When you see your reflection in the mirror, the fact that you recognize yourself comes naturally and seems too basic even to comment on—yet this small act of self-awareness turns out to have tremendous significance. The self you have learned to recognize in the mirror is constantly reinforcing all kinds of limitations that do not need to exist. When William Blake spoke of “mind-forged manacles,” he could just as well have said “ego-forged” instead.
It’s impossible to remember a time when you didn’t look in the mirror and see yourself. But there are steps in childhood development that gave you your first inkling of “I,” your sense of self. Mirrors hold no interest for very young infants, for example, and, surprisingly enough, walking and talking precede the time, around eighteen months, when a young child recognizes that he is seeing his own body in a mirror. After that, it becomes a favorite toy. (The few animals that can see themselves in a mirror also become fascinated with their own image once they catch on.)
At the very least, we need to realize that no one lives in the same reality. Everyone’s version is personal. A hundred people viewing a glorious sunset in Hawaii are actually seeing a hundred different sunsets. For a person who’s feeling depressed, there might be no beauty, much less glory, in any sunset. Since “I” is central to every person’s version of reality, it’s a key element in the simulation we accept as real, and until we can know ourselves beyond “I,” the illusions of virtual reality will keep us in its grip.
Illusion is a loaded word. Society disapproves of someone who is under the illusion that nobody else in the world really matters; we call this an inflated ego or solipsism. But the illusion that love conquers all, which everyone believes if they happen to become deeply infatuated, is an illusion we’d all like to believe in all the time—falling out of love, which replaces illusion with reality, is quite painful. A mix of pleasure and pain characterizes “I.” On the pleasurable side, discovering their identity makes little children exultantly happy. The “terrible twos” reflect a rampant display of egotism, where the child asserts, “This is me! Pay attention. I am here!”
The terrible twos are notorious for being a maddening time for parents, because the naked assertion of ego is obnoxious. More important, it’s unrealistic. You can’t survive in society if you run around demanding that the world pay attention to you all the time, or even most of the time. Adult life is a compromise between getting what you want and going along with social norms, between an all-consuming “I” as the center of the universe and a muted “I” that’s a small cog in the vast machinery of society. The balance isn’t easy to live with, and countless people fall into the trap of feeling insignificant, while a few are allowed to aggressively impose themselves on the rest.
Psychologists spend their careers mending people’s damaged sense of self, but on the road to metahuman, we must ask a more radical question: Why should “I” exist in the first place? It delivers a life of unpredictable pleasure and pain. It isolates us from the world and limits what we feel, think, say, and do. How often are we held back from doing something impulsive because we automatically think, “I’m not the kind of person who does X”? That X can be anything from pulling a practical joke to bragging about how much money you earn to running off and joining the circus. Every limitation imposed by “I” is actually pointless. It serves only to uphold old conditioning from the past.
When we see that “I” is a mental construct—and a very shaky one at that—it becomes open to change. We might decide to do without it entirely once “I” no longer serves its purpose. “I” exists to convince you that you are a creature of virtual reality, and that going beyond the simulation isn’t possible, any more than a portrait can jump out of its frame. The reason we find ourselves hopelessly entangled in an illusion is that we are totally wrapped up in “I” and everything it stands for.
There’s a lot of dismantling to do before “I” stops ruling a person’s life. From our first memories of having a self, “I” has been our closest companion, and it spends every waking moment glomming on to desirable experiences and kicking away undesirable ones. “I” doesn’t want to give up its power, and for good reason. Having one special person love you and only you makes life worthwhile. When “I” fades away, who is there to love and be loved? But there’s much more at stake. Everything a person thinks, feels, says, and does is in service to making “I” stronger, happier, and better. Becoming metahuman cannot succeed unless it offers something more fulfilling than anything “I” holds out to us.
