There are many things people do to improve their lives. You might say that developed societies live in a golden age, as far as standard of living goes. It has become realistic to look forward to decades of good health, to eat organic whole foods available around the corner, not to mention having things that were once out of reach for the average person, such as owning your own home and retiring in relative security.
It is strange, then, that millions of people strive to improve their lives without improving their personal reality. The two are intimately entwined, and if you don’t improve your reality, there’s something shaky and unreliable about improving your life. Reality isn’t simply the world “out there”—it is very personal. Two commuters going to the same job might look at the world entirely differently, one feeling anxious about job security and the prospect of being fired, the other placidly content and optimistic. Giving birth could be the same physical event, without any medical complications, for two new mothers, but one might suffer from postpartum depression while the other is filled with maternal joy.
Personal reality defines us. It consists of all the things we believe in, the emotions we feel, our unique set of memories, and a lifetime of experiences and relationships. Nothing is more decisive in how a person’s life turns out. So it is peculiar—one might say profoundly mysterious—that we build our lives on a deep lack of knowledge about who we really are. Delve into any basic issue about human existence, and behind the façade of expert opinion lies a blankness where understanding should be.
We have no idea why humans are designed to both love and hate, preach peace and practice violence, swing between happiness and despair, and lead lives governed by confidence one moment and self-doubt the next. Right now you are acting out in your own fashion all these contradictions. You are a mystery to yourself, because everyone is a mystery to themselves. What keeps people moving forward is the routine of everyday life and the hope that nothing goes horribly wrong.
I’m not devaluing the things most people live for—family, work, and relationships. But, to be blunt, we don’t manage even the most important things with any confidence that we know what we’re doing. It’s no wonder that we spend so much time working to improve our lives and so little working to improve our reality. Reality is too confusing. We are better off ignoring the deep water and remaining where it is safe in the shallows.
A handful of people, however, have ventured into deeper waters, and in every culture they bring back reports that are alien and inspiring at the same time. It’s inspiring to love your enemies, but who really does? Being told that divine love is infinite doesn’t make it so in your reality. Eternal peace vies with the prospect of crime, war, and violence in every age. A handful of people are cherished as saints, with a good chance they will be labeled as mad instead, or simply dismissed as too good for this world.
Yet one thing is beyond doubt—personal reality is where the whole game is played. It contains all the potential that humans have fulfilled, but also all the limitations that hold us back. A New York psychologist named Abraham Maslow, who died in 1970, continues to be famous today because he swam against the tide. Where the typical career in psychology consisted of examining the ills and defects of the psyche, Maslow felt that human nature went far beyond everyday experience. His core idea, which has now blossomed far beyond anything he could have imagined, is that humans are designed for extraordinary heights of experience, and, more than that, we should be creating these experiences in everyday life. It was as if the only cars that were on the road were junky rust heaps, and someone announced that you could trade in your clunker for a Mercedes or Jaguar.
If the only cars you see are junk heaps and the Mercedes and Jaguars exist far across the ocean, your reality won’t change. But Maslow, drawing on centuries of spiritual aspirations, insisted that the peak experiences in life are part of our design, that we need and crave them. The key was to go beyond the everyday.
The notion of going beyond became the motivation for this book.
To discover who you really are, you must go beyond who you think you are. To find peace, you must go beyond fear. To experience unconditional love, you must go beyond conditional love, the kind that comes and goes. I even thought for a time that this book should simply be titled Beyond. Instead I chose Metahuman, using the Greek word meta, which I noted earlier means “beyond.” My thesis is that becoming metahuman is a major shift of identity that anyone can make. Being designed for peak experiences raises the question of whether we have a choice. Often the most illuminating moments in life descend as if from another, higher plane by themselves. How do we know they aren’t accidental?
At a recent conference on science and consciousness, a young woman introduced herself, telling me that she was writing her graduate thesis on communicating with birds. I asked her how talking to birds was possible, and she replied that it was easier to show me than to tell me. We went outside. It was a bright day, and we sat quietly on a bench. She looked up at some birds sitting in a tree nearby, and one of them flew down and landed unafraid in her lap.
