If metareality is “everywhere, always, and everything,” a startling fact follows. There is no story we can tell about it. All the elements of a story—a beginning, a plot, various characters, and an ending—have no bearing. Yet everything else in the world is organized around these elements. You are a character in your own story, which had birth as its beginning, death as its ending, and all kinds of plot twists and incidental characters along the way. The prospect of giving up your story is all but unthinkable—yet it is totally necessary in order to experience metareality. We even have to give up mystical, religious, and spiritual stories, too, because they turn pure consciousness into something it isn’t, whether that something is the Old Testament God or Nirvana or a pantheon of gods and goddesses. I appreciate that these have been a guiding light for centuries. Isolated messengers have always existed to point to another world, bringing inspiring stories with them.
In his depictions of the Madonna and Child, Leonardo da Vinci followed the traditional story that St. John as a boy was a childhood companion of Jesus. Leonardo (and other Renaissance painters) show him enigmatically pointing upward with one finger, a smile playing beatifically across his face. Heaven—can’t you see it? Just there, the smile says.
Those who wake up see the transcendent world directly. The time frame of eternity becomes natural and is felt as a seamless flow. The Buddha once said (in a translation by Sogyal Rinpoche), “This existence of ours is as transient as autumn clouds. To watch the birth and death of beings is like looking at the movements of a dance. A lifetime is like a flash of lightning in the sky, rushing by like a torrent down a steep mountain.”
In every spiritual tradition, such messages have beckoned believers to a transcendent world, but all have failed to convince the average person that going beyond should be the focus of daily life. At no point in history did waking up go viral. Somewhere in the evolution of consciousness, Homo sapiens came to a fork in the road. Collectively, we could have identified with the true self or else we could have identified with “I,” the ego-personality. Obviously, we took the second road. Metareality didn’t abandon us; we abandoned it.
This made all the difference in how we see ourselves. The true self is connected to its source in pure consciousness. The ego-personality has its source only in the stories it imagines and believes in. Modern people have jettisoned mythology, and many are rejecting organized religion. But at every level, our lives are still shaped by stories invented by human imagination. The other road, which led to the true self, gained a reputation for being mystical (i.e., detached from real life), and once this happened, only a motley crew of saints, sages, poets, artists, and seers followed that path.
Finding metareality is an impossible task until you question your own story. You must take the challenge personally, because becoming metahuman is real only if it is real for you. If you are fully aware of what is happening to you here and now, you have gone beyond all stories. The habit of constantly adding to your story is just that, a habit. By itself, the present moment has no story—it just is. Why do we embellish it with our story? Because the present moment isn’t fulfilling by itself until it gets enriched by the true self. A computer is useless until you plug it in, and although we use our minds for everything already, much time is lost in fantasy, distractions, avoidance, denial, procrastination, self-judgment, and on and on. Every story contains these undesirable elements. Staying connected to the true self at every moment brings the fullness of life into our awareness.
Metahuman could be called a new story, another fiction added to the shelf, but I think that would be a misnomer. The element of fiction is taken out when you wake up. As part of the spell/dream/illusion, our personal stories can’t do without the fictional element. Virtual reality is a fiction to begin with. Anything based on it participates in unreality. We might pity our ancestors for their attachment to myths, superstition, and unproven religious beliefs. But if we are immersed in a better story, it’s still a story. Future generations won’t buy into it any more than we buy into Zeus, witches, and the heart as the seat of intelligence rather than the brain (a persistent belief in ancient Greek and Roman medicine).
This chapter is about a turning point where we stop telling ourselves stories, no longer needing them to defend us against harsh reality or to make sense out of a chaotic world. In metareality you go beyond danger and disorder. The true self gives you an unshakable stance in reality, at which point your life finds purpose and meaning from the source instead of from a cobbled-together fiction.
Humans are proud to be storytellers, and our story has a gaping hole because no record was left from the oldest times, before writing emerged. Can we imagine so many lost stories? Around 45,000 years ago, people we’d recognize as modern Homo sapiens started to migrate northward from Africa. All were hunter-gatherers. Many generations before farming, mining for metals, and fixed dwellings heralded the rise of civilization, life 45,000 years ago was already too complex to do without stories. In the human mind, fire had to come from somewhere, rain had to be unpredictable for a reason, and things we now take for granted, like a chick hatching out of an egg, posed a deep mystery. Mythology arose not as fantasy but as the best way to explain Nature, given the life people were leading. Ascribing meaning to anything and everything is the thread that binds us to earliest humans. Stories explain how life works and thus fulfill a need that is woven into the fabric of being human.