At first glance, the ego looks indispensable. How can we abandon something we need to survive? “I” is the reason you feel like you and no one else. You gaze at the world through a pair of eyes no one else possesses. A mother spotting her child as he comes out of school to be taken home receives the same visual information as every other parent waiting in the parking lot, but she literally sees a unique child, her own. Uniqueness is precious, but it comes with a price. Almost none of us is comfortable being totally on our own, and the prospect of becoming an outcast is very real if you insist on being yourself. The poet William Wordsworth rhapsodizes, “I wandered lonely as a cloud / That floats on high o’er vales and hills,” but very few of us view lonely as a positive. When somebody is so selfless that they surrender all personal needs, they’re sometimes called saintly. It’s more likely, though, they they’ll be labeled antisocial or mad—it’s hard to believe that someone can be normal and yet totally free of the ego and its need for pleasure and approval. Many spiritual movements denigrate the ego as a burden, a curse, or a hidden enemy of higher consciousness.
Ironically, calling the ego your enemy is an ego judgment. Calling the ego your friend is also an ego judgment. Therefore, to say, “I want to be without ego” is self-contradictory; the ego is saying that, and it certainly doesn’t want to commit suicide. Your very words cannot get you to a place outside the illusion you are entangled in. You can’t pluck out the ego like removing an inflamed appendix. If you think you can, you only sink deeper into the illusion by fooling yourself that you are selfless. “I” is a tiny thing, a single letter. But what you have built around it—what everyone has built around it—is like a coral reef made up of minuscule cells hardened over with a massive shell.
If this description sounds extreme, consider how you process raw experience. Experiences are interpreted and become part of how you personally accept or reject reality. We don’t witness how this occurs because most experiences seem too insignificant to matter. For example, you might taste a vindaloo curry in an Indian restaurant, find it blazing hot, decide you don’t like it, and never order it from a restaurant menu again. Someone else, raised in the Indian state of Goa, where vindaloo is a staple dish, barely registers the heat of the chilies that go into the recipes and instead has nostalgic memories about his mother’s vindaloo.
The two experiences, as raw data entering the brain through the sense of taste, appear to be identical. But they aren’t—experience always passes through someone’s personal interpretation. “I” is having every experience, not the five senses or the brain. Reducing experience to raw data is totally misleading, as if the eardrum determined which music you like, or brain cells decided that a Rembrandt painting was a masterpiece. “I” makes all such decisions, and, as it does, every experience makes the power of “I” stronger.
Experiences, by nature, are fleeting and momentary. As soon as I finish saying “thank you” or take a bite of chocolate or kiss my grandchild, the experience has vanished. Based on this undeniable fact, you have two options. You can accept how fleeting every experience is, or you can hold on to it. When you choose the first option, life is a flow of fresh experiences, like a stream constantly renewed at the source. You are not haunted by bad memories or filled with anxiety about what might happen next. If you pick the second option, you accumulate a storehouse of habits, conditioning, likes and dislikes, and a catalog of things you never want to repeat again. The second option is the foundation of the ego, which holds on tightly to reinforce “I” and its sense of security. The loss is very great, however, because experiences won’t stop occurring just because you want them to, and by holding on, you shut out the flow of life.
What drives us to hold on instead of letting go? A simple fact of life: “I” has an agenda. The illusions created by the mind are not random. “I” is in charge of your self-interest, and its agenda serves one demand—“More for me.” We shouldn’t be surprised when “More for me” becomes insatiable, as billionaires crave more money and despots more power. The average person cannot relate to such extremism. But the need for more is powerful in everyone, because everyone has needs and desires that want to be fulfilled. We all need security and a sense of safety. To need love makes us human. Needing to explore the world is an unstoppable urge in a toddler careening around the house and getting into everything.
