Somewhere in prehistory Homo sapiens crossed over into virtual reality, when a mind-made simulation became essential in our evolutionary path. The exact era will never be known, or the reason, if any, why one species should acquire such powers and know that it had them. No other creature consciously shapes its future. No other species tells stories and convinces itself that they are true. There are many mysteries in our past. Somehow, following whatever tortuous path, we managed to make our simulation so convincing that we got lost in it.
Although this simulation is very convincing, on a daily basis it breaks down. There are times when life goes out of kilter and the world doesn’t seem real and substantial anymore. Such experiences occur regularly, either to ourselves or to other people. For example, when there’s a sudden death in the family or a catastrophe like a tornado or the house burning down, we may go into shock. With a blank stare we reveal how dislocated our existence suddenly feels, saying things like “This can’t be happening. It’s unreal” or “Nothing matters anymore.”
Normally, this dissociated state will pass, and in time reality feels real again. But some people never return—after a psychotic break, for example, a percentage of mental patients become chronically schizophrenic and have hallucinations, seeing images or hearing voices for the rest of their lives. But the feeling of “This can’t be happening; it’s like a dream” doesn’t have to be triggered by shock. Countless people engage in personal fantasies of fame, wealth, or some other dream that feels totally real to them and drives them all their lives. When someone is suddenly ecstatically happy, for whatever reason, everything can seem surreal, too.
However, the physical world “out there” feels real and substantial a lot more than 99 percent of the time, which is proof enough, one would think, that we aren’t under some kind of spell. But we are. Ironically, there’s now technology that forces a person to confront what is real and what isn’t. When you don a virtual reality (VR) headset, powered by artificial intelligence, the simulation you are plunged into is like a wraparound, three-dimensional movie of such vividness that it overwhelms the senses and causes a dislocation from what we deem as everyday reality. You might find yourself precariously perched on a steel construction girder in midair with the city street many stories below. Your brain, fooled by the visual image, triggers the stress response just as if you were really teetering on the girder. You will feel yourself going off balance in a panic, even though in the room where you are actually standing, your feet are firmly on the ground and you are in no danger of plunging to your death.
The VR illusion is created by visual images, and the same holds true in everyday life. What you see, you believe in. Such trust is misplaced, as every grade-schooler learns when told that the sun doesn’t actually rise in the east and set in the west. Yet when quantum physics tells us that matter isn’t what it appears to be, we continue to cling to the sensations of weight and solidity of hard physical objects as if they were indisputable. Would a bullet be less dangerous if you saw through the illusion? No. The bullet and the entire physical world remain intact but with the realization that they are the end point of a process that begins in consciousness.
Once you grasp this and fully absorb it, your personal reality becomes much more malleable, because you can go to the source and be part of the creative process. Getting untangled from the virtual-reality simulation isn’t easy. Our personal experience would have to change drastically, but the beauty of it is that we have the potential for change where before we had none or very little. While you cannot turn bullets into cotton balls, to accept that all of reality “out there” is beyond your ability to change isn’t true.
The ground rules of everyday life are much looser than we imagine. Even when a person feels completely immersed in the simulation, there is an escape route. And not just one, but many. This only makes sense. Metareality is more real than any virtual simulation. We should regard glimpses into it as evidence that we can inhabit the meta state all the time. Instead, the entanglements of virtual reality have turned the picture wrong side up. As you read the meta experiences below, you will be tempted to see them as anomalous, freakish, or untrustworthy. Getting real is a process that begins by confronting your misplaced trust in illusions every day.
Let’s consider one of the most basic aspects of virtual reality. Hardly anyone would question that being inside the body is normal, natural, and a true experience. But this certainty runs counter to the phenomenon of out-of-body experiences (OBEs), which have been documented in every culture for centuries. The most widely publicized out-of-body experience is “going into the light,” as reported by patients who have clinically died during emergency medical procedures, especially from heart attacks.*
It turns out that expecting to go into the light when we die is misleading, because what happens in near-death experiences is much more individual than anyone thought. The largest study of near-death experiences, which examined 2,060 patients who died under emergency or intensive care, arrived at the conclusion that death isn’t a single event—it is a process. There isn’t simply one final or definitive event. During this process, there are ways to reverse death. In cases where medical professionals were successful at getting the heart, lungs, and brain to come back to normal functioning, about 40 percent of those who died and came back remember that “something happened” when they were flatlined.
