If you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don’t bother trying to teach them. Instead, give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking.
—BUCKMINSTER FULLER
Miserable as I was as a computer engineer, the training did give me one edge: a way of thinking that turns out to be perfect for challenging the Brules of the culturescape. It’s called computational thinking.
Computational thinking trains you to look at problems from all angles—to break down problems into processes and parts (decomposition), spot patterns (pattern recognition), and solve them in a very logical, linear fashion (algorithms). The goal is to come up not only with a solution but also with one that’s replicable, meaning that anyone—a man, woman, or child from India, Malaysia, or North America—could get the same results. Computational thinking makes you highly logical—and a very good problem solver. It’s what gives programmers and hackers their edge.
From the day I busted the beef Brule at the age of nine, I’ve wanted to hack everything about how I live. With my parents’ permission to question, I began looking at everything about life from the context of, “Why do we do this?”
But I never thought I’d be applying it to the human mind.
To explain how I found the tools for extraordinary living that you’ll learn about in this and later chapters, I have to take you back to some lean years in my life.
I got into personal growth because I was going through a tough period. In 2001, fresh out of college, I moved to Silicon Valley to launch a start-up. I was twenty-five. This was a time before Y-Combinator, 500 Startups, or any of the other dozen or so programs that fund aspiring young engineers and their dot-com dreams. Money, especially for twenty-five-year-olds, wasn’t easy to come by. I took what savings I had, borrowed some money from my dad, and went out to try my luck.
My timing, in a word, sucked. A few months after moving to Silicon Valley, the dot-com bubble burst. I remember reading that 14,000 people had been laid off in April 2001. Pink slip parties—where the jobless go to network and drink themselves into comfort—became the norm. Broke and desperate, I sent my résumé to every job I could find on craigslist.org but got zero replies. Funds were so low I couldn’t afford to rent a room, much less an apartment. So I rented a couch.
And it wasn’t even a three-seater couch. It was a two-seater, so my legs dangled off at night when I went to bed. I was renting it from a Berkeley college student who was trying to optimize his finances by renting out his least-favorite piece of furniture. On that couch in Berkeley, and on the radiator beside it, lay my entire life. All my clothes, my books, my laptop, and my shattered dreams. It was humbling to be living in a college town as a graduate with a computer engineering degree and realizing that most of the college students there were living in better conditions than I was.
Finally, one day, after another mind-numbing bout of sending my résumé to jobs on craigslist, I got a reply. It was from a company looking for people who would call law firms to sell case management software. It was a dialing-for-dollars job. And it was straight commission: If I didn’t sell, I didn’t eat. The economy was so bad that startups could get away with paying no base salary.
I knew nothing about sales and marketing, but it was the only job I could get, so I took it.
On my first week in the office, we were assigned territories to cover. Mine was San Antonio, Texas.
Work looked like this: I’d have to go to the San Francisco Public Library, get a copy of the San Antonio Yellow Pages, look up law firms, and start dialing every attorney from A to Z to find one bored enough to listen to my pitch without hanging up on me. Since my boss doubted that any lawyer in Texas would be able to pronounce the name Vishen, I became Mr. Vincent Lakhiani for convenience.
My first few months on the job, I earned around $2,500 a month in commissions—hardly enough to survive on in the Bay Area.
But it’s often when we’re feeling down that we end up taking a step toward our next level of personal growth. Remember the drawing from Chapter 1 on how extraordinary lives are meant to be bumpy? I was in for another bump that would help me grow and learn.
Bored and mildly depressed, I began searching online for classes to take to help get my mind off the drudgery of my job. I can’t remember exactly what I typed into Google—maybe “hope,” maybe “success,” or maybe “why does life have to suck so bad.” And that’s when I saw it.
I noticed a class on meditation and intuition. It was in Los Angeles and seemed interesting, especially since the lecturer was in pharma sales and spoke about how these methods had allowed her to rapidly expand her sales volume. Sold! I rather impulsively decided to fly down and take the class. When I showed up, I was the only student there (meditation wasn’t as popular then as it is now). I completed the entire two-day class in one day and flew back to San Francisco that night.
