You kno w that you exist; that’s all. As the still
silence of “I am ” starts to vibrate into thoughts, images, feelings,
and sensations , the first stirrings are very faint and subt le. They
are highly fluid and malleable , which is why desires and intentions
that come from our deepest source are not distorted by all the
cruder desires of the ego. “I want peace” is a subtler, fine r desire
than “I want a Porsche.”
At the level of the true self, all desire for change reaches its
goal, because only here is “I a m” enough to bring total fulfillment. No exte rnal gratification compares with this. It seems strange on
the face of it that the mind at its subtlest level should be more
fulfilled than the mind at more superficial levels. Chasing worldly
desires is what life is all abou t to the vast majority of people. Being
still and quiet, by the same token, feels very uncomfortable for
many. “There’s nothing to do,” we complain. Yet stillness can
unlock new realities. The key is that pure consciousness c ontains
infinite resou rces of creativity, bliss, intelligence, lo ve, and
awareness. By living close to the source, you have access  to this
infinite potential that allows you to be a genuine co-creator of
reality. I’ve put these three se lves—the ego-personality, the
unconscious self, and the true self—into separate categories only
for the purpose  of description. In daily life we call on all three. As
awareness rise s from its source, any impulse has an unconscious
component and eventually an ego component. A common example
is fr iendship that turns to romantic love. Two friends interact
largely on an ego level, me aning that they present their social
persona to each other. But as friendship deepens, the unco nscious
reveals itself more intimatel y, and sometimes, if the two people
feel safe  enough, the true core of friendship, which is love, reveals
itself. T hat see ms to be the final goal, but at the level of the true
self, no  other person is needed. “I am” already has the q uality of
love, trembling on the edge of pure consciousness. What th is com es down to is  that the self you identify with is
simply the self you ar e aware of . T here is no fixed self, just as
there is  no fixed body. Fight ing for your place in line at the post
office calls up the ego-personality. Feeling tenderness toward ababy calls up the unconscious personality. Feeling that you matter
in the great scheme of things calls up the true self. At a  certain po int, the true self dominates the scene, and when
this change occurs, the wor ld changes as well. The wo rld feels
hard, fi xed, stubborn, and inflexible if you are all those things. The
ego-personality finds it easier to resist than to accept, to hold on
rather than to let go. So being hard, fixed, stubborn, and inflexible
isn’t rar e, and seeing the world the same way isn’t rare, e ither. If
someone explo res more deeply and begins to identify with the
unconscious self, then the world seems beautiful, fresh, renewed,
and filled with light. This, too, is a reflection of the person’s state
of awar eness. Look at the gl owing light in French impressionist
paintings and you’ll see where such a state of awareness leads
painters. Yet you must go deeper to see the world in complete p urity. This sta te, kno wn generally as “enlightenment,” represents direct
contact with metareality. Sin ce our daily life is dominate d by the
ego’s de sires, needs, and demands, it isn’t possible to conceive of
what it feels like to experience metareality as a constant state. Let
me give a strik ing example in the thinking and teaching of  Krishna
Menon, born in 1883 in the S outh Indian state of Kerala. Although
obscure most of his life—Men on died in 1959—he has come to be
regarded as extremely important among seekers who want to
investigate the experience of enlightenment (as opposed to the
veneration of gurus and spiritual teachers, which has a major
religious component). The uncompromising nature of his awareness can be gleaned
by read ing the answers that Krishna Menon, later known to his
followers as Sri Atmananda, gave when questions were posed to
him. Time and again he took  every subject back to one e ssential
question: What is reality? Here are some succinct examples:
On pleasure and pain . I feel pleasure at one moment and
pain at another. But I am changeless all along. Thus my
pleasure and pain are not part of my real nature. How are physical objects related to thoughts? The question
arises on the assumption that objects exist independentof thoughts. That is never the case. Without thought,
there is no object. Should we follow a personal God? I say no, because a
personal God is nothing but a concept. Truth is beyond all
concepts. Such unshakable certainty feels liberating and audacious at the
same time. But it’s clear that Menon was not speaking merely to
draw at tention to himself; he was speaking from the perspective of
the true self, o nce the ego-personality and the fragmented  mind it
creates have been abandone d. This is made evident in another
question and answer. Q: Is reality indivisible? A: Real ity is only one and cannot be affected by quality or
degree in any way. Reality is purely subjective. I am t he only
subject, and all the rest are o bjects. Diversity can be diversity only
through me, the “One.”
You ha ve to reach the end o f this answer to discover tha t far
from being an expression of s olipsism (“I am the only subj ect, and
all t he rest are  objects”), Menon’s viewpoint reflects his sense of
wholeness (the One). This way of speaking echoes an Indian
tradition going back thousands of years, known as Advaita , which
in Sans krit means “not-two.”  One could also call it the perspective
of the whole m ind, because the primary purpose of Advaita (and
metahuman) is to get people to identify with consciousness as a
whole, instead of its fragmented products. I’ve com e to the point wh ere I hesitate to adopt spi ritual
language, preferring to see the inner journey as an escape from
illusion to reality. The questi on still lingers: If Menon, alo ng with
others who are called enlig htened, are so exceptional, do they
stand to o far outside the norm ? I say no. The process of waking up
is natur al; any one can do it. The proof of this is right before our
eyes. Every day we follow the  guidance of the ego-personality, the
unconscious self, and the true self in a kind of jumble. But the very
fact that the true self is speaking to us in moments of love, joy,
creativity, and renewal, even  if only in fits and starts, indicates
that w e are in touch with metareality. Knowing that theconnection exi sts, the whole process of waking up can be explored
in an organized way. How th is is done is the subject of the next
chapter in our journey.I8
 
G O I N G  B E Y O N D  A L L
S T O R I E S
f m etareality is “everywher e, always, and everything, ” a
startling fact follows. There is  no story we can tell about it . All the
elements of a story—a beginning, a plot, various characters, and
an ending—have no bearing. Yet everything else in the world is
organized arou nd these elements. You are a character in y our own
story, w hich ha d birth as its beginning, death as its ending , and all
kinds o f plot twists and incid ental characters along the way. The
prospect of giving up your story is all but unthinkable— yet it is
totally n ecessary in order to e xperience metareality. We ev en have
to g ive up mystical, religious, and spiritual stories, too, because
they turn pure consciousness into something it isn’t, whether that
something is the Old Testam ent God or Nirvana or a pantheon of
gods an d goddesses. I appreciate that these have been a guiding
light for centuries. Isolated messengers have always existed to
point to another world, bringing inspiring stories with them. In his depiction s of the Mado nna and Child, Leonardo da Vinci
followed the traditional story that St. John as a boy was a
childhood com panion of Jesus. Leonardo (and other Ren aissance
painters) show him enigm atically pointing upward w ith onefinger, a smile playing beatifically across his face. Heaven—can’t
you see it? Just there,  the smile says. Those who wake up see the transcendent world directly . The
time frame of eternity becom es natural and is felt as a seamless
flow. Th e Buddha once said ( in a translation by Sogyal Rinpoche),
“This ex istence of ours is as transient as autumn clouds. To watch
the birth and d eath of beings is like looking at the movements of a
dance. A lifetime is like a flas h of lightning in the sky, rushing by
like a torrent down a steep mountain.”
In every spiritual tradition , such messages have beckoned
believers to a transcendent world, but all have failed to convince
the average person that going  beyond should be the focus of daily
life. At no point in history di d waking up go viral. Somew here in
the evolution of consciousness, Homo sapiens  came to a fork in
the road. Collectively, we could have identified with the true self or
else we could have identified with “I,” the ego-personality. Obviously, we took the second road. Metareality didn’t abandon
us; we abandoned it. This made all the difference in how we see ourselves. The true
self is connected to its sour ce in pure consciousness. The ego-
personality has its source only in the stories it imagines and
believes in. Modern people have jettisoned mythology, and many
are reje cting organized relig ion. But at every level, our lives are
still shaped by stories invented by human imagination. The other
road, w hich led to the true self, gained a reputation for being
mystical (i.e., detached from real life), and once this happened,
only a motley crew of saints, sages, poets, artists, and seers
followed that path. Finding metareality is an impossible task until you question
your ow n story . You must ta ke the challenge personally, because
becoming metahuman is rea l only if it is real for you . I f you are
fully aware of what is happening to you here and now, you have
gone beyond all stories. The  habit of constantly adding to your
story is just that, a habit. By itself, the present moment has no
story—it just is. Why do we embellish it with our story? Because
the present moment isn’t fulfilling by itself until it gets enriched
by t he true se lf. A computer is useless until you plug it in, and
although we use our minds f or everything already, much  time islost in fantasy, distractions, avoidance, denial, procras tination,
self-judgment, and on and on. Every story contains these
undesirable elements. Staying connected to the true self at every
moment brings the fullness of life into our awareness. Metahuman could be called a new story, another fiction added
to th e s helf, but I think that would be a misnomer. The element of
fiction is taken out when you wake up. As part of the
spell/dream/illusion, our personal stories can’t do with out the
fictional element. Virtual r eality is a fiction to begin with. Anything based on it participates in unreality. We might pity our
ancestors for their attachm ent to myths, superstitio n, and
unproven religious beliefs. But if we are immersed in a better
story, it’s still a story. Future generations won’t buy int o it any
more than we buy into Zeus, witches, and the heart as the seat of
intelligence rather than the brain (a persistent belief in ancient
Greek and Roman medicine). This ch apter is about a turn ing point where we stop t elling
ourselves stories, no longer needing them to defend us against
harsh reality or to make sense out of a chaotic world. In
metareality you  go beyond danger and disorder. The true s elf gives
you an unshakable stance in reality, at which point your life finds
purpose and meaning from t he source instead of from a cobbled-
together fiction. C l i n g i n g  t o  S t o r i e s
Humans are proud to be storytellers, and our story has a gaping
hole because no record was  left from the oldest times , before
writing emerged. Can we imagine so many lost stories? Around
45,000 years ago, people we’d recognize as modern Homo sapiens
started to migrate northward from Africa. All were hunter-
gatherers. Many generations before farming, mining for metals,
and fix ed dwe llings heralded  the rise of civilization, life  45,000
years ago was already too co mplex to do without stories. In the
human mind, fire had to come from somewhere, rain ha d to beunpredictable for a reason, and things we now take for granted,
like a chick hatching out of an egg, posed a deep mystery. Mythology arose not as fantasy but as the best way to explain
Nature, given the life people were leading. Ascribing meaning to
anything and everything is the thread that binds us to earliest
humans. Stories explain how life works and thus fulfill a need that
is woven into the fabric of being human. We stil l live by stories, and whatever disrupts our per sonal
story is  usually rejected out o f hand or fought against vigorously. (Witness the guiltiest sexual abusers coming to light thro ugh the
#MeToo movement, abusers who flatly deny any wron gdoing.) We’ve a lready discussed how  the ego creates the illusion of being
separate and alone. “I” needs  a good story to feel safe, important,
socially acceptable, and worthy. Seeking to feel secure, people
want to  belong to something larger than themselves—a tribe, a
religion, a race, a nation—but to be accepted by any of these
groups, you first must accept their story. Without thinking about
the freedom they are surrendering, people adopt a secondhand,
sealed-off stor y. You know instantly who is “us” and who is
“them.” Yet no matter how convincing the story, you will always be
“them” to people embedded in another story. The security to be
found in  something larger than yourself breaks down when “they”
turn into a threat, even an enemy of your very survival. Stories grow out of such ba sic needs that going beyond any
story fe els impossible. A story consists of anything the human
mind c an imagine, which leads to infinite choices. But we can
simplify the matter. Stories are about attachment. We think to
ourselves, “I am X,” and then we cling to X as part of our identity. X can be the larger group (tribe, race, nation, reli gion)
mentioned above. “I am American” has enormous power over
people, as does “I am French ” or “I am Jewish” or “I am white.”
But in seeing t his, which most people do, we are only sc ratching
the surface. Any version of “I am X” can lead to cling ing and
attachment. “I  am a Patriots  fan” or “I am upper middle class”
creates passionate attachments. At the same time, stories become
more potent by what they exclude. For every “I am X,” there are
many possibilities of “I am not Y.” If you are American, you arenot ever y other nationality, of which there are hundreds. If  you are
Catholic, you exclude all other faiths, and so on. What’s wrong with this? If stories were held lightly, the way we
experience The Hobbit  or The Great Gatsby , being diverted for a
while before moving on, vexing problems wouldn’t arise. It’s not
the story that i s responsible; it’s our attachment to it. Atta chment
falsifies experience by freezing it in place. The weight of the past
becomes a burden. The pres ent moment is lost in the clutter of
memory, belief, and old conditioning. How many older people
crave to  be young again? How many regrets do we harbor that we
refuse to let g o of? These attachments exist in everyone’s life,
leaving aside the misery and violence created by an us-versus-
them mentality. Prying someon e loose from a  cherished story lies at the heart of
one of the most popular best sellers in the 1980s, M. Scott Peck’s
The Ro ad Le ss Traveled . The book begins with a gripping
sentence: “Life is difficult.” Immediately, Peck expands on  what he
means: “This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a
great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it…
[and] the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.”
