6

Self-Empowerment

Total meditation expands your awareness, and with that expansion comes personal power. Power based on awareness is not only possible but also automatic, and therein lies a secret. The typical image of a powerful person is attached to social markers like money, status, and the ability to dictate to others. And, unfortunately, as we’ve seen throughout history, those few who achieve great power tend to lord it over those who have less power or who feel powerless.

The actual source of power is mysterious, and when the richest and most prominent public figures are being candid, they are often baffled by their rise to the top. Most will say that luck played a big part—they were in the right place at the right time. Leaving good fortune aside, the path to self-empowerment needs to be clarified and made practical.

You might be well satisfied with your life choices up to now, an indication that things are going well for you. Most people, however, look upon their life choices as a mixture of good and bad. Whatever your attitude, no amount of success so far is the same as living from a starting point of infinite possibilities. In total meditation, you reframe your expectations by living closer and closer to your source of total consciousness. Then self-empowerment starts to take care of itself. That is, you naturally align with the level of consciousness that organizes the right outcome for any situation or challenge. If your desires are aligned with positive goals, the whole issue of empowerment has been solved.

Total Meditation

Lesson 14: Least Effort

Whether to say yes or no is probably the most basic choice people make every day. The decision is made over and over, and people who are in the habit of saying no much of the time don’t make life easy. Saying yes all the time also has its own share of problems. We wind up saying yes or no basically by repeating a choice we’ve made many times in the past. Acting out of habit is arbitrary. Parents get exasperated when a child keeps rejecting any new food with “I don’t like it,” to which the frustrated answer is “You haven’t even tasted it yet.” When we reject the new and unknown as adults, we are basically reverting to that childish habit of saying no without actually using any thought.

The issue can be reframed in terms of resistance. If you met with no resistance in your life, there would be much less reason to say no. Where does resistance come from? When other people resist us, the urge is to become annoyed and to push back. But the hidden resistance that exists inside us is something we need to pay great attention to. No one would argue with the following points:

  • Other people are more accepting if you don’t resist them.

  • Getting what you want often involves giving someone else what they want.

  • Cooperation achieves more results than not cooperating.

  • You can’t stop someone else from reacting to you the way they want to react.

  • It is easy to say no to things that are new and unknown.

Everyone has to deal with life along these lines, but when you understand the nature of consciousness, each item on the list changes. Because consciousness is total, it never resists itself. The ocean can get stormy, but no matter how turbulent the waves, it isn’t resisting itself. It has simply gone into a new mode, stormy instead of calm. Consciousness gives rise to all kinds of storms in human behavior. We don’t have to tick off the violence, disharmony, controversies, and conflicts that have bedeviled history. Everyday life faces you with the opportunity to struggle or give in, to join in an argument or stand aside. There is no pattern of behavior that suits all situations. Society exults over victory in war and in the next breath venerates a pacifist like Gandhi.

These contrary impulses will persist and remain at war without a deeper vision. In its own nature, consciousness is orderly and organized. It unfolds its power along the line of least effort. We see this in the perfect organization of a cell, which wastes not a molecule of oxygen and nutrients. Nature as a whole operates through laws of motion, heat, gravity, and so on that have one thing in common: they take the shortest path from A to B, because it requires the least effort. The falling apple that, according to legend, gave Isaac Newton his “Aha!” moment about gravity didn’t fall in a zigzag or take a brief detour to fall upward. Straight lines are the norm in Nature as long as there are no obstacles in the way.

Least effort isn’t just efficient. It is the most powerful way to reach any goal. It has the least friction and gets around obstacles as swiftly as possible. If you translate this into everyday life, self-empowerment then looks very different. You can adjust every choice to be in line with least effort, as follows:

  • Don’t immediately push back or say no without first relaxing, centering yourself, and letting your deeper awareness respond. If given a chance, deeper awareness prefers to bring about the right result with the least effort. Don’t act impulsively.

  • When faced with a stressful situation, consciously ask yourself if the path of least resistance is open to you. If so, take it.

  • Learn to allow and let go more often instead of insisting and trying to take control.

  • Favor consensus and cooperation.

  • Don’t bully, coerce, or fall back on “Because I said so, that’s why.”

  • Seek as much outside input as you can from people who are at least as aware as you are.

