Using the back feathers of a chicken, the
craftsman narrows them dow n, then smooths the edges with the
tip of a stick h eated red hot in a fire. Having assembled b ow andarrow ( along w ith a quiver m ade of bark to carry the arrows), the
craftsman prov ed the viability of his weapon by firing a n arrow
into a six-inch tree ten yards away with deadly accuracy. It’s hard to des cribe how astonishing this process seems when
first viewed, but, on reflection, a modern craftsman duplicating
the efforts of a  hunter over f orty thousand years ago is c heating. He already knows what a b ow and arrow look like and what
they’re for. The first maker of a bow and arrow worked w ith pure
ingenuity and a sense of discovery. What did it take to in vent the
first bow and arrow? It t ook expanded awareness, and, in
particular, it took some features of awareness possessed  only by
Homo sapiens , as follows: The bow-and-arrow maker had to
conceive of what he wanted to do and then figure out how to do it. He no doubt experimented and tested various options, just as
Thomas Edison  tested different substances for the filament of the
electric light bulb before he hit upon tungsten. Moreove r, as he
began to craft his weapon, th e bow-and-arrow maker had to focus
his atte ntion and keep his mind on what he was doing. If
distracted, he had to remember his task and return to it. Each of these mental facu lties—attention, intention, focus,
curiosity, diligence—are not thoughts. They are the foundation of
thoughts, like invisible brick and mortar. Without them, nothing
can be fabricated (an altern ative name for our species i s Homo
faber , man the maker). Learning what consciousness was capable
of lies at the h eart of human evolution. The multiple dim ensions
we grew  into are dimensions in awareness, which aren’t the same
as physical dimensions in space. This is the r ight place to specify the difference bet ween
consciousness and mind. It needn’t be abstract. Mind is the
activity of thought. Consciousness is the field of pure awareness. In a n analogy from ancient India, consciousness is the ocean,
mind is the wa ves that play across the ocean’s surface. O nce you
grasp the difference, a radi cal insight dawns. Mind only came
about because consciousness started to move within itself. The
field o f pure awareness b egan to vibrate, and from those
vibrations, consciousness acquired the familiar mental
attainments th at it took to make a bow and arrow (and ev erything
else in the field of technology for the next forty millennia).Eventually, h uman beings got lost in the complexity,
bewildered and yet fascinated  by everything the mind can do. That
includes the darker side, for we have inherited the mind’s capacity
to make  us violent, afraid, depressed, sad, and conflicted—all the
traits of the divided self. Living with the divided self has been the
source of profound sorrow an d sometimes a deep wish to start all
over ag ain. The re’s a reason t hat every culture has a myth  about a
golden age or a  lost Garden o f Eden. We are disappointed in how
we turned out, and the tug of  nostalgia leads us back to a pristine
time when we were more innocent and better. If w e drop the mythic trapp ings, however, what humans lost
was the  connec tion to our so urce—or pure consciousness. But we
have a path back to Eden that isn’t mythical. Somewhere in the
evolution of the human min d, at a time unreachable f rom the
present, Homo sapiens  bec ame self-aware. Was this  a momentous
shift or a gradual development? No one knows. Early humans
started to go beyond everyday thinking, which is largely
utilitarian, dev oted to the busyness of daily duties and demands. Going beyond became solidified, we might say, in God, a
superhuman fashioned in our own image. At other times,
however, goin g beyond meant contemplating the na ture of
awareness. We can call this the awareness of being aware. We
thereby gained access to our source. Only when you know  that you
are conscious can you begin to explore where consciousness comes
from. S a v e d — a n d  C u r s e d — b y  R e a s o n
Throughout history, this search for consciousness has been
haphazard and hazardous at the same time. Being human
encompasses a culture of nonviolence in Buddhism and early
Christianity, b ut also warrior cultures like the Mongols and the
Vikings. Traits we take for gr anted, like romantic love, didn’t exist
in m any early societies in the  Mediterranean Basin, including the
Greeks and the Egyptians; chivalry toward women was unknown
outside noble circles until th e rise of courtly knighthood in theMiddle Ages. Children were not considered exemp lars of
innocence as a matter of course—in medieval Christian doctrine,
sin arrived at birth, and under English common law a child was
treated as a fat her’s property, or chattel. Human dignity itself was
betrayed by the practice of slavery. What th is dismal history indicates, if we look for a common
denominator, is that the human mind knew itself in fra gments,
which accumulated into shared stories built up over time. For
example, the first life account of the Buddha, who lived in the
sixth century BCE, wasn’t written until around four hundred years
after hi s death , and it was very brief, being included in an account
of the twenty-five Buddhas who preceded Gautama Buddha. The
first tru e biography was an epic poem, dating to the second
century BCE, written by a m onk called Ashvaghosha, under the
title of Buddhacarita  ( Act of the Buddha ). Understandably, myths
and miracles are interspersed with facts that may be reliable
accounts—the important thing was to amass from many fragments
a saintly life suitable for worship and veneration. Likewise, the
New Testament comes from  many sources—principally, it is
thought, the various early churches scattered throughout the
Roman Empire—and very big differences crop up between the four
Gospels. All the stories that became w oven into civilization were created
collectively, even when it is traditional to refer to a single author
like Homer or a Gospel writer. The original texts  always
underwent alt erations later . Some stories became inspiring. Others became  part of a people’s identity or their way of worship. Against these positive effects, every story has severely lim ited our
infinite potent ial. Metareality has no story because it is outside
time and therefore outside hi story. Unlike the mind, which leaves
a trail of events behind it that historians can study, consciousness
has no beginning or end. At present the dominant story, collectively speaking, is
scientific, and one aspect of the mind is given credit for advancing
human evolution: rational thought. If we pity our forebears for
their di fficulty in getting past superstition and myth, the future
may pity us for glorifying the rational mind and neglecting the
whole mind.In his 2018 book, Enlightenment Now , the widely read
Harvard psych ologist Steven Pinker takes 450 pages to fu lly extol
the triumph of reason in rece nt cultural history. Pinker makes “the
case for reason, science, humanism, and progress” (the book’s
subtitle), much as it would have been made in France during the
eighteenth-century Age of Enlightenment. In fact, he look s to that
period as the turning point in Western civilization. For the vast majority of peop le in the West, Pinker is preaching
to the choir when he characterizes enlightenment  as secular, free-
thinking, rational, and dedic ated to progress. I know this in my
role as an MD  trained in scientific medicine. Rationality has few
greater triump hs, and the ris e of modern medicine was p art of a
much l arger campaign to wipe out the scourge of i gnorant
superstition. As a  prime example, no one  in the fourteenth century h ad a
rational explanation for the horrors of the Black Death, which
killed perhaps a third of Europe’s population, around twenty
million people,  between 1347 and 1352. Supernatural expla nations
became widespread, and ther e was a rash of persecutions of Jews
and witches. Three centuries  later, you would think society would
have learned its lessons and  realized how superstitious they had
been. No such luck. When William Harvey in the seve nteenth
century scientifically confirmed that the heart pumped blood to
every part of the body and  back again, many still bel ieved in
witches. It is e stimated that more were executed in the century
after Shakespeare’s death in 1616 than in the previous century. Harvey himself visited women suspected of witchcraft and
became a prominent and skeptical opponent of such superstitious
thinking. In one of these visits, he took a toad, which one  woman
thought was her familiar sent by the Devil, and dissected it before
her eye s to prove that nothing supernatural existed  in the
creature. Pinker praises  the rise of enlightened reason with fervor and
confidence:
What is enlightenment? In a 1784 essay with that
question as its title, Immanuel Kant answered that itconsists of “humankind’s emergence from its self-
incurred immaturity,” its “lazy and cowardly”
submission to  “dogmas and formulas” of religious or
political authority. Enlightenment’s motto, he
proclaimed, is “Dare to understand!”
