For example, when there’s a sudden death in the fam ily or a
catastrophe like a tornado or the house burning down, we  may go
into shock. With a blank stare we reveal how dislocated our
existence suddenly feels, saying things like “This can’t be
happening. It’s unreal” or “Nothing matters anymore.”Normally, this dissociated st ate will pass, and in time reality
feels real again. But some pe ople never return—after a psychotic
break, for example, a percentage of mental patients become
chronically sch izophrenic an d have hallucinations, seeing  images
or hearing voices for the rest of their lives. But the feeling  of “This
can’t be happening; it’s like a  dream” doesn’t have to be triggered
by shoc k. Coun tless people engage in personal fantasies of fame,
wealth, or some other dream that feels totally real to them and
drives them all their lives. W hen someone is suddenly ecstatically
happy, for whatever reason, everything can seem surreal, too. However, the physical world “out there” feels real and
substantial a lot more than 99 percent of the time, which is proof
enough, one would think, that we aren’t under some kind of spell. But we are. Iro nically, there’s  now technology that forces a person
to confr ont wh at is real and  what isn’t. When you don a virtual
reality (VR) headset, powered by artificial intelligen ce, the
simulation you are plunged  into is like a wraparound, three-
dimensional movie of such vividness that it overwhelms the senses
and cau ses a dislocation from what we deem as everyday reality. You might find yourself precariously perched on a steel
construction girder in midair with the city street many stories
below. Your brain, fooled by the visual image, triggers the stress
response just as if you were r eally teetering on the girder. You will
feel you rself go ing off balance in a panic, even though in t he room
where you are actually standing, your feet are firmly on the ground
and you are in no danger of plunging to your death. The VR illusion is created by visual images, and the same holds
true in everyday life. What you see, you believe in. Such trust is
misplaced, as every grade-schooler learns when told that  the sun
doesn’t actuall y rise in the east and set in the west. Y et when
quantum physics tells us that matter isn’t what it appears to be, we
continue to cling to the sens ations of weight and solidity of hard
physical objects as if they w ere indisputable. Would a bullet be
less dan gerous if you saw thr ough the illusion? No. The bullet and
the entire physical world remain intact but with the realization
that th ey are the end point of a process that begins in
consciousness.Once you grasp this and fully absorb it, your personal reality
becomes much more malleab le, because you can go to the source
and be part of the creative process. Getting untangled from the
virtual-reality simulation isn’t easy. Our personal experience
would h ave to  change drastically, but the beauty of it is that we
have th e potential for change where before we had none or very
little. W hile you cannot turn bullets into cotton balls, to accept
that all of reality “out there” is beyond your ability to chan ge isn’t
true. The gro und rules of everyday life are much looser than we
imagine. Even  when a perso n feels completely immerse d in the
simulation, the re is an escap e route. And not just one, but many. This only makes sense. Metareality is more real than any virtual
simulation. We should regard glimpses into it as evidence that we
can inhabit the meta state all  the time. Instead, the entang lements
of virtu al reality have turned the picture wrong side up. As you
read the meta experiences below, you will be tempted to see them
as a nomalous, freakish, or untrustworthy. Getting real is a process
that beg ins by confronting yo ur misplaced trust in illusions every
day. “ S o m e t h i n g  H a p p e n e d ”
Let’s co nsider one of the mo st basic aspects of virtual reality. Hardly anyone would question that being inside the body is
normal, natural, and a true experience. But this certainty runs
counter to the phenomenon of out-of-body experiences (OBEs),
which h ave be en documente d in every culture for centur ies. The
most widely publicized out-of-body experience is “going into the
light,” as reported by patien ts who have clinically died during
emergency medical procedures, especially from heart attacks. *
It tu rns out that expecting to go into the light when we die is
misleading, be cause what happens in near-death experi ences is
much more individual than a nyone thought. The largest study of
near-death exp eriences, whic h examined 2,060 patients who diedunder e mergency or intensiv e care, arrived at the conclus ion that
death isn’t a s ingle event—it  is a process. There isn’t simply one
final or definitive event. Du ring this process, there are ways to
reverse death . In cases where medical professionals were
successful at getting the heart, lungs, and brain to come back to
normal functio ning, about 40 percent of those who died a nd came
back remember that “some thing happened” when the y were
flatlined. This pa rt of the study, which was titled AWARE and was l ed by
British intensive-care doctor Sam Parnia, seems irrefuta ble. But
very q uickly the details of “something happened” become
controversial. We have to dive into a few details to see w hat the
issues are. Out of the 2,060  patients who died (the study went
from 2008 to 2012 and inclu ded 33 researchers in 15 ho spitals),
104 were resuscitated. The first point to note is that all had
actually died. They were not “near death.” Their hearts and lungs
had stopped functioning, and within 20 to 30 seconds their brains
showed no activity. The decomposition of cells throughout the
body actually takes several hours to commence afterward. During
the interval between dying and being brought back is when
39 percent reported the mem ory of being conscious even though
their brains had stopped. Dr. Parnia believes that this i s probably just a fraction of those
who had such experiences; the rest had their memories erased
either by brain inflammation , which occurs for 72 hours  after a
person is brought back from  death, or because of drugs that are
administered as part of resuscitation, which also cause memory
loss. Of  the 101 patients who completed the questionnaire about
their ex perience during death, only 9 percent had an ex perience
compatible wi th the typical “going into the light” model. The
majority of memories were vague and unfocused, som etimes
pleasant but sometimes not. Only 2 percent  of those who came back, which means 2 p eople
out of 101, ha d the experience of full awareness or out- of-body
experiences such as looking down from above their bodies
watching and listening to the medical team as it was working to
revive t hem. O nly one person could accurately narrate what hadbeen happenin g in the room in such detail that it corresponded to
timed events. So what does this one person tell us about dying? It depe nds. Skeptics shrug off all such experiences as p urely
physical, claim ing that if w e had finer measurements of brain
activity, at a ve ry subtle level we’d discover that the brai n hadn’t
actually died. Dr. Parnia accepts that this might be true. His main
focus is on ho w to achieve better results at resuscitation that
might bring back a normal person with no organ damage,
particularly brain damage after clinical death. But Dr. Parnia’s
personal conclu sion is that a person can be fully conscious  without
brain function, as this one patient was. He points to the basic
disagreement, thousands of years ago, between Aristo tle and
Plato. Aristotl e contended that consciousness was a physical
phenomenon, Plato that it was nonphysical, residing in a soul that
transcends the body. The AWARE study didn’t co nfirm either side. Unsurprisingly,
skeptics and believers didn’t change their position, or their
prejudices. On e can say that it’s a significant step to turn death
into a process  that can be  reversed. It’s also significant that
awareness dur ing death covers a wide range of experiences, not a
one-size-fits-all of going into the light. What I’d like to underscore
is that even wh en you die, yo u fashion the experience personally. Dr. Parnia found that people’s spiritual interpretation of their
death experience coincided with their own faith. They interpreted
the light as b eing Christ, if they were Christians, which was
different for Hindus and totally nonspiritual for atheists. What happens when we die, t hen, is open to interpretation. The
only co nsensus among those  who came back was that death is a
comfortable process, not to be feared. Having directly experienced
that their fear of death was g roundless, these people disco vered a
different persp ective on life. Many if not most concluded t hat they
should lead more selfless lives in service to others. I think it is useful that the AWARE study validated that
“something ha ppens,” but why are we trying to settle the issue of
consciousness at the most extreme moment when life and death
hang in the balance? It’s like  trying to validate gravity b y asking
survivors of a plane crash ab out their experience of falling from
the sky.It is the normal, everyday experience of consciousness that
needs to be e xplained, not the extreme states. I’ve debated or
conversed with many neuros cientists, and none has been able to
answer the simplest questions about consciousness. These  include
the following:
What is a thought? How does the electrochemical activity in a neuron turn into
words, sights, and sounds in our heads? Why is a person’s next thought totally unpredictable? If someone has a vocabulary of 30,000 words, does this
mean that a clump of brain cells knows 30,000 words? If
so, in what way are the words being stored? For the word
cat , is there a place inside a brain cell that holds the
letters c-a-t ? No one can adequately answer any of these questions. T h e  S e l f - M o d e l
An experience as otherworld ly as “going into the light” might
be a red herring. It turns ou t that being “inside” your b ody is a
malleable state; you can enter and leave your body almost at will. In a  fascinating account in The  New Yorker , titled “As Real As
It Gets”  by Joshua Rothman (April 2, 2018), the issue of living
inside the body is confronte d with unusual clarity. At n ineteen
Thomas Metzi nger, a German university student, fell asleep on a
meditation retreat and woke up feeling an itch in his back. According to Rothman:
He tried to scratch it, but couldn’t—his arm seemed
paralyzed. He  tried to force the arm to move, and,
somehow, this  shifted him up and out of his body, so
that he seemed to be floating above himself….He heardsomeone else breathing, and, in a panic, looked around
for an intruder. Only much later did he realize that the
breathing had been his. This uncanny experience soon ended but left a lasting
impression. A s it happened, Metzinger became a pr ominent
philosopher of mind, and he set out assiduously to explain OBEs,
which are estimated to occu r in 8–15 percent of the population,
generally at night or after surgery. As real as his own exp erience
felt—it was followed on occasion by other, similar experiences—
Metzinger discovered its limitations. He couldn’t flick the light
switch, for example, or fly out the window to visit his girlfriend. A surprising explanation began to dawn on Metzinger. He
discovered the work of the psychologist Philip Johnson-Laird and
his theory of “ mental models.” Instead of logically asses sing the
world, Johnson-Laird held, we apply a mental picture a nd shift
from one mental model to an other, depending on the situation. “If
you wan t to know whether a rug will go with your sofa,” Rothman
explains, “you don’t deduce the answer—you imagine it, by
moving furniture around on a mental stage set.”
