
spell/dream/illusion with everything else comes down to the
mind, b ecause connections ar e mind-made. No object is a ctually a
physical thing, pure and simple. “Object” and “thing” and
“physical” are strands of a mental web. People find it relatively easy to accept that a piece of paper
currency is the reified form of a concept (money), but they balk
when they are told that the same is true of body, bra in, and
universe. The key is to reve rse the whole process of reification,
bringing physical objects closer to reality. As you now view them,
the bones in yo ur arm are so lid and fixed; it’s hard to accept thatthey are  fluid and malleable. But all physical objects are actually
processes in motion. Bones are no exception; they constantly
exchange a stream of oxygen  and calcium at the molecul ar level. Each bo ne cell  is an activity of life in motion. If you wear shoes
that are  ill-fitting, your leg b ones will gradually bend to conform
to your lopsided gait. The fact that a process is slow or fast doesn’t make a difference
to the basic reality that things are processes. Broken bones heal
more slowly than a cut finger, but the very fact that healing occurs
testifies to the body being a process. Bone cancer is much feared
because it is so  painful, but in their normal healthy state, nerves
connect your bones to the brain and then to the outside w orld. By
clumping toget her all the flee ting sensations you are having right
now, yo u seem to have a body that is fixed, but in reality your body
today isn’t the body you had as a newborn, toddler, or ado lescent;
it isn’t even the body you had yesterday or five minutes ago. It’s surp risingly easy, then, to reverse the habit of thinking that
reifies t he body , turning a my riad of interconnected proces ses into
a thing . This reversal helps to get us back to where creation
originates, in consciousness alone. When you master the reversal,
you can undo anything in virtual reality by tracing it back to the
mind’s creativ e genius. This is what it means to th aw out
“thingness”: objects are reduced to a level of consciousness where
we can begin to experience  the creative process. As yo u come
closer to pure consciousness, the thawing process become easier
and faster. As “thingness” stops being so stubborn, experience is
transformed into something fluid, flexible, and malleable. The
reality of the “true self” is critical, because, as things stand,
everyone has a self filled wi th contradictions. The self you have
been identifying with keeps you in the spell/dream/illusion. The
true self takes you from illusion to reality. T h r e e  V e r s i o n s  o f  t h e  S e l fThe tru e self lies hidden beh ind layers of disguise. The layers
are so thick t hat no one can confidently define what the self
actually is. “Self” is a convenient fiction, lumping together a
jumble of beliefs, experience s, old conditioning, and secondhand
opinions. This is a greater problem than you’d imagine. For almost
everyone, there is a wide gap between “being yourself” and
“knowing yourself.” The first is considered desirable. When you
are able to be yourself, you feel natural and relaxed, without
pretense or defenses. Knowi ng yourself is a different matter. A
century after Freud discovere d the subconscious mind, it has been
identified with the dark side of human nature. We repress our
urges of anger, anxiety, envy, insecurity, and even violence. Of
course you cannot get along with other people if you say
everything you think or act on your every impulse. But the re’s mo re to it. When  the inner world is identified with
the dark side, people don’t w ant to look there. They dislike and
fear wh at they find, or mig ht find. We identify with the ego-
personality, which presents the self we want the world to see, and
we ignore the o pportunity to  explore what a deeper self might be. In time, countless people actually believe that their ego-
personality is their real self. Yet there are two more selves we all
possess, and they are nothing  to fear. In fact, they are the  richest
sources of human fulfillment. The first is th e unconscious  self. Even though we rout inely
shove negative emotions and impulses out of sight  in the
subconscious, the whole story is much more positive. The
unconscious self is creative and sensitive. When you walk into a
room w here two people have been arguing or someone was crying,
you silently sense it “in th e air.” Actually, you are sensing it
through your unconscious self. At the level below everyday
awareness, you constantly p erceive your surroundings. Y ou also
have the power of intuition in your unconscious self. You gain
“aha” moments when the unconscious self reveals something to
you that your conscious mind didn’t realize. As you grow to maturity, you begin to value what is rooted in
the unc onscious. You feel confident, self-reliant, and sure  of what
you kno w. You  know how to  do certain things—cooking, driving,
balancing your checkbook, finding a good restaurant. B ut at adeeper level you have a settled feeling that is hard to explain. Paying attention to all of your life experiences, your unco nscious
self distills the essence of your life into the experience of inner
fulfillment, wh ich over time becomes a natural part of w ho you
are. You know yourself a s a set of values, purpos es, and
achievements. There are countless people who do not arrive at this
stage, a nd they don’t know th e experience of inner fulfillment. Nor
can it be imparted, because so much happens out of sight in the
unconscious. T. S. Eliot comes to mind on ce again. In 1925 he wrote “The
Hollow Men,” a poem that h igh schoolers used to love to recite,
because adoles cence is marked by hidden fears. The fir st verse
begins:
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass. Writing in 1925, Eliot is exploring one of our deepest fears, that
life can turn meaningless, haunted by death and nothingness—the
ultimate hollow ness. In times of great peril and horror, as in the
two world wars of the twentieth century, the dread of losing all
meaning feels very real. Ye t the unconscious self, drawing on
reserves of infinite meaning, re-creates the world in a new image,
one that is livable despite all terror and horror in the past. There is yet an other self, however, and it is even more val uable
—call it the “true self.” This is a level of awareness very close to our
source in pure consciousness. Pure consciousness is silent and
still. It has th e potential for mental activity before any activity
arises. I  identif y it with the simplest of all experiences, the  pure “I
am” of existence. This is the simplest of all experiences be cause itrequires no thought.