In o ther words, we are hearing the call to go beyond. But Peck,
who wa s a psychiatrist, knew that just because a truth is great
doesn’t mean people can face it—quite the opposite. In his view,
after ye ars of treating patients in therapy, the biggest obstacle to
getting better his patients  faced was their refusal to take
responsibility. Why? “We cannot solve life’s problems except by
solving them,”  Peck writes. Yet this fact “is seemingly bey ond the
comprehension of much of the human race….Many, so many, seek
to a void the pain of their problems by saying to themselv es: ‘This
problem was caused by other people, or by social circumstances
beyond my control, and therefore it is up to other people to solve
this problem for me.’ ”
Peck gi ves vivid examples to illustrate his point, such as the
case of a woma n who had jus t tried to slash her wrists. She was an
army w ife on the Pacific isla nd of Okinawa, where the younger
Peck was an army psychiatrist.In the emergency room he asked the woman, who had managed
to i nflict only superficial cu ts on herself, why she wa nted to
commit suicide . She said it all came down to living “on th is dumb
island.” Not satisfied with her answer, Peck began a dialogue that
would b e comical if the woma n weren’t so miserable and unhappy. The back-and-forth between him and his patient can be
summarized as follows:
P ECK:  Why do you find being on Okinawa so painful? P ATIENT:  I have no friends, and I’m alone all the time. P ECK:  Why don’t you have any friends? P ATIENT:  I  live off bas e in the villag e, and nobody speaks
English. P ECK:  Wh y don’t yo u drive to the American base to find
some friends? P ATIENT:  My husband needs the car to drive to work. P ECK:  You could drive him to work. P ATIENT:  It’s a stick shift. I only know how to drive an
automatic. P ECK:  You could learn to drive a stick shift. P ATIENT:  Are you crazy? Not on these roads. What m ade the scene tragic and comical at the same time is
that the woman, despite her absurd stubbornness, was in genuine
pain; sh e was crying during most of their conversation. We all
believe in our story, almos t at any cost. From a therapist’s
perspective thi s woman was skirting any hope of getting b etter by
exhibiting all the classic signs of denial. Who among us hasn’t shut
our eye s when a situation was simply too hard to face? Lif e would
be m uch easier if our proble ms had cut-and-dried solutions, but
they don’t. Denial is only one element in the big picture, which is that we
live by stories. Denial comes down to ignoring anything that
disrupts your story or contradicts it. Even the healthiest person
psychologically ignores an enormous part of reality. If we see, once
and for all, th at being attached to stories is what we want toovercome, we recognize that there are people who have done just
that. Their inner world isn’t cluttered with the baggage of the past. They do n’t def end “I am X”  as if their survival depende d on it. Rather, they live effortlessly in the present. The real issue isn’t
whether such people exist; th e real issue is why we have ignored
them for so long. T h e  A w a k e n e d
States of awareness long considered mystical in the West—if
not bogus—exist all around us, affecting ordinary people who
almost always keep their ex periences private. A few years ago I
became acquainted with Dr. Jeffery Martin, a PhD social
researcher who had conducted groundbreaking research into
higher consciousness. What made his studies revolutionary is a
single b asic dis covery: many more people are awake than anyone
ever supposed. Martin gave them a voice. After gaining his doctorate at
Harvard’s School of Education, he started publishing his findings,
which in dicated the prevalenc e of enlightenment as a natu ral state
of awareness, one that many people have already accessed. Martin’s resear ch began with him posting an online query asking
for responses from people who thought they were enlightened. To h is surprise, he got more than 2,500 replies, and from  this
pool Martin intensively inter viewed around 50 subjects. At first it
was ha rd to find a comm on language. Feeling that you are
enlightened is personal, and  it also sets you apart from normal
society. Martin’s subjects were sensitized by being outsiders, often
being stigmatized in adolescence for being different. They also
knew o n the inside that the y weren’t normal according to the
social standards around them. For many, revealing their unusual
mental state had led to such things as being sent to a psychiatrist,
put on medication, or even being committed to a mental hospital. However, very early on, Martin realized that as different as
each of his su bjects was, their experiences fell on a con tinuum.There wasn’t a single enlight ened state, but rather a slidin g scale. To find some common ground, and to fit the accepted model of
what do ctoral research in psychology must look like, he dropped
the loaded term enlightenment , an d in its place adopted the
cumbersome tag persistent non-symbolic experience . When
someone begins to have such experiences, “[t]here is a shift in
what it feels like to be you,” Martin notes. “You move away from
an individual sense of self , which is considered normal, to
something else.”
Defining what that “something else” is wasn’t easy, because
these people came from different backgrounds an d were
influenced by diverse cultural factors. However, Martin was able
to ident ify specific areas that seemed to stand out as markers of
higher consciousness. Typically these people said they had lost a sense of being a
separate self—they had no lingering notion of personal identity. Putting himself in his subjects’ shoes, Martin comments, “I would
be sayin g, ‘There’s no Jeffery here talking to you.’ That’s literally
what they would say to me.”
Another comm on experience was a dramatic reduction in
thinking. “In fact,” Martin sa ys, “they would often report having
no thoughts.” This wasn’t lite rally true, as Martin discovered when
he did further research, but as a self-report, having no thoughts at
all is startling. Another common experience was a sense of unity,
oneness, and wholeness. This state of completeness, Martin says,
led to a tremendous sense of personal freedom. “There’s a loss of
fear tha t comes with this, a loss of identification with a p ersonal
story.” Many felt that their b odies were no longer bounded by the
skin but extended beyond the physical body. So now  we have an objecti ve profile of shifting into h igher
consciousness in everyday life, the state of metahuman. Personal
awakening isn’t rare, and according to those who have actually
experienced it, their awakenin g led to a wide range of possibilities. The implications for human nature are intriguing, beginning with
what it feels like not to defen d “I, me, and mine.” The source of so
much anger, fear, greed, and jealousy is rooted in the insecurity of
the ego and its endless demands.Putting ourselves in their shoes, these awakened people don’t
keep a runnin g story in the ir heads about what’s happening to
“me.” W hen they think about themselves, “me” fades away as soon
as they  notice it. The same i s true for their emotions, w hich are
fewer and more spontaneous . When anger arises, it fades almost
immediately. Emotions were still positive and negative but rarely,
if ev er, were t hey extreme. Martin’s subjects could be irritated
when somethin g bad happened at work, yet they didn’t c arry the
residue of stress around with  them afterward, and it wou ld never
build in to angry frustration. They felt a sense of inner peace that
could b e interrupted, but quite soon it would return. In a word,
these people were very good at letting go. To bring order to his findin gs, Martin divided the awakened
state into several “locations” as separate stages of awakening,
according to their intensity. His subjects regarded waking up as a
definite shift, which for some occurred as recently as six months
previously, for  others as long as forty years before. On ce they
arrived in Location 1, as Martin calls the opening stage of
awakening, pe ople usually kept progressing and rarely  slipped
back or jumped ahead. In o ther words, they were experiencing
personal evolution, and the process showed no prospect of
stopping. As Martin described their attitude, they “agreed that
their initial transition was just the beginning of a process that
seemed to be able to unfold, and deepen, endlessly—a never-
ending adventu re.” Everything happened internally, and for many
the shif t wasn’t something they would define as spiritual. It was
just the way they experienced themselves. “If y ou sat in a roomful of peo ple and a small percentage b elong
to th is a ltered sense of self,” says Martin, “you wouldn’t be able to
spot them. To all outer appearances they are just like you and me.”
So w ho exactly are these peo ple? At the outset, before Ma rtin’s
research began  to expand to many universities and countries, his
typical subject was a white m ale from the United States or Europe. Martin was disappointed to find that women, for unknown
reasons, were not eager to vo lunteer as enlightened or to discuss
their experien ces of “waking up.” Religious backgroun ds were
diverse, spanning Eastern and Western faiths, yet mos t of the
subjects had done some kind of spiritual practice—they wanted tobe in a h igher state of conscio usness. Curiously, around 14 percent
had done nothing of this kin d. They had spontaneously popped
into higher consciousness or, more typically, drifted into it. Martin’s resear ch base has ex panded to more than a thou sand
subjects, which means we must ask ourselves if “normal”
awareness isn’t a fixed state at all but a spectrum, with
consciousness evolving much further than anyone has pr eviously
predicted. At the very least, higher consciousness has become
much le ss exot ic. It’s no longe r the province of sadhus and  yogis in
the Himalayas. When we communicated by email and later met in person, I
accepted why Martin, for academic reasons, had to remain value-
neutral. But waking up has  for centuries been associated with
bliss, for example, or communication with higher beings like
angels, or feeling a divine pr esence. Was all of that abse nt when
modern people woke up? Martin assured me that “outside”
phenomena we re present, but he felt constrained not to mention
them in his doctoral thesis. He found that the spiritual dimension
of some of his subjects had also opened up. Some of the p eople he
tested reported the kind of open, clear, silent awareness associated
with Buddhism . Still others, however, had no idea what to make of
their state of awareness. In late r reports Martin notes that a small number of his
subjects had experiences that defy normal explanations. A small
number “experience a deep bliss sensation all through their body,
including during moments that would otherwise be ph ysically
painful. For some this seems to bring pain tolerances that appear
infinite. A few of [them] have reported experiences that should
have involved horrific amoun ts of pain, but only resulted in bliss. Others who experience ongoing bliss find that they can reach its
limits. They report a threshold, unique to each individual, above
which pain is experienced.”
It turns  out, as his researches deepened, that Martin disco vered
more and more uniqueness among these people. Beyond Location
4 a few  progr essed as far a s Location 9, for example. In that
location, Marti n notes, people would “say something like ‘it feels
like it is just the universe looking out these eyes.’ ” But g enerally
speaking, all of his subjects were amazed at the amount of well-being th ey were experiencing , and this grew as they moved further
along the spectrum. Paradox ically, in Location 4, all emotion fell
away, even love, which Martin associates with a larger shift—the
self that was built up through a continuous story (he calls this the
Narrative-Self) falls away, along with socially defined em otions. After L ocation 4, emotions begin to return in a different form,
based on the foundation of co ntinuous well-being. Yet even before
this re turn, his subjects reported that they didn’t miss the
experience of emotions, beca use in freedom they had found the
highest state of well-being. T e a c h i n g  P e o p l e  t o  W a k e  U p
Martin had made what he considered “the fundam ental
discovery that these were psychological states that had been
identified and adopted for thousands of years by many cultures
and belief systems.” In the present climate, where consciousness is
an expl oding growth field, the real issue isn’t skepticism. In one
survey, one-third of American adults believe in things widely
considered fringe or New Age, from reincarnation and the
paranormal to medical applications long opposed by mainstream
medicine. (According to vari ous sources, between one-th ird and
38 percent of American adults use alternative medicine. This
includes the 30 million, for ex ample, who visit chiropractors every
year.) Martin was not unique in saying that higher consciousness
wasn’t “inhere ntly spiritual or religious, or limited to any given
culture or population.” Given his academic and technical bent, he
decided to put his data to wo rk. He sifted out the techniq ues that
his subjects considered the most powerful in getting them to
arrive at higher consciousness, and he organized these into a
fifteen-week Finders course. What’s fascinating is that the
students would  be ordinary people who, for whatever reason, were
attracted to take the course.Three participants gathered at the website Reality Sandwich to
report on their experience: Catherine, a business and leadership
consultant from Paris; Paul, the co-owner and manag er of a
garden center in Wales; and Rebekah, a semiretired photographer
from Texas. Each had different reasons for taking the course. Paul
described a period of personal difficulties. “I’d become
disconnected, disillusioned, mostly due to physical and material
matters. I had a very spiritu al upbringing, but I seemed to have
lost the  plot altogether.” His general state was “not quite suicidal,
but about as low as I could possibly be.”
Catherine had heard about Martin’s research and was intrigued
by t he possibility of higher st ates of consciousness. It particularly
interested her that these states could be specially described—“It’s
not just nirvana all day long. My objective was to go through the
experience and to reach higher states of well-being and quiet.”
Rebekah had no prior expect ations. “[I] did not know wh at to
expect, just open to whatever.” But she had heard about Martin’s
research projects, and said, “I trusted the science in them.” She
also knew what she wanted out of the course. “My g oal was
spiritual evolu tion. How can I raise my consciousness to a higher
level?”
The m ethods presented to them were highly inten sive,
amounting to two to three hours a day, which they were expected
to k eep up w hen they went back to their everyday liv es. The
instruction consisted of a weekly video about what the participants
would b e doing for the follow ing week. Before the next video, as
Catherine describes it, “[y]ou  do a summary of the week. How do
you feel? What has happened to you? How many times a day did
you do the different activitie s?” There was meditation and also
group discussion. Some exe rcises came straight from standard
therapy, such as writing down and forgiving people from your past
who had wronged you. At the core of the course, however, was Martin’s eight-year
research into people who con sidered themselves enlightened. He
gave ea ch a questionnaire ab out which practices they found most
useful i n their journey, leadin g to a wealth of data. “We lo oked atall of that, and only a handfu l of things rose to the top. Some of
them were across all tradition s, like, for instance, a mantra-based
meditation practice.” Other techniques were more specific. For
example, says  Martin, he adopted a “direct awarene ss–type
method. This involves placing your attention on awareness itself. Now that sounds simple, but as I’m sure all of these folks will tell
you, it’s rather tricky.”
From students’ feedback, he quickly learned that some
practices work ed better than others for each person. He also
mixed in techniques: “It’s not all ancient practices. We also
include some of the gold standard exercises from positive
psychology.” In a general way, the course had two aims, to
increase well-being as quickly as possible and to deepen
awareness. The success that  resulted sounds remarkable : “More
than 70 percent of participan ts who completed the course report
having persistent forms of an ‘awakening’ experience, and
100 percent say that they ar e happier than they were w hen the
course began, even those who rated themselves as ‘very unhappy’
at the start of the course.”
Paul, the near-suicidal manager of a garden center, offers
personal testimony to that: “It was the dropping away of sloth;
that wa s the biggest single thing that I noticed. The chatter was
going, the general day-to-day worries and anxieties were dropping
away at a terri fic rate. That was what resonated for me initially. The lack of fear, of worry, of anxiety. That was the biggest impact
for me initially.”