  • Avoid people who typically do the opposite of everything mentioned above.

It’s important to note that least effort is not acquiescence or mental laziness. The main reason we haven’t already adopted least effort as a path to consciousness and self-empowerment comes down to social conditioning. A whole mythology surrounds the rewards of never giving up, fighting back, winning at all costs, and vanquishing the enemy. In the beginning, you might be tempted by this mythology, but consciousness shows a better way.

Least effort is applicable here and now, but you need to remember that any power derived from consciousness gets stronger the deeper your awareness is. As you meditate over time and practice least effort more and more, you will get closer to the source of pure awareness. And your choices will become increasingly successful because you have the orderliness and organizing power of consciousness supporting you.

When you change your starting point, the whole picture of self-empowerment changes. Imagine that you are about to enter a room where you will be challenged by someone in authority, say an IRS tax agent, a lawyer, or your boss. You don’t know how this encounter will turn out. How does this prospect make you feel? Some people will stand up for themselves, their work, and their opinions vigorously, while others are meek, nervous, or easily intimidated.

You know yourself well enough to realize how you’d probably react. Yet your self-knowledge in this case is actually about limitation. On the surface the person with the strongest ego might look superior to someone who is quiet and self-effacing. Yet there is no predicting which one will make the right choices. Indeed, we often resort to secondhand sources of power, trying to look strong, successful, and in control, while deep down we are baffled by how life works.

We remain baffled because we are disconnected from the source of power. The difference between being connected and disconnected is clear-cut once you understand how consciousness works. Whenever you have to make a decision, the process isn’t as rational as people suppose.

Pause for a moment and reflect on the last important decision you made. It can be anything. Buying a new house or changing jobs happens rarely, but you may have decided to speak up on an issue, offer advice to a friend or family member, make a presentation at work, or buy something expensive that needed consideration.

In the midst of your decision making, qualities of consciousness came into play. You may have found yourself in one of the following positions:

You were confident in yourself and certain that you’d make the right choice. You had a definite purpose in mind. You were in control. You didn’t have second thoughts.

Or

You were tentative and doubtful. You vacillated one way or another. You weren’t sure the outcome would be what you wanted. You were prone to worry and second thoughts.

It is these qualities of awareness that indicate how empowered you felt when you made your last important decision. Rational considerations entered in, certainly, but they were only part of the mix. If you were feeling really indecisive, you probably made your ultimate choice on impulse. Who is immune to buyer’s remorse?

If you want to be confident instead of doubtful, how do you go about it? Most often people choose to disguise their doubts and put up a more confident front than what they actually feel. You fall back on protecting your ego image rather than finding a level of consciousness where confidence, direction, certainty, purpose, meaning, control, and successful outcomes are the norm. Ego won’t get you there. This is why going beyond ego is a major part of total meditation.

The problem is that ego plays such a huge part in our decision making that it is hard to step off it. When you read the claim I just made that there is a level of consciousness where successful outcomes are the norm, how did you react? If you experienced doubt or skepticism, you were responding from ego. I don’t mean egotism, which is exaggerated ego. In daily life, whether you are self-centered or modest, ego is your individual viewpoint. It encompasses your experiences and memories, habits and beliefs, in other words, the whole story you have been living up to this moment.

Stepping off ego is so foreign that most people really have no conception of what this means. That’s totally understandable. Pure consciousness has no identity, no “I” to defend. It has no ties to memories, habits, and old conditioning, because only the present moment is its focus. As an experience, pure consciousness is a blank from the ego’s standpoint. The ego registers an experience chiefly through desire and self-interest. “I want X” and “I don’t want X” are prime considerations. “I like how this feels” and “I don’t like how this feels” also play an important part, as does “Is this good or bad for me?”

When desire and self-interest are missing, the ego feels devoid of experience. The experience of pure consciousness rests upon simply being here, observing, allowing, and acting in the right way without second thoughts or self-interest. Standing back turns experience upside down. Instead of the mind being constantly active and restless—with the occasional moment of quiet, peace, and ease—you are always at peace and easy, with occasional moments in which something arises to say, think, or do.