How did she do it? Feeling no need for words, she gave me a look that said, “See? It’s very simple.” My old Catholic schoolteachers would have pointed to St. Francis of Assisi, who is often portrayed beatifically with birds fluttering to him. From the Indian tradition, I thought of a quality in consciousness known as ahimsa, which means “harmlessness,” the empathy extended to all living things.
In either case, it wasn’t a matter of talking to the birds or knowing their language—the whole thing had taken place silently. It was a perfect example of going beyond—in this case, going beyond my own expectations. What the young woman did, she explained later, was to have mental clarity and insert an intention for the bird to come to her. In other words, it all happened in consciousness.
So few people have such experiences that it only magnifies the need to show how much choice we really have to go beyond. My strong feeling is that we have much more control over life than we currently realize.
To me, metahuman is the choice of a lifetime. Peak experiences are only the beginning, a glimpse at what is possible.
The term peak experience has become popular enough that most people have a general sense of what it means. The term describes moments when limitations drop away and life-changing insights come our way or a superb performance happens effortlessly. The quarterback in NFL football who approaches age forty with multiple Super Bowl wins, the musical prodigy who debuts in a Mozart piano concerto at age eight, the mathematical whiz who can multiply two eighteen-digit numbers in a matter of seconds—we don’t have to search far to find stories of peak performance like these that hint at enormously expanded human potential. But these accomplishments, astonishing as they are, occupy a specific niche. When fame and fortune are lavished on the exceptional few, we miss a much greater possibility that applies to the many.
Reality is much more malleable than anyone supposes. Most of the limitations that you feel are imposed on you personally are actually self-imposed. Not knowing who you really are keeps you stuck in secondhand beliefs, nursing old wounds, following outworn conditioning, and suffering a sense of self-doubt and self-judgment. No one’s life is free of these limitations. The ordinary world, and our ordinary lives in the world, are not sufficient to reveal who we really are—quite the opposite. The ordinary world has deceived us, and this deception runs so deep that we have molded ourselves to conform to it. In law, tainted evidence is known as the “fruit of the poisonous tree.” It’s not an exaggeration to say that as good as life can get, there is still a taint stemming from the deceptions we mistake for reality. Nothing, however beautiful and good, has completely escaped this taint. Going beyond is the only way to escape it.
A metahuman is someone whose personality is based on higher values; not just peak experiences, but love and self-worth. After finishing this book I was delighted to find that Maslow had actually used the term metahuman in exactly this way. (He didn’t associate it with comic book superheroes, and neither do I. While fantasy metahumans are persecuted as freaks and threats to society, this is a connotation to be avoided completely.)
It’s all well and good to consider certain experiences so exalted that they seem divine, which is where Maslow placed metahuman. It was an important step to declare that aspiring to reach God or eternal peace and love is just as real as driving in a nail. But I will argue that becoming metahuman is an urgent necessity. It is the only way out of the illusions that play out in our lives as inner suffering, confusion, and conflict.
Everyone would agree that it is better to live in reality than in fantasy. So it will come as a shock that you have been living in a fantasy all your life. It’s an all-embracing illusion you bought into from earliest childhood. Even the most practical, hardheaded person is immersed in fantasy all the time. I don’t mean flights of fancy or erotic fantasies or dreams of getting rich overnight. Nothing you perceive is as it seems. Everything is an illusion from the ground up.
Take out your smartphone and look at any photo you’ve saved on it. The image is several inches across, whether the photo is of the Grand Canyon, a mouse, or a microbe. Your eyes are about as far apart as the screen of a smartphone, but you perceive the Grand Canyon, a mouse, and a microbe as hugely different in size. How do we automatically adjust the size of what appears on a smartphone? No one knows, and this becomes even more puzzling when you consider that the retina at the back of the eye is curved and the image projected on it is upside down. Why doesn’t the world look as distorted as in a funhouse mirror?
You could shrug your shoulders and ascribe the whole mystery to the brain, which massages the raw data reaching the eye and gives us a realistic picture of the world. But this only deepens the illusion. When we say that our eyes respond to “visible light,” we conveniently skip over the fact that the elementary particles of light—photons—are invisible. A photon has no radiance, luster, color, or any other characteristic we associate with light. Like a Geiger counter that clicks madly in the presence of high levels of radioactivity and emits only a few clicks at low levels, the retina “clicks” madly when millions of photons trigger the rods and cones that line it and clicks faintly when light levels are low (which we call darkness).
