But a life based on
specifics is misguided, because the spell/dream/illusion contains
thousands of specific things,  so many that you cannot deal with
them all or esc ape their grip. As a child in India, I heard simple
versions of what it means to wake up to reality. In one tale, a fish
is fr antic with t hirst, rushing around to find a drink of wat er. Even
at four years ol d a child laugh s at the silly fish who doesn’t know itis surr ounded by water. Only when you grow up does the
seriousness of the paradox set in. Once you have the experien ce of sensing yourself, which is
available to each of us in our calmer moments, you can use inner
silence to transform your wor ld, one day at a time. This is done by
looking at your mistaken notions about reality and rejecting them. Like a physicist sorting through all the objects in the subatomic
world t hat aren’t the irreducible building blocks of the u niverse,
you exa mine yo ur bedrock beliefs and sort them out on the way to
arriving at your true source. This task is made easy by two invaluable qualities of mind—
insight and intuition. They are reliable guides when rational
thought falls short. They are reliable even when emotions fall
short. When people speak of “aha” moments, insight and intuition
have cut through a tangled pr oblem and gone directly to th e truth. At such  moments, when the light suddenly dawns, we exclaim, “I
knew it, I just knew it was th is way.” The beauty of an insight is
that it is self-justifying. You just know. The sen se of self is quiet and so subtle that few people both er to
notice it, but within the self are things we just know. The direct
path as ks us to ferret out the se bits of knowledge, so that they can
be appreciated. The befuddled hero in a romantic comedy typically
quarrels with the lady in his life until he knows—as she k new all
along—that he loves her. We’ve seen this plot a hundred times, but
it still delights us because insight, the moment of “Now I get it,”
brings clarity, and delight often follows. Having insights about a relationship or a tough mathematical
problem or the next chapter in a book you’re writing is quite
specific. Asking for insight into how life works is as nonspecific as
it gets. The direct path comes to our aid by simplifying the
mistaken beliefs we must see past in order to wake up. In fact,
there are only a small handful to consider:
MIST AKEN BELIEF:  I am separate and alone. REALITY :  The separate self is just a mental construct. MIST AKEN BELIEF:  This is my body.REALITY :  The body is part of the play of consciousness, which
is universal, not personal. MIST AKEN BELIEF:  The physical world is the basis of reality. REALITY :  The physical world is one appearance that the play
of consciousness takes. MIST AKEN BELIEF:  My life is bounded by time and space. REALITY :  Everyone lives in the eternal now, which is
boundless. At this point in the book, no ne of these mistakes comes as a
surprise. Now we only need to get over them, which leads to a
sorting-out procedure, as foll ows: At any moment when you have
an e xperience worth noticing , pause and say to yourself, “This is
the play  of consciousness.” So  that the statement sinks in, it is best
to h ave a sense of self along with it. But that part isn’t ne cessary. Nobody can separate milk from water (even a centrifuge only
separates out the solids from  the liquid), so they must be allowed
to separate themselves. This is a simple, effortless process, but one that requires
patience. By reminding yours elf that any experience is the play of
consciousness, you bring rea lity to mind. You don’t arg ue with
yourself (or anyone else); you  don’t try to be good or wise or better
than ot her people. You neither surrender nor strive. Instead, you
sit f or a  mome nt at the inters ection of awareness and reality, in a
moment of reflection. The experience at hand is life at this
moment, in this  pla ce. By consciously reminding yourself of what
is actually true, you allow the “pull of the self” to bring you home. Because we couldn’t stand  to be wrenched out of  the
conditioned mind all at once, the play of consciousness doesn’t
insist on anything. Life mov es on like a river between its banks. When you say, “This is the play of consciousness,” you aren’t
stopping the river or trying to steer it. You are sitting on the bank
appreciating h ow the river flows. I hesitate to mention t hat this
stance is known as witnessing , because once they hear the word,
many people try to witness o r get frustrated because they aren’twitnessing when they want to. I sympathize. It sounds tempting to
witness with calm detachme nt the death of a loved one, rather
than being plunged into grief. The river follows its own cou rse no matter how we might  wish
it to  move diff erently—it one day moves into grief, sorrow, pain,
and suffering—the whole lot . Then it keeps moving. That’s not
simply sorrow, it’s the inexorable flow that brings us to freedom. We onl y have to allow it, rather than struggling against it. Even
struggle is just another aspect of the river, a small eddy that has no
significance in  the river reac hing the sea. Allowing  is one of the
key words in descriptions of the direct path, but it is another word
I he sitate to mention. People will wind up trying to allow, getting
frustrated that they aren’t allowing when they want to, and so on. In pure form, the direct path is just experiencing the sense of
self and letting it do its wor k without interference. Yet there is
another stage, where silence and flow and the experience of “be
here now” is over and done with. They aren’t the goal, only a
platform for launching the next stage. With the next stage , you no
longer witness the flow—you are  the flow. The play of
consciousness and the self merge into one. Krishnamurti called
this merging “the first and last freedom,” a beautiful phrase. To
make it more than beautiful, you have to experience it—let’s start. We will overturn the cosmos and everything in it.H12
 