This part of the study, which was titled AWARE and was led by British intensive-care doctor Sam Parnia, seems irrefutable. But very quickly the details of “something happened” become controversial. We have to dive into a few details to see what the issues are. Out of the 2,060 patients who died (the study went from 2008 to 2012 and included 33 researchers in 15 hospitals), 104 were resuscitated. The first point to note is that all had actually died. They were not “near death.” Their hearts and lungs had stopped functioning, and within 20 to 30 seconds their brains showed no activity. The decomposition of cells throughout the body actually takes several hours to commence afterward. During the interval between dying and being brought back is when 39 percent reported the memory of being conscious even though their brains had stopped.
Dr. Parnia believes that this is probably just a fraction of those who had such experiences; the rest had their memories erased either by brain inflammation, which occurs for 72 hours after a person is brought back from death, or because of drugs that are administered as part of resuscitation, which also cause memory loss. Of the 101 patients who completed the questionnaire about their experience during death, only 9 percent had an experience compatible with the typical “going into the light” model. The majority of memories were vague and unfocused, sometimes pleasant but sometimes not.
Only 2 percent of those who came back, which means 2 people out of 101, had the experience of full awareness or out-of-body experiences such as looking down from above their bodies watching and listening to the medical team as it was working to revive them. Only one person could accurately narrate what had been happening in the room in such detail that it corresponded to timed events. So what does this one person tell us about dying?
It depends. Skeptics shrug off all such experiences as purely physical, claiming that if we had finer measurements of brain activity, at a very subtle level we’d discover that the brain hadn’t actually died. Dr. Parnia accepts that this might be true. His main focus is on how to achieve better results at resuscitation that might bring back a normal person with no organ damage, particularly brain damage after clinical death. But Dr. Parnia’s personal conclusion is that a person can be fully conscious without brain function, as this one patient was. He points to the basic disagreement, thousands of years ago, between Aristotle and Plato. Aristotle contended that consciousness was a physical phenomenon, Plato that it was nonphysical, residing in a soul that transcends the body.
The AWARE study didn’t confirm either side. Unsurprisingly, skeptics and believers didn’t change their position, or their prejudices. One can say that it’s a significant step to turn death into a process that can be reversed. It’s also significant that awareness during death covers a wide range of experiences, not a one-size-fits-all of going into the light. What I’d like to underscore is that even when you die, you fashion the experience personally. Dr. Parnia found that people’s spiritual interpretation of their death experience coincided with their own faith. They interpreted the light as being Christ, if they were Christians, which was different for Hindus and totally nonspiritual for atheists.
What happens when we die, then, is open to interpretation. The only consensus among those who came back was that death is a comfortable process, not to be feared. Having directly experienced that their fear of death was groundless, these people discovered a different perspective on life. Many if not most concluded that they should lead more selfless lives in service to others.
I think it is useful that the AWARE study validated that “something happens,” but why are we trying to settle the issue of consciousness at the most extreme moment when life and death hang in the balance? It’s like trying to validate gravity by asking survivors of a plane crash about their experience of falling from the sky.
It is the normal, everyday experience of consciousness that needs to be explained, not the extreme states. I’ve debated or conversed with many neuroscientists, and none has been able to answer the simplest questions about consciousness. These include the following:
What is a thought?
How does the electrochemical activity in a neuron turn into words, sights, and sounds in our heads?
Why is a person’s next thought totally unpredictable?
If someone has a vocabulary of 30,000 words, does this mean that a clump of brain cells knows 30,000 words? If so, in what way are the words being stored? For the word cat, is there a place inside a brain cell that holds the letters c-a-t?
No one can adequately answer any of these questions.
An experience as otherworldly as “going into the light” might be a red herring. It turns out that being “inside” your body is a malleable state; you can enter and leave your body almost at will.
In a fascinating account in The New Yorker, titled “As Real As It Gets” by Joshua Rothman (April 2, 2018), the issue of living inside the body is confronted with unusual clarity. At nineteen Thomas Metzinger, a German university student, fell asleep on a meditation retreat and woke up feeling an itch in his back. According to Rothman:
He tried to scratch it, but couldn’t—his arm seemed paralyzed. He tried to force the arm to move, and, somehow, this shifted him up and out of his body, so that he seemed to be floating above himself….He heard someone else breathing, and, in a panic, looked around for an intruder. Only much later did he realize that the breathing had been his.
