Marean
writes:
At some point between 195,000 and 123,000 years ago,
the population size of Homo sapiens  plummeted, thanks
to cold , dry climate conditions that left much of our
ancestors’ African homeland uninhabitable. Everyone
alive today is d escended from a group of people from a
single region who survive d this catastrophe. The
southern coast  of Africa would have been one of the few
spots where humans could survive during this climate
crisis because it harbors an abundance of shellfish and
edible plants. At c aves along a section of the South African coast, know n as
Pinnacle Point , archeologists  have found abundant mollusk shells
and occasionally remains of seals and whales, indicating thatalmost fifty thousand years before previously explored sites, early
humans had learned to harvest the sea for food while the
harshness of an Ice Age climate caused almost everyone else to
succumb. Tool s in the caves suggest that these survivors h ad high
cognitive abilities—Marean makes a strong if controversial case
for mental faculties that were totally necessary for survival, such
as c alculating tidal rise and fall by the moon. Only at low tide, he
says, co uld the inland cave dwellers trek to the sea and un dertake
the hazardous venture of harvesting mussels and other mollusks
against the pounding surf. Trapped in the direst distress, our ancestors had no avenue of
physical rescue or escape. How did they find the means to rescue
themselves? E d i t i n g  R e a l i t y
The answer is not physical. Fascinating as these archeological
discoveries are, it wasn’t harsh external pressure that forced our
ancestors to adapt. It took a great reality shift “in here.” We
became a consciousness-based species, using the mind to outwit
Nature’s challenges. One of  the most important factors in the
expansion of human consciousness was that our brains became
too big, efficient, and complex for their own good. A kind of brain
overload fueled our desperate  need to whittle it down so th at daily
life wou ld be manageable. If the rush and hubbub of a mod ern city
seem li ke over load, that’s nothing compared to the mental crisis
our remote ancestors faced. The pro blem wasn’t that the human brain simply grew and
couldn’t stop. The problem was that instinct, which guides how
other cr eatures behave, bega n to dwindle in us. A honeybee seeks
only flo wers; it instinctually stings an intruder; only the queen bee
lays egg s. Hum an beings have a choice in all three behaviors. We
explore Nature for all manner of food. We fight or keep the peace
in different circumstances. We mate according to extremely
complex behavior patterns. Having been freed from instinct, thechoices that face us are lite rally infinite. The brain cannot be
infinitely large , however. So how can the human mind fit  infinite
choice within a finite physiology? This wa sn’t a dilemma faced only by our remote ance stors. Every newbor n baby comes into a world where too much
information is constantly bombarding the higher brain, a flood of
raw data that could never be processed in its totality. Think of
searching for your car in a crowded parking lot. To find it, you
don’t visually take in the pave ment, sky, people, and every vehicle,
still or moving , in your field of vision. Instead, you have a mental
image of your car, and, wi th focused attention, you edit out
everything that’s irrelevant to one task, finding a specific vehicle. This points to another reason we develop an ego. People
identify with what they can do. A car mechanic is different from a
concert violinist. A sentence  that begins with “I am X” can end
with all  kinds of behaviors, tr aits, talents, and preferences. By the
same token, a sentence that b egins with “I am not Y” can also end
in many ways. As it turns out , the list of things that we choose not
to be is much l onger than that of the things we choose to b e. If you
are a Christia n, that’s a si ngle choice that excludes all other
religions—at p resent count, there are 4,200 faiths in the world
that a person with one faith d oesn’t have to think about e xcept in
passing. As we exclude countless choices without even thinking
about th em, w e are editing re ality according to the dictates of the
individual “I.”
This ability to edit raw realit y was already present in an imals
that hunt for a specific prey, for example, but there was no
conscious choo sing involved. When penguins and other seabirds
that nes t in huge colonies come back to shore with their c rops full
of food,  they somehow find t he one specific fledgling that belongs
to them in the overwhelming din of noise created by thousands of
chicks. The arctic fox can detect the movement of mice
underneath several feet of snow in the winter and pounce
precisely on its prey. Monarch butterflies can follow an exact
migration patt ern to and from one locale in Mexico wh ere they
breed. There’s an enormous myste ry about how humans developed
focused attenti on, not for specific types of food and locales, but asa tr ait we can  turn on and off. The things you’re interested in
fascinate you and hold your attention, while the things you have
no inte rest in escape your n otice. The appeal of detective novels
lies in how c leverly a Sherlock Holmes notices the tiniest,
seemingly irrel evant clue. (Holmes, we are told, was an e xpert in
cigar as h and what kind of tobacco each ash represented , but he
didn’t know that the Earth r evolves around the Sun because that
bit of knowledge was useless in the art of crime detection.) Even though we cannot solve  this mystery of paying attention
versus tuning out, there’s no  doubt that “I” is in charge of both. My wif e and children and grandchildren are objects of deep
personal interest to me (the kind of interest we label as “love”)
while th ey are total strangers to nearly seven billion other people
on the planet. Once attention is focused, emotion follows. Growing
up, my son Go tham loved the Boston Celtics basketball team and
hated th e Los Angeles Lakers . This became part of who he was, an
either/or decision that he identified with. Either/or is the most basic ed iting tool our minds possess, and
it b egins with “me or not me.” Ego separates each pers on from
every other person though countless decisions about “me or not
me.” M any such decisions have no real purpose except to reinforce
the ego. (It’s not as if Celtics fans are better, smarter, or more
well-off than Lakers fans. Yet  when Gotham found himself moving
to Los Angeles , and his wor k put him in close contact with the
Lakers, it was a wrenching c hange. Turning “not me” into “me”
can be very hard. Imagine, for example, that you had to spend a
year working for a political party you’ve disliked all your life.) As the ego metastasized over time, the “other” acquired
differences became the basis of social suspicion and disapproval. Before my children were born, I was a newly arrived immigrant
working at a h ospital in New Jersey during the doctor s hortage
caused by the Vietnam War in the 1970s. Every day going to work,
I kn ew in the back of my min d that the American-born doctors in
the emergency room looked upon me as their inferior because I
had come from India. If we stand back and consider the whole picture, “I” edits
reality too much and for se lfish reasons. We deliberately close
ourselves off from new possibilities to suit old, fixed pref erences.Everyone’s past is a chaotic c ollection of choices about what they
like and dislike, how they fee l emotionally, and the memories they
carry ar ound as baggage, not to mention their fixed beliefs, family
history, and every life-altering experience since birth. You weren’t shaped by what happened to you since birth. You
were sh aped b y what you th ought about those happenin gs. The
ego and every response it has ever had is a vast mental construct—
the metastasis of “I”—that grew from the seeds of ego  in our
remote ancest ors. Our ability to edit reality is responsible for
everything a human being c an decide to pay attention to, and
since w e pay attention to billions of things, reality in its unedited
state must be v astly larger. Human achievements represen t a tiny
fraction of what reality has to  offer—the horizon spreading before
us is unlimited. D e c i d i n g  t o  L e t  G o
We’ve b een covering what might be called the natural history of
“I,” and it has told us many important things about how the virtual
reality we accept as real is actually mind-made. In the  human
mind, reality is constructed so that
The available information isn’t overwhelming and chaotic. We feel free to accept or reject any aspect of reality we
choose. We seek to repeat the most familiar, safe, and agreeable
experiences. We avoid the most threatening, strange, and disagreeable
experiences. The ultimate judge of what’s real is the ego, which is highly
personal and selective about how we interpret the world. I’m not here to declare that the ego is your enemy, which would
be just another  ego judgment. From a neutral standpoint, the egois limiti ng. Having chosen to travel through life with “I” as your
most intimate companion, you have silently agreed to filter,
censor, and judge your exp eriences. That’s the primary  use of
consciousness in most people ’s lives, and it’s like using a powerful
computer just for emails. To limit your personal reality shuts you
off from the infinite potential that is the greatest gift of
consciousness. At some point “I” edits out too much reality or misse s the
important things that could expand love, compassion, creativity,
and evolution. We spend too much mental energy focusing on
things that are damaging and  self-defeating. If you’ve attended a
Thanksgiving gathering where the same tired, vexing family issues
are hau led out year after yea r, you know how stubbornly “I” can
cling to  petty, irksome things. For creatures trapped by physical
evolution, there’s no escape. Cheetahs are the fastest runners on
Earth, but their amazing speed has made them smaller and
weaker than other predators. The most vulnerable stage  in their
life cyc le is at birth, when t he cheetah mother is limited in her
ability to protect her young. It is estimated that 90 percent of
newborn cheetahs do not survive. Added to this is the speed of the
gazelles that the cheetah cha ses as its prey. The gazelle and the
cheetah are so closely matched that adult cheetahs often fail in
pursuit of food and therefore live on the brink of sta rvation. Trapped by their specific evolutionary adaptation, cheetahs can’t
turn to the other foods that a re all around them—termites or grass
or mice—to fend off starvation. Homo sapiens  f aces the opposite predicame nt. Our minds open
up the field o f infinite possibilities. Having the ability to bend
Nature to our will, we make deliberate choices that seem
beneficial to our survival , but decisions have unforeseen