Metzinger began to wonder if what we call reality isn’t merely a
stage set arranged and colored in by the mind. This was a key
insight, and confirmation came by chance when he was contacted
by a Swiss neuroscientist, Olaf Blanke, who had artificially
induced OBEs in his patients. Working with a forty-three-year-old
woman with epilepsy, Blanke  had stimulated a specific area of her
brain with mild electrical cur rent, “and she had the exper ience of
floating upward and looking down at her own body.” This illusion
had many variations that could be deliberately brought on. Rothman’s New Yorker  article explains:
Stimulating another location in the brain created the
impression of a doppelgänger standing across the room;
stimulating a third created the “sense of a presence”—
the feeling that someone was hovering nearby, just out
of sight.Metzinger found this research hard to interpret, because he was
committed as a philosopher to tracing experience back to the
mind, r ather than taking the usual scientific approach that all
mental events are the produ cts of physical activity in th e brain. But he eventua lly reached a conclusion consistent with the notion
of “mental models.” Something like a radical breakthrough
occurred. Rothman continues:
It isn’t just that we live inside a model of the external
world, Metzinger wrote. We also live inside models of
our own bodies, minds, and selves. These “self-models”
don’t al ways reflect reality, and they can be adjusted in
illogical ways. They can, for e xample, portray a self that
exists outside the body—an O.B.E. This is a fruitful way to explain why living “inside” the body
feels so convincing—we need it for stability and safety, to feel
grounded inside our personal shelter. There are other ways to
induce an OBE, such as using the drug ketamine, which has mind-
altering properties. VR simulation is perhaps the most effective,
however. For example, with a specific VR setup, Metzinger saw his
own body standing in front o f him with its back to him ( this was
done by  placing a camera beh ind him and transmitting the image
to the VR head set). If someone scratched Metzinger’s back, he felt
the sensation happening to t he body he saw in front of him—an
eerie, d istorting feeling. By remaining “inside” your body,  you can
avert such disorientation. But, at the same time, you ar e trapped behind the skin of  your
protective suit. It’s not that an OBE is better than the normal way
of inha biting our bodies, but that we have seemingly lost the
ability t o shift from one mental model to another. This ability can
never b e entir ely lost, however. In a variety of ways—dr eaming,
fantasizing, denial, willful blindness, and more—we turn our backs
on the simulation we have agreed to accept most of the time. Virtual reality in any guise—drug-induced, electrically
stimulated, or caused by happenstance—creates images. The fact
that the images come in 3-D, as created by the brain o r by VRequipment, doesn’t make them real. Your personal self-model has
been pa instakingly constructed out of images from the pas t stored
in y our memory. These artifa cts of old experiences feel lik e “you.”
It’s not hard to revisit the times in your life when you mad e major
additions to your self-mode l. For instance, I can see myself in
medical school , on the airpla ne from India to America, s weating
out my first days in a New Je rsey hospital as I felt the pressure of
the workload, a foreign environment, and the guarded acceptance
of A merican-bo rn doctors. These images pass through the mind as
if they were happening all over again—but they aren’t. Self-models are shared at some levels but not others. Th ere’s
enormous room for personal variations. You and I can spe nd a day
together seeing  the same sigh ts, eating the same food, int eracting
with the same people. A sha red self-model would bind us. The
Pacific Ocean, a bowl of rice pilaf, and the friends we mee t would
be part of experiences we share. But your self-model will absorb
and reject, interpret and forg et, hold on to and let go of the day in
an entirely unique way. I may love the ragas improvised by a great
Indian sitar player, while you experience the music’s microtones
as so much garbled noise. If our spouses join us at the ta ble, you
and I will be attached to different people with d ifferent
relationship histories. And so it goes, moment by moment, as the
self-model processes every life experience according to its own
designs. W h e n  t h e  I l l u s i o n  C r u m b l e s
What V R techn ology reveals is that the self-model isn’t lim ited
to one dimens ion, the visual. We also believe in what we hear,
touch, t aste, a nd smell. In e ffect, you and I were born to mesh
perfectly with a wraparound simulation of reality. But there’s a
hidden ability in the human m ind that we cannot overlook. This is
the ability to disconnect, to  stop identifying with the illusion. Pulling a rabbit out of a hat amazes children because they  believe
what they see. Once you discover that a hat can have a false
bottom, the trick doesn’t change, but how you relate to it does.There is no illu sion for the magician who has performed the hat-
and-rabbit tric k hundreds of times. He might feel impat ient and
bored, wanting  to get the whole act over with so that he can eat his
dinner. Once an illusion loses its fascination, it loses everything. The opposite is true, however, when it comes to dismantling
the self-model,  the wraparound stage set that each of us inhabits. Once you see through this i llusion, life suddenly becomes more
fascinating. Such is the testimony of people who had the illusion
crumble aroun d them, usually without any warning or e ffort on
their part. I re cently met someone to whom this happened. Now
sixty-eight, Lo rin Roche was a broke eighteen-year-old  college
student at the end of the si xties who agreed to participate in a
research project on the physiological effects of meditation. But as
recounted on Roche’s websit e, when he arrived at the lab, he was
told tha t “[h]e was a control subject, and received no inst ructions
whatsoever—they paid him to just sit in a totall y dark,
soundproofed room in the lab for two hours a day for several
weeks, and measure his bra in waves. With no instructions, and
never having heard of medita tion, Lorin just attended to the total
silence and darkness, and spo ntaneously entered a state of intense
alertness.”