C H O I C E L E S S  A W A R E N E S S
omo sapiens  i s the only species that must try to be
happy. Among all the mysteries that surround being human, this
is one of the most intractable. For centuries our struggle against
the enemies of happiness—violence, anxiety, despair,
hopelessness, a nd depression—has been the price we pay for being
conscious. We suppose, but d o not know with any certain ty, that
other creature s don’t experience these states. When it can no
longer r un with  the pack, an old wolf lies down to die, defeated by
age and  the raw elements of Nature. A human being at any age can
be warm , secure, and physically healthy, yet on the inside has
given up on life. Trying to be happy looks  harder the more deeply you
investigate human nature. Sigmund Freud, who devoted a lifetime
to in vestigating  what makes people tick, ended his days in  London
in 1 939 as a refugee after Hitler brought Austria under German
rule in 1938. As early as 1933, when Hitler first came to power,
Freud’s writings were banned, and as a Jew he was personally at
risk. To a disciple i n England he wrote bitterly, “What progress we
are making. In the Middle Ag es they would have burned m e. Now,
they are  content with burning my books.” Insisting on staying inVienna, Freud was finally persuaded to flee in the spring  of 1938
when the Gestapo arrested and interrogated his daughter Anna. After paying an extortionate “flight” tax by which th e Nazis
ruthlessly stripped Jews of their money and property, the founder
of psychoanalysis left for England in a state of pessimistic gloom,
wondering as fear and terror  blossomed like a poisonous flower if
it w as asking too much simply to prevent humans from
committing murder. Psychoanalysis has largely faded from the scene, replaced by
drug therapies for mental disorders. No pill for happiness is in the
medicine cabinet, however. In times of relative peace, people
content themselves with a kind of happiness that skims the
surface, findin g love and pleasure when they come along and
doing their best not to get trapped in the bad stuff. Attempting to reshape human nature by probing what makes
us t ick hasn’t succeeded. The direct path is about something
different, sorti ng out what isn’t essential in our lives. P ain and
suffering are not essential. They are part of the drama we’ve
constructed—a very stubborn part—but the drama can be left
behind. There is a level of consciousness that transcends p ain and
suffering. The great insight of the direct path is that everything
depends on your level of consciousness because everything is  a
level of consciousness. Metareality lies right next to everyday
reality, being only a level of consciousness away. (Christian
theology teaches that Heaven is where the soul finds eternal bliss,
but long ago t heologians abandoned the notion that Hea ven is a
physical place, despite the images carried around in our heads of
angels sitting on clouds playing harps or of lambs gamboling
through green meadows—that’s one of the most c ommon
descriptions given when people come back from a near-death
experience, claiming to have seen Heaven. The Catholic
Encyclopedia  d efines Heaven as a state of being attained through
grace. State of being  and state of consciousness  seem synonymous
to me.) So far we’ve taken the dir ect path through two realms of
awareness, the  body and the active mind. You might supp ose that
the journey has nowhere else to go. What more is there to life
beyond the physical and the mental? There actually is so methingdeeper, a department of existence that makes things turn out the
way the y do—g ood or bad, su ccessful or a flop, a dream fulfilled or
a dream denied. Here we discover that everything happens for a
reason, but the reason is very different from the stories  we tell
ourselves. Pur e consciousne ss organizes every event, including
every possible event. It sees and knows all. From this vie wpoint,
everything happens for a reason because there is only one thing. Yet the  parts of life we work  so hard to get right—job, family,
relationships, morality, religion, law, politics—are not expressions
of one thing. They are compartmentalized constructs. What
happens in one can be alien or even anathema in another. It is
against the law to take a life, but political leaders can win mass
popularity by starting a war and taking an enormous number of
lives. Nature ignores compartments at every level. A cell thrives as
one thing, not a collection of parts. It eats, breathes, manu factures
proteins and enzymes, divides, and expresses the knowledge
compressed into DNA’s double helix. To a cell, these are not
compartments described in a medical textbook—parts don’t
matter. What matters is the life of the cell, which is one thing. Can we get hum an life back t o one thing, and, if we can, will it
solve the problem of pain and suffering? The direct path affirms
that thi s is possible. The one thing, as it applies to human  beings,
is pure conscio usness, but giving it a label takes us further away
from one thing, not closer. The great mystery of pure
consciousness is that it has nothing that can be formulated , turned
into a good way to exist, and trusted to bring happiness. For example, in the Indian tradition pure consciousness is
eternal, conscious, and blissful ( Sat Chit Ananda  in Sanskrit). This
formulation led someone to think, “Aha, bliss is the key. What is
happiness but bliss?” On tha t basis, “Follow your bliss” b ecame a
widely popular phrase. Wh en put into practice, it had the
advantage of pointing people  inward, telling them that how they
feel abo ut their lives is more important than external rewa rds. Yet
“Follow your bliss” is useless if you can’t find your bliss in the first
place, or if a tragedy or natural disaster has struck. It is worse than
useless if, like Freud, you fin d yourself the target of unstoppable,
malignant persecution.The direct path doesn’t rely o n any formulations or fixed ideas
about how to l ive. Confronte d by the mystery of being human, it
says, “Let the mystery solve  itself. You are here to watch this
happen. In that role, you are the living expression of the mystery.”
This is the closest anyone has  ever come to living the one thing the
way a cell lives one thing, which is itself. When distilled to its
essence, the direct path asks you and me to dedicate our lives to
the kno wledge that we, in ou rselves, are the mystery of life as it
unfolds. Beautiful word s, but what d o we do when we get out o f bed
tomorrow morning? The actions and thoughts that occupy our
days ar en’t at issue. Tomorrow morning you will get out of bed
and do what y ou want to do or have to do. Following you around
with a video camera might  detect nothing special about your
everyday existence; it could seem like a typical existence followed
by someone who has never heard of the direct path. Yet on the inside the thing yo u have dedicated your life t o will
be v ery different. In every c ulture where people have seriously
investigated o ne thing (a philosophy technically known as
“monism”), the  same dedication was present. Whether it arose in
ancient India, Persia, Greece,  or China, monism directed the mind
away from the countless det ails of life toward one thing . That’s
what th is chapter is about. Despite the allure of diversity, the
infinite variety  of things held out by the physical unive rse, the
mystery offers no solution there. When you reduce life to wha t is truly essential, diversity d rops
away and unity increases. Your consciousness starts to reshape
itself ar ound one thing. Waking up is one thing; enlightenment is
one thin g; allowing the mystery of existence to unfold through you
is on e thing. These descriptions are limited, however. What we’re
really after is the experience of one thing. Once this is attained,
everything else follows, not just the end of suffering, but access to
the infinite potential that wants to express itself through us. This is the state I’ll call “choiceless awareness.” It is the very
opposite of struggle. Instead of always doing, you practice  the art
of n ot-doing. Instead of trying  to decide if X will make you  happier
than Y, you let  the choice happen on its own. When we hear about
the advantage of letting go, living in the now, and allowing life toflow, th ese possibilities become real in the state of ch oiceless
awareness. Choiceless awa reness is the final stage of waking up. It brings
you to a place where the next thing you want to do is the be st thing
for y ou. In suc h a state, pain  and suffering end because th ey bear
no relat ionship to the life you  are consciously living. The mystical
Indian poet Kabir saw the situation clearly:
I asked my heart,
Where are you bound? There’s no traveler ahead of you
Or even a road. How can you get there,
And where will you stay? The roa d, in Kabir’s imagery, is about the stages of lea ving,
going along, and arriving, which is how we all live. We start an
action, either a small one l ike getting orange juice out of the
fridge, or a lar ge one like ge tting married or finding a job. The
action begins, goes along, and  ends. Kabir sees that the heart—his
word for the soul—cannot find fulfillment this way. He sees
another way instead:
Be strong, O my heart,
Put your fancy away,
And stand where you are
In yourself. Let’s see if we can manage to do just that. T h e  A r t  o f  N o t - D o i n gChoiceless awareness sounds alien in the modern world, where
life is viewed a s nothing but choices, and happiness is thought to
be r eached by making good ones instead of bad ones. It’s hard to
realize that the best choices make themselves. The rationale
behind not-doing is simple: one thing has nothing to do but be
itself. Therefore, we have nothing to do but be ourselves . This is
the essence of not-doing. It’s not a new i dea. In the Tao ist teaching of ancient China not-
doing is Wu wei . The concept arose as far back as five to seven
centuries BCE. In Buddhism the teaching is found in a sutra like
the following: “Happiness can be accessed directly in meditation
by abstaining from conscious mental activity.” In Christianity, the
leap of faith th at originated with the Danish philosophe r Søren
Kierkegaard was his attempt to carry out the central concept in the
Sermon on the Mount, that all things can be left to Provid ence. In
a leap of faith, a believer lets God take over, the ultimate
experiment in trust. The absence of struggle is common to all teachings of not-
doing, b ut the passage of cen turies hasn’t made it less mysterious. Not-doing mak es no sense to  the logical mind. Of course we have
lots of stuff to do—we barely find enough hours in the day to
accomplish the m. But what did you do today to produce new red
blood corpuscl es, the lining of your stomach, and the out er layer
of your skin? These are parts of your anatomy that m ust be
constantly replenished because blood, stomach, and skin cells
have a life span of only a few weeks or months. For tha t matter, what will you do today to exchange oxygen for
carbon dioxide in your lungs, without which life is extinguished in
a matte r of minutes? Already the vast proportion of your physical
life takes care of itself. Existe nce is divided between things we do
and thi ngs that take care of themselves. Therefore, some  part of
you is already living without  making choices. To begin to  see the
value of choiceless awareness, stop assigning so much importance
to your  everyday choices, which are mostly governed by habit. In
the long run, h abits keep you from finding renewal. Even worse,
while entangle d in virtual rea lity, you may fall prey to the feeling
that life is incredibly unfair. You can be smart, gifted in all kinds ofways, ambitious, and celebrated for your achievements, yet there’s
no guarantee that you won’t suffer the fate of Mozart. In the late sum mer of 1791 Mozart went to Prague, where one
of his operas was the centerpiece of festivities for the A ustrian
emperor. He began to feel ill but returned to Vienna and te nded to
the prem iere o f The Magic Flute , o ne of his gre atest masterpi eces,
on September 30. By t hen his hea lth had taken an alarming turn—he experie nced
swelling, vomi ting, and severe pain. His wife and doctor d id their
best to nurse him back to health as Mozart’s mind tu rned to
writing a new commission for a requiem, which he never finished. Occupying him self with his musical genius was in vain, and an
hour after midnight on December 5, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart,
the most precious of musical minds, died of still-unknown causes
at the age of t hirty-five. There were heartrending scenes toward
the end of his life of him sitting up in bed to sing ditties from The
Magic Flute  with friends. Few who love classical music consider
Mozart’s death anything but a great loss. I don’t  bring up this sad story, which reached m any
nondevotees of classical music through the 1984 movie Amadeus ,
to mou rn a death or to speculate about what modern medicine
could h ave done to save Mo zart’s life. (Nearly twenty causes of
death have been conjectured, including rheumatic fever, kidney
failure, and blood poisoning. Most of them are infections curable
today with antibiotics.) I merely want to point out that the greatest
among us is still controlled by unseen causes. The drama we cling
to sim ply does what it does, on its own terms. The
spell/dream/illusion mysteriously generates unpredictable events
that cannot be fathomed. How do  we get beyond the sense that we are helpless b efore
random chance or invisible Fate? Without a doubt there are
moments when hidden links are revealed. The notion of
synchronicity h as become popular for describing a special kind of
coincidence. You think of a person’s name, and a few minutes later
that person calls. You want to read a certain book, and, without
being told, a friend brings you the book. Synchronicity  is defined
as a meaningful coincidence, setting it apart from randomcoincidences that have no meaning, like seeing the same make of
car as yours show up beside you at a stoplight. Metareality ha s a way of sending us messages now and  then
that co ntradict our fixed views. Synchronicity is one kind of
message. It says, “Your world is disorganized, but reality isn’t.” In
a fle eting glimpse, we see th at a higher intelligence can o rganize
events so that meaning pops up unexpectedly. Moreover, a
synchronous e xperience defi es our limited conception of cause
and effe ct. Inst ead of A causi ng B, the two are invisibly meshed. If
you think of a word and the n ext minute someone on TV says that
word, you didn’t create the coincidence. But something  did. You can feel yo ur physical body and listen to your thought s, but
the som ething that organizes all events cannot be sensed. Yet it is
here and now. The following exercise will show you what I mean. E x e r c i s e :  I ’ m  S t i l l  H e r e
Wherever you  are now, look around the room and tak e an
inventory of what it contains. Notice the furniture, knickknacks,
books, even the windows and the view outside. Now cl ose your eyes and s ee the room mentally. Begin to
remove its contents. (You can open your eyes to refresh your
memory if you need to.) See the furniture go poof! And n o longer
exist. Strip the room of the  knickknacks and books, then the
windows and the view outside. You will be left standing in an
empty b ox. If you have a me ntal image of your body stan ding in
the room, send it away, too. In one final str oke, remove the ceiling, walls, and floor. You will
be standing in a space with no objects. It’s hard to have a n image
of noth ing, so you probably see white light or blackness. Notice,
after removing everything, that you are still here. Now re verse the process. Bring back the floor, walls, and
ceiling. Reinstate the furnitu re, knickknacks, and books. Replace
the win dow and the view outside. Notice that you are still here. Nothing about the room, whether full or empty, changed you.To p rove that you are still h ere, try to get rid of yourself. See
yourself stand ing in the roo m when it is full or the sp ace left
behind when the room has d isappeared. In either state, can you
remove yourse lf? No. “I’m still here” is untouchable, because you
are the one thing. This ex ercise helps remind you of your true status. If you find
yourself in a busy place, full of distractions or stress, take an
inventory of everything you see. Close your eyes and empty the
place until there are no objects, people, or room. As you arrive at
nothing but emptiness, you a re still here. This gives you a feeling
of blissful self-sufficiency. To know that you are imperishable,
right this moment , is the ultimate validation that you are here
now. You have discovered your bei ng. After that, everything you say,
do, or think is a passing shadow. Simply by being, you have
mastered the art of not-doing. The next stage is to let one thing
show you what it is capable of. P r a c t i c a l  I m m o r t a l i t y
When you see yourself as th e unmoving point around which
everything mo ves, you are in  a special state of awareness. We can
call this the state of practical immortality . Countless people
already live such a life if they  are part of a religion that believes in
a personal God. Believing that God is watching and judging them,
devout believers are basing their lives on an immortal being. The
ultimate rewar d from such a  being is going to Heaven, where the
believer gets to join in immortality. In societies dominated by traditional religion, rules of morality
tend to be rigid and narrow. Dogmatic religions nail a set of rules
to the wall saying, “If you want to know what God wants, obey
these ru les.” The rules can be as basic as the Ten Comman dments
and the Golden Rule or as  complex as the hundreds of daily
instructions th at pertain to the life of an orthodox Bra hmin in
Hinduism. But living by the r ules depends on believing that therewas a line of communication between God and whoever delivers
the rul es here on Earth. R eligions tend to agree about what
constitutes a devout life (i.e. , trying to please God and obey the
rules), but they disagree on which messenger to trust. The direct path doesn’t propose that kind of practical
immortality. There are zero rules or even injunctions. Instead,
there is  a path that arrives at waking up. Once you are on the path,
you mu st comm unicate with immortality yourself, as best you can. Moses, Jesus, and Buddha aren’t going to help you (a lthough,
because there are no rules, if you want to follow a religion, the
choice i s yours ). To begin to  communicate with immorta lity, the
first step is to believe that you can, which isn’t easy. For our entire lives, all of us have been taught how to live i n the
state of practical mortality. Everything is gauged according to how
it fits in betwe en birth and death. People who squeeze the most
pleasure out of life, master many skills, work hard and play hard,
travel to  many places, amass money and possessions—they  are the
winners in the scheme of pr actical mortality. At its most basic,
however, every one lives in th e shadow of mortality. You see this in
our wo rship of youth, our o bsession with fending off aging, our
fear that our bodies might ge t injured. Protecting the body lies at
the heart of getting rich— money offers a surrogate form of
invulnerability. The rich and powerful come close to being
invulnerable to  life’s hardships. (Yet nothing is more untr ue than
the saying, “It’s better to die rich than poor.” Finality is finality, no
matter how much money you amass and throw around.) In t his context, how can you believe that you can commun icate
with immortality, much less turn it into a way of life? All you
actually need is the insight that you are doing it already. Wholeness—the one thing we ’ve been talking about—is immortal. It communicat es with mortal life by emerging into the physical
world a s time, space, matter, and energy. Physics has no problem
with that assertion. The prec reated state or quantum vacuum is
not bound by time or space. It contains no matter and energy but
only the potential for matter and energy. The direct path translates this basic fact into something
profoundly human. When yo u do the exercise in this chapter of
emptying a room until you a re left with a blank slate, you set thestage for filling the room up again with anything you want. As a
symbol of human creativity, the exercise is simple, but when you
look aro und you, the entire w orld has been constructed the same
way. Colors, textures, tastes,  smells, and the like are all symbols
for a quality human beings desired to have in virtual reality. We kee p at this project, taking a possibility, plucking it out of
its s tate of pote ntial, and then making it real. We embrace dogs for
their human traits—loyalty, friendliness, obedience, and so on—
while in return, through a sort of bleed-through or osmosis, the
primal Siberian wolf from which all domesticated dogs are
descended has been given an evolutionary makeover. H umans
consciously selected the traits we consider desirable and excluded
those w e don’t wish to see. Ad orable eyes are a very desira ble trait,
and a golden L abrador puppy as young as eight weeks inst inctively
gazes into its owner’s eyes,  forming a bond that we instantly
recognize. (Wolves, on the other hand, retain a feral glare with no
connection to humans.) The dog is a human creation in the flesh
as well as in our creative imagination. Hybridizing do gs and cats, li ke manipulating the genes of corn
and wh eat to resist pests, is physical manipulation, but t he force
behind it, imagination, isn’t. U sing our imagination is one way you
and I and eve ryone else are living the mystery. No one created
imagination, just as no one created creativity. No one created
evolution, either. When you get closer to the source, where
consciousness in all its diversity begins to narrow down to one
thing, it is evident that being human depends on contacting the
immortal domain constantly, not just every day but every second. Diversity is a blinding spectacle. Seven billion people with the
capacity to see millions of co lors, write countless melodies, speak
infinite combinations of words, and pursue endless dreams and
obsessions—this whole panorama is diversity. Being human
cannot be confined to any se t of rules, whether handed down by
divine authority or created by human lawgivers and enforcers. What m akes us human is inv isible and impossible to codify. To
be human, you must know  how to pay attention. Yo u must
understand what it means to remember something, hold it in your
mind, and return to it whene ver you need to. You must be able to
carry through with an intention. These things are so basic that webarely n otice them, but too o ften the basic instructions have gone
awry. The average mind is restless , u nable to stay  still for more than
a brief moment. The average mind is shallow , u nabl e to reach beneath t he
surface of unending mental activity. The average mind is without purpose , unable to bring its
intentions to fruition in a meaningful way. These t hree problems are interlinked, and they bring about the
struggle that most people kn ow all too well. If it were na tural for
the hum an mind to be restle ss, shallow, and without purpose, it
would be useless to speak of metahuman as anything but an empty
ideal. But, in r eality, the mind by nature is restful. It is ca pable of
going d eeply into its own awareness, and it can find a higher
purpose. Pract ical immortality brings this truth to light, telling us
what is normal and natural in our mental life. When y ou are in contact w ith one thing, other basic t hings
become clear. You cannot be  human without the ability to make
symbols and recognize what they mean. A red stop s ign is a
symbol that tells cars to ha lt at an intersection. Red  has zero
connection to stop  until human beings assign it that meaning. The
word tree  symbol izes a class of tall plants with wooden trunks, but
the con nection is totally arbitrary. Arbre  w ill do in Fren ch; Baum
in Ger man. Y et having created a symbol, we can become
imprisoned by it, the way tha t flags trap people into nationalism,
money into greed, and religious rituals into dogmatism. The fre edom to create symbols without being ruled by them is
part of practica l immortality. The Sufis say that everything in the
world i s symbolic, which seems true to me. Virtual reality is a
three-dimensional symbol of how Homo sapiens  wants the world
to be. The things we say in words are symbols of deeper things
that are beyond words or even thoughts. If you try to unravel
everything implied by the word love , for  example, the thread of
meaning will lead in every direction. “I love X” can be ass igned to
all desires, all wants and wishes. Then the opposite of love,
whether it is hate or fear, becomes symbolic of the undesirable.As part of going beyond your story, it is necessary to stop falling
prey to the lure of symbols. You begin to see that they are like
counterfeit money. Love  can be the word used to justify domestic
violence, obses sive jealousy, stalking, or attacking some one else
who de sires th e same person you desire. The same slip periness
afflicts a word like peace , w hich can be used by a country that sells
weapons of mass destruction  in the name of keeping peace among
nations or appeasing tyrants to prevent them from murdering
their own people. The ultimate rationale for pr actical immortality is the same as
the rationale for not-doing. Y ou let wholeness unfold on its own. You stop forcing, struggling, and interfering. It’s unfortunate that
the teachings of not-doing, whether in Buddhism, Taoism, or
Christianity, have acquired the reputation of being mystical. If
people simply stopped forcing, which isn’t mystical in the
slightest, daily life would improve immensely. If we stopped doing
a lot of things we know are bad for us, not-doing would b ecome a
way of life everyone would want to follow. Why don’t we? Because e verything involved in practical
immortality—paying attenti on, using your intention to get
somewhere, fulfilling a purpose, dropping your story, ending the
tyranny of symbols—depends on a state of consciousness y ou have
to arriv e at. Virtual reality is all about stories and symbols. Metareality isn ’t. That’s why a  path is needed to get from o ne state
of consciousness to a different one. What choiceless awareness
teaches us is th at the path isn’t about what you think, say, or do. You unf old your potential, which isn’t a matter of thinking, saying,
or doing. It happens on its own. The truth is th at no one has to worry about communic ating
with t he immortal, because the immortal is co nstantly
communicating with us. It won’t let us go, ever. A message from
metareality en ters our awareness, and it sticks. The message can
be a nything once it is transla ted into daily life. Look around you. No one  invente d attention, intention, love, intelligence, cr eativity,
and evo lution. Yet these things are here, now and forever. They
never let go, no matter how much we misuse them. One thing has
us a lways in m ind, which is w hy we have it in mind. Neither side
has a choice.W13
 
