Cosmetics and fashion
matter enough  to millions of people, just as fantasy foot ball and
adding more guns to their co llection matter enough to millions of
others. “So what?” is highly personal and unpredictable, but it is
also ruthless. Until something matters enough, we won’t change
our accustomed way of life. Here’s m y answ er to “So wha t?” as it applies to the direct path. In a very real  way, becoming metahuman is about elim inating
everything that is unnecessa ry for our species. Such a process isalready under way by bits and pieces. The modern world has
eradicated—or is in the process of eradicating—many things that
Homo sapiens  can do without. It would have seemed impossible
once to  do without religion, j udging by how a belief in God or the
gods lay at the heart of every ancient culture. But th ere are
millions of people who have adopted a secular worldview, placed
their faith in science, and live without a sense of loss in the
absence of religion. We can  argue forever over whether religion is good or bad for
society, and over every other thing that is in flux. From the
viewpoint of metahuman, however, stripping away all the things
that Homo sapiens  d oesn’t need a nymore is essential. The illusion
is g etting thinner, so to spe ak. Mental constructs like war and
poverty are no longer cons idered facts of life humanity must
accept. Why not get rid of th e whole illusion, then? Why not do it
simply, completely, and with the least discomfort possible? Once yo u elim inate everythin g that isn’t real, what’s left must
be r eal. The dir ect path accords with this notion. It holds t hat only
one thi ng is real if everything unreal is taken away: the sense of
self. Ev ery life has its own priorities. One person’s suffer ing may
be r ooted in po verty, while another person’s suffering is rooted in
sickness, a bad relationship, or lonely old age. Nothing is more tangled and chaotic than virtual reality. The
process of dismantling every  cause of suffering is too complex to
figure o ut in advance. The only realistic answer is to allow the
illusion to dissolve as effortlessly as it developed in the first place. This is what the direct path is all about; this is what sets  it apart
from every other scheme for the improvement of human existence. It se ems too g ood to be true that mind-forged manacles will
simply drop away of their o wn accord. But that’s exactly what
Rumi m eant w hen he declared that the jail cell is open. S ince we
are alre ady fre e, there is no effort needed to get free. You are free
once you base your life on one thing, your sense of self. But as things stand, the sense of self is almost t otally
overlooked. Woody Allen’s 1 983 movie, Zelig , depicted its title
character as a kind of historical phantom. Even though he was
totally insignificant, Leonard Zelig was a human chameleon. Hehad the ability to melt into his surroundings completely. The
movie t akes pla ce in the 1920 s and 1930s, and the novelist  F. Scott
Fitzgerald is the first to notic e Zelig’s amazing transformations. At
a Great Gatsby –like party, Zelig is in the liv ing room talking in a
refined Boston accent and upholding Republican values, while
later in the k itchen he comes off as a common man with
Democratic ideas. Somehow Zelig is everybod y and nobody, everywhere  and
nowhere. That’s a parable for the sense of self. It is present in
every experience but melts invisibly into the backgroun d—until
you star t payin g attention to it. Then the sense of self, un likely as
this seems, takes center stage. The firs t step is to begin to n otice your sense of self. Imag ine a
debating society where one side is defending a controversial
position on the Middle East conflict, abortion rights, or racism. See yourself standing up and delivering an eloquent argument on
one side. Let’s say you vehe mently oppose racism, beli eve in a
two-state solution for the Palestinians, and support a woman’s
right to have an abortion. Now pu t yourself on the opp osing side and make exactly the
contrary argument for each issue. It might help if the contrary
position is outrageous—you might see yourself defend ing the
necessity to ban all abortions or supporting the terrorists who
deny the right of Israel to exist. Even though you will experience
resistance in abandoning the  side you actually believe in, debaters
do it all the time. They shift perspective from pro to co n at the
drop of a hat. This ability to s hift perspectives is beyond any set of
beliefs. We can put on any coat we want to wear. Yet whether you
speak up for i deas you love or ideas you hate, you  are always
present. Your sense of self is independent of anything you think or
say. Next ex ample: Take any common object in your house and
touch it . Is it you who touched it? Anyone will automatic ally say
yes. Lo ok at the same objec t. Is it you who sees it? Yes again. There is no time in the history of humankind when the  answer
would be different. What kee ps changing is our mental m odel of
what it means to touch and  see an object. In prehistory , before
language arose, there was no explanation for seeing and to uching.In a n ag e of faith, when dead flesh, the body, was animate d by the
soul, it was God who ma de sensation possible. Today, the
experience of seeing and touching is ascribed to the central
nervous system and the activity of the brain in receiving sensory
data from the world “out there.”
Yet if you don’t bother with any of these explanations, th ere is
only the self having an experi ence. You can modify this ex ercise in
other w ays. In medical school, students are taught that bodily
sensations reach the brain through a spidery web of afferent
nerves running everywhere. If you touch your hand or lift your
arm, the signals from affere nt nerves are responsible for feeling
the experience. Every signal is like an Inca runner dashing from a
remote region to the Andes to the emperor in the royal city of
Cuzco. The information from afferent nerves is constantly flowing,
so w hy don’t w e feel every limb’s weight, position, warmth, and
the like all the time? Sit in your chair and let your attenti on roam
from the top of your head to your nose, then to your heart, then to
the tips of your toes. If I ask , “Who is roaming from one sensation to another? ” you
will sur ely answ er, “I am.” Th e self selects whatever it wan ts to pay
attention to. Therefore, the self is not bound by the activity of the
nervous system. It is present no matter which nerve cells are
firing. One fin al exam ple: If you clos e your eyes and see the color blue,
this exp erience is happening  in your awareness. If you open your
eyes and gaze at the blue sky, where is the blueness? It i s still in
your awareness. The experience of blue “in here” and blue “out
there” o ccurs in the same p lace. When you handle an object or
smell it or hea r it, you can remember those sensations. Did the
sensations travel from the outside world to your inside world? We
assume they did. Sitting arou nd a warm campfire and wat ching its
flickering flames is different from remembering the warmth and
the flickering flames. But both experiences happen in awareness. Hearing a bang in your head and hearing a car backfire on the
street are two different experiences, but they share the undeniable
fact that both occur in awareness. If awa reness is present both inside and outside, it is
independent of space. Likewi se, the campfire you sat beside mighthave be en in childhood, while the memory of it is now. Since
awareness was registering th e campfire both then and now, it is
independent o f time. Once you see that awareness isn’t b ound by
time and space, then you—the real you that is pure consciousness
—must not be bound by time and space. Wherever your aw areness
goes, yo ur sen se of self is present; the two are fused. The self is
present in everything, but we don’t notice this because, like Zelig,
the self knows how to melt perfectly into every situation. I thi nk most people, with a little reflection, can accept that  they
have a sense o f self following them everywhere like an invisible
shadow. But to fully pass the “So what?” test, the sense of s elf can’t
simply be a by stander. Part of Woody Allen’s conceit was  that, if
you loo k closely, Zelig appears in photos of momentous events like
a presid ential inauguration—but this didn’t make him im portant. Similarly, sensing yourself in every experience doesn’t put it
center stage. The direct path brings the sense of self to light. What’s needed next is to discover the enormous difference this
modest attainment actually makes. The leap from human to m etahuman, the shift from virtual
reality to the “ real” reality, is all contained in the simple act of
noticing the self. Not the eg o, which wants to hog the l imelight
and cla im that  it and it alone is the self. The ego-personality can’t
help but contain the sense o f self—every experience contains it. But the  ego blocks our view. It is tied to virtual reality an d keeps
luring our attention everywhere but  the sense of self. As we’ll see in Part Three, once you rid yourself of all the t hings
you don ’t actually need, your ego can be discarded, too,  but not
your sense of s elf. As the unnecessary burdens and rubbis h of the
spell/dream/illusion are tossed out, the sense of self doe sn’t hog
the limelight. Being the only thing about you that is timeless and
eternal, it doesn’t have to do anything. It simply is, a be acon of
pure aw areness that shines constantly in every second of your
existence. Ironically, everything else in your life has a much
harder time passing the “So what?” test.A10
 