This was a startling and unexpected experience, which he found
very absorbing while it lasted. A few months later, someone
handed Lorin a book of 112 meditations based on ancient Sanskrit
sutras (sayings  or teachings) from India. He was delighted to find
that he had spontaneously ha d some of the experiences d escribed
in these  centuries-old texts. For a Western adolescent to have a
predilection for meditation is as remarkable as having innate
musical talent, but Roche went further. He attended a festival of
Bhakti devotees in Joshua Tree National Park in the C alifornia
desert. In India, Bhakti is the most popular form of w orship,
consisting of love, faith, and devotion as the path to
enlightenment. The most c ommon daily practice is chanting,
which Roche was there to participate in. But the  heat was oppressive, and his energy was starting to
wane. As he describes the e xperience, “What sounds good right
now is to go jump in a nearby cool salt-water pool. As I ge t out of
hearing range of the festival, I realize the chanting is still g oing oninside me. And although it is quieter, this internal soundtrack feels
powerful. Somehow my atoms are dancing and singing the hymns
of p raise to the Goddess and  the God, Devi and Shiva… .It’s the
Bollywood of the atoms.”
Today R oche continues to dance in praise of the Goddess and
the God , and he has written a translation of the 112 Shiv a sutras
that is considered among the most ecstatic. Here ar e some
samples, all based on merging the ancient text with his own
personal experiences. Shiva is singing to Devi:
Rivers of power flowing everywhere. Fields of magnetism relating everything. This is your origin. This is your lineage. The current of creation is right here,
Coursing through subtle channels,
Animating this very form. Follow the gentle touch of life,
Soft as the footprint of an ant,
As tiny sensations open to vastness. I had an encounter with Lorin Roche while writing this book,
and he radiated the blissful state that is the goal of Bhakti—his
translation of the sutras is titled The Radiance Sutras . I boug ht a
copy to read on an airpla ne, and its personal authenticity
surpasses any other version I know. The “dance of atoms” is real
for him:
Power sings as it flows,
Electrifies the organs of sensing,
Becomes liquid light,
Nourishes your entire being. Celebrate the boundary
Where streams join the sea,
Where body meets infinity.A skeptic would argue th at this was such a subjective
experience that it has no bearing on reality. The atoms that dance
are in Lorin Roche’s imag ination, not in a physics l ab. The
physical world  doesn’t feel like a simulation; it feels tota lly real,
and when we see something  fantastic in our imagination, like a
flying dragon, we don’t run away to escape the fire it breathes. But this argument misses the point. Everything is mind-made,
including fire’s  heat and its destructive ability. This only shows
how complete the illusion  is. Fire-breathing drago ns are
imaginary and  a forest fire isn’t; as part of the simulation, the
physical world  operates the w ay it operates. Fire is hot, ice is cold. Trees burn down, water freezes. The key is identification—once
you identify with the simulation, you are embedded in it. You are
part of the who le setup, playing a passive role. If your invo lvement
changes, so does your experie nce. You have a more flexibl e role to
play. Ta ke som ething as basic as pain. There is no objective way to
measure pain. People experience it very differently, and
unpredictably. In a typical pain experiment, participants place their hands in
ice water and are asked to rate the pain on a scale of 1 to 10 where
10 is  excruciating. Even thoug h the temperature of the water is the
same for everyone, one pers on will rate the pain a 5 (moderate)
and ano ther an 8 or 9 (severe to excruciating). On the flip  side, if
you vis it a restaurant kitchen where the pastry chefs boil sugar
syrup for candy or frosting, you will observe that many of them
can dip their fingers to tes t whether the syrup has st arted to
thicken, which occurs at well over 212°F. (Women, by the way,
seem to have a higher pain threshold than men.) This re sult isn’t very surprising, but few of us realize that we
are actually creating the pain we feel as physically created . As part
of th e stress response, a rush  of adrenaline can block pain , which
is why soldiers report that  being shot wasn’t painful under
battlefield conditions, and th e same occurs if a person goes into
shock. But the total cessatio n of pain can also occur out of the
blue, and with it arrives a dramatic shift in consciousness. People who have had this ex perience typically report a “snap”
when the mind creates its own altered state spontaneously. In the
2017 book Stealing Fire , authors Steven Kotler and Jamie Whealgive the striking example of Mikey Siegel, an MIT-trained
engineer who had become burned out with his lucrative job in
robotics and artificial intelli gence. He wanted more fulfillment,
and Siegel began his search by hiking in South American jungles
and then visiting ashrams in India, eventually deciding to  take up
meditation. On a ten-day meditation retreat, Siegel found himself
participating in a focus exercise where the object was to  sit still
and experience sensations in the body without judging them:
But Siegel was overwhelmed by sensations. After a week
of cross-legged  meditation, his back ached, his neck
throbbed, and  his thighs w ere numb. “It was an all-
consuming pain,” he explains, “and all I was doing was
judging.”
Moments of extreme experie nces, whether pleasant or painful,
somehow brea k the bonds of the conditioned mind, w hich is
trapped in the habit of accept ing physical limitations at face value. Suddenly there is access to a n ecstatic state, free of conditioning,
as was the case for Siegel:
Something ins ide shifted. The part of his brain that had
been judging suddenly turned off. “It felt like freedom,”
[Siegel] explains….“It was the most clear, present, and
aware I  had ever been. And if  I could be in extreme pain
and still remain peaceful and clear, then I thought
maybe other people could do this, too. In that instant,
everything I believed about human potential shifted.”
Siegel wasn’t merely aston ished; he didn’t let go of this
experience, bu t rather chose to follow up on it. He fervently
embarked on the project of “engineering enlightenment,” using
meditation as one tool among many. For example, we can access
calmness by slowing down  our heart rate using a wearable
biofeedback de vice. We’ll get to the whole topic of interfa cing the
mind w ith devices that enhance awareness, but there are somebasic points to be made here . Pain has been known to suddenly
give way to a detached nonjudgmental state, known as
“witnessing.” In India, for centuries, sadhus and yogis have
undergone tapas , or physical austerity, as a path to awakening. The stereotype of the bearded yogi sitting in a remote Himalayan
cave reflects one kind of tapas. Putting stress on the body is found in disciplined Zen Bud dhist
meditations, where monks ge t up before dawn, consume green tea
and a handful  of rice, and then sit in meditation for hours with
head an d spine erect. As with Siegel, there will predicta bly be a
“snap” moment, when the mind pops out of its identification with
pain and the struggle to stop it. But many people are stuck in
various ways, and even years  of enduring extreme discomfort may
not lead to the desired result. Cessation of pain is powerfu l evidence that the mind can  free
itself from sensations that everyone considers a natural aspect of
life. But  we mustn’t miss the wider implications, which carry us to
the farthest reaches of realit y. Trapped in the self-model, which
clings t o us more tightly than  our skin, we can surrender  to it or
investigate it. The investigation may be intellectual, the way
quantum physics operates. It  may use imagination to tease us out
of our set wa ys. When Alice goes down the rabbit hole to
Wonderland, the everyday world is reshaped by nonsense, which
Alice, b eing a proper English miss, is impatient with. As Alice
watches the Red Queen play c roquet using flamingos as mallets or
the Che shire Cat disappear into thin air until nothing remains but
his sm ile, her sensible protests aren’t the reader’s. We are
delighted that Wonderland isn’t the everyday world. Why do we lon g for wonder? Because we’ve been there in  real
life. Wonder existed long bef ore the self-model took over. As one
researcher into the mind-altering effects of LSD has concluded,
babies don’t need psychedeli cs because they are “tripping all the
time.” B abies t ake a while to  get with the program, so to speak. They are wide-eyed and delig hted with a world that does n’t have
to make sense yet. To learn th at fire is hot and winter is freezing, a
young c hild mu st conform to everyday reality. Growing up means
learning the rules of the road. But once you learn them, t he roadturns out to be  narrow, and crossing the center line spells disaster. Deviate from the norm and you might just go mad. Metahuman holds out a third way that is neither as shapeless
as the innocen ce of babies nor as rigid as social conformity. We
can live  in both realities, in a state William Blake called “or ganized
innocence.” W onder can infuse the everyday world without
dissolving it into a trippy puddle. (The famous Indian spiritual
teacher J. Krishnamurti, who  had a sardonic sense of humor, liked
to say that being timeless and eternal, which is part of waking up,
doesn’t mean that you miss the afternoon train.) The wor ld of the
five sen ses is the organized part. We don’t inhabit a chaotic
hallucination. The all-enveloping setup that we are entangled in
appears to be complete. It covers everything we can see, hear,
touch, taste, and smell. Metareality is the innocent p art, where awe and wonder i nfuse