consequences. Defending themselves with weapons advanced the
rise of early humans, and a weapon as sophisticated as the bow
and arr ow appeared as early as 45,000 BCE. Then w eaponry
couldn’t be stopped, making the catastrophe of the nucle ar arms
race inevitable . Or was it? Freedom of thought is our natural state;
being trapped  by the past isn’t. We are still in that state of
liberation, should we choose  to take advantage of it. The pivotalissue is the me tastasis of “I,” which has taken free will too far in
the service of anger, fear, greed, blind selfishness, and all the rest. Once we see this, we can understand how personal
relationships g et sabotaged. Two people fall in love and get
married. After the honeymoo n, they must relate to each other in
all kin ds of ways—doing household chores, making money,
scheduling tim e for things to do together or apart—and “I” does its
job of managin g one situation after another. But if you are having
a fig ht o ver fam ily finances, your ego brings up anger, the need to
win, and the stubborn desire to be right. If the argument gets
heated enough, grievances over older wrangles come bubbling up
to the surface. Unless you are careful, a trivial disagreement gets
bitterly personal. What has been lost in the heat of the moment is
the underlying love that sparked the relationship in the first place. That’s the larger reality, which “I” single-mindedly excludes so
that it can win a small and usually pointless argument. Two pe ople occupy a small dot on the map. Now expand the
territory on a global scale. Th e human race is ravaging th e planet
because seven billion people , acting on the advice of “I,” prefer
local experience over solving a global problem. Wars break out
and population s incur death and destruction on a massive scale
because the larger territor y—maintaining amicable peace—is
sabotaged by the anger generated by every “I” choosing to follow
its irrational, angry, hostile agenda. The bot tom lin e is that “I” firmly believes it can manage re ality,
and yet human history is litte red with its abject failures. Even the
basic assumption that “I” is in contact with reality is false. At this
moment you have no actual e xperience of the quantum field, from
which e verything in creation springs. You have no experience of
the atoms and molecules th at constitute your body, nor of the
operation of your cells, nor of the brain itself. It seems strange that
the human brain has no idea of its very existence. Viewing a brain
under the surgeon’s knife or  while dissecting a body in medical
school is merely the second hand observation of a mushy gray
thing with grooves running across its outer surface. Nothing
observable hints that this mushy stuff processes consciousness. At bottom, “I” polices our experience to make sure that life
remains local and not infinite . Infinity is the ego’s enemy, becauseinfinity is the whole map, not just dots and pins stuck in it here
and the re. To let go of “I” is  to embrace infinity. Only by being
comfortable wi th our infinite potential can we discover tha t reality
doesn’t need editing. Whole ness is where we belong. Once we
begin to chop wholeness into bits and pieces, the ego takes over to
manage each one, bit by bit,  and, whether we realize it or not, it
depletes us physically and mentally. So we need to inv estigate
whether infinit y is a livable environment. If it is, then letting go of
the ego can be justified. And no matter what “I” has done to
improve life, we may begin to realize that living in wholeness is
better.H3
 
H U M A N  P O T E N T I A L
I S  I N F I N I T E
uman potential is infinite because consciousness has no
boundaries. Being human means that anything can happen. For
the mom ent let’s explore the inner world of possibilities. There are
ways in which outer reality  is much more malleable through
consciousness than anyone s upposes. Since consciousness is the
foundation of reality, we sho uldn’t set down any absolute limits. In order to fly, human beings didn’t sprout wings, but we did find
a path to achieve what we e nvisioned. Keep in mind that a path
will always be open, no matter how far-fetched our aspirations. In t he inner domain of consc iousness, the possibilities for new
thoughts, insights, and discoveries is already unlimited. This alone
makes it important to see Homo sapiens  as a consciousness-based
species. Infinite possibilities are part of our makeup. But
something inside us resists  believing in infinity as a human
quality. Edited reality fee ls more comfortable. Th ere are
extraordinary events, however, that prove, quite litera lly, the
reality of the notion “Anything can happen.” Sudden leaps in
consciousness are occurring all around us if we only take the time
to l ook. But “Anything can happen” could describe a totally
random universe filled with quantum noise. In quantum theory,everything bubbles up in “quantum foam” before form and
structure begin  to appear, rather like formless cake batter until the
cake is baked and acquires a solid shape. Because quantum
particles wink in and out of  existence, according to the laws of
probability, there is an infinitesimal chance that a physical object
—a leaf, a chai r, or a sperm whale—could suddenly appea r out of
the blue. Physics exists to te ll us exactly how nearly im possible
such an event actually is. You mi ght think that these matters are so abstract that they
have nothing to do with you personally. When quantum physics
asserts that the chance of you r driveway being blocked by a giant
squid is very, very tiny, you aren’t learning anything new. We
participate in the world “out there” the way society taught us to. But th is is a radically short-sighted view of reality. Our
participation i n the world actually begins at the quantum level. For all practical purposes, th is is where mind and matte r meet. Both ex ist as possibilities, rea dy to emerge into manifestation but
still invisible. Therefore, min d and matter are more malleable there, ju st as
soft clay is more malleable than a china plate or figurine after it
has be en sha ped, fired, and glazed. Being human, we can
consciously return to the quantum level, which expands our
participation infinitely compared with what we can do once
creation has hardened into p lace. Not only is creation softer, so to
speak, b ut mind and matter h aven’t separated yet. When they do,
a ro ck won’t instantly become a rock while a thought goes another
way and instantly becomes a thought. Mind and mat ter first
emerge exactly alike, as invisible ripples in the quantum field. These ripples will form patterns as they run into ripples from the
gravity field, the quark field,  the electron field, and a few others. Interference patterns, which are like the rippled imprint o f waves
left on a sandy beach, get se t up, and only then do recognizable
objects such as quarks and electrons begin to appear. Physics has done a brilliant jo b tracing creation back this f ar. It
has done very little, however, to trace the mind back to its source—
we’ll have a lot more to say a bout that. But the upshot is that the
average person assumes that mind and matter are naturally
separate. That’s how the illusion confuses us. Thinking about anapple is  very different from holding a physical apple. Y et at a
deeper level the thought and  the apple were once the same. They
begin as possibilities in the  domain that physics calls virtual
reality. The mystery revolves  around how two things tha t are so
unalike could have come from the same seed. To take  advan tage of infinite potential, you must accept that
reality is open-ended, capable of taking subtle, invisible impulses
and tur ning th em into mind a nd matter. This open-ended ness I’m
calling metareality, because it lies beyond mind and matter;
metareality is where the en tire universe and everything in it,
including all mental activity, is in an embryonic state. I won’t pretend that metareality is easy to embrace when you
first lea rn about its existence. How secure can you feel about your
life if it is tota lly open-ended ? Not very—everyone prefer s things
to b e more se ttled and orderly than that. But when yo u think
about i t, a painter contemplating a blank canvas or a writer
looking at a blank sheet of paper relies on “Anything can happen”
as th e best and  highest creative state. When you approach infinite
potential as infinite creative p ossibilities, there’s an openin g to the
kind of freedom “I” cannot experience within boundaries. We are so conditioned to say “my” body and “my” mind th at we
automatically believe they ar e doing the acting and thinking we
experience. But in metareality consciousness is doing the acting
and thinking. We could—and  should—shift into that perspective
for o ne simple reason. The br ain cannot make the leap int o higher
consciousness; only consciousness can. A violin string can’t invent
new forms of music, but the musical mind can use the vio lin as its
instrument of physical expression. In the same way, the bodymind
—an understan ding that the body and mind are a single  unit—is
the physical expression of consciousness. In music there are more possible combinations of notes than
atoms in the u niverse, and yet we are comfortable with such vast
possibilities. In chess, we play without anxiety in the face  of 400
possible positions after each player has made one move, which
explodes to over 288 billion after four moves. In everyday ways,
like playing games, we take infinity for granted. It’s all around us. Even if you had a limited vocabulary of two thousand words,
which is what a typical five-year-old has, that’s enough to createan endless string of word combinations, not to mention that
nothing stops you from giv ing a common word multiple new
meanings. ( Pet , f or example,  is already a verb, a noun, and an
adjective, as in “I pet my pet cat, who is the only pet I hav e”—and
anyone is free to assign new  meanings to the word. Pet  could
substitute for coddled , luxurious , endearing , and the like. It
already has those connotations. New meanings can be invented
out of the blue, the way hip  and cool  have wandered away from
their literal meanings.) Since w e are so used to infin ity in these simple guises, w e can
expand our comfort zone to be comfortable with infinity as a
personal  trait. S u d d e n  G e n i u s
“Anything can happen” is essential to being human. A leap of
awareness ca n happen unexpectedly, as in the amazing
phenomenon k nown as sudden genius , a term coined by Darold
Treffert, a physician in Wisconsin who has become an expert in
“exceptional brain performance.” He defines sudden genius  as a
“spontaneous epiphany-like  moment where the rules and
intricacies of music, art, or mathematics, for example, are
experienced and revealed, producing almost instantaneous
giftedness.”