F R E E I N G  Y O U R  B O D Y
s we saw, co nsciousness i s everywhere, always, and
everything. If that’s true, then you are everywhere, always, and
everything. But in your daily life, even if you were totally
convinced abo ut this, you a re guided in the opposite d irection. You’ve endured  a lifetime of training and conditioning telling you
that you  are a s olitary person  sitting by yourself in a room. Instead
of always, your life span is ve ry limited, bookended by two events
—birth and death. Instead of  everything, you are a bundle of very
specific things, beginning with your name, gender, marital status,
work, and so on. The vir tual reality we want to dismantle is made up of many
moving parts that occupy the ir own compartments. One part is the
body, another the mind, the world, and other people. These parts
were se t up so that life can be  managed one piece at a time. You go
to colle ge for your mind, to the gym for your body, on a  date to
establish a relationship, to work to bring home money. From a metahuman standpoint, any  d ivisio n of life into bits
and pieces only supports the illusion. Wholeness is wholeness, not
a co llection of parts. To put it another way, life happens all at
once, h ere and  now. The rea son we cling to virtual realit y is that
the prospect of “all at once, here and now” is too overwhelming.After ponderin g how to bring this truth home in a way that’s
practical and relatable, I co ncluded that the direct path should
start with the b ody, not the m ind. My reasoning is that the body is
what holds most people back. They experience themselves encased
in a  body. The y accept the reality of birth, sickness, ag ing, and
death. They seek physical pleasure and shrink from physical pain. As l ong as thes e are the prec onditions of your daily life, y ou can’t
be meta human. Your body won’t accept it. A liver, heart, or skin
cell can’t scream, “Are you crazy?” But it does seem crazy to
abandon the body as a physic al object—this act of craziness makes
your bo dy the perfect place to  start. If you can get past the  body as
a package of flesh and bone, transforming it into a m ode of
consciousness, everything else naturally falls into place. T h e  A n a t o m y  o f  A w a r e n e s s
If we have trap ped ourselves  inside an illusion, the body must
be part and pa rcel of that—and it is. Your body is your story in
physical form. As your story  grew over the years, the things you
thought, said, and did requ ired a huge array of brain activity. Learning to walk was a trium ph of balance, eyesight, and motor
coordination, but once you  as a little child put together this
complex puzzle, your brain remembered everything you learned
and sto red it for life, so you c an move on to something new. Your
brain has stored a host of skills, from speaking and wr iting to
riding a bike, doing arithmetic, and dancing the waltz. These
mental attainments are embodied in you physically. But as soon a s this is point ed out, we risk falling back  into
dividing “mental” from “physical,” which sends us straight back
into the illusion. As babies learn to walk, they are under no such
illusion. As they totter, fall, get up again, and keep on try ing, the
experience fits the holistic description given above: the whole
thing h appens all at once, here and now. The same is true of any
skill yo u can name—learning it wasn’t mental and/or physical. It
was happening in only one dimension: awareness.There are so many ways t hat we put mind and body in
opposition tha t going into all of them would be impossi ble. The
direct path doesn’t even req uire the small amount of discussion
we’ve just passed through. Instead, it experiences the body in
awareness . O nce you do  that, the division between mental and
physical return s to the authen ticity of a baby learning to walk. You
return to the self as the ag ent of the whole experience, fusing
thought and action. In this case, any action is returned to
wholeness, which is where it occurs. To begin, just b e open to the idea that your body isn’t a physical
object in which you reside. Such a viewpoint is just a habit of
thinking, even though a stubb orn one. I will guide you through an
exercise that will give you the direct experience of living, not in a
physical body, but in awaren ess. (This exercise and the o nes that
follow are much easier to do if someone reads them aloud to you. If yo u c an find a partner who will join you, switching the  roles of
reader and participant, all the better.) E x e r c i s e :  T h e  B o d y  i n  A w a r e n e s s
This first exercise involves the following steps:
STEP 1:  Being aware of your body. STEP 2:  Being aware of some bodily processes. STEP 3:  Being aware of the body as inner space. STEP 4:  Expanding inner space beyond the skin. STEP 5:  Resting in wholeness. Each step is a  natural progression from the one before, and
each st ep is a simple, dir ect experience. You don’t have to
memorize the instructions, just go through the exercise as an
experience.STEP 1: BEING A WARE OF YOUR BODY . Sit quie tly with your eyes clo sed. Let bodily sensations be your
focus of  attenti on, so that you  can feel your body. There’s no need
to tr y to stop your thoughts; they are irrelevant. It doesn’ t matter
what sensations you happen to feel. Just be with your body. STEP 2: BEING A WARE OF SOME BODIL Y
PROCESSES. Be aware of yo ur breath as it goes in and out. Slow your breath
down a bit, the n make it go a bit faster. Move your attentio n to the
center of your chest and be aware of your heartbeat. Ta ke some
easy, de ep breaths and sense your heartbeat slowing down as you
relax. See if yo u can feel your pulse elsewhere—many people can
feel it in their fingertips or forehead or inside their ears, for
example. STEP 3: BEING A WARE OF THE BODY AS INNER
SPACE. Now m ove you r attention to the inside of your body. Feel your
head as  empty space, and start going down your body to th e chest,
stomach, abdo men, legs, and feet, pausing at each place to
experience your internal organs as a space in which your
awareness freely moves. If you want, you can also experience your
breath as the e xpansion and relaxation of the space in you r chest,
your heartbeat as a constant pulsation in the space of the chest. STEP 4: EXP ANDING INNER SP ACE BEYOND THE
SKIN. Once you have felt the inside of your body as empty space in
which b odily processes are taking place, run your attention across
your skin. Roam over the sensations in your head, feeling the
outlines of face, scalp, and ears. Move downward, letting yourawareness go to every other place—throat, arms, hands, feet—as
sensations reach you. Now lif t your awareness slightly above your skin and gently let
it expand beyond the contou rs of your body. Some people  can do
this easily, but others need t o conjure up an image—you can see
your inner space suffused with light and watch the light expand
until it fills the room. Or you can visualize inner space around
your heart as a sphere, a round balloon that expands a bit more
every time you inhale, watch ing it get bigger and bigger  until it
takes up the entire room. STEP 5: RESTING IN WHOLENESS. Once you have gone through the previous steps, rest quietly for
a minute or two. Let the experience of the body be here now. What this exercise has done is multifold. You have freed
yourself from being trapped inside a thing, substituting the
experience of your body as p rocesses and sensations. Since your
experience was  conscious, these processes and sensations  moved
to w here they a ctually occur, in your awareness. Then you opened
yourself to experience your b ody as inner space—in Sanskrit this
space is  called Chit Akash , o r mind spac e. Since everything in life
happens in mind space, you e xpanded the space until there was no
boundary between “in here” and “out there.”
You may be surprised that you’ve accomplished all these things,
and sin ce the experience was likely to be unusual, you will easily
pop back into the habit of feeling that your body is a physical
object you reside in, like a mo use hiding in the walls of a house or
a ra bbit in its burrow. Yet, at the very least, you now can see that
there is  an alternative to the old habit. To free yourself fr om your
body, the old habit won’t serve you. To break down the old hab it—a process I call “thawing,” as
discussed befo re—take time once or twice a day to rep eat this
exercise. Once you become  used to it, the whole thing runs
naturally and smoothly. We’re all practical-minded, so what good
is the exercise in daily life?You can do it when you feel stressed. You can  do it to relieve tightness in your body or other
unpleasant and painful sensations. It also works to help relieve worried, anxious thoughts. You can center yourself with this exercise whenever you
feel distracted and scattered. Various practices in yoga and Zen Buddhism bring the body
under control through sheer focused awareness. When you felt
your he artbeat and breathing , for example, you took the first step
to co ntrolling both processes at once through the vagus nerve, one
of the ten cranial nerves that  extend from the brain to the rest of
the central nervous system. The vag us nerve is a wanderer, tracing its course like the t runk
line of an old-fashioned tel ephone system from brain to neck,
down into the chest, past the heart, and extending into the
abdomen. It is the longest cranial nerve, and its fibers both send
and receive sensory information. Most of the sensations you
experienced in the exercise you just did were channeled through
the vagus nerve. You can take advantage of t his knowledge in a practical way
through “vagal breathing,” which consists of inhaling to the count
of fo ur, holding the breath to the count of two, and exhaling to the
count o f four. This simple rhythm of 4-2-4 is easy for a  normal
healthy adult, and no one should try to force it to the point of
gasping or feeling uncomfort able. To the great surprise of medical
researchers, vagal breathing is the best way to reduce  stress,
particularly the immediate signs of ragged breath, increased heart
rate, and muscle tension. It tu rns out tha t chronic, low-level stress is more important and
more pervasive  than acute stress. In modern life, being in a state
of chronic low-level stress is so common as to be accepted as
normal. But your body doesn’t experience it as normal at all; the
earliest beginn ings of heart disease, hypertension, sle ep and
digestive disorders, and probably some cancers can be traced to
chronic stress.It is  no accide nt that the location of these disorders par allels
the course of th e vagus nerve, which serves to communicate stress
to the heart, stomach, digestive tract, and then the rest of the body
as t he nervous system branches out. Vagal breathing brings the
state of  the body back into ba lance and relieves tension. So even if
you haven’t come to the real ization that everything physical and
mental happens in consc iousness—meaning that our body
happens in consciousness—here is an unmistakable clue. We accept that a skill like walking and riding a bike is
permanent onc e it has been learned. But, at a more basic l evel, the
biorhythms th at sustain the bodymind as a whole were learned
and absorbed millions of ye ars ago by our hominid ancestors. Modern life pushes us to unlearn them, as witnessed by the huge
number of people with digest ive and sleep disorders. Both of those
functions are controlled thro ugh built-in biorhythms. On ce your
body has forgotten how to express a biorhythm, the effec t is like
one trumpet or violin playing a different piece of music from the
rest of the orchestra—the whole symphony is ruined. Vagal b reathing may wind up being very useful beyond its
ability t o norm alize heart rate, lower blood pressure, and make
breathing more regular. It’s  a good practice to use in bed just
before you fall asleep. Mild to moderate insomnia can often be
eased o r totally healed. General stress is eased, including stressful
thoughts and a racing mind, which countless people experience
when they try to go to sleep. I’ve gone into a little detail (the whole topic is covered in depth
in The Healing Self , which I coauthored with Rudy Tanzi) to make
the point that a physical map  of the nervous system, the operation
of the vagus n erve, consciously intervening in its operation, and
sensing the results directly ar e all one thing . The direct path leads
us b ack to that  one thing, wh ich will, in time, completely end the
state of  separation and allow us to rest in wholeness, which is
reality. Y o u r  B o d y ,  Y o u r  S t o r yOnce you begin to experience your body in awareness,
transformation starts to oc cur. You are moving out of the
separation between mind and body toward wholeness. You need
to be whole to be who you truly are. The direct path is experiential. It’s not theoretical, nor is it therapy or a spiritual journey. As you experie nce your body in awareness, you have taken time
out from your story. This seems like a modest thing, a moment or
two spent in d oing nothing but being here. Yet there’s no other
way to disman tle your story that is this direct. Millions of people
benefit from therapy and walking the spiritual path. But
eventually we must all face the fact that everything  we do, even in
the name of h ealing and spirituality, is taking place inside our
story. As a res ult, we can get glimpses of wholeness—these are
often q uite beautiful and uplifting—yet they do not carry us to
metareality as our home. At t he moment you are your story—it can’t be helped—and this
keeps you trapped in separation. The word separation  may not
come to mind; you might n ot even consider it a prob lem. To
illustrate, cons ider the following sentences, which all of us have
said or heard:
I hate my body. You’re only as old as you think you are. Youth is wasted on the young. I used to have a perfect figure. The statements express diffe rent sentiments, but each reflects
the sep aration of mind and body. “I hate my body” comes from
someone who feels trapped in physicality. The person is
bemoaning what she has done to her body, or what her body has
done to  her. The state of sep aration is obvious. “I” is pla ying the
part of the victim, and “body” is the culprit. “You are only as old as yo u think you are” is much more
optimistic, asserting that the mind can overcome the deterioration
of aging . Yet, as we all know, this is in part wishful thinkin g. Aging
is an inexorable process. It is much better to have a positive
attitude toward it than a negative one—society is benefiting fromthe “new old age,” which env isions every stage of life as v igorous,
productive, and  healthy. But a thought or a belief isn’t the same as
a state of awareness. “You’r e only as old as you think y ou are”
cannot substitu te for the true self. When established in yo ur sense
of s elf as a permanent state , aging holds no threat beca use you
identify with the timeless (we will go into what the timeless state
means in the next section). A good attitude toward the aging
process still leaves you trapped in your story. Oscar Wilde’s quip “Youth is wasted on the young” puts a witty
face on  a sad w ish that many people have: If only I could  go back
in t ime, I’d live my life so much better. Regret over the  past is
mingled into everyone’s story, and the basis for this regret  (and its
opposite, which  is nostalgia) is that the passage of time has power
over us . “I used to have a perfect figure” states this more directly
by c onnecting  the passing of the years with a loss of physical
attractiveness, while implying that “a perfect figure” is the  same as
self-worth and sexual desirability. These example s of how the mind feels separate and different
from the body could be expan ded endlessly. The body is su bject to
all man ner of judgment, and yet the underlying process, whether
you lov e your body or hate it, hasn’t been examined closely. This
underlying process is the inescapable way your body has absorbed
every detail of your life story and now mirrors it. To be tra pped in
your story and trapped in y our body are the same thin g. Your
brain has been shaped every minute since you were born , and it
has communicated everything you experience to the body’s fifty
trillion cells, which in turn pass the messages on to your DNA. Wholeness, then, isn’t just a mental shift. It’s a revolution in
the bodymind that undoes the past, beginning in the brain but
reaching out to liberate eve ry cell and influencing the genetic
activity in each cell. To see ho w this revolution occurs, let me go to
the heart of every story, which is time. H o w  t o  B e  T i m e l e s sThere was a period in infancy when your experience was
original and authentic. You were too young to interpret the world
on your own. All your development was occupied with the basics
of walk ing, talking, exploring the world, and so on. Let’s call this
the pre story period of life. W illiam Blake divided one group of
poems i nto “so ngs of innocence” and “songs of experience,” which
were a nonbiblical narrative  of the Fall from Grace. Like the
romantics who were to follow, and who idolized him, Blake
believed that the Fall didn’t occur to Adam and Eve; rather, it
happened to children as they  lost their innocence. The Fa ll was a
repeated experience generation after generation. What Blake saw in innocenc e was a fresh, simple, lyrical , and
joyous p erspective on the world. The tone is set in one of the most
famous songs of innocence, “The Lamb,” where you can read
infant  for lamb :
Little Lamb who made thee
Dost thou know who made thee
Gave thee life & bid thee feed,
By the stream & o’er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing wooly bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice. In c ontrast to this vision of  a childhood Eden, the son gs of
experience are  bitter and dar k, reflecting the hardship Blake knew
firsthand and saw all around him in eighteenth-century London. One fam ous poem, “A Poison Tree,” reimagines the tale of original
sin as the dark side of hum an nature, in verse that cou ld be a
nursery rhyme:
I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end. I was angry with my foe:I told it not, my wrath did grow. And I watered it in fears,
Night & morning with my tears:
And I sunned it with smiles,
And with soft deceitful wiles. And it grew both day and night,
Till it bore an apple bright. And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine. And into my garden stole,
When the night had veiled the pole;
In the morning glad I see,
My foe outstretched beneath the tree. Even without the benefit of Blake’s vision, we have all
experienced th e transformati on from innocence to experience. All
it took was time. Nothing else was necessary as we learned the
standard interpretation of the world everyone around us accepted. A baby is never bored. He lo oks on the world with wond er. The
hours don’t hang heavy; deadlines don’t make a baby rush through
his day s. He has no hunger for distraction so that he can  escape
from himself. Being a visionary, Blake saw the possibility of liberation from
the fallen state, which he c alled “organized innocence.” It’s a
brilliant phrase , because it im plies that a person’s experience can
be as original, authentic, and untainted as a baby’s while retaining
the org anized mind, a mind we must have to perform higher
functions as adults (which includes taking care of babies). Returning to innocence means embracing values like love and
creativity, which become more valued as we reach maturity. Yet
the years of m aturity make it more and more difficult to  journeyback to innocence. For all the countless people who yearn for what
it felt like to first fall in love, few find a way back. The culprit isn’t experience, because experience can still be
joyful and authentic at any tim e of life. The culprit is hidden in the
texture of our lives—it is time. I said above that be coming
embedded in the interpreted world (i.e., the spell/dream/illusion)
only needed time, nothing el se. By the same token, esca ping the
grip of time is the only way out. Far from being a mystica l notion,
you can be timeless right this minute—in fact, that’s the only way. For most people, the two words timeless  and eternal  seem
roughly the same. For religious believers in the Christian and
Muslim traditions, Heaven is  eternal, a place where time goes on
forever. For the nonreligious , time ends with physical death. In
both cases, however, ordinary clock time has ceased. But there are
problems with all these concepts, and if we go deeply into the
subject, time is very different from what we casually accept. Physics has had a lot to say about time, thanks to Eins tein’s
revolutionary concept that time isn’t constant but varies according
to the situation at hand. Traveling near the speed of light or
drawing near the massive gravitational pull of a black hole will
have a drastic impact on how  time passes. But let’s set r elativity
aside fo r a moment to consider how time works in human terms,
here and now. Each of us normally experiences three states of
time: ti me ticking on the clock when we are awake, time a s part of
the illus ion of having a dream, and the absence of time wh en we’re
asleep b ut not dreaming. Thi s tells us that time is tied to our state
of consciousness. We take it for granted that one kind of time—the one measured
by clock s—is real time, but th at’s not true. All three relationships
with time—wak ing, dreaming , and sleeping—are knowable only as
personal experiences. Time doesn’t exist outside human
awareness. Th ere is no absolute clock time “out there” in the
universe. Many  cosmologists would argue that time, as we know it
in our waking  state, entered the universe only at the big bang. What ca me bef ore the big ban g is probably inconceivable,  because
“before the big bang” has no meaning if time were born at the
instant the cosmos was born. If you go to the finest level of Nature,
to the vacuum  state from wh ich the quantum field emerged, thequalities of everyday existence, such as sight, sound, taste , touch,
and sm ell, no longer exist, and there is also a vanishing point
where three-dimensionality vanishes, along with time itself. What lies beyond the quant um horizon is purely a matt er of
conjecture. The precreated state of the universe can be modeled
almost any way you choose, as being multidimensional, infinitely
dimensional, or nondimensional. So it must be accepted that time
came out of the timeless and not just at the big bang. Everything
in the physical  universe winks in and out of existence at a rapid
rate of excitation here and now. The timeless is with us at every
second of our lives. Yet something looks fishy in that sentence, because the timeless
can’t be measured using a cl ock, so it makes no sense to say that
the timeless is with us “at ev ery second.” Instead, the timeless is
with us , period . This world is timeless. There is no need to wait for
death or Heaven to prove that eternity is real. Once you acknowledge that t he timeless is with us, a question
naturally arise s: How is the timeless related to clock tim e? The
answer is that the two aren’t related. The timeless is absolute, and
since it can’t be measured by  clocks, it has no relative ex istence. How strange. The timeless is with us, yet we can’t relate to it. So of
what good is the timeless? To answ er this  question, we have to back up a bit. Clock  time
has no privileg ed position in reality. There is no reason  why it
should be elevated above dream time or the absence of  time in
dreamless sleep. Clock time is just a quality of daily life, like other
qualities we know as colors, tastes, smells, and so on. Without
human beings to experience these qualities, they don’t exist. Photons, the particles of lig ht, have no brightness without our
perception of brightness; p hotons are invisible and colorless. Likewise, time is an artifact of human experience. Outside our
perception, we cannot know anything about time. This seems to
contradict the cornerstone of  science, which holds that “of course”
there was a physical universe before human life evolved on Earth,
which m eans that “of course” there was time as well, billions of
years of time.Here w e come  to a fork in th e road, because either you a ccept
that tim e, as registered by th e human brain, is real on its own or
you arg ue that, being dependent on the human brain, time is
created in consciousness. The second position is by far the
stronger one, even though fewer people believe it. In our
awareness we constantly convert the timeless into the experience
of time—ther e is no getting around this. Since such a
transformation cannot happen “in” time, something else must be
going on. To get a handle on t his “something else,” let’s look at the
present moment, the now, the immediate present. All e xperience happens in the  now. Even to remember the  past
or antic ipate the future is a present-moment event. Brain cells,
which physically process the conversion of the timeless into time,
function only in the present. They have no other choice, since the
electrical signals and chemical reactions that run brain cells occur
only here and now. If the present moment is the only real time we
can know in th e waking state, why is it so elusive? You can use a
clock as fine-tuned as an atomic clock to predict when the next
second, millisecond, or trillionth of a second will arrive, but that’s
not the same a s predicting the now. The present momen t, as an
experience, is totally unpredi ctable. If it could be predicted, you’d
know your next thought in advance, which is impossible. As we touched on already,  the present moment is always
elusive because  the instant you register it as either a sensation, an
image, a feeling, or a thought, it’s gone. So let’s boil these  insights
down. The now, the place where we all live, can be described as:
the junction point where the timeless is converted into
time
the only “real” time we know in the waking state
a totally unpredictable phenomenon
a totally elusive phenomenon
Now, if  all these characteristi cs are being correctly described, it
turns o ut that we have been fooling ourselves to believe that time
is a  simple ma tter of tick-tock on the clock. In some my sterious
way, ea ch of us occupies a tim eless domain, and to produce a four-dimensional w orld for the purpose of living in it, we mentally
construct it. That is, we create the world in consciousness first and
foremost. Reality, including ordinary clock time, is constructed in
consciousness as well. We mu st not fall into the tra p of saying that the mind creates
reality. The mind is a vehicle for active thinking experience, and,
like tim e and space, it has to  have a source beyond some thing as
transient and elusive as thou ghts. If we trusted our min ds, we’d
equate going to sleep with death. In sleep the conscious mind
gives up the w orld of solid physical objects and clock time. Yet
when w e wake up in the morning, there is a return of solid objects
and clock time. They were held in waiting, so to speak, by
consciousness, even during the eight hours a day that the thinking
mind was out of commission. If th e d irect pa th aims to tak e us beyond the illusion we accept
as r eal, it must deliver the experience of being timeless. In its
fullest state, the timeless experience is simple, natural, and
effortless—it is  the sense of self, which quietly lies insid e every
other experience. We are only partially there. The exercise in this
chapter, which  allows you to experience your body in awareness,
thaws o ut one aspect of the  illusion. The present discussion of
being t imeless thaws out another aspect. In both cases, as
physicality and  clock time sta rt to lose their grip, you realize that
there is another way to live: being metahuman. When you start being metahuman, you exist at the timeless
source of the self. It’s a huge step to know that the timeless is with
us, bey ond any belief in birth and death, age and decay. Things
appear and disappear in our dreams when we’re sleeping. Yet we
don’t m ourn them, because we know that dreams are an illusion. What matters isn’t the things  that appear and disappear, o nly that
you don’t mistake the dream for reality. Discovering that the same is true about our waking dream sets
us f ree from t he fear of death. Metahuman is about mo re than
this. Liberated  from illusion, we can be free of all fear. In the end,
waking up leads to absolut e freedom. We don’t just l ead our
everyday lives. We navigate the field of infinite possibilities.I11
 