the min d. It’s not a mindless state, but it does go beyond rational
thought. No less than Albert Einstein confirmed this personally:
I somet imes as k myself how i t came about that I was the
one to develop  the theory of relativity. The reason, I
think, i s that a normal adult never stops to think about
problems of space and time. These are things which he
has thought about as a child. But my intellectual
development w as retarded, as a result of which I began
to wond er about space and tim e only when I had already
grown up. Einstein never lost his sense of wonder and imbued it with a
deeply spiritual quality. “My sense of God is my sense of wonder
about the universe,” he once said. But it isn’t necessary , as I’ve
underscored several times, to couch metareality in spiritual terms. “Going beyond ” is an aspect of consciousness, and it is accessible
to everyone. If y ou ask pe ople how interested they are in investig ating
reality, not many will respond enthusiastically. But there’s a
gripping story behind how w e got entangled in an illusio n. Even
more gripping  is the possibility of writing a new ending to thestory, which has us escaping into the domain of wonder, discovery,
ecstasy, and freedom. I n  Y o u r  L i f e
CHANGING YOUR BODY EXPERIENCE
You are  living in an interpreted world, and your body is p art of
the interpretation. Change the interpretation, and y ou will
experience your body in a new way. When you look at exercise not
as a chore, for example, but a s a way of increasing your focus and
energy, you have created a n ew interpretation. Now the burn of
your mu scles on the StairMaster and the windedness you feel after
running a mile are positive things, not reasons for distress. It takes a more  basic shift of interpretation to stop seeing  your
body as a thing, an object suspended in time and space. Is this a
mere in terpretation? Yes. Wh en you look in a mirror, what do you
see? We are co nditioned to see a solid, stable physical obj ect with
defined bound aries—in that regard, you could be seeing a life-
sized mannequin in the mirror. We already know, from discussing
the qua ntum re volution, that  matter only appears solid. W hen you
touch your forearm with your  other hand—go ahead and do this if
you like—it seems as if two solid objects are coming into contact. In reality, you are experien cing two electromagnetic fields
coming into contact with each other, which gives the impression of
solidity. For example, two magnets with opposite poles facing each
other create a repellent force. If the magnets are powerful enough,
a point will come when you c annot push them together until they
touch. T he repelling force will keep them apart. Therefore, from
the magnets’ perspective, the air between them feels solid. The other four senses besides touch also collaborate in the
interpreted bo dy. Since photons have no color, the fact that you
can see your bo dy as colorful—brown hair, blue eyes, olive skin—is
an o ptical illusion. So are the defined outlines of the body. You do
not stop  at the barrier of your skin. You travel in a vaguely shaped
aura of  moisture and exhaled air, trailing behind you a constantstream of microbes and old skin cells that are being shed (by one
estimate, the dust bunnies that accumulate in a house are
50 p ercent dead skin cells). You are also emitting heat and a very
mild electrical charge. These emanations have no bounda ry at all,
since they are part of universal fields that extend to infinity. Nor can you say that you are looking at “my” body, because a
question immediately arises: Which body do you mean? Y our cells
are constantly being exchang ed, like bricks flying in and out of a
building. The body you see i n the mirror isn’t the same as it was
when you were an infant, or e ven what it was yesterday an d will be
tomorrow. Bes ides the death of old cells and the birth of new ones,
atoms and molecules fly in and out by the trillions every hour as
your body is nurtured and excretes waste. The fact is that your body coheres and looks stable, l ike a
building being held together,  not by bricks and mortar, but by its
blueprint. In your case, the b lueprint leaves a physical footprint as
DNA, which serves as the te mplate for all life forms. But, once
again, the physicality of DNA  is an illusion, a mask. The c hemical
compounds tha t constitute DNA are phosphates and sugars, and it
is only the arrangement  o f them that determines the difference
between a banana and the monkey eating it, or between you and a
sea snail. These arrangements are nothing but pure information. Therefore, your body is an information construct, and your
bloodstream, teeming with thousands of different c hemical
messages flowing from cell to cell, is an information
superhighway. Having gotten this far, we have dematerialized your body, and
yet ther e’s ano ther step to g o. What is information? It, too, is a
construct. Until the human mind named the construct,
information had no formal existence, and some have argued that
an info rmation universe co uld be a kind of quantum  soup,
swirling, combining, and r ecombining at every secon d with
lightning speed. This soup can be coded any way you wish. A
physicist could code it in te rms of force fields like grav ity and
electromagnetism. But these fields are unified and merge into the
ground state of everything that exists, vanishing from the visible
universe into a formless vacuum.A computer engineer could code the information a different
way, a s the 0s and 1s of digital programming, b ut this
arrangement of information is only viable for tangible
information, l ike the letters on this page, which you may be
reading digital ly right now. The mathematics of anything in the
visible universe can be calculated. Your DNA is coded by the
mathematics of four base pairs (thymine, adenine, guanine, and
cytosine) in a sequence with three billion separate units of
information. W hich brings us full circle, because the base pairs
aren’t solid matter, either. Even mathematics cannot get at what
they are. A mathematical language of 0s and 1s is useful for
computer technology, but the immaterial aspects of life—
intelligence, creativity, emotions, hopes, fears, and so on—have no
mathematical coding. Before Einstein formulated E  = mc2, it
existed as pure creative potential—a thought not yet thought—and
being as  yet uncreated, it had no existence in the physical world or
the information world or even the mathematical world. T h e  H u m b l i n g  o f  D N A
The notion that life can be  explained by understanding the
human genom e has prevailed for decades, but in fact yo ur DNA
turns out to be a bit player in the larger scheme. The fa ilure of
DNA to explain how life emerged is startling, although the general
public hasn’t heard about this very much. This is a perfect
example of how materialistic explanations always fall shor t, so it’s
worth telling the story in some detail. The accepted story, which ev eryone learned at school, is that
DNA contains the “code of life,” a master blueprint that jumps into
action t he instant an egg is fertilized in the mother’s womb. From
that point on, a human be ing develops from a single cell to
30 t rillion cells as the bluepr int unfolds. As powerful as the “code
of life” story is, behind the sc enes a growing number of geneticists
don’t buy into it; in fact, they think we’ve gotten a lot about genes
wrong. In various ways the “code of life” has huge holes in it thatare grow ing bi gger every day. This is outlined in an online article
in the journal Nautilus  titled “It’s the End of the Gene as We Know
It.” Th e author, Ken Richardson, is an expert in human
development, and he gives us a remarkable view of how cells work,
which depends much mo re on invisible ingredien ts like
intelligence an d creativity than on molecules, even one as complex
as human DNA. Richardson’s argument goes as follows: DNA’s purpose is to
produce the proteins that ar e the basic building blocks of a cell. But DN A alone does not account for the many ways that cells,
tissues, and organs use the se proteins. The notion that DNA
contains the blueprint for the body is basically dead in the water. Recent research has shown that cells are dynamic systems that
change their makeup “on t he hoof,” as Richardson puts it, a
process of self-regulation that begins almost the moment a sperm
fertilizes an ovum. As s oon as that  one cell form s into a minuscule ball of identical
cells, Richardson writes, “[they] are already talking to each other
with storms of chemical signals. Through the statistical patterns
within the storms, instructio ns are, again, created de novo [i.e.,
from scratch].” It turns out th at totally independent of DNA, a cell
is controlling all kinds of information contained in amino acids,
fats, vitamins, minerals, enzymes, various kinds of nucleic acids
(RNA)—a who le factory of in gredients necessary to keep  the cell
going is  not predetermined by our genes at all. This self-regulation
implies tremendous intelligence. In the newly emerging view, the cell controls DNA just as much
as D NA controls the cell. The situation has been like this f rom the
beginning of life on Earth. DNA, it seems, emerged at a late stage
of c ellular evolution. In their  earliest stages, billions of ye ars ago,
cells had no DNA but were self-enclosed vats of molecular soup. This so up somehow began to regulate itself, giving rise g radually
over tim e to permanent structures that were needed on a regular
basis, such as proteins, enzymes, and probably RNA, which makes
proteins. The information for these structures was then coded as
DNA, which serves as a kin d of passive database. Richardson
notes s omething else that puts DNA in its rightful place: “More
startling has been the realization that less than 5 percen t of thegenome is used to make proteins at all. Most produce a va st range
of different factors (RNAs) regulating, through the network, how
the other genes are used.”