We still live by stories, and whatever disrupts our personal story is usually rejected out of hand or fought against vigorously. (Witness the guiltiest sexual abusers coming to light through the #MeToo movement, abusers who flatly deny any wrongdoing.) We’ve already discussed how the ego creates the illusion of being separate and alone. “I” needs a good story to feel safe, important, socially acceptable, and worthy. Seeking to feel secure, people want to belong to something larger than themselves—a tribe, a religion, a race, a nation—but to be accepted by any of these groups, you first must accept their story. Without thinking about the freedom they are surrendering, people adopt a secondhand, sealed-off story. You know instantly who is “us” and who is “them.” Yet no matter how convincing the story, you will always be “them” to people embedded in another story. The security to be found in something larger than yourself breaks down when “they” turn into a threat, even an enemy of your very survival.
Stories grow out of such basic needs that going beyond any story feels impossible. A story consists of anything the human mind can imagine, which leads to infinite choices. But we can simplify the matter. Stories are about attachment. We think to ourselves, “I am X,” and then we cling to X as part of our identity.
X can be the larger group (tribe, race, nation, religion) mentioned above. “I am American” has enormous power over people, as does “I am French” or “I am Jewish” or “I am white.” But in seeing this, which most people do, we are only scratching the surface. Any version of “I am X” can lead to clinging and attachment. “I am a Patriots fan” or “I am upper middle class” creates passionate attachments. At the same time, stories become more potent by what they exclude. For every “I am X,” there are many possibilities of “I am not Y.” If you are American, you are not every other nationality, of which there are hundreds. If you are Catholic, you exclude all other faiths, and so on.
What’s wrong with this? If stories were held lightly, the way we experience The Hobbit or The Great Gatsby, being diverted for a while before moving on, vexing problems wouldn’t arise. It’s not the story that is responsible; it’s our attachment to it. Attachment falsifies experience by freezing it in place. The weight of the past becomes a burden. The present moment is lost in the clutter of memory, belief, and old conditioning. How many older people crave to be young again? How many regrets do we harbor that we refuse to let go of? These attachments exist in everyone’s life, leaving aside the misery and violence created by an us-versus-them mentality.
Prying someone loose from a cherished story lies at the heart of one of the most popular best sellers in the 1980s, M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled. The book begins with a gripping sentence: “Life is difficult.” Immediately, Peck expands on what he means: “This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it…[and] the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.”
In other words, we are hearing the call to go beyond. But Peck, who was a psychiatrist, knew that just because a truth is great doesn’t mean people can face it—quite the opposite. In his view, after years of treating patients in therapy, the biggest obstacle to getting better his patients faced was their refusal to take responsibility. Why? “We cannot solve life’s problems except by solving them,” Peck writes. Yet this fact “is seemingly beyond the comprehension of much of the human race….Many, so many, seek to avoid the pain of their problems by saying to themselves: ‘This problem was caused by other people, or by social circumstances beyond my control, and therefore it is up to other people to solve this problem for me.’ ”
Peck gives vivid examples to illustrate his point, such as the case of a woman who had just tried to slash her wrists. She was an army wife on the Pacific island of Okinawa, where the younger Peck was an army psychiatrist.
In the emergency room he asked the woman, who had managed to inflict only superficial cuts on herself, why she wanted to commit suicide. She said it all came down to living “on this dumb island.” Not satisfied with her answer, Peck began a dialogue that would be comical if the woman weren’t so miserable and unhappy. The back-and-forth between him and his patient can be summarized as follows:
PECK: Why do you find being on Okinawa so painful?
PATIENT: I have no friends, and I’m alone all the time.
PECK: Why don’t you have any friends?
PATIENT: I live off base in the village, and nobody speaks English.
PECK: Why don’t you drive to the American base to find some friends?
PATIENT: My husband needs the car to drive to work.
PECK: You could drive him to work.
PATIENT: It’s a stick shift. I only know how to drive an automatic.
PECK: You could learn to drive a stick shift.
PATIENT: Are you crazy? Not on these roads.
What made the scene tragic and comical at the same time is that the woman, despite her absurd stubbornness, was in genuine pain; she was crying during most of their conversation. We all believe in our story, almost at any cost. From a therapist’s perspective this woman was skirting any hope of getting better by exhibiting all the classic signs of denial. Who among us hasn’t shut our eyes when a situation was simply too hard to face? Life would be much easier if our problems had cut-and-dried solutions, but they don’t.