But look deeper, and it becomes clear that “I” is based on need. It ties you to a program of constantly finding new needs that never end, which is the opposite of fulfillment. Fulfillment is the state of needing nothing because you are enough in yourself. Consumer society promotes neediness as normal—there is always something new to buy that will at last put a satisfied smile on your face. Thus, a normal life is actually a life of lack desperately and constantly trying to fill a black hole that will never be filled. When you are needy, fulfillment is unattainable.
Here a very important insight dawns. “I” doesn’t have an agenda. “I” is the agenda. The ego comes with built-in demands, no matter how hard we struggle either to deny these demands or to fulfill them. Neediness is a state of awareness, and “I” will never loosen its grip until we find a higher state of awareness.
“I” creates obstacles that keep metareality shut out, as if by a thick wall, even though the wall is invisible. It’s important, in our journey of self-awareness, to understand why human beings chose to isolate themselves in this particular way. Was there a time when “I” was weak or didn’t exist? Even though ego is now an ingrained part of the human psyche, it has a history. It has left clues in physical form, like a trail of footprints in the forest made by an invisible creature. For example, one sign that you are an individual “I” is that you answer to your name. The first name is lost in prehistory, but the first written name belongs to an Egyptian pharaoh, Iry-Hor (the Mouth of Horus) from 3200 BCE.
Once you begin to investigate, other clues about the evolution of self-awareness emerge. Much earlier than written names came the ability to recognize our reflection. We have no way to re-create what our remote ancestors experienced, naturally. Did prehistoric humans gaze into dark pools of water and recognize their reflection? The speculation is that they did, but the event cannot be dated. But the invention of mirrors came along very recently, measured in evolutionary time. Polished stones used as mirrors date to 6000 BCE in what is now modern-day Turkey, and as ancient civilizations emerged in Egypt, South America, and China, whatever could hold a polished surface, from obsidian and copper to bronze and silver, was employed for this purpose.
Are we the only creatures who can see themselves in a mirror? A pet parakeet will play with its image in a mirror because (we assume) it sees another parakeet there. Dogs and cats typically show no interest in mirrors. But, oddly enough, self-recognition evolved in creatures that have no reason to possess this ability. Chimpanzees, gorillas, and other great apes do see themselves in a mirror. How do we know if a creature actually sees itself in a reflection? The most telling test is actually quite simple: put a pink hat on the animal’s head. When the animal looks in the mirror and sees the pink hat, does it touch the hat on its head or the hat in the mirror? If it touches the hat on its head, it passes the test of “That’s me I see.”
Yet great apes don’t have mirrors in their native habitat, so there seems to be no evolutionary reason for this ability. Likewise, we don’t know why three other creatures—magpies, elephants, and dolphins—can recognize themselves in a mirror. Magpies use their reflections to preen themselves more, while elephants, once they understand how a mirror works, engage in novel new behaviors. For example, they spend an inordinate amount of time examining the inside of their mouths, an area of the body they couldn’t see without the aid of a mirror. (If this topic fascinates you, go to a YouTube video that shows Asian elephants and how they behave when confronted with a mirror: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EjukzL-bJc.)
Mirrors aren’t the only way we recognize ourselves. The oldest artifacts that hint at self-awareness are sculptures that depict humanoid forms. What makes them so astonishing, according to the most recent archeology, is that such objects predate the rise of Homo sapiens. A simplified time line will help us to get our bearings:
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14 million years ago |
First great apes appear |
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2.5 million years ago |
The genus Homo evolves |
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1.9 million years ago |
Hominids evolve into Homo erectus |
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200,000 years ago |
Homo sapiens appears |
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10,000 years ago |
End of the last Ice Age |
By the time Homo sapiens was becoming a distinct species, around 200,000 years ago, our closest ancestor, Homo erectus, had long discovered fire and toolmaking. Nor did hominids wait for our species in order to develop a sense of self-awareness. In extremely ancient ruins have been found crude humanoid figures fashioned by Homo erectus. They are astonishingly old. The first to be discovered was the Venus of Berekhat Ram, a basalt artifact unearthed in 1981 by a team of archeologists from Hebrew University on a dig in the Golan Heights near Syria in Israel.