R E C O V E R I N G  T H E
W H O L E  M I N D
magine that you’ve gone to a cabin in the woods that sits by a
small lake. The sun wakes you up very early, and when you walk
down to  the lake in the pale light of dawn, it is perfectly still. The
surface is mirror-like and undisturbed. You have the urge to pick
up a pebble and toss it into the lake. The pebble lands with a plop,
ripples spread  out across the water, and, as the ring of ripples
widens, they fade away until nothing remains but the still surface
of the lake. It h as returned to what it was before you came along to
disturb it. In this modes t experience is reflected the whole story of the
human mind. All that’s needed is to see the scene in reverse, like
running a film backward. The surface of the lake is perfectly still. A faint ring of ripples distur bs the water, at first in a way that’s
barely d iscernible. The ripple s grow bigger and the ring starts to
shrink. All at once a pebble pops out of the water and f lies into
your hand. This is how the human mind looks from the perspective of
metareality. Th ere is pure c onsciousness, still and undisturbed. Faint activity begins to stir, s o faint that you have to be quiet andvery alert to notice it. But this activity—call it a vibr ation in
consciousness—becomes mo re urgent until something fully
formed pops into existence: a sensation, image, feeling, or
thought. In d aily life a myriad of mental events pop into existence , and
they are so con stant and compelling we never experience  the still
surface of the lake, which is pure consciousness. The direct path
aims to recover this experien ce, because a still, undisturbed state
of a wareness is whole mind . Whole mind contains the infinite
potential that is unique to Homo sapiens . A s with so ma ny things
in meta reality, whole mind is already here and now. You  have to
have a lake before you can throw a pebble into it, and you have to
have a lake for the pebble to pop out of it, too. Both p rocesses
occur in the co smos as every subatomic particle emerges from the
quantum vacuum and fades back into it. Likewise, your thoughts
arise from silence, poise in midair only as long as it takes to be
noticed, and then fade back where they came from. If w hole mind is already here and now, why do we ne ed to
recover it? The answer offered in this book is that metareality lies
beyond the illusions of virtual reality, which bamboozles us by
seeming to be real. Whole m ind is indisputably real, as th e direct
path aims to prove. But I feel that something more is needed. If
mental activity were exactly like pebbles popping out of a lake,
each thought would naturally die away, and the mind  would
effortlessly ret urn to its und isturbed state. In other words, there
would be no i nterruptions, no clinging or blurring or storms to
whip the lake up. Unfortunately, our minds are not smoothly connected to pure
consciousness. Our minds are a confused, chaotic jumble, vividly
described in some Eastern traditions as a monkey. Every thought
joins the storm of other thoughts without returning to a still,
undisturbed st ate. To be hu man is to ride the storm. Once you
learned as a small child to speak and put thoughts into words,
your mind was off and running. Fueled by the agenda of the ego,
“I” started the endless task of accepting A and rejecting B. Even
two- or three-year-olds want  what they want: toys to call “mine,”
attention from  their mother, their favorite foods, stories th ey want
to h ear over and over again. Rejection is a vital part of the ego’sagenda as well. A two- or three-year-old throws some toys on the
floor, re jects hugs and kisses, refuses to eat certain foods , and so
on. There is a fam ous cartoon by Carl Rose and E. B. W hite
showing a mother and child at the dinner table. The caption goes:
M OTHER:  “It’s broccoli, dear.”
D AUGHTER:  “I say it’s spinach and I say the hell with it.”
If kids spoke in adult voices, that’s exactly how they’d talk! From the perspective of metahuman, none of the ego’s agenda
is a necessity. Why go to the  trouble of constructing a se lf when
you already are  the self? The o nly real necessity is to be here now
and allow life to unfold. But bec ause our thoughts don’t fade away into pure, quiet
calmness, an obstacle arises. Thoughts interfere with our ability to
be here now. Every thought generates a new thought, every
sensation a new sensation. This endless mental activity is so
distracting that we cannot see our source or touch it or sense its
presence. Getting rid of mental interference has become hard
work. T he years spent in Zen  Buddhist monasteries or sitting in
lotus pose in a Himalayan cave are images in popular culture that
represent just how arduous it  is to quiet the mind. The dir ect path
cuts thr ough th e hard work i n a simple way, as illustrate d in the
following exercise. E x e r c i s e :  E y e s  O p e n ,  N o  T h o u g h t s
This exercise is reserved for  the moment you wake up in the
morning. When you open your eyes and before you get out of bed,
your mind begins its day. You are preset to jump in to your
customary rou tine. You start to think about what you have to do
that da y, and very soon you have rebooted your persona l story—
your mind is tr ained to run automatically, like a computer whosesoftware is ready for instructions the minute the machine is
turned on. Yet ther e is a s mall interval before your story reboots. For a few
seconds you are awake but not yet engaged with the world. At this
moment there is no interven ing thought to block pure aw areness. You can expand these few s econds into a conscious experience. Here’s how. Go to bed wit h the intention that you are going to tak e the
following steps the instant you wake up the next morning:
Step 1:  When you first are aware of waking up, open your
eyes. Step 2:  Stare at the ceiling without focusing on anything in
particular. Step 3:  Try to keep your eyes open. Focus on this and
nothing else. What t his exercise does is to set a trap for undisturbed
awareness. Each step is important in the sequence. As yo u go to
bed the night before, you set an intention; this puts the exercise at
the top of your  mental agenda in the morning. Opening y our eyes
and staring at the ceiling d istracts you from starting to think. Focusing your attention on keeping your eyes open is the real
secret, howeve r. Your brain wakes up in the morning in  waves,
alternating sleep and wakefulness. As these waves increase, there
is st eadily more wakefulness  than sleepiness, and thus you wake
up, still feeling a bit sleepy. By focusing your attention on keeping your eyes open, your
brain h as no choice but to blo ck thinking. The effort to sta y awake
occupies it entirely. (You can accomplish the same thing by
visually seeing a blue dot in your mind’s eye and keeping your
attention on it.) Once th e steps  of this exerci se are mastered, you will be  in a
state of “eyes o pen, no thoughts.” As you lie there, simply notice
what this state feels like. Very few people have actually been
awake without thinking for more than a few seconds. With
practice, you can sustain thi s exercise for up to a minute. It’s asignificant thin g to be still, quiet, calm, and alert with no ego to
defend or story to construc t. The more you are aware of how
significant the  experience actually is, the more insight you will
have into your true self. The exercise isn’t an end unt o itself,
merely a starting point. There a re varia nts of getting t o the same state of “eyes open, no
thoughts.” In meditation, for example, the mind settles down into
a r ested quiet s tate, and when you open your eyes at the end of the
meditation, this mental relaxation persists. Here the mind is
coordinating a  brain response, the natural tendency to return to
pure consciousness if given a chance. The purpose of a mantra, if
you pra ctice mantra medita tion, is to give the mind a sound
without meani ng to occupy it, which helps you stop focu sing on
what your thoughts are trying to tell you. As the mantra returns to
the min d, it becomes subtler and fainter, allowing an easy slide
into qu iet min d. At first, whe n you are coming out of meditation,
“eyes open, no thoughts” is  brief, because we are so used to
jumping back into our story. But over time there is an expansion,
and “eyes open, no thoughts”  turns into a steady state around the
clock. At that point, a person is considered fully awake. In the
morning exercise just presented, “eyes open, no thoughts” is
blank. But the experience of being fully awake isn’t. Mental
activity arises—pebbles pop out of the lake—while the undisturbed
state remains. Silence and a ctivity are experienced as one thing:
awareness moving within itself. The experience of “eyes open, no
thoughts” is modest at first, yet it opens the way to transfo rm how
we use our minds. I’ve made the point that m ost people don’t abandon their
stories, no matter how much pain and suffering those stories are
causing, because their natural instinct is to cling to those stories. If
you aren’t a b attered wife who refuses to leave her hus band, a
closeted gay man afraid to come out, an opioid addict unable to
end her  habit—or any other person stuck in deep pain—you can’t
grasp how horrible the consequences of clinging can be. Stories
can turn into a hopeless stat e, and that state challenges the best
that medicine and psychotherapy can do to help.Since w e all cling to our stori es, can the direct path really  offer
a wa y o ut? Let’s agree that you and I and everyone else are stuck
in our story. Stuck  is  convenient shorthand for  old conditioning
that kee ps us from creating the changes we want in our l ives. It’s
possible to learn a lot from the various ways to get unst uck that
have fai led. Consider the New Testament, where Jesus of N azareth
appears as one of the most compelling spiritual figures in recorded
history. The story of the Son of God who preaches peace to the
world and is crucified for it constitutes a drama that has transfixed
the West for two millennia. It is striking, however, that what the New Testament teaches is
often impossib le to achieve. “Love thy neighbor as thyself” clearly
runs counter to how human n ature operates (and would have been
a fatal teaching to follow in the face of Nazism, at a tim e when
many J ews had neighbors who joined the Nazi Party, or in Bosnia
where mixed Muslim and Christian neighborhoods became
battlegrounds based on religion). “Turn the other cheek” seems
masochistic, except to a deeply confirmed Christian, asking for
bullies to victimize the helpless even more than they already do. But this isn’t a criticism aimed at one faith—all spiritual traditions
have fo undered on the same obstacle. Human nature is in love
with its  own self-created drama, and the more stark the contrast
between good and evil, the more we cling to our story. If the
human race is waiting for the day when either good or evil is
triumphant, the only predictable outcome is that the drama is
designed to last an eternity. Most people are clinging to  drama at a much milder level,
naturally. Except for those times when unconscious forces erupt
and a whole nation, or the world at large, is dragged to the edge of
catastrophe—sometimes plunging over into the abyss—da ily life is
stuck in  mund ane wants and desires, duties and demands. Like
being drowned in the bathtub or being drowned at sea, the result
is the same. Yet, someone doesn’t have to experience misery to experience
being in  separa tion. Your quality of life may be good or ba d—a life
generally brings both—the situation comes down to the same
nitty-gritty: stuck is stuck. The drama is self-perpetuating. Even
our desire to escape the spell /dream/illusion becomes part of thestory. A passing experience like “eyes open, no thoughts ” or the
peaceful relaxa tion of meditation is like a peashooter a gainst a
tank. The momentum of our collective drama has proved
unstoppable. If whol e mind didn’t exist, nobody could have invented it. We’re a ll too stuck to see beyo nd the story we’re tangled up in. But
whole m ind do es exist; therefore, it must have a way of revealing
itself. It is said of Lord Shiva in the Vedas that he has as many
ways to  show himself as to disguise himself. This is worth
knowing. For every impulse of love, there is an impulse of fear. For
every moment of clarity, there is a moment of confusion. The trick
is not to favor the love and clarity over the fear and confusion,
because the pendulum will inevitably swing back again. The tric k is to c all upon the so urce of love and clarity, grad ually
come closer to it, and finally make it your own. (T he New
Testament had  a better chance of being practical if Je sus had
taught “Try to love your neig hbor as yourself” and “See if  turning
the oth er cheek helps break the cycle of retaliation.”) The only
hope fo r escap ing the traps o f the conditioned mind is to  use its
better nature as a thread, following it day by day until your story
fades away. Then, living in wholeness becomes natural. A  D e s i r e  t o  R e m o v e  D e s i r e
The endless cycle of good  and evil, pleasure and pain,
happiness and  misery is like a bonfire that fuels itself. Yet just as
the min d is riotously active on the surface and quiet in its  depths,
so is life. The d rama is everything, but only at its own leve l. When
you have a mo dest experience like “eyes open, no thoughts,” the
interference of mental activit y ceases temporarily. What replaces
it is more than quietude. By itself, a silent mind is no better, as far
as nego tiating the demands of daily life, than a car would be if the
engine dies. There has to be something attractive within the
experience of silence.This so mething exists in the form of a faint presence, which
we’ve already encountered as the sense of self. We are most
natural, relaxed, free, and present when the sense of self  is upon
us. Sustaining this feeling of presence eludes us, however. I think
it’s fair to say  that the glim pses of the true self that generate
experiences of love, joy, peac e, safety, and self-worth are the only
thing that has brought light into the condition of being human. There i s a natural desire to  expand upon such experiences. In
return, the true self has the p ower of attraction (known in Sanskrit
as Swarupa , the pull of the Self). Being silent and largely unnoticed, the sense of self cannot get
us unstuck by itself. If you  have practiced mantra meditation,
mindfulness practices, or one-pointed awareness, which  are all
valuable techniques for bringing the sense of self to the fore, you
know how stubbornly your m ind returns to business as us ual. You
can tra in your self with effort to display any spiritual att ribute—
loving-kindness, forgiveness , steady attention to God—but the
sense of self cannot be trained. It simply is . Effort is not only
useless but damaging. This concept was voiced by the ve nerable
spiritual teacher J. Krishnamurti, when he said, “Can you
discipline your  mind to be free?” There’s the rub. No matter how
well we train o ur minds, including all kinds of spiritual t raining,
freedom is a state where discipline is totally foreign. I h ad that in the back of my  mind when I said that the direct
path must be easy, efficient, and spontaneous. If you wa nt to be
here now, which is the state of metahuman, you first have to stop
trying. Meditation gives the experience of not trying, which
surprises almost everyone when they first begin to meditate. The
sense o f self is brought into our awareness, and its presence can,
in fact, be quite strong. It ca n turn into a state of ecstasy, a love
affair with the Divine, as in this passionate outcry from Rumi:
Oh God, I have discovered love! How marvelous, how good, how beautiful it is!…
I offer my salutation
To the spirit of passion that aroused and excited this
whole universeAnd all it contains. The usual experience of pres ence is pleasant and far sho rt of
passionate. We  get a clue from Rumi, however, when he points to
the pow er of desire. In his case, desire is an intoxicati on with
divine love. Everyone has d esires, and it is due to the force of
desire t hat we wake up every morning with a will to see what the
day is going to bring. If the day brings moments of aw akening,
then desire has served us in getting unstuck. Since the sense of self simply is , you can’t desire it directly. That would be like saying, “I wish I existed.” What happens
instead is that you trick desire into going where you want to go. (You spirituall y hack into materialism, as a friend put it.) In
Buddhism this comes under the heading of “Use a thorn to remove
a th orn, then throw both tho rns away.” That teaching is famous
and has aroused much commentary. It sounds simple enough to
remove a splinter from your finger by pricking it out with a  needle. The mental equivalent runs into difficulties. Since we are going to
use desire to go beyond desire, these difficulties need a little
explaining. Originally, the Buddha seem s to refer to thorns as deep pain
that can not be healed. One of the deepest sources of pain i s fear of
violence, which Buddha spea ks of with personal candor. “Fear is
born fro m arm ing oneself. Just see how many people fight! I’ll tell
you about the dreadful fear  that caused me to shake all over. Seeing creatures thrashing lik e fish in shallow water, so hostile to
one another! Seeing this, I became afraid” (Sutta Nipata). We lean forward to hear wha t Buddha’s escape from fear was,
which conjure s up the imag e of the thorn. He goes on, “Seeing
people locked in conflict, I became completely distraught. But
then I discerne d a thorn, diff icult to see, lodged deep in the heart. It is only when pierced by th is thorn that one runs wild ly in all
directions. So if the thorn is taken out, one no longer r uns but
settles down.”
In pure form, experiencing the thorn of pain in the heart spurs
a person to find inner peace. The teaching is beautiful, but, like the
New Testamen t teachings, it contradicts human nature . Whenpeople are locked in conflict , they are motivated to ramp  up the
conflict, ignori ng the pain in their hearts, or, more likely, taking it
to b e a messag e that they mu st fight on. (To the credit of Buddhist
cultures in Asia, the teaching of peace has brought fewer bloody
conflicts over time, a record o ther faiths might envy. The Buddhist
violence against Muslims in Burma proves that no religion is
immune to violence, however.) “A thor n to remove a thorn” can be used more psycholog ically
as a tactic for  healing. The goal is to substitute negative, self-
defeating thou ghts with positive, self-enhancing ones. Un der the
name o f cognitive therapy, this approach relies on rationality to
overcome emotion. For example, a patient might complain that
nothing ever works out, th at no matter how hard sh e tries,
everything ends in defeat and disappointment. There’s obviously a
strong emotional charge be hind defeatist thinking. Wh en this
becomes a habit, the first thought that comes to mi nd in a
challenging situation is automatically “Nothing is going to work
out. I know it.”
The usual result is that, inde ed, nothing good happens. There
could hardly be a more p erfect example of a self-fulfilling
prophecy. A cognitive therapist would use a new tho ught to
remove the old one (the thorn that removes the thorn) by pointing
out that good things have h appened to the patient. Life hasn’t
been a string o f endless defeats. Therefore, the rational course is
to think, “This situation may turn out well or badly. No one knows,
so I have a chance to do my best to get a good outcome.”  It’s not
easy to replace pessimism with optimism, since emotions lie
deeper than reason, and telling yourself that something good
might  h appen gives pessimism a ll the opening it needs. With
practice and guidance, habitual negativity can be softened, but
human nature hasn’t been m ade peaceful and fulfilled by the use
of reason. Finally, there is the second part of the teaching to contend with. “Use a thorn to  remove a thor n, then throw both thorns away .” In
the pro cess of getting over an illness, you take medicine as long as
it’s needed, then you throw the pills away. But the same thing is
more mysterio us when it com es to the mind. If you use positive
thoughts, for example, to rep lace negative thoughts, you still windup as a posit ive thinker, just as embedded in your story as
someone who is gloomy. It’s better to live in sunshine than in
shade, no doubt. Escaping the illusion is another matter. Throwing both  thorns away means that the whole scena rio of
pain and pleasure, good and evil, light and darkness, is di scarded. This is taken t o be Buddha’s essential message. The diagnosis is
accurate, and the picture of being healed—living beyond the grip
of th e drama—is inspiring. The challenge presented to the direct
path is how to make inspiration a living reality. C l e a r i n g  t h e  W a y  f o r  t h e  S e l f
The answer, as I conceive it, is to use desire as the thorn,
because we all have experienced its double nature. Desire
demands to be fulfilled. If the desire is strong enough, as in
passionate sexual attraction, it is enough to drive people mad. The
thorn causes pain, because it is never enough to have one moment
of f ulfillment— the next desire arrives with a new demand to be
fulfilled. What ’s the other thorn, the one that will end the pain? Fulfillment itse lf. Moralists who preach against desire, who call it
the work of the Devil or, in Freudian terms, the work of the id, see
with on ly one eye. Desire is as  beautiful as it is treacherous . Sexual
attraction leads to lasting, loving relationships and not just sexual
assault. I do n’t think anyone would d eny this truism, and we can draw
on i t by  using the thorn of desire to remove the thorn of desire. But desire for what? If spiritu al traditions have held out th e desire
for love, peace, divine grace, forgiveness, and a ticket to Heaven or
Nirvana, only to fall short in t he end, what is left? The only answer
I can think of is the desire to  be real. The sense of self ul timately
has that to offer, and that alone. There is no stick or carrot, only
the promise that you can be here now, which is how you can
experience reality free of all illusion. In p ractical terms, the mind can’t learn what it is to be real all
at once . The direct path is s till a path—it takes time. Li fe offersevery im aginable reason to quit the path. Desire lures us to turn
our inte rest elsewhere—the o ld story is very insistent. But you can
cultivate an interest in getting  real. It’s not necessarily har der than
cultivating an interest in wine or stamp collecting or Russian
novels. All that’s needed is curiosity and the flicker of desire
(referred to in the Indian tradition as the spark that burns down
the forest; one urge to escap e the illusion will destroy th e whole
illusion eventually). The direct path is unique because we are not taught by love,
peace, compas sion, or any other desirable quality our lives can
bring. We are t aught by existence itself. Only knowing wh at lies at
the heart of existence will work. Contrary to Hamlet, “To be, or not
to be” isn’t the question. “To be” is the question, all by itself. If you
ask it every day, your tru e self will hear and then present
fascinating, ever-changing answers. Engaged in finding out what it
means to be here, you tr ansform your mind from its old
conditioning into a vehicle  that can reach the beyond. The
conditioned mind has firmly decided what it means to exist, which
is how we became stuck in the first place. To g et ourselves unstuck, onc e and for all, the direct path runs
into a practical problem, w hich has been described in ancient
Indian texts as “separating water from milk.” In other  words,
everyday reali ty mixes the real and the unreal so t hey are
inseparable. T his is obvious when you look at the brain , which
presents virtual reality only because the “real” reality makes us
conscious in the first place. The worst movie ever made is
projected on the screen with the same projector as a classic film
masterpiece. M any versions of the direct path teach that we are
like children watching shado w puppets on the wall. We believe in
these images so completely that the truth escapes us—shadows
can’t exist without the light that makes them visible. Virtual reality
only exists thanks to metareality. To separate light from shadow sounds easy enough, and the
direct p ath proves it. All you need to do is bring the sense o f self to
your at tention. As a practical matter, nothing is easier or more
natural. At any moment in the day, simply shut your eyes, take a
few deep breaths to bring on a state of relaxation, and center your
attention on your heart (or on your breath). It sounds strange,given th e elaborate complexity of religion, that the entire spiritual
journey is only this: relax and be aware of yourself. By doin g this, you subtly allow  the “pull of the self” to become a
real ex perience. If your intention is more serious, learning to
meditate or making a commitment to yoga intensifies the
experience of sensing the self—the mantras and yoga poses
( asanas ) w ere devised to give a differ ent flavor or coloration of the
self. We  are already outfitted for this process. As children grow up,
for example, they learn to identify the gradations of e motion. Hostility, outrage, irritation, and hate. Once you connect those
labels with an inner feeling,  it comes naturally to say, “I’m not
angry, just frustrated” or “Don’t go near him—he’s a hater.”
Gradations in consciousness  can also be felt, but they don’t
have labels. When you experience the sen se of self as directed above, you go
beyond the thoughts and feelings that can be labeled. None of
them, even the most loving thought and spiritual feelin g, is the
basis of  reality . Only the sens e of self is irreducible. You cannot go
beyond it or t urn it into something more basic. Mental activity
vanishes into a kind of nothingness—silent mind. Accordin g to the
direct path, this is the sour ce of everything “in here” a nd “out
there.” But here’s the tricky part. Is “everything” practical? If
someone show ed you a blan k piece of paper and said, “Here is
every b ook” or a blank canvas and said, “Here is every pa inting,”
such a statement would not  help you write a book or paint a
painting. Wha t you want is to write one book, not every book,
paint one painting and not every painting. Likewise, it seems unhelpful to say that metareality is “always,
everything, and everywhere.” We are attuned to specifics. For
better or worse, we live our lives at this  mo ment, in this  location. It may seem h opelessly vagu e to tell someone as I’ve been saying
to “Be here now .” Where else are we, on Mars?
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:

        Cosmetics and fashion
matter enough  to millions of people, just as fantasy foot ball and
adding more guns to their co llection matter enough to millions of
others. “So what. ” is highly personal and unpredictable, but it is
also ruthless. Until something matters enough, we won’t change
our accustomed way of life. Here’s m y answ er to “So wha t. ” as it applies to the direct path. In a very real  way, becoming metahuman is about elim inating
everything that is unnecessa ry for our species. Such a process isalready under way by bits and pieces. The modern world has
eradicated—or is in the process of eradicating—many things that
Homo sapiens  can do without. It would have seemed impossible
once to  do without religion, j udging by how a belief in God or the
gods lay at the heart of every ancient culture. But th ere are
millions of people who have adopted a secular worldview, placed
their faith in science, and live without a sense of loss in the
absence of religion. We can  argue forever over whether religion is good or bad for
society, and over every other thing that is in flux. From the
viewpoint of metahuman, however, stripping away all the things
that Homo sapiens  d oesn’t need a nymore is essential. The illusion
is g etting thinner, so to spe ak. Mental constructs like war and
poverty are no longer cons idered facts of life humanity must
accept. Why not get rid of th e whole illusion, then. Why not do it
simply, completely, and with the least discomfort possible. Once yo u elim inate everythin g that isn’t real, what’s left must
be r eal. The dir ect path accords with this notion. It holds t hat only
one thi ng is real if everything unreal is taken away: the sense of
self. Ev ery life has its own priorities. One person’s suffer ing may
be r ooted in po verty, while another person’s suffering is rooted in
sickness, a bad relationship, or lonely old age. Nothing is more tangled and chaotic than virtual reality. The
process of dismantling every  cause of suffering is too complex to
figure o ut in advance. The only realistic answer is to allow the
illusion to dissolve as effortlessly as it developed in the first place. This is what the direct path is all about; this is what sets  it apart
from every other scheme for the improvement of human existence. It se ems too g ood to be true that mind-forged manacles will
simply drop away of their o wn accord. But that’s exactly what
Rumi m eant w hen he declared that the jail cell is open. S ince we
are alre ady fre e, there is no effort needed to get free. You are free
once you base your life on one thing, your sense of self. But as things stand, the sense of self is almost t otally
overlooked. Woody Allen’s 1 983 movie, Zelig, depicted its title
character as a kind of historical phantom. Even though he was
totally insignificant, Leonard Zelig was a human chameleon. Hehad the ability to melt into his surroundings completely. The
movie t akes pla ce in the 1920 s and 1930s, and the novelist  F. Scott
Fitzgerald is the first to notic e Zelig’s amazing transformations. At
a Great Gatsby –like party, Zelig is in the liv ing room talking in a
refined Boston accent and upholding Republican values, while
later in the k itchen he comes off as a common man with
Democratic ideas. Somehow Zelig is everybod y and nobody, everywhere  and
nowhere. That’s a parable for the sense of self. It is present in
every experience but melts invisibly into the backgroun d—until
you star t payin g attention to it. Then the sense of self, un likely as
this seems, takes center stage. The firs t step is to begin to n otice your sense of self. Imag ine a
debating society where one side is defending a controversial
position on the Middle East conflict, abortion rights, or racism. See yourself standing up and delivering an eloquent argument on
one side. Let’s say you vehe mently oppose racism, beli eve in a
two-state solution for the Palestinians, and support a woman’s
right to have an abortion. Now pu t yourself on the opp osing side and make exactly the
contrary argument for each issue. It might help if the contrary
position is outrageous—you might see yourself defend ing the
necessity to ban all abortions or supporting the terrorists who
deny the right of Israel to exist. Even though you will experience
resistance in abandoning the  side you actually believe in, debaters
do it all the time. They shift perspective from pro to co n at the
drop of a hat. This ability to s hift perspectives is beyond any set of
beliefs. We can put on any coat we want to wear. Yet whether you
speak up for i deas you love or ideas you hate, you  are always
present. Your sense of self is independent of anything you think or
say. Next ex ample: Take any common object in your house and
touch it. Is it you who touched it. Anyone will automatic ally say
yes. Lo ok at the same objec t. Is it you who sees it. Yes again. There is no time in the history of humankind when the  answer
would be different. What kee ps changing is our mental m odel of
what it means to touch and  see an object. In prehistory, before
language arose, there was no explanation for seeing and to uching. In a n ag e of faith, when dead flesh, the body, was animate d by the
soul, it was God who ma de sensation possible. Today, the
experience of seeing and touching is ascribed to the central
nervous system and the activity of the brain in receiving sensory
data from the world “out there. ”
Yet if you don’t bother with any of these explanations, th ere is
only the self having an experi ence. You can modify this ex ercise in
other w ays. In medical school, students are taught that bodily
sensations reach the brain through a spidery web of afferent
nerves running everywhere. If you touch your hand or lift your
arm, the signals from affere nt nerves are responsible for feeling
the experience. Every signal is like an Inca runner dashing from a
remote region to the Andes to the emperor in the royal city of
Cuzco. The information from afferent nerves is constantly flowing,
so w hy don’t w e feel every limb’s weight, position, warmth, and
the like all the time. Sit in your chair and let your attenti on roam
from the top of your head to your nose, then to your heart, then to
the tips of your toes. If I ask, “Who is roaming from one sensation to another. ” you
will sur ely answ er, “I am. ” Th e self selects whatever it wan ts to pay
attention to. Therefore, the self is not bound by the activity of the
nervous system. It is present no matter which nerve cells are
firing. One fin al exam ple: If you clos e your eyes and see the color blue,
this exp erience is happening  in your awareness. If you open your
eyes and gaze at the blue sky, where is the blueness. It i s still in
your awareness. The experience of blue “in here” and blue “out
there” o ccurs in the same p lace. When you handle an object or
smell it or hea r it, you can remember those sensations. Did the
sensations travel from the outside world to your inside world. We
assume they did. Sitting arou nd a warm campfire and wat ching its
flickering flames is different from remembering the warmth and
the flickering flames. But both experiences happen in awareness. Hearing a bang in your head and hearing a car backfire on the
street are two different experiences, but they share the undeniable
fact that both occur in awareness. If awa reness is present both inside and outside, it is
independent of space. Likewi se, the campfire you sat beside mighthave be en in childhood, while the memory of it is now. Since
awareness was registering th e campfire both then and now, it is
independent o f time. Once you see that awareness isn’t b ound by
time and space, then you—the real you that is pure consciousness
—must not be bound by time and space. Wherever your aw areness
goes, yo ur sen se of self is present; the two are fused. The self is
present in everything, but we don’t notice this because, like Zelig,
the self knows how to melt perfectly into every situation. I thi nk most people, with a little reflection, can accept that  they
have a sense o f self following them everywhere like an invisible
shadow. But to fully pass the “So what. ” test, the sense of s elf can’t
simply be a by stander. Part of Woody Allen’s conceit was  that, if
you loo k closely, Zelig appears in photos of momentous events like
a presid ential inauguration—but this didn’t make him im portant. Similarly, sensing yourself in every experience doesn’t put it
center stage. The direct path brings the sense of self to light. What’s needed next is to discover the enormous difference this
modest attainment actually makes. The leap from human to m etahuman, the shift from virtual
reality to the “ real” reality, is all contained in the simple act of
noticing the self. Not the eg o, which wants to hog the l imelight
and cla im that  it and it alone is the self. The ego-personality can’t
help but contain the sense o f self—every experience contains it. But the  ego blocks our view. It is tied to virtual reality an d keeps
luring our attention everywhere but  the sense of self. As we’ll see in Part Three, once you rid yourself of all the t hings
you don ’t actually need, your ego can be discarded, too,  but not
your sense of s elf. As the unnecessary burdens and rubbis h of the
spell/dream/illusion are tossed out, the sense of self doe sn’t hog
the limelight. Being the only thing about you that is timeless and
eternal, it doesn’t have to do anything. It simply is, a be acon of
pure aw areness that shines constantly in every second of your
existence. Ironically, everything else in your life has a much
harder time passing the “So what. ” test. A10
 