This is such a  widely accepted view of enlightenment that
there’s little that’s daring abo ut it. A secular, scientific cul ture not
only tak es pride in rationality, it worships rationality with a faith
as a bsolute as the religious  dogmas Kant wanted humanity to
escape. What would be dar ing is to find a way to esc ape the
unfounded exaltation of reason. For rationality has wreaked as
much havoc as unreason—medieval monks, wedded to the “lazy
and cowardly” dogmas of Catholicism, as Pinker describes them,
didn’t drop the atomic bomb, invent chemical warfare and
biological weapons, or desp oil the environment to the point of
humanity’s self-destruction. Reason has certainly created many good things, but in
Pandora’s box there was diabolical creativity, too. When freedom
of thought became widespread, there was nothing to stop
diabolical creativity from devising newer means of mec hanized
death, w hich h as proceeded apace since the Roman catapult and
the crossbow in the Middle A ges. Reason hasn’t been able to curb
its own creations, pursued in every case with the backing of
rational explanations for why horrific weapons were necessary to
develop. Bypassing this fatal flaw, Pinker’s optimism paints a picture of
progress on many fronts. The  core of Enlightenment Now  i s a set
of seven ty-five charts illustrating the advance of humankin d up to
this mo ment in history, countering the popular notion that the
world is falling apart. The range of topics illustrated by these
charts covers everything from the tone of the news people read,
life expectanc y, and child mortality to malnourishme nt and
famine deaths; from Gross World Product and global income
distribution to American leisure time and the cost of jet travel. It’s an impressive summing up of what rationality and progress
have achieved. But Pinker’s overview leaves consciousness for verylate in the game. The word is  barely present in the book, and the
main references, beginning on page 425, are skeptical and
debunking. He raises the issue of the “hard problem,” a phrase
coined by philosopher David  Chalmers, which poses the riddle of
why human beings have subjectivity—in other words, the world
“in here.”
True to his fait h in reason, lo gic, and science, Pinker says that
what goes on i n the subjective domain (i.e., thoughts, sen sations,
images, and emotions), along with the behavior we exhibit based
on subj ective events, are “obvious Darwinian adaptations. With
advances in evolutionary psychology more and more of our
conscious experiences are being explained in this way, including
our in tellectual obsessions, moral emotions, and a esthetic
reactions.”
In other words, the mind can be logically explained—or
explained away—by the same Darwinian drive that shaped every
living creature: survival of the fittest. The possibility that Homo
sapiens  i s a consciousness-based spe cies isn’t touched on, and one
imagines Pinke r would laugh it away. He isn’t someone I  want to
single o ut for special criticism—Pinker’s argument is p art of a
much la rger tre nd in science—but saying that humankind feels the
difference between right and wrong (a moral emotion), craves the
truth (an intellectual obsession), and loves beauty (an aesthetic
reaction) because those things were survival traits is seriously
misguided. By refusing even to take consciousness se riously,
Pinker returns  us to being higher mammals who happened to
become consci ous in order to  get an advantage in finding food and
gaining mating rights. Some pure Darwinians stop there, but Pinker realizes that
consciousness needs a slightly more credible explanation, because
the hard problem doesn’t as k how humans became conscious; it
asks wh at consciousness is. Again not singling Pinker out for
blame, he joins many other “ apostles of scientism,” as one of his
critics called them, by saying two things: (1) Consciousness is
probably an illusion created by complex brain activity, and (2) the
whole issue is basically irrelevant. *
To hold  that the entire subj ective world is an illusion shows
how blind the dogma of r ationality has become. Citing thephilosopher Daniel Dennett, one of the strongest consciousness
deniers, Pinke r is impressed by Dennett’s view that “there is no
hard pr oblem of consciousne ss: it is a confusion arising from the
bad habit of a homunculus  seated in a theater inside the skull. This is the disembodied experiencer.” The word homunculus
means a small human being, and it has various meanings in
science and philosophy. Supporters of the view that consciousness
is an illusion like to say that  people mistakenly believe there is a
“little me,” or an individual s elf, inside us. Dennett dismisses the
self as an illusory artifact of the whirling, teeming brain. Pinker
can’t bring himself to go that far, but many neuroscientist s do. In
a se nse they m ust, because if the brain creates the mind, then the
notion of the self can’t be anything but another product of brain
activity. If every self is a delusion, then why should we believe a
scientist (i.e., a self) when he tries to debunk the self? Wou ldn’t we
be taki ng the word of an  illusion? The whole argument is
hopelessly illogical. B e h i n d  t h e  M a s k
Many people consider science  a liberating force, and it is. But it
has also served to block the  way to the absolute freedom that
metahuman holds out. Claiming that consciousness is an illusion
or i rrelevant or just Darwin ian evolution at work in th e brain
shows h ow far working scientists of integrity and intelligence are
willing to go to adopt the role of deniers. The deepest iron y is that
quantum phys ics, which peered behind the mask of the physical
world a  centur y ago, gave rise  to generations of physicists who feel
that consciousness isn’t worth bothering about. There have been moments of  going back to the future, though. The em inent Russian-American physicist Andrej Linde made
important contributions to “inflation theory,” which deals with the
first stages of the infant uni verse when it was smaller than the
period at the end of a sent ence. Later on, he became an early
supporter of the “multiverse,” which posits that there areinnumerable other universes beyond ours—the current estimate
runs to 10500 different universes, or 10 followed by 500 zeroes. In a 1998 paper titled, with characteristically swe eping
ambition, “Un iverse, Life, Consciousness,” Linde not s o subtly
sabotages the accepted world view of modern physics. “According
to standard materialistic doctrine,” he asserts, “consciousness…
plays a secondary, subservient role, being considered just a
function of matter and a to ol for the description of the truly
existing material world.”
One envisions  heads nodding in the audience as Linde  says
this, wi th no hint of the con trarian thinking that is to co me. He
continues:
But let us remember that our knowledge of the world
begins not with matter but w ith perceptions. I know for
sure that my pain exists, my “green” exists, and my
“sweet” exists. I do not need any proof of their existence,
because these events are a part of me; everything else is
a theory. This last statement, “everything else is a theory,” indicates that
something str ange is afoot, and the radical nature of that
something begins to build. Linde notes that in the scientific model,
perceptions ar e subject to the laws of Nature, like everyth ing else
in the universe:
This mo del of [a] material world obeying laws of physics
is so successful that soon we  forget about our starting
point and say that matter is the only reality, and
perceptions ar e only helpful for its description….But in
fact we are sub stituting [the] reality of our feelings by a
successfully wo rking theory of an independently existing
material world. Linde’s audience was probably squirming by this point, because
he had  spotted that the wo rld “out there” is a substitute for
perceptions, which rightfully should be considered the startingpoint for any model of reality. After all, as he declares, science isn’t
needed to prove that green is green and sweet is sweet. It can’t
offer such proof; only subjective experience validates the most
basic perceptions. Only perceptio n, without a doubt, is real. In other words, Linde
was turning the tables on a worldview that puts matter f irst and
consciousness second. He goes on, “And the [materialistic] theory
is so successfu l that we alm ost never think about its limitations
until we must address some  really deep issues, which do not fit
into our model of reality.”
Linde’s version  of a deep issue would focus on the precise
nature of how creation came about in terms of big bangs, other
universes, subatomic particles, and so on. But when he speculates
that co nsciousness is unavoidable in reaching an an swer—a
realization the quantum pioneers had reached long ago—this is
likely t o be a bridge too far. Science today is at i ts most
materialistic, thanks to the surging success of technology. Linde
breaks ranks, but he still remains locked in the technicalities of a
professional physicist. Yet he has joined Stephen Hawking and
others in realizing that science, however advanced, does not
describe reality. Linde goes even further. To quote from an online
article, “Consciousness and the New Paradigm,” by Adrian David
Nelson,
Linde…has urg ed his colleagues to remain open-minded
toward a fundamental pla ce for consciousness in
quantum mechanics. “Avoiding the concept of
consciousness in quantum co smology,” he warns, “may
lead to an artificial narrowing of our outlook.”