Of t he fourteen cases Treffe rt has studied to date, a striking
example is a twenty-eight- year-old Israeli-born man he calls
“K.A.” As a performer, K.A. could casually pick out popular tunes
on t he piano one note at a t ime. One day he was in a shopping
mall that had a piano on display. To quote his account of the next
moment, “I suddenly realize d what the major scale and minor
scale we re, wh at their chords were and where to put my fi ngers in
order to play c ertain parts of the scale.” Without prior kn owledge
or abilit y, K.A. suddenly just knew  how musical harmony worked. He veri fied this by searching for music theory on the internet, and,
to h is amazement, “[m]ost o f what they had to teach I alreadyknew.” He was left baffled by  how he could know a subject he had
never studied. Such a phenomenon strongly supports a central feature of
metareality—that human beings are already connected to infinite
possibilities. We are kept from our hidden potential for all kinds of reasons—
we’ve just seen how the ego edits and limits reality, for i nstance. Even when we are confronted by evidence to the contrary, the
power of limitation prompt s us to greet it with skepticism or
overlook it entirely. The very fact that Treffert could get his
observations on sudden genius published in Scientific American
(July 25, 2018) is owed to a larger mystery, known as  savant
syndrome, which has a well-established history in medical and
psychological practice. Savant syndro me also deals with extraordinary abilities  that
defy explanation. There were already two different forms of this
condition that Treffert is also an expert on. In “congenital savant
syndrome,” the extraordinary ability appears early in life. There
are chil dren who can tell you the day of the week that any date,
past or  future, falls on—so-called calendar savants—and others
who can mentally generate prime numbers with the sp eed and
accuracy of a computer. (A prime number is a numera l that is
divisible only by 1 and itself. The sequence begins easily with 2, 3,
5, 7 , and 11. But soon it beco mes much harder to know the next
number in the sequence without a calculator to help. For instance,
7,727 and 7,741 are both prim e numbers, but none of the numbers
in between them are.) The other form is “acquired savant syndrome,” where an
ordinary person suddenly has astonishing abilities after a head
injury, stroke, or other central nervous system incident. To these
two ver sions T reffert has added “sudden savant syndrom e” as a
third ty pe, as in K.A.’s story. None can be scientifically ex plained. In the congenital form, the child is often on the spec trum of
autism or mental retardation. (In his celebrated 1985 book, The
Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat , th e neurologist Oliver
Sacks recounts stories of “other-brained” people, including
incidents of people with right-brain injury and autistic children
who have extraordinary mathematical abilities. )Savant syndrom e had a some what alien reputation when it was
confined to autism and bra in injuries, but once sudden genius
occurred in seemingly norm al people, it came much closer to
home. Treffert titled his article “Brain Gain: A Person Can
Instantly Blossom into a Savant—and No One Knows Why.” To a
science-minded reader, brain  is the most si gnificant word  in the
title, because the standard explanation for all mental phenomena
in our day is brain-centered. But it’s not reasonable to say that a
brain suddenly learned how music theory works without any
external input, education, or training. (It’s rather like saying that
the brain knows all the cities in the world without ever having seen
a map.) People who acquire sudden artistic ability typically
become obsessed with painting and can hardly pull themselves
away to  do anything else. This is reminiscent of Picasso, who was
obsessed with painting from early childhood, but it would be hard
to im agine that people who had little or no interest in art  became
fascinated with making pain tings overnight because the ir brain
told them to. For mo st people, art, music, and math are not critical aspects of
life, and with o nly fourteen cases of sudden genius on record, so
far at least, th is strange phenomenon seems fairly exotic. But it
turns out that sudden genius is yet another clue to the mystery of
what it means to be human, and the clue has to do with infinity
itself. R e l a t i n g  t o  I n f i n i t y
If s omeone has little or no  interest in music and sud denly
knows music theory without studying it, where did the knowledge
come from? It wasn’t sent through a teacher or textbook, which is
the normal way of gaining knowledge. Somehow it was
downloaded, w e might say, from a source “out there” somewhere. But wh ere? Music is a hum an creation—there are no chords or
sonatas or symphonies in Nature. Nor is there an invisible library
“out there,” where all the information about music is stored.Besides, even if such a libr ary existed, who would be sending
people a download when they didn’t want one? We want to keep away from the head-spinning department, and
metareality can feel bewildering. Metareality is the storage place
for ever ything that has ever been thought and ever will be thought. Because infini ty is boundless, metareality also contain s every
possible  thought. Only recently have scholars of ancient Greece
been ab le to decode the scrap s of manuscripts that contain written
music, and, with painstaking effort and guesswork, enabled the
music to actually be played on reed pipes and drums exactly as
Socrates might have heard street musicians as he wandered
around Athens in the fourth century BCE. To b ring back ancient music is an act of re-creation. The mind
is tr ying to rem ember what it never forgot, which sounds strange. That’s not the same as retr ieving information. To grasp what’s
really at stake, an image from everyday life might help: the cloud. Anyone who accesses the int ernet has probably heard, if only
vaguely, of the cloud, a place in cyberspace where the world’s sum
of in formation  is held. The cloud has a capacity multip le times
larger than the world’s larges t libraries. Every email is save d there,
every online photo, every tr ansaction at Amazon or search on
Google. As universal as the c loud has become, few realize that it
has a physical location. Huge data centers have been erected to store all the
information that was once stored on home and business
computers. W hen you snap a photo of anything—a sunset, the
Grand Canyon, a newborn baby—then crop it, improve the color,
and send it to someone’s smartphone, the image doesn’t actually
go from you to  the other pers on without passing first through the
cloud. Massive data centers in Loudon County, Virginia, each
millions of square feet in size, house the actual cloud. Accessing the cloud is instantaneous in cyberspace, but getting
into on e of these data cente rs is an arduous process. The core
where thousands of powerful computers are located is protected
by layer s of security. A worker must pass through a retinal scanner
that ide ntifies the person (it even can tell that the person is alive,
not someone contriving to use someone else’s eyeball), thenthrough a “mantrap,” a room where the entry door must lock
before the exit door will open, then through a squad o f armed
guards, and all along the wa y nine different passwords must be
presented. The fact that cyberspace is  an actual place stands in stark
contrast to consciousness. You don’t go to a destinati on “out
there” to remember the tune to Frank Sinatra’s “Strangers in the
Night,” which comes complete with the sound of his voice  and an
image o f his face. Metareality stores the whole experience, and we
re-create it whenever we want to. Neuroscience says that we
retrieve it from the brain, but the phenomenon of sudden genius
casts shadows on that explanation, since people can retrieve
knowledge they never had in the first place. To go a step further, being human is creative, so we  use
consciousness to invent and discover new things. This isn’t the
same as re-creating ancient Greek music. But figuring out why
some people are creative proves very difficult. Like the cloud,
metareality ha s security measures in place. For a Leonardo da
Vinci o r a Ludwig van Beet hoven, the riches of creation open
easily and copiously. These artists are consumed by the creative
act. At the oth er extreme, some people are completely shut off
from artistic creativity. Creative geniuses, it seems, are hacking
into me tareality. They relate to its infinite potential far beyond
what we allow ourselves to do normally. Efforts have been made to ma ke creativity a skill, which so unds
promising at first. It motivat es a far-seeing company like Google
or Apple to identify and harness the most creative minds. Let’s go
back to the book Stealing Fire  me ntioned above. In it Steven
Kotler and Jamie Wheal go inside the making of “talent traps”
across Silicon Valley. These enterprises, along with the revolution
in s ocial media via Facebook  and Twitter, got their start through
innovation, an d it’s only natural that, with billions of d ollars at
their di sposal, Silicon Valley wants to spur ever more creative
ideas—in a high-tech environment, survival depends on it. These c orporations would lov e to monetize the zone, but “aha”
moments are just that, temporary flashes of insight. Sustaining
insight and making innova tion a way of life comprise the
challenge. Stealing Fire  des cribes how Google has cr eated a workenvironment w here one important element of creativity— flow—is
engineered in ingenious ways. The underlying notion is simple: if you want the mind to flow,
make t he workplace flow. Google takes this idea seriously and
constantly twea ks its workplace so that it feels continuous with life
outside work. There are bicycles for getting from one part of the
campus to another, Wi-Fi on company buses, high-quality organic
food, an d a loose structure that allows ideas to move freely, rather
than the traditional rigid hierarchy that seals management off
from workers. But the se amenities have had limited success, because flow by
itself do esn’t define creativity. Kotler and Wheal focus on “altered
states,” as they term them, in  which normal habits of mind drop
away en tirely. Whether induc ed by LSD or a total immersion tank,
by meditation or sacred rituals, one can experience ecstasis , a
word derived from Latin roots that mean “outside” and “to stand.”
An ecst atic state puts the pe rson outside and beyond the mind’s
normal sense of self. In ecsta sy we feel free, unbounded, blissful—
and creative. Stealing Fire  is essentially about how Silicon Valley
seeks to monetize ecstasy. Google encourages meditation for all its workers, for example,
which gives access to a quiete r, more expansive state of aw areness. But despite knowing about the zone, flow, ecstasy, meditation, and
witnessing awareness, it turns out that creativity is elusive. In
2013, searchin g for the me ans to solve “wicked” problems, a
diverse group of bright minds met for the Hacking Creativity
project, “the largest meta-an alysis of creativity ever conducted.”