F R E E I N G  Y O U R  B O D Y
s we saw, co nsciousness i s everywhere, always, and
everything. If that’s true, then you are everywhere, always, and
everything. But in your daily life, even if you were totally
convinced abo ut this, you a re guided in the opposite d irection. You’ve endured  a lifetime of training and conditioning telling you
that you  are a s olitary person  sitting by yourself in a room. Instead
of always, your life span is ve ry limited, bookended by two events
—birth and death. Instead of  everything, you are a bundle of very
specific things, beginning with your name, gender, marital status,
work, and so on. The vir tual reality we want to dismantle is made up of many
moving parts that occupy the ir own compartments. One part is the
body, another the mind, the world, and other people. These parts
were se t up so that life can be  managed one piece at a time. You go
to colle ge for your mind, to the gym for your body, on a  date to
establish a relationship, to work to bring home money. From a metahuman standpoint, any  d ivisio n of life into bits
and pieces only supports the illusion. Wholeness is wholeness, not
a co llection of parts. To put it another way, life happens all at
once, h ere and  now. The rea son we cling to virtual realit y is that
the prospect of “all at once, here and now” is too overwhelming. After ponderin g how to bring this truth home in a way that’s
practical and relatable, I co ncluded that the direct path should
start with the b ody, not the m ind. My reasoning is that the body is
what holds most people back. They experience themselves encased
in a  body. The y accept the reality of birth, sickness, ag ing, and
death. They seek physical pleasure and shrink from physical pain. As l ong as thes e are the prec onditions of your daily life, y ou can’t
be meta human. Your body won’t accept it. A liver, heart, or skin
cell can’t scream, “Are you crazy. ” But it does seem crazy to
abandon the body as a physic al object—this act of craziness makes
your bo dy the perfect place to  start. If you can get past the  body as
a package of flesh and bone, transforming it into a m ode of
consciousness, everything else naturally falls into place. T h e  A n a t o m y  o f  A w a r e n e s s
If we have trap ped ourselves  inside an illusion, the body must
be part and pa rcel of that—and it is. Your body is your story in
physical form. As your story  grew over the years, the things you
thought, said, and did requ ired a huge array of brain activity. Learning to walk was a trium ph of balance, eyesight, and motor
coordination, but once you  as a little child put together this
complex puzzle, your brain remembered everything you learned
and sto red it for life, so you c an move on to something new. Your
brain has stored a host of skills, from speaking and wr iting to
riding a bike, doing arithmetic, and dancing the waltz. These
mental attainments are embodied in you physically. But as soon a s this is point ed out, we risk falling back  into
dividing “mental” from “physical,” which sends us straight back
into the illusion. As babies learn to walk, they are under no such
illusion. As they totter, fall, get up again, and keep on try ing, the
experience fits the holistic description given above: the whole
thing h appens all at once, here and now. The same is true of any
skill yo u can name—learning it wasn’t mental and/or physical. It
was happening in only one dimension: awareness. There are so many ways t hat we put mind and body in
opposition tha t going into all of them would be impossi ble. The
direct path doesn’t even req uire the small amount of discussion
we’ve just passed through. Instead, it experiences the body in
awareness. O nce you do  that, the division between mental and
physical return s to the authen ticity of a baby learning to walk. You
return to the self as the ag ent of the whole experience, fusing
thought and action. In this case, any action is returned to
wholeness, which is where it occurs. To begin, just b e open to the idea that your body isn’t a physical
object in which you reside. Such a viewpoint is just a habit of
thinking, even though a stubb orn one. I will guide you through an
exercise that will give you the direct experience of living, not in a
physical body, but in awaren ess. (This exercise and the o nes that
follow are much easier to do if someone reads them aloud to you. If yo u c an find a partner who will join you, switching the  roles of
reader and participant, all the better. ) E x e r c i s e :  T h e  B o d y  i n  A w a r e n e s s
This first exercise involves the following steps:
STEP 1:  Being aware of your body. STEP 2:  Being aware of some bodily processes. STEP 3:  Being aware of the body as inner space. STEP 4:  Expanding inner space beyond the skin. STEP 5:  Resting in wholeness. Each step is a  natural progression from the one before, and
each st ep is a simple, dir ect experience. You don’t have to
memorize the instructions, just go through the exercise as an
experience. STEP 1: BEING A WARE OF YOUR BODY. Sit quie tly with your eyes clo sed. Let bodily sensations be your
focus of  attenti on, so that you  can feel your body. There’s no need
to tr y to stop your thoughts; they are irrelevant. It doesn’ t matter
what sensations you happen to feel. Just be with your body. STEP 2: BEING A WARE OF SOME BODIL Y
PROCESSES. Be aware of yo ur breath as it goes in and out. Slow your breath
down a bit, the n make it go a bit faster. Move your attentio n to the
center of your chest and be aware of your heartbeat. Ta ke some
easy, de ep breaths and sense your heartbeat slowing down as you
relax. See if yo u can feel your pulse elsewhere—many people can
feel it in their fingertips or forehead or inside their ears, for
example. STEP 3: BEING A WARE OF THE BODY AS INNER
SPACE. Now m ove you r attention to the inside of your body. Feel your
head as  empty space, and start going down your body to th e chest,
stomach, abdo men, legs, and feet, pausing at each place to
experience your internal organs as a space in which your
awareness freely moves. If you want, you can also experience your
breath as the e xpansion and relaxation of the space in you r chest,
your heartbeat as a constant pulsation in the space of the chest. STEP 4: EXP ANDING INNER SP ACE BEYOND THE
SKIN. Once you have felt the inside of your body as empty space in
which b odily processes are taking place, run your attention across
your skin. Roam over the sensations in your head, feeling the
outlines of face, scalp, and ears. Move downward, letting yourawareness go to every other place—throat, arms, hands, feet—as
sensations reach you. Now lif t your awareness slightly above your skin and gently let
it expand beyond the contou rs of your body. Some people  can do
this easily, but others need t o conjure up an image—you can see
your inner space suffused with light and watch the light expand
until it fills the room. Or you can visualize inner space around
your heart as a sphere, a round balloon that expands a bit more
every time you inhale, watch ing it get bigger and bigger  until it
takes up the entire room. STEP 5: RESTING IN WHOLENESS. Once you have gone through the previous steps, rest quietly for
a minute or two. Let the experience of the body be here now. What this exercise has done is multifold. You have freed
yourself from being trapped inside a thing, substituting the
experience of your body as p rocesses and sensations. Since your
experience was  conscious, these processes and sensations  moved
to w here they a ctually occur, in your awareness. Then you opened
yourself to experience your b ody as inner space—in Sanskrit this
space is  called Chit Akash, o r mind spac e. Since everything in life
happens in mind space, you e xpanded the space until there was no
boundary between “in here” and “out there. ”
You may be surprised that you’ve accomplished all these things,
and sin ce the experience was likely to be unusual, you will easily
pop back into the habit of feeling that your body is a physical
object you reside in, like a mo use hiding in the walls of a house or
a ra bbit in its burrow. Yet, at the very least, you now can see that
there is  an alternative to the old habit. To free yourself fr om your
body, the old habit won’t serve you. To break down the old hab it—a process I call “thawing,” as
discussed befo re—take time once or twice a day to rep eat this
exercise. Once you become  used to it, the whole thing runs
naturally and smoothly. We’re all practical-minded, so what good
is the exercise in daily life. You can do it when you feel stressed. You can  do it to relieve tightness in your body or other
unpleasant and painful sensations. It also works to help relieve worried, anxious thoughts. You can center yourself with this exercise whenever you
feel distracted and scattered. Various practices in yoga and Zen Buddhism bring the body
under control through sheer focused awareness. When you felt
your he artbeat and breathing, for example, you took the first step
to co ntrolling both processes at once through the vagus nerve, one
of the ten cranial nerves that  extend from the brain to the rest of
the central nervous system. The vag us nerve is a wanderer, tracing its course like the t runk
line of an old-fashioned tel ephone system from brain to neck,
down into the chest, past the heart, and extending into the
abdomen. It is the longest cranial nerve, and its fibers both send
and receive sensory information. Most of the sensations you
experienced in the exercise you just did were channeled through
the vagus nerve. You can take advantage of t his knowledge in a practical way
through “vagal breathing,” which consists of inhaling to the count
of fo ur, holding the breath to the count of two, and exhaling to the
count o f four. This simple rhythm of 4-2-4 is easy for a  normal
healthy adult, and no one should try to force it to the point of
gasping or feeling uncomfort able. To the great surprise of medical
researchers, vagal breathing is the best way to reduce  stress,
particularly the immediate signs of ragged breath, increased heart
rate, and muscle tension. It tu rns out tha t chronic, low-level stress is more important and
more pervasive  than acute stress. In modern life, being in a state
of chronic low-level stress is so common as to be accepted as
normal. But your body doesn’t experience it as normal at all; the
earliest beginn ings of heart disease, hypertension, sle ep and
digestive disorders, and probably some cancers can be traced to
chronic stress. It is  no accide nt that the location of these disorders par allels
the course of th e vagus nerve, which serves to communicate stress
to the heart, stomach, digestive tract, and then the rest of the body
as t he nervous system branches out. Vagal breathing brings the
state of  the body back into ba lance and relieves tension. So even if
you haven’t come to the real ization that everything physical and
mental happens in consc iousness—meaning that our body
happens in consciousness—here is an unmistakable clue. We accept that a skill like walking and riding a bike is
permanent onc e it has been learned. But, at a more basic l evel, the
biorhythms th at sustain the bodymind as a whole were learned
and absorbed millions of ye ars ago by our hominid ancestors. Modern life pushes us to unlearn them, as witnessed by the huge
number of people with digest ive and sleep disorders. Both of those
functions are controlled thro ugh built-in biorhythms. On ce your
body has forgotten how to express a biorhythm, the effec t is like
one trumpet or violin playing a different piece of music from the
rest of the orchestra—the whole symphony is ruined. Vagal b reathing may wind up being very useful beyond its
ability t o norm alize heart rate, lower blood pressure, and make
breathing more regular. It’s  a good practice to use in bed just
before you fall asleep. Mild to moderate insomnia can often be
eased o r totally healed. General stress is eased, including stressful
thoughts and a racing mind, which countless people experience
when they try to go to sleep. I’ve gone into a little detail (the whole topic is covered in depth
in The Healing Self, which I coauthored with Rudy Tanzi) to make
the point that a physical map  of the nervous system, the operation
of the vagus n erve, consciously intervening in its operation, and
sensing the results directly ar e all one thing. The direct path leads
us b ack to that  one thing, wh ich will, in time, completely end the
state of  separation and allow us to rest in wholeness, which is
reality. Y o u r  B o d y,  Y o u r  S t o r yOnce you begin to experience your body in awareness,
transformation starts to oc cur. You are moving out of the
separation between mind and body toward wholeness. You need
to be whole to be who you truly are. The direct path is experiential. It’s not theoretical, nor is it therapy or a spiritual journey. As you experie nce your body in awareness, you have taken time
out from your story. This seems like a modest thing, a moment or
two spent in d oing nothing but being here. Yet there’s no other
way to disman tle your story that is this direct. Millions of people
benefit from therapy and walking the spiritual path. But
eventually we must all face the fact that everything  we do, even in
the name of h ealing and spirituality, is taking place inside our
story. As a res ult, we can get glimpses of wholeness—these are
often q uite beautiful and uplifting—yet they do not carry us to
metareality as our home. At t he moment you are your story—it can’t be helped—and this
keeps you trapped in separation. The word separation  may not
come to mind; you might n ot even consider it a prob lem. To
illustrate, cons ider the following sentences, which all of us have
said or heard:
I hate my body. You’re only as old as you think you are. Youth is wasted on the young. I used to have a perfect figure. The statements express diffe rent sentiments, but each reflects
the sep aration of mind and body. “I hate my body” comes from
someone who feels trapped in physicality. The person is
bemoaning what she has done to her body, or what her body has
done to  her. The state of sep aration is obvious. “I” is pla ying the
part of the victim, and “body” is the culprit. “You are only as old as yo u think you are” is much more