The contrast is so stark that many people reject the state of quiet ease their mind naturally wants to be in. To them, inner calm feels like “nothing is going on,” so they seek an immediate source of activity and distraction. Have you ever found yourself feeling a bit at loose ends or jittery? Suddenly you jump up to get a snack, check your texts, or channel-surf, generally without thinking or really needing to do any of these things. Impulsive behavior arises as a rejection of simply being here. The ego senses its own restlessness in a place of genuine quiet and ease, and “nothing is going on” becomes the trigger for pointless mental activity.

No one can be expected overnight to step off the plane of ego onto the plane of infinite possibilities—such a leap is more or less inconceivable. But we can fall back on the basic truth that consciousness is everywhere, participating in everything. It participates in how we lead our life, thus offering us a midway point that is totally human and yet far more expanded than the ego. This midway point is where you, the individual, encounter the organizing power of consciousness, the power that oversees the entire bodymind. From here, all the benefits of the awakened life are available.

THE HUMAN MATRIX

If we are told that total consciousness is supporting us in everything we do, we have the right to ask, “What is it doing for me today?” This is not a selfish or a presumptuous question. If you examine your life closely, it turns out that consciousness is doing not just a lot for you every day—it is doing everything. So far, I’ve used comparisons between less power and more power, but in reality you don’t have to compare yourself to anyone else. Being total, consciousness cannot give you less power or more power. It offers everything to everyone. It’s like being alive. When you are alive, you are just alive—it isn’t a matter of half alive or one-tenth alive. Life exists as one thing. Microbes have this one thing, and so do whales, mole rats, iguanas, and you.

As human beings, we are embedded in a network that organizes, governs, and manages existence down to the level of the smallest thought as well as the smallest subatomic particle. I call this network the human matrix. This is the midway point between pure consciousness and the ego. In the human matrix, consciousness has constructed a setup tailored to our lives. There is a different matrix for other creatures. A sperm whale whose entire bodymind is set up to dive thousands of feet under the sea to locate and eat giant squid lives in a matrix, just as we do. We cannot claim that a sperm whale’s matrix is simpler or more primitive than ours.

When consciousness creates a matrix, no one can have complete knowledge of how it is done. First of all, the process is invisible. Second, it leaves very few footprints behind. Chemical reactions inside a cell are perfectly organized, but they vanish after a few thousandths of a second. A thought delivers a meaningful message, but then it disappears without a trace. The human matrix is dynamic, changing all the time, something that works tremendously to your advantage. You are surrounded by the total power of consciousness working for you automatically, and it has complete knowledge about what you need.

Every time you have a new desire or intention, the whole matrix reacts. I have spent a great deal of time exploring the connection between quantum physics and consciousness. I can trace my fascination with this back to a quote from the eminent English physicist Sir Arthur Eddington, who said, “When the electron vibrates, the universe shakes.” The same is true of the human matrix. Every desire you have, no matter how small, vibrates through consciousness and creates a change in its living structure.

We cannot see the organizing power that lies behind everything we think, say, and do. We cannot see intelligence on a brain scan, either, but it exists. No measuring device can quantify how much love you feel, but everyone who has fallen in love feels its enormous power. The human matrix has been in place for hundreds of thousands of years, evolving with every advance made by Homo sapiens. The higher brain of our remote Stone Age ancestors was organized so that mathematics, literature, and science were already being anticipated thousands of years before their first glimmering signs appeared. Our brain is constructed from DNA that is 85 percent the same as that of a mouse, 98 percent the same as that of a gorilla, and 99 percent the same as that of a chimpanzee, our nearest genetic relation.

But in that tiny sliver of a difference, the human matrix has been constructed. No one knows how that is possible, because relying on DNA to tell the story is misleading and inadequate. Homo sapiens has been around for no more than 200,000 years; chimpanzees first appeared 18 million years ago. Chimps have higher brains, too, but the chimp matrix has close to zero potential for mathematics, literature, and science. They occupy a matrix that is complete for them, and if evolution occurs, it must be happening very, very slowly. We can presume, although we will never know for certain, that ancestral chimpanzees probably behaved very much like present-day examples.

The human matrix has evolved at lightning speed by comparison. If Stone Age humans had the potential for mathematics, literature, and science, they didn’t know it, just as a two-year-old has no idea it has the potential to read. When you learned to read, you were playing evolutionary catch-up. Your consciousness unfolded its potential step-by-step. Yet these steps came from the past. Being able to speak, read, and think rationally is an inheritance—we acquire it automatically, simply by being born.