Either way, everything you think you see has been processed inside your brain, in a specific region known as the visual cortex, which is totally dark. A flashbulb blinding you in the eye is just as black in the brain as the faintest glimmer of stars at night. Nor do the signals reaching the visual cortex form pictures, much less 3-D images. The picture you take to be a snapshot of the world was fabricated by your mind.
In the same fashion, the other four senses are just “clicks” on the surface of other kinds of cells. There is no explanation for why the nerve endings in your nose should turn the bombardment of molecules floating around into the scent of a rose or the stink of a garbage dump. The entire three-dimensional world is based on a magic trick no one can explain, but it is certainly not a true picture of reality. The whole thing is mind-made.
A neuroscientist would stop and correct me, claiming that the world we perceive is brain-made instead. A few simple examples disprove this contention, however. As far as your brain is concerned, the letters on this page are black specks, no different from specks you might scatter randomly with flecks of ink off a brush. Before you learned to read the alphabet, letters were only meaningless specks, while after you learned to read they became meaningful. Yet you had the same brain from three years old onward, as far as processing information goes. The mind learns to read, not the brain. Likewise, anything you see around you—an elm tree, a Belgian chocolate bar, a church, or a cemetery—acquires meaning because your mind gives it meaning.
Another example: When children who were born blind are given sight through medical means, they are baffled by things we take for granted. A cow in the distance looks the same size to them as a cat close up. Stairs look painted on the wall; their own shadow is a mysterious black patch that insists on following them around. What such children have missed—and need to catch up with—is the learning curve by which we all learned to shape ordinary reality. (So discomfiting is the visible world that newly sighted children and adults often prefer to sit in the dark to regain a sense of comfort.)
The learning curve is necessary to make your way in the world, but you have adapted yourself in strange and unexpected ways. Take perspective. If you are lying in bed and someone touches your shoulder to wake you up, you don’t see the person having a very wide body with a small head on top. But take a photo from a position lying in bed and reality is revealed. The person’s torso, being level with your eyes, is unnaturally wide, while the head, being farther away, is unnaturally small. Likewise, when you are talking to someone right next to you, his nose is swollen out of proportion, and if you compare it to a photo, his eyes might be bigger than the hand resting in his lap.
We automatically block out how things really look in perspective, and through an act of mind we adjust the data. The data reaching your eye reports that the room you are sitting in has walls that converge closer together at the far end, but you know that the room is square, so you adjust the data accordingly. You know that a nose is smaller than a hand, requiring a similar adjustment.
What causes real shock is that everything you perceive is adjusted. Floating molecules in the garden are adjusted into fragrances. Vibrating airwaves are adjusted into sounds you recognize and identify. There is no escaping that we live in a mind-made world. This is both the glory and the peril of being human. Walking the streets of London two hundred years ago, the visionary poet William Blake lamented over what he saw:
[I] mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every man,
In every infant’s cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear
It’s a woeful picture, still being repeated today. Humans have wandered into every kind of suffering and hardship out of a deep-seated belief that we are destined to lead such an existence. There is no alternative until you accept that what the mind has made, it can unmake.
While participating in the everyday world, it isn’t possible to see beyond the illusion. Going beyond is needed, which is why the shift to metahuman is needed. The only way an illusion can be all-encompassing is if everything about it is deceptive, fooling us about the big things and the little things alike. That’s the case here. The human mind has constructed everything to suit itself from the ground up. In a sense, this book was written simply to convince you that your personal reality is totally mind-made, and not just by your mind alone. Having spent a lifetime adapting to the artificial reality you inherited as a child, you have to undertake a journey to discover the difference between reality and illusion.
To anyone who accepts the physical world “out there” as totally real, the notion of a mind-made world seems absurd. It’s one thing to be struck by an idea, but quite another to be struck by lightning. The difference is so obvious that you’d distrust anyone who told you that the two events were the same.