Meta_Humans_-_Unleashing_Your_Infinite_Potential_by_Deepak_Chopra.txt
Summarize the following text section accurately and concisely. Maintain specific details and numerical information, and use anti-repetition mechanisms:

        Moving a mountain with yourmind is nothing next to mo ving the whole world, which is our
ultimate goal. I6
 
E X I S T E N C E  A N D
C O N S C I O U S N E S S  A R E
T H E  S A M E
have strong memories, growing up in India, of attending
schools taught by Catholic  missionaries. The Old Testament
wasn’t light reading—I came away remembering sin, wars, laws,
lamentations, a nd plagues. But there’s a verse very early o n, after
the seven days of creation, in which God “was walking  in the
Garden in the cool of the day” (Genesis 3:8). God was still on good
terms with Adam and Eve, a nd, in my imagination, the moment
was perfect for a casual conve rsation. None occurs. Adam and Eve
aren’t a ctually there at first, h aving hidden from God out of shame
for thei r nakedness. But in my imaginary conversation, they would
ask a crucial question: “Why did you do it. Why did you create the
world. ”
In reply, God would say, somewhat sheepishly, “There wasn’t
any reason. I just had to. I couldn’t help myself. ”
Modern cosmology has come up with no better answer. The
universe is self-creating. It exists just because it has to exist. Everything sin ce the big bang has unfolded of its own  accord,
driven b y natural forces. We a lmost didn’t make it. Physicists havecalculated that the balance of creation and destruction was
extremely delicate in the beginning. Destruction came within a
hairbreadth of  winning out, because all but the tiniest fra ction of
primal mass and energy coll apsed within itself, returning to the
vacuum state, as it is know n. As little as one part in a billion
escaped the jaws of destruction—a metaphor for gravity, the force
that caused the collapse of e verything else—but one billionth of
creation was enough to enab le trillions of stars and galaxies to be
formed. (This didn’t happen quickly, though. It took 800 million
years for the oldest star to coalesce from interstellar dust. ) A se lf-creating universe is our version, with many bells and
whistles attached, of the eighteenth-century notion of God as a
cosmic clockm aker who wound up the early universe, set it going,
and departed to let it operate  mechanically. But self-crea tion is a
sticky b usiness. Who or what got the process going. The creator’s
creator wasn’t a problem for the ancient Jewish rabbis—they
accepted God on faith as always existing. Finding a similar
nonfaith agent has proved all but impossible. I’m arg uing in this book tha t consciousness is the only viable
self-creator, turning itself into mind, body, brain, and universe. That’s a radical departure from physical explanations of the
cosmos. As in the Book of Ge nesis, consciousness creates because
it h as to. It only needs to ex ist in order to start the ball rolling. (Where did existence come from. We don’t have to worry about
that, because if nonexistence existed, it wouldn’t be nonexistence. ) Just because it exists, pure consciousness generates reality as
we know  it. The ancient Indi an scriptures speak of myriad worlds
spinning into creation like motes of dust dancing in a sunbeam. But in the same sunbeam we see myriad thoughts, feelings,
sensations, and images, too, the entire content of the human
mind. Faced with staggering overload, our minds have to generate
a livabl e world to inhabit—a human world—and the virtual reality
that we created was inevitable. But simply reducing the teeming multiplicity of raw reality
wasn’t enough. The human world contains meaning. Where did it
come from. It was always there, as a primary trait of met areality. Pure consciousness created a universe filled with meaning. Everything we can say about being human—our joy, love, vitality,intelligence, a nd infinite potential—needed no creator. Those
qualities came  with existence, right off the bat. Without w heels, a
car isn’t a car. Without humanity, the cosmos isn’t a cos mos we
could ever relate to, or even inhabit. The universe was created for us because there is no other
alternative. Creation cannot be whole unless we are who le. Once
this secret is re vealed, metahuman can free itself from sel f-doubt,
confusion, and sorrow. They are the stepchildren of illusion. A  S p e c i a l  C r e a t i o n
Pure consciousness cannot be interviewed, like talking to God,
even in an imaginary conversation. But the notion of self-creation
has always been viable. We  can accept without question that
Homo sapiens  cre ated its ow n version of reality. We are still at it,
with no signs of stopping. It makes no sense to claim that our