O N E  L I F E
hen we  are whole, the world will become whole. That
would be an a mazing change, because, as things stand,  we are
divided and so is the world. This state of affairs goes bey ond the
never-ending c onflicts that make the news. There’s a deep  fracture
at the very core of being human. We call ourselves mammals, and
yet most people believe they have a soul. We set ourselves apart
from N ature, e xploiting it without considering the conseq uences. As caretakers of the planet, we are also its worst threat. A shift is already being sparked in collective consciousness,
however. One of the most h eartening signs of this is seemingly
trivial, an online video abo ut a grateful octopus, now seen by
almost twelve million viewer s. It begins on a beach in Portugal
with a man, Pei Yan Heng, strolling along the sand. He spots a
small octopus stranded out of the water. Pei takes out his
smartphone to film the creature. Presumably tossed onshore by a
large w ave, the  octopus looks shriveled and near death. In a kind
gesture Pei gathers the octopu s into a plastic cup, carries it back to
the sea, and releases it. The octopus immediately begins to revive. Its eight arms spread
out (experts tell us that tentacle  isn ’t the prop er term), and it
changes to a healthier colo r. Typically, an octopus is shy andscuttles away from any approaching threat, a necessary tactic for
such a baggy, s oft-bodied ani mal. But instead of fleeing, the saved
octopus approaches Pei’s boots and places two arms on them,
resting for several seconds before moving away without haste. Soon the “grateful octopus” entered popular culture when the
video went viral. You might suppose that this was an exa mple of
human sentim entality, but then, there is no proof that the  rescued
octopus wasn’t  grateful. Is there any way to tell? The convention al answer is n o. This can be a hard no or a soft
no. The hard n o holds that only human beings are conscio us. The
soft no holds t hat humans are the only fully conscious cr eatures. This lea ves a little wiggle room for big-brained mammals, like
porpoises, elep hants, and the great apes. The soft no has h eld firm
for a  long time. But once you understand that consciousness is the
source of creation, the road to yes—an octopus can  feel gratitude—
is opened. From the perspective of metahuman, nothing is alien, however. There is only o ne reality, governed by one consciousness. There is
only one life, too, despite our distinctions between smart
chimpanzees, s tupid lizards, and totally unconscious bacteria. An
urgent need at this moment w hen the Earth is in peril is t o evolve
to metahuman for the sake of all living things. O n e  L i f e ,  a n d  O n e  L i f e  O n l y
In a January 2014 article in Scientific American , the highly
regarded neuro scientist Christoph Koch made inroads against the
“no” po sition by asking if co nsciousness is universal. He is very
persuasive when he points out that animal intelligence isn’t
primitive. Not only that, it is n’t correlated with brain size or even
possessing a complex nervous system. “Bees can fly several
kilometers and return to their hive, a remarkable navigational
performance,” Koch points ou t (not only remarkable, I would add,
but something  human beings lost in the woods are incap able of).“And a scent blown into the  hive can trigger a return to the site
where the bees previously encountered this odor.”
Koch links this trait, called “associative memory,” with the
famous momen t in French literature centered on a cookie known
as a madeleine . The massive seven-volume novel À la recherche
du temps perdu  ( In Search of Lost Time ), by Marcel Proust,
begins with a f lood of memory occasioned when the narrator dips
a madeleine in a cup of tea, a gesture from his childhood. This
experience of associative me mory Koch also ascribes to bees, a
lowly form of insect life. But we can find a wealth of other
examples. Staying just with bees, Koch points out the following:
[They] are capable of recognizing specific faces from
photographs, c an communica te the location and quality
of food sources to their sisters via the waggle dance, and
can nav igate c omplex mazes  with the help of cues they
store in short-term memory ( for instance, “after arriving
at a  fork, take the exit marked by the color at the
entrance”). The upshot, Koch says, is tha t consciousness cannot be walled
off in arbitrary ways just because a life form looks biologically too
simple to be conscious. With arms wide open, he declares, “All
species—bees, octopuses, ravens, crows, magpies, parrots, tuna,
mice, whales , dogs, cats and monkeys—are cap able of
sophisticated, learned, nonstereotyped behaviors.” This gets us a
long wa y from “no,” only hu man beings are conscious, to “yes,”
consciousness is universal. The grateful octopus was act ing out a human gesture. T o see
this isn’t sentimentality or fantasy. Koch believes that if we
weren’t so prejudiced, we’d see that animals behave constantly in
ways that would be called conscious if the same activity were
displayed by a person. A dog’s look of love toward his ma ster, his
distress if his owner is absen t, and the grief he feels if hi s owner
dies are conscious traits being expressed through another life
form. Yet our prejudice is ha rd to overcome because it se rves our
selfishness. Homo sapiens  has ancient hunting stock in it. We killand eat  a great many animals, and it salves our conscience to see
them as  lower life forms, dep rived of mind, will, and freedom of
choice. Everything that makes othe r life forms alien in our eyes is
arbitrary. No creature looks more alien than an octopus. Among
the three hundred octopus species, which first appeared at least
295 mi llion years ago according to the oldest fossils, the largest
types resemble the smallest in having two eyes, eight arm s, and a
beak ce ntered where the arms meet. Blown up to a large scale, as
in the giant Pacific octopus, w hich can reach a weight of up to six
hundred pounds with an arm span between fourteen and thirty
feet, those eight arms and snapping beak seem monstrous. But
like Tyrannosaurus rex  or a great white shark, the giant Pacific
octopus isn’t a monster in its own eyes. In the play of
consciousness, the octopus occupies the same cosmic status as
Homo sapiens. It is alive and aware of itself and its surroundings. There’s abundant evidence to support this claim. In her 2015
book, The Soul of an Octopus , naturalist Sy Montgomery closes
the gap between people an d mollusks in startling ways. In a
section that begins, “Octopuses realize that huma ns are
individuals, to o,” she relates how distinctly an octopus can make
friends and enemies. In the mildest example, one keeper at the
Seattle Aquarium was assigned to feed the octopuses while
another touched them with a bristly stick. Within a week , at first
sight of the two people, most of the octopuses drifted toward the
feeder. But the ir ability to relate to specific humans grows much more
mysterious. A volunteer at th e New England Aquarium earned the
dislike of a pa rticular octop us named Truman for no a pparent
reason. Whenever she came close to the tank, Truman would use
its siph on (a funnel on the sid e of an octopus’s head that propels it
through the water) to spray a blast of cold seawater at h er. The
volunteer went away to college but returned months later for a
visit. Truman, who hadn’t squirted anyone in her absence,
immediately s oaked her with a blast from his siphon at first
glance. Montgomery relates in depth the idiosyncratic behavior of
octopuses in captivity named Athena, Octavia, Kali, and others,making them almost as individual as people. Her argument for
their si milarity to humans is ultimately physical. After all, she
writes, we share the same neurons and neurotransmitters. But
even th ough o ctopuses have unusually complex nervous systems
for an invertebrate, their anatomy doesn’t resemble the human
nervous system . The majority of octopus neurons are lo cated in
their eight arms, not in their  brains. Each arm can indepe ndently
move, touch, and taste (the suckers that line each arm are
locations for the sense of taste) without needing to refe r to the
brain. Anatomy cannot explain how octopuses recognize people and
remember their faces. Disl iking a bright light at night that
disturbed its sleep, one octopus aimed a jet of water at it and
burned it out through short-circuiting. Dissecting an o ctopus’s
nervous system doesn’t expla in how such a tactic was devised (in
the wild octopuses don’t sq uirt water above the surface of the
seas). It would seem to be an act of creative intelligence. My contention  is that existence is  con sciousness ; therefore, no
animal ability is astonishing (except in our one-eyed view),
because every life form expresses traits that belong to pure
consciousness. These traits wake up, as it were, emerging into the
physical world according to each creature’s evolutionary story. The
grateful octopus wasn’t being like a human. We could say with
equal ju stice that when we ar e grateful, we are being octopus-like. Both views are one-eyed. This bo ok has been making the case for waking up, but being
awake i sn’t the  end—ahead lies cosmic consciousness. I am using
the term  the way others use supreme enlightenment  (known in
Sanskrit as Paramatma ). If  metahuman is the awakened state,
think of it as crossing a threshold. There is a vast new ter ritory to
explore beyond. C o s m i c  C o n s c i o u s n e s sCosmic consci ousness doesn’t give a little bit of itself to an
amoeba, more  to bees, still more to octopuses, and fin ally the
grand p rize to Homo sapiens . In a hologram, a fragment of a laser
image c an be used to projec t the whole image—with only Mona
Lisa ’s smile, the entire painting can be projected. Hologram
technology can  even simulate a statue or a living person in 3-D
from a laser im age in two dimensions. Cosmic consciousn ess does
this on a huge scale—the entire universe—using merely the
possibility  of a cosmos. Therefore, it’s not quite true that
something is created out of nothing. The physical universe sprang
from a conception in cosmic consciousness that unfolded in
material form. Pure consciousness is not nothing. This capacity has been inhe rited by human beings. If I  say,
“Imagine the Eiffel Tower” or “See the Statue of Liberty  in your
mind’s eye,” it only takes the name of those monuments for you to
see them in to tality. A name doesn’t have three dimensions; in
fact, it has no dimensions, being just a verbal tag for a concept. The Statue of Liberty is the concept of freedom transformed into a
work of art. But liberty  can  also prod uce completely different
manifestations, such as r evolutionary wars or an antiwar
movement. Con cepts are constantly shaping and reshaping events,
civilizations, and the human world in general. You are  living in a world that  consists of ideas blown into three
dimensions. As usual, the great minds got there before us. More
than two thousand years ago  Plato argued that everything in the
world originated in abstract universal ideas, which he called
“forms.” Leap ahead two millennia, and here is Werner
Heisenberg: “I  think that mod ern physics has definitely decided in
favor of  Plato. In fact the sma llest units of matter are not physical
objects in the ordinary sense; they are forms, ideas which can be
expressed unambiguously only in mathematical language.”
If th e elementary building blocks of matter and energy are
conceptual, then the universe itself is bubbling up from a set of
ideas or forms, too. This par ticular set of ideas that became our
home u niverse could have other variations, some of which would
be inconceiva ble to the human mind. One feature of the
multiverse, if it actually exists, is that billions of other universes
may be operating on totally d ifferent laws of Nature from ours. Alaw of Nature is simply a mathematical model, and math ematical
models are concepts. Let me interject a personal no te here. When I first encoun tered
the quantum, which led to a book, Quantum Healing , I was
thrilled that physics was in accord with profound insigh ts from
India . Maya , the Sanskrit word usually translated as “illusion,”
refers to virtual reality, and the doctrine of Maya holds that the
illusion is merely a concep t. The parallels went even deeper. Heisenberg held that Nature exhibits a phenomenon according to
the que stions we ask of it—i n other words, the qualities of time,
space, matter, and energy are extracted from the quantum field by
the observer. In ancient India, Maya originates through the
participation of humans seeking confirmation of our inner beliefs. In both cases Nature is showing us what we want to see. I was thrilled by the prosp ect that the inward path o f the
ancients and the outward pa th of modern science had ar rived at
the sam e reality. So it came as a shock to discover that
contemporary physics has largely turned its back on the inspired
quantum pion eers. As a professor at Cal Tech told m e, “My
graduate students know more about physics than Einstein ever
did.” This advance in technical knowledge has been tremendous,
but does it justify throwing out what the quantum pioneers
understood about reality? Einstein at least recognized t he danger when he remarked, “So
many people today—and even professional scientists—seem to me
like someone who has seen thousands of trees but has never seen a
forest.” To correct this short-sightedness, Einstein advocated that
scientists acquire a broad outlook from philosophy, which he
considered the mark of “a real seeker after truth.” In the twenty-
first cen tury, a las, fewer forests are being seen today than ever as
every science becomes more specialized and fragmented. You can
spend a n entire career in physics focusing on a single concept like
eternal inflatio n or a single elementary particle, like the Higgs
boson. Cosmic consciousness sounds like something very far away
from how we use our minds in day-to-day life. In reality, however,
each person’s mind is projecting cosmic consciousness all the
time. Yo ur min d is a fragmen t of cosmic consciousness, yet, as in ahologram, a fragment is e nough to project the whole. The
following exercise will help bring this insight home. E x e r c i s e :  S u r f i n g  t h e  U n i v e r s e
Close your eyes and imagine that you are standing on a beach,
watching the surf roll in. When you have this image firmly in your
mind’s eye, start transformi ng the waves in various ways. See
them become bigger, swelling  into the monster waves that world-
class surfers ride. See them s hrink to small chop. Make the waves
turn different colors—red or purple or neon orange. Place yourself
on t op of the waves, balancin g without a surfboard as you  ride to
shore. If you wish, you can  invent your own transformations. Perhaps a mermaid emerges  from the waves, singing her siren
song. You get the idea. When y ou made these creative changes to the surf, reflect on
what was happening. You didn’t thumb through a ca talog of
possibilities. You were free instead to let your imagination roam. Two pe ople doing this exercise would come up with d ifferent
creative choices. The possibilities are unlimited and not bound by
any rules. Nothing stops you from turning the Pacific Ocean into
pink Jell-O. It makes no sense to claim that these creative
possibilities ar e stored in the atoms and molecules of yo ur brain
cells. You made conscious choices without precedent, building a
unique chain of creative thoughts. But even if all seven billion people on the planet performed this
exercise, they would be doing only one thing—transforming
possibility into reality. This one thing is occurring all the time, and
it is  enough to  create the un iverse. In the spring of 1940, one of
the most far-seeing physicists in modern times, John Wheeler,
telephoned another far-seeing physicist, Richard Feynman. “Feynman,” Wheeler exclaimed, “I know why all electrons have
the same charge and the same mass.”
“Why?”
“Because, they are all the same electron!”This startling notion, which became known as the One-Electron
Universe, sank into Feynm an’s imagination, although, as he
recalls, he didn’t take it seriously enough at first. When we look at
the physical world, a huge number of electrons exist—trillions
send electrical charges through your household current every
second. Each electron traces a path in time and space, kno wn as a
“world line.”
Wheeler propo sed that a single electron could zigzag all over
the pla ce, creating a tangle of world lines. It’s a fascinating
alternative to many electrons creating many world lines. N ow let’s
translate this into human terms. Instead of many electrons,
substitute man y observers, each with his own eyes. On  planet
Earth there would be over sev en billion observers. However, those
billions of observers express the ability to observe, which is one
thing. So it’s e ntirely plausi ble that we inhabit a “one-o bserver
universe.” It’s like saying “All humans draw breath” without
having to count how many humans are breathing. Suc h is the
perspective of cosmic consciousness. I didn’t choose the i mage of
waves p ounding the shore by accident. The ancient Indian seers
pointed to the sea and said, “Each wave is an outcropping of the
ocean without being different  from the ocean. Do not be fooled by
your individual ego. You are an outcropping of cosmic
consciousness without being different from it.”
Homo sapiens  is the only creature that can choose which
perspective to take. We can be separate waves of one oce an. The
only difference between a one-electron universe and a many-
electron univer se is our perspective. Both are as real as we decide
they are . Or, to put it more strongly, both are only  as real as we
decide they are. Standing at the pivot of making this choice, we
stand at the pivot of creat ion. Only one thing is hap pening:
possibility is becoming reality. John Wheeler was also responsible
for saying that we live in a participatory universe. I’m only
expanding on the same idea. A participatory universe offers
infinite choices; the one thing you can’t choose is not  to
participate. Once you are i n the game, h ow you play it is entirely open to
you. Hu mans can look upon creation and explain it any  way we
choose. Why are there cold viruses, elephants, sequoias, and micein th e world? Some may say God created them on purpos e, while
others believe that they emerged from the quantum vacuum
through random processes th at took billions of years to come to
fruition. The most radical exp lanation is that Homo sapiens  added
everything we desired to our  virtual reality. Each explanation is
simply a different story. Beyond stories, cosmic consciousness is
creating from within itself . Stories are postcreation; cosmic
consciousness is precreation. T h e  C a u s e l e s s  C a u s e
Our role as cr eators of reality imposes a heavy burden if we
view it from th e limitations of human nature. For many centuries
the whole thing could be left to God. The medieval m ind, for
example, made  God the origin of everything in Heaven and on
Earth—Thomas Aquinas, the greatest of medieval theologians,
presented God  as the “first mover” ( primum mobile  i n Latin ). God
alone had the knowledge to create the universe. Because perfec tion is a divine attribute, God must have set
creation in perfect motion, while in the fallen world ev erything
that is in motion, even a beat ing heart and surging ocean w aves, is
an impe rfect representation of God’s work. When Adam and Eve
fell, so did Nature. The first humans were driven out of a  perfect
natural world into an imperfe ct one. The Garden of Eden gave way
to a hostile wilderness. In the Divine Comedy , wh ich stands as the most complete
reflection of medieval cosmol ogy in literature, Dante reached for a
visual image of divine perfection that his readers could grasp. As
the website Danteworlds describes it, “In the Primum Mobile
(‘first mover’)—the swiftest, outermost sphere that imparts motion
to the other sp heres—Dante s ees nine fiery rings whirling about a
central point of intense light.”
These n ine fiery rings are angelic orders, because in Da nte’s
religious world view there had to be perfected beings ass igned to
keep creation going. Otherwis e, God would have to be engineeringeverything, an impossibility when he was the Unmoving M over by
definition. ( He  is archaic and not correct  in Hebrew, but I’m
resorting to the masculine for convenience, since he/she/it  is
cumbersome.) When referring to God, the medieval Christian
mind couldn’t violate—or escape—divine perfection. That ob session survives today , but in a different guise. With no
perfect creatio n to dream about, we are left with o ur own
imperfections. We feel as bewildered and confused as the biblical
Adam and Eve. We feel guilty about despoiling the planet  and yet
cannot help ourselves, even as Nature crumbles before our eyes. This book has proposed that creation unfolds from pure
consciousness. There is no divine artist with a picture in mind. There is just c reation evolving without end. The process  has no
one story line; it embraces all story lines. It has no m orality. Tragedy is as fascinating to the human imagination as comedy,
which is why we keep creatin g both. (Shakespeare presented the
whole panoram a to his audience standing in the pit of the Globe
Theatre, and Hollywood keeps the show going.) The evolution of consciousness is the only explanation for
creation that holds everything  together. It has the advanta ge of no
boundaries. Th e miraculous stands on the same level playing field
as the mundan e. At this poin t I am going to go out on a limb. If
you go  to YouTube and enter three search words, Lourdes
levitating Host , yo u can watch a filmed miracle that occurred in
Lourdes, France. As one informed online commentator explains it:
In 1999, during a Mass celebrated by Cardinal Billé,
then archbisho p of Lyon, the Host began to levitate just
above the paten [the plate us ed for Eucharist] from the
moment of the epiclesis  u ntil the eleva tion. The prodigy
was filmed for broadcast an d a clip of it is making its
way around the internet. At the time, the French bishops
decided to keep it quiet. Recently, it was brought to the
attention of a cardinal in th e Curia, who took it upon
himself to verify the origin of the clip and ask the
current archbishop of Lyon for the position of the
French bishops on the matter. This cardinal in turnpassed it on to  the Holy Father. He is concerned that
certain bishops were too quick to put the lid on what
seems to be an authentic sign. The existing video is blurry, but it shows what the commentator
describes. During this Mass a large Host was used, about  the size
of a dinner pla te. The levitation, which lasts several minutes, ends
with th e elevat ion of the Hos t, when the archbishop lifts it up to
display to the congregation. The levitation, if that is wha t we are
seeing, raises the Host only an inch or two into the air. I d on’t know w ho is in a position to rule the footage rea l or a
clever d igital h oax, but for m e the issue isn’t about mirac les. It is
about what human beings ar e willing to allow into the acceptable
picture of reality. To date, millions of people have seen the video
of t he levitating Host, and their responses cover the spectrum. Most people I know are momentarily impressed; others question
the blur ry imag es. A few get a strange expression on their faces, as
if th ey were H oratio and Hamlet had just said, “There a re more
things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your
philosophy.”
You co uld say that Hamlet is accusing his friend of not
dreaming deep ly enough. Miracles are similar reminde rs. The
levitating Host may be explained away one day—after all,
antigravity exists in theoretic al physics. It might be exposed as a
fraud or simply sink into the morass of forgotten experience. Even
so, something important happened. A bit of strangeness was
allowed to enter our collective dream. It takes only a spark to burn
down a  forest. You never kn ow which strange bit will dispel our
collective dream. The time for waking up never grows short. Waking up takes you
beyond the bounds of time. Yet it’s hard not to feel the pressure of
disaster the closer it approac hes. There is such a thing as a storm
so powe rful it occurs only on ce every five hundred years, but by
the reckoning of meteorologists, twenty-six such storms have
occurred in the past decade . If we are going to make cosmic
consciousness matter, we cannot wear rose-colored glasses. Those
storms, and the human misery they generated, were allowed intovirtual reality. Many things have entered virtual reality to make
life nightmarish. The average person isn’t prepared to accept responsibility for
the spell/dream/illusion we are entangled in. The accumulation of
greenhouse gas es can be explained as divine retribution, or as the
outcome of a series of very  unfortunate events, or as human
imperfection screwing up one more thing. Self-destruction is part
of our nature, but self-creation is infinitely more powerful. By
waking up, metahumans can make right what humans ha ve done
wrong. Waking  up happens o nly one person at a time. Reality isn’t
a numb ers game. It’s a one-player universe, and you an d I are
enough to move creation itself.One purpose of this book is to demystify the process of
waking up. The direct path i s meant to be effortless and natural. The only uncertainty is time—people who want to achieve higher
consciousness all begin at a different place, and this makes a
difference. I’ve found in my own experience that desire is a
powerful incentive no matter  where you start from. If you really
want to learn something—a new language, French cooking, rock
climbing—the process becomes enjoyable. The better you get at
learning, the more enjoyable it is. Unlike those things, however , waking up isn’t a skill. There’s no
set of rules or  guidelines. Even finding a teacher is fraug ht with
missteps. How does a teacher prove that he’s awake? But every
culture that believes in higher consciousness has, over time,
developed a setting for this special kind of learning, suc h as an
Indian ashram or a Zen Buddhist monastery. These settings fit into the context of each culture. If you don’t
happen to belong to the culture, however, and you’re viewing
these settings from the outside, ashrams and monasteries look
alien and exotic. Yet there’s no proof that a special setting is
mandatory. Af ter all, the process of waking up is abo ut self-
awareness. No  one can teach you to be self-aware. No one needs
to. Con sciousness already includes self-awareness. I’ve been
arguing in this book that existence is  consciousness. In other
words, you were born with the tools to become more self-aware. It’s just a matter of applying them. In the process of waking up, n o special lifestyle is required. You
live as you’re living now, by being aware of the world “ou t there”
and the  world “in here.” The  only thing new is that you relate to
both wo rlds using new assumptions. You assume that the “real”
reality isn’t the same as virt ual reality. You assume that you are
whole at the le vel of the true self. You assume that the true self
offers a better way to live, a more conscious way but also more
creative, open, relaxed, accepting, and free. Assumptions a ren’t the same as truth or facts. They need to be
tested, which is the purpose of this section. You are asked toexperiment on yourself, spen ding time every day for a month to
find out if the direct path works. It’s a fortunate time to seek
higher consciousness. Stripped of religious trappings and the fog
of m ystery, consciousness h as entered a new phase as  a full-
fledged researc h topic, studied by psychologists, psychoth erapists,
biologists, philosophers, neuroscientists, and even physicists. This explosion  of interest makes for a better setting, in  fact,
than traditional ashrams and monasteries. You can be fully
engaged in everyday life while placing your deeper attention on
waking up. It’s a little odd th at someone must learn to w ake up,
but that’s the result of living  so long with the conditione d mind. Convinced that the spell/d ream/illusion is real, our  minds
conform to it. Waking up happens by dismantling the conditioning
that kee ps us trapped in mental constructs. When those co nstructs
begin to fade away, waking up is the state we arrive at. Arriving there is unpredictable and totally personal. It’s best to
set out with an open mind and no expectations. Just adopt the
attitude that waking up is real; other people have done it f or many
centuries, and the only requirement is self-awareness. A  D a i l y  P l a n
The lessons in this section are set up to be as flexib le as
possible. First there’s an axiom or insight for the day. It is followed
by a brief expl anation, and then an exercise. Read the axiom and
explanation at least once, although several times throughout the
day is better, so that your att ention is drawn back to the theme of
the day . The exercise should be done as often as it takes fo r you to
feel tha t it really sank in—one  to three times separated throughout
your day should do it. Finally, space has been left for you to
journal about your experien ce. Even better would be to keep a
separate journal devoted to waking up. Is a  month en ough time to completely wake up? I sinc erely
doubt it , but some people have been known to open their e yes one
morning, look around, and know with certainty that they haveawakened. Others gradually change inside and slip into higher
consciousness almost without noticing that the change has taken
place—it becam e second nature over the years. In all likelihood
you will get th e most out of repeating these lessons, goi ng back
when you feel the desire to reengage with the learning process. There a re degr ees of being a wake, just as there are skill levels in
learning a new language, French cooking, or rock climbing. Reinforcing your awakened state is part of the process. The lessons get longer as the  month goes on, not because  they
are hard er but because there is more to see. Every lesson is  equally
easy. Be open , fluid, and flexible a bout getting there. The beauty of
the direct path is that each lesson along the way has its own
achievements, its own “aha” moments, and its own pleasures. In
that spirit, let the waking up begin.To download, go to http://prhlink.com/9781524762988a001
DAY 1
 