So do we have a final answer—has metahuman become
accessible through a cocktail of psychotherapy, group sharing,
self-help, meditation, and a program as personalized as a fitness
regimen at the gym? There’s no cut-and-dried answer. Too many
people f ind too many paths to waking up. Martin’s researc h is only
one version of a trend to ma ke the mind a kind of techie project,
and although he claims that 70 percent of participants who
experienced some form of awakening continued to have the
experience, only time will tell. An intensive lifestyle change that
includes hours of practice a day will attract only the dedicated few. The mystery of awakening in cludes the 14 percent in Martin’s
surveys who awoke spontaneously. One day, without w arning,they found themselves fully se lf-aware or they eased into th at state
over time but without effort. We’ve already touched on a  similar
phenomenon i n sudden genius syndrome (see this page ), and
there are rare c ases where people discover suddenly that they have
total recall of everything t hat has happened in their life (a
phenomenon known as “su perior autobiographical memory”). Such people can get together and chat about things like “W hat was
the best Tuesday in your life ?” or recall the theme song to a TV
series that aired only a few times in the seventies. In all these cas es, a person’s awareness doesn’t accept imp osed
limitations as normal. Under hypnosis, ordinary people can
uncover detailed memories they can’t otherwise retrieve, such as
knowing the number of roseb ushes in a garden from child hood or
how many stairs led to the basement in their parents’ home. Is it
normal to remember or forget? Both, of course. Unfiltered raw
data bombards  us in waves too overwhelming to absorb, so we
selectively forg et and remember. The point of waking up is to
remove some barriers created by memory and other barriers
created by forgetting. Happiness is blocked if you keep
remembering and rehashing old hurts, but just as effective ly if you
forget how happy you once w ere—it’s a matter of perspective. You
can even say th at virtual reality makes us forget to remember who
we really are. At its most universal, enlightenment is simply expanded self-
awareness. W e go beyond stories, beyond fixed bou ndaries,
beyond the rickety construct  of “I,” and, in doing so, awareness
effortlessly expands. It expands naturally, of its own accord,
because storie s, boundaries , and limitations were artificial to
begin with.T9
 
T H E  D I R E C T  P A T H
he g uides of humanity who urge us to undergo radical
change use many tactics, including the religious promise of eternal
peace and unbounded happi ness, either here or in the afterlife. The carrots lure us on, but there’s also the stick—the persistence of
present suffering and fear of more suffering to come. The stick
doesn’t work in getting people to change, because even the
ultimate threat, unending suffering in hellfire and brimstone, can’t
compete with the urges of d esire and the reckless behavior that
follows. The carrot isn’t muc h better. Why should we be lieve in
divine rewards? Anyone can  see that virtue very often is not
rewarded whil e sin is. Soldie rs are told that God is on th eir side,
which gives divine vindicatio n for going to war. But, at the same
time, urging soldiers to wi pe out the enemy contradicts the
teaching that God forbids killing. When G od is used to justify k illing and condemn it at the same
time, w e are almost too dee p in the spell/dream/illusion to be
rescued. Every religion has tried to make the rewards of salvation,
redemption, enlightenment, waking up, or whatever you want to
call it more e xtravagant. Consider the Parable of the Burning
House, which appears in an a ncient Buddhist scripture, the Lotus
Sutra.A rich man’s house is on fire  and, to his dismay, his children
refuse to leave. They are so absorbed in playing with th eir toys
that the y ignore the flames a ll around them. Frantically, the rich
man gropes for a solution, and one occurs to him. He tells his
children that waiting outside  the house are even better toys. Their
fondest wish was for a pretty goat-drawn cart, and one  is right
outside the door. Enticed by their father’s promise, the children
run out of the burning house, and what they find isn’t an ordinary
goat-drawn cart, which would have made them happy, but a far
more splendid reward, a jewe l-encrusted cart pulled by two snow-
white bullocks. This carrot, like the promise of a heavenly feast prepared by
God with Christ sitting at the head of the table, demonstrates how
far relig ions wi ll go to win adherents. But, for many, these  inflated
promises have  lost their power to inspire devotion. I don ’t think
modern secular people are less faithful—they’ve simply shifted
their faith from religion to science. The spell/dream/illusion keeps
changing. In prosperous societies, most people live in an u pgraded
illusion filled with the wonders of technology. Why should they
give tha t up? In sheer exasp eration, the great Persian poet Rumi
looks at humanity and pleads, “Why do you stay in prison when
the doo r is wide open!” The honest answer is that we like it  here. It
took enormous creativity t o devise the current state of our
collective dream. But the key isn’t wealth and comfort. At a very
deep level, humans agreed to a life of high drama. The drama is
driven by the warring opposites of pain and pleasure, desire and
repulsion, good and evil, light and darkness, us versus them, my
God against your God, and so on. There’s no sign that the drama will ever end. The direst threats,
like global climate change, only exacerbate it. As for new carrots, I
doubt t hat waking up can compete with going to Heaven or
finding a jewel-encrusted ca rt. There has to be a way t o reach
metahuman th at isn’t either c arrot or stick. Such a way does exist;
it’s known as the “direct pat h.” It offers no punishment and no
reward. What else is there? W holeness. This answer doesn’t seem
very enticing at first. We’re too used to the system of rewards and
punishments meted out by the war of opposites. But wholeness is
healing—it overcomes the wounds of separation and the dividedself. Wholenes s is unshakable and eternal. It is the only th ing that
no one and nothing can take away from you, not even death. I don’t want to make these things seem like another set of
rewards. The direct path isn’t a sneaky tactic for dressing up
Heaven in a new costume. Reality is whole already, needing no
human beings to validate it. Wholeness is totally real. The direct
path ex ists to show the way t o the same reality. If it succeeds, the
outcome will be unpredictable. Reality is confronted here and
now, in  the midst of constant change. The here and now can’t be
pictured or described. But  by ending the war of opposites,
wholeness erases a false reality—no reward we can possibly
imagine compares with this. The dir ect path, also known as the direct method, aims to shift
a perso n’s sense of self. Inst ead of “I am X,” which forces us to
identify with bits and pieces  of experience, we become content
with “I am.” Th is is more than a semantic twist. “I am” means that
you identify with existence, and because existence contains the
infinite potential of consciousness, so do you. The shift to  “I am”
involves every aspect of life, and this poses a potential problem. Which aspect should we confront first—the body, the mind, the
brain, psychology, relationships, beliefs, or habits a nd old
conditioning? It’s not clear that any of these should be given top
priority, or confronted at all. The direct path doesn’t ask us to think about our prob lems
intellectually o r to analyze the prospects for inner change. In fact,
the direct path bypasses all o rdinary ways of seeing and thinking
about ourselve s. These are w hat got us into trouble to begin with. Ordinary ways of seeing and t hinking are totally adapted to virtual
reality. A different way must be found. In m y e xperience, direct  is a tricky wor d. It implies s omething
that happens immediately, but going to college for four years is the
direct way to get a bachelor’s degree, and four years isn’t
immediate. Direct  a lso implies something easy , efficient, without
obstacles. This  applies, for example, when a package is delivered
directly  to your house. You don’t h ave to go to the trouble and
expense of driving to the ma nufacturer to get whatever is inside
the pac kage. B ut a Sherpa leading a trek to the top of Mt. Everestis exact ly the opposite—the path might be direct, but it is arduous
and full of obstacles. The origins of the direct path can be traced back to Vedic India
and ancient Greece, where the issue of waking up was fully
discussed. Many answers an d many ways to reach the goal were
devised. A detailed survey of  all these paths would lead to more
confusion than ever, becaus e disagreements among the  various
approaches abound. There ha ve been dreams of shortcuts, such as
accepting Christ as the Son of God, a single decision that redeems
all sins and opens the door to Heaven. That’s as direct as it gets. On the other hand, a lifetime can be spent by a Tibetan Buddhist
monk or a devout Hindu reno uncing the world for a forest  ashram
or a mountain  cave. This ch oice presents the prospect of a long,
difficult inward journey. In this book I’ve been de scribing the simplest and most
powerful (I believe) version of a shortcut, which is to exchange
illusion for reality. I define direct  a s easy, effici ent, and natural. There is no need for anythin g arduous and filled with obs tacles. I
insist on a path  that is painless, because I’ve seen too much of the
opposite. Some people spend years in frustration and
disappointment struggling to reach some spiritual goal that
remains just out of reach. What baffles people is that the whole
spiritual project gets tangled  up in misguided ideas and doomed
expectations. Let me list the pitfalls one is most likely to
encounter:
1 . Mistaking the goal for some kind of self-improvement,
shedding your old imperfect self for a shiny new one. 2 . Assuming that you already know what the goal is. 3 . Hoping that higher consciousness will solve all your
problems. 4 . Struggling and striving to get somewhere fast. 5 . Following a cut-and-dried method, usually a method
backed by some famous spiritual authority. 6 . Hoping to be looked upon with respect, reverence, or
devotion as a higher being.7 . Being tossed around by the ups and downs of
momentary successes and failures. I doubt that anyone who has honestly undertaken an inner
journey is immune to some  or all of these pitfalls. There is an
enormous gap between where you find yourself today (totally
dependent on the active mind ) and the reality you need to unveil. It’s not waking up that is painful but the pitfalls. They are created
by the ego-personality, which thinks, mistakenly, that it deserves
its share of the goodies that are about to fall from the sky. If you focus o n your experience here and now, the e go is
irrelevant, and many distractions can be avoided. Think about
parenting. Parents go through all kinds of troubles, worries,
everyday crises, and argumen ts with their children, but without a
doubt th ey know they love them. On the direct path you co nstantly
reinforce your purpose, which keeps the distractions at b ay. The
ancient Vedas declare that everyone is defined by their deepest
desires. Desire  leads to thou ghts, thoughts to words and actions,
actions to the fulfillment of desire. So in a very basic way, desire is
all you need. I f your deepest desire is to wake up, to esc ape the
illusion, to unveil reality, and  in the end to know who yo u really
are, the message gets through. Your deepest desire activates a level
of awareness that will get you to the goal. Strange as it sounds, the dir ect path is valid only if it lea ds to
the plac e wher e you already a re. Each of us is already a co nscious,
creative being We are already in the state of wholeness, despite
our allegiance to mental constructs that impose all kinds of
limitations on us. The only change that’s needed is a shift of
identity, and yet no change is  more earthshaking. Once you realize
that you are whole, the transformation from human to
metahuman has occurred. N a t u r e ’ s  H i d d e n  M e s s a g eWhat makes us whole alread y is that Nature is whole, and we
are par t of Nature. Such reasoning is totally sound, but it is hard
for man y people to accept. M odern physics holds that the universe
operates as a whole, each subatomic particle woven into the
cosmic fabric. But the method of science is to subdivide Nature
into smaller and smaller increments, and as the investigation
arrives at finer levels of exis tence, wholeness is lost from view. This is more than a technical glitch. A crucial question is at stake. Does the whole control the parts, or is it the reverse—there is no
whole e xcept f or an accumulation of parts? A new car is a whole
thing; we see it as one image and refer to it with one word. But just
as easily we ca n see a car the way a garage mechanic do es, as a
collection of parts: carburetor, driveshaft, transmission, and so on. With lit tle or no effort, your m ind can shift from one view point to
the other. The sam e hold s true for how you see yourself. In the mirror you
appear as a whole thing, a body; you refer to yourself by on e word,
your na me. Bu t if you sudde nly feel acute pain in the region of
your appendix,  you rush to the doctor—a kind of garage mechanic
for tissu es and organs—and you become a collection of parts. You
have the option to see yourself as whole or as a collection of parts. When we come right down t o it, what is wholeness, any way? It’s har d to imagine a more  baffling question. But without an
answer, living in wholeness is impossible. Fortunately, Nature
presents some inescapable clues, going back to the first
appearance of life on Earth. Life began 3.8 billion years ago when
RNA appeared and had the a bility to divide and replicate itself; a
billion years later, cells with outer membranes appeared on the
scene; j ump ahead another billion years or more and sing le-celled
organisms evolved into multicelled organisms. The leap to multicelled organisms wasn’t due to physical
necessity—it was a creative breakthrough, and an astounding one. For almost three billion years, single-celled organisms were
thriving, muta ting into new species on an endless conveyor belt
(which is still running at mid-ocean, where millions, perhaps
billions, of undiscovered single-celled creatures ride on its
surface). Life forms restric ted to single cells, or even more
primitive bacte ria and viruses, vastly outnumber, by far more than100 to 1, mult icelled life forms. DNA had achieved the ability to
fend off  enviro nmental hazar ds and laughed at death. The  trillions
of amoebas, blue-green algae, and simple fungi populating the
Earth to day are  clones of one  ancestor—it died as a physical object
but is nearly immortal as a package of knowledge inside DNA. With su ch a successful enter prise showing no signs of wa ning,
there was no r eason to risk multicelled life, except for one: the
sheer exuberance of creativity. The basic challenge of creating
multicelled life  was how to reproduce a complex organism whose
moving parts aren’t the same . The task was like handing someone
the han dlebars of a racing bike and asking for the whole b ike to be
built from it, w ith the added c hallenge that no one had ever seen a
whole bike before. In your body, two stem cells might sit in
suspended animation for months or years, mixed in with fully
formed cells. When a stem cell is triggered into activity, it
specifically turns into a blood, brain, liver, or skin cel l, not a
generic human cell. The last generic cells in human development
disappeared in the womb by the fifth week of pregnancy, when a
ball of generic cells (the zyg ote) proceeded to the stage of the
embryo. The early embryo doesn’t look anything like a mini–human