The guiding idea was that if creativity could be und erstood,
anything would be possible. To this  end more than thirty thousand research papers on
creativity were analyzed and hundreds of expert s were
interviewed, “from break dancers and circus performers to poets
and rock stars.” By 2016, two conclusions were reached. First, cr eativity is essential for solving complex problems —the
kinds w e often face in a fast-paced world. Second, we have very
little su ccess in  training people to be more creative. And there’s apretty simple explanation for this failure: we’re trying to train a
skill, but what we should be training is a state of mind. Metareality, it turns out, is i mpossible to hack. Hacking is an
intrusion, the cyber equivalent of breaking and entering. Creative
people don’t break and enter. What they do is much c loser to
evolution; something new is coming to light and taking physical
form as  a painting or a piece  of music. To evolve is creative—the
giraffe’s long neck, the chameleon’s ability to change color, and
our own prize possession physically, the opposable thumb and
forefinger, are the result of N ature’s creativity. Working from the
field of infinite possibilities, evolution proceeds one step at a time
to create a whole creature, the same way you and I re-create the
whole experience of hearing Sinatra sing “Strangers in the Night.”
Every life form relates to metareality through evolution,
tapping into its creative pote ntial in an orderly, progressive way. The oddest creatures, as they  look to us, aren’t an assemblage of
spare parts haphazardly cobbled together. They are expressions of
a de licate adaptation that find s a perfect niche for itself apart from
thousands of other life forms living in the same environment. Every morning when it wakes up, the giant anteater
( Myrmecophaga tridactyla ) of  Central a nd South America is
hungry for ants. It is superb ly adapted by physical evolution to
seek out its insect prey buried deep underground. The giant
anteater’s front paws are equipped with four-inch-long, ta lon-like
claws fo r rippi ng into an ant  or termite colony. It has a tw o-foot-
long, sticky tongue that it uses to slither around and ensnare the
ants, which are then slurped back into its mouth. One ma rvels at how specific these adaptations are. Even the
giant an teater’s jaws have been reduced to miniature size, since
anything larger would be useless for burrowing into the narrow
passages of anthills and termite colonies. But, at the same time, no
human being would ever choose to be trapped at such an
evolutionary dead end. To survive, the giant anteater must
consume up to thirty thousand ants a day, and because  its diet
supplies so little nutrition, th e animal doesn’t have enough energy
to do more than sleep for sixteen hours a day.The beloved giant panda is also at a dead end. Although it is a
true bear, and one of the earliest to evolve, the panda is badly
served by having the wrong intestinal tract, which, unlike other
bears’ d igestive systems, can  only digest bamboo leaves. W hy did
the gian t pand a lose, or neve r gain, a typical bear’s abilit y to eat
almost anything? “Why” doesn’t count in evolution. An adaptation
occurs, and either it contributes to a species’ survival or it doesn’t. Homo sapiens  has eluded every dead end, including those that
other primates ran into. Our nearest relations among living
species are the chimpanzee an d the gorilla, but we did not descend
from th em or any other ape, contrary to popular opinion. The last
common ances tor between humans and chimpanzees lived around
thirteen millio n years ago, ac cording to the best current e stimate,
leading to a genetic split. O ne branch of the split evolv ed into
chimps, gorillas, orangutans, and their relations, while the other
branch led to our hominid ancestors. A chimp  is a modern species, and so are we. (Interestingly, the
genetic evoluti on of chimps was two or three times more complex
than ou rs, the result of two f actors: first, chimps pass on twice as
many random mutations from parent to offspring as human
parents do—on average a human baby inherits around seventy
new mutations from its parents. Second, there is something in
genetics referred to as a “bottleneck,” where not enough new genes
are available. Fewer genes lead to fewer mutations, ca using a
species to remain closed off f rom new traits. According to genetic
analyses, over millions of years chimps ran into three bottlenecks
that squeezed their gene pool, while humans ran into only one
bottleneck whi le migrating out of Africa 200,000 years ago. Once
out of the bott leneck, our species expanded explosively to cover
the globe.) The great reality shift poses a  profound mystery that cannot be
unraveled by examining our genes. Even with twice the m utation
rate as Homo sapiens , chim panzees have not gained self-
awareness. That’s not the same as lacking intelligence. Primate
studies increasingly show that chimpanzees are much closer to
human intelligence than was previously thought. According to
primatologist Frans de Waal,  the idea that only humans can make
tools is now “an unsustainable position. Then we also got the apes-have-no-theory-of-mind claim s, which now have been s eriously
weakened. The  culture claims, the idea that only humans a re great
at cooperation, and so on—none of [them] really holds up.”
Theory of mind  is a term fro m philosophy  and psychology
about k nowing someone else’s mental state without being  told. A
shorthand definition is “mind-reading.” Many dog lovers would
swear that their pet knows when the owner is happy, sad, or angry. But proving that any animal understands that it has a mind
remains controversial. It is fascinating to consider that our
common ancestor thirteen million years ago had the hidden
potential for traits that flowered in chimps along one branch of the
divide and in humans on the other. But chimps didn’t experienc e the great reality shift that gave
Homo sapiens  self-awareness. There are limits to what a chimp
can learn and understand. For example, if you place a peanut
under a  yellow  cup and no peanut under a red cup, a chimp will
quickly learn the difference a nd always pick the yellow cup. But if
you present a c himp with two weights and give him a reward if he
picks up the one that weighs  less, he won’t make the con nection
and will keep p icking up the two weights at random. Lik ewise, if
one chimp teaches herself how to unlatch a complicated bo x to get
at som e food, another chimp cannot learn how to solve the
problem simply by watching the first chimp. These differences between us and our closest relatives go only
so far. Chimps and gorill as have a much wider r ange of
possibilities open to them than a giant anteater. But they aren’t
remotely close  to us in accessing infinite possibilities. The great
reality shift transcends genetics, and no matter how much we see
ourselves when observing other primates, they do n’t see
themselves in us, because they simply can’t. Some evolutionary
dead ends lead to lives as complex as the ones led by  higher
primates, but they are dead ends nevertheless. The miracle of being huma n is that we evolved in multiple
dimensions. E verything about us—behavior, abstract t hinking,
curiosity, individual personalities, social networks—exploded
beyond any precedents, as if  life on Earth rushed into unknown
levels of aspiration. A master of three-dimensional chess would be
dumbfounded to lay eyes on o ur game board, which has numerouslevels and adds new ones all the time. But this master wouldn’t be
able to see our setup, because it exists and evolves in
consciousness. This is such an important point that we ne ed to go
into it more deeply. A w a r e n e s s  i n  M u l t i p l e  D i m e n s i o n s
Infinity can stay in one dimension, or it can exist in se veral
dimensions at once. You might think of a number like two-thirds
spinning out a single string of digits—0.6666666—to infinity, like
a mathematical silkworm spinning an endless thread. That’s an
example of infinity occupying one dimension. But flow, like
creativity, is a state of awaren ess that covers multiple dimensions. A person is “ in the flow” when everything seems to g o right,
obstacles melt away, and answers come effortlessly. Each aspect
occupies its own dimension, yet somehow they get coordinated
when flow is e xperienced. Th ere is a sense of calmness and also
the experience  of happiness, sometimes to the point of ec stasy. If
the flow is pow erful enough, it can be all-consuming, giving the
impression that the creative ideas are coming of their own accord,
using us as a vehicle, the way a playwright uses actors to mouth
his words. Flow feels desirable but quit e mysterious, since it comes and
goes, an d some people never experience it. The mystery is solved
when you realize that flow is the unobstructed access to
metareality. In it we are experiencing wholeness. Puddles don’t
flow, but the oc ean does. Only wholeness can orchestrate a  state of
awareness tha t embraces multiple dimensions. Our h ominid
ancestors undo ubtedly becam e multidimensional long, lo ng ago. There w as a mass awakening  that left its traces in the firs t known
cave paintings. These were only made possible by a seismic shift in
consciousness. The accepted date by scientists for the first
paintings of animals on cave walls has been moving back further
and fur ther. The record was long held by Europe, fir st in a
complex of caves in Lascaux, France (about 17,000 years ago),
then by separate caves in France and Romania (30,000–32,000years ago), representing a hu ge leap back in time. Now the current
record i s held by a cave system  in Indonesia on the South Sulawesi
Peninsula, still in use by the native people. Radiocarbon analysis
has date d the Indonesian paintings at between 35,000 and 42,000
years ago. Gazing at photos of these prehistoric artifacts (easily found
online) is a fo rm of time tra vel, not physical but mental. At the
oldest French site, the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave, which is on a
limestone cliff above an ancient riverbed, now dry, the paintings
are not hing less than art. Di scovered in 1994 and soon named a
World H eritage Site by UNESCO, the Chauvet Cave features very
large, very well-preserved animal figures by the hundreds,
depicting thirteen species. In other Ice Age paintings, the chief
subjects are herbivores, like  horses and cattle, but the Chauvet
artists added predators, like the cave lion, the panther, the bear,
and the hyena. The circ umstances behind th e art were arduous. The cave walls
are dee p inside, far from o utside light, which means that the
painters worked in the dark by the light of flickering torches. As
the ligh t bobbe d back and fo rth, the painters still had suc h a sure