Denial is only one element in the big picture, which is that we live by stories. Denial comes down to ignoring anything that disrupts your story or contradicts it. Even the healthiest person psychologically ignores an enormous part of reality. If we see, once and for all, that being attached to stories is what we want to overcome, we recognize that there are people who have done just that. Their inner world isn’t cluttered with the baggage of the past. They don’t defend “I am X” as if their survival depended on it. Rather, they live effortlessly in the present. The real issue isn’t whether such people exist; the real issue is why we have ignored them for so long.
States of awareness long considered mystical in the West—if not bogus—exist all around us, affecting ordinary people who almost always keep their experiences private. A few years ago I became acquainted with Dr. Jeffery Martin, a PhD social researcher who had conducted groundbreaking research into higher consciousness. What made his studies revolutionary is a single basic discovery: many more people are awake than anyone ever supposed.
Martin gave them a voice. After gaining his doctorate at Harvard’s School of Education, he started publishing his findings, which indicated the prevalence of enlightenment as a natural state of awareness, one that many people have already accessed. Martin’s research began with him posting an online query asking for responses from people who thought they were enlightened.
To his surprise, he got more than 2,500 replies, and from this pool Martin intensively interviewed around 50 subjects. At first it was hard to find a common language. Feeling that you are enlightened is personal, and it also sets you apart from normal society. Martin’s subjects were sensitized by being outsiders, often being stigmatized in adolescence for being different. They also knew on the inside that they weren’t normal according to the social standards around them. For many, revealing their unusual mental state had led to such things as being sent to a psychiatrist, put on medication, or even being committed to a mental hospital.
However, very early on, Martin realized that as different as each of his subjects was, their experiences fell on a continuum. There wasn’t a single enlightened state, but rather a sliding scale. To find some common ground, and to fit the accepted model of what doctoral research in psychology must look like, he dropped the loaded term enlightenment, and in its place adopted the cumbersome tag persistent non-symbolic experience. When someone begins to have such experiences, “[t]here is a shift in what it feels like to be you,” Martin notes. “You move away from an individual sense of self, which is considered normal, to something else.”
Defining what that “something else” is wasn’t easy, because these people came from different backgrounds and were influenced by diverse cultural factors. However, Martin was able to identify specific areas that seemed to stand out as markers of higher consciousness.
Typically these people said they had lost a sense of being a separate self—they had no lingering notion of personal identity. Putting himself in his subjects’ shoes, Martin comments, “I would be saying, ‘There’s no Jeffery here talking to you.’ That’s literally what they would say to me.”
Another common experience was a dramatic reduction in thinking. “In fact,” Martin says, “they would often report having no thoughts.” This wasn’t literally true, as Martin discovered when he did further research, but as a self-report, having no thoughts at all is startling. Another common experience was a sense of unity, oneness, and wholeness. This state of completeness, Martin says, led to a tremendous sense of personal freedom. “There’s a loss of fear that comes with this, a loss of identification with a personal story.” Many felt that their bodies were no longer bounded by the skin but extended beyond the physical body.
So now we have an objective profile of shifting into higher consciousness in everyday life, the state of metahuman. Personal awakening isn’t rare, and according to those who have actually experienced it, their awakening led to a wide range of possibilities. The implications for human nature are intriguing, beginning with what it feels like not to defend “I, me, and mine.” The source of so much anger, fear, greed, and jealousy is rooted in the insecurity of the ego and its endless demands.
Putting ourselves in their shoes, these awakened people don’t keep a running story in their heads about what’s happening to “me.” When they think about themselves, “me” fades away as soon as they notice it. The same is true for their emotions, which are fewer and more spontaneous. When anger arises, it fades almost immediately. Emotions were still positive and negative but rarely, if ever, were they extreme. Martin’s subjects could be irritated when something bad happened at work, yet they didn’t carry the residue of stress around with them afterward, and it would never build into angry frustration. They felt a sense of inner peace that could be interrupted, but quite soon it would return. In a word, these people were very good at letting go.