This uncanny experience soon ended but left a lasting impression. As it happened, Metzinger became a prominent philosopher of mind, and he set out assiduously to explain OBEs, which are estimated to occur in 8–15 percent of the population, generally at night or after surgery. As real as his own experience felt—it was followed on occasion by other, similar experiences—Metzinger discovered its limitations. He couldn’t flick the light switch, for example, or fly out the window to visit his girlfriend.
A surprising explanation began to dawn on Metzinger. He discovered the work of the psychologist Philip Johnson-Laird and his theory of “mental models.” Instead of logically assessing the world, Johnson-Laird held, we apply a mental picture and shift from one mental model to another, depending on the situation. “If you want to know whether a rug will go with your sofa,” Rothman explains, “you don’t deduce the answer—you imagine it, by moving furniture around on a mental stage set.”
Metzinger began to wonder if what we call reality isn’t merely a stage set arranged and colored in by the mind. This was a key insight, and confirmation came by chance when he was contacted by a Swiss neuroscientist, Olaf Blanke, who had artificially induced OBEs in his patients. Working with a forty-three-year-old woman with epilepsy, Blanke had stimulated a specific area of her brain with mild electrical current, “and she had the experience of floating upward and looking down at her own body.” This illusion had many variations that could be deliberately brought on. Rothman’s New Yorker article explains:
Stimulating another location in the brain created the impression of a doppelgänger standing across the room; stimulating a third created the “sense of a presence”—the feeling that someone was hovering nearby, just out of sight.
Metzinger found this research hard to interpret, because he was committed as a philosopher to tracing experience back to the mind, rather than taking the usual scientific approach that all mental events are the products of physical activity in the brain. But he eventually reached a conclusion consistent with the notion of “mental models.” Something like a radical breakthrough occurred. Rothman continues:
It isn’t just that we live inside a model of the external world, Metzinger wrote. We also live inside models of our own bodies, minds, and selves. These “self-models” don’t always reflect reality, and they can be adjusted in illogical ways. They can, for example, portray a self that exists outside the body—an O.B.E.
This is a fruitful way to explain why living “inside” the body feels so convincing—we need it for stability and safety, to feel grounded inside our personal shelter. There are other ways to induce an OBE, such as using the drug ketamine, which has mind-altering properties. VR simulation is perhaps the most effective, however. For example, with a specific VR setup, Metzinger saw his own body standing in front of him with its back to him (this was done by placing a camera behind him and transmitting the image to the VR headset). If someone scratched Metzinger’s back, he felt the sensation happening to the body he saw in front of him—an eerie, distorting feeling. By remaining “inside” your body, you can avert such disorientation.
But, at the same time, you are trapped behind the skin of your protective suit. It’s not that an OBE is better than the normal way of inhabiting our bodies, but that we have seemingly lost the ability to shift from one mental model to another. This ability can never be entirely lost, however. In a variety of ways—dreaming, fantasizing, denial, willful blindness, and more—we turn our backs on the simulation we have agreed to accept most of the time.
Virtual reality in any guise—drug-induced, electrically stimulated, or caused by happenstance—creates images. The fact that the images come in 3-D, as created by the brain or by VR equipment, doesn’t make them real. Your personal self-model has been painstakingly constructed out of images from the past stored in your memory. These artifacts of old experiences feel like “you.” It’s not hard to revisit the times in your life when you made major additions to your self-model. For instance, I can see myself in medical school, on the airplane from India to America, sweating out my first days in a New Jersey hospital as I felt the pressure of the workload, a foreign environment, and the guarded acceptance of American-born doctors. These images pass through the mind as if they were happening all over again—but they aren’t.
Self-models are shared at some levels but not others. There’s enormous room for personal variations. You and I can spend a day together seeing the same sights, eating the same food, interacting with the same people. A shared self-model would bind us. The Pacific Ocean, a bowl of rice pilaf, and the friends we meet would be part of experiences we share. But your self-model will absorb and reject, interpret and forget, hold on to and let go of the day in an entirely unique way. I may love the ragas improvised by a great Indian sitar player, while you experience the music’s microtones as so much garbled noise. If our spouses join us at the table, you and I will be attached to different people with different relationship histories. And so it goes, moment by moment, as the self-model processes every life experience according to its own designs.