As v alidation of this new und erstanding, it is now known that
cells can alter their own DNA—this has emerged in the new field of
epigenetics, w hich explores  how everyday experience  leaves
chemical “mar kers” on a gene, altering how it functions. F ar from
robotically following a fixed blueprint, the life of a cell is highly
dynamic and flexible, responding to changing conditions on a
microscopic sc ale. If this was n’t so, we couldn’t respond t o life on
a macroscopic scale. Being h uman means that we think and act creatively, using our
intelligence to devise new wa ys of meeting all kinds of challenges. DNA di dn’t discover fire or in vent the personal computer. The fact
that DNA is responsible for the manufacture of proteins is
important, but it’s seriously mistaken to expand its role to life as a
whole. Richard son is particularly worried that wildly exag gerated
assumptions ab out DNA could lead to social policy that ec hoes the
racism that fueled the eugenic movement decades ago, most
notoriously wi th the Nazi ide ology of a master race. As a case in
point, Nobel laureate Jame s Watson, who co-discove red the
structure of DNA in 1953, was recently stripped of all his h onors at
Cold Spring Harbor Labora tory, where he spent much of his
scientific care er, after he continually expressed his bigoted
opinion that black people and women are less intelligent than
others based on their genetics. With the blueprint of life crum bling before our eyes, what next? At pres ent the new story in genetics is stuck on two factors,
information and complexity. The notion is that primal “molecular
soup” f ound ways for atoms and molecules to form com plicated
structures through information exchange and the statistical
possibilities that arise when zillions of molecules start churning
around. But is that feasible? C an the human brain, for example, be
the end  produc t of swirling so up to which more and more “stuff” is
added? As someone wittily put it, the notion that complexity is
enough to explain the brain is like saying that if you add enough
cards to the deck, they will start playing poker.Because science is tied into a materialist explanation for
everything, it has an enormous blind spot. A cell biologist cannot
make t he leap to invisible t raits every cell displays beyond its
chemical struc tures, namely , intelligence and creativity. Logical
analysis has been science’s most powerful tool, and it’s no small
accomplishment to replace myth, superstition, and popular
opinion with rational facts. Is it really possible, though , that a
sudden creative leap comes about because someone followed the
rules of  logic? The obvious answer is no, and, as proof, we can
offer the amazing imaginative leaps made by the quantum
pioneers who uncovered the absolutely illogical quantum domain. More re cently, the existence of dark matter and energy revealed
another domain, even more peculiar and illogical than the
quantum world, which doesn’t even interact with ordinary matter
and energy. Your body isn’t a  machine governed by logic, which is
why any attempt to turn it into a kind of super-complicated
machine is bound to fail. Too much of the information being sent
throughout the  body, affecting all thirty trillion cells, is generated
by emotions, hopes, fears, beliefs, mistakes, and imagination—all
the most important things that give richness to human existence. Matter and energy behave ve ry peculiarly at the quantum level,
to the point that solid phys ical objects are undermined . Every
phenomenon in the univers e can be reduced to ripples in the
quantum field as it interacts with the gravity field or the more
arcane quark field. On the surface of life, solid objects are just
slow-moving ripples compared with, say, photons traveling at the
speed o f light. Physics can b ack and fill by pointing out that the
human body, like all solid o bjects, remains intact despite all the
quantum funny business. B ut your body is intact due to yet
another field, the electron field. This re assurance only holds true, however, as long as the
information in DNA i s intact—with physical death,
electromagnetism hasn’t changed, nor have the atom s and
molecules that constitute yo ur body. But the process of decay
breaks down the invisible bonds of life. Cells lose the real glue that
makes l ife possible, which isn’t electromagnetism. No one  can say
with logical certainty why the human body doesn’t fly apart into a
cloud of atoms that the next breeze will blow away.It’s easy  to have your head s tart to spin when you realize  that
your b ody, at best, is a constant stream of ever-shifting
information, but we mustn’t lean on this as a crutch for keeping
the physical world intact. Information, remember, is a human
concept, like any other model. To say that we are intact because of
information ha s its limits. It’s not as if 0s and 1s are sticky. They
don’t glom on to one anothe r. The way that 0s and 1s g et glued
together is through human interpretation. We kno w that
information exists because we invented the concept. So where did we get this ability to glue the world together and
give it meaning? The answer will be persuasive only if  we can
apply it to our  bodies. How d id we acquire the ability to hold our
bodies togethe r? That ability must lie outside the body, because
we c an’t say that our bodies told us how to live and be and think. We can ’t even claim that our brains told us how to live and  be and
think. The brain is another physical object, and it would be
circular logic to say that a physical object created itself. (In the
field of artificial intelligence , this is like saying that there was a
robot that invented robots.) No matter what angle you take, the body vanishes into the
realm of concept, mind, and intangible agencies that are its true
creator. But concepts, mind, and immaterial agencies mus t have a
source. Before  you can paint  the Mona Lisa , t here has to be the
concept of art. What gave rise to art that isn’t art alread y? What
gave ri se to concepts that isn’t a concept already? The only
possible answer, as this book argues from many perspectives, is
consciousness. There is no other building block that viably
explains all the mysteries we’ve just touched on, from creativity to
hold cells together, to how inanimate atoms and molecules
somehow arranged themselves into living creatures. There is much more to say, yet if you look at your reflecti on in
the mirror, you can already se e that it is only a solid, stable  “thing”
with de fined edges because you interpret it that way. My aim isn’t
to plunge you into a state of  confusion over your body, h owever. My aim is to free you from all interpretations that force lim itation
upon you. Being human can o nly be defined as limitless. W hen we
impose limitations, we dimin ish being human. That’s the truth of
metareality, a truth we can  inch toward step by step until itbecomes a living reality for as many people as possible, including
you and me. *  The near-death experience is discussed in detail in my book Life After Death , giving
evidence offered by skeptics as well as researchers who support the validity of “going
into the light.”W2
 
“ I ”  I S  T H E  C R E A T O R
O F  I L L U S I O N
hen you see yo ur reflection in the mirror, the fact that
you rec ognize yourself comes naturally and seems too basic even
to c omment on—yet this sma ll act of self-awareness turns out to
have tremendous significance. The self you have learned to
recognize in the mirror is constantly reinforcing all kinds of
limitations tha t do not need to exist. When William Blake spoke of
“mind-forged manacles,” he could just as well have said “ego-
forged” instead. It’s impossible  to remember a time when you didn’t look in the
mirror and see yourself. But there are steps in childhood
development that gave you your first inkling of “I,” your sense of
self. Mirrors hold no interest for very young infants, for example,
and, surprisingly enough, walking and talking precede the time,
around eighteen months, whe n a young child recognizes that he is
seeing h is own  body in a mirror. After that, it becomes a favorite
toy. (Th e few animals that can see themselves in a mirror also
become fascinated with their own image once they catch on.) At t he very least, we need to realize that no one lives in the
same reality. Everyone’s version is personal. A hundred peopleviewing a glorious sunset in H awaii are actually seeing a hundred
different sunsets. For a person who’s feeling depressed, there
might b e no beauty, much less glory, in any sunset. Since “I” is
central to every person’s vers ion of reality, it’s a key element in the
simulation we  accept as real, and until we can know ourselves
beyond “I,” the illusions of virtual reality will keep us in its grip. Illusion  is a loaded wo rd. Society disapproves of someone who
is u nder the illusion that nob ody else in the world really matters;
we c all this an  inflated ego o r solipsism. But the illusion t hat love
conquers all, which everyone  believes if they happen to become
deeply infatua ted, is an illus ion we’d all like to believe in all the
time—falling out of love, which replaces illusion with reality, is
quite painful. A mix of pleasu re and pain characterizes “I.” On the
pleasurable side, discovering their identity makes little children
exultantly happy. The “terrible twos” reflect a rampant display of
egotism, where  the child asse rts, “This is me! Pay attention. I am
here!”