Immediately I began applying some of the techniques I’d learned, one of which was a simple technique to meditate and get myself into the alpha state of mind. Alpha is a brain wave frequency common in meditation where you’re in a relaxed state. People who advocate this type of meditation say that alpha puts you highly in tune with your intuition, your creativity, and your problem-solving abilities. A key part of what I had learned was listening to my inner voice or intuition. I practiced this when making my phone calls. I stopped calling every lawyer from A to Z in the Yellow Pages, as my coworkers were doing. Instead, I’d go into a relaxed, meditative level of mind, run my finger down the listings, and call the ones where I felt an impulse. The impulse often felt like guessing, but I heeded it. I realize this makes no logical sense. But I discovered that listening to my impulse somehow caused me to call lawyers more likely to buy. My closing rate started rising rapidly.
How much of a change can you expect from studying meditation? I certainly didn’t expect much, other than learning to relax and destress better. But by the end of the first week after flying back from L.A., I had my best-ever sales week. I assumed it was an aberration and that it wouldn’t last. But I closed two deals the next week. And the next. And it got better. A month later, I leveled up to closing three deals. Listening to my intuition seemed to triple the odds of my calling a receptive lawyer.
Other things improved, too. I started feeling happier and more positive about my days. My confidence and my rapport with people at work improved. I credit these to the fact that I was now meditating for about fifteen to thirty minutes every day, listening to my intuition and visualizing myself closing deals with ease.
Then I started using another technique I’d learned from another class: a simple empathy technique for connecting more effectively with people. Before speaking to a lawyer, I’d tell myself that I’d be able to connect with my potential client at a subconscious level, have empathy for his or her needs, know the right things to say at the right moment, and then—only if this was a software that would genuinely benefit the lawyer’s firm—close the sale. While in meditation, I would visualize the lawyer in front of me and imagine beaming genuine kindness and compassion toward him or her. I’d end the three-minute visualization with a mental affirmation that we’d close the deal if it was in the best interest of all the parties involved.
Again I saw a massive boost in my sales. Soon I was closing more than anyone in the company. And so, twenty-six-years-old and with no prior sales experience, I got promoted three times in the next four months and was made director of sales. In September of 2002, just nine months after I joined the company, my boss sent me to New York City to head up the company’s New York office.
I continued to grow within the company. I also continued experimenting, adjusting, and refining my meditation practice. And with each refinement, my abilities at work seemed to grow. Soon I was doing the jobs of two people—business development manager (managing the company’s advertising spend on Google AdWords) and heading the New York office—excelling in both roles. My salary had tripled in a few short months.
At the time, I couldn’t explain why all of this success was happening. I just knew that what I was doing worked.
My rapid success in the world of sales sparked my fascination with decoding the human mind. I realized that we can improve our performance in logical ways—by, say, reading a book on sales—and there’s nothing wrong with that. But there are also techniques that can dramatically accelerate our performance. The ones I learned changed my life in just one week.
My computational thinking training kicked in, big-time. I wanted to break down human behavior—which at first glance appears like a huge, tangled knot of thoughts, actions, responses, emotions, impulses, drives, cravings, habits, and God knows what else—and crack the code for how we humans work.
As I got better at meditation and other conscious practices, it started to bother me that I’d been the only person in that class in Los Angeles. There was a lot more to learn. I wanted to teach others what had worked so awesomely for me. So I quit my software sales job and started a small e-commerce store. I called it Mindvalley. Our first products were nothing more than meditation CDs I sourced from established publishers. As Mindvalley grew, I launched as many companies as I could, teaching people mindfulness, meditation, contemplative practices, how to have better relationships, nutrition, health, wellness—basically, the knowledge that we truly need in order to have richer, healthier, more meaningful lives—knowledge that our industrial-age education system had failed to teach us. Soon we were publishing many of America’s leading thinkers in health, wellness and consciousness from Ken Wilber to JJ Virgin to Michael Beckwith. I started Mindvalley with nothing more than $700 in 2003. Twelve years later, with not a single bank loan and no venture capital money, the company had grown to 200 employees and more than 500,000 paying students.
In that time I got to know at a deep personal level many of America’s top minds in human development. I spent nine days at the invitation of author and motivational speaker Tony Robbins on his Fiji estate. I hooked my brain to electrodes with famed biohacker Dave Asprey to study different levels of consciousness. I met masters and gurus from India, billionaires at the peak of their game, and legends in business and society. And with every meeting, interview, and experience, I began dissecting, assimilating, and assembling the framework that helped create this book.