But some of the greatest minds have said just that. This is where the real fascination begins. Max Planck, a brilliant German physicist, was a major figure in the quantum revolution; in fact, he coined the term quantum mechanics. In a 1931 interview with the Observer newspaper in London, Planck said, “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”
In other words, consciousness is fundamental. If that’s true, then roses blooming in an English garden spring from the same source as a painting of a rose. That source is awareness, meaning your awareness. Without consciousness, nothing can be proven to exist. Simply by being conscious, you participate in the mind-made world and help create it every day. The beauty of this understanding is that if creation springs from consciousness, we can reshape reality from its source.
Planck was not alone in his reinterpretation of reality, away from the physical toward the mental. The whole drift of the quantum revolution was to dismantle the commonsense view that the world is first and foremost material, solid, and tangible. Another brilliant quantum pioneer, the German physicist Werner Heisenberg, said, “What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.”
The implications of this statement are astonishing. Gaze out your window, and you might see a tree, a cloud, a swath of grass, or the sky. Plug any of those words into Heisenberg’s sentence in place of the word nature. You see a tree because you ask to see a tree. You see a mountain, a cloud, the sky for the same reason. As an observer, everything outside your window comes into being through the questions you are asking. You might not be aware of asking questions, but that’s only because they were asked so early on. When toddlers spy their first tree, they test to see what it is, basically asking, “Is this hard or soft? Rough or smooth? Tall or short? What are those green things on the branches? Why do they ripple in the breeze?” In this way, by applying human consciousness to everything in the universe, we get answers that fit human consciousness. But we don’t get reality. Physics dismantles every quality of a tree—its hardness, height, shape, and color—by revealing that all objects are actually invisible ripples in the quantum field.
If this discussion seems too abstract, it can be brought very close to home. Your body is being created in consciousness right this minute; otherwise, it couldn’t exist. Again, Heisenberg can be credited with getting there early: “The atoms or elementary particles themselves are not real; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities.” But in the commonsense world, where the body is our shelter, life support system, and personal vehicle for getting around, defending it becomes necessary. It’s too disturbing to think of our body as a mental illusion.
Shifting away from the false assumption that the world is solid and physical runs counter to a trend I find increasingly disturbing. Science persistently tries to prove that human beings are machines, and where this was once just a metaphor for how the body works in all its complex parts, man-as-machine is being taken more and more literally. We are told that the complexity of human emotions can be reduced to rising and falling levels of brain hormones. Brain areas that light up on an fMRI scan supposedly indicate the causation or mechanism behind a person feeling depressed or being prone to criminal behavior and much else. Besides being brain puppets, we are supposed to believe that our genes program us in powerful ways, to the point that “bad” genes doom a person to a host of problems, from schizophrenia to Alzheimer’s. Those examples of predisposition are then extended to behaviors and traits like being prone to anxiety and depression.
Metahuman has many implications, but one of the strongest is to rebuff the notion that human beings are primarily mechanisms. Even though science has a wealth of findings about both genes and the brain, that doesn’t make that notion any more valid. The general public isn’t aware, for example, that only 5 percent of disease-related genetic mutations will definitely cause a particular illness. The other 95 percent of genes raise or lower a person’s risk factors and, in complex ways, interact with other genes.
The public is still stuck on a misconception that a single gene, like the so-called “gay gene” or the “selfishness gene,” exists and creates an irresistible predisposition. This misconception was obliterated when the human genome was mapped. The current picture of DNA is almost the opposite of the public’s misguided image. DNA isn’t fixed; it is fluid and dynamic, constantly interacting with the outside world and with your inner thoughts and feelings.
The notion that your genes run your life is ingrained, even among educated people, so it is eye-opening to review a recent experiment published in the December 10, 2018, issue of Nature: Human Behavior. Researchers in the psychology department of Stanford University took two groups of participants and tested them for two genes, one associated with higher risk of becoming obese, the other with higher risk of performing badly in physical exercise.
First I’ll focus on the obesity gene. The participants ate a meal and afterward were asked how full they felt; in addition, their blood was tested for levels of leptin, the hormone associated with feeling full after a meal. The results were about the same for people genetically prone to obesity and those who weren’t. The next week the same group returned and ate the same meal, but with a difference. Half the group was told, completely randomly, that they had the gene that protects someone from risk for obesity while the other group was told they had the higher-risk version of the gene.