If you unpack Linde’s seemingly mild warning, he’s implying
that the universe cannot exist without consciousness. Nelson goes
on,
Linde is also one of several respected physicists who’ve
pointed out that the quantum wave function of theentire universe could not evolve in time without the
introduction of a relative observer. In a  word, the universe sin ce the big bang could not have
expanded, lead ing in one small corner to life on Earth, without
someone to see it happen (th e “relative observer”). So who is this
mystery obser ver? The religious will say God, but in scientific
terms there are only two possibilities: an infinite cosmic
consciousness or we humans. In fact, both possibilities merge into
one. Th e universe exists only as humans experience it, and our
ability to experience it comes from infinite or cosmic
consciousness. This merging occurs because the so urce of
consciousness, cosmic and individual, is within us. I’ve taken this time to venture into some very abstract concepts. Rationality has built a world of its own. In advanced societies the
average person cannot enter this world without extensive
specialized training. But there is a human side to all of this. A
worldview that  leaves the ave rage person out in the cold makes for
a ve ry lonely e xistence. The newest iPhone isn’t a hug. Einstein
humanized the isolation of modern life in one of his most powerful
quotes. A human being, Einstein said,
experiences himself, his t houghts and feelings as
something separated from the rest, a kind of optical
delusion of his consciousness . This delusion is a kind of
prison for us, r estricting us to our personal desires and
to a ffection for a few person s nearest to us. Our task
must be to free ourselves from this prison…
That’s one scientist’s cry for something to unify us, bring
comfort, and end the delusion of lonely isolation. In this book I am
only expanding  on the same desire. Virtual reality stands f or every
mind-made limitation that n eeds to be undone. As long as we
believe in virtual reality, metareality lies beyond our grasp. Everything must be done in the name of freedom, which rescues
reality and ourselves at the same time. *  For an extended discussion of the hard problem, see You Are the Universe , coauthored
by me and the widely published physicist Menas Kafatos.T5
 
M I N D ,  B O D Y ,  B R A I N ,  A N D
U N I V E R S E  A R E  M O D I F I E D
C O N S C I O U S N E S S
he title of this c hapter encom passes a new creation story. It
begins by positing that a new story is needed. The old story has
sunk in deeply. Schoolchildre n have heard of the big bang, which
was conceived of in their grandparents’ day—the British
astronomer Fred Hoyle coine d the term in 1949, while the concept
of an expanding universe that began with a bang goes back to the
Belgian astronomer Georges Lemaître in 1931. Strange as it seems,
the whole quantum revolution basically had no creation story. Einstein and the other famous names in his generation accepted
that the universe is, was, and always had been. Behind the workings of genius devoted to the radical notions of
general relativity and the quantum, the “steady state” universe, as
it was known , hadn’t advanced since the days of the ancient
Greeks. The Book of Genesis, if viewed a certain way, had one up
on modern physics—Genesis and the world’s other creation myths
were ba sed on the belief that everything in the cosmos had to have
a be ginning. The big bang a llowed physics to fall into li ne with
that co mmonsense idea, and the current estimate of a universe13.8 billion years old could be verified, in place of biblical time
(which Sir Isaac Newton, a devout fundamentalist Christian, spent
years trying to calculate, so that he would establish a s cientific
date for the Garden of Eden). A universe that began with a  bang satisfied the commonsense
mind, but it’s a wobbly story once you ask where the big bang
came fr om. An enormous problem blocks the way to finding an
answer: logic breaks down w hen you ask what preceded t ime and
space, s ince no thing can come “before” time or “outside” space. The inability to talk about a d omain outside time and space, which
nonetheless m ade the decision to create time and space, forced
physics to retreat into arcane mathematics that doesn’t depend on
being a ble to form pictures or logical statements in the mind. As
sci-fi fa ns know , if you go back in time and kill your gran dfather
before h e got married, suddenly logic collapses in that i nstance,
too. Yo u cannot be alive (as a result of your grandfather having
children) and dead (as a re sult of your grandfather not having
children) at the same time. A new creation story must g et around this enormous, messy
collapse of logic. Either it mu st describe a rock-solid ground zero
when creation began, as Genesis does, or it must substitute
something that doesn’t need  a beginning. The second path is the
one I’ve  been taking by grounding the universe in conscio usness. Of all the ca ndidates for an eternal something that has no
beginning or end, consciousness is the most viable. In the new
creation story,  there are no gods or God, no wind-up universe
running like a finely tuned watch, and no birth pangs in the big
bang. Without  them, there isn’t even a story in the usual sense. There is only consciousness doing its thing while Homo sapiens
generates creation stories that attempt to grasp what is
ungraspable, to conceive of what is inconceivable. If God created
the world, who created God? If the big bang gave rise to time and
space, this implies a state of no-time and no-space, which is
ungraspable. You can’t logically ask what happened before time
began, since “before” only ha s meaning within the framework of
time. C reation wouldn’t exist if we had to explain it with c ommon
sense first.But the re is a w ay to get ther e. Two people can disagree a bout
everything in the world. One can dislike what the other likes. One
can beli eve in God and the ot her be a confirmed atheist. B ut even
if person A dedicated his life to contradicting everything person B
said, ev en if he could get inside person B’s mind and co ntradict
every thought he had, on o ne thing the two antagonists would
have to agree: They are conscious beings. If intelligent life from
another solar system made co ntact with Earth, no matter w hat the
creatures looke d like physically—mutant humans, walking squid,
amoeba-like blobs—they would have to be conscious, too. The deepest mystery about alien intelligence won’t be the
technology it has developed. No doubt an interstellar spac eship or
teleportation device or time machine will be mind-bending in
scientific terms . There’s a good chance that Earthlings could learn
amazing things from alien technology. But the deepest mystery
will remain unsolved. We w ill never know what it is like to be
them, because their species of consciousness will be impenetrable. Little green aliens might feel physical pain from touching water;
they might inform us that photons are delicious or that gravity is
having a bad day. Even th ose strange statements assume a lot. Little green a liens
might not possess any of our five senses. As long as t hey are
conscious bein gs, the reality they inhabit can take an y form,
because consciousness takes any form already. The most common
butterfly on Earth is the pai nted lady, whose wings are brightly
patched with orange and whose genealogy is delightfully poetic:
the painted lady belongs to the group of Cynthia  butterflies, a
subgenus of Vanessa  butterflies, which are part of the family
Nymphalidae . If these names evoke a kind of ethereal mythology,
populated by fairy folk, the  painted lady’s sense organs are as
mind-bending as any alien’s. Painted ladies can taste the leaf they are standing on with the
tips of their le gs. They smell the air through their anten nae and
view the world through eyes that possess thirty thousand lenses. They hear with their wings. Looking from the outside, we’d say
that evolution has created a  reality for the painted lady that we
barely c omprehend. If you want to believe in aliens among us,believe in butterflies. As with visiting aliens, we’ll never experience
their consciousness. But life is impossible without consciousness, which is another
thing in  favor of the new creation story. Fritjof Capr a is an
Austrian-born American physicist who gained fame with his 1975
book, The Tao  of Physics . It was a landmark in the “new physics”
because Capra connected science to ancient wisdom traditions like
Taoism. Evide nce from the subjective world, long con sidered
useless in science, suddenly became relevant. Capra h as connected life and mind far beyond what biolo gists
currently understand. A biologist would call the painted lady
butterfly min dless. To the contrary, Capra asserts, “The
interactions of  a living organism—plant, animal or huma n—with
its environment are cognitive interactions. Thus life and cognition
are inseparably connected.” In everyday language, there cannot be
life without mind. The pain ted lady’s sense organs are strange
from th e human standpoint, but it is a conscious creature. There is
no o ther alternative explana tion. Capra goes on to say as much:
“The process of cognition—o r, if you wish, of mind—is immanent
in matt er at all levels of life. F or the first time, we have a s cientific
theory that unifies mind, matter, and life.”
This sounds exactly like a metahuman declaration. It is human
to believe that only Homo sapiens  is conscious, with a small
proviso added to include higher primates like gorillas and
chimpanzees (maybe). It is metahuman to be aware that
consciousness is universal. If this insight doesn’t cause mental
overload, that means its implications haven’t fully sunk in. Consciousness can be desc ribed in three words: everything,
always, and everywhere. On  their own, each word is mentally
unmanageable. If children took seriously that Santa Claus is
everywhere, wa tching each boy and girl in the world to se e if they
were naughty or nice, the idea would be as thorny as a medieval
theologian tryi ng to grasp Go d keeping tabs on every sinner in the
world, down to each person’s secret thoughts. There a re reassuring ways to get around the dilemma and any
possible anxiet y. For every id ea a human being has ever had, there
are infinite ideas yet to come. When I realize this, I feel optimistic
—vistas of unlimited creativi ty open up in my mind’s eye. But Iknow I am only using an ima ge; I am not looking at the r eality of
consciousness directly. There’s a haunting passage in T. S. Eliot’s
poem “Burnt Norton” in whic h a bird summons us to run through
a garde n gate into “our first world,” only to have the bird warn us
back: “Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind / Cannot bear very
much reality.”