What VR technology reveals is that the self-model isn’t limited to one dimension, the visual. We also believe in what we hear, touch, taste, and smell. In effect, you and I were born to mesh perfectly with a wraparound simulation of reality. But there’s a hidden ability in the human mind that we cannot overlook. This is the ability to disconnect, to stop identifying with the illusion. Pulling a rabbit out of a hat amazes children because they believe what they see. Once you discover that a hat can have a false bottom, the trick doesn’t change, but how you relate to it does. There is no illusion for the magician who has performed the hat-and-rabbit trick hundreds of times. He might feel impatient and bored, wanting to get the whole act over with so that he can eat his dinner. Once an illusion loses its fascination, it loses everything.
The opposite is true, however, when it comes to dismantling the self-model, the wraparound stage set that each of us inhabits. Once you see through this illusion, life suddenly becomes more fascinating. Such is the testimony of people who had the illusion crumble around them, usually without any warning or effort on their part. I recently met someone to whom this happened. Now sixty-eight, Lorin Roche was a broke eighteen-year-old college student at the end of the sixties who agreed to participate in a research project on the physiological effects of meditation. But as recounted on Roche’s website, when he arrived at the lab, he was told that “[h]e was a control subject, and received no instructions whatsoever—they paid him to just sit in a totally dark, soundproofed room in the lab for two hours a day for several weeks, and measure his brain waves. With no instructions, and never having heard of meditation, Lorin just attended to the total silence and darkness, and spontaneously entered a state of intense alertness.”
This was a startling and unexpected experience, which he found very absorbing while it lasted. A few months later, someone handed Lorin a book of 112 meditations based on ancient Sanskrit sutras (sayings or teachings) from India. He was delighted to find that he had spontaneously had some of the experiences described in these centuries-old texts. For a Western adolescent to have a predilection for meditation is as remarkable as having innate musical talent, but Roche went further. He attended a festival of Bhakti devotees in Joshua Tree National Park in the California desert. In India, Bhakti is the most popular form of worship, consisting of love, faith, and devotion as the path to enlightenment. The most common daily practice is chanting, which Roche was there to participate in.
But the heat was oppressive, and his energy was starting to wane. As he describes the experience, “What sounds good right now is to go jump in a nearby cool salt-water pool. As I get out of hearing range of the festival, I realize the chanting is still going on inside me. And although it is quieter, this internal soundtrack feels powerful. Somehow my atoms are dancing and singing the hymns of praise to the Goddess and the God, Devi and Shiva….It’s the Bollywood of the atoms.”
Today Roche continues to dance in praise of the Goddess and the God, and he has written a translation of the 112 Shiva sutras that is considered among the most ecstatic. Here are some samples, all based on merging the ancient text with his own personal experiences. Shiva is singing to Devi:
Rivers of power flowing everywhere.
Fields of magnetism relating everything.
This is your origin. This is your lineage.
The current of creation is right here,
Coursing through subtle channels,
Animating this very form.
Follow the gentle touch of life,
Soft as the footprint of an ant,
As tiny sensations open to vastness.
I had an encounter with Lorin Roche while writing this book, and he radiated the blissful state that is the goal of Bhakti—his translation of the sutras is titled The Radiance Sutras. I bought a copy to read on an airplane, and its personal authenticity surpasses any other version I know. The “dance of atoms” is real for him:
Power sings as it flows,
Electrifies the organs of sensing,
Becomes liquid light,
Nourishes your entire being.
Celebrate the boundary
Where streams join the sea,
Where body meets infinity.
A skeptic would argue that this was such a subjective experience that it has no bearing on reality. The atoms that dance are in Lorin Roche’s imagination, not in a physics lab. The physical world doesn’t feel like a simulation; it feels totally real, and when we see something fantastic in our imagination, like a flying dragon, we don’t run away to escape the fire it breathes.
But this argument misses the point. Everything is mind-made, including fire’s heat and its destructive ability. This only shows how complete the illusion is. Fire-breathing dragons are imaginary and a forest fire isn’t; as part of the simulation, the physical world operates the way it operates. Fire is hot, ice is cold. Trees burn down, water freezes. The key is identification—once you identify with the simulation, you are embedded in it. You are part of the whole setup, playing a passive role. If your involvement changes, so does your experience. You have a more flexible role to play. Take something as basic as pain. There is no objective way to measure pain. People experience it very differently, and unpredictably.
In a typical pain experiment, participants place their hands in ice water and are asked to rate the pain on a scale of 1 to 10 where 10 is excruciating. Even though the temperature of the water is the same for everyone, one person will rate the pain a 5 (moderate) and another an 8 or 9 (severe to excruciating). On the flip side, if you visit a restaurant kitchen where the pastry chefs boil sugar syrup for candy or frosting, you will observe that many of them can dip their fingers to test whether the syrup has started to thicken, which occurs at well over 212°F. (Women, by the way, seem to have a higher pain threshold than men.)