hand that the major curves o f each specific animal—horns, back,
head, and legs—were done in a single stroke, the way an
accomplished draftsman would do them today. The walls were
apparently cleaned and smo othed to give a suitable pale area, a
bare canvas, before the actual painting began. Two woolly
rhinoceroses a re pictured butting heads, reflecting a desire by the
original artist to portray scenes, and many animals are shown in
motion, not like a child’s stick-figure drawings. As you could im agine, the desire to paint a picture isn’t si mple
and nev er has been. Are these paintings mystical, ritualistic, or
magical? The mental state o f the artists cannot be conclusively
determined. There is beauty in how the animals were drawn, or
are we simply imposing “beau ty” from our own familiar concepts? Whatever cave  painters had in  mind, it went viral, so to sp eak. The
same images are repeated by cultures thousands of miles apart. A s maller mystery within the larger one is why the cave
painters didn’t depict them selves. At Chauvet thirty thousand
years ag o, the painters portrayed no full human figures and onlyone par tial figu re (the lower h alf of a female body, with prominent
sexual organs), but there are numerous outlines of human hands
imprinted on the wall. These were done by blowing red ochre
pigment around someone’s hand as it was pressed against the
stone. Outlines of hands also appear in the Indonesian caves
thousands of years earlier, then in Argentina between nine
thousand and thirteen thousand years ago, and in petroglyphs of
the An asazi, or ancient ones, of the Southwest of the United
States. These scattered handprints lead to no definite conclusion. Perhaps they mark tribal alle giances, or simply the message I was
here . The explosion of sophisticate d art, on a global scale, testifies to
a hidd en potential comin g to life as an awaken ing in
consciousness, vibrant and full-blown. Art must be considered
evolutionary in Homo sapiens , be cause it h as persisted as a
dominant trait  of our species in every society without dy ing out. Yet it seems un likely that art somehow provided a survival value. Cave painting testifies to prehistoric humans’ caring for something
beyond physical needs, and this something emerged directly from
their consciousness. To me the Chauvet cave paintings clearly drew on the whole
mind. A  prehis toric Picasso didn’t step up to the blank canvas of a
limestone wall  and let fly his genius. Homo sapiens  evolved much
more ho listically. At the very least, the desire to create art involves
the following attributes we ca n all identify with, even if we aren’t
artists:
Curiosity
Intelligence
Purpose
Motivation
Diligence
Eye-hand coordination
Learning a skill setThese m ental traits have to exist in order to build the Taj
Mahal, invent the internal combustion engine, or paint a woolly
rhinoceros on a cave wall. And the whole collection of traits has to
come t ogether into a single intention. Figuring out how this
happens may be impossible  scientifically. There is no way to
gather evidenc e when what you are looking for is invisib le. Even
so, the capaci ty to use the whole mind convinces me that our
remote ancestors contained the seeds of metahuman. Being able
to access the whole mind destroys the myth that our ancestors
were primitive. Their potential was already infinite. A  B r a i n  T e a s e r
Once Homo sapiens  found a path to whole mind, the
experience became embedded in human evolution. If we examine
ourselves closely, it is clear that we are whole-mind cr eatures. Let’s te st this proposition with a simple chore like driving to the
grocery store to buy a child’s  birthday cake. Behind the simplicity
of the task is a complex of mental activities we take for granted. The ingredients in the mix include the following:
Knowing the concept of “birthday cake” and matching the
words to a physical object. Wanting to do something nice for your child. Putting the cake on your to-do list. Knowing how to drive. Remembering the route to the grocery store. Giving priority to this task over other demands on your
time. Selecting one cake out of many, using judgment about
which one your child will like the best.These things span emotion, intention, visual recognition,
memory, moto r coordinatio n, and stored skills—for one small
errand! Neuro science can locate and isolate where some of these
mental activiti es are represented in the brain, but how th ey mesh
into a unified outcome—shopping for a birthday cake—cannot be
explained. The  process of ge tting billions of brain cells t o fire in
sync makes herding cats lo ok simple. It’s more like wrangling
every cat in the world. Even less can anyone explain how the brain shifts gears without
any visible transition from A to B. One incredibly com plicated
pattern of brain activity spontaneously shifts to another. Unlike a
car, the re’s no transmission or gearshift. Imagine that you are
reading a novel and forget that there’s a roast in th e oven. Absorbed in The Lord of the Rings  or Jane Eyre , you suddenly
notice the acrid smell of smoke in the air. Instantly, this simple
sensation of smell causes you to leap into action, and the book is
forgotten. Carbon molecules stimulating receptors for detecting
odor th row your brain into a  new pattern of coordinated action. Relaxation turns to stress in an instant. To s ay that you r brain noticed the burning roast doesn’t ex plain
your reaction. Your brain processed the raw data of smoke
particles entering the nasal passage, but it takes a person to notice
the smell and g ive it significance. The same smell, when applied to
charring a steak on the grill in summer, provokes no alarm, even
though the physical process taking place in the nose and brain is
identical. Elec trochemical a ctivity buzzing around the  cortex
forms one pattern for the house burning down and another for a
barbecue. That’s all a neuroscientist has to work with, and it’s not
nearly enough. Even if  neuroscience could map every minute area of brain
activity, down to the smallest detail—as is currently being
attempted by the National Institutes of Health through the
federally fund ed Brain Initiative—consciousness would be
undetectable. If the brain is a red herring in regard to a whiff of
smoke, it may be a red herri ng in lots of other ways as well. Two
would-be poet s could be writing a sonnet, causing specific brain
activity to light up on an fMRI scan, but nobody would be  able to
pick out which writer is Shakespeare and which a duffer.Einstein’s brain was autops ied after death to determine if the
world’s greate st genius, as he was popularly tagged, had an
unusual brain; he didn’t. On YouTube, you can find numerous
videos o f child  prodigies playing the piano at the age of three or
four when, according to normal brain development, such a
complex display of muscle coordination shouldn’t be possible. Attaining skill at piano playin g ordinarily takes years or de cades to
achieve. Having escape d the constraints of physical evolution, Homo
sapiens  stoppe d being puppets of the brain. Despite every finding
revealed by neuroscience—many of them fascinating and
important—the bottom line is that you rule your brain, not the
other w ay around. The path to metahuman is a path of self-
awareness about this very thing. You can control who you are,
even if you thi nk you can’t. T he trail of clues has led us far along
the path. Now we are ready to undertake a reality shift even more
radical than the mass awakening of our remote ancestors. In the
next reality shift, we will define ourselves as beings endowed with
infinite possib ilities. Metare ality becomes home when everyone
agrees that we belong there.F4
 
M E T A R E A L I T Y  O F F E R S
A B S O L U T E  F R E E D O M
reedom is the opposite of feeling trapped. We’ve created
virtual reality on such a huge scale that people can go abo ut their
lives no t feelin g trapped. But, in truth, the whole setup is a trap. Hamlet was trapped in a dil emma over murdering the man who
murdered his father. Indecis ion would lead him either to murder
or t o suicide—eventually it l eads him to both—and at on e point
Hamlet speaks to his friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern with
all the symptoms of clinical depression:
I have…lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of
exercises, and indeed it goes so heavily with my
disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to
me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the
air—look you, this brave o’e r-hanging firmament, this
majestical roof fretted with golden fire—why, it appears
no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent
congregation of vapors.No actual person burdened by depression speaks so beautifully,
no doubt, but Hamlet still harbors the great optimism about
human potential that fueled  the Renaissance. Immedi ately he
adds:
What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason,
how infinite in faculty! In for m and moving how express
and admirable! In action how like an angel, in
apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals! Four hundred  years later, we are the same species, but
optimism has become a struggle. Looking around, would you
agree with Shakespeare’s praise of human beings as “The beauty of
the wor ld! The paragon of an imals!”? I’ve been arguing that Homo
sapiens  i s the o nly spe cies on Earth that is multidimensional. This
seems l ike the greatest possib le gift any life form could receive. It
gave our minds an open tick et to imagine anything we want. It
saved us from the evolution ary dead end that befell th e giant
anteater, the panda, and every other creature that is trapped by
physical evolut ion. It is easy to become intoxicated by the prospect
of our own boundless potential. So it is strange but true that human beings don’t accept this gift
of unlim ited potential. We are starkly divided—one side of human
nature craving  freedom, the other side deeply fearing it. By
freedom  I mean much more than not being in prison or under the
thumb of the powerful. Freedom is boundless awareness, the very
definition of metahuman . When anythin g is possible, we are most
ourselves. Wh en only some things are possible, we are all too
human. Freedom has no fixed rules. It is without walls, and any tho ught
is pe rmissible. No matter how  good your life is, you are n ot living
in fr eedom, unfortunately. Y ou were born into a reality hemmed
in b y ru les, wa lls, and thoughts you are not supposed to t hink. In
these p ages we have been de aling in forbidden thoughts, the kind
that undermine virtual reality and expose its illusions. Why? To
build a new r eality based on freedom. The ultimate fo rbiddenthought is “None of this is real.” It wipes the slate clean of all