It’s a sweeping  and gloomy n otion that humans cannot endure
a full blast of reality, as if some kind of overload would b low our
fuses. I don’t agree. Our first world isn’t the Garden of Eden,
although that’s the metaphor  Eliot is using. Our first world is pure
consciousness, which we can call “pure” because it doesn’t contain
anything. The  open space between thoughts doesn’t contain
anything, eithe r, except the potential for the next thought and the
next and the next. Apparently, a kind of nothing, the gap between
thoughts in reality is the “stuff” that a thought is made of. The
mind is the play of consciousness once it starts making things. I’d c onsider alien life forms to be superior beings only if they
comprehended “everything, always, and everywhere.” Short of
that, we cannot enter metareality ourselves. The play of
consciousness is behind all of creation. I think of this as “Genesis
now,” the constant appearance of newness in every dimension—
mind, b ody, br ain, and universe—that gives us the experience of
being human. “Everything, always, and everywhere” is the real story of
creation. It alone tells us who  we are and why we are here. Beyond
the narratives provided by any storyteller, whether they are the
rabbis of 1000 BCE compiling the Hebrew Bible, the
mythologizers of Homer’s Greece, or modern theorists of a
gazillion possible universes, something  is making creation
happen. This something  is  here and n ow. It has no story in the
conventional sense. It is content, like a choreographer standing
offstage, to invisibly invent what the dancing universe is doing. T h e  U l t i m a t e  F a i l - S a f eConsciousness isn’t playing with  the universe. Consciousness is
the univ erse. It plays at turni ng into a helium atom or a g alaxy. It
plays at turning into a brain  cell or a heartbeat. Shape- shifting
never ceases. When you feel happy or sad, you are experiencing
two con trasting modes of consciousness. But since you are also
consciousness, and so is your brain, there can be only one
conclusion. Creation is consciousness experiencing itself. Like
making all the gold jewelry in the world, the forms in creation
change, but the gold—the essential “stuff” of creation— remains
the same. In humanity’s search for Truth with a capital T, this
truth alone qualifies. Is T ruth with a  capital T exciting, fascinating, or merely m ind-
boggling? When people get wind of consciousness, their worldview
isn’t shattered. They don’t sit down in amazement as Truth  washes
over them. In fact, the average person shows complete
indifference (in my experience) and dismisses such thoughts from
his mind. The opportunity to access metareality doesn’t strike
people as anything urgent or  necessary. I’ve reflected on w hy this
is, and it comes down to a series of fail-safe mechanisms. A fail-
safe keeps disasters from sh utting a system down or ma king the
unthinkable happen, as in the accidental launch of ballistic
missiles armed with nuclear warheads. There are strong fail-safes
to prevent such a catastrophe. In t he case of  the human mind, the fail-safe protects v irtual
reality from being dismantled. Strangely, the mind must be
protected from  its own infinite potential. Imagine that you are an
art s tudent, and on the first d ay of class the instructor out fits your
skull w ith electrodes that will fill your brain with every painting
that has ever existed or eve r will. You reluctantly comply, and
suddenly the full reality of ar t pours into your cranium, from the
earliest cave paintings on, covering thousands of years. Such an
experience would be unbearable, in all likelihood, but it would also
be u seless. You can’t teach bu dding artists by showing them every
piece of art. It’s like asking for a glass of water and being made to
swallow the Great Lakes. In other words, the slow unfolding of the
mind in time is a fail-safe. In linear sequence, event A is followed
by B, which is followed by C.This linear process is not r eal, however; it is a mecha nism
installed in human consciou sness. One can argue as to whether
our anc ient ancestors instal led it early in prehistory or it was
installed by the force of evolution. But there’s no doubt that we
consider this mental fail-safe necessary for survival. One piece of
evidence is how hard it was to convince ordinary people that time
is relative. Even though the concept dates back to Einstein’s theory
of special relativity in 1905, the notion of time deviating from a
straight line in a fixed way  seemed unfathomable. As late as
twenty or thirty years later, it seemed like a kind of specia l magic. The British philosopher Bertr and Russell, who wrote a small book
titled The ABC of Relativity  in 1925, anno unced public ly, with
typical lack of modesty, that h e was one of only three people in the
world who understood what relativity was. Einstein’s rev olutionary the ory didn’t alter everyday life;
relativity could be set aside in its own exotic cage. (But there are
practical applications. For example, the GPS satellites that orbit
the Ear th have to take rela tivistic effects into account. If they
didn’t, t he GPS  in your car would be off by a fraction of a  second
and thus give you an inaccurate location for where you are.) Once you accept the human construct of time unfolding in a
straight line, it naturally follows that there is cause and effect. The
big ban g led to the creation o f planet Earth after around 1 0 billion
years, w hich in turn led to  the creation of DNA, then human
beings, then civilization, then  New York City, then the birth of a
new bab y in a New York hos pital at some hour this morn ing. The
reverse cannot be true—the  birth of a baby in New York City
cannot lead to the big bang. That would defy cause and effect. This fail-safe is so convincin g that we cannot easily acce pt its
artificiality. B ut relativity wasn’t the last or the only  glitch. Modern physics has devised mathematical models of the universe
in which everything happens simultaneously at the subtlest level
of c reation, where time disso lves into the timeless and th e entire
cosmos is a sin gle subatomic particle. But such models are exotic,
even in  quantum physics, which is quite exotic to begin with. Nobody expect s such notions to rise to the surface of every day life. Without our fail-safes, we become very anxious.We are  all quite comfortable with the illusions we have
protected with fail-safe mechanisms. We see the univer se as a
theater of space and time i n which objects and people bounce
around. Our bodies are objects. Our minds are the produ ct of an
amazing think ing machine called the brain, another  object. Marvin Minsky of MIT, one of the fathers of artificial intelligence,
defined human beings as “nothing but meat machines  t ha t ca rry a
computer in their head”—a merciless expression of what most
people assume to be true. But there are also personal fail-safes that each of us
constructed on our own. These personal fail-safes have been
dubbed “the things that must be so.” Some people must be in
charge; others must win; still others must never start an
argument. Is there a rational reason behind “what must be so”? No—these psychological mechanisms exist as forms of self-
defense. They give us a sens e of security, and even a se emingly
small incident can trigger a major alarm. In Love’s Executioner , a
1989 book by Stanford psychiatry professor Irvin Yalom, the
author describes a middle-aged woman he calls Elva who had been
the victim of a  purse snatching outside a restaurant. The crime
was ran dom, and while she lost $300, there was nothing else in
the purse that couldn’t be replaced. Most people would feel the
shock of such an assault and then move on. But Elva couldn’t:
“Along with her purse and h er three hundred dollars, an illusion
was snatched away from Elva—the illusion of specialness.”
Having lived a life of relative  privilege, Elva assumed that she
was imm une from this kind of disruption—she kept repeating, “I
never thought it would happe n to me.” But it had, and the loss of
illusion exacted a terrible price:
The robbery changed everything. Gone was the coziness,
the softness in her life; gone was the safety. Her home
had always beckoned her w ith its cushions, gardens,
comforters, and deep carpets. Now she saw locks, doors,
burglar alarms, and telephones.Elva was constantly anxious, and time didn’t make her feel that
her life was ret urning to normal. As Yalom explains it, “H er world
view wa s fractured…She had lost her belief in benevolence, in her
personal invulnerability. She felt stripped, ordinary, unprotected.”