Today, I obsessively seek out new models and systems for how we can best understand ourselves and reach levels of potential we’ve only dreamed about. My hacker mentality pushes me to always be looking for the most effective solution that is replicable—that brings extraordinary results within reach of the greatest number of people. This is how I developed the model I’m about to share with you: consciousness engineering.
If you have a computer, you’ve probably had to install a new operating system from time to time. Windows 95 gave way to Windows 8 over the last two decades. And the boring 1996 Macintosh computers I used as a freshman at the University of Michigan gave way to the gorgeous Mac OS we see powering MacBooks today. Every few years, we upgrade our operating systems on our machines to make our computers run faster, better, and take on increasingly complex tasks with ease.
But how many of us even think about doing the same for ourselves? Consciousness engineering is an operating system for the human mind. And the beauty of it is that—like the best hacks—it’s really simple. It all boils down to just two things.
Your models of reality are your beliefs about the world. In Chapter 2, we talked about how most of the rules we accept as true exist inside our heads and were put there, as Steve Jobs said, “by people no smarter than you.” Human society today runs on the accumulated beliefs of our forefathers: Our economic systems, definitions of marriage, the food we eat, our methods of schooling and work—these structures were created long ago by people in very different settings than what we live in today.
Some of us were raised with empowering beliefs about ourselves and the world. Yet most of us also have at least a few sickly, disempowering beliefs that hold us back. The important thing to realize is that no matter what these beliefs are, they became true because we act and think in accordance with them. Thus, our beliefs truly do shape our world in a very real sense.
But while your beliefs make you, your beliefs are NOT you. You can use consciousness engineering to swap out old beliefs, swap in new ones, and take on new understandings of the world that might serve you better.
Using our computer analogy, think of your models of reality as your hardware. Want a faster machine or a better resolution monitor? Just swap the older model and replace it with the latest model. Need more space? Replace your 250 terabyte hard drive with a 500 terabyte drive. Beliefs are like that, too. When an old belief no longer serves you, you have every right to swap it out. Yet we don’t. When you use the Brule Test to challenge your Brules and swap out obsolete Brules for rules that work better, you’re upgrading your hardware so your operating system works optimally. In people-speak, that means you’re choosing what to believe, and your life is yours to control.
Replacing outdated models of reality is essential. Our models of reality do more than just create our feelings around an event or life in general. To an astonishing extent, they seem to influence the reality of the world that we experience every single day.
Our models of reality make us who we are. The problem is, as we saw in Chapter 2, that many of them weren’t taken on by rational choice but rather by imitation. Our beliefs about life, love, work, parenting, our bodies, our self-worth—are often a result of our innate tendency to imitate the people and practices around us. What you think and believe about the world shapes who you are and your experience of the world around you. Change your accepted models of reality, and dramatic changes will happen in your world.
For example, researchers Ellen Langer, PhD, and Alia J. Crum, PhD, set up a study, reported in 2007 in Psychological Science, in which they asked 84 hotel maids how much they exercised. You’d think that with all the physical work involved with cleaning hotel rooms, they would have answered, “A helluva lot!” But although they cleaned about fifteen rooms a day, one-third said they didn’t get any exercise, and the other two-thirds said they didn’t exercise on a regular basis. Now, as anyone who has just completed a weekend of housecleaning can tell you, cleaning a room, changing sheets, vacuuming, and so on is a lot of work. Yet according to their model of reality, the maids didn’t consider their work activities to be “exercise.” That seemed to be borne out when the researchers assessed the women and found that they seemed about as fit as sedentary folks.
Here’s where it gets interesting. The researchers implanted a new model of reality in the maid’s minds. They informed forty-four of the maids that their daily duties met the Centers for Disease Control’s (CDC) activity guidelines and surpassed the Surgeon General’s guidelines. They also gave the maids a rundown of calorie counts for various cleaning activities and put similar information where the maids could see it at work. In short, they flipped a belief switch. They gave the maids new information about their existing habits that showed how the work they did was, in fact, exercise.
A month passes. The researchers follow up. Incredibly, the maids who’d been given the fitness information had, on average, lost two pounds, had lower blood pressures, and overall “were significantly healthier” based on measurements of their body fat, body mass index (BMI), and waist-to-hip ratio. And guess what? The maids told the researchers of no changes in their actions. The only change was in the information they’d been given—the truth the researchers had provided. The researchers had successfully swapped out an old model of reality and implanted a new one. They made the maids view their work as “exercise.” And the results caused actual physical changes in the bodies of the maids.