The Venus of Berekhat Ram consists of two round shapes, the bigger one suggesting a body, the smaller one a head. Three incisions can be seen, two on either side of the “body” standing for arms, one encircling the “head” without standing for any facial feature. Despite the name Venus, this object is so primitive that at first some experts believed it was an accidental formation made by natural erosion. The debate over whether these are intentional marks etched by an artist was settled when a closely related figure, the Venus of Tan-Tan, was later discovered in Morocco. The two sculptures resemble each other so closely that they could have been created by the same hand.
Dating the Israeli find was exciting but difficult to pinpoint. The Venus of Berekhat Ram was sandwiched between two layers of volcanic deposits, one from around 230,000 years BCE, the other from 700,000 years BCE. The sculpture was made sometime in that vast expanse of time. To the modern eye, the Venus of Tan-Tan from the same Lower Stone Age looks more convincingly human, since it has a torso, head, and legs. The fact that a mind predating not just Homo sapiens but Neanderthals felt the urge to depict its form artistically is a sign of self-awareness woven into the very fabric of our existence. The sculptor is saying, “This is what I and my kind look like.” As far back as anyone can tell, there were never humans without self-awareness.
“I” hasn’t just survived since prehistory: it metastasized. All around us we see evidence of malignant selfishness. The grotesque excesses of greed in our present Gilded Age is a symptom of “I” run amok, and we’ve seen how recklessness in the financial sector can bring about disasters in the global economy without the moneyed culprits bothering to care—or stopping in their pursuit of even more wealth. If it weren’t for the ego’s drive to defeat other egos, to make itself important by denigrating anyone who is different, there would be no need for us-versus-them thinking and the endless conflicts this has created, from family squabbles to civil wars, religious crusades, and the global atomic threat. Can we account for this metastasis and come up with a cure?
If you lived through the Cold War and the threat of nuclear devastation, you have seen how “I,” having formed an enemy, will carry enmity to the brink of mass destruction. Even if the nuclear shadow somehow vanished, nations would continue to perfect new, more deadly means of mechanized death. It would benefit humankind to reduce the amount of damage we do to ourselves that is directly traceable to our habit of viewing the world from the ego’s perspective, given the needless fear and suffering it has brought.
No one catches pneumonia or even the common cold voluntarily, but when it comes to “I”—whose ill effects reach into every corner of life, we have chosen to be separate—this is a species trait. We have evolved to feel superior to every other life form. On the one hand, this gave us a major evolutionary advantage. Consider how we relate to the environment. Every other creature adapts to the environment and merges with it. Over billions of years, evolution has created exquisite mechanisms for adapting to the most inhospitable reaches on the planet. The interior of Antarctica, for example, contains a specific kind of mountain known as a “nunatak,” a peak that crops up from the thick surrounding ice cap. A more desolate environment would be hard to imagine, with nothing but ice fields in all directions, subzero cold, howling winds, and seemingly no foothold for plants or animals.
Yet there are records of a white seabird known as the snow petrel (Pagodroma nivea) nesting in nunataks as much as 60 miles inland from the coast, to which they must return to skim the water for food. When mating season arrives, snow petrels find exposed rock crevices for their nests made of small pebbles, and a mating couple nurtures a single egg in a frozen wilderness for forty to fifty days before it hatches. Evolution placed the snow petrel in this situation, but humans have a choice about where and how to live.
These choices weren’t dictated by our physical limitations. Humans have encroached on the planet’s farthest reaches much more than our hominid ancestors could physically endure. It is our force of will, an inner drive that is determined to bring Nature under control, that impelled us to inhabit all but the most lifeless environments in terms of extreme heat and cold, scarce food supplies, long periods of the year without the sun, high altitude, and so on.