Being the victim of a crime shatters personal boundaries,
because the crime is a personal invasion. Here, Elva couldn’t
repair her boundaries. She went into an existential tailspin,
haunted by the ultimate threa t: death. It wasn’t a fear she h ad ever
confronted, an d yet death h ad touched her intimately when her
husband died. It was a loss she had never really come to grips
with, an d it became the key i ssue that Yalom worked with her on
in therapy. Elva turned out to be an extra ordinary patient, and in time “she
moved from a position of forsakenness to one of trust,” a change
Yalom conside rs not just tr ansformative but redemptive. Elva,
who once thought she had cr eated the perfect story, learned how
to be aware  of death without fearing it. It’s futile to believe that you can create a perfect story, which is
most pe ople’s notion of a per fect life. Stories are always intruded
upon by unwelcome events. And stories become tangled webs even
when they seem to be wor king out well, because unconscious
forces—anxiety, depression, anger, jealousy, loneliness—can erupt
at any time. A lthough Yalom doesn’t use the term fail-safe , one
can see that Elva’s sense of being safe and protected was a
psychological f ail-safe. It had served her well for a long tim e, until
she discovered how flimsy and unreliable it actually was. All of us have c reated our own version of personal fail-safes. As
with most mental constructs,  we often don’t realize what we have
done, and sometimes the mechanism seems to be so unconscious
that it is totally out of our control. Phobias are a good e xample. People who are afraid of spiders will not physically be able to
touch even a small, harmless one. If they reach out and attempt to
touch o ne, fear  will arise, gro wing more extreme as the hand gets
closer. The next stage is viol ent trembling, a cold sweat, signs of
panic, and the feeling of being about to faint. Phobias offer perverse evidence about the creativity of
consciousness, because anxiety can focus on anything. At thewebsite The Phobia List, yo u can find a catalog in alphabetical
order o f the phobias specified in the psychiatric literature. A total
number isn’t given—new references are constantly being added—
but under the letter A alone there are sixty-five entries, in cluding
aulophobia  ( fea r of flutes). Not every letter is this full; under G,
for example, there are only nineteen phobias listed, including
seemingly silly ones, like geniophobia  ( fear of chins ) and quite
serious ones like genophobia , a fear of sex. No consensus exists for
why ph obias ap pear, although psychiatrically they are cat egorized
as a form of anxiety diso rder, the common element being
excessive fear. Besides specific phobias, there are social phobias
that involve situations where  the person is afraid of what other
people think, and a whole c lass of agoraphobias, where people
grow panicky because they feel they are in a situation they cannot
escape. People suffering from phobias did not necessarily have a bad
experience with the object they fear—they generally have n’t—but
they will go to great lengths to avoid the object once the phobia
has em erged. Phobias seem strange to anyone not suffering from
one, in part b ecause avoiding the feared object or situation can
lead to odd be havior, as with agoraphobes, whose fear of open
spaces p revents them from leaving the house for years at a time. It
is also strange that fear—whi ch puts mind and body on high alert
and is an effective protection when actual danger arises—turns
counterproductive in phobias. Being on high alert because you
hear a flute or see a chin has no survival value whatsoever. Yet the normal  fail-safes that we hardly notice have a breaking
point, and when it is reached, severe dislocation occurs. Going
into sho ck, for example, renders the victim of an auto accident,
fire, or crime utterly helple ss. The dazed look and ina bility to
make decision s that are sym ptoms of shock could be see n as the
opposite of fight-or-flight. In fight-or-flight, a flow of stress
hormones is released, and under their influence, the lower brain is
totally i n charge—a soldier running from battle in a panic cannot
consciously will himself not to flee until the burst of adrenaline
subsides and the higher brain can once more make conscious
decisions. (We  can see the same response in a trivial situation, like
being sh own an  illusion by a street magician. When he gue sses theright ca rd or pulls a quarter f rom behind someone’s ear, it is quite
common for the person to ju mp back or turn away in alarm—the
lower brain is reacting to the  trick as if it were a threat.) Shock is
involuntary and would seem to have no self-protection value. Gathered together, these various fail-safes are essential to the
self-model, the  view of realit y that tells you what is real for you . No doubt personal reality has its quirks, and no two people inhabit
the same self-model. But, collectively, we share virtual reality,
with its universally accepted  features of time, space, matter, and
energy. These features are so ingrained that we feel “at home” as
long as space, time, matter , and energy don’t go hayw ire. But
knowing that these are ment al constructs isn’t about reality going
haywire. It’s about acquiring self-awareness, which alone can tell
us what is really going on. B u y i n g  I n ,  O p t i n g  O u t
No single individual created the human experience of space,
time, matter, and energy—they were created in our collective
consciousness, which goes ba ck as far as the emergence of Homo
sapiens  an d certainly before that. We cannot follow a trail o f
footprints that will retrace the steps that gave humans self-
awareness, which is our species’s unique feature. Our genes
contain the evidence of every life form, including bacteria, that
contributed to our physical makeup, but there are no physical
traces to tell us how our ancestors experienced their lives. Our species’s most importa nt inheritance is invisible . We
connect with this legacy in early childhood, absorbing the whole
virtual-reality setup. Once a young child learns that time exists,
the rule s of time soon follow, and then there is no turning back. To
give an analogy, once you learn to read at age six or seven, you
cannot return to the state of illiteracy. Letters on a page cannot
turn back into meaningless black marks. Likewise, once you and
your brain have adapted to the rules of time, it wou ld seem
impossible to live as if time didn’t exist. A day, an hour, a  minute,a s econd—this dissection of life into bits of time is what T. S. Eliot
lamented in another poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”
Time has become Prufrock’s psychological enemy. For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons. Making a habit of dividing li fe into units of time doesn’t m ean
that hu man time is more rea l than another version. We have no
idea of how other species of  consciousness experience time and
space. Does the lumbering Galapagos tortoise feel it is moving
slowly or the jackrabbit that it is bounding fast over a western
prairie? We might speculate that animals live in the present
moment, react ing to the ins tincts that tell them that no w is the
time to  eat or sleep or hunt. But “present moment” does n’t exist
for a creature that has no concept of time. Nature gives us biorhythms that are imprinted in our g enes,
like the circadian (daily) rhyt hm for waking and sleeping. But that
doesn’t answer the riddle of how time exists in the first place. There is  timing  that is precis ely tuned over thousands of miles of
ocean, in a w ay no one c an explain. For example, a small
sandpiper know n as the red knot ( Calidris canutus rufa ) migrates
every year from Tierra del Fuego, at the southern tip o f South
America, to its breeding grounds in the Canadian Arctic. In a
lifetime the red knot flies an estimated 240,000 miles, lon ger than
the distance from the Earth to the Moon. Why birds cross from one hemisphere to another to mate
seems i nexplicable, but the red knot embodies a specific mystery
all its own. Needing food along its immense journey, the bird stops
off i n M ay on the beaches of Delaware Bay, timing its arri val with
a primordial event. Between the full moons of May and June,
hordes of horseshoe crabs emerge from ocean shallows to lay their
eggs. A  female lays between 60,000 and 120,000 eggs in one
spawning. Dat ing back 450 million years, or 200 millio n years
before dinosaurs, horseshoe crabs look like hard, rounded turtleshells with spiky tails (they are not actually crabs but are closely
related to spiders and scorpions). Within two weeks the eggs will hatch, so the opening for the red
knots to  feast on them is very brief. Yet every year, the stirring to
migrate is felt 9,300 miles aw ay near the Antarctic. The full moon
in May can fall  on any of the month’s thirty-one days, and the red
knot m ust start its journey from Tierra del Fuego in F ebruary. How di d Nature synchroniz e the Moon, the mating cycle of a
living fossil in the sea, and a tiny bird that has the  longest
migratory path  on earth? In the red knot’s case, the timing is
somehow rooted in its DNA, and it comes with s weeping
physiological changes. Prior to migrating, the bird’s wing muscles
expand while its leg muscles shrink. Because horseshoe crab eggs
are soft and easily digested, the red knot’s stomach shrinks prior
to ta king off. Its crop, which has grit in it to grind up the hard food
that the bird eats in winter, also shrinks. In o ther words, the red kno t’s DNA knows in advance every
detail of the f uture. Since their Arctic breeding ground is bare,
exposed tundra with no food source, the birds double their weight
by adding fat during the Delaware feeding frenzy on horseshoe
crab eggs, which lasts from ten to fourteen days. If any element in
this synchronized cycle falters, survival is threatened. (Unfortunately, this has happened. Red knots are endangered for
various reason s, a major one being the drastic de cline in
horseshoe crabs as coastal waters are damaged.) Human beings are not tied t o instinct when it comes to time,
although our DNA somehow knows how to time puberty and
menstrual cycl es, for example. Cells are programmed to die at a
certain time, a process known  as apoptosis . A  typical cell can only
divide around fifty times before dying (the so-called Hayflick