The researchers concluded that what’s become known as the placebo effect—results that appear to come purely from a person’s mind-set instead of from a specific medication or medical treatment—plays a role when it comes to exercise.
Amazing, isn’t it? Measurable positive change—just from installing a new belief that their work was actually healthy work. Imagine the implications this could have for how we encourage employees to be more engaged in their work or how we encourage people to lose weight. If the mind is so powerful that it can actually change health based on a changed perspective, imagine what that could mean about the mind’s power to control our mood, our self-confidence, our happiness, and everything else that determines the quality of our time here on Earth.
As the hotel maids’ study vividly shows, while your models of reality are not you, they make you who you are. When you realize that, you can swap out a bad or outdated model, swap in a healthier one, and gain incredible power to shift your world. Let’s return for a moment to our computer hardware analogy. If your computer hardware can’t handle the tasks you need it to do, you get a faster, more powerful computer, a higher-quality monitor, a better mouse. Look how sleek and efficient our computers have become in the last thirty years. Wouldn’t it be great to think with that same level of elegance, speed, and efficiency? Yet when it comes to updating our models of reality, most us are stuck with the 1980s Macintosh rather than the new MacBook. We hold on to our old models and deny ourselves an upgrade.
The hotel maids in the study lost weight and got healthier simply because a new belief was installed in them. What would happen to you if you swapped in new beliefs about your love life? Your work? Your body? Your ability to make money? We’ll explore how to do this in the next chapter.
As I’ve learned about the power of beliefs, I’ve chosen specific models of reality to help me stay healthier and younger. I’ve decided I’m going to live to be one hundred. I’ve chosen a model where seven minutes of early-morning exercise gets me the same results as hours in a gym. As a result, I’ve been able to get fitter and develop a better body in my forties than I had in my twenties. I’ve also decided on a belief that work is one of the most pleasurable things in life—so I enjoy what I do on a daily basis. All of us have this ability to decide what models of reality we’ll adopt. You get to choose.
Thus the single most effective model of reality you can adopt right now is the idea that your models of reality are swappable. You do not have to continue believing and seeing the world through the lens installed within you in your younger years. I’ll show you how to swap in a new, optimal set of beliefs in the next chapter. But first there’s another important part of the picture to look at.
Your habits, or systems for living, are how you put your models of reality into practice. If models of reality are the hardware of the human “machine,” systems for living are the software. They’re your activities and daily habits—for example, how you eat (based on your beliefs about nutrition), how you work (based on your beliefs about what kind of career and work behaviors are acceptable), and how you deal with money (based on your beliefs about the ease of acquiring money or the guilt or honor of having lots of it). There are many others, from how you raise your kids to how you make love, make friends, work out, solve problems, finish a project at work, make a difference in the world, and have fun.
Systems of living are easy to acquire. You can always learn new ones. The problem is that our Industrial Age school system hasn’t done a very good job of keeping us up to date with the best systems for functioning in the world. Nobody taught us optimal ways to exercise, love, parent, eat, or even to speed-read or improve longevity. I think of them like apps you can easily download and update, intended for specific purposes or to solve specific problems. Not working? Download the new version that fixes old bugs. Found a better one? DELETE. The trick is recognizing what systems you’re running and doing enough self-checks to quickly identify the ones you need to upgrade.
All of this now brings us to Law 3.
Extraordinary minds understand that their growth depends on two things: their models of reality and their systems for living. They carefully curate the most empowering models and systems and frequently update themselves.
Our current models and systems have three limitations:
1.Our models of reality are programmed by the world we grew up in.
2.Our models of reality (good or bad) determine our systems for living. In short, bad beliefs create bad habits.
3.Our modern models and systems are lacking in conscious practices—we’re only just beginning to realize the power of our minds.
To understand these three limitations, we need to look at our current world from the outside in. Getting outside our culturescape is easier said than done. That’s why, in order to understand how we can improve our models and systems, I decided to journey to visit a culture far removed from the modern Western world.