To bring order to his findings, Martin divided the awakened state into several “locations” as separate stages of awakening, according to their intensity. His subjects regarded waking up as a definite shift, which for some occurred as recently as six months previously, for others as long as forty years before. Once they arrived in Location 1, as Martin calls the opening stage of awakening, people usually kept progressing and rarely slipped back or jumped ahead. In other words, they were experiencing personal evolution, and the process showed no prospect of stopping. As Martin described their attitude, they “agreed that their initial transition was just the beginning of a process that seemed to be able to unfold, and deepen, endlessly—a never-ending adventure.” Everything happened internally, and for many the shift wasn’t something they would define as spiritual. It was just the way they experienced themselves.
“If you sat in a roomful of people and a small percentage belong to this altered sense of self,” says Martin, “you wouldn’t be able to spot them. To all outer appearances they are just like you and me.”
So who exactly are these people? At the outset, before Martin’s research began to expand to many universities and countries, his typical subject was a white male from the United States or Europe. Martin was disappointed to find that women, for unknown reasons, were not eager to volunteer as enlightened or to discuss their experiences of “waking up.” Religious backgrounds were diverse, spanning Eastern and Western faiths, yet most of the subjects had done some kind of spiritual practice—they wanted to be in a higher state of consciousness. Curiously, around 14 percent had done nothing of this kind. They had spontaneously popped into higher consciousness or, more typically, drifted into it.
Martin’s research base has expanded to more than a thousand subjects, which means we must ask ourselves if “normal” awareness isn’t a fixed state at all but a spectrum, with consciousness evolving much further than anyone has previously predicted. At the very least, higher consciousness has become much less exotic. It’s no longer the province of sadhus and yogis in the Himalayas.
When we communicated by email and later met in person, I accepted why Martin, for academic reasons, had to remain value-neutral. But waking up has for centuries been associated with bliss, for example, or communication with higher beings like angels, or feeling a divine presence. Was all of that absent when modern people woke up? Martin assured me that “outside” phenomena were present, but he felt constrained not to mention them in his doctoral thesis. He found that the spiritual dimension of some of his subjects had also opened up. Some of the people he tested reported the kind of open, clear, silent awareness associated with Buddhism. Still others, however, had no idea what to make of their state of awareness.
In later reports Martin notes that a small number of his subjects had experiences that defy normal explanations. A small number “experience a deep bliss sensation all through their body, including during moments that would otherwise be physically painful. For some this seems to bring pain tolerances that appear infinite. A few of [them] have reported experiences that should have involved horrific amounts of pain, but only resulted in bliss. Others who experience ongoing bliss find that they can reach its limits. They report a threshold, unique to each individual, above which pain is experienced.”
It turns out, as his researches deepened, that Martin discovered more and more uniqueness among these people. Beyond Location 4 a few progressed as far as Location 9, for example. In that location, Martin notes, people would “say something like ‘it feels like it is just the universe looking out these eyes.’ ” But generally speaking, all of his subjects were amazed at the amount of well-being they were experiencing, and this grew as they moved further along the spectrum. Paradoxically, in Location 4, all emotion fell away, even love, which Martin associates with a larger shift—the self that was built up through a continuous story (he calls this the Narrative-Self) falls away, along with socially defined emotions. After Location 4, emotions begin to return in a different form, based on the foundation of continuous well-being. Yet even before this return, his subjects reported that they didn’t miss the experience of emotions, because in freedom they had found the highest state of well-being.
Martin had made what he considered “the fundamental discovery that these were psychological states that had been identified and adopted for thousands of years by many cultures and belief systems.” In the present climate, where consciousness is an exploding growth field, the real issue isn’t skepticism. In one survey, one-third of American adults believe in things widely considered fringe or New Age, from reincarnation and the paranormal to medical applications long opposed by mainstream medicine. (According to various sources, between one-third and 38 percent of American adults use alternative medicine. This includes the 30 million, for example, who visit chiropractors every year.)
Martin was not unique in saying that higher consciousness wasn’t “inherently spiritual or religious, or limited to any given culture or population.” Given his academic and technical bent, he decided to put his data to work. He sifted out the techniques that his subjects considered the most powerful in getting them to arrive at higher consciousness, and he organized these into a fifteen-week Finders course. What’s fascinating is that the students would be ordinary people who, for whatever reason, were attracted to take the course.
Three participants gathered at the website Reality Sandwich to report on their experience: Catherine, a business and leadership consultant from Paris; Paul, the co-owner and manager of a garden center in Wales; and Rebekah, a semiretired photographer from Texas.