remotest ancestors somehow learned to be creative. Creativity is
intrinsic to us, like breathing. Somehow we picked up a lo t of old habits that consciousness
had got ten use d to. All life forms are wrapped up in self-c reation,
but they are c ontent to let it roll over them. The ancestor of all
mammals was a shrew-like cr eature named Juramaia  t ha t liv ed in
tree ferns around freshwate r lakes 160 million years ago. The
discovery of this creature in China in 2011 pushed the ancestry of
all “tru e” mammals back by 35 million years. (A true m ammal
species is one in which the fetus is nurtured by a placenta in the
womb. This accounts for 95 percent of all mammals, the other
portion being marsupials like possums and kangaroos that give
birth t o tiny babies that finish their maturation inside the
mother’s pouch. ) Juramaia  did n’t know t hat it would be anything but a shrew,
and you’d think, looking at its five-inch skeleton, that only modern
shrews would descend from it, not all true mammals. No  trace of
dogs, cats, bats, elephants, o r whales is visible. It took a lot of
inference to suggest that Juramaia  had a placenta, since no softtissues are preserved in fossils. Yet guesswork isn’t needed when it
comes t o know ing that a plac enta was the key. Once it appeared, a
unique feature never seen before, a door was opened. What rushed
through it wasn’t Juramaia, which eventually became extinct, but
self-creation. An unstoppable habit took a leap forward. From
then on, true mammals could be small, big, or mammoth. They
could s wim, walk, crawl, burrow, or fly. Nothing was fixed or
permanent—except a placenta. Nature took a creative leap without
precedent, wit h barely a hin t in all past life forms that t his new
kind of birth was possible. This brings up a second mi sconception, that evolution is all
about p rogress. Creativity doesn’t need to progress; it is already
complete. Ever y life form is a complete creative act. In the case of
Juramaia, a tiny shrew-like creature wasn’t better than what came
before. Marsupials could have ruled the Earth—they became the
only indigeno us mammals in Australia. Much earlie r, eggs
evolved, and they kept on h atching, just as they did during the
reign of the dinosaurs. Live birth wasn’t better—today some
sharks lay eggs while others give birth to live young. There is no
straight-line progression from early life forms to us. Billion-year-
old microbes, one-celled animals, and blue-green algae continue
to e xist because their adaptation to the Earth was perfe ct in its
own wa y. Without the unstoppable urge to create, there was no
reason for primitive life to leave its very secure comfort zone. Self-creation is a strong clue that consciousness needs nothing
outside itself to keep expanding endlessly. In time, Homo sapiens
rushed through another door, the one that opened to self-
awareness. We can do anything with our potential that we want to,
but no matter how civilizat ion changes, it is impossible to be
human withou t being aware. The only question is the d egree of
awareness we choose to emb race. Metahuman is closer than we
imagine, being just a higher degree of awareness. Awareness and existence ar e uncreated. That’s the simplest
formulation of  the truth. Bein g uncreated means they simply are. Without having to give a reason, needing no creation story, the
primal setup for being human is that we are here. We exist
because consci ousness exists. Of all the secrets of metareality, this
one tak es the longest to sink in. At first glance, existence i s a non-issue. Nobody in a college de bating society like the Oxford Union
will arg ue the case for nonex istence. There would be no debating
societies if we didn’t exist—the point seems silly, even childish. But if being he re is enough to bring about everything in creation
through a conscious process, that  is big news. Existence and consciousness  cannot be separated. They don’t
just belong together, like hea t and fire or water and wetness. They
are the same th ing. Descartes  famously declared Cogito ergo sum,
“I think, there fore I am. ” It’s  more accurate to say the reverse: I
am, therefore I think. Either way, however, seeking a cause-and-effect relations hip is
chop lo gic. To exist and to th ink are the same thing. One  doesn’t
cause the other. Failing t o see this fact has led to many
misconceptions. For example, if you insist that the mind needs a
cause, y ou are stuck giving it a creation story. If you are a modern
secular person, you are soon trapped in the mistake of believing
that the brain created the mind. To a developmental psychologist,
there i s no doubt that t he brain creates the mind, and
neuroscience c oncurs. As creation stories go, this one is bolstered