Once you reached maturity, however, you became the point person for evolution in the present. Standing on the shoulders of our ancestors, you can push the human matrix—your portion of it, anyway—wherever you desire. So where are you going next? No road map exists—how could it, with seven billion people constantly making choices every minute? If you stand back, however, there are links that unite human beings across all of recorded history. These links are our invisible potential, and they make us a unique species of consciousness. We can direct our own evolutionary path.

If you pause for a moment and look at your hand, you can observe directly how consciousness works. The human hand has twenty-seven bones, the same number as in the hand of a chimpanzee. The main difference is that when you relax your hand, your thumb rests against the palm—this is the famous opposable thumb that evolutionists talk about. Chimps and other higher primates also have an opposable thumb, which they use to peel bananas, to groom each other, and to fashion a primitive tool from a twig that they use to poke for grubs in a tree.

What makes the opposable thumb an evolutionary miracle in humans cannot be seen in our bones. The miracle occurred in consciousness and is therefore invisible. The opposable thumb made it possible for humans to do fine detail work, as when an artist makes an engraving by using a stylus to scratch fine lines onto a copper plate. There is such an engraving, which Rembrandt etched of himself as a young man. His delicately rendered frowzy hair encircles his head like a tangled halo. The etching would be remarkable enough without knowing that the original is only about two inches across. (You can see it online by googling “Rembrandt self-portrait etching.” It’s the one with him looking over his left shoulder.) As adroit as chimps are, they can’t do what Rembrandt did or, for that matter, what a street artist with a flourish of spray paint can do on a brick wall in a New York alley.

The fineness of detail required to cut a diamond, paint a cameo portrait, or make Venetian lace requires an opposable thumb, but it is just a tool, a tool useful to consciousness. Without consciousness, the tool is useless, or of limited use in the primate family.

When you consider every department of human life, you can see how unique the human matrix is, and how totally it embraces us.

The Human Matrix

Everything consciousness has given us

Biology (organizing and running the body)

Survival instincts (fight or flight)

Perception (the five senses)

Psychology (personality, emotions, moods, etc.)

Rational thought

Social bonds, personal relationships

Language

Creativity

Curiosity, discovery, invention

Self-awareness

There are two amazing things about this list. First is its complexity. No other living creature uses consciousness with such diversity. Second is its unity. Consciousness is doing everything all at once. These two features—diversity and unity—combined define totality. It would be better if we didn’t have to use abstract terms like totality, but there’s a reason. Wholeness isn’t an experience. In the human matrix, everything is being coordinated at the same time, but experiences occur singly in separation.

To get around this obstacle, here’s an exercise that demonstrates what totality is doing out of sight.

Read the following sentence, which I picked at random, and as you do, count the number of times the letter e appears while at the same time trying to understand what the words mean.

There are, by best estimate, although no one knows for sure, somewhere between 100,000 and a million types of proteins in our bodies.

It’s obvious, I think, that your mind resists doing two things at once—it wants you to either read the sentence for meaning or count the number of times the letter e appears. Such is the limitation of linear experience. Yet at every moment of your life, the totality of consciousness has no difficulty managing everything I listed on this page, from bodily processes to emotions, rational thought, and so on—the entirety of the human matrix. You live within the human matrix at the pinnacle of what consciousness is able to achieve on Earth. This realization radically redefines who you are.

If you understand what totality is, normal expectations become ridiculously inadequate to describe the power that exists inside and outside you. In fact there is no inside and outside. The totality of consciousness governs creation without regard for boundaries. This invisible structure, the human matrix, expands the meaning of total meditation. We must regard meditation as all-embracing, affecting everything in the human matrix. Here again the analogy of the ocean helps. One of the most surprising—and distressing—aspects of climate change is how rapidly the world’s oceans have been affected by small changes. Alarming news reports tell us that as of 2019, more than a third of the coral reefs on the globe had suffered serious damage or died.

No one suspected that warming the seas by a few degrees Celsius could have such drastic effects. The Great Barrier Reef off the east coast of Australia has suffered from the sudden proliferation of a coral-eating starfish that consumes vast swaths of the reef. In addition, surges of higher water temperature passing over the coral lead to die-off of the algae that keep coral alive.