illusions. What makes such  a thought forbidden isn’t that the
police w ill knock on your door and punish you for breaking the
law. No one will even know it if you opt out of virtual reality. What m akes it forbidden to think “None of this is real” is
something personal: the fear of what comes next. Absolute
freedom is terrifying. It expands the unknown as far as the eye can
see. Th at’s th e main reason that human history isn’t about
absolute freedo m; it is about testing the next boundary, a nd then
moving beyond  it to test a new boundary. From the perspective of
metareality, Homo sapiens  has  never needed to respect  so many
boundaries. A history of “th ou shalt not” has unfolded with so
much fear behind it, and suc h powerful enforcement of the rules,
that our evolution has had to struggle every step of the way. The root cause of living inside boundaries is the divided self. We have defined human nature simultaneously as something to
celebrate and something to fear. Getting beyond the divided self is
crucial, becaus e, like every part of virtual reality, the divi ded self
has no validity other than what we give it. The war between good
and evi l, light and darkness, creation and destruction, is a mental
construct. It was born out of our deep confusion over who we are. When a species has an open ticket in terms of its future evolution,
the destination printed on the ticket is Everywhere. Homo sapiens
still holds this open ticket in hand, but we plot the co urse of
history by ups and downs, progress and setbacks, tyrants and
liberators, war and peace. Every day we force reality to  fit the
model of the divided self. Testing bound aries is a stage of development. Every child tests
the rules laid down by his parents and grows up with an inner map
of d os a nd don’ts that, for the most part, lasts for life. But it would
be far better if our inner map  showed us how to use our ticket to
Everywhere. Fortunately, metareality gets closer the more we
realize w ho we  are. It has been getting closer for tens of th ousands
of y ears. To see the invisible  evolution of consciousness requires
us to look at our species with new eyes.T h e  I c e m a n ’ s  T a l e
Although we have no exact d ate for it, human beings cou ldn’t
explore multiple dimensions until they became aware that this was
possible. Prehistoric humans made that breakthrough a nd, like
the othe r invisi ble things in our past, we can read the minds of our
remote ancestors by investigating a handful of physical clues. What these clues reveal is fas cinating. While warring between the
darkness and the light insid e us, we were also expand ing into
freedom. Limi tation pulled us one way, freedom the oth er. This
tug-of-war will take some explaining. In 1 991 some h ikers chanced upon a natural mummy pres erved
in glacial ice a t an altitude o f approximately 10,000 fee t on the
side of an Alp  on the Austrian-Italian border. Named Ötzi by
anthropologists (after the mountains he was discovered in) and
“the Ice man” i n the popular press, this male from 3500 BCE is a
frozen snapsho t of life in Europe during the Chalcolithic Period,
also known as the Copper A ge— chalcolithic  is derived from the
Greek word for copper. By this time prehistoric humans had
discovered how  to smelt copper ore, but had yet to mix it with tin
to form bronze, a harder metal. If y ou were h iking the South Tyrol Mountains and met the
Iceman two hours before his death, you’d have seen a thin, almost
malnourished male about five feet, two inches in height, perhaps
on a  hunting t rip, sitting on a rock and having a meal. He was
carrying bread made of wheat and barley; there were also fruits
and roots in his supplies, and the dried meat of chamois, red deer,
and ibex. If he smiled at you, Ötzi would have shown teeth riddled
with cavities, probably because his diet was high in carbohydrates. The mu mmified Ötzi’s expose d skin displays numerous tattoos,
sixty-one in all, mostly horizontal lines and crosses, primarily
running up and down the sp ine and behind the knees. According
to the anthrop ologists who studied his remains, he had been sick
three times in the previous six months before he died. For a forty-
five-year-old, Ötzi was in bad shape by modern standards, already
showing wear and tear in the  knees and ankles, and osteoporosis
of the spine. (T he tattoos, made from powdered black soot, mighthave been some form of ancient medical treatment. There’s an
ancestral tradit ion in every culture of tattooing to relieve p ain, and
the Iceman’s tattoos are clu stered around the joints and lower
back, where he would certain ly have suffered from chronic pain.) Unlike others who settled in agricultural communities, this man
took lon g walk s all his life, which adds to the speculation  that he
was perhaps a shepherd or a hunter. No o ther early European has  been studied as thoroughly a s the
Iceman, down to the content s of his stomach, the minera ls in his
hair (showing  traces of copper and arsenic), and the exact
composition of  his DNA. His genes reveal that he had brown eyes
and dar k hair, along with a predisposition to heart disease . But my
mind goes to the invisible inner journey that Homo sapiens  had
taken b y the Copper Age, strongly hinted at in the physical
findings. There had been many awakenings in consciousness to make
Ötzi po ssible. We have to imagine what these awakenings were
like. Ag riculture, sewing, the  tanning of hides, the discov ery that
rocks could be heated until they oozed with pure metal—these are
titanic leaps in awareness. T he Iceman’s brain was outfitted to
perform extremely sophisticated tasks. Keeping thoug hts in consecutive order, each leading to its own
conclusion, isn ’t a modern trait. A highly organized mind made it
possible for the Iceman to navigate a surprisingly complicated
existence. We can infer thi s, for example, from his e laborate
costume: shoe s, a hat, a belt, leggings, and a loincl oth, all
fabricated from  different leathers. His cape was of woven grass,
pointing the way to the intricate weaving that lay ahead as cultures
evolved. The Iceman feels very far awa y from us and yet very close a t the
same time. However, as members of Homo sapiens , we inhabit the
same s pecies of consciousness as Ötzi. Some of the s trongest
evidence of our kinship across the centuries is tragic. On the day of
his death, the I ceman was heavily armed with an ax, fashioned out
of 9 9 percent pure copper, and a flint knife, both crafted with
wooden handl es. Over his shoulder was slung a longbow and a
quiver filled with fourteen arrows. Clearly, he met adversaries
similarly arme d, because an arrowhead had pierced his cloak atthe sho ulder and lodged itself. The arrow shaft was broken off,
probably in an unsuccessful attempt to remove the arrowhead. There was DNA on the bod y from three other individuals: his
friends, his enemies, perhaps someone he killed before he himself
was slain? Ötzi was found facedown, suggesting that someone else placed
him tha t way while trying to  pull the arrow out of his back. But
Ötzi quickly bled to death and was covered by ice from an ice
storm a lmost immediately a fterward. It’s not hard to im agine a
link from him to familiar emotional states in modern life: tribal
warfare and loyalty, angry att acks and defense, the desire to save a
fallen comrade . The war between light and darkness had already
become endemic in human society. T h e  L o s t  S o u r c e
The Ice man wasn’t the first p erson to die by violence. Skeletons
of fema les from fourteen thousand years ago in Mexico display
broken bones and other woun ds, indicating that they had suffered
physical injuries consistent with abuse, rather than accidents. Somewhere between metareality and human reality, bad  things
happen. For millennia, the blame has been ascribed to sin or
human failing in general. I’m  ascribing it to the divided self, where
peace a nd viol ence were given separate compartments. P rojected
outward, they  became institutions of war—armies, w eapons
makers, armorers—and institutions of peace—law courts, codes of
justice, religions that depicted a God of mercy. Societies learned to live with the contradiction. Rome saw itself
as the great harbinger of peace in the world and, yet, in
conquering th e territories of modern-day Spain, Brita in, and
Germany, Julius Caesar led campaigns of unspeakable ba rbarity. In one village he ordered the  hands of every adult male cut off; all
told, his conquest of Gaul took as many as two million lives. The
Romans celebrated Caesar (offering him the title of emperor
before he was assassinated i n the Senate), but a popula r sayingexposes a deeper truth: Homo homini lupus , “Man is wolf to
man.” We have not seemingly evolved past this brutal wisdom,
since th e United States is both a global peacekeeper and the
world’s largest arms dealer. Being tr apped in the divided self isn’t the whole story, however. If we examine the Iceman with new eyes, from the perspective of
consciousness, we recognize that something immense was
happening in  human history. Anthropologists refer to the
“cognitive explosion” or “intelligence explosion” that hurtled
Stone A ge hum ans forward. One cannot deny the evidence offered
by the complexity of the Iceman’s tools, weapons, diet, and
clothing. It took new and ing enious thinking for early humans to
arrive at such sophisticated mental activity. To explain the cognitive explosion, various arguments point to
the higher brain and genetic s, or milestones like the disc overy of
fire, which brought early humans closer together, making
collective thinking possible. As usual, scientists rely on the
physical evidence. However, I think the real story lies  in the
expansion of awareness, w hich occurred before the physical
evidence appe ared. Consider what kind of awareness it took to
make th e first bow and arrow. Given nothing but a forest and a
single sharp stone blade, could you invent the bow and arrow? A s tartling series of YouTube videos, titled “Prim itive
Technology,” shows how it might be done. A single barefoot man
in shorts cuts down a small tree by hacking at it with a  chunky
rock, sharpened on one side into a blade. He splits the wood using
the same blade until he has a three-foot-long piece that h e tapers
at e ach end un til it is limber— this is the bow, which gets notched
at both  ends to hold the string. The string comes from  peeled
green bark from a sapling. A llowing the sapling bark to dry and
twisting it twice, the string is attached to the bow. For arr ows, the
man uses a t hin sapling, and by peeling away the b ark and
scraping down the wood, he fashions a long, thin shaft. At this point o ur primitive craftsman needs feathers to make
the arro w fly straight; these are the only artifacts not related to a
single stone blade.