by phy siology, but childhood development also offers enough
evidence to blow the story apart. T h e  E x p a n d i n g  B r a i n
If we look at th e last stages of the fetus’s life in the womb, the
brain is  the main focus of development, the last organ to acquire
its final configuration—but th at won’t happen yet. At the moment
of birth, the infant brain is exploding with untapped growth
potential. The biggest part of the human brain is the cerebrum,
responsible for thinking and other higher functions, and evolution
has given babies a huge cerebrum to begin with, one reason that a
newborn’s hea d is so large, at the limits of what can pass  though
the birth canal. In a normal fetus carried to term, the last
trimester sees the brain roughly tripling in weight, from 3. 5
ounces at the end of the second trimester to 10. 6 ounces at birth. In a  sense, all babies are born prematurely, entering a “fo urth
trimester” the day they are born, because the brain keep s up its
accelerated gro wth outside the womb. In the first three m onths of
life, a newborn’s brain grow s by as much as 1 percent a day,
expanding by 64 percent in the first ninety days, after which the
growth rate shrinks to an average of 0. 4 percent a day. Du ring the
rapid-growth p hase, 60 percent of the energy consumed by a baby
is used by the brain. The lar ge-scale or macro view shows that a
newborn already has all the brain cells needed for a lifetime—in
fact, too many. A newborn’s b rain cells number around twice what
an a dult has, even though the  newborn brain weighs half a s much. As it grows to full size, which takes three years, the baby brain
thins ou t its weaker connect ions (a process technically known as
“synaptic prun ing”). It’s like sorting through an attic filled to the
rafters with things you need and junk you can do without. Here w e begin to see the mystery of uniqueness, be cause
synaptic pruni ng is different for each baby. The brain somehow
disposes of what will not be needed for that one individual. A
musical prodigy who needs phenomenal motor skills to play the
piano at a vir tuoso level may not need advanced math ematical
ability or articulate language skills. A sculptor with a  highly
developed ability to envision  objects in three-dimension al space
may wi nd up without the relationship skills to find the right
spouse. The combinations are endless, and, to match th em, the
brain’s quadri llion synaptic  connections are just enough. Yet
clearly a brain cell has no for eknowledge that it will be ne eded or
not nee ded, according to events far in the future. Synaptic pruning
isn’t ran dom. It only makes sense that a higher perspectiv e that is
beyond time must be managing the process. For example, a study by researchers at the University of
Washington found that speci fic areas of the brain that control the
physical aspec ts of speech (Broca’s area and the cerebellum) are
activated in seven-month-olds in advance of learning to speak. This is evidenc e of looking a head to the future and throwing the
necessary brain switches in advance. A seven-month-old baby
doesn’t know that she will on e day speak, but Homo sapiens  does,
because we are a species of consciousness. Our speciescommunicates through the spoken word, and just about every
baby has inherited that ability. This is different from inheriting the physical need to exchange
baby tee th for adult teeth, wh ich is linked to the growth of the jaw,
or th e n eed to go through puberty, which makes it possible to pass
on our genes through sexua l reproduction. Speech is a mental
acquisition, a prime tool for knowing what someone else is
thinking. If unde rstanding the brain would allow us to understand the
mind, w e’d be  far ahead of the game. Yet the notion that “brain
creates mind” has always been a fallacy. For a cell to know
anything, it cannot get that knowledge from atoms and mo lecules. Atoms and molecules don’t know that speech will be necessary. Only consciousness affords a valid explanation, because
consciousness is the knowing element in every cell, every life form,
and every person. Because we live in the golden age of neuroscience, you would
think th at som eday there would be a user’s manual for the mind. But tha t day will never come. Our view is blocked by the mistake
of eq uating mind and brain. Even the fact that the brain co ntains a
quadrillion con nections is meaningless in terms of mind, just as
measuring every frequency of visible light would be meaningless
to explain how Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa. Life
would be meaningless if the  brain were in charge, beca use the
brain itself is meaningless. The mystique that surrounds it,
ascribing thoughts, feelings, and sensations to clumps of neurons,