Kristina and I arrived in the deep Ecuadorian Amazon just before sunset. Our small plane took off from a run-down town called Puyo on the border of the jungle and flew over a sea of green before landing on a dirt airstrip smack in the center of the rain forest. A boat ride, a hike, and several hours later, we were at Tingkias, a village belonging to a family of the Achuar tribe. The nearest “civilized” town was more than one hundred miles away. Around us was nothing but green, humid jungle and the sounds of countless birds and animals. Here we would spend the next five days, living life in a radically different culture where many of the norms of human civilization—from how we sleep to how we care for our bodies to how we drink water or worship a higher power—were completely challenged.
The Achuar people of the Amazon rain forest in Ecuador evolved for generations with little contact with the wider outside world. They only became known to the Western world in 1977, so being with them is about as close as you can get to visiting a culture relatively untouched by modern human beings. With minimal exposure to the modern culturescape, their models of reality are dramatically different from ours. I’m not talking about conventional things that we expect other cultures to do differently—like food, dress, music, and dance. I’m talking about things so different that if we were to read about them in a historical text, we would find it hard to believe that these were normal human beings alive on the planet today.
Many truths that we assume to be absolute, such as “drink water” or “eat breakfast,” are meaningless to them. Living with the Achuar was eye-opening. What I saw there profoundly shifted my thinking about what I believe to be acceptable truths.
By the time you arrive at the village, you’re ready for a bath and a long drink of water. You can bathe in the pond nearby. But if you want a drink of water, you’re out of luck. Because the water you bathed in—where everyone in the tribe bathes and swims, too—is the only water around. And it’s filled with bacteria that would not be wise to ingest.
We assume that all human beings drink water. You might even consider that it’s an absolute truth, as we discussed in Chapter 1. But the Achuar have evolved a brilliant hack for the fact that there’s no clean water in the Amazon. The women harvest, boil, and mash yucca roots and then repeatedly chew and spit the chewed-up root into a bowl. They mix this combo of yucca and saliva with pond water and leave it for several days. The mixture ferments, yielding alcohol, which kills the bacteria. What you end up with isn’t water, but chicha, a beer of sorts, made from the fermented spit of the tribeswomen. Every woman has her own brew, which she makes for her husband (men can have more than one wife) and children. Every woman’s brew tastes different, based on the taste of her saliva. The women spend hours each day chewing and spitting to make chicha while the men go hunting. It’s a big job, since this is all that the tribe drinks.
How does chicha taste? Well, to me, really awful, only because I haven’t been trained to appreciate it. To the Achuar, it tastes delicious, and the men come home from a long hunt craving it. It sounds weird to us, but it’s totally normal for them, and it’s how they survive in one of the most challenging places on Earth to live.
Is drinking water normal? It is to most of humanity. But to the Achuar, drinking water is unusual and distasteful. Our definition of what is normal is nothing more than what is programmed into us.
What we see as our culture is really nothing more than a quirk of history. It’s not necessarily right or wrong. Just like the Achuar way of living isn’t right or wrong. Our culture is the result of thousands of years of ideas emerging, clashing, and dissolving, battling for dominance. But I can assure you of one thing: Our culture wasn’t created by pure rational choice. In many ways it took form merely by imitation and chance. Yet we cling to our culture, both the good and the bad, as if it’s the only way of living. When you look at the Achuar and you look at us, you see that pretty much every aspect of human culture—of life as we live it day to day—is malleable, up for grabs, within our control, and open for questioning.
The Achuar don’t have a model of reality for God in the way that most humans beings do. Instead, they believe that animals and plants possess human souls and that these souls have the ability to communicate through language and signs. To communicate with this world, they drink ayahuasca (a natural plant-based drug) that induces vivid visions and metaphysical experiences.
I decided to experience the ayahuasca ceremony with a visiting shaman who was stopping by our village. I knelt on a platform before him. In the darkness I could not see his face, only the flicker of light from the tobacco leaves he smoked. It was a surreal moment, like stepping back centuries in time to an ancient culture. The shaman mumbled some words, blew smoke in my face, tapped me with a branch, and then gave me a tiny taste of the precious ayahuasca.
Everything seemed fine for a moment. Then suddenly: unbearable pain in my stomach. I fell to my knees as the pain hit, hung my head over the edge of the platform, and started vomiting violently as my guides held my arms and legs to prevent me from falling off the platform onto the jungle floor. After four to five minutes I stopped vomiting but was so weak I could barely walk. I was helped to a hammock. As soon as I closed my eyes, all I could see were fractals. It was as if the world were a series of interlocking triangles of all different colors spinning, pivoting, and merging.