When we were still in our naked state, extreme physical hardship did push us to the edge of survival, nearly extinguishing Homo sapiens almost as soon as our species appeared. It took awareness to overcome the physical odds against us. As detailed in a 2016 Scientific American article, titled “When the Sea Saved Humanity,” human survival was touch and go, and most of our ancestors didn’t make it. The article’s author, Curtis W. Marean, is an archeologist from Arizona State University, whose team discovered the evidence for this evolutionary crisis. Marean writes:
At some point between 195,000 and 123,000 years ago, the population size of Homo sapiens plummeted, thanks to cold, dry climate conditions that left much of our ancestors’ African homeland uninhabitable. Everyone alive today is descended from a group of people from a single region who survived this catastrophe. The southern coast of Africa would have been one of the few spots where humans could survive during this climate crisis because it harbors an abundance of shellfish and edible plants.
At caves along a section of the South African coast, known as Pinnacle Point, archeologists have found abundant mollusk shells and occasionally remains of seals and whales, indicating that almost fifty thousand years before previously explored sites, early humans had learned to harvest the sea for food while the harshness of an Ice Age climate caused almost everyone else to succumb. Tools in the caves suggest that these survivors had high cognitive abilities—Marean makes a strong if controversial case for mental faculties that were totally necessary for survival, such as calculating tidal rise and fall by the moon. Only at low tide, he says, could the inland cave dwellers trek to the sea and undertake the hazardous venture of harvesting mussels and other mollusks against the pounding surf.
Trapped in the direst distress, our ancestors had no avenue of physical rescue or escape. How did they find the means to rescue themselves?
The answer is not physical. Fascinating as these archeological discoveries are, it wasn’t harsh external pressure that forced our ancestors to adapt. It took a great reality shift “in here.” We became a consciousness-based species, using the mind to outwit Nature’s challenges. One of the most important factors in the expansion of human consciousness was that our brains became too big, efficient, and complex for their own good. A kind of brain overload fueled our desperate need to whittle it down so that daily life would be manageable. If the rush and hubbub of a modern city seem like overload, that’s nothing compared to the mental crisis our remote ancestors faced.
The problem wasn’t that the human brain simply grew and couldn’t stop. The problem was that instinct, which guides how other creatures behave, began to dwindle in us. A honeybee seeks only flowers; it instinctually stings an intruder; only the queen bee lays eggs. Human beings have a choice in all three behaviors. We explore Nature for all manner of food. We fight or keep the peace in different circumstances. We mate according to extremely complex behavior patterns. Having been freed from instinct, the choices that face us are literally infinite. The brain cannot be infinitely large, however. So how can the human mind fit infinite choice within a finite physiology?
This wasn’t a dilemma faced only by our remote ancestors. Every newborn baby comes into a world where too much information is constantly bombarding the higher brain, a flood of raw data that could never be processed in its totality. Think of searching for your car in a crowded parking lot. To find it, you don’t visually take in the pavement, sky, people, and every vehicle, still or moving, in your field of vision. Instead, you have a mental image of your car, and, with focused attention, you edit out everything that’s irrelevant to one task, finding a specific vehicle.
This points to another reason we develop an ego. People identify with what they can do. A car mechanic is different from a concert violinist. A sentence that begins with “I am X” can end with all kinds of behaviors, traits, talents, and preferences. By the same token, a sentence that begins with “I am not Y” can also end in many ways. As it turns out, the list of things that we choose not to be is much longer than that of the things we choose to be. If you are a Christian, that’s a single choice that excludes all other religions—at present count, there are 4,200 faiths in the world that a person with one faith doesn’t have to think about except in passing. As we exclude countless choices without even thinking about them, we are editing reality according to the dictates of the individual “I.”