To the surprise of researchers, there was an immediate and dramatic effect. Simply by being told that they had the protective gene, subjects showed a blood level of leptin two and a half times higher than before. The group who were told they didn’t have the protective gene didn’t change from their earlier results. What this indicates is that simply being told about a genetic benefit caused people to exhibit the physiology associated with that gene. What the participants believed to be true overrode their actual genetic predisposition, because in some cases the people who thought they were genetically protected actually weren’t.
The same dramatic results occurred in the exercise experiment. People who were told that they had a gene that produced poor results from exercise displayed the cardiovascular and respiratory signs that such a gene is supposed to produce. Even though they didn’t have the at-risk gene, merely by being told they did reduced their lung capacity and made them too exhausted to continue running on a treadmill.
In short, the body conforms to mind-made reality. If your physiology produces genetic effects simply by hearing that you have a certain gene, the myth of genes controlling our lives is seriously challenged. It’s not that genetic programming is irrelevant (for the full picture, refer to the book Super Genes, which I cowrote with Harvard geneticist Rudy Tanzi), but the reality is as complex as human life itself. Genes are among the host of causes and influences that affect us. How strongly they affect any given person is impossible to predict, and in every area of behavior and health there is wide latitude for personal choice.
Given an either/or choice, see yourself as a free agent capable of conscious change, rather than a robotic machine run by genes and brain cells. Life is rarely as simple as either/or, which is true here as well. But despite the public image fostered by popular science articles, it’s not true that a human being is a biological puppet. Far closer to the truth is the view that we are conscious agents whose potential for creativity and change is unlimited. We become metahuman by making the life-altering choice to be metahumans.
I don’t expect you to accept this conclusion—not yet, anyway. The overall picture needs to be sketched before you make up your mind. Without realizing it, we are all embedded in a preformed reality that we began to adapt to in infancy. Everything you perceive at this moment through the five senses—the solid walls of your room, the faint movement of air in your lungs, the brightness of the light streaming in through the window or emitted by a lamp—is a simulation, a construct that engulfs you in a virtual reality.
On the one hand, we are set up—brain, body, and mind—to conform to virtual reality, the result of a collective hoodwinking that has taken many thousands of years to create. This makes things very tricky. A prisoner has an incentive to dig a tunnel to the outside world, because he knows that there’s something lying beyond the prison walls. The virtual reality you now experience offers nothing on the other side that you can touch, taste, feel, hear, or smell. But something does lie outside virtual reality, which I’ll term metareality. Metareality is the workshop where consciousness creates everything. It is our source and origin, a field of pure creative potential. Metareality is not perceived by the five senses, because it has no shape or location. Yet it is totally accessible, and it offers our only means to escape simulated reality.
Once you realize that you are engulfed in a simulation, it dawns on you how infinite the creative power of humans really is. We fashioned our world using not bricks and mortar but one invisible material: consciousness. In a scientific age, this assertion seems incredible, if not absurd. From inside the simulation, creation can be viewed like a movie of the universe unfolding from the big bang onward, along a time line that has taken 13.7 billion years. How can this mind-boggling arena, bounded by time, space, matter, and energy, be essentially fake?
To find out, it will take a personal sense of curiosity and a touch of adventurousness to go beyond conventional wisdom. Consciousness is present in every second of our lives, yet conventional wisdom takes it for granted. This isn’t like missing the forest for the trees. It’s like living in the forest without seeing any trees at all.
Take the enormously popular book Homo Deus, whose overarching theme is the invention of the future. The author, Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari, wants to offer a new and better starting point for the future. Age-old burdens from the past once seemed inescapable, Harari writes:
The same three problems preoccupied the people of twentieth-century China, of medieval India and of ancient Egypt. Famine, plague and war were always at the top of the list….Many thinkers and prophets concluded that famine, plague and war must be an integral part of God’s cosmic plan or of our imperfect nature.
In a burst of optimism rare among futurists, Harari goes on to write that these problems are essentially solved, even though they persist in pockets around the globe: “[A]t the dawn of the third millennium, humanity wakes up to an amazing realisation….[I]n the last few decades we have managed to rein in famine, plague and war.” Eagerly his readers want to accept Harari’s vision that “on the cosmic scale of history humankind can lift its eyes up and start looking towards new horizons.”