This result isn’t very surprising, but few of us realize that we are actually creating the pain we feel as physically created. As part of the stress response, a rush of adrenaline can block pain, which is why soldiers report that being shot wasn’t painful under battlefield conditions, and the same occurs if a person goes into shock. But the total cessation of pain can also occur out of the blue, and with it arrives a dramatic shift in consciousness.
People who have had this experience typically report a “snap” when the mind creates its own altered state spontaneously. In the 2017 book Stealing Fire, authors Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal give the striking example of Mikey Siegel, an MIT-trained engineer who had become burned out with his lucrative job in robotics and artificial intelligence. He wanted more fulfillment, and Siegel began his search by hiking in South American jungles and then visiting ashrams in India, eventually deciding to take up meditation.
On a ten-day meditation retreat, Siegel found himself participating in a focus exercise where the object was to sit still and experience sensations in the body without judging them:
But Siegel was overwhelmed by sensations. After a week of cross-legged meditation, his back ached, his neck throbbed, and his thighs were numb. “It was an all-consuming pain,” he explains, “and all I was doing was judging.”
Moments of extreme experiences, whether pleasant or painful, somehow break the bonds of the conditioned mind, which is trapped in the habit of accepting physical limitations at face value. Suddenly there is access to an ecstatic state, free of conditioning, as was the case for Siegel:
Something inside shifted. The part of his brain that had been judging suddenly turned off. “It felt like freedom,” [Siegel] explains….“It was the most clear, present, and aware I had ever been. And if I could be in extreme pain and still remain peaceful and clear, then I thought maybe other people could do this, too. In that instant, everything I believed about human potential shifted.”
Siegel wasn’t merely astonished; he didn’t let go of this experience, but rather chose to follow up on it. He fervently embarked on the project of “engineering enlightenment,” using meditation as one tool among many. For example, we can access calmness by slowing down our heart rate using a wearable biofeedback device. We’ll get to the whole topic of interfacing the mind with devices that enhance awareness, but there are some basic points to be made here. Pain has been known to suddenly give way to a detached nonjudgmental state, known as “witnessing.” In India, for centuries, sadhus and yogis have undergone tapas, or physical austerity, as a path to awakening. The stereotype of the bearded yogi sitting in a remote Himalayan cave reflects one kind of tapas.
Putting stress on the body is found in disciplined Zen Buddhist meditations, where monks get up before dawn, consume green tea and a handful of rice, and then sit in meditation for hours with head and spine erect. As with Siegel, there will predictably be a “snap” moment, when the mind pops out of its identification with pain and the struggle to stop it. But many people are stuck in various ways, and even years of enduring extreme discomfort may not lead to the desired result.
Cessation of pain is powerful evidence that the mind can free itself from sensations that everyone considers a natural aspect of life. But we mustn’t miss the wider implications, which carry us to the farthest reaches of reality. Trapped in the self-model, which clings to us more tightly than our skin, we can surrender to it or investigate it. The investigation may be intellectual, the way quantum physics operates. It may use imagination to tease us out of our set ways. When Alice goes down the rabbit hole to Wonderland, the everyday world is reshaped by nonsense, which Alice, being a proper English miss, is impatient with. As Alice watches the Red Queen play croquet using flamingos as mallets or the Cheshire Cat disappear into thin air until nothing remains but his smile, her sensible protests aren’t the reader’s. We are delighted that Wonderland isn’t the everyday world.
Why do we long for wonder? Because we’ve been there in real life. Wonder existed long before the self-model took over. As one researcher into the mind-altering effects of LSD has concluded, babies don’t need psychedelics because they are “tripping all the time.” Babies take a while to get with the program, so to speak. They are wide-eyed and delighted with a world that doesn’t have to make sense yet. To learn that fire is hot and winter is freezing, a young child must conform to everyday reality. Growing up means learning the rules of the road. But once you learn them, the road turns out to be narrow, and crossing the center line spells disaster. Deviate from the norm and you might just go mad.
Metahuman holds out a third way that is neither as shapeless as the innocence of babies nor as rigid as social conformity. We can live in both realities, in a state William Blake called “organized innocence.” Wonder can infuse the everyday world without dissolving it into a trippy puddle. (The famous Indian spiritual teacher J. Krishnamurti, who had a sardonic sense of humor, liked to say that being timeless and eternal, which is part of waking up, doesn’t mean that you miss the afternoon train.) The world of the five senses is the organized part. We don’t inhabit a chaotic hallucination. The all-enveloping setup that we are entangled in appears to be complete. It covers everything we can see, hear, touch, taste, and smell.