Ocean currents have also been affected, and as they shift, fishing suffers—an El Niño year, characterized by warmer temperatures and heavier rains, determines the fortunes of Peruvian anchovy fishermen, whose livelihood is a mainstay of the national economy.

We’re all familiar with the continual reports about ice caps melting at both poles, polar bears drowning because they cannot swim the long stretches of open water between the ice floes, and the potential for huge chunks of Antarctic ice cap to break off, melt, and raise the level of the oceans. Low-lying islands like the Maldives in the Indian Ocean are already threatened.

The oceans absorb greenhouse gases as well as heat. Overload the system and the water becomes too acidic (a major factor in dying reefs). Some doomsayers point to the possibility that the Earth’s atmosphere might become too poisonous for human life, and this, too, is connected to the oceans.

As fish die, their remains, if not eaten by other fish or the occasional gull, sink to the bottom of the sea, where they rot and give off methane gas. The sea depths are cold enough to trap the methane far below the surface, but with enough warming, the gas will rise and be released into the atmosphere. In sufficient quantities, methane kills living things. The early Earth had large quantities of methane in the atmosphere, which had to come down to acceptable levels before life could emerge. Paleontologists calculate there have been five major extinctions in Earth’s history—which, taken together, wiped out not just the dinosaurs, but up to a billion life forms across the five extinctions. The release of methane by the oceans during a warming cycle might be responsible for some of these extinctions.

Whether you are optimistic or pessimistic about humanity’s ability to stem climate change, the ocean stands for the totality in one realm of life, and every small effect of climate change stands for the diversity of the human matrix. We can visualize the oceans, map them, observe and measure all kinds of changes in them. But the human matrix reflects the invisible currents of consciousness moving within itself. Unlike the warming seas, which passively react to heat and greenhouse gases, consciousness knows what is happening and invents new responses constantly. This infinite dynamic power is also expressed through you—as with everything pertaining to the totality, this power is you.

Total Meditation

Lesson 15: Oneness

Once you truly grasp that consciousness is total, you have grasped the secret of infinite power. Oneness sounds abstract. It would be frightening to find yourself floating out at sea with water extending as far as the eye can see in all directions. But the experience of oneness isn’t like that. Finding yourself surrounded by consciousness as far as the eye can see is like being at the center of creation. When you are fully awake, your existence will feel exactly that way. (Many religious traditions depict divine beings with eyes all over their body, and there is the all-seeing mystical eye on the one-dollar bill. These images attempt to visualize the state of total awareness.)

There is no pressure to wake up, however. Oneness is already expressing itself through your bodymind. The essential task is to align yourself with totality instead of opposing it. But how do you do so?

You are aligned with Oneness whenever

You enjoy being where you are

You accept yourself without judgment

You feel supported by Nature

Life goes smoothly, without obstacles and pushback

Your desires come true with little or no effort

You enjoy being here

You accept yourself without judgment

You feel supported by Nature

The last point might sound confusing, but it is actually the most important. To be supported by Nature is the experience of every living thing. Every creature matches the habitat it lives in. Since this support comes so naturally, a porpoise, an aardvark, an Irish setter, or a rhesus monkey doesn’t have to think about Oneness. (It would be nice to know if porpoises do, since they seem to be perpetually smiling.) By the same token, living creatures don’t oppose or undermine the support of Nature. However, because humans inhabit a habitat in which choice plays a huge part, we can deviate from the support of Nature.

We do this when

We find ourselves struggling and suffering

We abandon pure food, water, and air

We allow fear and anger to dictate our behavior

We let old habits and conditioning have power over us

We forget our role as cocreators of reality

You were born into a world where aligning yourself with Oneness isn’t part of a child’s training and education. This lack has perpetually left room for much confusion and doubt. If you are not aware that Nature can support you in everything you think, say, and do, it is all too easy to make choices that throw your life off in small and large ways. The solution isn’t to put more effort into making better choices, however, because there are always unforeseen consequences. The secret is to align yourself with Oneness—in other words, to practice total meditation.