body, b ut its blobby pink ap pearance is deceptive. As the zygote
emerged from a single fertiliz ed egg, and then went from two cells
to four,  eight, sixteen, and so on, DNA was biding its tim e. With
precise timing, new instruct ions were sent out that altered the
destiny of the e mbryo, pushin g it closer to human form. Each new
cell was given its own separa te identity, through a bewilderingly
complex set of chemical signals that is even more remarkable than
DNA alone. We are far from being able to explain how a cell
understands w hat to do, but we know the general outline. In the
coming weeks of embryonic development not only will a brain cell
become differe nt from a liver  cell, but each brain cell travels to a
specific location, hooks up with similar cells that have made the
same journey, and undertake s a joint enterprise: creating a brain. The same for each liver cell. This process, known as “cell differentiation,” has been minutely
studied. It’s fascinating to observe so-called neuronal migration as
nascent brain cells, starting from their birthplace, are providedwith slick pathways to slide a long so that each reaches th e region
of th e brain th at needs to develop into vision, the fight- or-flight
response, emotions, higher thought, and so on. (I’m giving a
simplified picture, since neu ronal migration is multista ged and
extremely com plex.) To all ap pearances, a cell is a squishy bag of
water a nd soluble chemicals , but it is actually the repository of
every bit of knowledge pertaining to the history of life on Earth. Creation looks like a process unfolding step by step, bit by bit,
but behind this appearance, one reality creates, governs, and
controls everything. Dividing life into its component parts—the
physical bits and pieces—is t otally artificial. Whether we go back
three b illion years or to the moment you were conceived  in your
mother’s womb , the same hidden message is present. The whole is
contained in the parts. Without the whole, the parts are
meaningless. S e l f - R e g u l a t i o n :  T h e  G l u e  o f
E x i s t e n c e
If th e whole c reates, governs, and controls the parts, can we
observe it happening? Science doesn’t deny that the universe
operates as a w hole, but scientists maintain their insistence that
physical forces  glue everything together. As with everything else in
virtual reality, a story has been made up to satisfy the belief that
the universe must  be physical. The glue that really holds creation
together isn’t physical at all. It consists of self-regulation , or the
ability of every system to re main intact inside its own fe nced-in
world. Self-regulation is why brain cells know that they aren’t
supposed to be liver or heart cells. Self-regulation is why your
body do esn’t fly apart into a  cloud of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen,
and nitr ogen a toms. Self-regulation has no physical prope rties—it
isn’t matter or energy—becau se it is a quality of wholeness itself. To show  the exquisite delicacy of this invisible glue, consider how
the rise  in temperature of ocean water by only a few de grees inrecent decades  led to the destruction of coral reefs aro und the
world. (There are other reaso ns as well, including water pollution,
predators, and disease.) The phenomenon is known as a “marine
heat wave”; such waves began to assault Australia’s Great Barrier
Reef in 1998 and 2002, but created only limited damage. When water temperatures suddenly rise, a reef undergoes self-
destruction through “coral bleaching”—the corals, which
symbiotically depend on algae inside them to survive, become
stressed and expel the algae, which also had given the reefs their
bright colors. When the algae leave, the coral becomes bleached
white and dies. The sudden death of huge portions of the Great
Barrier Reef occurred over nine months in 2016, when a marine
heat wa ve affe cted three-qua rters of the world’s reefs (su ch heat
waves had begun to inten sify starting in 2014). “We lost
30 p ercent of t he corals in the nine-month period between March
and November  2016,” said a spokesman for the study gro up that
monitors the reef. More mari ne heat waves came in 2017, affecting
all part s of the Great Barrier  Reef, including central sections that
had managed to withstand  previous destruction. The fastest-
growing corals  can replenish themselves in ten to fifteen ye ars, but
marine heat waves of destructive force are returning on average
every six years. This has all been driven by our failure to keep o cean
temperatures from rising 2°C since preindustrial times, or roughly
two hundred years. A minute change in temperature you could
barely register by putting your hand in warm water was enough to
tip the balance of a complex system of self-regulation that goes
back 535 million years. But the lesson reaches much deeper. A
coral reef is a  megasystem  that encloses smaller systems: all
manner of fish and other marine creatures, sing le-celled
organisms low er down on th e food chain, the cells that  are the
basis of  life, and DNA itself. E ach system has its own rules of self-
regulation. They build up their own boundaries for survival. Yet
when viewed from the megasystem, encompassing the entire reef
community, wholeness dominates over separation. We can bring this lesson home in our own bodies. When you
cuddle a baby, its warm, smooth skin feels nice, but it’s also the
sign of a potential threat if th at warmth starts to drop off. Startingat norm al body temperature, which is between 97.7°F and 99.5°F,
we start to feel chilly around 97°F, and hypothermia starts to set
in under 95°F, the same slight variance that threatens coral. If a person’s c ore body temperature drops to 90°F, a medical
emergency is declared, and severe symptoms like delirium and
hallucinations set in. Below 88°F, the body becomes comatose. Irregular heartbeat threatens death, which almost certainl y occurs
below 7 5°–79°F. At any given time, while healthy, we are barely
20 d egrees from dying—less than the temperature swing during a
summer day in the Rockies. How do we remain in che ck? The
basic q uestion was probably answered during the age  of the
dinosaurs. Current speculation is that, unlike reptiles, dinosaurs
were warm-blooded. This ag ain was a creative leap with no pressing ph ysical
necessity. Cold-blooded creatures had existed for over a billion
years a s both single-cell and multicelled organisms. They
breathed, ate food, expelled waste, reproduced, and survived the
harshness of environmental assaults. This all happened, and
continues to happen, without  a key ingredient: converting some of
the ene rgy contained in food into heat, enough heat to keep the
body’s interna l temperature constantly high enough for survival,
even when the outside temperature fell too low. Self-regulation is found at every level of Nature, beginning with
the atom, which keeps itself intact without either running down
like a wind-up toy or flying a part into its smaller parts (el ectrons,
protons, and neutrons). This is enough to prove th at self-
regulation is how wholeness operates without needing matter or
energy as its g lue. Moreover,  in a complex system like the human
body, e ach cell knows that it must live for the whole, not for itself
alone. C ells that opt to be selfish and multiply unchec ked are
cancerous, and the reward for their rampant division is death for
them and the body. Normal, healthy cells do everything—eat,
expel w aste, reproduce, heal, and die—with the surviva l of the
body as their main goal, not individual survival.T h e  S e n s e  o f  S e l f
This discussion  about self-regulation gives us a toehold on how
wholeness works. I’ve been insisting that everything in creation is
actually a mode of consc iousness. A cell is one m ode of
consciousness, bringing with it all the qualities of consciousness,
including know ing. It is literally true that a brain cell knows it is a
brain cell. Self-regulation isn ’t a mechanical process. It grows out
of a sense of self. As a person, you have a sense of self that
encompasses hundreds of self-regulating systems, just as a coral
reef doe s. You are the wholeness that the parts need to e xist. We
can cal l this a “top-down th eory,” because there can be no self-
regulation without the entire universe having a sense of self from
the very  beginn ing. The whole creates, controls, and governs every
event. The opposite is a bottom-up theory, the mainstream scientific
view th at the parts came together to assemble the whole. But self-
regulation wa s never physically created. It is part of how
consciousness operates. But we’ve only gotten halfway in our
investigations. The discussion up to now is more than en ough to
prove th at you  are a wonder of self-regulation, as far as the body
goes. But waking up is abou t the mind, and, as everyone  knows,
our tho ughts can be wild to the point of madness; in any ev ent, the
next thought anyone has is totally unpredictable. You might think
of u s as unruly passengers, riding a perfectly assembled vehicle
through life, with the body o perating as a whole while the mind
roams recklessly from one  thought, feeling, sensatio n, and
emotion to the next. The direct path is based on reality being one thing, a wholeness
we c an live in daily life. It see ms far-fetched to believe that we live
with a whole mind. Everyon e’s mind seems like a junk pile of
miscellaneous impulses tossed in a heap, from which we struggle
to extra ct reas onable, socially acceptable behavior. This d isparity
between an exquisitely regulated body and a recklessly
unregulated mind hasn’t gone unnoticed by neuroscience and has
created a baffling mystery. T houghts, according to neuro science,
are created by brain cells. B rian cells operate by fixed laws ofelectromagnetism that leave no wiggle room. Electrical i mpulses
and chemical reactions are without free will. They behave the
same in a brain cell as they would in a flashlight battery or
household current. How, then, did this fixed, deterministic setup
lead to freedom of thought? One answer, which seems pec uliar but is widely held, note s that
we don’t have freedom of th ought. We only think we do (which
would constitu te a free thoug ht, but let it pass). The churning of
brain a ctivity is so complex, the theory goes, that we cannot find
out where any particular tho ught comes from. But since it must
come from brain activity, a thought is just as predetermine d as the
electrochemical reactions that produce it. This hypothesis neatly
skips ov er the total unpredictability of our thoughts and feelings. If yo u d on’t have an all-seeing eye that can peer into the firing of
100 bi llion brain cells, of course your thoughts will seem
unpredictable. Only a sup ercomputer could process such a
mountain of information, and if computer technology continues to
expand at an exponential ra te, such an all-seeing eye w ill soon
exist. In this view, artificial intelligence (AI) is superior to the human
brain, not only because it pro cesses more information but because
it is  free of glitches like depression, anxiety, low IQ, w ayward
emotions, and forgetfulness. We must never sell technology short,
or so the thin king goes. Anticipating the rise of AI to  godlike
status, Anthony Levandowski, known in Silicon Valley for his
contribution to  driverless cars and as a pioneering visionary in AI,
gained media attention in 2017 by founding the first AI church,
which he named the Way of the Future. Levandowski is searching
for adherents, and foresees an AI godhead as not ridiculous but
inevitable. As he told an interviewer from Wired  magazine, “It’s not a god
in the sense th at it makes lightning or causes hurricane s. But if
there is something a billion  times smarter than the s martest
human, what else are you goi ng to call it?” What saves the Way of
the Future from being a lamp oon is the enormous impact that AI
is goin g to have everywhe re. The Wired  interviewer writes,
“Levandowski believes that a change is coming—a change that will
transform every aspect of human existence, disruptingemployment, l eisure, religion , the economy, and possibly decide
our very survival as a species.”
Everyone is free to worry about a hollow, dehumanized AI
future, populated by false gods, but other doomsday scenarios
might befall us first. A supe rcomputer with global reach almost
certainly will be weaponized (or will weaponize itself) into a super-
hacker, capable of doing immense harm, from disabling security
defenses to wrecking the  banking system. Such attacks,
unfortunately, are under way every day already. Be that  as it m ay, the artificial  in AI keeps computers from
being alive and conscious—increased speed, memory, and
complexity only improve the imitation of thought. The imitation
isn’t th ought itself. A computer will never have a sense  of self,
which i s a primary trait of consciousness. After all, it was our
sense of self that led to computers in the first place. “I can think” is
part of being self-aware. Once you say to yourself, “I can think,”
you have a reason to build a machine that imitates thought. The sense of se lf tells you tha t you are you. It tells you that you
are aliv e, thinking, feeling, wishing, dreaming, and so on. No
physical proce ss created your sense of self. You possess it as a
built-in trait. Imagine that y ou are sitting in the dark at a movie
that totally captivates you. Your eyes are glued to a chase scene,
perhaps; your ears are overwhelmed by gunfire, screeching tires,
and police sirens. At that moment, you don’t feel the weight of
your body or th e sensation of the seat you’re occupying. Y ou don’t
sense your breathing; the temperature in the theater isn’t
something you’re likely to notice. Engrossed in the movie, you’ve
surrendered to its spell. But with your body and your
surroundings out of mind, and probably with no thoughts running
through your mind, are you so captivated that you  disappear? No. You are present no matter ho w exciting a movie becomes, and
the sam e is true of the ever yday movie you walk through like a
lucid dream. You can subtract everything from your experience
except your sense of self. In  a typical day, the experiences you
notice a re a tiny fraction of th e sensory input you receive. You will
remember a few things or not hing, but surely not everything. Most
experiences fli cker past and vanish, escaping all notice. But you
cannot abando n the sense of self. Putting it out of mind doesn’talter, d istort, o r destroy it. L ike a cork bobbing to the surface, it
will always return. Unexpectedly, we are plopped back onto the direct path. Your
sense o f self is the thing that makes you whole already. Ev erything
that exi sts “out  there” or “in here” is glued together by your sense
of self, because  it is the common denominator in every exp erience. Once yo u see this, you can identify with your sense of s elf, and
then the direct path has reached its goal. P a s s i n g  t h e  “ S o  W h a t ? ”  T e s t
As intriguing as this discus sion has been, “so what?” Why
should you and I go to the trouble of following the direct path? Looking at their lives, most people feel happy, more or less, with
the cho ices they’ve already made. Or so they tell pollsters, who
find dec ade after decade that more than 70 percent of responders,
when a sked the simple question “Are you happy?” say yes. News
stories appear naming the happiest countries in the world—the
latest c andidate is Denma rk—and correspondingly there are
unhappy count ries, which turn out to be those that are ve ry poor,
afflicted with war and strife,  and where people must str uggle to
acquire the basic necessities of life. The direct path and everything else we’ve been discussing—
waking up, enlightenment, wholeness, the true self, meta reality—
confronts the “So what?” test . We make choices based on whether
they ma tter enough in our liv es. This isn’t a trustworthy measure
of what is actually beneficial, however.