Each had different reasons for taking the course. Paul described a period of personal difficulties. “I’d become disconnected, disillusioned, mostly due to physical and material matters. I had a very spiritual upbringing, but I seemed to have lost the plot altogether.” His general state was “not quite suicidal, but about as low as I could possibly be.”
Catherine had heard about Martin’s research and was intrigued by the possibility of higher states of consciousness. It particularly interested her that these states could be specially described—“It’s not just nirvana all day long. My objective was to go through the experience and to reach higher states of well-being and quiet.”
Rebekah had no prior expectations. “[I] did not know what to expect, just open to whatever.” But she had heard about Martin’s research projects, and said, “I trusted the science in them.” She also knew what she wanted out of the course. “My goal was spiritual evolution. How can I raise my consciousness to a higher level?”
The methods presented to them were highly intensive, amounting to two to three hours a day, which they were expected to keep up when they went back to their everyday lives. The instruction consisted of a weekly video about what the participants would be doing for the following week. Before the next video, as Catherine describes it, “[y]ou do a summary of the week. How do you feel? What has happened to you? How many times a day did you do the different activities?” There was meditation and also group discussion. Some exercises came straight from standard therapy, such as writing down and forgiving people from your past who had wronged you.
At the core of the course, however, was Martin’s eight-year research into people who considered themselves enlightened. He gave each a questionnaire about which practices they found most useful in their journey, leading to a wealth of data. “We looked at all of that, and only a handful of things rose to the top. Some of them were across all traditions, like, for instance, a mantra-based meditation practice.” Other techniques were more specific. For example, says Martin, he adopted a “direct awareness–type method. This involves placing your attention on awareness itself. Now that sounds simple, but as I’m sure all of these folks will tell you, it’s rather tricky.”
From students’ feedback, he quickly learned that some practices worked better than others for each person. He also mixed in techniques: “It’s not all ancient practices. We also include some of the gold standard exercises from positive psychology.” In a general way, the course had two aims, to increase well-being as quickly as possible and to deepen awareness. The success that resulted sounds remarkable: “More than 70 percent of participants who completed the course report having persistent forms of an ‘awakening’ experience, and 100 percent say that they are happier than they were when the course began, even those who rated themselves as ‘very unhappy’ at the start of the course.”
Paul, the near-suicidal manager of a garden center, offers personal testimony to that: “It was the dropping away of sloth; that was the biggest single thing that I noticed. The chatter was going, the general day-to-day worries and anxieties were dropping away at a terrific rate. That was what resonated for me initially. The lack of fear, of worry, of anxiety. That was the biggest impact for me initially.”
So do we have a final answer—has metahuman become accessible through a cocktail of psychotherapy, group sharing, self-help, meditation, and a program as personalized as a fitness regimen at the gym? There’s no cut-and-dried answer. Too many people find too many paths to waking up. Martin’s research is only one version of a trend to make the mind a kind of techie project, and although he claims that 70 percent of participants who experienced some form of awakening continued to have the experience, only time will tell. An intensive lifestyle change that includes hours of practice a day will attract only the dedicated few.
The mystery of awakening includes the 14 percent in Martin’s surveys who awoke spontaneously. One day, without warning, they found themselves fully self-aware or they eased into that state over time but without effort. We’ve already touched on a similar phenomenon in sudden genius syndrome (see this page), and there are rare cases where people discover suddenly that they have total recall of everything that has happened in their life (a phenomenon known as “superior autobiographical memory”). Such people can get together and chat about things like “What was the best Tuesday in your life?” or recall the theme song to a TV series that aired only a few times in the seventies.
In all these cases, a person’s awareness doesn’t accept imposed limitations as normal. Under hypnosis, ordinary people can uncover detailed memories they can’t otherwise retrieve, such as knowing the number of rosebushes in a garden from childhood or how many stairs led to the basement in their parents’ home. Is it normal to remember or forget? Both, of course. Unfiltered raw data bombards us in waves too overwhelming to absorb, so we selectively forget and remember. The point of waking up is to remove some barriers created by memory and other barriers created by forgetting. Happiness is blocked if you keep remembering and rehashing old hurts, but just as effectively if you forget how happy you once were—it’s a matter of perspective. You can even say that virtual reality makes us forget to remember who we really are.
At its most universal, enlightenment is simply expanded self-awareness. We go beyond stories, beyond fixed boundaries, beyond the rickety construct of “I,” and, in doing so, awareness effortlessly expands. It expands naturally, of its own accord, because stories, boundaries, and limitations were artificial to begin with.