When I opened my eyes and turned on my side to stare out at the jungle, the trees looked like huge, friendly monsters of the type you’d see in the book Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak. It was as if Sendak’s famous line: “Let the wild rumpus start!” had somehow been signaled in my brain. I don’t know how long I stared at the tree monsters before I felt the urge to fall asleep, but closing my eyes thrust me into that mesmerizing world of dancing fractals forming random shapes.
I felt scared at first, but the fear turned into a sense of sublime peace. I felt a oneness with the forest, the trees, the humidity, and the sky. It was a beautiful feeling of being completely in the now with no regard for the past or future. It felt good to be alive. Eventually I fell asleep and woke later as dawn broke, when I joined the rest of the group to eat and discuss our experiences.
The beliefs of the Achuar in the spirit of the forest led to their system for experiencing the divine through ayahuasca. Similarly many of our systems for living evolved as our culture did—in response to certain beliefs of the time. But in modern times they evolve into habits because of, well, just habit. We’ve done them for so long we don’t even know how we got started. We accept our current systems as “just the way things are,” but look deeper and you’ll see that these systems stem from beliefs from the past that you may have absorbed through the culture you were raised in.
Many of our models and systems are rooted in the purely physical aspects of life—what we eat, how we take care of our bodies, beauty regimens, and so on. But until recently, there’s been almost no innovation in the systems that improve the way our minds and spirits function.
The Achuar wake up each day at 4:00 a.m. and assemble as a tribe around a fire to drink a certain type of tea called wayusa. While drinking their tea, they also share life experiences, problems, worries, and dreams from the previous night. Most of us don’t remember our dreams without effort. We tend to see them as fleeting images, soon forgotten in the serious business of the day. But the Achuar view their experiences during the day and at night as equally important and seem to simultaneously live in the waking and dream states. In the blending of these worlds, they solve problems, have adventures, and communicate with one another and with the spirit realm. They share these events while drinking their tea, and the elders listen and advise. The morning tea is a ritual for mental and spiritual cleansing.
Are the Achuar simply gifted at remembering dreams? Perhaps. But there might be more to it. We had journeyed into the jungle with the celebrated philanthropist and aid worker Lynne Twist. Lynne told me how she had come in contact with the Achuar. She’d repeated dreams of indigenous people with distinctive red markings on their faces. They seemed to be calling to her for help. When she described these visions to friends, one remarked that the faces she described looked much like the Achuar. That’s how Lynne came to Ecuador to meet the tribe. The Achuar are facing eviction from their centuries-old home due to logging and oil and gas companies cutting large swaths of the Amazon. Lynne, working with the Ecuadorian government and the Achuar, has helped create laws to protect as much as four million acres of rainforest.
And it all started with visitors who seemed to enter her dreams calling for her to help. Are dreams more than what we in the modern world make them out to be? Perhaps there’s something to the Achuar early-morning commitment to exploring the dream world.
Just how much of these spiritual experiences and abilities are we lacking in our modern world? Perhaps similar to the Himba tribespeople who have difficulty seeing the color blue, are we blind to certain spiritual experiences?
We’re physical beings, and we evolve our physical systems very fast. Think of all the new diet and exercise routines you’ve heard or read about in just the past year or so. Yet our spiritual evolution is stuck in the past. Many of us are dissatisfied with the dogma of conventional religion; that’s not new. But it’s only been fairly recently that we’ve come to realize that the spiritual landscape is vast and varied and offers many options besides participating in your family’s religion. I believe our spiritual systems need a major leveling up. That’s why I was so struck by the Achuar morning ritual of sharing their dreams and cleansing their minds while drinking the morning tea that cleanses their bodies.
In the next two chapters, we’ll talk about new models and systems that are evolving to help our minds catch up with our bodies.
We might consider their lives bizarre, but to the Achuar, we seem bizarre. We run off to stressful jobs, leaving our kids in the care of others. We sit and stare at a lit-up screen for most of the day. Then we exercise like maniacs to burn off the calories we consumed the day before. We pack our elders into communal homes and then worry about how to care for them. We take pills to keep from feeling fear and other emotions we believe are negative. We drink potions to stay awake. Then we take pills to put ourselves to sleep. We eat and drink too much, partly because we have more than we need and partly because we’re stressed out. Every tribe has its troubles. But the Achuar taught me that what we consider real, what we define as culture, what we believe is true about life—the nine-to-five, marriage, the way we raise our kids, how we treat our elders, what we do all day—are just collections of beliefs and practices that we put together because, well, they seemed like good ideas at the time. When you become aware of this fact, you also gain the ability to transcend and evolve these cultural practices.