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:

        You kno w that you exist; that’s all. As the still
silence of “I am ” starts to vibrate into thoughts, images, feelings,
and sensations, the first stirrings are very faint and subt le. They
are highly fluid and malleable, which is why desires and intentions
that come from our deepest source are not distorted by all the
cruder desires of the ego. “I want peace” is a subtler, fine r desire
than “I want a Porsche. ”
At the level of the true self, all desire for change reaches its
goal, because only here is “I a m” enough to bring total fulfillment. No exte rnal gratification compares with this. It seems strange on
the face of it that the mind at its subtlest level should be more
fulfilled than the mind at more superficial levels. Chasing worldly
desires is what life is all abou t to the vast majority of people. Being
still and quiet, by the same token, feels very uncomfortable for
many. “There’s nothing to do,” we complain. Yet stillness can
unlock new realities. The key is that pure consciousness c ontains
infinite resou rces of creativity, bliss, intelligence, lo ve, and
awareness. By living close to the source, you have access  to this
infinite potential that allows you to be a genuine co-creator of
reality. I’ve put these three se lves—the ego-personality, the
unconscious self, and the true self—into separate categories only
for the purpose  of description. In daily life we call on all three. As
awareness rise s from its source, any impulse has an unconscious
component and eventually an ego component. A common example
is fr iendship that turns to romantic love. Two friends interact
largely on an ego level, me aning that they present their social
persona to each other. But as friendship deepens, the unco nscious
reveals itself more intimatel y, and sometimes, if the two people
feel safe  enough, the true core of friendship, which is love, reveals
itself. T hat see ms to be the final goal, but at the level of the true
self, no  other person is needed. “I am” already has the q uality of
love, trembling on the edge of pure consciousness. What th is com es down to is  that the self you identify with is
simply the self you ar e aware of. T here is no fixed self, just as
there is  no fixed body. Fight ing for your place in line at the post
office calls up the ego-personality. Feeling tenderness toward ababy calls up the unconscious personality. Feeling that you matter
in the great scheme of things calls up the true self. At a  certain po int, the true self dominates the scene, and when
this change occurs, the wor ld changes as well. The wo rld feels
hard, fi xed, stubborn, and inflexible if you are all those things. The
ego-personality finds it easier to resist than to accept, to hold on
rather than to let go. So being hard, fixed, stubborn, and inflexible
isn’t rar e, and seeing the world the same way isn’t rare, e ither. If
someone explo res more deeply and begins to identify with the
unconscious self, then the world seems beautiful, fresh, renewed,
and filled with light. This, too, is a reflection of the person’s state
of awar eness. Look at the gl owing light in French impressionist
paintings and you’ll see where such a state of awareness leads
painters. Yet you must go deeper to see the world in complete p urity. This sta te, kno wn generally as “enlightenment,” represents direct
contact with metareality. Sin ce our daily life is dominate d by the
ego’s de sires, needs, and demands, it isn’t possible to conceive of
what it feels like to experience metareality as a constant state. Let
me give a strik ing example in the thinking and teaching of  Krishna
Menon, born in 1883 in the S outh Indian state of Kerala. Although
obscure most of his life—Men on died in 1959—he has come to be
regarded as extremely important among seekers who want to
investigate the experience of enlightenment (as opposed to the
veneration of gurus and spiritual teachers, which has a major
religious component). The uncompromising nature of his awareness can be gleaned
by read ing the answers that Krishna Menon, later known to his
followers as Sri Atmananda, gave when questions were posed to
him. Time and again he took  every subject back to one e ssential
question: What is reality. Here are some succinct examples:
On pleasure and pain. I feel pleasure at one moment and
pain at another. But I am changeless all along. Thus my
pleasure and pain are not part of my real nature. How are physical objects related to thoughts. The question
arises on the assumption that objects exist independentof thoughts. That is never the case. Without thought,
there is no object. Should we follow a personal God. I say no, because a
personal God is nothing but a concept. Truth is beyond all
concepts. Such unshakable certainty feels liberating and audacious at the
same time. But it’s clear that Menon was not speaking merely to
draw at tention to himself; he was speaking from the perspective of
the true self, o nce the ego-personality and the fragmented  mind it
creates have been abandone d. This is made evident in another
question and answer. Q: Is reality indivisible. A: Real ity is only one and cannot be affected by quality or
degree in any way. Reality is purely subjective. I am t he only
subject, and all the rest are o bjects. Diversity can be diversity only
through me, the “One. ”
You ha ve to reach the end o f this answer to discover tha t far
from being an expression of s olipsism (“I am the only subj ect, and
all t he rest are  objects”), Menon’s viewpoint reflects his sense of
wholeness (the One). This way of speaking echoes an Indian
tradition going back thousands of years, known as Advaita, which
in Sans krit means “not-two. ”  One could also call it the perspective
of the whole m ind, because the primary purpose of Advaita (and
metahuman) is to get people to identify with consciousness as a
whole, instead of its fragmented products. I’ve com e to the point wh ere I hesitate to adopt spi ritual
language, preferring to see the inner journey as an escape from
illusion to reality. The questi on still lingers: If Menon, alo ng with
others who are called enlig htened, are so exceptional, do they
stand to o far outside the norm. I say no. The process of waking up
is natur al; any one can do it. The proof of this is right before our
eyes. Every day we follow the  guidance of the ego-personality, the
unconscious self, and the true self in a kind of jumble. But the very
fact that the true self is speaking to us in moments of love, joy,
creativity, and renewal, even  if only in fits and starts, indicates
that w e are in touch with metareality. Knowing that theconnection exi sts, the whole process of waking up can be explored
in an organized way. How th is is done is the subject of the next
chapter in our journey. I8
 
G O I N G  B E Y O N D  A L L
S T O R I E S
f m etareality is “everywher e, always, and everything, ” a
startling fact follows. There is  no story we can tell about it. All the
elements of a story—a beginning, a plot, various characters, and
an ending—have no bearing. Yet everything else in the world is
organized arou nd these elements. You are a character in y our own
story, w hich ha d birth as its beginning, death as its ending, and all
kinds o f plot twists and incid ental characters along the way. The
prospect of giving up your story is all but unthinkable— yet it is
totally n ecessary in order to e xperience metareality. We ev en have
to g ive up mystical, religious, and spiritual stories, too, because
they turn pure consciousness into something it isn’t, whether that
something is the Old Testam ent God or Nirvana or a pantheon of
gods an d goddesses. I appreciate that these have been a guiding
light for centuries. Isolated messengers have always existed to
point to another world, bringing inspiring stories with them. In his depiction s of the Mado nna and Child, Leonardo da Vinci
followed the traditional story that St. John as a boy was a
childhood com panion of Jesus. Leonardo (and other Ren aissance
painters) show him enigm atically pointing upward w ith onefinger, a smile playing beatifically across his face. Heaven—can’t
you see it. Just there,  the smile says. Those who wake up see the transcendent world directly. The
time frame of eternity becom es natural and is felt as a seamless
flow. Th e Buddha once said ( in a translation by Sogyal Rinpoche),
“This ex istence of ours is as transient as autumn clouds. To watch
the birth and d eath of beings is like looking at the movements of a
dance. A lifetime is like a flas h of lightning in the sky, rushing by
like a torrent down a steep mountain. ”
In every spiritual tradition, such messages have beckoned
believers to a transcendent world, but all have failed to convince
the average person that going  beyond should be the focus of daily
life. At no point in history di d waking up go viral. Somew here in
the evolution of consciousness, Homo sapiens  came to a fork in
the road. Collectively, we could have identified with the true self or
else we could have identified with “I,” the ego-personality. Obviously, we took the second road. Metareality didn’t abandon
us; we abandoned it. This made all the difference in how we see ourselves. The true
self is connected to its sour ce in pure consciousness. The ego-
personality has its source only in the stories it imagines and
believes in. Modern people have jettisoned mythology, and many
are reje cting organized relig ion. But at every level, our lives are
still shaped by stories invented by human imagination. The other
road, w hich led to the true self, gained a reputation for being
mystical (i. e. , detached from real life), and once this happened,
only a motley crew of saints, sages, poets, artists, and seers
followed that path. Finding metareality is an impossible task until you question
your ow n story. You must ta ke the challenge personally, because
becoming metahuman is rea l only if it is real for you. I f you are
fully aware of what is happening to you here and now, you have
gone beyond all stories. The  habit of constantly adding to your
story is just that, a habit. By itself, the present moment has no
story—it just is. Why do we embellish it with our story. Because
the present moment isn’t fulfilling by itself until it gets enriched
by t he true se lf. A computer is useless until you plug it in, and
although we use our minds f or everything already, much  time islost in fantasy, distractions, avoidance, denial, procras tination,
self-judgment, and on and on. Every story contains these
undesirable elements. Staying connected to the true self at every
moment brings the fullness of life into our awareness. Metahuman could be called a new story, another fiction added
to th e s helf, but I think that would be a misnomer. The element of
fiction is taken out when you wake up. As part of the
spell/dream/illusion, our personal stories can’t do with out the
fictional element. Virtual r eality is a fiction to begin with. Anything based on it participates in unreality. We might pity our
ancestors for their attachm ent to myths, superstitio n, and
unproven religious beliefs. But if we are immersed in a better
story, it’s still a story. Future generations won’t buy int o it any
more than we buy into Zeus, witches, and the heart as the seat of
intelligence rather than the brain (a persistent belief in ancient
Greek and Roman medicine). This ch apter is about a turn ing point where we stop t elling
ourselves stories, no longer needing them to defend us against
harsh reality or to make sense out of a chaotic world. In
metareality you  go beyond danger and disorder. The true s elf gives
you an unshakable stance in reality, at which point your life finds
purpose and meaning from t he source instead of from a cobbled-
together fiction. C l i n g i n g  t o  S t o r i e s
Humans are proud to be storytellers, and our story has a gaping
hole because no record was  left from the oldest times, before
writing emerged. Can we imagine so many lost stories. Around
45,000 years ago, people we’d recognize as modern Homo sapiens
started to migrate northward from Africa. All were hunter-
gatherers. Many generations before farming, mining for metals,
and fix ed dwe llings heralded  the rise of civilization, life  45,000
years ago was already too co mplex to do without stories. In the
human mind, fire had to come from somewhere, rain ha d to beunpredictable for a reason, and things we now take for granted,
like a chick hatching out of an egg, posed a deep mystery. Mythology arose not as fantasy but as the best way to explain
Nature, given the life people were leading. Ascribing meaning to
anything and everything is the thread that binds us to earliest
humans. Stories explain how life works and thus fulfill a need that
is woven into the fabric of being human. We stil l live by stories, and whatever disrupts our per sonal
story is  usually rejected out o f hand or fought against vigorously. (Witness the guiltiest sexual abusers coming to light thro ugh the
#MeToo movement, abusers who flatly deny any wron gdoing. ) We’ve a lready discussed how  the ego creates the illusion of being
separate and alone. “I” needs  a good story to feel safe, important,
socially acceptable, and worthy. Seeking to feel secure, people
want to  belong to something larger than themselves—a tribe, a
religion, a race, a nation—but to be accepted by any of these
groups, you first must accept their story. Without thinking about
the freedom they are surrendering, people adopt a secondhand,
sealed-off stor y. You know instantly who is “us” and who is
“them. ” Yet no matter how convincing the story, you will always be
“them” to people embedded in another story. The security to be
found in  something larger than yourself breaks down when “they”
turn into a threat, even an enemy of your very survival. Stories grow out of such ba sic needs that going beyond any
story fe els impossible. A story consists of anything the human
mind c an imagine, which leads to infinite choices. But we can
simplify the matter. Stories are about attachment. We think to
ourselves, “I am X,” and then we cling to X as part of our identity. X can be the larger group (tribe, race, nation, reli gion)
mentioned above. “I am American” has enormous power over
people, as does “I am French ” or “I am Jewish” or “I am white. ”
But in seeing t his, which most people do, we are only sc ratching
the surface. Any version of “I am X” can lead to cling ing and
attachment. “I  am a Patriots  fan” or “I am upper middle class”
creates passionate attachments. At the same time, stories become
more potent by what they exclude. For every “I am X,” there are
many possibilities of “I am not Y. ” If you are American, you arenot ever y other nationality, of which there are hundreds. If  you are
Catholic, you exclude all other faiths, and so on. What’s wrong with this. If stories were held lightly, the way we
experience The Hobbit  or The Great Gatsby, being diverted for a
while before moving on, vexing problems wouldn’t arise. It’s not
the story that i s responsible; it’s our attachment to it. Atta chment
falsifies experience by freezing it in place. The weight of the past
becomes a burden. The pres ent moment is lost in the clutter of
memory, belief, and old conditioning. How many older people
crave to  be young again. How many regrets do we harbor that we
refuse to let g o of. These attachments exist in everyone’s life,
leaving aside the misery and violence created by an us-versus-
them mentality. Prying someon e loose from a  cherished story lies at the heart of
one of the most popular best sellers in the 1980s, M. Scott Peck’s
The Ro ad Le ss Traveled. The book begins with a gripping
sentence: “Life is difficult. ” Immediately, Peck expands on  what he
means: “This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a
great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it…
[and] the fact that life is difficult no longer matters. ”
In o ther words, we are hearing the call to go beyond. But Peck,
who wa s a psychiatrist, knew that just because a truth is great
doesn’t mean people can face it—quite the opposite. In his view,
after ye ars of treating patients in therapy, the biggest obstacle to
getting better his patients  faced was their refusal to take
responsibility. Why. “We cannot solve life’s problems except by
solving them,”  Peck writes. Yet this fact “is seemingly bey ond the
comprehension of much of the human race…. Many, so many, seek
to a void the pain of their problems by saying to themselv es: ‘This