optimistic, asserting that the mind can overcome the deterioration
of aging. Yet, as we all know, this is in part wishful thinkin g. Aging
is an inexorable process. It is much better to have a positive
attitude toward it than a negative one—society is benefiting fromthe “new old age,” which env isions every stage of life as v igorous,
productive, and  healthy. But a thought or a belief isn’t the same as
a state of awareness. “You’r e only as old as you think y ou are”
cannot substitu te for the true self. When established in yo ur sense
of s elf as a permanent state, aging holds no threat beca use you
identify with the timeless (we will go into what the timeless state
means in the next section). A good attitude toward the aging
process still leaves you trapped in your story. Oscar Wilde’s quip “Youth is wasted on the young” puts a witty
face on  a sad w ish that many people have: If only I could  go back
in t ime, I’d live my life so much better. Regret over the  past is
mingled into everyone’s story, and the basis for this regret  (and its
opposite, which  is nostalgia) is that the passage of time has power
over us. “I used to have a perfect figure” states this more directly
by c onnecting  the passing of the years with a loss of physical
attractiveness, while implying that “a perfect figure” is the  same as
self-worth and sexual desirability. These example s of how the mind feels separate and different
from the body could be expan ded endlessly. The body is su bject to
all man ner of judgment, and yet the underlying process, whether
you lov e your body or hate it, hasn’t been examined closely. This
underlying process is the inescapable way your body has absorbed
every detail of your life story and now mirrors it. To be tra pped in
your story and trapped in y our body are the same thin g. Your
brain has been shaped every minute since you were born, and it
has communicated everything you experience to the body’s fifty
trillion cells, which in turn pass the messages on to your DNA. Wholeness, then, isn’t just a mental shift. It’s a revolution in
the bodymind that undoes the past, beginning in the brain but
reaching out to liberate eve ry cell and influencing the genetic
activity in each cell. To see ho w this revolution occurs, let me go to
the heart of every story, which is time. H o w  t o  B e  T i m e l e s sThere was a period in infancy when your experience was
original and authentic. You were too young to interpret the world
on your own. All your development was occupied with the basics
of walk ing, talking, exploring the world, and so on. Let’s call this
the pre story period of life. W illiam Blake divided one group of
poems i nto “so ngs of innocence” and “songs of experience,” which
were a nonbiblical narrative  of the Fall from Grace. Like the
romantics who were to follow, and who idolized him, Blake
believed that the Fall didn’t occur to Adam and Eve; rather, it
happened to children as they  lost their innocence. The Fa ll was a
repeated experience generation after generation. What Blake saw in innocenc e was a fresh, simple, lyrical, and
joyous p erspective on the world. The tone is set in one of the most
famous songs of innocence, “The Lamb,” where you can read
infant  for lamb :
Little Lamb who made thee
Dost thou know who made thee
Gave thee life & bid thee feed,
By the stream & o’er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing wooly bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice. In c ontrast to this vision of  a childhood Eden, the son gs of
experience are  bitter and dar k, reflecting the hardship Blake knew
firsthand and saw all around him in eighteenth-century London. One fam ous poem, “A Poison Tree,” reimagines the tale of original
sin as the dark side of hum an nature, in verse that cou ld be a
nursery rhyme:
I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end. I was angry with my foe:I told it not, my wrath did grow. And I watered it in fears,
Night & morning with my tears:
And I sunned it with smiles,
And with soft deceitful wiles. And it grew both day and night,
Till it bore an apple bright. And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine. And into my garden stole,
When the night had veiled the pole;
In the morning glad I see,
My foe outstretched beneath the tree. Even without the benefit of Blake’s vision, we have all
experienced th e transformati on from innocence to experience. All
it took was time. Nothing else was necessary as we learned the
standard interpretation of the world everyone around us accepted. A baby is never bored. He lo oks on the world with wond er. The
hours don’t hang heavy; deadlines don’t make a baby rush through
his day s. He has no hunger for distraction so that he can  escape
from himself. Being a visionary, Blake saw the possibility of liberation from
the fallen state, which he c alled “organized innocence. ” It’s a
brilliant phrase, because it im plies that a person’s experience can
be as original, authentic, and untainted as a baby’s while retaining
the org anized mind, a mind we must have to perform higher
functions as adults (which includes taking care of babies). Returning to innocence means embracing values like love and
creativity, which become more valued as we reach maturity. Yet
the years of m aturity make it more and more difficult to  journeyback to innocence. For all the countless people who yearn for what
it felt like to first fall in love, few find a way back. The culprit isn’t experience, because experience can still be
joyful and authentic at any tim e of life. The culprit is hidden in the
texture of our lives—it is time. I said above that be coming
embedded in the interpreted world (i. e. , the spell/dream/illusion)
only needed time, nothing el se. By the same token, esca ping the
grip of time is the only way out. Far from being a mystica l notion,
you can be timeless right this minute—in fact, that’s the only way. For most people, the two words timeless  and eternal  seem
roughly the same. For religious believers in the Christian and
Muslim traditions, Heaven is  eternal, a place where time goes on
forever. For the nonreligious, time ends with physical death. In
both cases, however, ordinary clock time has ceased. But there are
problems with all these concepts, and if we go deeply into the
subject, time is very different from what we casually accept. Physics has had a lot to say about time, thanks to Eins tein’s
revolutionary concept that time isn’t constant but varies according
to the situation at hand. Traveling near the speed of light or
drawing near the massive gravitational pull of a black hole will
have a drastic impact on how  time passes. But let’s set r elativity
aside fo r a moment to consider how time works in human terms,
here and now. Each of us normally experiences three states of
time: ti me ticking on the clock when we are awake, time a s part of
the illus ion of having a dream, and the absence of time wh en we’re
asleep b ut not dreaming. Thi s tells us that time is tied to our state
of consciousness. We take it for granted that one kind of time—the one measured
by clock s—is real time, but th at’s not true. All three relationships
with time—wak ing, dreaming, and sleeping—are knowable only as
personal experiences. Time doesn’t exist outside human
awareness. Th ere is no absolute clock time “out there” in the
universe. Many  cosmologists would argue that time, as we know it
in our waking  state, entered the universe only at the big bang. What ca me bef ore the big ban g is probably inconceivable,  because
“before the big bang” has no meaning if time were born at the
instant the cosmos was born. If you go to the finest level of Nature,
to the vacuum  state from wh ich the quantum field emerged, thequalities of everyday existence, such as sight, sound, taste, touch,
and sm ell, no longer exist, and there is also a vanishing point
where three-dimensionality vanishes, along with time itself. What lies beyond the quant um horizon is purely a matt er of
conjecture. The precreated state of the universe can be modeled
almost any way you choose, as being multidimensional, infinitely
dimensional, or nondimensional. So it must be accepted that time
came out of the timeless and not just at the big bang. Everything
in the physical  universe winks in and out of existence at a rapid
rate of excitation here and now. The timeless is with us at every
second of our lives. Yet something looks fishy in that sentence, because the timeless
can’t be measured using a cl ock, so it makes no sense to say that
the timeless is with us “at ev ery second. ” Instead, the timeless is
with us, period. This world is timeless. There is no need to wait for
death or Heaven to prove that eternity is real. Once you acknowledge that t he timeless is with us, a question
naturally arise s: How is the timeless related to clock tim e. The
answer is that the two aren’t related. The timeless is absolute, and
since it can’t be measured by  clocks, it has no relative ex istence. How strange. The timeless is with us, yet we can’t relate to it. So of
what good is the timeless. To answ er this  question, we have to back up a bit. Clock  time
has no privileg ed position in reality. There is no reason  why it
should be elevated above dream time or the absence of  time in
dreamless sleep. Clock time is just a quality of daily life, like other
qualities we know as colors, tastes, smells, and so on. Without
human beings to experience these qualities, they don’t exist. Photons, the particles of lig ht, have no brightness without our
perception of brightness; p hotons are invisible and colorless. Likewise, time is an artifact of human experience. Outside our
perception, we cannot know anything about time. This seems to
contradict the cornerstone of  science, which holds that “of course”
there was a physical universe before human life evolved on Earth,
which m eans that “of course” there was time as well, billions of
years of time. Here w e come  to a fork in th e road, because either you a ccept
that tim e, as registered by th e human brain, is real on its own or
you arg ue that, being dependent on the human brain, time is
created in consciousness. The second position is by far the
stronger one, even though fewer people believe it. In our
awareness we constantly convert the timeless into the experience
of time—ther e is no getting around this. Since such a
transformation cannot happen “in” time, something else must be
going on. To get a handle on t his “something else,” let’s look at the
present moment, the now, the immediate present. All e xperience happens in the  now. Even to remember the  past
or antic ipate the future is a present-moment event. Brain cells,
which physically process the conversion of the timeless into time,
function only in the present. They have no other choice, since the
electrical signals and chemical reactions that run brain cells occur
only here and now. If the present moment is the only real time we
can know in th e waking state, why is it so elusive. You can use a
clock as fine-tuned as an atomic clock to predict when the next
second, millisecond, or trillionth of a second will arrive, but that’s
not the same a s predicting the now. The present momen t, as an
experience, is totally unpredi ctable. If it could be predicted, you’d
know your next thought in advance, which is impossible. As we touched on already,  the present moment is always
elusive because  the instant you register it as either a sensation, an
image, a feeling, or a thought, it’s gone. So let’s boil these  insights
down. The now, the place where we all live, can be described as:
the junction point where the timeless is converted into
time
the only “real” time we know in the waking state
a totally unpredictable phenomenon
a totally elusive phenomenon
Now, if  all these characteristi cs are being correctly described, it
turns o ut that we have been fooling ourselves to believe that time
is a  simple ma tter of tick-tock on the clock. In some my sterious
way, ea ch of us occupies a tim eless domain, and to produce a four-dimensional w orld for the purpose of living in it, we mentally
construct it. That is, we create the world in consciousness first and
foremost. Reality, including ordinary clock time, is constructed in
consciousness as well. We mu st not fall into the tra p of saying that the mind creates
reality. The mind is a vehicle for active thinking experience, and,
like tim e and space, it has to  have a source beyond some thing as
transient and elusive as thou ghts. If we trusted our min ds, we’d
equate going to sleep with death. In sleep the conscious mind
gives up the w orld of solid physical objects and clock time. Yet
when w e wake up in the morning, there is a return of solid objects
and clock time. They were held in waiting, so to speak, by
consciousness, even during the eight hours a day that the thinking
mind was out of commission. If th e d irect pa th aims to tak e us beyond the illusion we accept
as r eal, it must deliver the experience of being timeless. In its
fullest state, the timeless experience is simple, natural, and
effortless—it is  the sense of self, which quietly lies insid e every
other experience. We are only partially there. The exercise in this
chapter, which  allows you to experience your body in awareness,
thaws o ut one aspect of the  illusion. The present discussion of
being t imeless thaws out another aspect. In both cases, as
physicality and  clock time sta rt to lose their grip, you realize that
there is another way to live: being metahuman. When you start being metahuman, you exist at the timeless
source of the self. It’s a huge step to know that the timeless is with
us, bey ond any belief in birth and death, age and decay. Things
appear and disappear in our dreams when we’re sleeping. Yet we
don’t m ourn them, because we know that dreams are an illusion. What matters isn’t the things  that appear and disappear, o nly that
you don’t mistake the dream for reality. Discovering that the same is true about our waking dream sets
us f ree from t he fear of death. Metahuman is about mo re than
this. Liberated  from illusion, we can be free of all fear. In the end,
waking up leads to absolut e freedom. We don’t just l ead our
everyday lives. We navigate the field of infinite possibilities. I11
 