Metareality is the innocent part, where awe and wonder infuse the mind. It’s not a mindless state, but it does go beyond rational thought. No less than Albert Einstein confirmed this personally:
I sometimes ask myself how it came about that I was the one to develop the theory of relativity. The reason, I think, is that a normal adult never stops to think about problems of space and time. These are things which he has thought about as a child. But my intellectual development was retarded, as a result of which I began to wonder about space and time only when I had already grown up.
Einstein never lost his sense of wonder and imbued it with a deeply spiritual quality. “My sense of God is my sense of wonder about the universe,” he once said. But it isn’t necessary, as I’ve underscored several times, to couch metareality in spiritual terms. “Going beyond” is an aspect of consciousness, and it is accessible to everyone.
If you ask people how interested they are in investigating reality, not many will respond enthusiastically. But there’s a gripping story behind how we got entangled in an illusion. Even more gripping is the possibility of writing a new ending to the story, which has us escaping into the domain of wonder, discovery, ecstasy, and freedom.
You are living in an interpreted world, and your body is part of the interpretation. Change the interpretation, and you will experience your body in a new way. When you look at exercise not as a chore, for example, but as a way of increasing your focus and energy, you have created a new interpretation. Now the burn of your muscles on the StairMaster and the windedness you feel after running a mile are positive things, not reasons for distress.
It takes a more basic shift of interpretation to stop seeing your body as a thing, an object suspended in time and space. Is this a mere interpretation? Yes. When you look in a mirror, what do you see? We are conditioned to see a solid, stable physical object with defined boundaries—in that regard, you could be seeing a life-sized mannequin in the mirror. We already know, from discussing the quantum revolution, that matter only appears solid. When you touch your forearm with your other hand—go ahead and do this if you like—it seems as if two solid objects are coming into contact.
In reality, you are experiencing two electromagnetic fields coming into contact with each other, which gives the impression of solidity. For example, two magnets with opposite poles facing each other create a repellent force. If the magnets are powerful enough, a point will come when you cannot push them together until they touch. The repelling force will keep them apart. Therefore, from the magnets’ perspective, the air between them feels solid.
The other four senses besides touch also collaborate in the interpreted body. Since photons have no color, the fact that you can see your body as colorful—brown hair, blue eyes, olive skin—is an optical illusion. So are the defined outlines of the body. You do not stop at the barrier of your skin. You travel in a vaguely shaped aura of moisture and exhaled air, trailing behind you a constant stream of microbes and old skin cells that are being shed (by one estimate, the dust bunnies that accumulate in a house are 50 percent dead skin cells). You are also emitting heat and a very mild electrical charge. These emanations have no boundary at all, since they are part of universal fields that extend to infinity.
Nor can you say that you are looking at “my” body, because a question immediately arises: Which body do you mean? Your cells are constantly being exchanged, like bricks flying in and out of a building. The body you see in the mirror isn’t the same as it was when you were an infant, or even what it was yesterday and will be tomorrow. Besides the death of old cells and the birth of new ones, atoms and molecules fly in and out by the trillions every hour as your body is nurtured and excretes waste.
The fact is that your body coheres and looks stable, like a building being held together, not by bricks and mortar, but by its blueprint. In your case, the blueprint leaves a physical footprint as DNA, which serves as the template for all life forms. But, once again, the physicality of DNA is an illusion, a mask. The chemical compounds that constitute DNA are phosphates and sugars, and it is only the arrangement of them that determines the difference between a banana and the monkey eating it, or between you and a sea snail. These arrangements are nothing but pure information. Therefore, your body is an information construct, and your bloodstream, teeming with thousands of different chemical messages flowing from cell to cell, is an information superhighway.
Having gotten this far, we have dematerialized your body, and yet there’s another step to go. What is information? It, too, is a construct. Until the human mind named the construct, information had no formal existence, and some have argued that an information universe could be a kind of quantum soup, swirling, combining, and recombining at every second with lightning speed. This soup can be coded any way you wish. A physicist could code it in terms of force fields like gravity and electromagnetism. But these fields are unified and merge into the ground state of everything that exists, vanishing from the visible universe into a formless vacuum.