HIDDEN POWERS

We constantly fail to see how powerful we are. Immersed in the human matrix, our lives proceed within fixed limits. Nothing close to infinite power belongs to us. But the power we could be drawing on is hiding in plain sight. We don’t see it because our life is dominated by the voice in our head that is narrating our thoughts. You aren’t just casually dropping in on this narration, however. It affects you deeply, and over the years, what you think, you become. That’s the problem in a nutshell. Thinking isn’t the same as being aware. Quite often thinking—and particularly overthinking—is the enemy of awareness.

Child psychologists inform us that when parents give orders—“Clean up your room,” “Turn off the TV,” “Go to bed”—their children can easily ignore what’s being said. But if a parent says something that describes a child, especially a negative description—“You’re not as funny as the other girls,” “You’re not all that bright,” “You’re a bad boy”—the words are absorbed and often remembered for life. If these descriptive statements are repeated and backed up with strong emotion, the effect can be devastating. “I am X” becomes embedded in the character of the child, leading to guilt, shame, low self-esteem, and other issues that have no basis except that the words of a parent become the words the child hears in their head.

The voice in your head brings up the past all the time. Even beyond the destructive things the voice might say, being pulled back into the past makes you unconscious of the present. Your mind is elsewhere. Awareness is always present, but if you aren’t, then the power of awareness winds up hiding in plain sight, obscured by the screen of thoughts that define “me,” the isolated ego personality. Look at the following comparison:

In awareness you have unlimited knowledge, infinite possibilities, and an unbreakable connection to pure consciousness.

In your thoughts you have limited knowledge, a handful of possibilities, and a faulty connection to pure consciousness.

Because of this mismatch, it is no wonder that we are forced to rely on the ego—it keeps us anchored to the things we hear in our head, and it keeps our personal story going. “I” feels connected to other people’s stories, so we don’t feel alone. As long as “I” can hold things together this way, being unaware doesn’t seem so bad. You might even overlook it, as most people do.

The voice in your head conspires with the ego to give you a sense of identity. You can see yourself in the mirror as a known quantity, a professional white male in his forties rising up the corporate ladder, for example, or a young woman of color struggling to feed and clothe her children alone. One of those identities is much more desirable in society’s eyes, but both feel real and substantial to the person involved.

If you want a better life, your ego sets out to improve the story you are living, and its efforts might succeed. But this kind of success only disguises the fact that the ego was never all that reliable and substantial. It is really just a pack of memories, impressions, likes and dislikes, social conditioning, beliefs, and denial. This pack has been haphazardly assembled with no more structure than newspaper pages drifting down the street in a windstorm, yet it has a way of convincing you that the whole messy assemblage is who you are. Where would you be if you looked at yourself in the mirror and didn’t see your ego-based story reflected back at you?

In fact, you’d be much better off.

Nothing that thought produces is a substitute for being aware. The identity you have wrapped around yourself includes much that is false, damaging, and secondhand. As an example, take the sentence “I am not ____ enough.” Fill in the blank with a word describing something you think you lack, such as “I am not intelligent enough.” Other choices might be confident, thin, attractive, rich, or good. These expressions are not simply self-judgments. They are embedded in your story. The voice in your head is programmed to remember these judgments, which originated in the past when you, or someone in authority like your parents, described you to yourself as not good enough, intelligent enough, attractive enough, and so on.

This discussion makes clear that such embedded self-judgments need to be cleared away. The next part of the book, “Making Your Practice Richer,” is devoted to that process. It is just as necessary to replace your story with a conception based on awareness here and now. The self that exists in the present is your true self. It is the self that is connected to total consciousness and always has been. Your true self is the source of all the highest values in human life, and through it you create your rightful place in the human matrix.

There is no need to cling to the false supports provided by ego and the voice in your head. From the moment you begin to wake up, the process of total meditation will reveal your true self. All the doubt, fear, and judgment you have experienced up to now was ego created. It keeps reinforcing your story to serve its own agenda, which is to survive. As you get unstuck from the limitations that seem so real, you will see quite clearly that the ego by its very nature is judgmental, insecure, and afraid.

What makes the whole process of getting unstuck effortless is that you are dismantling a phantom in order to see who you really are. Phantoms can be frightening, but ultimately they have no reality or substance. Everything real and substantial exists in the connection between your true self and the infinite possibilities awaiting in consciousness. It’s time to repair that connection so that you can experience reality for yourself.