The terrible twos are notorious for being a maddening time for
parents, becau se the naked assertion of ego is obnoxiou s. More
important, it’s  unrealistic. You can’t survive in society if you run
around deman ding that the world pay attention to you all the
time, or  even most of the tim e. Adult life is a compromise between
getting what you want and go ing along with social norms, between
an all-consuming “I” as the center of the universe and a muted “I”
that’s a  small cog in the vast machinery of society. The balance
isn’t ea sy to live with, and c ountless people fall into the trap of
feeling insignificant, while a few are allowed to aggressively
impose themselves on the rest. Psychologists spend their careers mending people’s damaged
sense of self, but on the road to metahuman, we must ask  a more
radical questio n: Why should “I” exist in the first place? It  delivers
a lif e of unpre dictable pleasure and pain. It isolates us f rom the
world and limits what we feel, think, say, and do. How often are
we held back from doing something impulsive because we
automatically think, “I’m no t the kind of person who does X”? That X can be  anything from pulling a practical joke to b ragging
about h ow much money you earn to running off and joining thecircus. Every limitation imposed by “I” is actually pointless. It
serves only to uphold old conditioning from the past. When we see t hat “I” is a mental construct—and a very shaky
one at that—it becomes open  to change. We might decide to do
without it entirely once “I” no longer serves its purpose. “I” exists
to c onvince you that you are a creature of virtual reality, a nd that
going b eyond the simulation isn’t possible, any more  than a
portrait can jump out of its frame. The reason we find o urselves
hopelessly enta ngled in an illusion is that we are totally wrapped
up in “I” and everything it stands for. There’s a lot of dismantling  to do before “I” stops ruling a
person’s life. From our first memories of having a self, “I” has been
our closest companion, and it spends every waking moment
glomming on to desirable experiences and kicking away
undesirable on es. “I” doesn’t want to give up its power, and for
good re ason. Having one special person love you and only you
makes life worthwhile. When “I” fades away, who is there to love
and be loved? But there’s much more at stake. Everything a person
thinks, feels, says, and does is in service to making “I” s tronger,
happier, and better. Becomin g metahuman cannot succee d unless
it offers  something more fulfilling than anything “I” holds out to
us. T h e  E g o ’ s  A g e n d a
At first glance, the ego lo oks indispensable. How can we
abandon something we need  to survive? “I” is the reason you feel
like you and n o one else. You  gaze at the world through a pair of
eyes no  one else possesses. A mother spotting her chil d as he
comes out of s chool to be ta ken home receives the same visual
information as every other parent waiting in the parking lot, but
she lite rally sees a unique ch ild, her own. Uniqueness is precious,
but it comes with a price. Almost none of us is comfortable being
totally on our own, and the prospect of becoming an outcast is
very real if you insist on being yourself. The poet WilliamWordsworth r hapsodizes, “I wandered lonely as a cloud / That
floats on high o’er vales and hills,” but very few of us view  lonely
as a  positive. W hen somebody is so selfless that they surre nder all
personal needs, they’re sometimes called saintly. It’s more likely,
though, they they’ll be labeled antisocial or mad—it’s hard to
believe that someone can be normal and yet totally free of the ego
and its need fo r pleasure and approval. Many spiritual mo vements
denigrate the ego as a burden, a curse, or a hidden en emy of
higher consciousness. Ironically, calling the ego your enemy is an ego judgment. Calling the ego your friend is  also an ego judgment. Ther efore, to
say, “I want to be without ego” is self-contradictory; the ego is
saying that, and it certainly doesn’t want to commit suicide. Your
very wo rds can not get you to  a place outside the illusion  you are
entangled in. You can’t pluck out the ego like removing an
inflamed appen dix. If you thi nk you can, you only sink deeper into
the illu sion by  fooling yourself that you are selfless. “I” is a tiny
thing, a single letter. But w hat you have built around it—what
everyone has built around it—is like a coral reef made up of
minuscule cells hardened over with a massive shell. If this description sounds extreme, consider how you process
raw experience. Experiences are interpreted and become part of
how you  personally accept or reject reality. We don’t witness how
this occurs because most experiences seem too insignificant to
matter. For example, you might taste a vindaloo curry in an Indian
restaurant, find it blazing hot, decide you don’t like it, and never
order it from a  restaurant menu again. Someone else, raise d in the
Indian state of Goa, where vindaloo is a staple dish, barely
registers the heat of the chilies that go into the recipes and  instead
has nostalgic memories about his mother’s vindaloo. The two experiences, as raw data entering the brain through
the sen se of taste, appear to be identical. But they aren’t—
experience a lways passes through someone’s p ersonal
interpretation. “I” is having every experience, not the five senses
or the brain. Reducing experience to raw data is  totally
misleading, as if the eardrum  determined which music you like, or
brain cells decided that a Rem brandt painting was a masterpiece.“I” makes all such decisions, and, as it does, every experience
makes the power of “I” stronger. Experiences, b y nature, are fleeting and momentary. As soon as
I f inish  saying  “thank you” or take a bite of chocolate or kiss my
grandchild, the experience has vanished. Based on this undeniable
fact, you have two options. You can accept how fleeting every
experience is, or you can hold on to it. When you choose the first
option, life is a  flow of fresh experiences, like a stream co nstantly
renewed at the source. You a re not haunted by bad memories or
filled w ith anx iety about what might happen next. If you pick the
second option, you accumulate a storehouse of habits,
conditioning, likes and dislikes, and a catalog of things you never
want to repeat again. The second option is the foundatio n of the
ego, which holds on tightly  to reinforce “I” and its sense of
security. The loss is very great, however, because experiences
won’t stop occurring just b ecause you want them to, and by
holding on, you shut out the flow of life. What d rives us to hold on instead of letting go? A simple fact of
life: “I”  has an agenda. The i llusions created by the mind are not
random. “I” is in charge of yo ur self-interest, and its agenda serves
one demand—“More for me.” We shouldn’t be surprised when
“More for me” becomes insatiable, as billionaires crave more
money and despots more power. The average person cannot relate
to su ch extremism. But the n eed for more is powerful in everyone,
because everyo ne has needs and desires that want to be fulfilled. We all need security and a se nse of safety. To need love makes us
human. Needing to explore the world is an unstoppable u rge in a
toddler careening around the house and getting into everything. But look deeper, and it becomes clear that “I” is based  on need. It ti es y ou to a program of con stantly finding new needs that never
end, wh ich is the opposite of fulfillment. Fulfillment is the state of
needing nothing because you are enough in yourself. Consumer
society promot es neediness as normal—there is always so mething
new to buy tha t will at last put a satisfied smile on your fac e. Thus,
a norm al life is actually a life of lack desperately and co nstantly
trying to fill a black hole that will never be filled. When  you are
needy, fulfillment is unattainable.Here a very important insight dawns. “I” doesn’t have an
agenda. “I” is  the agenda. The ego comes with built-in demands,
no matter how hard we struggle either to deny these demands or
to fu lfill them. Neediness is a state of awareness, and “I” w ill never
loosen its grip until we find a higher state of awareness. A  M y s t e r i o u s  B i r t h
“I” c reates obstacles that keep metareality shut out, as if  by a
thick w all, even  though the w all is invisible. It’s important, in our
journey of self-awareness, to understand why human beings chose
to isolat e themselves in this particular way. Was there a time when
“I” w as weak o r didn’t exist? Even though ego is now an ingrained
part of the human psyche, it has a history. It has left clues in
physical form, like a trail of footprints in the forest made by an
invisible creature. For exa mple, one sign that you are an