A computer engineer could code the information a different way, as the 0s and 1s of digital programming, but this arrangement of information is only viable for tangible information, like the letters on this page, which you may be reading digitally right now. The mathematics of anything in the visible universe can be calculated. Your DNA is coded by the mathematics of four base pairs (thymine, adenine, guanine, and cytosine) in a sequence with three billion separate units of information. Which brings us full circle, because the base pairs aren’t solid matter, either. Even mathematics cannot get at what they are. A mathematical language of 0s and 1s is useful for computer technology, but the immaterial aspects of life—intelligence, creativity, emotions, hopes, fears, and so on—have no mathematical coding. Before Einstein formulated E = mc2, it existed as pure creative potential—a thought not yet thought—and being as yet uncreated, it had no existence in the physical world or the information world or even the mathematical world.
The notion that life can be explained by understanding the human genome has prevailed for decades, but in fact your DNA turns out to be a bit player in the larger scheme. The failure of DNA to explain how life emerged is startling, although the general public hasn’t heard about this very much. This is a perfect example of how materialistic explanations always fall short, so it’s worth telling the story in some detail.
The accepted story, which everyone learned at school, is that DNA contains the “code of life,” a master blueprint that jumps into action the instant an egg is fertilized in the mother’s womb. From that point on, a human being develops from a single cell to 30 trillion cells as the blueprint unfolds. As powerful as the “code of life” story is, behind the scenes a growing number of geneticists don’t buy into it; in fact, they think we’ve gotten a lot about genes wrong. In various ways the “code of life” has huge holes in it that are growing bigger every day. This is outlined in an online article in the journal Nautilus titled “It’s the End of the Gene as We Know It.” The author, Ken Richardson, is an expert in human development, and he gives us a remarkable view of how cells work, which depends much more on invisible ingredients like intelligence and creativity than on molecules, even one as complex as human DNA.
Richardson’s argument goes as follows: DNA’s purpose is to produce the proteins that are the basic building blocks of a cell. But DNA alone does not account for the many ways that cells, tissues, and organs use these proteins. The notion that DNA contains the blueprint for the body is basically dead in the water. Recent research has shown that cells are dynamic systems that change their makeup “on the hoof,” as Richardson puts it, a process of self-regulation that begins almost the moment a sperm fertilizes an ovum.
As soon as that one cell forms into a minuscule ball of identical cells, Richardson writes, “[they] are already talking to each other with storms of chemical signals. Through the statistical patterns within the storms, instructions are, again, created de novo [i.e., from scratch].” It turns out that totally independent of DNA, a cell is controlling all kinds of information contained in amino acids, fats, vitamins, minerals, enzymes, various kinds of nucleic acids (RNA)—a whole factory of ingredients necessary to keep the cell going is not predetermined by our genes at all. This self-regulation implies tremendous intelligence.
In the newly emerging view, the cell controls DNA just as much as DNA controls the cell. The situation has been like this from the beginning of life on Earth. DNA, it seems, emerged at a late stage of cellular evolution. In their earliest stages, billions of years ago, cells had no DNA but were self-enclosed vats of molecular soup. This soup somehow began to regulate itself, giving rise gradually over time to permanent structures that were needed on a regular basis, such as proteins, enzymes, and probably RNA, which makes proteins. The information for these structures was then coded as DNA, which serves as a kind of passive database. Richardson notes something else that puts DNA in its rightful place: “More startling has been the realization that less than 5 percent of the genome is used to make proteins at all. Most produce a vast range of different factors (RNAs) regulating, through the network, how the other genes are used.”
As validation of this new understanding, it is now known that cells can alter their own DNA—this has emerged in the new field of epigenetics, which explores how everyday experience leaves chemical “markers” on a gene, altering how it functions. Far from robotically following a fixed blueprint, the life of a cell is highly dynamic and flexible, responding to changing conditions on a microscopic scale. If this wasn’t so, we couldn’t respond to life on a macroscopic scale.
Being human means that we think and act creatively, using our intelligence to devise new ways of meeting all kinds of challenges. DNA didn’t discover fire or invent the personal computer. The fact that DNA is responsible for the manufacture of proteins is important, but it’s seriously mistaken to expand its role to life as a whole. Richardson is particularly worried that wildly exaggerated assumptions about DNA could lead to social policy that echoes the racism that fueled the eugenic movement decades ago, most notoriously with the Nazi ideology of a master race. As a case in point, Nobel laureate James Watson, who co-discovered the structure of DNA in 1953, was recently stripped of all his honors at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where he spent much of his scientific career, after he continually expressed his bigoted opinion that black people and women are less intelligent than others based on their genetics.