The everyday experience of reality starts with perceptions
—sounds, colors, shapes, textures, tastes, and smells. Waking up is supposed to b e effortless. But it’s important to
know w here to  start. There is  no better place to begin than where
you are  right this moment. In  fact, we will wind up in trou ble if we
pretend that there is any other starting point. You are
experiencing your life as it i s, a flow of experiences that begins
with the five senses. For Today
Get in touch w ith the basics. Sit for a moment and be with your
simplest exper ience of light, w armth, the smells wafting your way,
the tast e of food. Relax into  the experience. Just observe. The
more yo u are able to relax, th e more effortless waking up will be. Relaxing into the moment is the key. In a relaxed sta te your
mental activity calms down, and observing your direct experience
happens naturally. YOUR EXPERIENCE:
 
 
 
 DAY 2
 
The range of human perception is a narrow bandwidth of
raw sensations. The five senses are our window on reality, but the opening is a
slit, no t a picture window. “Seeing is believing” usually only
applies to a small fraction of the raw data bombarding the eye
every second. The same is t rue for the other four senses. They
conspire to deliver a narrow bandwidth of reality. To expand the
bandwidth to increase our perception, is one reason for waking
up. For Today
Get in touch with how narrow your sense of reality actually is.
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:

        But a life based on
specifics is misguided, because the spell/dream/illusion contains
thousands of specific things,  so many that you cannot deal with
them all or esc ape their grip. As a child in India, I heard simple
versions of what it means to wake up to reality. In one tale, a fish
is fr antic with t hirst, rushing around to find a drink of wat er. Even
at four years ol d a child laugh s at the silly fish who doesn’t know itis surr ounded by water. Only when you grow up does the
seriousness of the paradox set in. Once you have the experien ce of sensing yourself, which is
available to each of us in our calmer moments, you can use inner
silence to transform your wor ld, one day at a time. This is done by
looking at your mistaken notions about reality and rejecting them. Like a physicist sorting through all the objects in the subatomic
world t hat aren’t the irreducible building blocks of the u niverse,
you exa mine yo ur bedrock beliefs and sort them out on the way to
arriving at your true source. This task is made easy by two invaluable qualities of mind—
insight and intuition. They are reliable guides when rational
thought falls short. They are reliable even when emotions fall
short. When people speak of “aha” moments, insight and intuition
have cut through a tangled pr oblem and gone directly to th e truth. At such  moments, when the light suddenly dawns, we exclaim, “I
knew it, I just knew it was th is way. ” The beauty of an insight is
that it is self-justifying. You just know. The sen se of self is quiet and so subtle that few people both er to
notice it, but within the self are things we just know. The direct
path as ks us to ferret out the se bits of knowledge, so that they can
be appreciated. The befuddled hero in a romantic comedy typically
quarrels with the lady in his life until he knows—as she k new all
along—that he loves her. We’ve seen this plot a hundred times, but
it still delights us because insight, the moment of “Now I get it,”
brings clarity, and delight often follows. Having insights about a relationship or a tough mathematical
problem or the next chapter in a book you’re writing is quite
specific. Asking for insight into how life works is as nonspecific as
it gets. The direct path comes to our aid by simplifying the
mistaken beliefs we must see past in order to wake up. In fact,
there are only a small handful to consider:
MIST AKEN BELIEF:  I am separate and alone. REALITY :  The separate self is just a mental construct. MIST AKEN BELIEF:  This is my body. REALITY :  The body is part of the play of consciousness, which
is universal, not personal. MIST AKEN BELIEF:  The physical world is the basis of reality. REALITY :  The physical world is one appearance that the play
of consciousness takes. MIST AKEN BELIEF:  My life is bounded by time and space. REALITY :  Everyone lives in the eternal now, which is
boundless. At this point in the book, no ne of these mistakes comes as a
surprise. Now we only need to get over them, which leads to a
sorting-out procedure, as foll ows: At any moment when you have
an e xperience worth noticing, pause and say to yourself, “This is
the play  of consciousness. ” So  that the statement sinks in, it is best
to h ave a sense of self along with it. But that part isn’t ne cessary. Nobody can separate milk from water (even a centrifuge only
separates out the solids from  the liquid), so they must be allowed
to separate themselves. This is a simple, effortless process, but one that requires
patience. By reminding yours elf that any experience is the play of
consciousness, you bring rea lity to mind. You don’t arg ue with
yourself (or anyone else); you  don’t try to be good or wise or better
than ot her people. You neither surrender nor strive. Instead, you
sit f or a  mome nt at the inters ection of awareness and reality, in a
moment of reflection. The experience at hand is life at this
moment, in this  pla ce. By consciously reminding yourself of what
is actually true, you allow the “pull of the self” to bring you home. Because we couldn’t stand  to be wrenched out of  the
conditioned mind all at once, the play of consciousness doesn’t
insist on anything. Life mov es on like a river between its banks. When you say, “This is the play of consciousness,” you aren’t
stopping the river or trying to steer it. You are sitting on the bank
appreciating h ow the river flows. I hesitate to mention t hat this
stance is known as witnessing, because once they hear the word,
many people try to witness o r get frustrated because they aren’twitnessing when they want to. I sympathize. It sounds tempting to
witness with calm detachme nt the death of a loved one, rather
than being plunged into grief. The river follows its own cou rse no matter how we might  wish
it to  move diff erently—it one day moves into grief, sorrow, pain,
and suffering—the whole lot. Then it keeps moving. That’s not
simply sorrow, it’s the inexorable flow that brings us to freedom. We onl y have to allow it, rather than struggling against it. Even
struggle is just another aspect of the river, a small eddy that has no
significance in  the river reac hing the sea. Allowing  is one of the
key words in descriptions of the direct path, but it is another word
I he sitate to mention. People will wind up trying to allow, getting
frustrated that they aren’t allowing when they want to, and so on. In pure form, the direct path is just experiencing the sense of
self and letting it do its wor k without interference. Yet there is
another stage, where silence and flow and the experience of “be
here now” is over and done with. They aren’t the goal, only a
platform for launching the next stage. With the next stage, you no
longer witness the flow—you are  the flow. The play of
consciousness and the self merge into one. Krishnamurti called
this merging “the first and last freedom,” a beautiful phrase. To
make it more than beautiful, you have to experience it—let’s start. We will overturn the cosmos and everything in it. H12
 