individual “I” is that you answer to your name. The first name is
lost in prehis tory, but the first written name belongs to an
Egyptian pharaoh, Iry-Hor (the Mouth of Horus) from 3200 BCE. Once you begin to investigat e, other clues about the evolution
of self-awareness emerge. Much earlier than written names came
the abil ity to recognize our reflection. We have no way to re-create
what our remote ancestors experienced, naturally. Did prehistoric
humans gaze into dark po ols of water and recognize their
reflection? The  speculation is that they did, but the even t cannot
be dated. But the invention of mirrors came along very recently,
measured in evolutionary time. Polished stones used as mirrors
date to 6000 BCE in what is now modern-day Turkey, and as
ancient civilizations emerged in Egypt, South America, and China,
whatever could hold a polished surface, from obsidian and copper
to bronze and silver, was employed for this purpose. Are we the onl y creatures who can see themselves in a mi rror? A pet parakeet  will play with  its image in a mirror because (we
assume) it sees another parakeet there. Dogs and cats typically
show no interest in mirrors. But, oddly enough, self-recognitionevolved in creatures that ha ve no reason to possess this  ability. Chimpanzees, gorillas, and ot her great apes do see themselves in a
mirror. How do we know if a creature actually sees itself in a
reflection? The most telling test is actually quite simple: pu t a pink
hat on the animal’s head. When the animal looks in the mi rror and
sees the pink hat, does it touch the hat on its head or the hat in the
mirror? If it touches the ha t on its head, it passes the test of
“That’s me I see.”
Yet gre at apes don’t have m irrors in their native habitat, so
there seems to be no evolutionary reason for this ability. Likewise,
we don’t know why three other creatures—magpies, elephants,
and dolphins—can recognize themselves in a mirror. Magpies use
their reflections to preen themselves more, while elephants, once
they understand how a mirror works, engage in novel new
behaviors. For example, they spend an inordinate amount  of time
examining the  inside of thei r mouths, an area of the body they
couldn’t see without the aid of a mirror. (If this topic fascinates
you, go to a YouTube video that shows Asian elephants and how
they behave when confronted with a mirror:
https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=-EjukzL-bJc .) Mirrors aren’t the only way w e recognize ourselves. The oldest
artifacts that hint at self-awareness are sculptures that depict
humanoid forms. What makes them so astonishing, according to
the mos t recen t archeology, is that such objects predate the rise of
Homo sapiens . A simplified time line will help us to get our
bearings:
14 million years ago First great apes appear
2.5 million years ago The genus Homo  evolves
1.9 million years ago Hominids evolve into Homo erectus
200,000 years ago Homo sapiens  appears
10,000 years ago End of the last Ice Age
By the time Homo sapiens  wa s becoming a distinct species,
around 200,000 years ago, our closest ancestor, Homo erectus ,
had long discovered fire and toolmaking. Nor did hominids waitfor our species  in order to develop a sense of self-awareness. In
extremely ancient ruins have been found crude humanoid figures
fashioned by Homo erectus . T hey are astonishingly old. The first
to b e discovered was the Ven us of Berekhat Ram, a basalt artifact
unearthed in 1981 by a team of archeologists from Hebrew
University on a dig in the Golan Heights near Syria in Israel. The Ven us of Berekhat Ram consists of two round shapes, the
bigger one suggesting a body, the smaller one a head. Three
incisions can be seen, two on either side of the “body” stan ding for
arms, o ne encircling the “head” without standing for any facial
feature. Despite the name Venus , t his object is so primitive that at
first som e experts believed it was an accidental formation made by
natural erosion. The debate over whether these are intentional
marks etched by an artist was  settled when a closely related figure,
the Ven us of Tan-Tan, was l ater discovered in Morocco. The two
sculptures rese mble each other so closely that they cou ld have
been created by the same hand. Dating the Israeli find was exciting but difficult to pinp oint. The Venus of B erekhat Ram was sandwiched between tw o layers
of v olcanic deposits, one from around 230,000 years BCE, the
other from 700,000 years BCE. The sculpture was made sometime
in that vast expanse of time. To the modern eye, the Venus  of Tan-
Tan from the same Lower Stone Age looks more conv incingly
human, since it has a torso, head, and legs. The fact that a mind
predating not just Homo sapiens  but  Ne anderthals felt the urge to
depict i ts form artistically is a sign of self-awareness woven into
the very fabric of our existe nce. The sculptor is saying, “This is
what I and my kind look like.” As far back as anyone can tell, there
were never humans without  self-awareness. “I” hasn’t just survived since prehistory: it metastasized. All
around us we s ee evidence of malignant selfishness. The gr otesque
excesses of greed in our present Gilded Age is a symptom of “I”
run amok, and we’ve seen ho w recklessness in the financial sector
can bring about disasters i n the global economy without the
moneyed culprits bothering to care—or stopping in their pursuit of
even m ore wea lth. If it weren ’t for the ego’s drive to defeat other
egos, to  make itself important by denigrating anyone  who is
different, there would be no n eed for us-versus-them thinking andthe end less conflicts this has created, from family squabbles to
civil wa rs, religious crusades,  and the global atomic threat. Can we
account for this metastasis and come up with a cure? If you lived th rough the Cold War and the threat of nu clear
devastation, you have seen how “I,” having formed an enemy, will
carry enmity to the brink of m ass destruction. Even if the nuclear
shadow somehow vanished, nations would continue to perfect
new, more deadly means of mechanized death. It would benefit
humankind to reduce the am ount of damage we do to ourselves
that is directly traceable to our habit of viewing the world f rom the
ego’s p erspective, given the needless fear and sufferin g it has
brought. C h o o s i n g  t o  B e  S e p a r a t e
No one catches pneumonia or even the common cold
voluntarily, but when it comes to “I”—whose ill effects reach into
every corner of life, we have chosen to be separate—this is a
species trait. We have evolved to feel superior to every other life
form. On the one hand, t his gave us a major evol utionary
advantage. Consider how we relate to the environment. Every
other cr eature adapts to the e nvironment and merges with it. Over
billions of years, evolution has created exquisite mechanisms for
adapting to the most inhospitable reaches on the planet. The
interior of Antarctica, for example, contains a specific kind of
mountain know n as a “nunatak,” a peak that crops up from the
thick surround ing ice cap. A more desolate environment would be
hard to imagine, with nothing but ice fields in all directions,
subzero cold, howling winds, and seemingly no foothold for plants
or animals. Yet the re are records of a white seabird known as the snow
petrel ( Pagodroma nivea ) nestin g in nunataks as much as 60
miles in land fr om the coast, t o which they must return to skim the
water for food. When mating season arrives, snow petrels find
exposed rock crevices for their nests made of small pebble s, and amating couple  nurtures a single egg in a frozen wilder ness for
forty to fifty d ays before it hatches. Evolution placed the snow
petrel in this si tuation, but humans have a choice about wh ere and
how to live. These choices weren’t dictated by our physical limitations. Humans have encroached on the planet’s farthest reaches much
more than our hominid anc estors could physically endure. It is
our force of will, an inner drive that is determined to bring Nature
under c ontrol, that impelled us to inhabit all but the most lifeless
environments in terms of extreme heat and cold, scarce food
supplies, long periods of the  year without the sun, high altitude,
and so on. When we were still in our naked state, extreme physical
hardship did push us to the edge of survival, nearly exting uishing
Homo sapiens  a lmost as soo n as our species appeared. It took
awareness to overcome the ph ysical odds against us. As de tailed in
a 2016 Scientific American  art icle, titled “When the Sea Saved
Humanity,” human survival was touch and go, and most of our
ancestors didn’t make it. The article’s author, Curtis W. Marean, is
an archeologist from Arizona State University, whose team
discovered the  evidence for this evolutionary crisis.