With the blueprint of life crumbling before our eyes, what next? At present the new story in genetics is stuck on two factors, information and complexity. The notion is that primal “molecular soup” found ways for atoms and molecules to form complicated structures through information exchange and the statistical possibilities that arise when zillions of molecules start churning around. But is that feasible? Can the human brain, for example, be the end product of swirling soup to which more and more “stuff” is added? As someone wittily put it, the notion that complexity is enough to explain the brain is like saying that if you add enough cards to the deck, they will start playing poker.
Because science is tied into a materialist explanation for everything, it has an enormous blind spot. A cell biologist cannot make the leap to invisible traits every cell displays beyond its chemical structures, namely, intelligence and creativity. Logical analysis has been science’s most powerful tool, and it’s no small accomplishment to replace myth, superstition, and popular opinion with rational facts. Is it really possible, though, that a sudden creative leap comes about because someone followed the rules of logic? The obvious answer is no, and, as proof, we can offer the amazing imaginative leaps made by the quantum pioneers who uncovered the absolutely illogical quantum domain. More recently, the existence of dark matter and energy revealed another domain, even more peculiar and illogical than the quantum world, which doesn’t even interact with ordinary matter and energy. Your body isn’t a machine governed by logic, which is why any attempt to turn it into a kind of super-complicated machine is bound to fail. Too much of the information being sent throughout the body, affecting all thirty trillion cells, is generated by emotions, hopes, fears, beliefs, mistakes, and imagination—all the most important things that give richness to human existence.
Matter and energy behave very peculiarly at the quantum level, to the point that solid physical objects are undermined. Every phenomenon in the universe can be reduced to ripples in the quantum field as it interacts with the gravity field or the more arcane quark field. On the surface of life, solid objects are just slow-moving ripples compared with, say, photons traveling at the speed of light. Physics can back and fill by pointing out that the human body, like all solid objects, remains intact despite all the quantum funny business. But your body is intact due to yet another field, the electron field.
This reassurance only holds true, however, as long as the information in DNA is intact—with physical death, electromagnetism hasn’t changed, nor have the atoms and molecules that constitute your body. But the process of decay breaks down the invisible bonds of life. Cells lose the real glue that makes life possible, which isn’t electromagnetism. No one can say with logical certainty why the human body doesn’t fly apart into a cloud of atoms that the next breeze will blow away.
It’s easy to have your head start to spin when you realize that your body, at best, is a constant stream of ever-shifting information, but we mustn’t lean on this as a crutch for keeping the physical world intact. Information, remember, is a human concept, like any other model. To say that we are intact because of information has its limits. It’s not as if 0s and 1s are sticky. They don’t glom on to one another. The way that 0s and 1s get glued together is through human interpretation. We know that information exists because we invented the concept.
So where did we get this ability to glue the world together and give it meaning? The answer will be persuasive only if we can apply it to our bodies. How did we acquire the ability to hold our bodies together? That ability must lie outside the body, because we can’t say that our bodies told us how to live and be and think. We can’t even claim that our brains told us how to live and be and think. The brain is another physical object, and it would be circular logic to say that a physical object created itself. (In the field of artificial intelligence, this is like saying that there was a robot that invented robots.)
No matter what angle you take, the body vanishes into the realm of concept, mind, and intangible agencies that are its true creator. But concepts, mind, and immaterial agencies must have a source. Before you can paint the Mona Lisa, there has to be the concept of art. What gave rise to art that isn’t art already? What gave rise to concepts that isn’t a concept already? The only possible answer, as this book argues from many perspectives, is consciousness. There is no other building block that viably explains all the mysteries we’ve just touched on, from creativity to hold cells together, to how inanimate atoms and molecules somehow arranged themselves into living creatures.
There is much more to say, yet if you look at your reflection in the mirror, you can already see that it is only a solid, stable “thing” with defined edges because you interpret it that way. My aim isn’t to plunge you into a state of confusion over your body, however. My aim is to free you from all interpretations that force limitation upon you. Being human can only be defined as limitless. When we impose limitations, we diminish being human. That’s the truth of metareality, a truth we can inch toward step by step until it becomes a living reality for as many people as possible, including you and me.
* The near-death experience is discussed in detail in my book Life After Death, giving evidence offered by skeptics as well as researchers who support the validity of “going into the light.”