limit), and the process can  be scientifically measured  in the
laboratory. But at bottom it is totally mysterious. Cells are
chemical facto ries enclosed in a soft, permeable me mbrane. Chemical reactions happen instantly when two molecules meet;
there is  no hesitation, delay,  postponement, or going back. How,
then, does a collection of chemical reactions, each tied to the
present instant, acquire the  ability to time future events? The
question is so basic that almost no one asks it.Imagine a game of pool, with  the balls representing atoms and
molecules set to collide inside a heart or liver cell. After you break
the pac k with your first shot, the rest is mechanical. When pool
balls collide, they must bounce off each other instantly, and where
they tra vel nex t is determined by Newton’s laws of motion. As one
of New ton’s laws dictates, once a ball is hit or collides with
another ball, it must travel in a straight line until something stops
it. Nothing abnormal seems to happen as the game unfolds. Yet
when y ou return to the pool room the next day at noon, the balls
have alr eady ar ranged thems elves in a pack, ready for the first hit. Such be havior would be remarkable enough in pool balls, but your
DNA anticipates countless events, controlling the timed release of
hormones, for example, anticipating the need to refresh the
chemical triggers that fire in a brain cell with every thought, and
organizing hun dreds of synchronized biorhythms with absolute
precision unless we interfere (by staying up all night, for example,
or taking hormone supplements). We cannot enter into the experience of time that other species
have. But since time is so variable and malleable, we can say that it
is constructed differently by the DNA of each living thing. Therefore, it takes no leap of imagination to say that time is a
construct to begin with. Since DNA consists of atoms that interact
instantly, something outside the atom must be doing all this
precision timing and synchronization. The only viable candidate is
consciousness. After all, you cannot manipulate time unless you
know that time exists. L i v i n g  i n  a  C r e a t i v e  U n i v e r s e
If time is a construct, the same is true for the other things we
consider essen tial to the universe. Our experience of matter and
energy is quite species-specific. Does a termite steadily gnawing its
way through a house’s woo den frame experience the wood as
hard? D oes a mole confined underground for its entire lifetime in
a tunnel barely wide enough to crawl through experience space as
tight?For our species of consciousness, time, space, matter, and
energy are malleable experie nces, tied to our creativity. That is,
they ca n expand and contract in various ways, as Einstein
explained with  a quip: “Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute,
and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it
seems like a minute. That’s relativity.” But he was actually
sidestepping t he core issue of time: Is it relative just because
humans say so? Sitting in a  dentist’s chair dislocates time for
people who fear the experience; they cannot say how much time
has pas sed, exc ept that every minute was unpleasant. This doesn’t
alter the hands on the clock in the dentist’s office, s o which
version, the personal experience or the mechanical device, is real? It w ill seem biz arre, but human experience is what makes time
real, not clocks. To get at how we create the experience of time—
along w ith sp ace, matter, and energy—you must opt  out of
accepting that  these are fixed things. The current theory of the
universe helps us out here, because after Einstein proved that
matter can turn into energy ( E  = mc2), th e door wa s opened for
other t ransformations. A later physicist, the American Richard
Feynman, could even show mathematically how an electron’s
position can be expressed as moving backward in time. This is like
being a sked w here you live, and you answer, “I live at 6 3 Maple
Street, although sometimes I live in last February. Take your
pick.” Our stable notion of c ause and effect has been dis mantled
by expe riments in “reverse causation,” where an even t in the
future affects what is happening now. The ultimate transformation, however, occurs when the field of
virtual particles morphs into physical particles. This is commonly
known as “something from nothing.” Virtual particles are invisible
and have no location in time and space, but they are  totally
necessary for the physical universe. It’s like reversing ghost
stories, where the ghost com es first and the living person  second. If you look at your hand and  begin to reduce it to finer a nd finer
levels of physicality, it qu ickly becomes a shivering web of
molecules. These molecules are not as solid as your hand , and at
the next level down, you arrive at a congregation of atoms that are
barely p hysical, being over 99.9999 percent empty space . This is
the last  level at which physical existence clings by a thread. At thelevel of subatomic particles , there is a winking in and out of
existence as quarks, gluons, and other exotica of the quantum
domain shift from being vir tual to being intact in our physical
universe. Goin g from nothing to something is happening in your
hand and in every other physical object all the time. So t he pivotal i ssue isn’t that solid physicality is an illusio n. No
one can  dispute this—we couldn’t exist without buying into the
psychological security blanket that the world won’t vanish
tomorrow in a puff of subatomic mist. The pivotal issue is whether
consciousness, and particularly human consciousness,  is the
creative force behind “something from nothing.”
Being human unfolds in time and space. Your birth certificate
attests t o the date of your birt h and the town you were born in. No
one’s birth certificate says, D ate of Birth: Eternity; Place o f Birth:
Everywhere. The commonsense assumption is that time and space
simply exist “out there” as part of the natural world. To e volve to
metahuman, h owever, we need to stop thinking of creation in
fixed te rms. Reality must be rebuilt to account for the role
consciousness plays. There ar e only two levels of reality. One level
is unbounded pure consciousness, which is a field of potential. The
other le vel is consciousness in  its excited state (to borrow a phrase
from particle physics), which we call the universe. All excited states vibrate with  energy. Matter is vibrating with
physical energy, the mind with mental energy. The body is an
excited state; so is the brain,  being part of the body, and so is the
mind as thinking goes on. Even when a rock looks like a rock and a
neuron like a neuron, which makes them seem totally dissimilar,
both are excited modes of consciousness. This is practical knowledge. When you know, for example, that
time is just an excited state o f consciousness, you see why time is
so m alleable. It has no choice  but to be as fluid and flexib le as the
mind. W e manipulate time to conform to our human needs. Some
time fra mes ar e long, like the  life of the universe, while some are
short, like the milliseconds it takes for a signal to jump from one
nerve cell to th e next. These time frames can be extremely stable:
hydrogen atoms are likely to exist until the death of the universe,
while a  thought is stable onl y for its duration, which is transient
and evanescen t. The fact tha t mental activity flies by so fast canlead to a mistake. We might suppose that consciousness is on a
time schedule— it isn’t. Consciousness can be fast or slow, large or
small, random or predictable, and so on. Being t he sour ce of “something from nothing,” consciou sness
isn’t bound by its own creation, just as a person with a vocabulary
of thirty thousand words i sn’t tied down to thirty thousand
thoughts. Com bining and re-forming all the time, consci ousness
dictates to itself whether to b e as tiny as a quark or as immense as
the universe. This fact help s dispel one of the most obstinate
objections to consciousness-based reality. We don’t see our minds
create trees, mountains, pla nets, and stars. The scale is wrong,
skeptics will say. When you are afraid and your heart starts to
pound, a mental event—your fear—sets chemicals in motion in
your body. The scale is molecular, meaning very small. Moving a
mountain with your mind, however, cannot happen, beca use it is
too large. This ob jection is invalid, however, because consciousness
doesn’t respect limits of scale. Imagine that you wake up  from a
nightmare, and you tell a fr iend that a hundred men w ith guns
were chasing you down the st reet. What if your friend repl ied, “I’d
buy it if one m an were chasing you down the street, but a h undred
is t oo many t o be believable.” Such a comment would show
ignorance about how dreams work. Dreams are not bounded by
big and small. A mouse cha sing you down the street during a
nightmare is the same as the Red Army invading your town. In a
dream a blade of grass c an tremble, followed by a planet
exploding. We accept these anomalies i n dreams because we are us ed to
waking up and returning to t he physical world and its constraints. Consciousness is set up so that some things are free to move
around just by thinking, like brain chemicals that move around in
sync with our thoughts, while other things aren’t movable by
thinking. That’s the setup in a human universe. We don’t know the
limits of the setup until we test them. One has to ponder  if Jesus
had a similar understanding  in mind when he declared  to his
disciples, “Truly I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be
taken u p and cast into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart,but beli eves that what he says  is going to happen, it will be  granted
him” (Mark 11:23). Whether you accept those words as gospel or metaphor, literal
truth or  a vivid teaching exam ple, the notion of moving mountains
with your mind sounds supernatural, therefore irrelevant to
everyday life. The problem isn’t that supernatural = impossible. The problem is that, so far, science cannot explain what we call
“natural.” Leaving consciousness out of standard s cientific
explanations dooms them to failure. The mind cannot be
explained by juggling brain chemicals around, and when science
declares that there is no other explanation, we are no longer in the
realm of credibility—we are in the realm of “things that must be
so.”