This ability to edit raw reality was already present in animals that hunt for a specific prey, for example, but there was no conscious choosing involved. When penguins and other seabirds that nest in huge colonies come back to shore with their crops full of food, they somehow find the one specific fledgling that belongs to them in the overwhelming din of noise created by thousands of chicks. The arctic fox can detect the movement of mice underneath several feet of snow in the winter and pounce precisely on its prey. Monarch butterflies can follow an exact migration pattern to and from one locale in Mexico where they breed.
There’s an enormous mystery about how humans developed focused attention, not for specific types of food and locales, but as a trait we can turn on and off. The things you’re interested in fascinate you and hold your attention, while the things you have no interest in escape your notice. The appeal of detective novels lies in how cleverly a Sherlock Holmes notices the tiniest, seemingly irrelevant clue. (Holmes, we are told, was an expert in cigar ash and what kind of tobacco each ash represented, but he didn’t know that the Earth revolves around the Sun because that bit of knowledge was useless in the art of crime detection.)
Even though we cannot solve this mystery of paying attention versus tuning out, there’s no doubt that “I” is in charge of both. My wife and children and grandchildren are objects of deep personal interest to me (the kind of interest we label as “love”) while they are total strangers to nearly seven billion other people on the planet. Once attention is focused, emotion follows. Growing up, my son Gotham loved the Boston Celtics basketball team and hated the Los Angeles Lakers. This became part of who he was, an either/or decision that he identified with.
Either/or is the most basic editing tool our minds possess, and it begins with “me or not me.” Ego separates each person from every other person though countless decisions about “me or not me.” Many such decisions have no real purpose except to reinforce the ego. (It’s not as if Celtics fans are better, smarter, or more well-off than Lakers fans. Yet when Gotham found himself moving to Los Angeles, and his work put him in close contact with the Lakers, it was a wrenching change. Turning “not me” into “me” can be very hard. Imagine, for example, that you had to spend a year working for a political party you’ve disliked all your life.)
As the ego metastasized over time, the “other” acquired differences became the basis of social suspicion and disapproval. Before my children were born, I was a newly arrived immigrant working at a hospital in New Jersey during the doctor shortage caused by the Vietnam War in the 1970s. Every day going to work, I knew in the back of my mind that the American-born doctors in the emergency room looked upon me as their inferior because I had come from India.
If we stand back and consider the whole picture, “I” edits reality too much and for selfish reasons. We deliberately close ourselves off from new possibilities to suit old, fixed preferences. Everyone’s past is a chaotic collection of choices about what they like and dislike, how they feel emotionally, and the memories they carry around as baggage, not to mention their fixed beliefs, family history, and every life-altering experience since birth.
You weren’t shaped by what happened to you since birth. You were shaped by what you thought about those happenings. The ego and every response it has ever had is a vast mental construct—the metastasis of “I”—that grew from the seeds of ego in our remote ancestors. Our ability to edit reality is responsible for everything a human being can decide to pay attention to, and since we pay attention to billions of things, reality in its unedited state must be vastly larger. Human achievements represent a tiny fraction of what reality has to offer—the horizon spreading before us is unlimited.
We’ve been covering what might be called the natural history of “I,” and it has told us many important things about how the virtual reality we accept as real is actually mind-made. In the human mind, reality is constructed so that
The available information isn’t overwhelming and chaotic.
We feel free to accept or reject any aspect of reality we choose.
We seek to repeat the most familiar, safe, and agreeable experiences.
We avoid the most threatening, strange, and disagreeable experiences.
The ultimate judge of what’s real is the ego, which is highly personal and selective about how we interpret the world.
I’m not here to declare that the ego is your enemy, which would be just another ego judgment. From a neutral standpoint, the ego is limiting. Having chosen to travel through life with “I” as your most intimate companion, you have silently agreed to filter, censor, and judge your experiences. That’s the primary use of consciousness in most people’s lives, and it’s like using a powerful computer just for emails. To limit your personal reality shuts you off from the infinite potential that is the greatest gift of consciousness.