has no  basis. If a neuroscientist went around saying, “That
quarterback is  out of his brain” or “I’d like to buy a house, but I
just can’t make up my brain,” no one would deny that mind  is the
word intended. It’s very difficult, however, to pry neuroscientists from their
belief th at “brain creates mind. ” In the emergency room, an EEG
reveals when the victim of a  fatal car accident is brain- dead, at
which p oint th ere is no min d left. Isn’t it obvious that the mind
lived there, beneath the hard shell of the skull. Not at all. Imagine
that you  had never seen a player piano and knew nothin g about
how one works. You walk into a music room, and a piano isplaying “The Blue Danube Waltz” by itself. You can see the keys
going up and down, the hammers striking the strings. How w ould y ou know if there was an invisible p ianist
performing this magical act. There’s no way to tell. On the other
hand, it seems irrational to jump to the conclusion that the piano
is playing itself. The instrument’s raw materials—wood, steel, felt,
and ivo ry—can be studied down to the atomic level. Nowhere will
you find a tale nt for music. Y et in neuroscience and everyday life,
we say that the brain, which is also a physical instrument, thinks,
feels, sees, and does everythin g else that happens in the mind. We
make t his assumption without the slightest proof that the raw
materials inside a cell—basically hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and
nitrogen—can love or hate Brussels sprouts, enjoy Viennese
waltzes, fall in love, and so on. The fact that the brain is constantly
buzzing with activity doesn’t tell us that a mind is at work or why
each mind is unique at any given moment. Finding the source of the mind is easy once you put
consciousness first. It’s not hard to do this. We naturally  rely on
the min d because our existence is tied to it. We use our minds in
lots of ways th at do not light  up on a brain scan and that require
no d iscernible brain activity. Can you recognize your spou se’s face
in a  cro wd. Ye s, instantly, but you don’t go through a proc ess that
requires brain activity. Your brain doesn’t flip through a mental
Rolodex until you find a stor ed image of the right face and pick it
out, the way th e witness to a  crime is asked to flip through mug
shots at the police station. Recognition happens in the mind
without burnin g calories in the brain, and unless the brain is
burning calories, it’s not at work. In t he s ame wa y, you choose words without thumbing thr ough
a dictio nary stored in the brai n. And once you learn the streets of a
new town, you can negotiate them without consulting a map—on
paper o r in your brain. Lea rned things are simply there. The
opposite is also true. If s omeone asks you the meaning of
hydrocephalus  or ratatouille, an d you don’t know the word, you
don’t n eed to comb through your vocabulary for missing words—
you immediate ly know that you don’t know. But a high-speed
computer has to consult its stored memory before it says, “Does
not compute. ”Some years ago I met a math prodigy, now retired from being a
professor, who had started publishing in leading math ematics
journals at the age of twelve and subsequently attended P rinceton
at sixte en. He finished his co ursework for a doctorate at Harvard
while still an u ndergraduate. As remarkable as prodigies are, one
comment in an interview with  this math genius stuck in my mind. When asked how his thinking process was different from other
people’s, he said that he didn’t think in order to solve a math
problem—he p osed the problem to himself, allowed it to incubate,
and waited for the right answer to pop out. He had developed such abso lute confidence early on and still
continues to rely on it. Should we consider genius exce ptional,
totally divorced from the norm.
Moving the whole world.
According to the author, what is the ultimate goal?
That consciousness is the only viable self-creator, and that it creates the universe and the meaning it contains.
What is the author arguing in this book?
The author is suggesting that the universe is self-creating and that it is impossible to know why it exists, as it is a fundamental aspect of existence.
What is the author suggesting about the origin of the universe?
The author is arguing that the brain is not the creator, but rather a tool for the creation process, and that the brain's activity is a manifestation of consciousness.
What is the author saying about the role of the brain in creation?
The author believes that psychedelics can be used to access and experience the true self, which is a step towards achieving self-awareness and moving beyond the limitations of the brain.
What is the author's view on the role of psychedelics in achieving self-awareness?