C H O I C E L E S S  A W A R E N E S S
omo sapiens  i s the only species that must try to be
happy. Among all the mysteries that surround being human, this
is one of the most intractable. For centuries our struggle against
the enemies of happiness—violence, anxiety, despair,
hopelessness, a nd depression—has been the price we pay for being
conscious. We suppose, but d o not know with any certain ty, that
other creature s don’t experience these states. When it can no
longer r un with  the pack, an old wolf lies down to die, defeated by
age and  the raw elements of Nature. A human being at any age can
be warm, secure, and physically healthy, yet on the inside has
given up on life. Trying to be happy looks  harder the more deeply you
investigate human nature. Sigmund Freud, who devoted a lifetime
to in vestigating  what makes people tick, ended his days in  London
in 1 939 as a refugee after Hitler brought Austria under German
rule in 1938. As early as 1933, when Hitler first came to power,
Freud’s writings were banned, and as a Jew he was personally at
risk. To a disciple i n England he wrote bitterly, “What progress we
are making. In the Middle Ag es they would have burned m e. Now,
they are  content with burning my books. ” Insisting on staying inVienna, Freud was finally persuaded to flee in the spring  of 1938
when the Gestapo arrested and interrogated his daughter Anna. After paying an extortionate “flight” tax by which th e Nazis
ruthlessly stripped Jews of their money and property, the founder
of psychoanalysis left for England in a state of pessimistic gloom,
wondering as fear and terror  blossomed like a poisonous flower if
it w as asking too much simply to prevent humans from
committing murder. Psychoanalysis has largely faded from the scene, replaced by
drug therapies for mental disorders. No pill for happiness is in the
medicine cabinet, however. In times of relative peace, people
content themselves with a kind of happiness that skims the
surface, findin g love and pleasure when they come along and
doing their best not to get trapped in the bad stuff. Attempting to reshape human nature by probing what makes
us t ick hasn’t succeeded. The direct path is about something
different, sorti ng out what isn’t essential in our lives. P ain and
suffering are not essential. They are part of the drama we’ve
constructed—a very stubborn part—but the drama can be left
behind. There is a level of consciousness that transcends p ain and
suffering. The great insight of the direct path is that everything
depends on your level of consciousness because everything is  a
level of consciousness. Metareality lies right next to everyday
reality, being only a level of consciousness away. (Christian
theology teaches that Heaven is where the soul finds eternal bliss,
but long ago t heologians abandoned the notion that Hea ven is a
physical place, despite the images carried around in our heads of
angels sitting on clouds playing harps or of lambs gamboling
through green meadows—that’s one of the most c ommon
descriptions given when people come back from a near-death
experience, claiming to have seen Heaven. The Catholic
Encyclopedia  d efines Heaven as a state of being attained through
grace. State of being  and state of consciousness  seem synonymous
to me. ) So far we’ve taken the dir ect path through two realms of
awareness, the  body and the active mind. You might supp ose that
the journey has nowhere else to go. What more is there to life
beyond the physical and the mental. There actually is so methingdeeper, a department of existence that makes things turn out the
way the y do—g ood or bad, su ccessful or a flop, a dream fulfilled or
a dream denied. Here we discover that everything happens for a
reason, but the reason is very different from the stories  we tell
ourselves. Pur e consciousne ss organizes every event, including
every possible event. It sees and knows all. From this vie wpoint,
everything happens for a reason because there is only one thing. Yet the  parts of life we work  so hard to get right—job, family,
relationships, morality, religion, law, politics—are not expressions
of one thing. They are compartmentalized constructs. What
happens in one can be alien or even anathema in another. It is
against the law to take a life, but political leaders can win mass
popularity by starting a war and taking an enormous number of
lives. Nature ignores compartments at every level. A cell thrives as
one thing, not a collection of parts. It eats, breathes, manu factures
proteins and enzymes, divides, and expresses the knowledge
compressed into DNA’s double helix. To a cell, these are not
compartments described in a medical textbook—parts don’t
matter. What matters is the life of the cell, which is one thing. Can we get hum an life back t o one thing, and, if we can, will it
solve the problem of pain and suffering. The direct path affirms
that thi s is possible. The one thing, as it applies to human  beings,
is pure conscio usness, but giving it a label takes us further away
from one thing, not closer. The great mystery of pure
consciousness is that it has nothing that can be formulated, turned
into a good way to exist, and trusted to bring happiness. For example, in the Indian tradition pure consciousness is
eternal, conscious, and blissful ( Sat Chit Ananda  in Sanskrit). This
formulation led someone to think, “Aha, bliss is the key. What is
happiness but bliss. ” On tha t basis, “Follow your bliss” b ecame a
widely popular phrase. Wh en put into practice, it had the
advantage of pointing people  inward, telling them that how they
feel abo ut their lives is more important than external rewa rds. Yet
“Follow your bliss” is useless if you can’t find your bliss in the first
place, or if a tragedy or natural disaster has struck. It is worse than
useless if, like Freud, you fin d yourself the target of unstoppable,
malignant persecution. The direct path doesn’t rely o n any formulations or fixed ideas
about how to l ive. Confronte d by the mystery of being human, it
says, “Let the mystery solve  itself. You are here to watch this
happen. In that role, you are the living expression of the mystery. ”
This is the closest anyone has  ever come to living the one thing the
way a cell lives one thing, which is itself. When distilled to its
essence, the direct path asks you and me to dedicate our lives to
the kno wledge that we, in ou rselves, are the mystery of life as it
unfolds. Beautiful word s, but what d o we do when we get out o f bed
tomorrow morning. The actions and thoughts that occupy our
days ar en’t at issue. Tomorrow morning you will get out of bed
and do what y ou want to do or have to do. Following you around
with a video camera might  detect nothing special about your
everyday existence; it could seem like a typical existence followed
by someone who has never heard of the direct path. Yet on the inside the thing yo u have dedicated your life t o will
be v ery different. In every c ulture where people have seriously
investigated o ne thing (a philosophy technically known as
“monism”), the  same dedication was present. Whether it arose in
ancient India, Persia, Greece,  or China, monism directed the mind
away from the countless det ails of life toward one thing. That’s
what th is chapter is about. Despite the allure of diversity, the
infinite variety  of things held out by the physical unive rse, the
mystery offers no solution there. When you reduce life to wha t is truly essential, diversity d rops
away and unity increases. Your consciousness starts to reshape
itself ar ound one thing. Waking up is one thing; enlightenment is
one thin g; allowing the mystery of existence to unfold through you
is on e thing. These descriptions are limited, however. What we’re
really after is the experience of one thing. Once this is attained,
everything else follows, not just the end of suffering, but access to
the infinite potential that wants to express itself through us. This is the state I’ll call “choiceless awareness. ” It is the very
opposite of struggle. Instead of always doing, you practice  the art
of n ot-doing. Instead of trying  to decide if X will make you  happier
than Y, you let  the choice happen on its own. When we hear about
the advantage of letting go, living in the now, and allowing life toflow, th ese possibilities become real in the state of ch oiceless
awareness. Choiceless awa reness is the final stage of waking up. It brings
you to a place where the next thing you want to do is the be st thing
for y ou. In suc h a state, pain  and suffering end because th ey bear
no relat ionship to the life you  are consciously living. The mystical
Indian poet Kabir saw the situation clearly:
I asked my heart,
Where are you bound. There’s no traveler ahead of you
Or even a road. How can you get there,
And where will you stay. The roa d, in Kabir’s imagery, is about the stages of lea ving,
going along, and arriving, which is how we all live. We start an
action, either a small one l ike getting orange juice out of the
fridge, or a lar ge one like ge tting married or finding a job. The
action begins, goes along, and  ends. Kabir sees that the heart—his
word for the soul—cannot find fulfillment this way. He sees
another way instead:
Be strong, O my heart,
Put your fancy away,
And stand where you are
In yourself. Let’s see if we can manage to do just that. T h e  A r t  o f  N o t - D o i n gChoiceless awareness sounds alien in the modern world, where
life is viewed a s nothing but choices, and happiness is thought to
be r eached by making good ones instead of bad ones. It’s hard to
realize that the best choices make themselves. The rationale
behind not-doing is simple: one thing has nothing to do but be
itself. Therefore, we have nothing to do but be ourselves. This is
the essence of not-doing. It’s not a new i dea. In the Tao ist teaching of ancient China not-
doing is Wu wei. The concept arose as far back as five to seven
centuries BCE. In Buddhism the teaching is found in a sutra like
the following: “Happiness can be accessed directly in meditation
by abstaining from conscious mental activity. ” In Christianity, the
leap of faith th at originated with the Danish philosophe r Søren
Kierkegaard was his attempt to carry out the central concept in the
Sermon on the Mount, that all things can be left to Provid ence. In
a leap of faith, a believer lets God take over, the ultimate
experiment in trust. The absence of struggle is common to all teachings of not-
doing, b ut the passage of cen turies hasn’t made it less mysterious. Not-doing mak es no sense to  the logical mind. Of course we have
lots of stuff to do—we barely find enough hours in the day to
accomplish the m. But what did you do today to produce new red
blood corpuscl es, the lining of your stomach, and the out er layer
of your skin. These are parts of your anatomy that m ust be
constantly replenished because blood, stomach, and skin cells
have a life span of only a few weeks or months. For tha t matter, what will you do today to exchange oxygen for
carbon dioxide in your lungs, without which life is extinguished in
a matte r of minutes. Already the vast proportion of your physical
life takes care of itself. Existe nce is divided between things we do
and thi ngs that take care of themselves. Therefore, some  part of
you is already living without  making choices. To begin to  see the
value of choiceless awareness, stop assigning so much importance
to your  everyday choices, which are mostly governed by habit. In
the long run, h abits keep you from finding renewal. Even worse,
while entangle d in virtual rea lity, you may fall prey to the feeling
that life is incredibly unfair. You can be smart, gifted in all kinds ofways, ambitious, and celebrated for your achievements, yet there’s
no guarantee that you won’t suffer the fate of Mozart. In the late sum mer of 1791 Mozart went to Prague, where one
of his operas was the centerpiece of festivities for the A ustrian
emperor. He began to feel ill but returned to Vienna and te nded to
the prem iere o f The Magic Flute, o ne of his gre atest masterpi eces,
on September 30. By t hen his hea lth had taken an alarming turn—he experie nced
swelling, vomi ting, and severe pain. His wife and doctor d id their
best to nurse him back to health as Mozart’s mind tu rned to
writing a new commission for a requiem, which he never finished. Occupying him self with his musical genius was in vain, and an
hour after midnight on December 5, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart,
the most precious of musical minds, died of still-unknown causes
at the age of t hirty-five. There were heartrending scenes toward
the end of his life of him sitting up in bed to sing ditties from The
Magic Flute  with friends. Few who love classical music consider
Mozart’s death anything but a great loss. I don’t  bring up this sad story, which reached m any
nondevotees of classical music through the 1984 movie Amadeus,
to mou rn a death or to speculate about what modern medicine
could h ave done to save Mo zart’s life. (Nearly twenty causes of
death have been conjectured, including rheumatic fever, kidney
failure, and blood poisoning. Most of them are infections curable
today with antibiotics. ) I merely want to point out that the greatest
among us is still controlled by unseen causes. The drama we cling
to sim ply does what it does, on its own terms. The
spell/dream/illusion mysteriously generates unpredictable events
that cannot be fathomed. How do  we get beyond the sense that we are helpless b efore
random chance or invisible Fate. Without a doubt there are
moments when hidden links are revealed. The notion of
synchronicity h as become popular for describing a special kind of
coincidence. You think of a person’s name, and a few minutes later
that person calls. You want to read a certain book, and, without
being told, a friend brings you the book. Synchronicity  is defined
as a meaningful coincidence, setting it apart from randomcoincidences that have no meaning, like seeing the same make of
car as yours show up beside you at a stoplight. Metareality ha s a way of sending us messages now and  then
that co ntradict our fixed views. Synchronicity is one kind of
message. It says, “Your world is disorganized, but reality isn’t. ” In
a fle eting glimpse, we see th at a higher intelligence can o rganize
events so that meaning pops up unexpectedly. Moreover, a
synchronous e xperience defi es our limited conception of cause
and effe ct. Inst ead of A causi ng B, the two are invisibly meshed. If
you think of a word and the n ext minute someone on TV says that
word, you didn’t create the coincidence. But something  did. You can feel yo ur physical body and listen to your thought s, but
the som ething that organizes all events cannot be sensed. Yet it is
here and now. The following exercise will show you what I mean. E x e r c i s e :  I ’ m  S t i l l  H e r e
Wherever you  are now, look around the room and tak e an
inventory of what it contains. Notice the furniture, knickknacks,
books, even the windows and the view outside. Now cl ose your eyes and s ee the room mentally. Begin to
remove its contents. (You can open your eyes to refresh your
memory if you need to. ) See the furniture go poof. And n o longer
exist. Strip the room of the  knickknacks and books, then the
windows and the view outside. You will be left standing in an
empty b ox. If you have a me ntal image of your body stan ding in
the room, send it away, too. In one final str oke, remove the ceiling, walls, and floor. You will
be standing in a space with no objects. It’s hard to have a n image
of noth ing, so you probably see white light or blackness. Notice,
after removing everything, that you are still here. Now re verse the process. Bring back the floor, walls, and
ceiling. Reinstate the furnitu re, knickknacks, and books. Replace
the win dow and the view outside. Notice that you are still here. Nothing about the room, whether full or empty, changed you. To p rove that you are still h ere, try to get rid of yourself. See
yourself stand ing in the roo m when it is full or the sp ace left
behind when the room has d isappeared. In either state, can you
remove yourse lf. No. “I’m still here” is untouchable, because you
are the one thing. This ex ercise helps remind you of your true status. If you find
yourself in a busy place, full of distractions or stress, take an
inventory of everything you see. Close your eyes and empty the
place until there are no objects, people, or room. As you arrive at
nothing but emptiness, you a re still here. This gives you a feeling
of blissful self-sufficiency. To know that you are imperishable,
right this moment, is the ultimate validation that you are here
now. You have discovered your bei ng. After that, everything you say,
do, or think is a passing shadow. Simply by being, you have
mastered the art of not-doing. The next stage is to let one thing
show you what it is capable of. P r a c t i c a l  I m m o r t a l i t y
When you see yourself as th e unmoving point around which
everything mo ves, you are in  a special state of awareness. We can
call this the state of practical immortality. Countless people
already live such a life if they  are part of a religion that believes in
a personal God. Believing that God is watching and judging them,
devout believers are basing their lives on an immortal being. The
ultimate rewar d from such a  being is going to Heaven, where the
believer gets to join in immortality. In societies dominated by traditional religion, rules of morality
tend to be rigid and narrow. Dogmatic religions nail a set of rules
to the wall saying, “If you want to know what God wants, obey
these ru les. ” The rules can be as basic as the Ten Comman dments
and the Golden Rule or as  complex as the hundreds of daily
instructions th at pertain to the life of an orthodox Bra hmin in
Hinduism. But living by the r ules depends on believing that therewas a line of communication between God and whoever delivers
the rul es here on Earth. R eligions tend to agree about what
constitutes a devout life (i. e. , trying to please God and obey the
rules), but they disagree on which messenger to trust. The direct path doesn’t propose that kind of practical
immortality. There are zero rules or even injunctions. Instead,
there is  a path that arrives at waking up. Once you are on the path,
you mu st comm unicate with immortality yourself, as best you can. Moses, Jesus, and Buddha aren’t going to help you (a lthough,
because there are no rules, if you want to follow a religion, the
choice i s yours ). To begin to  communicate with immorta lity, the
first step is to believe that you can, which isn’t easy. For our entire lives, all of us have been taught how to live i n the
state of practical mortality. Everything is gauged according to how
it fits in betwe en birth and death. People who squeeze the most
pleasure out of life, master many skills, work hard and play hard,
travel to  many places, amass money and possessions—they  are the
winners in the scheme of pr actical mortality. At its most basic,
however, every one lives in th e shadow of mortality. You see this in
our wo rship of youth, our o bsession with fending off aging, our
fear that our bodies might ge t injured. Protecting the body lies at
the heart of getting rich— money offers a surrogate form of
invulnerability. The rich and powerful come close to being
invulnerable to  life’s hardships. (Yet nothing is more untr ue than
the saying, “It’s better to die rich than poor. ” Finality is finality, no
matter how much money you amass and throw around. ) In t his context, how can you believe that you can commun icate
with immortality, much less turn it into a way of life. All you
actually need is the insight that you are doing it already. Wholeness—the one thing we ’ve been talking about—is immortal. It communicat es with mortal life by emerging into the physical
world a s time, space, matter, and energy. Physics has no problem
with that assertion. The prec reated state or quantum vacuum is
not bound by time or space. It contains no matter and energy but
only the potential for matter and energy. The direct path translates this basic fact into something
profoundly human. When yo u do the exercise in this chapter of
emptying a room until you a re left with a blank slate, you set thestage for filling the room up again with anything you want. As a
symbol of human creativity, the exercise is simple, but when you
look aro und you, the entire w orld has been constructed the same
way. Colors, textures, tastes,  smells, and the like are all symbols
for a quality human beings desired to have in virtual reality. We kee p at this project, taking a possibility, plucking it out of
its s tate of pote ntial, and then making it real. We embrace dogs for
their human traits—loyalty, friendliness, obedience, and so on—
while in return, through a sort of bleed-through or osmosis, the
primal Siberian wolf from which all domesticated dogs are
descended has been given an evolutionary makeover. H umans
consciously selected the traits we consider desirable and excluded
those w e don’t wish to see. Ad orable eyes are a very desira ble trait,
and a golden L abrador puppy as young as eight weeks inst inctively
gazes into its owner’s eyes,  forming a bond that we instantly
recognize. (Wolves, on the other hand, retain a feral glare with no
connection to humans. ) The dog is a human creation in the flesh
as well as in our creative imagination. Hybridizing do gs and cats, li ke manipulating the genes of corn
and wh eat to resist pests, is physical manipulation, but t he force
behind it, imagination, isn’t. U sing our imagination is one way you
and I and eve ryone else are living the mystery. No one created
imagination, just as no one created creativity. No one created
evolution, either. When you get closer to the source, where
consciousness in all its diversity begins to narrow down to one
thing, it is evident that being human depends on contacting the
immortal domain constantly, not just every day but every second. Diversity is a blinding spectacle. Seven billion people with the
capacity to see millions of co lors, write countless melodies, speak
infinite combinations of words, and pursue endless dreams and
obsessions—this whole panorama is diversity. Being human
cannot be confined to any se t of rules, whether handed down by
divine authority or created by human lawgivers and enforcers. What m akes us human is inv isible and impossible to codify. To
be human, you must know  how to pay attention. Yo u must
understand what it means to remember something, hold it in your
mind, and return to it whene ver you need to. You must be able to
carry through with an intention. These things are so basic that webarely n otice them, but too o ften the basic instructions have gone
awry. The average mind is restless, u nable to stay  still for more than
a brief moment. The average mind is shallow, u nabl e to reach beneath t he
surface of unending mental activity. The average mind is without purpose, unable to bring its
intentions to fruition in a meaningful way. These t hree problems are interlinked, and they bring about the
struggle that most people kn ow all too well. If it were na tural for
the hum an mind to be restle ss, shallow, and without purpose, it
would be useless to speak of metahuman as anything but an empty
ideal. But, in r eality, the mind by nature is restful. It is ca pable of
going d eeply into its own awareness, and it can find a higher
purpose. Pract ical immortality brings this truth to light, telling us
what is normal and natural in our mental life. When y ou are in contact w ith one thing, other basic t hings
become clear. You cannot be  human without the ability to make
symbols and recognize what they mean. A red stop s ign is a
symbol that tells cars to ha lt at an intersection. Red  has zero
connection to stop  until human beings assign it that meaning. The
word tree  symbol izes a class of tall plants with wooden trunks, but
the con nection is totally arbitrary. Arbre  w ill do in Fren ch; Baum
in Ger man. Y et having created a symbol, we can become
imprisoned by it, the way tha t flags trap people into nationalism,
money into greed, and religious rituals into dogmatism. The fre edom to create symbols without being ruled by them is
part of practica l immortality. The Sufis say that everything in the
world i s symbolic, which seems true to me. Virtual reality is a
three-dimensional symbol of how Homo sapiens  wants the world
to be. The things we say in words are symbols of deeper things
that are beyond words or even thoughts. If you try to unravel
everything implied by the word love, for  example, the thread of
meaning will lead in every direction. “I love X” can be ass igned to
all desires, all wants and wishes. Then the opposite of love,
whether it is hate or fear, becomes symbolic of the undesirable. As part of going beyond your story, it is necessary to stop falling
prey to the lure of symbols. You begin to see that they are like
counterfeit money. Love  can be the word used to justify domestic
violence, obses sive jealousy, stalking, or attacking some one else
who de sires th e same person you desire. The same slip periness
afflicts a word like peace, w hich can be used by a country that sells
weapons of mass destruction  in the name of keeping peace among
nations or appeasing tyrants to prevent them from murdering
their own people. The ultimate rationale for pr actical immortality is the same as
the rationale for not-doing. Y ou let wholeness unfold on its own. You stop forcing, struggling, and interfering. It’s unfortunate that
the teachings of not-doing, whether in Buddhism, Taoism, or
Christianity, have acquired the reputation of being mystical. If
people simply stopped forcing, which isn’t mystical in the
slightest, daily life would improve immensely. If we stopped doing
a lot of things we know are bad for us, not-doing would b ecome a
way of life everyone would want to follow. Why don’t we. Because e verything involved in practical
immortality—paying attenti on, using your intention to get
somewhere, fulfilling a purpose, dropping your story, ending the
tyranny of symbols—depends on a state of consciousness y ou have
to arriv e at. Virtual reality is all about stories and symbols. Metareality isn ’t. That’s why a  path is needed to get from o ne state
of consciousness to a different one. What choiceless awareness
teaches us is th at the path isn’t about what you think, say, or do. You unf old your potential, which isn’t a matter of thinking, saying,
or doing. It happens on its own. The truth is th at no one has to worry about communic ating
with t he immortal, because the immortal is co nstantly
communicating with us. It won’t let us go, ever. A message from
metareality en ters our awareness, and it sticks. The message can
be a nything once it is transla ted into daily life. Look around you. No one  invente d attention, intention, love, intelligence, cr eativity,
and evo lution. Yet these things are here, now and forever. They
never let go, no matter how much we misuse them. One thing has
us a lways in m ind, which is w hy we have it in mind. Neither side
has a choice. W13
 