And what are these horizons? In Homo Deus, Harari takes the reader on a journey through all the existing problems and a roster of possible solutions that futurists love to explore. Only on page 409 does he arrive at consciousness, and then he touts a future dominated by “techno-religions”—in other words, our evolution is leading toward artificial intelligence and supercomputers that upgrade the raw material of the human brain. Faced with a stupendous intelligence that towers over us, what can we do but worship it?
Harari’s vision winds up in the wrong place because it started in the wrong place. Consciousness belongs on page 1, and the future that evolved consciousness can lead to is where humanity should be heading. Every future that has unfolded throughout history has been based on a direction taken by the mind. Artificial intelligence, after all, is just another notch on the belt of human intelligence; therefore, predicting that we will be surpassed by a Frankenstein race of supercomputers is very premature. We need to know our full capacity before taking bets on any future. Until metareality becomes a common experience, being human has not reached its full creative capacity. Settling for a better dream isn’t good enough—an upgraded illusion is still an illusion.
The best evidence we have for going beyond is that everyday people are already experiencing metareality. One measure of this is a twenty-question survey developed by John Astin and David Butlein, which goes by the awkwardly academic title of Nondual Embodiment Thematic Inventory (NETI). On a scale from 20 to 100, NETI assesses how people rank themselves on qualities long considered spiritual, psychological, or moral. They include metahuman traits we already value highly because they are so meaningful, as well as other traits that make life easier to cope with, such as the following:
Compassion
Resilience
Propensity to surrender
Interest in truth
Lack of defensiveness
Capacity to tolerate cognitive dissonance (i.e., having inconsistent thoughts, beliefs, or attitudes)
Tolerance for emotional discomfort
Gratitude
Low anxiety level
Authenticity
Humility
These traits describe human nature liberated from secondhand social norms and conditioning. When you possess these qualities, you are free to reach the metahuman state of awareness.
Take a moment to participate personally. Here’s the NETI questionnaire that was used to assess what are often called “nondual experiences,” meaning a heightened state of consciousness. You will give yourself a total score from 20 to 100, and we’ll proceed from there.
To download, go to http://prhlink.com/9781524762988a002
1. Never
2. Rarely
3. Sometimes
4. Most of the time
5. All of the time
1. An inner contentment that is not contingent or dependent upon circumstances, objects, or the actions of other people.
Never
Rarely
Sometimes
Most of the time
All of the time
2. Accepting (not struggling with) whatever experience I may be having.
Never
Rarely
Sometimes
Most of the time
All of the time
3. An interest in clearly seeing the reality or truth about myself, the world, and others, rather than in feeling a particular way.
Never
Rarely
Sometimes
Most of the time
All of the time
4. A sense that I am protecting or defending a self-image or concept I hold about myself.
Never
Rarely
Sometimes
Most of the time
All of the time
5. Deep love and appreciation for everyone and everything I encounter in life.
Never
Rarely
Sometimes
Most of the time
All of the time
6. Understanding that there is ultimately no separation between what I call my “self” and the whole of existence.
Never
Rarely
Sometimes
Most of the time
All of the time
7. Feeling deeply at ease, wherever I am or whatever situation or circumstance I may find myself in.
Never
Rarely
Sometimes
Most of the time
All of the time
8. A sense that my actions in life are motivated by fear or mistrust.
Never
Rarely
Sometimes
Most of the time
All of the time
9. Conscious awareness of my nonseparation from (essential oneness with) a transcendent reality, source, higher power, spirit, god, etc.