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:

        Marean
writes:
At some point between 195,000 and 123,000 years ago,
the population size of Homo sapiens  plummeted, thanks
to cold, dry climate conditions that left much of our
ancestors’ African homeland uninhabitable. Everyone
alive today is d escended from a group of people from a
single region who survive d this catastrophe. The
southern coast  of Africa would have been one of the few
spots where humans could survive during this climate
crisis because it harbors an abundance of shellfish and
edible plants. At c aves along a section of the South African coast, know n as
Pinnacle Point, archeologists  have found abundant mollusk shells
and occasionally remains of seals and whales, indicating thatalmost fifty thousand years before previously explored sites, early
humans had learned to harvest the sea for food while the
harshness of an Ice Age climate caused almost everyone else to
succumb. Tool s in the caves suggest that these survivors h ad high
cognitive abilities—Marean makes a strong if controversial case
for mental faculties that were totally necessary for survival, such
as c alculating tidal rise and fall by the moon. Only at low tide, he
says, co uld the inland cave dwellers trek to the sea and un dertake
the hazardous venture of harvesting mussels and other mollusks
against the pounding surf. Trapped in the direst distress, our ancestors had no avenue of
physical rescue or escape. How did they find the means to rescue
themselves. E d i t i n g  R e a l i t y
The answer is not physical. Fascinating as these archeological
discoveries are, it wasn’t harsh external pressure that forced our
ancestors to adapt. It took a great reality shift “in here. ” We
became a consciousness-based species, using the mind to outwit
Nature’s challenges. One of  the most important factors in the
expansion of human consciousness was that our brains became
too big, efficient, and complex for their own good. A kind of brain
overload fueled our desperate  need to whittle it down so th at daily
life wou ld be manageable. If the rush and hubbub of a mod ern city
seem li ke over load, that’s nothing compared to the mental crisis
our remote ancestors faced. The pro blem wasn’t that the human brain simply grew and
couldn’t stop. The problem was that instinct, which guides how
other cr eatures behave, bega n to dwindle in us. A honeybee seeks
only flo wers; it instinctually stings an intruder; only the queen bee
lays egg s. Hum an beings have a choice in all three behaviors. We
explore Nature for all manner of food. We fight or keep the peace
in different circumstances. We mate according to extremely
complex behavior patterns. Having been freed from instinct, thechoices that face us are lite rally infinite. The brain cannot be
infinitely large, however. So how can the human mind fit  infinite
choice within a finite physiology. This wa sn’t a dilemma faced only by our remote ance stors. Every newbor n baby comes into a world where too much
information is constantly bombarding the higher brain, a flood of
raw data that could never be processed in its totality. Think of
searching for your car in a crowded parking lot. To find it, you
don’t visually take in the pave ment, sky, people, and every vehicle,
still or moving, in your field of vision. Instead, you have a mental
image of your car, and, wi th focused attention, you edit out
everything that’s irrelevant to one task, finding a specific vehicle. This points to another reason we develop an ego. People
identify with what they can do. A car mechanic is different from a
concert violinist. A sentence  that begins with “I am X” can end
with all  kinds of behaviors, tr aits, talents, and preferences. By the
same token, a sentence that b egins with “I am not Y” can also end
in many ways. As it turns out, the list of things that we choose not
to be is much l onger than that of the things we choose to b e. If you
are a Christia n, that’s a si ngle choice that excludes all other
religions—at p resent count, there are 4,200 faiths in the world
that a person with one faith d oesn’t have to think about e xcept in
passing. As we exclude countless choices without even thinking
about th em, w e are editing re ality according to the dictates of the
individual “I. ”
This ability to edit raw realit y was already present in an imals
that hunt for a specific prey, for example, but there was no
conscious choo sing involved. When penguins and other seabirds
that nes t in huge colonies come back to shore with their c rops full
of food,  they somehow find t he one specific fledgling that belongs
to them in the overwhelming din of noise created by thousands of
chicks. The arctic fox can detect the movement of mice
underneath several feet of snow in the winter and pounce
precisely on its prey. Monarch butterflies can follow an exact
migration patt ern to and from one locale in Mexico wh ere they
breed. There’s an enormous myste ry about how humans developed
focused attenti on, not for specific types of food and locales, but asa tr ait we can  turn on and off. The things you’re interested in
fascinate you and hold your attention, while the things you have
no inte rest in escape your n otice. The appeal of detective novels
lies in how c leverly a Sherlock Holmes notices the tiniest,
seemingly irrel evant clue. (Holmes, we are told, was an e xpert in
cigar as h and what kind of tobacco each ash represented, but he
didn’t know that the Earth r evolves around the Sun because that
bit of knowledge was useless in the art of crime detection. ) Even though we cannot solve  this mystery of paying attention
versus tuning out, there’s no  doubt that “I” is in charge of both. My wif e and children and grandchildren are objects of deep
personal interest to me (the kind of interest we label as “love”)
while th ey are total strangers to nearly seven billion other people
on the planet. Once attention is focused, emotion follows. Growing
up, my son Go tham loved the Boston Celtics basketball team and
hated th e Los Angeles Lakers. This became part of who he was, an
either/or decision that he identified with. Either/or is the most basic ed iting tool our minds possess, and
it b egins with “me or not me. ” Ego separates each pers on from
every other person though countless decisions about “me or not
me. ” M any such decisions have no real purpose except to reinforce
the ego. (It’s not as if Celtics fans are better, smarter, or more
well-off than Lakers fans. Yet  when Gotham found himself moving
to Los Angeles, and his wor k put him in close contact with the
Lakers, it was a wrenching c hange. Turning “not me” into “me”
can be very hard. Imagine, for example, that you had to spend a
year working for a political party you’ve disliked all your life. ) As the ego metastasized over time, the “other” acquired
differences became the basis of social suspicion and disapproval. Before my children were born, I was a newly arrived immigrant
working at a h ospital in New Jersey during the doctor s hortage
caused by the Vietnam War in the 1970s. Every day going to work,
I kn ew in the back of my min d that the American-born doctors in
the emergency room looked upon me as their inferior because I
had come from India. If we stand back and consider the whole picture, “I” edits
reality too much and for se lfish reasons. We deliberately close
ourselves off from new possibilities to suit old, fixed pref erences. Everyone’s past is a chaotic c ollection of choices about what they
like and dislike, how they fee l emotionally, and the memories they
carry ar ound as baggage, not to mention their fixed beliefs, family
history, and every life-altering experience since birth. You weren’t shaped by what happened to you since birth. You
were sh aped b y what you th ought about those happenin gs. The
ego and every response it has ever had is a vast mental construct—
the metastasis of “I”—that grew from the seeds of ego  in our
remote ancest ors. Our ability to edit reality is responsible for
everything a human being c an decide to pay attention to, and
since w e pay attention to billions of things, reality in its unedited
state must be v astly larger. Human achievements represen t a tiny
fraction of what reality has to  offer—the horizon spreading before
us is unlimited. D e c i d i n g  t o  L e t  G o
We’ve b een covering what might be called the natural history of
“I,” and it has told us many important things about how the virtual
reality we accept as real is actually mind-made. In the  human
mind, reality is constructed so that
The available information isn’t overwhelming and chaotic. We feel free to accept or reject any aspect of reality we
choose. We seek to repeat the most familiar, safe, and agreeable
experiences. We avoid the most threatening, strange, and disagreeable
experiences. The ultimate judge of what’s real is the ego, which is highly
personal and selective about how we interpret the world. I’m not here to declare that the ego is your enemy, which would
be just another  ego judgment. From a neutral standpoint, the egois limiti ng. Having chosen to travel through life with “I” as your
most intimate companion, you have silently agreed to filter,
censor, and judge your exp eriences. That’s the primary  use of
consciousness in most people ’s lives, and it’s like using a powerful
computer just for emails. To limit your personal reality shuts you
off from the infinite potential that is the greatest gift of
consciousness. At some point “I” edits out too much reality or misse s the
important things that could expand love, compassion, creativity,
and evolution. We spend too much mental energy focusing on
things that are damaging and  self-defeating. If you’ve attended a
Thanksgiving gathering where the same tired, vexing family issues
are hau led out year after yea r, you know how stubbornly “I” can
cling to  petty, irksome things. For creatures trapped by physical
evolution, there’s no escape. Cheetahs are the fastest runners on
Earth, but their amazing speed has made them smaller and
weaker than other predators. The most vulnerable stage  in their
life cyc le is at birth, when t he cheetah mother is limited in her
ability to protect her young. It is estimated that 90 percent of
newborn cheetahs do not survive. Added to this is the speed of the
gazelles that the cheetah cha ses as its prey. The gazelle and the
cheetah are so closely matched that adult cheetahs often fail in
pursuit of food and therefore live on the brink of sta rvation. Trapped by their specific evolutionary adaptation, cheetahs can’t
turn to the other foods that a re all around them—termites or grass
or mice—to fend off starvation. Homo sapiens  f aces the opposite predicame nt. Our minds open
up the field o f infinite possibilities. Having the ability to bend
Nature to our will, we make deliberate choices that seem
beneficial to our survival, but decisions have unforeseen
consequences. Defending themselves with weapons advanced the
rise of early humans, and a weapon as sophisticated as the bow
and arr ow appeared as early as 45,000 BCE. Then w eaponry
couldn’t be stopped, making the catastrophe of the nucle ar arms
race inevitable. Or was it. Freedom of thought is our natural state;
being trapped  by the past isn’t. We are still in that state of