At some point “I” edits out too much reality or misses the important things that could expand love, compassion, creativity, and evolution. We spend too much mental energy focusing on things that are damaging and self-defeating. If you’ve attended a Thanksgiving gathering where the same tired, vexing family issues are hauled out year after year, you know how stubbornly “I” can cling to petty, irksome things. For creatures trapped by physical evolution, there’s no escape. Cheetahs are the fastest runners on Earth, but their amazing speed has made them smaller and weaker than other predators. The most vulnerable stage in their life cycle is at birth, when the cheetah mother is limited in her ability to protect her young. It is estimated that 90 percent of newborn cheetahs do not survive. Added to this is the speed of the gazelles that the cheetah chases as its prey. The gazelle and the cheetah are so closely matched that adult cheetahs often fail in pursuit of food and therefore live on the brink of starvation. Trapped by their specific evolutionary adaptation, cheetahs can’t turn to the other foods that are all around them—termites or grass or mice—to fend off starvation.
Homo sapiens faces the opposite predicament. Our minds open up the field of infinite possibilities. Having the ability to bend Nature to our will, we make deliberate choices that seem beneficial to our survival, but decisions have unforeseen consequences. Defending themselves with weapons advanced the rise of early humans, and a weapon as sophisticated as the bow and arrow appeared as early as 45,000 BCE. Then weaponry couldn’t be stopped, making the catastrophe of the nuclear arms race inevitable. Or was it? Freedom of thought is our natural state; being trapped by the past isn’t. We are still in that state of liberation, should we choose to take advantage of it. The pivotal issue is the metastasis of “I,” which has taken free will too far in the service of anger, fear, greed, blind selfishness, and all the rest.
Once we see this, we can understand how personal relationships get sabotaged. Two people fall in love and get married. After the honeymoon, they must relate to each other in all kinds of ways—doing household chores, making money, scheduling time for things to do together or apart—and “I” does its job of managing one situation after another. But if you are having a fight over family finances, your ego brings up anger, the need to win, and the stubborn desire to be right. If the argument gets heated enough, grievances over older wrangles come bubbling up to the surface. Unless you are careful, a trivial disagreement gets bitterly personal. What has been lost in the heat of the moment is the underlying love that sparked the relationship in the first place. That’s the larger reality, which “I” single-mindedly excludes so that it can win a small and usually pointless argument.
Two people occupy a small dot on the map. Now expand the territory on a global scale. The human race is ravaging the planet because seven billion people, acting on the advice of “I,” prefer local experience over solving a global problem. Wars break out and populations incur death and destruction on a massive scale because the larger territory—maintaining amicable peace—is sabotaged by the anger generated by every “I” choosing to follow its irrational, angry, hostile agenda.
The bottom line is that “I” firmly believes it can manage reality, and yet human history is littered with its abject failures. Even the basic assumption that “I” is in contact with reality is false. At this moment you have no actual experience of the quantum field, from which everything in creation springs. You have no experience of the atoms and molecules that constitute your body, nor of the operation of your cells, nor of the brain itself. It seems strange that the human brain has no idea of its very existence. Viewing a brain under the surgeon’s knife or while dissecting a body in medical school is merely the secondhand observation of a mushy gray thing with grooves running across its outer surface. Nothing observable hints that this mushy stuff processes consciousness.
At bottom, “I” polices our experience to make sure that life remains local and not infinite. Infinity is the ego’s enemy, because infinity is the whole map, not just dots and pins stuck in it here and there. To let go of “I” is to embrace infinity. Only by being comfortable with our infinite potential can we discover that reality doesn’t need editing. Wholeness is where we belong. Once we begin to chop wholeness into bits and pieces, the ego takes over to manage each one, bit by bit, and, whether we realize it or not, it depletes us physically and mentally. So we need to investigate whether infinity is a livable environment. If it is, then letting go of the ego can be justified. And no matter what “I” has done to improve life, we may begin to realize that living in wholeness is better.