O N E  L I F E
hen we  are whole, the world will become whole. That
would be an a mazing change, because, as things stand,  we are
divided and so is the world. This state of affairs goes bey ond the
never-ending c onflicts that make the news. There’s a deep  fracture
at the very core of being human. We call ourselves mammals, and
yet most people believe they have a soul. We set ourselves apart
from N ature, e xploiting it without considering the conseq uences. As caretakers of the planet, we are also its worst threat. A shift is already being sparked in collective consciousness,
however. One of the most h eartening signs of this is seemingly
trivial, an online video abo ut a grateful octopus, now seen by
almost twelve million viewer s. It begins on a beach in Portugal
with a man, Pei Yan Heng, strolling along the sand. He spots a
small octopus stranded out of the water. Pei takes out his
smartphone to film the creature. Presumably tossed onshore by a
large w ave, the  octopus looks shriveled and near death. In a kind
gesture Pei gathers the octopu s into a plastic cup, carries it back to
the sea, and releases it. The octopus immediately begins to revive. Its eight arms spread
out (experts tell us that tentacle  isn ’t the prop er term), and it
changes to a healthier colo r. Typically, an octopus is shy andscuttles away from any approaching threat, a necessary tactic for
such a baggy, s oft-bodied ani mal. But instead of fleeing, the saved
octopus approaches Pei’s boots and places two arms on them,
resting for several seconds before moving away without haste. Soon the “grateful octopus” entered popular culture when the
video went viral. You might suppose that this was an exa mple of
human sentim entality, but then, there is no proof that the  rescued
octopus wasn’t  grateful. Is there any way to tell. The convention al answer is n o. This can be a hard no or a soft
no. The hard n o holds that only human beings are conscio us. The
soft no holds t hat humans are the only fully conscious cr eatures. This lea ves a little wiggle room for big-brained mammals, like
porpoises, elep hants, and the great apes. The soft no has h eld firm
for a  long time. But once you understand that consciousness is the
source of creation, the road to yes—an octopus can  feel gratitude—
is opened. From the perspective of metahuman, nothing is alien, however. There is only o ne reality, governed by one consciousness. There is
only one life, too, despite our distinctions between smart
chimpanzees, s tupid lizards, and totally unconscious bacteria. An
urgent need at this moment w hen the Earth is in peril is t o evolve
to metahuman for the sake of all living things. O n e  L i f e,  a n d  O n e  L i f e  O n l y
In a January 2014 article in Scientific American, the highly
regarded neuro scientist Christoph Koch made inroads against the
“no” po sition by asking if co nsciousness is universal. He is very
persuasive when he points out that animal intelligence isn’t
primitive. Not only that, it is n’t correlated with brain size or even
possessing a complex nervous system. “Bees can fly several
kilometers and return to their hive, a remarkable navigational
performance,” Koch points ou t (not only remarkable, I would add,
but something  human beings lost in the woods are incap able of). “And a scent blown into the  hive can trigger a return to the site
where the bees previously encountered this odor. ”
Koch links this trait, called “associative memory,” with the
famous momen t in French literature centered on a cookie known
as a madeleine. The massive seven-volume novel À la recherche
du temps perdu  ( In Search of Lost Time ), by Marcel Proust,
begins with a f lood of memory occasioned when the narrator dips
a madeleine in a cup of tea, a gesture from his childhood. This
experience of associative me mory Koch also ascribes to bees, a
lowly form of insect life. But we can find a wealth of other
examples. Staying just with bees, Koch points out the following:
[They] are capable of recognizing specific faces from
photographs, c an communica te the location and quality
of food sources to their sisters via the waggle dance, and
can nav igate c omplex mazes  with the help of cues they
store in short-term memory ( for instance, “after arriving
at a  fork, take the exit marked by the color at the
entrance”). The upshot, Koch says, is tha t consciousness cannot be walled
off in arbitrary ways just because a life form looks biologically too
simple to be conscious. With arms wide open, he declares, “All
species—bees, octopuses, ravens, crows, magpies, parrots, tuna,
mice, whales, dogs, cats and monkeys—are cap able of
sophisticated, learned, nonstereotyped behaviors. ” This gets us a
long wa y from “no,” only hu man beings are conscious, to “yes,”
consciousness is universal. The grateful octopus was act ing out a human gesture. T o see
this isn’t sentimentality or fantasy. Koch believes that if we
weren’t so prejudiced, we’d see that animals behave constantly in
ways that would be called conscious if the same activity were
displayed by a person. A dog’s look of love toward his ma ster, his
distress if his owner is absen t, and the grief he feels if hi s owner
dies are conscious traits being expressed through another life
form. Yet our prejudice is ha rd to overcome because it se rves our
selfishness. Homo sapiens  has ancient hunting stock in it. We killand eat  a great many animals, and it salves our conscience to see
them as  lower life forms, dep rived of mind, will, and freedom of
choice. Everything that makes othe r life forms alien in our eyes is
arbitrary. No creature looks more alien than an octopus. Among
the three hundred octopus species, which first appeared at least
295 mi llion years ago according to the oldest fossils, the largest
types resemble the smallest in having two eyes, eight arm s, and a
beak ce ntered where the arms meet. Blown up to a large scale, as
in the giant Pacific octopus, w hich can reach a weight of up to six
hundred pounds with an arm span between fourteen and thirty
feet, those eight arms and snapping beak seem monstrous. But
like Tyrannosaurus rex  or a great white shark, the giant Pacific
octopus isn’t a monster in its own eyes. In the play of
consciousness, the octopus occupies the same cosmic status as
Homo sapiens. It is alive and aware of itself and its surroundings. There’s abundant evidence to support this claim. In her 2015
book, The Soul of an Octopus, naturalist Sy Montgomery closes
the gap between people an d mollusks in startling ways. In a
section that begins, “Octopuses realize that huma ns are
individuals, to o,” she relates how distinctly an octopus can make
friends and enemies. In the mildest example, one keeper at the
Seattle Aquarium was assigned to feed the octopuses while
another touched them with a bristly stick. Within a week, at first
sight of the two people, most of the octopuses drifted toward the
feeder. But the ir ability to relate to specific humans grows much more
mysterious. A volunteer at th e New England Aquarium earned the
dislike of a pa rticular octop us named Truman for no a pparent
reason. Whenever she came close to the tank, Truman would use
its siph on (a funnel on the sid e of an octopus’s head that propels it
through the water) to spray a blast of cold seawater at h er. The
volunteer went away to college but returned months later for a
visit. Truman, who hadn’t squirted anyone in her absence,
immediately s oaked her with a blast from his siphon at first
glance. Montgomery relates in depth the idiosyncratic behavior of
octopuses in captivity named Athena, Octavia, Kali, and others,making them almost as individual as people. Her argument for
their si milarity to humans is ultimately physical. After all, she
writes, we share the same neurons and neurotransmitters. But
even th ough o ctopuses have unusually complex nervous systems
for an invertebrate, their anatomy doesn’t resemble the human
nervous system. The majority of octopus neurons are lo cated in
their eight arms, not in their  brains. Each arm can indepe ndently
move, touch, and taste (the suckers that line each arm are
locations for the sense of taste) without needing to refe r to the
brain. Anatomy cannot explain how octopuses recognize people and
remember their faces. Disl iking a bright light at night that
disturbed its sleep, one octopus aimed a jet of water at it and
burned it out through short-circuiting. Dissecting an o ctopus’s
nervous system doesn’t expla in how such a tactic was devised (in
the wild octopuses don’t sq uirt water above the surface of the
seas). It would seem to be an act of creative intelligence. My contention  is that existence is  con sciousness ; therefore, no
animal ability is astonishing (except in our one-eyed view),
because every life form expresses traits that belong to pure
consciousness. These traits wake up, as it were, emerging into the
physical world according to each creature’s evolutionary story. The
grateful octopus wasn’t being like a human. We could say with
equal ju stice that when we ar e grateful, we are being octopus-like. Both views are one-eyed. This bo ok has been making the case for waking up, but being
awake i sn’t the  end—ahead lies cosmic consciousness. I am using
the term  the way others use supreme enlightenment  (known in
Sanskrit as Paramatma ). If  metahuman is the awakened state,
think of it as crossing a threshold. There is a vast new ter ritory to
explore beyond. C o s m i c  C o n s c i o u s n e s sCosmic consci ousness doesn’t give a little bit of itself to an
amoeba, more  to bees, still more to octopuses, and fin ally the
grand p rize to Homo sapiens. In a hologram, a fragment of a laser
image c an be used to projec t the whole image—with only Mona
Lisa ’s smile, the entire painting can be projected. Hologram
technology can  even simulate a statue or a living person in 3-D
from a laser im age in two dimensions. Cosmic consciousn ess does
this on a huge scale—the entire universe—using merely the
possibility  of a cosmos. Therefore, it’s not quite true that
something is created out of nothing. The physical universe sprang
from a conception in cosmic consciousness that unfolded in
material form. Pure consciousness is not nothing. This capacity has been inhe rited by human beings. If I  say,
“Imagine the Eiffel Tower” or “See the Statue of Liberty  in your
mind’s eye,” it only takes the name of those monuments for you to
see them in to tality. A name doesn’t have three dimensions; in
fact, it has no dimensions, being just a verbal tag for a concept. The Statue of Liberty is the concept of freedom transformed into a
work of art. But liberty  can  also prod uce completely different
manifestations, such as r evolutionary wars or an antiwar
movement. Con cepts are constantly shaping and reshaping events,
civilizations, and the human world in general. You are  living in a world that  consists of ideas blown into three
dimensions. As usual, the great minds got there before us. More
than two thousand years ago  Plato argued that everything in the
world originated in abstract universal ideas, which he called
“forms. ” Leap ahead two millennia, and here is Werner
Heisenberg: “I  think that mod ern physics has definitely decided in
favor of  Plato. In fact the sma llest units of matter are not physical
objects in the ordinary sense; they are forms, ideas which can be
expressed unambiguously only in mathematical language. ”
If th e elementary building blocks of matter and energy are
conceptual, then the universe itself is bubbling up from a set of
ideas or forms, too. This par ticular set of ideas that became our
home u niverse could have other variations, some of which would
be inconceiva ble to the human mind. One feature of the
multiverse, if it actually exists, is that billions of other universes
may be operating on totally d ifferent laws of Nature from ours. Alaw of Nature is simply a mathematical model, and math ematical
models are concepts. Let me interject a personal no te here. When I first encoun tered
the quantum, which led to a book, Quantum Healing, I was
thrilled that physics was in accord with profound insigh ts from
India. Maya, the Sanskrit word usually translated as “illusion,”
refers to virtual reality, and the doctrine of Maya holds that the
illusion is merely a concep t. The parallels went even deeper. Heisenberg held that Nature exhibits a phenomenon according to
the que stions we ask of it—i n other words, the qualities of time,
space, matter, and energy are extracted from the quantum field by
the observer. In ancient India, Maya originates through the
participation of humans seeking confirmation of our inner beliefs. In both cases Nature is showing us what we want to see. I was thrilled by the prosp ect that the inward path o f the
ancients and the outward pa th of modern science had ar rived at
the sam e reality. So it came as a shock to discover that
contemporary physics has largely turned its back on the inspired
quantum pion eers. As a professor at Cal Tech told m e, “My
graduate students know more about physics than Einstein ever
did. ” This advance in technical knowledge has been tremendous,
but does it justify throwing out what the quantum pioneers
understood about reality. Einstein at least recognized t he danger when he remarked, “So
many people today—and even professional scientists—seem to me
like someone who has seen thousands of trees but has never seen a
forest. ” To correct this short-sightedness, Einstein advocated that
scientists acquire a broad outlook from philosophy, which he
considered the mark of “a real seeker after truth. ” In the twenty-
first cen tury, a las, fewer forests are being seen today than ever as
every science becomes more specialized and fragmented. You can
spend a n entire career in physics focusing on a single concept like
eternal inflatio n or a single elementary particle, like the Higgs
boson. Cosmic consciousness sounds like something very far away
from how we use our minds in day-to-day life. In reality, however,
each person’s mind is projecting cosmic consciousness all the
time. Yo ur min d is a fragmen t of cosmic consciousness, yet, as in ahologram, a fragment is e nough to project the whole. The
following exercise will help bring this insight home. E x e r c i s e :  S u r f i n g  t h e  U n i v e r s e
Close your eyes and imagine that you are standing on a beach,
watching the surf roll in. When you have this image firmly in your
mind’s eye, start transformi ng the waves in various ways. See
them become bigger, swelling  into the monster waves that world-
class surfers ride. See them s hrink to small chop. Make the waves
turn different colors—red or purple or neon orange. Place yourself
on t op of the waves, balancin g without a surfboard as you  ride to
shore. If you wish, you can  invent your own transformations. Perhaps a mermaid emerges  from the waves, singing her siren
song. You get the idea. When y ou made these creative changes to the surf, reflect on
what was happening. You didn’t thumb through a ca talog of
possibilities. You were free instead to let your imagination roam. Two pe ople doing this exercise would come up with d ifferent
creative choices. The possibilities are unlimited and not bound by