problem was caused by other people, or by social circumstances
beyond my control, and therefore it is up to other people to solve
this problem for me. ’ ”
Peck gi ves vivid examples to illustrate his point, such as the
case of a woma n who had jus t tried to slash her wrists. She was an
army w ife on the Pacific isla nd of Okinawa, where the younger
Peck was an army psychiatrist. In the emergency room he asked the woman, who had managed
to i nflict only superficial cu ts on herself, why she wa nted to
commit suicide. She said it all came down to living “on th is dumb
island. ” Not satisfied with her answer, Peck began a dialogue that
would b e comical if the woma n weren’t so miserable and unhappy. The back-and-forth between him and his patient can be
summarized as follows:
P ECK:  Why do you find being on Okinawa so painful. P ATIENT:  I have no friends, and I’m alone all the time. P ECK:  Why don’t you have any friends. P ATIENT:  I  live off bas e in the villag e, and nobody speaks
English. P ECK:  Wh y don’t yo u drive to the American base to find
some friends. P ATIENT:  My husband needs the car to drive to work. P ECK:  You could drive him to work. P ATIENT:  It’s a stick shift. I only know how to drive an
automatic. P ECK:  You could learn to drive a stick shift. P ATIENT:  Are you crazy. Not on these roads. What m ade the scene tragic and comical at the same time is
that the woman, despite her absurd stubbornness, was in genuine
pain; sh e was crying during most of their conversation. We all
believe in our story, almos t at any cost. From a therapist’s
perspective thi s woman was skirting any hope of getting b etter by
exhibiting all the classic signs of denial. Who among us hasn’t shut
our eye s when a situation was simply too hard to face. Lif e would
be m uch easier if our proble ms had cut-and-dried solutions, but
they don’t. Denial is only one element in the big picture, which is that we
live by stories. Denial comes down to ignoring anything that
disrupts your story or contradicts it. Even the healthiest person
psychologically ignores an enormous part of reality. If we see, once
and for all, th at being attached to stories is what we want toovercome, we recognize that there are people who have done just
that. Their inner world isn’t cluttered with the baggage of the past. They do n’t def end “I am X”  as if their survival depende d on it. Rather, they live effortlessly in the present. The real issue isn’t
whether such people exist; th e real issue is why we have ignored
them for so long. T h e  A w a k e n e d
States of awareness long considered mystical in the West—if
not bogus—exist all around us, affecting ordinary people who
almost always keep their ex periences private. A few years ago I
became acquainted with Dr. Jeffery Martin, a PhD social
researcher who had conducted groundbreaking research into
higher consciousness. What made his studies revolutionary is a
single b asic dis covery: many more people are awake than anyone
ever supposed. Martin gave them a voice. After gaining his doctorate at
Harvard’s School of Education, he started publishing his findings,
which in dicated the prevalenc e of enlightenment as a natu ral state
of awareness, one that many people have already accessed. Martin’s resear ch began with him posting an online query asking
for responses from people who thought they were enlightened. To h is surprise, he got more than 2,500 replies, and from  this
pool Martin intensively inter viewed around 50 subjects. At first it
was ha rd to find a comm on language. Feeling that you are
enlightened is personal, and  it also sets you apart from normal
society. Martin’s subjects were sensitized by being outsiders, often
being stigmatized in adolescence for being different. They also
knew o n the inside that the y weren’t normal according to the
social standards around them. For many, revealing their unusual
mental state had led to such things as being sent to a psychiatrist,
put on medication, or even being committed to a mental hospital. However, very early on, Martin realized that as different as
each of his su bjects was, their experiences fell on a con tinuum. There wasn’t a single enlight ened state, but rather a slidin g scale. To find some common ground, and to fit the accepted model of
what do ctoral research in psychology must look like, he dropped
the loaded term enlightenment, an d in its place adopted the
cumbersome tag persistent non-symbolic experience. When
someone begins to have such experiences, “[t]here is a shift in
what it feels like to be you,” Martin notes. “You move away from
an individual sense of self, which is considered normal, to
something else. ”
Defining what that “something else” is wasn’t easy, because
these people came from different backgrounds an d were
influenced by diverse cultural factors. However, Martin was able
to ident ify specific areas that seemed to stand out as markers of
higher consciousness. Typically these people said they had lost a sense of being a
separate self—they had no lingering notion of personal identity. Putting himself in his subjects’ shoes, Martin comments, “I would
be sayin g, ‘There’s no Jeffery here talking to you. ’ That’s literally
what they would say to me. ”
Another comm on experience was a dramatic reduction in
thinking. “In fact,” Martin sa ys, “they would often report having
no thoughts. ” This wasn’t lite rally true, as Martin discovered when
he did further research, but as a self-report, having no thoughts at
all is startling. Another common experience was a sense of unity,
oneness, and wholeness. This state of completeness, Martin says,
led to a tremendous sense of personal freedom. “There’s a loss of
fear tha t comes with this, a loss of identification with a p ersonal
story. ” Many felt that their b odies were no longer bounded by the
skin but extended beyond the physical body. So now  we have an objecti ve profile of shifting into h igher
consciousness in everyday life, the state of metahuman. Personal
awakening isn’t rare, and according to those who have actually
experienced it, their awakenin g led to a wide range of possibilities. The implications for human nature are intriguing, beginning with
what it feels like not to defen d “I, me, and mine. ” The source of so
much anger, fear, greed, and jealousy is rooted in the insecurity of
the ego and its endless demands. Putting ourselves in their shoes, these awakened people don’t
keep a runnin g story in the ir heads about what’s happening to
“me. ” W hen they think about themselves, “me” fades away as soon
as they  notice it. The same i s true for their emotions, w hich are
fewer and more spontaneous. When anger arises, it fades almost
immediately. Emotions were still positive and negative but rarely,
if ev er, were t hey extreme. Martin’s subjects could be irritated
when somethin g bad happened at work, yet they didn’t c arry the
residue of stress around with  them afterward, and it wou ld never
build in to angry frustration. They felt a sense of inner peace that
could b e interrupted, but quite soon it would return. In a word,
these people were very good at letting go. To bring order to his findin gs, Martin divided the awakened
state into several “locations” as separate stages of awakening,
according to their intensity. His subjects regarded waking up as a
definite shift, which for some occurred as recently as six months
previously, for  others as long as forty years before. On ce they
arrived in Location 1, as Martin calls the opening stage of
awakening, pe ople usually kept progressing and rarely  slipped
back or jumped ahead. In o ther words, they were experiencing
personal evolution, and the process showed no prospect of
stopping. As Martin described their attitude, they “agreed that
their initial transition was just the beginning of a process that
seemed to be able to unfold, and deepen, endlessly—a never-
ending adventu re. ” Everything happened internally, and for many
the shif t wasn’t something they would define as spiritual. It was
just the way they experienced themselves. “If y ou sat in a roomful of peo ple and a small percentage b elong
to th is a ltered sense of self,” says Martin, “you wouldn’t be able to
spot them. To all outer appearances they are just like you and me. ”
So w ho exactly are these peo ple. At the outset, before Ma rtin’s
research began  to expand to many universities and countries, his
typical subject was a white m ale from the United States or Europe. Martin was disappointed to find that women, for unknown
reasons, were not eager to vo lunteer as enlightened or to discuss
their experien ces of “waking up. ” Religious backgroun ds were
diverse, spanning Eastern and Western faiths, yet mos t of the
subjects had done some kind of spiritual practice—they wanted tobe in a h igher state of conscio usness. Curiously, around 14 percent
had done nothing of this kin d. They had spontaneously popped
into higher consciousness or, more typically, drifted into it. Martin’s resear ch base has ex panded to more than a thou sand
subjects, which means we must ask ourselves if “normal”
awareness isn’t a fixed state at all but a spectrum, with
consciousness evolving much further than anyone has pr eviously
predicted. At the very least, higher consciousness has become
much le ss exot ic. It’s no longe r the province of sadhus and  yogis in
the Himalayas. When we communicated by email and later met in person, I
accepted why Martin, for academic reasons, had to remain value-
neutral. But waking up has  for centuries been associated with
bliss, for example, or communication with higher beings like
angels, or feeling a divine pr esence. Was all of that abse nt when
modern people woke up. Martin assured me that “outside”
phenomena we re present, but he felt constrained not to mention
them in his doctoral thesis. He found that the spiritual dimension
of some of his subjects had also opened up. Some of the p eople he
tested reported the kind of open, clear, silent awareness associated
with Buddhism. Still others, however, had no idea what to make of
their state of awareness. In late r reports Martin notes that a small number of his
subjects had experiences that defy normal explanations. A small
number “experience a deep bliss sensation all through their body,
including during moments that would otherwise be ph ysically
painful. For some this seems to bring pain tolerances that appear
infinite. A few of [them] have reported experiences that should
have involved horrific amoun ts of pain, but only resulted in bliss. Others who experience ongoing bliss find that they can reach its
limits. They report a threshold, unique to each individual, above
which pain is experienced. ”
It turns  out, as his researches deepened, that Martin disco vered
more and more uniqueness among these people. Beyond Location
4 a few  progr essed as far a s Location 9, for example. In that
location, Marti n notes, people would “say something like ‘it feels
like it is just the universe looking out these eyes. ’ ” But g enerally
speaking, all of his subjects were amazed at the amount of well-being th ey were experiencing, and this grew as they moved further
along the spectrum. Paradox ically, in Location 4, all emotion fell
away, even love, which Martin associates with a larger shift—the
self that was built up through a continuous story (he calls this the
Narrative-Self) falls away, along with socially defined em otions. After L ocation 4, emotions begin to return in a different form,
based on the foundation of co ntinuous well-being. Yet even before
this re turn, his subjects reported that they didn’t miss the
experience of emotions, beca use in freedom they had found the
highest state of well-being. T e a c h i n g  P e o p l e  t o  W a k e  U p
Martin had made what he considered “the fundam ental
discovery that these were psychological states that had been
identified and adopted for thousands of years by many cultures
and belief systems. ” In the present climate, where consciousness is
an expl oding growth field, the real issue isn’t skepticism. In one
survey, one-third of American adults believe in things widely
considered fringe or New Age, from reincarnation and the
paranormal to medical applications long opposed by mainstream
medicine. (According to vari ous sources, between one-th ird and
38 percent of American adults use alternative medicine. This
includes the 30 million, for ex ample, who visit chiropractors every
year. ) Martin was not unique in saying that higher consciousness
wasn’t “inhere ntly spiritual or religious, or limited to any given
culture or population. ” Given his academic and technical bent, he
decided to put his data to wo rk. He sifted out the techniq ues that
his subjects considered the most powerful in getting them to
arrive at higher consciousness, and he organized these into a
fifteen-week Finders course. What’s fascinating is that the
students would  be ordinary people who, for whatever reason, were
attracted to take the course. Three participants gathered at the website Reality Sandwich to
report on their experience: Catherine, a business and leadership
consultant from Paris; Paul, the co-owner and manag er of a
garden center in Wales; and Rebekah, a semiretired photographer
from Texas. Each had different reasons for taking the course. Paul
described a period of personal difficulties. “I’d become
disconnected, disillusioned, mostly due to physical and material
matters. I had a very spiritu al upbringing, but I seemed to have
lost the  plot altogether. ” His general state was “not quite suicidal,
but about as low as I could possibly be. ”
Catherine had heard about Martin’s research and was intrigued
by t he possibility of higher st ates of consciousness. It particularly
interested her that these states could be specially described—“It’s
not just nirvana all day long. My objective was to go through the
experience and to reach higher states of well-being and quiet. ”
Rebekah had no prior expect ations. “[I] did not know wh at to
expect, just open to whatever. ” But she had heard about Martin’s
research projects, and said, “I trusted the science in them. ” She
also knew what she wanted out of the course. “My g oal was
spiritual evolu tion. How can I raise my consciousness to a higher
level. ”
The m ethods presented to them were highly inten sive,
amounting to two to three hours a day, which they were expected
to k eep up w hen they went back to their everyday liv es. The
instruction consisted of a weekly video about what the participants
would b e doing for the follow ing week. Before the next video, as
Catherine describes it, “[y]ou  do a summary of the week. How do
you feel. What has happened to you. How many times a day did
you do the different activitie s. ” There was meditation and also
group discussion. Some exe rcises came straight from standard
therapy, such as writing down and forgiving people from your past
who had wronged you. At the core of the course, however, was Martin’s eight-year
research into people who con sidered themselves enlightened. He
gave ea ch a questionnaire ab out which practices they found most
useful i n their journey, leadin g to a wealth of data. “We lo oked atall of that, and only a handfu l of things rose to the top. Some of
them were across all tradition s, like, for instance, a mantra-based
meditation practice. ” Other techniques were more specific. For
example, says  Martin, he adopted a “direct awarene ss–type
method. This involves placing your attention on awareness itself. Now that sounds simple, but as I’m sure all of these folks will tell
you, it’s rather tricky. ”
From students’ feedback, he quickly learned that some
practices work ed better than others for each person. He also
mixed in techniques: “It’s not all ancient practices. We also
include some of the gold standard exercises from positive
psychology. ” In a general way, the course had two aims, to
increase well-being as quickly as possible and to deepen
awareness. The success that  resulted sounds remarkable : “More
than 70 percent of participan ts who completed the course report
having persistent forms of an ‘awakening’ experience, and
100 percent say that they ar e happier than they were w hen the
course began, even those who rated themselves as ‘very unhappy’
at the start of the course. ”
Paul, the near-suicidal manager of a garden center, offers
personal testimony to that: “It was the dropping away of sloth;
that wa s the biggest single thing that I noticed. The chatter was
going, the general day-to-day worries and anxieties were dropping