Never
Rarely
Sometimes
Most of the time
All of the time
10. Not being personally invested in or attached to my own ideas and concepts.
Never
Rarely
Sometimes
Most of the time
All of the time
11. An unwavering awareness of a stillness/quietness, even in the midst of movement and noise.
Never
Rarely
Sometimes
Most of the time
All of the time
12. Acting without assuming a role or identity based on my own or others’ expectations.
Never
Rarely
Sometimes
Most of the time
All of the time
13. A sense of immense freedom and possibility in my moment-to-moment experience.
Never
Rarely
Sometimes
Most of the time
All of the time
14. A desire to be understood by others.
Never
Rarely
Sometimes
Most of the time
All of the time
15. Concern or discomfort about either the past or the future.
Never
Rarely
Sometimes
Most of the time
All of the time
16. A sense of fear or anxiety that inhibits my actions.
Never
Rarely
Sometimes
Most of the time
All of the time
17. A feeling of profound aliveness and vitality.
Never
Rarely
Sometimes
Most of the time
All of the time
18. Acting without a desire to change anybody or anything.
Never
Rarely
Sometimes
Most of the time
All of the time
19. Feelings of gratitude and/or open curiosity about all experiences.
Never
Rarely
Sometimes
Most of the time
All of the time
20. A sense of the flawlessness and beauty of everything and everyone, just as they are.
1. Never
2. Rarely
3. Sometimes
4. Most of the time
5. All of the time
Total score __________
If you have never experienced any traits of metahuman awareness, your score will be 20. If you experience metahuman awareness all the time, your score will be 100. Either one would be extremely rare. The average scores are as follows for three specific groups drawn from the therapeutic community:
Psychology graduate students: 52
Psychotherapists: 71
Psychotherapists self-reporting as being established in nondual (i.e., metahuman) awareness: 81.6
What does this say about people in everyday life? Most important, can we all develop higher consciousness here and now? To find out, a research team that I was part of conducted a study on short-term awakening. We got 69 volunteers who were healthy adults, ranging in age from 32 to 86 (the average age was just over 59). There were two requirements: that they would largely abstain from alcohol for a week (one drink per day was allowed) and that they had not been on a meditation or yoga retreat within the past twelve months.
The participants were divided randomly into two groups at the Chopra Center in Carlsbad, California, which offers a spa setting. One group was told to spend the next six days relaxing and enjoying the spa experience. The other group underwent an Ayurveda-based mind-body program aimed at improving overall well-being. This included a special diet (primarily vegetarian but also geared to specific body types), massage, meditation, and instructions in leading an Ayurvedic lifestyle. The approach is far-reaching in that it covers emotional and spiritual well-being. We already recognized from years of offering the program, known as Perfect Health, that participants would report afterward that they felt healthier, less stressed, more relaxed, and generally happier.
The specific angle in this new study was to compare the two groups on how they answered the NETI questionnaire before and after the six days were up. The mind-body group showed a significant improvement in their scores, compared with the control group, and the results were sustained on reevaluation one month later.*2
In the Chopra Center study, participants started out with above-average scores, averaging 62, which is 10 points higher than the typical psychology grad student. After being divided into the two groups, the group that went through the Perfect Health regimen had a mean score of 74 (higher than the average psychotherapist), while the group that went through six days of relaxation in a spa setting improved only marginally, with an average score of 68. When evaluated a month later, there was a small increase among the Perfect Health group, from 74 to 76, while the score for the relaxation group remained flat.
Your score is meant to give you a rough idea of where you stand, with the caveat that this was just one small study. It is striking and hopeful to find that a weeklong focus on mind and body increases these experiences, and the road ahead is open to anyone who wants to develop even better training programs.
I’m not suggesting that the Perfect Health approach based on Ayurveda is the last word for reaching higher consciousness. It’s the overall implications that matter the most. Metahuman experiences are everywhere, but people differ in how often they have them. Some people are well established in these experiences, which have occurred frequently over the course of a lifetime. Such people may take for granted an experience like feeling blissful energy in their bodies. The same experience would astound someone else if it came out of the blue and was totally new.
The range of consciousness is far greater than a questionnaire can measure, obviously. Still, an enormous question is posed: Why live in limitation when expanded awareness offers such great rewards, such as the sense of peace and understanding that come when you know who you really are and the unlimited creative potential that you were designed to fulfill?
*1 Developed by John Astin and David A. Butlein.
*2 Complete research details were published in a peer-reviewed article in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine in December 2017. The coauthors come from a range of institutions, from the University of California–Davis, Harvard Medical School, Duke University, and the Chopra Center for Wellbeing. Very quickly the article became widely cited. Its lengthy title is “Change in Sense of Nondual Awareness and Spiritual Awakening in Response to a Multidimensional Well-Being Program.”