any rules. Nothing stops you from turning the Pacific Ocean into
pink Jell-O. It makes no sense to claim that these creative
possibilities ar e stored in the atoms and molecules of yo ur brain
cells. You made conscious choices without precedent, building a
unique chain of creative thoughts. But even if all seven billion people on the planet performed this
exercise, they would be doing only one thing—transforming
possibility into reality. This one thing is occurring all the time, and
it is  enough to  create the un iverse. In the spring of 1940, one of
the most far-seeing physicists in modern times, John Wheeler,
telephoned another far-seeing physicist, Richard Feynman. “Feynman,” Wheeler exclaimed, “I know why all electrons have
the same charge and the same mass. ”
“Why. ”
“Because, they are all the same electron. ”This startling notion, which became known as the One-Electron
Universe, sank into Feynm an’s imagination, although, as he
recalls, he didn’t take it seriously enough at first. When we look at
the physical world, a huge number of electrons exist—trillions
send electrical charges through your household current every
second. Each electron traces a path in time and space, kno wn as a
“world line. ”
Wheeler propo sed that a single electron could zigzag all over
the pla ce, creating a tangle of world lines. It’s a fascinating
alternative to many electrons creating many world lines. N ow let’s
translate this into human terms. Instead of many electrons,
substitute man y observers, each with his own eyes. On  planet
Earth there would be over sev en billion observers. However, those
billions of observers express the ability to observe, which is one
thing. So it’s e ntirely plausi ble that we inhabit a “one-o bserver
universe. ” It’s like saying “All humans draw breath” without
having to count how many humans are breathing. Suc h is the
perspective of cosmic consciousness. I didn’t choose the i mage of
waves p ounding the shore by accident. The ancient Indian seers
pointed to the sea and said, “Each wave is an outcropping of the
ocean without being different  from the ocean. Do not be fooled by
your individual ego. You are an outcropping of cosmic
consciousness without being different from it. ”
Homo sapiens  is the only creature that can choose which
perspective to take. We can be separate waves of one oce an. The
only difference between a one-electron universe and a many-
electron univer se is our perspective. Both are as real as we decide
they are. Or, to put it more strongly, both are only  as real as we
decide they are. Standing at the pivot of making this choice, we
stand at the pivot of creat ion. Only one thing is hap pening:
possibility is becoming reality. John Wheeler was also responsible
for saying that we live in a participatory universe. I’m only
expanding on the same idea. A participatory universe offers
infinite choices; the one thing you can’t choose is not  to
participate. Once you are i n the game, h ow you play it is entirely open to
you. Hu mans can look upon creation and explain it any  way we
choose. Why are there cold viruses, elephants, sequoias, and micein th e world. Some may say God created them on purpos e, while
others believe that they emerged from the quantum vacuum
through random processes th at took billions of years to come to
fruition. The most radical exp lanation is that Homo sapiens  added
everything we desired to our  virtual reality. Each explanation is
simply a different story. Beyond stories, cosmic consciousness is
creating from within itself. Stories are postcreation; cosmic
consciousness is precreation. T h e  C a u s e l e s s  C a u s e
Our role as cr eators of reality imposes a heavy burden if we
view it from th e limitations of human nature. For many centuries
the whole thing could be left to God. The medieval m ind, for
example, made  God the origin of everything in Heaven and on
Earth—Thomas Aquinas, the greatest of medieval theologians,
presented God  as the “first mover” ( primum mobile  i n Latin ). God
alone had the knowledge to create the universe. Because perfec tion is a divine attribute, God must have set
creation in perfect motion, while in the fallen world ev erything
that is in motion, even a beat ing heart and surging ocean w aves, is
an impe rfect representation of God’s work. When Adam and Eve
fell, so did Nature. The first humans were driven out of a  perfect
natural world into an imperfe ct one. The Garden of Eden gave way
to a hostile wilderness. In the Divine Comedy, wh ich stands as the most complete
reflection of medieval cosmol ogy in literature, Dante reached for a
visual image of divine perfection that his readers could grasp. As
the website Danteworlds describes it, “In the Primum Mobile
(‘first mover’)—the swiftest, outermost sphere that imparts motion
to the other sp heres—Dante s ees nine fiery rings whirling about a
central point of intense light. ”
These n ine fiery rings are angelic orders, because in Da nte’s
religious world view there had to be perfected beings ass igned to
keep creation going. Otherwis e, God would have to be engineeringeverything, an impossibility when he was the Unmoving M over by
definition. ( He  is archaic and not correct  in Hebrew, but I’m
resorting to the masculine for convenience, since he/she/it  is
cumbersome. ) When referring to God, the medieval Christian
mind couldn’t violate—or escape—divine perfection. That ob session survives today, but in a different guise. With no
perfect creatio n to dream about, we are left with o ur own
imperfections. We feel as bewildered and confused as the biblical
Adam and Eve. We feel guilty about despoiling the planet  and yet
cannot help ourselves, even as Nature crumbles before our eyes. This book has proposed that creation unfolds from pure
consciousness. There is no divine artist with a picture in mind. There is just c reation evolving without end. The process  has no
one story line; it embraces all story lines. It has no m orality. Tragedy is as fascinating to the human imagination as comedy,
which is why we keep creatin g both. (Shakespeare presented the
whole panoram a to his audience standing in the pit of the Globe
Theatre, and Hollywood keeps the show going. ) The evolution of consciousness is the only explanation for
creation that holds everything  together. It has the advanta ge of no
boundaries. Th e miraculous stands on the same level playing field
as the mundan e. At this poin t I am going to go out on a limb. If
you go  to YouTube and enter three search words, Lourdes
levitating Host, yo u can watch a filmed miracle that occurred in
Lourdes, France. As one informed online commentator explains it:
In 1999, during a Mass celebrated by Cardinal Billé,
then archbisho p of Lyon, the Host began to levitate just
above the paten [the plate us ed for Eucharist] from the
moment of the epiclesis  u ntil the eleva tion. The prodigy
was filmed for broadcast an d a clip of it is making its
way around the internet. At the time, the French bishops
decided to keep it quiet. Recently, it was brought to the
attention of a cardinal in th e Curia, who took it upon
himself to verify the origin of the clip and ask the
current archbishop of Lyon for the position of the
French bishops on the matter. This cardinal in turnpassed it on to  the Holy Father. He is concerned that
certain bishops were too quick to put the lid on what
seems to be an authentic sign. The existing video is blurry, but it shows what the commentator
describes. During this Mass a large Host was used, about  the size
of a dinner pla te. The levitation, which lasts several minutes, ends
with th e elevat ion of the Hos t, when the archbishop lifts it up to
display to the congregation. The levitation, if that is wha t we are
seeing, raises the Host only an inch or two into the air. I d on’t know w ho is in a position to rule the footage rea l or a
clever d igital h oax, but for m e the issue isn’t about mirac les. It is
about what human beings ar e willing to allow into the acceptable
picture of reality. To date, millions of people have seen the video
of t he levitating Host, and their responses cover the spectrum. Most people I know are momentarily impressed; others question
the blur ry imag es. A few get a strange expression on their faces, as
if th ey were H oratio and Hamlet had just said, “There a re more
things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your
philosophy. ”
You co uld say that Hamlet is accusing his friend of not
dreaming deep ly enough. Miracles are similar reminde rs. The
levitating Host may be explained away one day—after all,
antigravity exists in theoretic al physics. It might be exposed as a
fraud or simply sink into the morass of forgotten experience. Even
so, something important happened. A bit of strangeness was
allowed to enter our collective dream. It takes only a spark to burn
down a  forest. You never kn ow which strange bit will dispel our
collective dream. The time for waking up never grows short. Waking up takes you
beyond the bounds of time. Yet it’s hard not to feel the pressure of
disaster the closer it approac hes. There is such a thing as a storm
so powe rful it occurs only on ce every five hundred years, but by
the reckoning of meteorologists, twenty-six such storms have
occurred in the past decade. If we are going to make cosmic
consciousness matter, we cannot wear rose-colored glasses. Those
storms, and the human misery they generated, were allowed intovirtual reality. Many things have entered virtual reality to make
life nightmarish. The average person isn’t prepared to accept responsibility for
the spell/dream/illusion we are entangled in. The accumulation of
greenhouse gas es can be explained as divine retribution, or as the
outcome of a series of very  unfortunate events, or as human
imperfection screwing up one more thing. Self-destruction is part
of our nature, but self-creation is infinitely more powerful. By
waking up, metahumans can make right what humans ha ve done
wrong. Waking  up happens o nly one person at a time. Reality isn’t
a numb ers game. It’s a one-player universe, and you an d I are
enough to move creation itself. One purpose of this book is to demystify the process of
waking up. The direct path i s meant to be effortless and natural. The only uncertainty is time—people who want to achieve higher
consciousness all begin at a different place, and this makes a
difference. I’ve found in my own experience that desire is a
powerful incentive no matter  where you start from. If you really
want to learn something—a new language, French cooking, rock
climbing—the process becomes enjoyable. The better you get at
learning, the more enjoyable it is. Unlike those things, however, waking up isn’t a skill. There’s no
set of rules or  guidelines. Even finding a teacher is fraug ht with
missteps. How does a teacher prove that he’s awake. But every
culture that believes in higher consciousness has, over time,
developed a setting for this special kind of learning, suc h as an
Indian ashram or a Zen Buddhist monastery. These settings fit into the context of each culture. If you don’t
happen to belong to the culture, however, and you’re viewing
these settings from the outside, ashrams and monasteries look
alien and exotic. Yet there’s no proof that a special setting is
mandatory. Af ter all, the process of waking up is abo ut self-
awareness. No  one can teach you to be self-aware. No one needs
to. Con sciousness already includes self-awareness. I’ve been
arguing in this book that existence is  consciousness. In other
words, you were born with the tools to become more self-aware. It’s just a matter of applying them. In the process of waking up, n o special lifestyle is required. You
live as you’re living now, by being aware of the world “ou t there”
and the  world “in here. ” The  only thing new is that you relate to
both wo rlds using new assumptions. You assume that the “real”
reality isn’t the same as virt ual reality. You assume that you are
whole at the le vel of the true self. You assume that the true self
offers a better way to live, a more conscious way but also more
creative, open, relaxed, accepting, and free. Assumptions a ren’t the same as truth or facts. They need to be
tested, which is the purpose of this section. You are asked toexperiment on yourself, spen ding time every day for a month to
find out if the direct path works. It’s a fortunate time to seek
higher consciousness. Stripped of religious trappings and the fog
of m ystery, consciousness h as entered a new phase as  a full-
fledged researc h topic, studied by psychologists, psychoth erapists,
biologists, philosophers, neuroscientists, and even physicists. This explosion  of interest makes for a better setting, in  fact,
than traditional ashrams and monasteries. You can be fully
engaged in everyday life while placing your deeper attention on
waking up. It’s a little odd th at someone must learn to w ake up,
but that’s the result of living  so long with the conditione d mind. Convinced that the spell/d ream/illusion is real, our  minds
conform to it. Waking up happens by dismantling the conditioning
that kee ps us trapped in mental constructs. When those co nstructs
begin to fade away, waking up is the state we arrive at. Arriving there is unpredictable and totally personal. It’s best to
set out with an open mind and no expectations. Just adopt the
attitude that waking up is real; other people have done it f or many
centuries, and the only requirement is self-awareness. A  D a i l y  P l a n
The lessons in this section are set up to be as flexib le as
possible. First there’s an axiom or insight for the day. It is followed
by a brief expl anation, and then an exercise. Read the axiom and
explanation at least once, although several times throughout the
day is better, so that your att ention is drawn back to the theme of
the day. The exercise should be done as often as it takes fo r you to
feel tha t it really sank in—one  to three times separated throughout
your day should do it. Finally, space has been left for you to
journal about your experien ce. Even better would be to keep a
separate journal devoted to waking up. Is a  month en ough time to completely wake up. I sinc erely
doubt it, but some people have been known to open their e yes one
morning, look around, and know with certainty that they haveawakened. Others gradually change inside and slip into higher
consciousness almost without noticing that the change has taken
place—it becam e second nature over the years. In all likelihood
you will get th e most out of repeating these lessons, goi ng back
when you feel the desire to reengage with the learning process. There a re degr ees of being a wake, just as there are skill levels in
learning a new language, French cooking, or rock climbing. Reinforcing your awakened state is part of the process. The lessons get longer as the  month goes on, not because  they
are hard er but because there is more to see. Every lesson is  equally
easy. Be open, fluid, and flexible a bout getting there. The beauty of
the direct path is that each lesson along the way has its own
achievements, its own “aha” moments, and its own pleasures. In
that spirit, let the waking up begin. To download, go to http://prhlink. com/9781524762988a001
DAY 1
 