away at a terri fic rate. That was what resonated for me initially. The lack of fear, of worry, of anxiety. That was the biggest impact
for me initially. ”
So do we have a final answer—has metahuman become
accessible through a cocktail of psychotherapy, group sharing,
self-help, meditation, and a program as personalized as a fitness
regimen at the gym. There’s no cut-and-dried answer. Too many
people f ind too many paths to waking up. Martin’s researc h is only
one version of a trend to ma ke the mind a kind of techie project,
and although he claims that 70 percent of participants who
experienced some form of awakening continued to have the
experience, only time will tell. An intensive lifestyle change that
includes hours of practice a day will attract only the dedicated few. The mystery of awakening in cludes the 14 percent in Martin’s
surveys who awoke spontaneously. One day, without w arning,they found themselves fully se lf-aware or they eased into th at state
over time but without effort. We’ve already touched on a  similar
phenomenon i n sudden genius syndrome (see this page ), and
there are rare c ases where people discover suddenly that they have
total recall of everything t hat has happened in their life (a
phenomenon known as “su perior autobiographical memory”). Such people can get together and chat about things like “W hat was
the best Tuesday in your life. ” or recall the theme song to a TV
series that aired only a few times in the seventies. In all these cas es, a person’s awareness doesn’t accept imp osed
limitations as normal. Under hypnosis, ordinary people can
uncover detailed memories they can’t otherwise retrieve, such as
knowing the number of roseb ushes in a garden from child hood or
how many stairs led to the basement in their parents’ home. Is it
normal to remember or forget. Both, of course. Unfiltered raw
data bombards  us in waves too overwhelming to absorb, so we
selectively forg et and remember. The point of waking up is to
remove some barriers created by memory and other barriers
created by forgetting. Happiness is blocked if you keep
remembering and rehashing old hurts, but just as effective ly if you
forget how happy you once w ere—it’s a matter of perspective. You
can even say th at virtual reality makes us forget to remember who
we really are. At its most universal, enlightenment is simply expanded self-
awareness. W e go beyond stories, beyond fixed bou ndaries,
beyond the rickety construct  of “I,” and, in doing so, awareness
effortlessly expands. It expands naturally, of its own accord,
because storie s, boundaries, and limitations were artificial to
begin with. T9
 
T H E  D I R E C T  P A T H
he g uides of humanity who urge us to undergo radical
change use many tactics, including the religious promise of eternal
peace and unbounded happi ness, either here or in the afterlife. The carrots lure us on, but there’s also the stick—the persistence of
present suffering and fear of more suffering to come. The stick
doesn’t work in getting people to change, because even the
ultimate threat, unending suffering in hellfire and brimstone, can’t
compete with the urges of d esire and the reckless behavior that
follows. The carrot isn’t muc h better. Why should we be lieve in
divine rewards. Anyone can  see that virtue very often is not
rewarded whil e sin is. Soldie rs are told that God is on th eir side,
which gives divine vindicatio n for going to war. But, at the same
time, urging soldiers to wi pe out the enemy contradicts the
teaching that God forbids killing. When G od is used to justify k illing and condemn it at the same
time, w e are almost too dee p in the spell/dream/illusion to be
rescued. Every religion has tried to make the rewards of salvation,
redemption, enlightenment, waking up, or whatever you want to
call it more e xtravagant. Consider the Parable of the Burning
House, which appears in an a ncient Buddhist scripture, the Lotus
Sutra. A rich man’s house is on fire  and, to his dismay, his children
refuse to leave. They are so absorbed in playing with th eir toys
that the y ignore the flames a ll around them. Frantically, the rich
man gropes for a solution, and one occurs to him. He tells his
children that waiting outside  the house are even better toys. Their
fondest wish was for a pretty goat-drawn cart, and one  is right
outside the door. Enticed by their father’s promise, the children
run out of the burning house, and what they find isn’t an ordinary
goat-drawn cart, which would have made them happy, but a far
more splendid reward, a jewe l-encrusted cart pulled by two snow-
white bullocks. This carrot, like the promise of a heavenly feast prepared by
God with Christ sitting at the head of the table, demonstrates how
far relig ions wi ll go to win adherents. But, for many, these  inflated
promises have  lost their power to inspire devotion. I don ’t think
modern secular people are less faithful—they’ve simply shifted
their faith from religion to science. The spell/dream/illusion keeps
changing. In prosperous societies, most people live in an u pgraded
illusion filled with the wonders of technology. Why should they
give tha t up. In sheer exasp eration, the great Persian poet Rumi
looks at humanity and pleads, “Why do you stay in prison when
the doo r is wide open. ” The honest answer is that we like it  here. It
took enormous creativity t o devise the current state of our
collective dream. But the key isn’t wealth and comfort. At a very
deep level, humans agreed to a life of high drama. The drama is
driven by the warring opposites of pain and pleasure, desire and
repulsion, good and evil, light and darkness, us versus them, my
God against your God, and so on. There’s no sign that the drama will ever end. The direst threats,
like global climate change, only exacerbate it. As for new carrots, I
doubt t hat waking up can compete with going to Heaven or
finding a jewel-encrusted ca rt. There has to be a way t o reach
metahuman th at isn’t either c arrot or stick. Such a way does exist;
it’s known as the “direct pat h. ” It offers no punishment and no
reward. What else is there. W holeness. This answer doesn’t seem
very enticing at first. We’re too used to the system of rewards and
punishments meted out by the war of opposites. But wholeness is
healing—it overcomes the wounds of separation and the dividedself. Wholenes s is unshakable and eternal. It is the only th ing that
no one and nothing can take away from you, not even death. I don’t want to make these things seem like another set of
rewards. The direct path isn’t a sneaky tactic for dressing up
Heaven in a new costume. Reality is whole already, needing no
human beings to validate it. Wholeness is totally real. The direct
path ex ists to show the way t o the same reality. If it succeeds, the
outcome will be unpredictable. Reality is confronted here and
now, in  the midst of constant change. The here and now can’t be
pictured or described. But  by ending the war of opposites,
wholeness erases a false reality—no reward we can possibly
imagine compares with this. The dir ect path, also known as the direct method, aims to shift
a perso n’s sense of self. Inst ead of “I am X,” which forces us to
identify with bits and pieces  of experience, we become content
with “I am. ” Th is is more than a semantic twist. “I am” means that
you identify with existence, and because existence contains the
infinite potential of consciousness, so do you. The shift to  “I am”
involves every aspect of life, and this poses a potential problem. Which aspect should we confront first—the body, the mind, the
brain, psychology, relationships, beliefs, or habits a nd old
conditioning. It’s not clear that any of these should be given top
priority, or confronted at all. The direct path doesn’t ask us to think about our prob lems
intellectually o r to analyze the prospects for inner change. In fact,
the direct path bypasses all o rdinary ways of seeing and thinking
about ourselve s. These are w hat got us into trouble to begin with. Ordinary ways of seeing and t hinking are totally adapted to virtual
reality. A different way must be found. In m y e xperience, direct  is a tricky wor d. It implies s omething
that happens immediately, but going to college for four years is the
direct way to get a bachelor’s degree, and four years isn’t
immediate. Direct  a lso implies something easy, efficient, without
obstacles. This  applies, for example, when a package is delivered
directly  to your house. You don’t h ave to go to the trouble and
expense of driving to the ma nufacturer to get whatever is inside
the pac kage. B ut a Sherpa leading a trek to the top of Mt. Everestis exact ly the opposite—the path might be direct, but it is arduous
and full of obstacles. The origins of the direct path can be traced back to Vedic India
and ancient Greece, where the issue of waking up was fully
discussed. Many answers an d many ways to reach the goal were
devised. A detailed survey of  all these paths would lead to more
confusion than ever, becaus e disagreements among the  various
approaches abound. There ha ve been dreams of shortcuts, such as
accepting Christ as the Son of God, a single decision that redeems
all sins and opens the door to Heaven. That’s as direct as it gets. On the other hand, a lifetime can be spent by a Tibetan Buddhist
monk or a devout Hindu reno uncing the world for a forest  ashram
or a mountain  cave. This ch oice presents the prospect of a long,
difficult inward journey. In this book I’ve been de scribing the simplest and most
powerful (I believe) version of a shortcut, which is to exchange
illusion for reality. I define direct  a s easy, effici ent, and natural. There is no need for anythin g arduous and filled with obs tacles. I
insist on a path  that is painless, because I’ve seen too much of the
opposite. Some people spend years in frustration and
disappointment struggling to reach some spiritual goal that
remains just out of reach. What baffles people is that the whole
spiritual project gets tangled  up in misguided ideas and doomed
expectations. Let me list the pitfalls one is most likely to
encounter:
1. Mistaking the goal for some kind of self-improvement,
shedding your old imperfect self for a shiny new one. 2. Assuming that you already know what the goal is. 3. Hoping that higher consciousness will solve all your
problems. 4. Struggling and striving to get somewhere fast. 5. Following a cut-and-dried method, usually a method
backed by some famous spiritual authority. 6. Hoping to be looked upon with respect, reverence, or
devotion as a higher being. 7. Being tossed around by the ups and downs of
momentary successes and failures. I doubt that anyone who has honestly undertaken an inner
journey is immune to some  or all of these pitfalls. There is an
enormous gap between where you find yourself today (totally
dependent on the active mind ) and the reality you need to unveil. It’s not waking up that is painful but the pitfalls. They are created
by the ego-personality, which thinks, mistakenly, that it deserves
its share of the goodies that are about to fall from the sky. If you focus o n your experience here and now, the e go is
irrelevant, and many distractions can be avoided. Think about
parenting. Parents go through all kinds of troubles, worries,
everyday crises, and argumen ts with their children, but without a
doubt th ey know they love them. On the direct path you co nstantly
reinforce your purpose, which keeps the distractions at b ay. The
ancient Vedas declare that everyone is defined by their deepest
desires. Desire  leads to thou ghts, thoughts to words and actions,
actions to the fulfillment of desire. So in a very basic way, desire is
all you need. I f your deepest desire is to wake up, to esc ape the
illusion, to unveil reality, and  in the end to know who yo u really
are, the message gets through. Your deepest desire activates a level
of awareness that will get you to the goal. Strange as it sounds, the dir ect path is valid only if it lea ds to
the plac e wher e you already a re. Each of us is already a co nscious,
creative being We are already in the state of wholeness, despite
our allegiance to mental constructs that impose all kinds of
limitations on us. The only change that’s needed is a shift of
identity, and yet no change is  more earthshaking. Once you realize
that you are whole, the transformation from human to
metahuman has occurred. N a t u r e ’ s  H i d d e n  M e s s a g eWhat makes us whole alread y is that Nature is whole, and we
are par t of Nature. Such reasoning is totally sound, but it is hard
for man y people to accept. M odern physics holds that the universe
operates as a whole, each subatomic particle woven into the
cosmic fabric. But the method of science is to subdivide Nature
into smaller and smaller increments, and as the investigation
arrives at finer levels of exis tence, wholeness is lost from view. This is more than a technical glitch. A crucial question is at stake. Does the whole control the parts, or is it the reverse—there is no
whole e xcept f or an accumulation of parts. A new car is a whole
thing; we see it as one image and refer to it with one word. But just
as easily we ca n see a car the way a garage mechanic do es, as a
collection of parts: carburetor, driveshaft, transmission, and so on. With lit tle or no effort, your m ind can shift from one view point to
the other. The sam e hold s true for how you see yourself. In the mirror you
appear as a whole thing, a body; you refer to yourself by on e word,
your na me. Bu t if you sudde nly feel acute pain in the region of
your appendix,  you rush to the doctor—a kind of garage mechanic
for tissu es and organs—and you become a collection of parts. You
have the option to see yourself as whole or as a collection of parts. When we come right down t o it, what is wholeness, any way. It’s har d to imagine a more  baffling question. But without an
answer, living in wholeness is impossible. Fortunately, Nature
presents some inescapable clues, going back to the first
appearance of life on Earth. Life began 3. 8 billion years ago when
RNA appeared and had the a bility to divide and replicate itself; a
billion years later, cells with outer membranes appeared on the
scene; j ump ahead another billion years or more and sing le-celled
organisms evolved into multicelled organisms. The leap to multicelled organisms wasn’t due to physical
necessity—it was a creative breakthrough, and an astounding one. For almost three billion years, single-celled organisms were
thriving, muta ting into new species on an endless conveyor belt
(which is still running at mid-ocean, where millions, perhaps
billions, of undiscovered single-celled creatures ride on its
surface). Life forms restric ted to single cells, or even more
primitive bacte ria and viruses, vastly outnumber, by far more than100 to 1, mult icelled life forms. DNA had achieved the ability to
fend off  enviro nmental hazar ds and laughed at death. The  trillions
of amoebas, blue-green algae, and simple fungi populating the
Earth to day are  clones of one  ancestor—it died as a physical object
but is nearly immortal as a package of knowledge inside DNA. With su ch a successful enter prise showing no signs of wa ning,
there was no r eason to risk multicelled life, except for one: the
sheer exuberance of creativity. The basic challenge of creating
multicelled life  was how to reproduce a complex organism whose
moving parts aren’t the same. The task was like handing someone
the han dlebars of a racing bike and asking for the whole b ike to be
built from it, w ith the added c hallenge that no one had ever seen a
whole bike before. In your body, two stem cells might sit in
suspended animation for months or years, mixed in with fully
formed cells. When a stem cell is triggered into activity, it
specifically turns into a blood, brain, liver, or skin cel l, not a
generic human cell. The last generic cells in human development
disappeared in the womb by the fifth week of pregnancy, when a
ball of generic cells (the zyg ote) proceeded to the stage of the
embryo. The early embryo doesn’t look anything like a mini–human
body, b ut its blobby pink ap pearance is deceptive. As the zygote
emerged from a single fertiliz ed egg, and then went from two cells
to four,  eight, sixteen, and so on, DNA was biding its tim e. With
precise timing, new instruct ions were sent out that altered the
destiny of the e mbryo, pushin g it closer to human form. Each new
cell was given its own separa te identity, through a bewilderingly