liberation, should we choose  to take advantage of it. The pivotalissue is the me tastasis of “I,” which has taken free will too far in
the service of anger, fear, greed, blind selfishness, and all the rest. Once we see this, we can understand how personal
relationships g et sabotaged. Two people fall in love and get
married. After the honeymoo n, they must relate to each other in
all kin ds of ways—doing household chores, making money,
scheduling tim e for things to do together or apart—and “I” does its
job of managin g one situation after another. But if you are having
a fig ht o ver fam ily finances, your ego brings up anger, the need to
win, and the stubborn desire to be right. If the argument gets
heated enough, grievances over older wrangles come bubbling up
to the surface. Unless you are careful, a trivial disagreement gets
bitterly personal. What has been lost in the heat of the moment is
the underlying love that sparked the relationship in the first place. That’s the larger reality, which “I” single-mindedly excludes so
that it can win a small and usually pointless argument. Two pe ople occupy a small dot on the map. Now expand the
territory on a global scale. Th e human race is ravaging th e planet
because seven billion people, acting on the advice of “I,” prefer
local experience over solving a global problem. Wars break out
and population s incur death and destruction on a massive scale
because the larger territor y—maintaining amicable peace—is
sabotaged by the anger generated by every “I” choosing to follow
its irrational, angry, hostile agenda. The bot tom lin e is that “I” firmly believes it can manage re ality,
and yet human history is litte red with its abject failures. Even the
basic assumption that “I” is in contact with reality is false. At this
moment you have no actual e xperience of the quantum field, from
which e verything in creation springs. You have no experience of
the atoms and molecules th at constitute your body, nor of the
operation of your cells, nor of the brain itself. It seems strange that
the human brain has no idea of its very existence. Viewing a brain
under the surgeon’s knife or  while dissecting a body in medical
school is merely the second hand observation of a mushy gray
thing with grooves running across its outer surface. Nothing
observable hints that this mushy stuff processes consciousness. At bottom, “I” polices our experience to make sure that life
remains local and not infinite. Infinity is the ego’s enemy, becauseinfinity is the whole map, not just dots and pins stuck in it here
and the re. To let go of “I” is  to embrace infinity. Only by being
comfortable wi th our infinite potential can we discover tha t reality
doesn’t need editing. Whole ness is where we belong. Once we
begin to chop wholeness into bits and pieces, the ego takes over to
manage each one, bit by bit,  and, whether we realize it or not, it
depletes us physically and mentally. So we need to inv estigate
whether infinit y is a livable environment. If it is, then letting go of
the ego can be justified. And no matter what “I” has done to
improve life, we may begin to realize that living in wholeness is
better. H3
 
H U M A N  P O T E N T I A L
I S  I N F I N I T E
uman potential is infinite because consciousness has no
boundaries. Being human means that anything can happen. For
the mom ent let’s explore the inner world of possibilities. There are
ways in which outer reality  is much more malleable through
consciousness than anyone s upposes. Since consciousness is the
foundation of reality, we sho uldn’t set down any absolute limits. In order to fly, human beings didn’t sprout wings, but we did find
a path to achieve what we e nvisioned. Keep in mind that a path
will always be open, no matter how far-fetched our aspirations. In t he inner domain of consc iousness, the possibilities for new
thoughts, insights, and discoveries is already unlimited. This alone
makes it important to see Homo sapiens  as a consciousness-based
species. Infinite possibilities are part of our makeup. But
something inside us resists  believing in infinity as a human
quality. Edited reality fee ls more comfortable. Th ere are
extraordinary events, however, that prove, quite litera lly, the
reality of the notion “Anything can happen. ” Sudden leaps in
consciousness are occurring all around us if we only take the time
to l ook. But “Anything can happen” could describe a totally
random universe filled with quantum noise. In quantum theory,everything bubbles up in “quantum foam” before form and
structure begin  to appear, rather like formless cake batter until the
cake is baked and acquires a solid shape. Because quantum
particles wink in and out of  existence, according to the laws of
probability, there is an infinitesimal chance that a physical object
—a leaf, a chai r, or a sperm whale—could suddenly appea r out of
the blue. Physics exists to te ll us exactly how nearly im possible
such an event actually is. You mi ght think that these matters are so abstract that they
have nothing to do with you personally. When quantum physics
asserts that the chance of you r driveway being blocked by a giant
squid is very, very tiny, you aren’t learning anything new. We
participate in the world “out there” the way society taught us to. But th is is a radically short-sighted view of reality. Our
participation i n the world actually begins at the quantum level. For all practical purposes, th is is where mind and matte r meet. Both ex ist as possibilities, rea dy to emerge into manifestation but
still invisible. Therefore, min d and matter are more malleable there, ju st as
soft clay is more malleable than a china plate or figurine after it
has be en sha ped, fired, and glazed. Being human, we can
consciously return to the quantum level, which expands our
participation infinitely compared with what we can do once
creation has hardened into p lace. Not only is creation softer, so to
speak, b ut mind and matter h aven’t separated yet. When they do,
a ro ck won’t instantly become a rock while a thought goes another
way and instantly becomes a thought. Mind and mat ter first
emerge exactly alike, as invisible ripples in the quantum field. These ripples will form patterns as they run into ripples from the
gravity field, the quark field,  the electron field, and a few others. Interference patterns, which are like the rippled imprint o f waves
left on a sandy beach, get se t up, and only then do recognizable
objects such as quarks and electrons begin to appear. Physics has done a brilliant jo b tracing creation back this f ar. It
has done very little, however, to trace the mind back to its source—
we’ll have a lot more to say a bout that. But the upshot is that the
average person assumes that mind and matter are naturally
separate. That’s how the illusion confuses us. Thinking about anapple is  very different from holding a physical apple. Y et at a
deeper level the thought and  the apple were once the same. They
begin as possibilities in the  domain that physics calls virtual
reality. The mystery revolves  around how two things tha t are so
unalike could have come from the same seed. To take  advan tage of infinite potential, you must accept that
reality is open-ended, capable of taking subtle, invisible impulses
and tur ning th em into mind a nd matter. This open-ended ness I’m
calling metareality, because it lies beyond mind and matter;
metareality is where the en tire universe and everything in it,
including all mental activity, is in an embryonic state. I won’t pretend that metareality is easy to embrace when you
first lea rn about its existence. How secure can you feel about your
life if it is tota lly open-ended. Not very—everyone prefer s things
to b e more se ttled and orderly than that. But when yo u think
about i t, a painter contemplating a blank canvas or a writer
looking at a blank sheet of paper relies on “Anything can happen”
as th e best and  highest creative state. When you approach infinite
potential as infinite creative p ossibilities, there’s an openin g to the
kind of freedom “I” cannot experience within boundaries. We are so conditioned to say “my” body and “my” mind th at we
automatically believe they ar e doing the acting and thinking we
experience. But in metareality consciousness is doing the acting
and thinking. We could—and  should—shift into that perspective
for o ne simple reason. The br ain cannot make the leap int o higher
consciousness; only consciousness can. A violin string can’t invent
new forms of music, but the musical mind can use the vio lin as its
instrument of physical expression. In the same way, the bodymind
—an understan ding that the body and mind are a single  unit—is
the physical expression of consciousness. In music there are more possible combinations of notes than
atoms in the u niverse, and yet we are comfortable with such vast
possibilities. In chess, we play without anxiety in the face  of 400
possible positions after each player has made one move, which
explodes to over 288 billion after four moves. In everyday ways,
like playing games, we take infinity for granted. It’s all around us. Even if you had a limited vocabulary of two thousand words,
which is what a typical five-year-old has, that’s enough to createan endless string of word combinations, not to mention that
nothing stops you from giv ing a common word multiple new
meanings. ( Pet, f or example,  is already a verb, a noun, and an
adjective, as in “I pet my pet cat, who is the only pet I hav e”—and
anyone is free to assign new  meanings to the word. Pet  could
substitute for coddled, luxurious, endearing, and the like. It
already has those connotations. New meanings can be invented
out of the blue, the way hip  and cool  have wandered away from
their literal meanings. ) Since w e are so used to infin ity in these simple guises, w e can
expand our comfort zone to be comfortable with infinity as a
personal  trait. S u d d e n  G e n i u s
“Anything can happen” is essential to being human. A leap of
awareness ca n happen unexpectedly, as in the amazing
phenomenon k nown as sudden genius, a term coined by Darold
Treffert, a physician in Wisconsin who has become an expert in
“exceptional brain performance. ” He defines sudden genius  as a
“spontaneous epiphany-like  moment where the rules and
intricacies of music, art, or mathematics, for example, are
experienced and revealed, producing almost instantaneous
giftedness. ”
Of t he fourteen cases Treffe rt has studied to date, a striking
example is a twenty-eight- year-old Israeli-born man he calls
“K. A. ” As a performer, K.
The cold and dry climate conditions in Africa.
According to the text, what event caused a significant decline in the human population?
The ability to edit and filter reality, which led to the survival of a single group.
What was the outcome of the human brain's adaptation to the harsh climate?
To filter out reality and reinforce our sense of self.
What is the primary use of the ego, according to the author?
The author is suggesting that the brain is not the primary source of creativity, but rather consciousness and the infinite potential that lies within.
What is the author arguing about the nature of the human brain and its relationship to creativity?
The divided self, which is the root cause of our inability to tap into our infinite potential.
What is the author suggesting is the primary obstacle to human evolution?