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:

        For example, when there’s a sudden death in the fam ily or a
catastrophe like a tornado or the house burning down, we  may go
into shock. With a blank stare we reveal how dislocated our
existence suddenly feels, saying things like “This can’t be
happening. It’s unreal” or “Nothing matters anymore. ”Normally, this dissociated st ate will pass, and in time reality
feels real again. But some pe ople never return—after a psychotic
break, for example, a percentage of mental patients become
chronically sch izophrenic an d have hallucinations, seeing  images
or hearing voices for the rest of their lives. But the feeling  of “This
can’t be happening; it’s like a  dream” doesn’t have to be triggered
by shoc k. Coun tless people engage in personal fantasies of fame,
wealth, or some other dream that feels totally real to them and
drives them all their lives. W hen someone is suddenly ecstatically
happy, for whatever reason, everything can seem surreal, too. However, the physical world “out there” feels real and
substantial a lot more than 99 percent of the time, which is proof
enough, one would think, that we aren’t under some kind of spell. But we are. Iro nically, there’s  now technology that forces a person
to confr ont wh at is real and  what isn’t. When you don a virtual
reality (VR) headset, powered by artificial intelligen ce, the
simulation you are plunged  into is like a wraparound, three-
dimensional movie of such vividness that it overwhelms the senses
and cau ses a dislocation from what we deem as everyday reality. You might find yourself precariously perched on a steel
construction girder in midair with the city street many stories
below. Your brain, fooled by the visual image, triggers the stress
response just as if you were r eally teetering on the girder. You will
feel you rself go ing off balance in a panic, even though in t he room
where you are actually standing, your feet are firmly on the ground
and you are in no danger of plunging to your death. The VR illusion is created by visual images, and the same holds
true in everyday life. What you see, you believe in. Such trust is
misplaced, as every grade-schooler learns when told that  the sun
doesn’t actuall y rise in the east and set in the west. Y et when
quantum physics tells us that matter isn’t what it appears to be, we
continue to cling to the sens ations of weight and solidity of hard
physical objects as if they w ere indisputable. Would a bullet be
less dan gerous if you saw thr ough the illusion. No. The bullet and
the entire physical world remain intact but with the realization
that th ey are the end point of a process that begins in
consciousness. Once you grasp this and fully absorb it, your personal reality
becomes much more malleab le, because you can go to the source
and be part of the creative process. Getting untangled from the
virtual-reality simulation isn’t easy. Our personal experience
would h ave to  change drastically, but the beauty of it is that we
have th e potential for change where before we had none or very
little. W hile you cannot turn bullets into cotton balls, to accept
that all of reality “out there” is beyond your ability to chan ge isn’t
true. The gro und rules of everyday life are much looser than we
imagine. Even  when a perso n feels completely immerse d in the
simulation, the re is an escap e route. And not just one, but many. This only makes sense. Metareality is more real than any virtual
simulation. We should regard glimpses into it as evidence that we
can inhabit the meta state all  the time. Instead, the entang lements
of virtu al reality have turned the picture wrong side up. As you
read the meta experiences below, you will be tempted to see them
as a nomalous, freakish, or untrustworthy. Getting real is a process
that beg ins by confronting yo ur misplaced trust in illusions every
day. “ S o m e t h i n g  H a p p e n e d ”
Let’s co nsider one of the mo st basic aspects of virtual reality. Hardly anyone would question that being inside the body is
normal, natural, and a true experience. But this certainty runs
counter to the phenomenon of out-of-body experiences (OBEs),
which h ave be en documente d in every culture for centur ies. The
most widely publicized out-of-body experience is “going into the
light,” as reported by patien ts who have clinically died during
emergency medical procedures, especially from heart attacks. *
It tu rns out that expecting to go into the light when we die is
misleading, be cause what happens in near-death experi ences is
much more individual than a nyone thought. The largest study of
near-death exp eriences, whic h examined 2,060 patients who diedunder e mergency or intensiv e care, arrived at the conclus ion that
death isn’t a s ingle event—it  is a process. There isn’t simply one
final or definitive event. Du ring this process, there are ways to
reverse death. In cases where medical professionals were
successful at getting the heart, lungs, and brain to come back to
normal functio ning, about 40 percent of those who died a nd came
back remember that “some thing happened” when the y were
flatlined. This pa rt of the study, which was titled AWARE and was l ed by
British intensive-care doctor Sam Parnia, seems irrefuta ble. But
very q uickly the details of “something happened” become
controversial. We have to dive into a few details to see w hat the
issues are. Out of the 2,060  patients who died (the study went
from 2008 to 2012 and inclu ded 33 researchers in 15 ho spitals),
104 were resuscitated. The first point to note is that all had
actually died. They were not “near death. ” Their hearts and lungs
had stopped functioning, and within 20 to 30 seconds their brains
showed no activity. The decomposition of cells throughout the
body actually takes several hours to commence afterward. During
the interval between dying and being brought back is when
39 percent reported the mem ory of being conscious even though
their brains had stopped. Dr. Parnia believes that this i s probably just a fraction of those
who had such experiences; the rest had their memories erased
either by brain inflammation, which occurs for 72 hours  after a
person is brought back from  death, or because of drugs that are
administered as part of resuscitation, which also cause memory
loss. Of  the 101 patients who completed the questionnaire about
their ex perience during death, only 9 percent had an ex perience
compatible wi th the typical “going into the light” model. The
majority of memories were vague and unfocused, som etimes
pleasant but sometimes not. Only 2 percent  of those who came back, which means 2 p eople
out of 101, ha d the experience of full awareness or out- of-body
experiences such as looking down from above their bodies
watching and listening to the medical team as it was working to
revive t hem. O nly one person could accurately narrate what hadbeen happenin g in the room in such detail that it corresponded to
timed events. So what does this one person tell us about dying. It depe nds. Skeptics shrug off all such experiences as p urely
physical, claim ing that if w e had finer measurements of brain
activity, at a ve ry subtle level we’d discover that the brai n hadn’t
actually died.
The author argues that the simulation of reality is not fixed, and that it's possible to change and create a new reality by recognizing the illusory nature of the world and taking control of our own experiences.
What is the author's main argument in the passage?
The author suggests that DNA is not the primary factor in human development, and that the information contained in DNA is not the sole determinant of human behavior.
What is the author's stance on the concept of DNA and its role in human development?
The author argues that the concept of the self and the ego is a mental construct that can be changed and reinterpreted, and that it's holding us back from experiencing life fully.
What is the author's view on the concept of the self and the ego?
The author does not explicitly state an opinion on the role of quantum physics in understanding human consciousness, but rather uses it as an example to illustrate the idea that our perception of reality is an illusion.
What is the author's opinion on the role of quantum physics in understanding human consciousness?
The author argues that the concept of metareality, or the ability to change one's perception of reality, is essential for personal growth and self-awareness, and that it's possible to achieve a higher level of consciousness by recognizing the illusory nature of the world.
What is the main point of the author's discussion of the concept of "metareality"?