R E C O V E R I N G  T H E
W H O L E  M I N D
magine that you’ve gone to a cabin in the woods that sits by a
small lake. The sun wakes you up very early, and when you walk
down to  the lake in the pale light of dawn, it is perfectly still. The
surface is mirror-like and undisturbed. You have the urge to pick
up a pebble and toss it into the lake. The pebble lands with a plop,
ripples spread  out across the water, and, as the ring of ripples
widens, they fade away until nothing remains but the still surface
of the lake. It h as returned to what it was before you came along to
disturb it. In this modes t experience is reflected the whole story of the
human mind. All that’s needed is to see the scene in reverse, like
running a film backward. The surface of the lake is perfectly still. A faint ring of ripples distur bs the water, at first in a way that’s
barely d iscernible. The ripple s grow bigger and the ring starts to
shrink. All at once a pebble pops out of the water and f lies into
your hand. This is how the human mind looks from the perspective of
metareality. Th ere is pure c onsciousness, still and undisturbed. Faint activity begins to stir, s o faint that you have to be quiet andvery alert to notice it. But this activity—call it a vibr ation in
consciousness—becomes mo re urgent until something fully
formed pops into existence: a sensation, image, feeling, or
thought. In d aily life a myriad of mental events pop into existence, and
they are so con stant and compelling we never experience  the still
surface of the lake, which is pure consciousness. The direct path
aims to recover this experien ce, because a still, undisturbed state
of a wareness is whole mind. Whole mind contains the infinite
potential that is unique to Homo sapiens. A s with so ma ny things
in meta reality, whole mind is already here and now. You  have to
have a lake before you can throw a pebble into it, and you have to
have a lake for the pebble to pop out of it, too. Both p rocesses
occur in the co smos as every subatomic particle emerges from the
quantum vacuum and fades back into it. Likewise, your thoughts
arise from silence, poise in midair only as long as it takes to be
noticed, and then fade back where they came from. If w hole mind is already here and now, why do we ne ed to
recover it. The answer offered in this book is that metareality lies
beyond the illusions of virtual reality, which bamboozles us by
seeming to be real. Whole m ind is indisputably real, as th e direct
path aims to prove. But I feel that something more is needed. If
mental activity were exactly like pebbles popping out of a lake,
each thought would naturally die away, and the mind  would
effortlessly ret urn to its und isturbed state. In other words, there
would be no i nterruptions, no clinging or blurring or storms to
whip the lake up. Unfortunately, our minds are not smoothly connected to pure
consciousness. Our minds are a confused, chaotic jumble, vividly
described in some Eastern traditions as a monkey. Every thought
joins the storm of other thoughts without returning to a still,
undisturbed st ate. To be hu man is to ride the storm. Once you
learned as a small child to speak and put thoughts into words,
your mind was off and running. Fueled by the agenda of the ego,
“I” started the endless task of accepting A and rejecting B. Even
two- or three-year-olds want  what they want: toys to call “mine,”
attention from  their mother, their favorite foods, stories th ey want
to h ear over and over again. Rejection is a vital part of the ego’sagenda as well. A two- or three-year-old throws some toys on the
floor, re jects hugs and kisses, refuses to eat certain foods, and so
on. There is a fam ous cartoon by Carl Rose and E. B. W hite
showing a mother and child at the dinner table. The caption goes:
M OTHER:  “It’s broccoli, dear. ”
D AUGHTER:  “I say it’s spinach and I say the hell with it. ”
If kids spoke in adult voices, that’s exactly how they’d talk. From the perspective of metahuman, none of the ego’s agenda
is a necessity. Why go to the  trouble of constructing a se lf when
you already are  the self. The o nly real necessity is to be here now
and allow life to unfold. But bec ause our thoughts don’t fade away into pure, quiet
calmness, an obstacle arises. Thoughts interfere with our ability to
be here now. Every thought generates a new thought, every
sensation a new sensation. This endless mental activity is so
distracting that we cannot see our source or touch it or sense its
presence. Getting rid of mental interference has become hard
work. T he years spent in Zen  Buddhist monasteries or sitting in
lotus pose in a Himalayan cave are images in popular culture that
represent just how arduous it  is to quiet the mind. The dir ect path
cuts thr ough th e hard work i n a simple way, as illustrate d in the
following exercise. E x e r c i s e :  E y e s  O p e n,  N o  T h o u g h t s
This exercise is reserved for  the moment you wake up in the
morning. When you open your eyes and before you get out of bed,
your mind begins its day. You are preset to jump in to your
customary rou tine. You start to think about what you have to do
that da y, and very soon you have rebooted your persona l story—
your mind is tr ained to run automatically, like a computer whosesoftware is ready for instructions the minute the machine is
turned on. Yet ther e is a s mall interval before your story reboots. For a few
seconds you are awake but not yet engaged with the world. At this
moment there is no interven ing thought to block pure aw areness. You can expand these few s econds into a conscious experience. Here’s how. Go to bed wit h the intention that you are going to tak e the
following steps the instant you wake up the next morning:
Step 1:  When you first are aware of waking up, open your
eyes. Step 2:  Stare at the ceiling without focusing on anything in
particular. Step 3:  Try to keep your eyes open. Focus on this and
nothing else. What t his exercise does is to set a trap for undisturbed
awareness. Each step is important in the sequence. As yo u go to
bed the night before, you set an intention; this puts the exercise at
the top of your  mental agenda in the morning. Opening y our eyes
and staring at the ceiling d istracts you from starting to think. Focusing your attention on keeping your eyes open is the real
secret, howeve r. Your brain wakes up in the morning in  waves,
alternating sleep and wakefulness. As these waves increase, there
is st eadily more wakefulness  than sleepiness, and thus you wake
up, still feeling a bit sleepy. By focusing your attention on keeping your eyes open, your
brain h as no choice but to blo ck thinking. The effort to sta y awake
occupies it entirely. (You can accomplish the same thing by
visually seeing a blue dot in your mind’s eye and keeping your
attention on it. ) Once th e steps  of this exerci se are mastered, you will be  in a
state of “eyes o pen, no thoughts. ” As you lie there, simply notice
what this state feels like. Very few people have actually been
awake without thinking for more than a few seconds. With
practice, you can sustain thi s exercise for up to a minute. It’s asignificant thin g to be still, quiet, calm, and alert with no ego to
defend or story to construc t. The more you are aware of how
significant the  experience actually is, the more insight you will
have into your true self. The exercise isn’t an end unt o itself,
merely a starting point. There a re varia nts of getting t o the same state of “eyes open, no
thoughts. ” In meditation, for example, the mind settles down into
a r ested quiet s tate, and when you open your eyes at the end of the
meditation, this mental relaxation persists. Here the mind is
coordinating a  brain response, the natural tendency to return to
pure consciousness if given a chance. The purpose of a mantra, if
you pra ctice mantra medita tion, is to give the mind a sound
without meani ng to occupy it, which helps you stop focu sing on
what your thoughts are trying to tell you. As the mantra returns to
the min d, it becomes subtler and fainter, allowing an easy slide
into qu iet min d. At first, whe n you are coming out of meditation,
“eyes open, no thoughts” is  brief, because we are so used to
jumping back into our story. But over time there is an expansion,
and “eyes open, no thoughts”  turns into a steady state around the
clock. At that point, a person is considered fully awake. In the
morning exercise just presented, “eyes open, no thoughts” is
blank. But the experience of being fully awake isn’t. Mental
activity arises—pebbles pop out of the lake—while the undisturbed
state remains. Silence and a ctivity are experienced as one thing:
awareness moving within itself. The experience of “eyes open, no
thoughts” is modest at first, yet it opens the way to transfo rm how
we use our minds. I’ve made the point that m ost people don’t abandon their
stories, no matter how much pain and suffering those stories are
causing, because their natural instinct is to cling to those stories. If
you aren’t a b attered wife who refuses to leave her hus band, a
closeted gay man afraid to come out, an opioid addict unable to
end her  habit—or any other person stuck in deep pain—you can’t
grasp how horrible the consequences of clinging can be. Stories
can turn into a hopeless stat e, and that state challenges the best
that medicine and psychotherapy can do to help. Since w e all cling to our stori es, can the direct path really  offer
a wa y o ut. Let’s agree that you and I and everyone else are stuck
in our story. Stuck  is  convenient shorthand for  old conditioning
that kee ps us from creating the changes we want in our l ives. It’s
possible to learn a lot from the various ways to get unst uck that
have fai led. Consider the New Testament, where Jesus of N azareth
appears as one of the most compelling spiritual figures in recorded
history. The story of the Son of God who preaches peace to the
world and is crucified for it constitutes a drama that has transfixed
the West for two millennia. It is striking, however, that what the New Testament teaches is
often impossib le to achieve. “Love thy neighbor as thyself” clearly
runs counter to how human n ature operates (and would have been
a fatal teaching to follow in the face of Nazism, at a tim e when
many J ews had neighbors who joined the Nazi Party, or in Bosnia
where mixed Muslim and Christian neighborhoods became
battlegrounds based on religion). “Turn the other cheek” seems
masochistic, except to a deeply confirmed Christian, asking for
bullies to victimize the helpless even more than they already do. But this isn’t a criticism aimed at one faith—all spiritual traditions
have fo undered on the same obstacle. Human nature is in love
with its  own self-created drama, and the more stark the contrast
between good and evil, the more we cling to our story. If the
human race is waiting for the day when either good or evil is
triumphant, the only predictable outcome is that the drama is
designed to last an eternity. Most people are clinging to  drama at a much milder level,
naturally. Except for those times when unconscious forces erupt
and a whole nation, or the world at large, is dragged to the edge of
catastrophe—sometimes plunging over into the abyss—da ily life is
stuck in  mund ane wants and desires, duties and demands. Like
being drowned in the bathtub or being drowned at sea, the result
is the same. Yet, someone doesn’t have to experience misery to experience
being in  separa tion. Your quality of life may be good or ba d—a life
generally brings both—the situation comes down to the same
nitty-gritty: stuck is stuck. The drama is self-perpetuating. Even
our desire to escape the spell /dream/illusion becomes part of thestory. A passing experience like “eyes open, no thoughts ” or the
peaceful relaxa tion of meditation is like a peashooter a gainst a
tank. The momentum of our collective drama has proved
unstoppable. If whol e mind didn’t exist, nobody could have invented it. We’re a ll too stuck to see beyo nd the story we’re tangled up in. But
whole m ind do es exist; therefore, it must have a way of revealing
itself. It is said of Lord Shiva in the Vedas that he has as many
ways to  show himself as to disguise himself. This is worth
knowing. For every impulse of love, there is an impulse of fear. For
every moment of clarity, there is a moment of confusion. The trick
is not to favor the love and clarity over the fear and confusion,
because the pendulum will inevitably swing back again. The tric k is to c all upon the so urce of love and clarity, grad ually
come closer to it, and finally make it your own. (T he New
Testament had  a better chance of being practical if Je sus had
taught “Try to love your neig hbor as yourself” and “See if  turning
the oth er cheek helps break the cycle of retaliation. ”) The only
hope fo r escap ing the traps o f the conditioned mind is to  use its
better nature as a thread, following it day by day until your story
fades away. Then, living in wholeness becomes natural. A  D e s i r e  t o  R e m o v e  D e s i r e
The endless cycle of good  and evil, pleasure and pain,
happiness and  misery is like a bonfire that fuels itself. Yet just as
the min d is riotously active on the surface and quiet in its  depths,
so is life. The d rama is everything, but only at its own leve l. When
you have a mo dest experience like “eyes open, no thoughts,” the
interference of mental activit y ceases temporarily. What replaces
it is more than quietude. By itself, a silent mind is no better, as far
as nego tiating the demands of daily life, than a car would be if the
engine dies. There has to be something attractive within the
experience of silence. This so mething exists in the form of a faint presence, which
we’ve already encountered as the sense of self. We are most
natural, relaxed, free, and present when the sense of self  is upon
us. Sustaining this feeling of presence eludes us, however. I think
it’s fair to say  that the glim pses of the true self that generate
experiences of love, joy, peac e, safety, and self-worth are the only
thing that has brought light into the condition of being human. There i s a natural desire to  expand upon such experiences. In
return, the true self has the p ower of attraction (known in Sanskrit
as Swarupa, the pull of the Self). Being silent and largely unnoticed, the sense of self cannot get
us unstuck by itself. If you  have practiced mantra meditation,
mindfulness practices, or one-pointed awareness, which  are all
valuable techniques for bringing the sense of self to the fore, you
know how stubbornly your m ind returns to business as us ual. You
can tra in your self with effort to display any spiritual att ribute—
loving-kindness, forgiveness, steady attention to God—but the
sense of self cannot be trained. It simply is. Effort is not only
useless but damaging. This concept was voiced by the ve nerable
spiritual teacher J. Krishnamurti, when he said, “Can you
discipline your  mind to be free. ” There’s the rub. No matter how
well we train o ur minds, including all kinds of spiritual t raining,
freedom is a state where discipline is totally foreign. I h ad that in the back of my  mind when I said that the direct
path must be easy, efficient, and spontaneous. If you wa nt to be
here now, which is the state of metahuman, you first have to stop
trying. Meditation gives the experience of not trying, which
surprises almost everyone when they first begin to meditate. The
sense o f self is brought into our awareness, and its presence can,
in fact, be quite strong. It ca n turn into a state of ecstasy, a love
affair with the Divine, as in this passionate outcry from Rumi:
Oh God, I have discovered love. How marvelous, how good, how beautiful it is. …
I offer my salutation
To the spirit of passion that aroused and excited this
whole universeAnd all it contains. The usual experience of pres ence is pleasant and far sho rt of
passionate. We  get a clue from Rumi, however, when he points to
the pow er of desire. In his case, desire is an intoxicati on with
divine love. Everyone has d esires, and it is due to the force of
desire t hat we wake up every morning with a will to see what the
day is going to bring. If the day brings moments of aw akening,
then desire has served us in getting unstuck. Since the sense of self simply is, you can’t desire it directly. That would be like saying, “I wish I existed. ” What happens
instead is that you trick desire into going where you want to go. (You spirituall y hack into materialism, as a friend put it. ) In
Buddhism this comes under the heading of “Use a thorn to remove
a th orn, then throw both tho rns away. ” That teaching is famous
and has aroused much commentary. It sounds simple enough to
remove a splinter from your finger by pricking it out with a  needle. The mental equivalent runs into difficulties. Since we are going to
use desire to go beyond desire, these difficulties need a little
explaining. Originally, the Buddha seem s to refer to thorns as deep pain
that can not be healed. One of the deepest sources of pain i s fear of
violence, which Buddha spea ks of with personal candor. “Fear is
born fro m arm ing oneself. Just see how many people fight. I’ll tell
you about the dreadful fear  that caused me to shake all over. Seeing creatures thrashing lik e fish in shallow water, so hostile to
one another. Seeing this, I became afraid” (Sutta Nipata). We lean forward to hear wha t Buddha’s escape from fear was,
which conjure s up the imag e of the thorn. He goes on, “Seeing
people locked in conflict, I became completely distraught. But
then I discerne d a thorn, diff icult to see, lodged deep in the heart. It is only when pierced by th is thorn that one runs wild ly in all
directions. So if the thorn is taken out, one no longer r uns but
settles down. ”
In pure form, experiencing the thorn of pain in the heart spurs
a person to find inner peace. The teaching is beautiful, but, like the
New Testamen t teachings, it contradicts human nature. Whenpeople are locked in conflict, they are motivated to ramp  up the
conflict, ignori ng the pain in their hearts, or, more likely, taking it
to b e a messag e that they mu st fight on. (To the credit of Buddhist
cultures in Asia, the teaching of peace has brought fewer bloody
conflicts over time, a record o ther faiths might envy. The Buddhist
violence against Muslims in Burma proves that no religion is
immune to violence, however. ) “A thor n to remove a thorn” can be used more psycholog ically
as a tactic for  healing. The goal is to substitute negative, self-
defeating thou ghts with positive, self-enhancing ones. Un der the
name o f cognitive therapy, this approach relies on rationality to
overcome emotion. For example, a patient might complain that
nothing ever works out, th at no matter how hard sh e tries,
everything ends in defeat and disappointment. There’s obviously a
strong emotional charge be hind defeatist thinking. Wh en this
becomes a habit, the first thought that comes to mi nd in a
challenging situation is automatically “Nothing is going to work
out. I know it. ”
The usual result is that, inde ed, nothing good happens. There
could hardly be a more p erfect example of a self-fulfilling
prophecy. A cognitive therapist would use a new tho ught to
remove the old one (the thorn that removes the thorn) by pointing
out that good things have h appened to the patient. Life hasn’t
been a string o f endless defeats. Therefore, the rational course is
to think, “This situation may turn out well or badly. No one knows,
so I have a chance to do my best to get a good outcome. ”  It’s not
easy to replace pessimism with optimism, since emotions lie
deeper than reason, and telling yourself that something good
might  h appen gives pessimism a ll the opening it needs. With
practice and guidance, habitual negativity can be softened, but
human nature hasn’t been m ade peaceful and fulfilled by the use
of reason. Finally, there is the second part of the teaching to contend with. “Use a thorn to  remove a thor n, then throw both thorns away. ” In
the pro cess of getting over an illness, you take medicine as long as
it’s needed, then you throw the pills away. But the same thing is
more mysterio us when it com es to the mind. If you use positive
thoughts, for example, to rep lace negative thoughts, you still windup as a posit ive thinker, just as embedded in your story as
someone who is gloomy. It’s better to live in sunshine than in
shade, no doubt. Escaping the illusion is another matter. Throwing both  thorns away means that the whole scena rio of
pain and pleasure, good and evil, light and darkness, is di scarded. This is taken t o be Buddha’s essential message. The diagnosis is
accurate, and the picture of being healed—living beyond the grip
of th e drama—is inspiring. The challenge presented to the direct
path is how to make inspiration a living reality. C l e a r i n g  t h e  W a y  f o r  t h e  S e l f
The answer, as I conceive it, is to use desire as the thorn,
because we all have experienced its double nature. Desire
demands to be fulfilled. If the desire is strong enough, as in
passionate sexual attraction, it is enough to drive people mad. The
thorn causes pain, because it is never enough to have one moment
of f ulfillment— the next desire arrives with a new demand to be
fulfilled. What ’s the other thorn, the one that will end the pain. Fulfillment itse lf. Moralists who preach against desire, who call it
the work of the Devil or, in Freudian terms, the work of the id, see
with on ly one eye. Desire is as  beautiful as it is treacherous. Sexual
attraction leads to lasting, loving relationships and not just sexual
assault. I do n’t think anyone would d eny this truism, and we can draw
on i t by  using the thorn of desire to remove the thorn of desire. But desire for what. If spiritu al traditions have held out th e desire
for love, peace, divine grace, forgiveness, and a ticket to Heaven or
Nirvana, only to fall short in t he end, what is left. The only answer
I can think of is the desire to  be real. The sense of self ul timately
has that to offer, and that alone. There is no stick or carrot, only
the promise that you can be here now, which is how you can
experience reality free of all illusion. In p ractical terms, the mind can’t learn what it is to be real all
at once. The direct path is s till a path—it takes time. Li fe offersevery im aginable reason to quit the path. Desire lures us to turn
our inte rest elsewhere—the o ld story is very insistent. But you can
cultivate an interest in getting  real. It’s not necessarily har der than
cultivating an interest in wine or stamp collecting or Russian
novels. All that’s needed is curiosity and the flicker of desire
(referred to in the Indian tradition as the spark that burns down
the forest; one urge to escap e the illusion will destroy th e whole
illusion eventually). The direct path is unique because we are not taught by love,
peace, compas sion, or any other desirable quality our lives can
bring. We are t aught by existence itself. Only knowing wh at lies at
the heart of existence will work. Contrary to Hamlet, “To be, or not
to be” isn’t the question. “To be” is the question, all by itself. If you
ask it every day, your tru e self will hear and then present
fascinating, ever-changing answers. Engaged in finding out what it
means to be here, you tr ansform your mind from its old
conditioning into a vehicle  that can reach the beyond. The
conditioned mind has firmly decided what it means to exist, which
is how we became stuck in the first place. To g et ourselves unstuck, onc e and for all, the direct path runs
into a practical problem, w hich has been described in ancient
Indian texts as “separating water from milk. ” In other  words,
everyday reali ty mixes the real and the unreal so t hey are
inseparable. T his is obvious when you look at the brain, which
presents virtual reality only because the “real” reality makes us
conscious in the first place. The worst movie ever made is
projected on the screen with the same projector as a classic film
masterpiece. M any versions of the direct path teach that we are
like children watching shado w puppets on the wall. We believe in
these images so completely that the truth escapes us—shadows
can’t exist without the light that makes them visible. Virtual reality
only exists thanks to metareality. To separate light from shadow sounds easy enough, and the
direct p ath proves it. All you need to do is bring the sense o f self to
your at tention. As a practical matter, nothing is easier or more
natural. At any moment in the day, simply shut your eyes, take a
few deep breaths to bring on a state of relaxation, and center your
attention on your heart (or on your breath). It sounds strange,given th e elaborate complexity of religion, that the entire spiritual
journey is only this: relax and be aware of yourself. By doin g this, you subtly allow  the “pull of the self” to become a
real ex perience. If your intention is more serious, learning to
meditate or making a commitment to yoga intensifies the
experience of sensing the self—the mantras and yoga poses
( asanas ) w ere devised to give a differ ent flavor or coloration of the
self. We  are already outfitted for this process. As children grow up,
for example, they learn to identify the gradations of e motion. Hostility, outrage, irritation, and hate. Once you connect those
labels with an inner feeling,  it comes naturally to say, “I’m not
angry, just frustrated” or “Don’t go near him—he’s a hater. ”
Gradations in consciousness  can also be felt, but they don’t
have labels. When you experience the sen se of self as directed above, you go
beyond the thoughts and feelings that can be labeled. None of
them, even the most loving thought and spiritual feelin g, is the
basis of  reality. Only the sens e of self is irreducible. You cannot go
beyond it or t urn it into something more basic. Mental activity
vanishes into a kind of nothingness—silent mind. Accordin g to the
direct path, this is the sour ce of everything “in here” a nd “out
there. ” But here’s the tricky part. Is “everything” practical. If
someone show ed you a blan k piece of paper and said, “Here is
every b ook” or a blank canvas and said, “Here is every pa inting,”
such a statement would not  help you write a book or paint a
painting. Wha t you want is to write one book, not every book,
paint one painting and not every painting. Likewise, it seems unhelpful to say that metareality is “always,
everything, and everywhere. ” We are attuned to specifics. For
better or worse, we live our lives at this  mo ment, in this  location. It may seem h opelessly vagu e to tell someone as I’ve been saying
to “Be here now. ” Where else are we, on Mars. Section summary: 