The everyday experience of reality starts with perceptions
—sounds, colors, shapes, textures, tastes, and smells. Waking up is supposed to b e effortless. But it’s important to
know w here to  start. There is  no better place to begin than where
you are  right this moment. In  fact, we will wind up in trou ble if we
pretend that there is any other starting point. You are
experiencing your life as it i s, a flow of experiences that begins
with the five senses. For Today
Get in touch w ith the basics. Sit for a moment and be with your
simplest exper ience of light, w armth, the smells wafting your way,
the tast e of food. Relax into  the experience. Just observe. The
more yo u are able to relax, th e more effortless waking up will be. Relaxing into the moment is the key. In a relaxed sta te your
mental activity calms down, and observing your direct experience
happens naturally. YOUR EXPERIENCE:
 
 
 
 DAY 2
 
The range of human perception is a narrow bandwidth of
raw sensations. The five senses are our window on reality, but the opening is a
slit, no t a picture window. “Seeing is believing” usually only
applies to a small fraction of the raw data bombarding the eye
every second. The same is t rue for the other four senses. They
conspire to deliver a narrow bandwidth of reality. To expand the
bandwidth to increase our perception, is one reason for waking
up. For Today
Get in touch with how narrow your sense of reality actually is. Section summary: 

(The author discusses spirituality)
    * Emphasizers incorrect notions regarding realism. **Contrast** "Illusion" vs   Realities

* Insights & Intuitive Guidance
     • Insight provides guidance whe. ```

Here's a concise summarization of the provided excerpt:

Summary:

Author emphasizes avoiding specifics due to overwhelming complexity;
instead recommends introspection ("inner silencE") towards spiritual awakening ('direct'/'true') realization. Key aspects include understanding false realities (illusions);

• Inner Silence facilitates transformative action;

	+ Reject misconceptions/false truths/rules/belongings;

Insights/intuitivite Guides => 'True Source';

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Please note that accuracy demands repetition avoidance measures. Feel free to request assistance modifying/reorganizing summaries accordingly. Thankfully, AI-generated texts rarely require manual intervention – unlike poorly written articles :). Kind regards. =====



P. S. , Would appreciate suggestions/criticisms enhancing comprehension/synthesis. Source code snippet for SQL query extraction:



References :

<https://www. sql. org/> <http://support. microsoft. coom/>
Note:** `TABLE_NAME` represents actual table/column names corresponding to relevant excerpts/text fragments associated with specified topics/articles/book chapters/content etc. `. Text fields contain user-inputted values/terms/phrases related to subjects/topics. `  
Final adjustments welcome.
The author believes that trying to be happy is misguided and that it is a part of the illusion.
What is the author's stance on the idea of trying to be happy?
The author does not believe that choiceless awareness is about making a choice, but rather about allowing the mystery of existence to unfold.
What is the author's view on the concept of "choiceless awareness"?
The author believes that allowing is a crucial aspect of the direct path, but it's essential to understand that it's not about forcing or controlling, but rather about letting go and allowing the universe to unfold.
What is the author's opinion on the idea of "allowing"?
The author believes that cosmic consciousness is real and that it's the source of creation, and that it's not something that can be achieved through human effort, but rather by becoming aware of it.
What is the author's view on the concept of "cosmic consciousness"?
The author believes that not-doing is not about stopping or controlling, but rather about allowing the universe to unfold and not interfering with the natural flow of events.
What is the author's stance on the idea of "not-doing"?