Once vi rtual reality has been dismantled, however, there is no
going b ack. Yo u cannot see th rough an illusion and believe in it at
the same time. A magician can’t sit in the audience and be fooled
by his own tricks. However, that’s exactly what we do. We place
our fait h in the physical world while knowing full well that it is
illusory. Instead of passively accep ting the commonsense w orld,
metareality gives us an alternative—seeing everything  in the
universe as shifting modes of consciousness. A tree, for example,
is tailor -made to fit our human response to it. Any quality of a tree
can be taken out of its ass igned slot and reassigned to fit a
different, nonhuman framework. The tree’s color doesn’t exist for
someone with complete color-blindness. The solidity of a tree
doesn’t exist for a neutrino, a subatomic particle that can whiz
through the Earth as if passin g through outer space. The w eight of
the tree doesn’t exist if you t ransfer it to the International Space
Station. The life span of a tre e vanishes when viewed from the life
span of the pr otons in the nucleus of every molecule, wh ich take
billions of years to decay. Everything acquires its “ realness” from the mod e of
consciousness applied to it. In sleep the entire physical world
disappears and  no longer exists for you . It still exists collectively,
held in place b y the rules of virtual reality. But in sleep you  opt out
of v irtual reality by experienc ing a different world, which isn’t the
blank unconsciousness most people assume sleep to b e. It ispossible to experience deep sleep as pure awareness without
excitations—indeed, that’s how centuries of swamis, yogis, and
other versions of metahuman experience it. The Buddhist concept
of Nirv ana is closer to deep  sleep than to the ordinary waking
state, because Nirvana reconnects a person with pure awareness. Dreaming is a mode of consciousness in which mental
excitations are subtle. This is yet another world, one where the
rules of virtual reality don’t apply. In dreams, objects magically
defy the ordinary laws of physics—a locomotive can fly, the
Empire State Building can va nish in a puff of smoke. There is no
reason to demote those two modes of consciousness, sleeping and
dreaming, to an inferior pos ition compared with being awake. If
we can look a t the world a s a lucid dream, why cons ider the
dreams you experience at night as any less real or unreal? People blindly follow the assumption that hard physical things
are mo re real than subtle things like thoughts, imagination, and
dreams. But your subtle impulses determine how your personal
reality operate s. I’ve given on e example—phobias—where a person
who can lift hu ndred-pound weights at the gym may be u nable to
lift a spider in his hand; fea r freezes up his muscles. It  doesn’t
matter how light the feared object is. But we also need positive
examples of how a person’s subtle intentions can alter personal
reality. Think back to our earlier ex ample of using VR apparatus to
simulate the experience of standing on a skyscraper girder high in
the air ( this page ). A person standing safely on the ground, thanks
to t he VR illu sion, feels giddy and weak, and experiences a
powerful threa t of falling. This indicates that our sense of  balance
can be  consc iously manipulated in various ways. T ightrope
walkers have separated their  sense of balance from any feeling of
threat o r danger. To someone standing on the ground looking up,
the danger looks real enough  (your heart can pound simp ly from
watching a risky circus act without experiencing it firsthand). In the accepted model of evolution, all the traits we inherited
have survival value. Our anc estors needed a sense of bal ance for
obvious reason s when hunting and fighting other creatures in the
wild. But we go beyond survival all the time and toy with our
evolutionary inheritance simply because we want to. Tightropewalking has no survival val ue, and since it poses considerable
danger unless you are highly trained, it has negative survival
value. Babies are afraid of falling from a very early age, and they  can’t
learn to walk without testing the precarious state between falling
down and staying on their feet. Clearly fear of falling loses out in
the end. Tightrope walkers go a step further by consciously
overriding evolution when they disconnect fear of falling from
sense o f balance. This ability to override evolution is actually a
higher evolutionary trait. The pow er of consciousness allows daredevils to hang glide or
free-climb vertical rock faces using any rationale that comes to
mind—thrill s eeking, a drive to accomplish the imp ossible,
competitive riv alry, or simply no reason at all—oblivious to their
life-or-death s ituation. Suc h freedom is absent in creatures
hemmed in by physical ev olution. Only Homo sapiens  turns
extreme risk-t aking into fun. We choose our own motiv es, and
personal realit y moves with our intentions. It would be horrifying
to find yourself in a dark alley facing an assailant armed with a
knife, b ut som eone with appendicitis, blocked coronary arteries,
or a tumor willingly undergoes the controlled violence presented
by knife-wielding surgeons. Once consciousness interprets a
situation in a specific way, th e reality of the situation fits whatever
consciousness has decided. The virt ual rea lity that surrounds us permanently is a cons truct
that fits so many motives, intentions, decisions, and
interpretations that we’ve lost track of them all. This chapter has dived into deep water, and some issues get
complex. But the purpose of the chapter is simple—to close the
gap be tween illusion and reality. No one’s body is going to
vaporize. The commonsense world will be there to greet yo u when
you wake up tomorrow morning. Yet everything is entangled in
illusion, makin g the commonsense world unstable at its core. By
testing the very limits of time, space, matter, and energy , we are
testing our own creative po wer.
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:

        Using the back feathers of a chicken, the
craftsman narrows them dow n, then smooths the edges with the
tip of a stick h eated red hot in a fire. Having assembled b ow andarrow ( along w ith a quiver m ade of bark to carry the arrows), the
craftsman prov ed the viability of his weapon by firing a n arrow
into a six-inch tree ten yards away with deadly accuracy. It’s hard to des cribe how astonishing this process seems when
first viewed, but, on reflection, a modern craftsman duplicating
the efforts of a  hunter over f orty thousand years ago is c heating. He already knows what a b ow and arrow look like and what
they’re for. The first maker of a bow and arrow worked w ith pure
ingenuity and a sense of discovery. What did it take to in vent the
first bow and arrow. It t ook expanded awareness, and, in
particular, it took some features of awareness possessed  only by
Homo sapiens, as follows: The bow-and-arrow maker had to
conceive of what he wanted to do and then figure out how to do it. He no doubt experimented and tested various options, just as
Thomas Edison  tested different substances for the filament of the
electric light bulb before he hit upon tungsten. Moreove r, as he
began to craft his weapon, th e bow-and-arrow maker had to focus
his atte ntion and keep his mind on what he was doing. If
distracted, he had to remember his task and return to it. Each of these mental facu lties—attention, intention, focus,
curiosity, diligence—are not thoughts. They are the foundation of
thoughts, like invisible brick and mortar. Without them, nothing
can be fabricated (an altern ative name for our species i s Homo
faber, man the maker). Learning what consciousness was capable
of lies at the h eart of human evolution. The multiple dim ensions
we grew  into are dimensions in awareness, which aren’t the same
as physical dimensions in space. This is the r ight place to specify the difference bet ween
consciousness and mind. It needn’t be abstract. Mind is the
activity of thought. Consciousness is the field of pure awareness. In a n analogy from ancient India, consciousness is the ocean,
mind is the wa ves that play across the ocean’s surface. O nce you
grasp the difference, a radi cal insight dawns. Mind only came
about because consciousness started to move within itself. The
field o f pure awareness b egan to vibrate, and from those
vibrations, consciousness acquired the familiar mental
attainments th at it took to make a bow and arrow (and ev erything
else in the field of technology for the next forty millennia). Eventually, h uman beings got lost in the complexity,
bewildered and yet fascinated  by everything the mind can do. That
includes the darker side, for we have inherited the mind’s capacity
to make  us violent, afraid, depressed, sad, and conflicted—all the
traits of the divided self. Living with the divided self has been the
source of profound sorrow an d sometimes a deep wish to start all
over ag ain. The re’s a reason t hat every culture has a myth  about a
golden age or a  lost Garden o f Eden. We are disappointed in how
we turned out, and the tug of  nostalgia leads us back to a pristine
time when we were more innocent and better. If w e drop the mythic trapp ings, however, what humans lost
was the  connec tion to our so urce—or pure consciousness. But we
have a path back to Eden that isn’t mythical. Somewhere in the
evolution of the human min d, at a time unreachable f rom the
present, Homo sapiens  bec ame self-aware. Was this  a momentous
shift or a gradual development. No one knows. Early humans
started to go beyond everyday thinking, which is largely
utilitarian, dev oted to the busyness of daily duties and demands. Going beyond became solidified, we might say, in God, a
superhuman fashioned in our own image. At other times,
however, goin g beyond meant contemplating the na ture of
awareness. We can call this the awareness of being aware. We
thereby gained access to our source. Only when you know  that you
are conscious can you begin to explore where consciousness comes
from. S a v e d — a n d  C u r s e d — b y  R e a s o n
Throughout history, this search for consciousness has been
haphazard and hazardous at the same time. Being human
encompasses a culture of nonviolence in Buddhism and early
Christianity, b ut also warrior cultures like the Mongols and the
Vikings. Traits we take for gr anted, like romantic love, didn’t exist
in m any early societies in the  Mediterranean Basin, including the
Greeks and the Egyptians; chivalry toward women was unknown