Please summarize the main topics discussed below. **Cosmetic/fashion**

None

*No relevant content*

            **Metaphysical**
                * Becoming "meta" requires eliminating useless aspects. - Eliminate social norms and cultural expectations leading   →    # Meta-human transformation       |         |
              *
                  **
          |

Source


According to [Author], cosmetic issues ("cosmetics") and lifestyle choices      •     ^^^^|           |||||. ```

Summary:

Not applicable. Main Topics Discussed:

• Discussions surrounding metaphysics/meta-humanneness
	+ Importance of recognizing individual senses/thought patterns. Key Points Mentioned:
	
– Recognizing and understanding the importance of acknowledging 'who' you're throughout numerous scenarios 
­− Emphasis on removing unwanted elements ('unnecessary') to progress towards metamorphic growth  
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Note: Please ensure accuracy consistency among summarized keypoints. References:

[1] Author's Name, Book Title.
Until something matters enough to us, we won't change our accustomed way of life.
According to the author, what is the main obstacle to changing one's accustomed way of life?
The author suggests that we should eliminate everything that is unnecessary for our species, as it is not essential for our survival.
What is the author's approach to eliminating unnecessary things for our species?
The direct path doesn't require the effort to achieve a specific goal, but rather allows the illusion to dissolve effortlessly.
What is the main difference between the direct path and other schemes for improving human existence?
The author believes that the body and mind are not separate entities, but rather, the body is a reflection of the mind, and the mind is a vehicle for consciousness.
What is the author's perspective on the relationship between the body and the mind?
The author argues that time is an illusion created by human consciousness, and that it is not an objective reality.
What is the author's stance on the concept of time?