I once got to meet a man who many say is one of the most brilliant minds alive today. Ken Wilber is the most widely translated academic writer in America, with twenty-five books translated into some thirty foreign languages. Wilber is the originator of an extremely comprehensive philosophy called Integral Theory, which is a sort of theory of everything that unifies the disciplines of cultural studies, anthropology, systems theory, developmental psychology, biology, and spirituality, to name just a few. Ken has been quoted by everyone from Bill Clinton to Kermit the Frog, and Integral Theory has been applied in fields as diverse as ecology, sustainability, psychotherapy, psychiatry, education, business, medicine, politics, sports, and art. As part of the research for this book, I spent five hours interviewing Wilber about human development models and how consciousness evolves.
One of the questions I asked Ken was “what’s your vision of an ideal education curriculum for children?” This is what Ken told me:
Humanity is flying way under its full potential simply because we do not educate for the whole or complete human being. We educate for just a small part, a slice, a fragment of just what’s possible for us. . . . Because according to the great wisdom traditions around the world—not only do humans possess typical states of consciousness like waking, dreaming, or deep sleep, they also possess profoundly high states of consciousness like enlightenment or awakening—and none of our education systems teach ANY of that. Now, all of these factors I’ve mentioned . . . none of these are rare, isolated, esoteric, far-out, strange, or occult. They are all some of the very most basic and most fundamental potentials of a human being everywhere. They are simply human 101. Yet we don’t educate human 101. We educate something like human 1/10. So yes, I firmly believe that we can bring about health on this planet for the planet and the humans on it if we started educating the whole person with all their fundamental potentials and capacities and skills and stopped this fragmented, partial, broken system that we have now.
Consciousness engineering isn’t just about being happy—though happiness is a wonderful by-product. It’s about getting to human 101 and beyond and striving to be at the highest level of human development we can be, so we can fulfill our highest potential and, as the saying goes, leave this world a little better for our having been in it.
While there are many ways to get beyond human 101, I’ve found the framework of consciousness engineering to be the most powerful tool, since all growth comes from changing your models of reality or upgrading a system for living.
Changing a model of reality is a form of growth that often comes from epiphany or insight. It’s a sudden awakening or revelation that shifts a belief. Once you adopt a new model of reality that is superior to an older model, you can’t go back. It’s what happened to me when I moved from seeing work as a job to seeing my work as my calling. Or when someone moves from following a religion to discovering spirituality.
Changing a system for living, on the other hand, is a process change. It’s a step-by-step upgrade of a given process—as when you learn to go from riding a bicycle to driving a car as a means for mobility.
Once you understand the consciousness engineering approach, you can view yourself as a highly tuned operating system ready to install new hardware (models of reality) or new apps (systems for living) when needed. You never get attached to the ones you have because you know newer, better ones are always being discovered.
In short, you view yourself as always ready for change and growth.
Consciousness engineering primes you to learn and grow much faster than before because it creates a mental map in your brain.
Elon Musk was once asked in a Reddit.com Q&A: “How do you learn so fast?”
He replied: “It is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree—make sure you understand the fundamental principles, i.e. the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to.”
As you think of your personal growth, think of consciousness engineering as that trunk. The two big branches are models of reality and systems for living. Everything you study in personal growth will either be a model (a new belief about money, for example) or a system (say, a new exercise or diet routine). These things cling to the two big branches.
I’ve found that by keeping this idea in mind, I can learn and grow faster than ever before. Once you internalize consciousness engineering, every time you pick up a book to read on personal growth or health, or an autobiography of a great leader, you start to look for model upgrades that you can swap in and new systems you can adopt.
In the next two chapters we’ll refine this learning process by showing you exactly HOW to upgrade your models and systems in the best way possible.
Each of us has so much untapped capability. We’re reminded of it every time we hear stories of triumphs of will and ingenuity—whether it’s an innovation by someone like Dean Kamen, one of America’s greatest inventors, or a citizen standing up for honor in the community. We call it all kinds of things—courage, brilliance, vision, even miracle. But consciousness engineering on a regular basis catapults us into becoming our best, most extraordinary selves. And that, my fellow hackers, is within reach of every one of us.