outside noble circles until th e rise of courtly knighthood in theMiddle Ages. Children were not considered exemp lars of
innocence as a matter of course—in medieval Christian doctrine,
sin arrived at birth, and under English common law a child was
treated as a fat her’s property, or chattel. Human dignity itself was
betrayed by the practice of slavery. What th is dismal history indicates, if we look for a common
denominator, is that the human mind knew itself in fra gments,
which accumulated into shared stories built up over time. For
example, the first life account of the Buddha, who lived in the
sixth century BCE, wasn’t written until around four hundred years
after hi s death, and it was very brief, being included in an account
of the twenty-five Buddhas who preceded Gautama Buddha. The
first tru e biography was an epic poem, dating to the second
century BCE, written by a m onk called Ashvaghosha, under the
title of Buddhacarita  ( Act of the Buddha ). Understandably, myths
and miracles are interspersed with facts that may be reliable
accounts—the important thing was to amass from many fragments
a saintly life suitable for worship and veneration. Likewise, the
New Testament comes from  many sources—principally, it is
thought, the various early churches scattered throughout the
Roman Empire—and very big differences crop up between the four
Gospels. All the stories that became w oven into civilization were created
collectively, even when it is traditional to refer to a single author
like Homer or a Gospel writer. The original texts  always
underwent alt erations later. Some stories became inspiring. Others became  part of a people’s identity or their way of worship. Against these positive effects, every story has severely lim ited our
infinite potent ial. Metareality has no story because it is outside
time and therefore outside hi story. Unlike the mind, which leaves
a trail of events behind it that historians can study, consciousness
has no beginning or end. At present the dominant story, collectively speaking, is
scientific, and one aspect of the mind is given credit for advancing
human evolution: rational thought. If we pity our forebears for
their di fficulty in getting past superstition and myth, the future
may pity us for glorifying the rational mind and neglecting the
whole mind. In his 2018 book, Enlightenment Now, the widely read
Harvard psych ologist Steven Pinker takes 450 pages to fu lly extol
the triumph of reason in rece nt cultural history. Pinker makes “the
case for reason, science, humanism, and progress” (the book’s
subtitle), much as it would have been made in France during the
eighteenth-century Age of Enlightenment. In fact, he look s to that
period as the turning point in Western civilization. For the vast majority of peop le in the West, Pinker is preaching
to the choir when he characterizes enlightenment  as secular, free-
thinking, rational, and dedic ated to progress. I know this in my
role as an MD  trained in scientific medicine. Rationality has few
greater triump hs, and the ris e of modern medicine was p art of a
much l arger campaign to wipe out the scourge of i gnorant
superstition. As a  prime example, no one  in the fourteenth century h ad a
rational explanation for the horrors of the Black Death, which
killed perhaps a third of Europe’s population, around twenty
million people,  between 1347 and 1352. Supernatural expla nations
became widespread, and ther e was a rash of persecutions of Jews
and witches. Three centuries  later, you would think society would
have learned its lessons and  realized how superstitious they had
been. No such luck. When William Harvey in the seve nteenth
century scientifically confirmed that the heart pumped blood to
every part of the body and  back again, many still bel ieved in
witches. It is e stimated that more were executed in the century
after Shakespeare’s death in 1616 than in the previous century. Harvey himself visited women suspected of witchcraft and
became a prominent and skeptical opponent of such superstitious
thinking. In one of these visits, he took a toad, which one  woman
thought was her familiar sent by the Devil, and dissected it before
her eye s to prove that nothing supernatural existed  in the
creature. Pinker praises  the rise of enlightened reason with fervor and
confidence:
What is enlightenment. In a 1784 essay with that
question as its title, Immanuel Kant answered that itconsists of “humankind’s emergence from its self-
incurred immaturity,” its “lazy and cowardly”
submission to  “dogmas and formulas” of religious or
political authority. Enlightenment’s motto, he
proclaimed, is “Dare to understand. ”
This is such a  widely accepted view of enlightenment that
there’s little that’s daring abo ut it. A secular, scientific cul ture not
only tak es pride in rationality, it worships rationality with a faith
as a bsolute as the religious  dogmas Kant wanted humanity to
escape. What would be dar ing is to find a way to esc ape the
unfounded exaltation of reason. For rationality has wreaked as
much havoc as unreason—medieval monks, wedded to the “lazy
and cowardly” dogmas of Catholicism, as Pinker describes them,
didn’t drop the atomic bomb, invent chemical warfare and
biological weapons, or desp oil the environment to the point of
humanity’s self-destruction. Reason has certainly created many good things, but in
Pandora’s box there was diabolical creativity, too. When freedom
of thought became widespread, there was nothing to stop
diabolical creativity from devising newer means of mec hanized
death, w hich h as proceeded apace since the Roman catapult and
the crossbow in the Middle A ges. Reason hasn’t been able to curb
its own creations, pursued in every case with the backing of
rational explanations for why horrific weapons were necessary to
develop. Bypassing this fatal flaw, Pinker’s optimism paints a picture of
progress on many fronts. The  core of Enlightenment Now  i s a set
of seven ty-five charts illustrating the advance of humankin d up to
this mo ment in history, countering the popular notion that the
world is falling apart. The range of topics illustrated by these
charts covers everything from the tone of the news people read,
life expectanc y, and child mortality to malnourishme nt and
famine deaths; from Gross World Product and global income
distribution to American leisure time and the cost of jet travel. It’s an impressive summing up of what rationality and progress
have achieved. But Pinker’s overview leaves consciousness for verylate in the game. The word is  barely present in the book, and the
main references, beginning on page 425, are skeptical and
debunking. He raises the issue of the “hard problem,” a phrase
coined by philosopher David  Chalmers, which poses the riddle of
why human beings have subjectivity—in other words, the world
“in here. ”
True to his fait h in reason, lo gic, and science, Pinker says that
what goes on i n the subjective domain (i. e. , thoughts, sen sations,
images, and emotions), along with the behavior we exhibit based
on subj ective events, are “obvious Darwinian adaptations. With
advances in evolutionary psychology more and more of our
conscious experiences are being explained in this way, including
our in tellectual obsessions, moral emotions, and a esthetic
reactions. ”
In other words, the mind can be logically explained—or
explained away—by the same Darwinian drive that shaped every
living creature: survival of the fittest. The possibility that Homo
sapiens  i s a consciousness-based spe cies isn’t touched on, and one
imagines Pinke r would laugh it away. He isn’t someone I  want to
single o ut for special criticism—Pinker’s argument is p art of a
much la rger tre nd in science—but saying that humankind feels the
difference between right and wrong (a moral emotion), craves the
truth (an intellectual obsession), and loves beauty (an aesthetic
reaction) because those things were survival traits is seriously
misguided. By refusing even to take consciousness se riously,
Pinker returns  us to being higher mammals who happened to
become consci ous in order to  get an advantage in finding food and
gaining mating rights. Some pure Darwinians stop there, but Pinker realizes that
consciousness needs a slightly more credible explanation, because
the hard problem doesn’t as k how humans became conscious; it
asks wh at consciousness is. Again not singling Pinker out for
blame, he joins many other “ apostles of scientism,” as one of his
critics called them, by saying two things: (1) Consciousness is
probably an illusion created by complex brain activity, and (2) the
whole issue is basically irrelevant. *
To hold  that the entire subj ective world is an illusion shows
how blind the dogma of r ationality has become. Citing thephilosopher Daniel Dennett, one of the strongest consciousness
deniers, Pinke r is impressed by Dennett’s view that “there is no
hard pr oblem of consciousne ss: it is a confusion arising from the
bad habit of a homunculus  seated in a theater inside the skull. This is the disembodied experiencer. ” The word homunculus
means a small human being, and it has various meanings in
science and philosophy. Supporters of the view that consciousness
is an illusion like to say that  people mistakenly believe there is a
“little me,” or an individual s elf, inside us. Dennett dismisses the
self as an illusory artifact of the whirling, teeming brain. Pinker
can’t bring himself to go that far, but many neuroscientist s do. In
a se nse they m ust, because if the brain creates the mind, then the
notion of the self can’t be anything but another product of brain
activity. If every self is a delusion, then why should we believe a
scientist (i.
Expanded awareness and the ability to conceive of and experiment with new ideas.
What did it take to invent the first bow and arrow?
Consciousness is the field of pure awareness, while the mind is the activity of thought.
What is the difference between consciousness and the mind?
The book argues that reason and science have led to human progress, but also acknowledges that this progress has also led to negative consequences.
What is the main point of the book "Enlightenment Now" by Steven Pinker?
The text suggests that consciousness is the universe, and that our experience of time, space, matter, and energy is a construct of consciousness.
What is the relationship between consciousness and the universe?
The author argues that our reality is a construct of consciousness, and that we need to rethink our understanding of the world to move forward.
What is the author's main argument in this chapter?