complex set of chemical signals that is even more remarkable than
DNA alone. We are far from being able to explain how a cell
understands w hat to do, but we know the general outline. In the
coming weeks of embryonic development not only will a brain cell
become differe nt from a liver  cell, but each brain cell travels to a
specific location, hooks up with similar cells that have made the
same journey, and undertake s a joint enterprise: creating a brain. The same for each liver cell. This process, known as “cell differentiation,” has been minutely
studied. It’s fascinating to observe so-called neuronal migration as
nascent brain cells, starting from their birthplace, are providedwith slick pathways to slide a long so that each reaches th e region
of th e brain th at needs to develop into vision, the fight- or-flight
response, emotions, higher thought, and so on. (I’m giving a
simplified picture, since neu ronal migration is multista ged and
extremely com plex. ) To all ap pearances, a cell is a squishy bag of
water a nd soluble chemicals, but it is actually the repository of
every bit of knowledge pertaining to the history of life on Earth. Creation looks like a process unfolding step by step, bit by bit,
but behind this appearance, one reality creates, governs, and
controls everything. Dividing life into its component parts—the
physical bits and pieces—is t otally artificial. Whether we go back
three b illion years or to the moment you were conceived  in your
mother’s womb, the same hidden message is present. The whole is
contained in the parts. Without the whole, the parts are
meaningless. S e l f - R e g u l a t i o n :  T h e  G l u e  o f
E x i s t e n c e
If th e whole c reates, governs, and controls the parts, can we
observe it happening. Science doesn’t deny that the universe
operates as a w hole, but scientists maintain their insistence that
physical forces  glue everything together. As with everything else in
virtual reality, a story has been made up to satisfy the belief that
the universe must  be physical. The glue that really holds creation
together isn’t physical at all. It consists of self-regulation, or the
ability of every system to re main intact inside its own fe nced-in
world. Self-regulation is why brain cells know that they aren’t
supposed to be liver or heart cells. Self-regulation is why your
body do esn’t fly apart into a  cloud of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen,
and nitr ogen a toms. Self-regulation has no physical prope rties—it
isn’t matter or energy—becau se it is a quality of wholeness itself. To show  the exquisite delicacy of this invisible glue, consider how
the rise  in temperature of ocean water by only a few de grees inrecent decades  led to the destruction of coral reefs aro und the
world. (There are other reaso ns as well, including water pollution,
predators, and disease. ) The phenomenon is known as a “marine
heat wave”; such waves began to assault Australia’s Great Barrier
Reef in 1998 and 2002, but created only limited damage. When water temperatures suddenly rise, a reef undergoes self-
destruction through “coral bleaching”—the corals, which
symbiotically depend on algae inside them to survive, become
stressed and expel the algae, which also had given the reefs their
bright colors. When the algae leave, the coral becomes bleached
white and dies. The sudden death of huge portions of the Great
Barrier Reef occurred over nine months in 2016, when a marine
heat wa ve affe cted three-qua rters of the world’s reefs (su ch heat
waves had begun to inten sify starting in 2014). “We lost
30 p ercent of t he corals in the nine-month period between March
and November  2016,” said a spokesman for the study gro up that
monitors the reef. More mari ne heat waves came in 2017, affecting
all part s of the Great Barrier  Reef, including central sections that
had managed to withstand  previous destruction. The fastest-
growing corals  can replenish themselves in ten to fifteen ye ars, but
marine heat waves of destructive force are returning on average
every six years. This has all been driven by our failure to keep o cean
temperatures from rising 2°C since preindustrial times, or roughly
two hundred years. A minute change in temperature you could
barely register by putting your hand in warm water was enough to
tip the balance of a complex system of self-regulation that goes
back 535 million years. But the lesson reaches much deeper. A
coral reef is a  megasystem  that encloses smaller systems: all
manner of fish and other marine creatures, sing le-celled
organisms low er down on th e food chain, the cells that  are the
basis of  life, and DNA itself. E ach system has its own rules of self-
regulation. They build up their own boundaries for survival. Yet
when viewed from the megasystem, encompassing the entire reef
community, wholeness dominates over separation. We can bring this lesson home in our own bodies. When you
cuddle a baby, its warm, smooth skin feels nice, but it’s also the
sign of a potential threat if th at warmth starts to drop off. Startingat norm al body temperature, which is between 97. 7°F and 99. 5°F,
we start to feel chilly around 97°F, and hypothermia starts to set
in under 95°F, the same slight variance that threatens coral. If a person’s c ore body temperature drops to 90°F, a medical
emergency is declared, and severe symptoms like delirium and
hallucinations set in. Below 88°F, the body becomes comatose. Irregular heartbeat threatens death, which almost certainl y occurs
below 7 5°–79°F. At any given time, while healthy, we are barely
20 d egrees from dying—less than the temperature swing during a
summer day in the Rockies. How do we remain in che ck. The
basic q uestion was probably answered during the age  of the
dinosaurs. Current speculation is that, unlike reptiles, dinosaurs
were warm-blooded. This ag ain was a creative leap with no pressing ph ysical
necessity. Cold-blooded creatures had existed for over a billion
years a s both single-cell and multicelled organisms. They
breathed, ate food, expelled waste, reproduced, and survived the
harshness of environmental assaults. This all happened, and
continues to happen, without  a key ingredient: converting some of
the ene rgy contained in food into heat, enough heat to keep the
body’s interna l temperature constantly high enough for survival,
even when the outside temperature fell too low. Self-regulation is found at every level of Nature, beginning with
the atom, which keeps itself intact without either running down
like a wind-up toy or flying a part into its smaller parts (el ectrons,
protons, and neutrons). This is enough to prove th at self-
regulation is how wholeness operates without needing matter or
energy as its g lue. Moreover,  in a complex system like the human
body, e ach cell knows that it must live for the whole, not for itself
alone. C ells that opt to be selfish and multiply unchec ked are
cancerous, and the reward for their rampant division is death for
them and the body. Normal, healthy cells do everything—eat,
expel w aste, reproduce, heal, and die—with the surviva l of the
body as their main goal, not individual survival. T h e  S e n s e  o f  S e l f
This discussion  about self-regulation gives us a toehold on how
wholeness works. I’ve been insisting that everything in creation is
actually a mode of consc iousness. A cell is one m ode of
consciousness, bringing with it all the qualities of consciousness,
including know ing. It is literally true that a brain cell knows it is a
brain cell. Self-regulation isn ’t a mechanical process. It grows out
of a sense of self. As a person, you have a sense of self that
encompasses hundreds of self-regulating systems, just as a coral
reef doe s. You are the wholeness that the parts need to e xist. We
can cal l this a “top-down th eory,” because there can be no self-
regulation without the entire universe having a sense of self from
the very  beginn ing. The whole creates, controls, and governs every
event. The opposite is a bottom-up theory, the mainstream scientific
view th at the parts came together to assemble the whole. But self-
regulation wa s never physically created. It is part of how
consciousness operates. But we’ve only gotten halfway in our
investigations. The discussion up to now is more than en ough to
prove th at you  are a wonder of self-regulation, as far as the body
goes. But waking up is abou t the mind, and, as everyone  knows,
our tho ughts can be wild to the point of madness; in any ev ent, the
next thought anyone has is totally unpredictable. You might think
of u s as unruly passengers, riding a perfectly assembled vehicle
through life, with the body o perating as a whole while the mind
roams recklessly from one  thought, feeling, sensatio n, and
emotion to the next. The direct path is based on reality being one thing, a wholeness
we c an live in daily life. It see ms far-fetched to believe that we live
with a whole mind. Everyon e’s mind seems like a junk pile of
miscellaneous impulses tossed in a heap, from which we struggle
to extra ct reas onable, socially acceptable behavior. This d isparity
between an exquisitely regulated body and a recklessly
unregulated mind hasn’t gone unnoticed by neuroscience and has
created a baffling mystery. T houghts, according to neuro science,
are created by brain cells. B rian cells operate by fixed laws ofelectromagnetism that leave no wiggle room. Electrical i mpulses
and chemical reactions are without free will. They behave the
same in a brain cell as they would in a flashlight battery or
household current. How, then, did this fixed, deterministic setup
lead to freedom of thought. One answer, which seems pec uliar but is widely held, note s that
we don’t have freedom of th ought. We only think we do (which
would constitu te a free thoug ht, but let it pass). The churning of
brain a ctivity is so complex, the theory goes, that we cannot find
out where any particular tho ught comes from. But since it must
come from brain activity, a thought is just as predetermine d as the
electrochemical reactions that produce it. This hypothesis neatly
skips ov er the total unpredictability of our thoughts and feelings. If yo u d on’t have an all-seeing eye that can peer into the firing of
100 bi llion brain cells, of course your thoughts will seem
unpredictable. Only a sup ercomputer could process such a
mountain of information, and if computer technology continues to
expand at an exponential ra te, such an all-seeing eye w ill soon
exist. In this view, artificial intelligence (AI) is superior to the human
brain, not only because it pro cesses more information but because
it is  free of glitches like depression, anxiety, low IQ, w ayward
emotions, and forgetfulness. We must never sell technology short,
or so the thin king goes. Anticipating the rise of AI to  godlike
status, Anthony Levandowski, known in Silicon Valley for his
contribution to  driverless cars and as a pioneering visionary in AI,
gained media attention in 2017 by founding the first AI church,
which he named the Way of the Future. Levandowski is searching
for adherents, and foresees an AI godhead as not ridiculous but
inevitable. As he told an interviewer from Wired  magazine, “It’s not a god
in the sense th at it makes lightning or causes hurricane s. But if
there is something a billion  times smarter than the s martest
human, what else are you goi ng to call it. ” What saves the Way of
the Future from being a lamp oon is the enormous impact that AI
is goin g to have everywhe re. The Wired  interviewer writes,
“Levandowski believes that a change is coming—a change that will
transform every aspect of human existence, disruptingemployment, l eisure, religion, the economy, and possibly decide
our very survival as a species. ”
Everyone is free to worry about a hollow, dehumanized AI
future, populated by false gods, but other doomsday scenarios
might befall us first. A supe rcomputer with global reach almost
certainly will be weaponized (or will weaponize itself) into a super-
hacker, capable of doing immense harm, from disabling security
defenses to wrecking the  banking system. Such attacks,
unfortunately, are under way every day already. Be that  as it m ay, the artificial  in AI keeps computers from
being alive and conscious—increased speed, memory, and
complexity only improve the imitation of thought. The imitation
isn’t th ought itself. A computer will never have a sense  of self,
which i s a primary trait of consciousness. After all, it was our
sense of self that led to computers in the first place. “I can think” is
part of being self-aware. Once you say to yourself, “I can think,”
you have a reason to build a machine that imitates thought. The sense of se lf tells you tha t you are you. It tells you that you
are aliv e, thinking, feeling, wishing, dreaming, and so on. No
physical proce ss created your sense of self. You possess it as a
built-in trait. Imagine that y ou are sitting in the dark at a movie
that totally captivates you. Your eyes are glued to a chase scene,
perhaps; your ears are overwhelmed by gunfire, screeching tires,
and police sirens. At that moment, you don’t feel the weight of
your body or th e sensation of the seat you’re occupying. Y ou don’t
sense your breathing; the temperature in the theater isn’t
something you’re likely to notice. Engrossed in the movie, you’ve
surrendered to its spell. But with your body and your
surroundings out of mind, and probably with no thoughts running
through your mind, are you so captivated that you  disappear. No. You are present no matter ho w exciting a movie becomes, and
the sam e is true of the ever yday movie you walk through like a
lucid dream. You can subtract everything from your experience
except your sense of self. In  a typical day, the experiences you
notice a re a tiny fraction of th e sensory input you receive. You will
remember a few things or not hing, but surely not everything. Most
experiences fli cker past and vanish, escaping all notice. But you
cannot abando n the sense of self. Putting it out of mind doesn’talter, d istort, o r destroy it. L ike a cork bobbing to the surface, it
will always return. Unexpectedly, we are plopped back onto the direct path. Your
sense o f self is the thing that makes you whole already. Ev erything
that exi sts “out  there” or “in here” is glued together by your sense
of self, because  it is the common denominator in every exp erience. Once yo u see this, you can identify with your sense of s elf, and
then the direct path has reached its goal. P a s s i n g  t h e  “ S o  W h a t. ”  T e s t
As intriguing as this discus sion has been, “so what. ” Why
should you and I go to the trouble of following the direct path. Looking at their lives, most people feel happy, more or less, with
the cho ices they’ve already made. Or so they tell pollsters, who
find dec ade after decade that more than 70 percent of responders,
when a sked the simple question “Are you happy. ” say yes. News
stories appear naming the happiest countries in the world—the
latest c andidate is Denma rk—and correspondingly there are
unhappy count ries, which turn out to be those that are ve ry poor,
afflicted with war and strife,  and where people must str uggle to
acquire the basic necessities of life. The direct path and everything else we’ve been discussing—
waking up, enlightenment, wholeness, the true self, meta reality—
confronts the “So what. ” test. We make choices based on whether
they ma tter enough in our liv es. This isn’t a trustworthy measure
of what is actually beneficial, however. Section summary: 

(Note: Please summarize approximately within 250-word limit)

Please provide accurate summaries for subsequent texts as requested.
Stillness
What is the key to unlocking new realities?
The true self is changeless and unattached, while the ego-personality is constantly seeking external validation and attachment.
What is the main difference between the true self and the ego-personality?
To bring total fulfillment
What is the goal of the true self, according to the text?
The direct path is not a means to achieve a specific goal or reward, but rather a shift in perspective, allowing one to see the world in a new light.
What is the implication of the direct path, according to the author?
The author argues that self-regulation is not a physical process, but rather a fundamental quality of consciousness, and that it is present in all living beings, from single-celled organisms to humans.
What is the author's view on the concept of self-regulation in the universe?