Here’s an important exercise. Consciousness engineering works best when applied in a holistic way across our lives. In order to do that, we need to understand two things: First, we need to identify the key areas of our lives where we can apply consciousness engineering, and second, we need to pinpoint which of those areas could use some rebalancing.
My friend Jon Butcher is the owner of Precious Moments, the famous American catalog order company that sells giftware in the form of cute porcelain dolls. He’s one of the most successful entrepreneurs in America today, but what is really unique about Jon is how superbly well balanced his life is. He seems to have it all—wealth, success, a perfect marriage, great kids, and a life filled with adventure. For example, Jon’s a grandfather, but he’s in such great health, you’d mistake him for a forty-year-old. Jon’s secret, he claims, is how he sets his goals in life.
Jon divided his life into twelve categories, and for each category he mapped out his beliefs, his vision, his strategy, and his purpose. It’s goal setting at the deepest level. When Jon’s friends asked him what his secret was, he would teach them his system. It eventually evolved into Lifebook, a personal growth seminar you can take in Chicago, where you spend four days diving deep into different aspects of your life to create a detailed life plan.
The idea I’m sharing here is partially inspired by Jon Butcher’s Lifebook seminar, which I attended in 2010. I’ve adapted the categories (my own twelve are different from Jon’s) for this exercise to help you discover the models and systems you’re applying in your life so that you can begin to consider where you need to upgrade. I call them the Twelve Areas of Balance. Each area influences and shapes you in an important way. This exercise will help you elevate yourself on every level, leaving no part of your life behind.
Ready to start your adventure in consciousness engineering? Here goes:
When you think of your life and where you want to grow, think holistically. Too many people live lives lacking in balance. They may have great wealth but lousy relationships with their family. Or they may be incredibly fit and healthy but struggle with debt. Or they may have a career filled with achievements but feel heartbroken and lonely. An extraordinary life is balanced on all levels. Thinking holistically will help you make sure you don’t end up winning in one area but losing in another. I use the Twelve Areas of Balance to help keep an even keel, and now it’s your turn.
For each category below, rate your life on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being “very weak” and 10 being “extraordinary.” Don’t think about each item for too long. Often the first impulse—your gut check—is the most accurate.
1.YOUR LOVE RELATIONSHIP. This is the measure of how happy you are in your current state of relationship—whether you’re single and loving it, in a relationship, or desiring one.
2.YOUR FRIENDSHIPS. This is the measure of how strong a support network you have. Do you have at least five people who you know have your back and whom you love being around?
3.YOUR ADVENTURES. How much time do you get to travel, experience the world, and do things that open you to new experiences and excitement?
4.YOUR ENVIRONMENT. This is the quality of your home, your car, your work, and in general the spaces where you spend your time—even when traveling.
5.YOUR HEALTH AND FITNESS. How would you rate your health, given your age, and any physical conditions?
6.YOUR INTELLECTUAL LIFE. How much and how fast are you growing and learning? How many books do you read? How many seminars or courses do you take yearly? Education should not stop after you graduate from college.
7.YOUR SKILLS. How fast are you improving the skills you have that make you unique and help you build a successful career? Are you growing toward mastery or are you stagnating?
8.YOUR SPIRITUAL LIFE. How much time do you devote to spiritual, meditative, or contemplative practices that keep you feeling connected, balanced, and peaceful?
9.YOUR CAREER. Are you growing, climbing the ladder, and excelling? Or do you feel you’re stuck in a rut? If you have a business, is it thriving or stagnating?
10.YOUR CREATIVE LIFE. Do you paint, write, play musical instruments, or engage in any other activity that helps you channel your creativity? Or are you more of a consumer than a creator?
11.YOUR FAMILY LIFE. Do you love coming home to your family after a hard day’s work? If you’re not married or a parent, define your family as your parents and siblings.
12.YOUR COMMUNITY LIFE. Are you giving, contributing, and playing a definite role in your community?
Are you already seeing some areas where you’d like to improve? That’s just the point—now you have a clear baseline from which to begin your journey toward the extraordinary. For the moment, just think about how you’d currently rate yourself in each category. In the next few chapters we’ll return to these Twelve Areas of Balance to help you identify where you want to focus your attention to improve your models of reality and your systems for living.