As we saw, consciousness is everywhere, always, and everything. If that’s true, then you are everywhere, always, and everything. But in your daily life, even if you were totally convinced about this, you are guided in the opposite direction. You’ve endured a lifetime of training and conditioning telling you that you are a solitary person sitting by yourself in a room. Instead of always, your life span is very limited, bookended by two events—birth and death. Instead of everything, you are a bundle of very specific things, beginning with your name, gender, marital status, work, and so on.
The virtual reality we want to dismantle is made up of many moving parts that occupy their own compartments. One part is the body, another the mind, the world, and other people. These parts were set up so that life can be managed one piece at a time. You go to college for your mind, to the gym for your body, on a date to establish a relationship, to work to bring home money.
From a metahuman standpoint, any division of life into bits and pieces only supports the illusion. Wholeness is wholeness, not a collection of parts. To put it another way, life happens all at once, here and now. The reason we cling to virtual reality is that the prospect of “all at once, here and now” is too overwhelming.
After pondering how to bring this truth home in a way that’s practical and relatable, I concluded that the direct path should start with the body, not the mind. My reasoning is that the body is what holds most people back. They experience themselves encased in a body. They accept the reality of birth, sickness, aging, and death. They seek physical pleasure and shrink from physical pain. As long as these are the preconditions of your daily life, you can’t be metahuman. Your body won’t accept it. A liver, heart, or skin cell can’t scream, “Are you crazy?” But it does seem crazy to abandon the body as a physical object—this act of craziness makes your body the perfect place to start. If you can get past the body as a package of flesh and bone, transforming it into a mode of consciousness, everything else naturally falls into place.
If we have trapped ourselves inside an illusion, the body must be part and parcel of that—and it is. Your body is your story in physical form. As your story grew over the years, the things you thought, said, and did required a huge array of brain activity. Learning to walk was a triumph of balance, eyesight, and motor coordination, but once you as a little child put together this complex puzzle, your brain remembered everything you learned and stored it for life, so you can move on to something new. Your brain has stored a host of skills, from speaking and writing to riding a bike, doing arithmetic, and dancing the waltz. These mental attainments are embodied in you physically.
But as soon as this is pointed out, we risk falling back into dividing “mental” from “physical,” which sends us straight back into the illusion. As babies learn to walk, they are under no such illusion. As they totter, fall, get up again, and keep on trying, the experience fits the holistic description given above: the whole thing happens all at once, here and now. The same is true of any skill you can name—learning it wasn’t mental and/or physical. It was happening in only one dimension: awareness.
There are so many ways that we put mind and body in opposition that going into all of them would be impossible. The direct path doesn’t even require the small amount of discussion we’ve just passed through. Instead, it experiences the body in awareness. Once you do that, the division between mental and physical returns to the authenticity of a baby learning to walk. You return to the self as the agent of the whole experience, fusing thought and action. In this case, any action is returned to wholeness, which is where it occurs.
To begin, just be open to the idea that your body isn’t a physical object in which you reside. Such a viewpoint is just a habit of thinking, even though a stubborn one. I will guide you through an exercise that will give you the direct experience of living, not in a physical body, but in awareness. (This exercise and the ones that follow are much easier to do if someone reads them aloud to you. If you can find a partner who will join you, switching the roles of reader and participant, all the better.)
This first exercise involves the following steps:
STEP 1: Being aware of your body.
STEP 2: Being aware of some bodily processes.
STEP 3: Being aware of the body as inner space.
STEP 4: Expanding inner space beyond the skin.
STEP 5: Resting in wholeness.
Each step is a natural progression from the one before, and each step is a simple, direct experience. You don’t have to memorize the instructions, just go through the exercise as an experience.
Sit quietly with your eyes closed. Let bodily sensations be your focus of attention, so that you can feel your body. There’s no need to try to stop your thoughts; they are irrelevant. It doesn’t matter what sensations you happen to feel. Just be with your body.
Be aware of your breath as it goes in and out. Slow your breath down a bit, then make it go a bit faster. Move your attention to the center of your chest and be aware of your heartbeat. Take some easy, deep breaths and sense your heartbeat slowing down as you relax. See if you can feel your pulse elsewhere—many people can feel it in their fingertips or forehead or inside their ears, for example.
Now move your attention to the inside of your body. Feel your head as empty space, and start going down your body to the chest, stomach, abdomen, legs, and feet, pausing at each place to experience your internal organs as a space in which your awareness freely moves. If you want, you can also experience your breath as the expansion and relaxation of the space in your chest, your heartbeat as a constant pulsation in the space of the chest.
Once you have felt the inside of your body as empty space in which bodily processes are taking place, run your attention across your skin. Roam over the sensations in your head, feeling the outlines of face, scalp, and ears. Move downward, letting your awareness go to every other place—throat, arms, hands, feet—as sensations reach you.
Now lift your awareness slightly above your skin and gently let it expand beyond the contours of your body. Some people can do this easily, but others need to conjure up an image—you can see your inner space suffused with light and watch the light expand until it fills the room. Or you can visualize inner space around your heart as a sphere, a round balloon that expands a bit more every time you inhale, watching it get bigger and bigger until it takes up the entire room.
Once you have gone through the previous steps, rest quietly for a minute or two. Let the experience of the body be here now.
What this exercise has done is multifold. You have freed yourself from being trapped inside a thing, substituting the experience of your body as processes and sensations. Since your experience was conscious, these processes and sensations moved to where they actually occur, in your awareness. Then you opened yourself to experience your body as inner space—in Sanskrit this space is called Chit Akash, or mind space. Since everything in life happens in mind space, you expanded the space until there was no boundary between “in here” and “out there.”
You may be surprised that you’ve accomplished all these things, and since the experience was likely to be unusual, you will easily pop back into the habit of feeling that your body is a physical object you reside in, like a mouse hiding in the walls of a house or a rabbit in its burrow. Yet, at the very least, you now can see that there is an alternative to the old habit. To free yourself from your body, the old habit won’t serve you.
To break down the old habit—a process I call “thawing,” as discussed before—take time once or twice a day to repeat this exercise. Once you become used to it, the whole thing runs naturally and smoothly. We’re all practical-minded, so what good is the exercise in daily life?
You can do it when you feel stressed.
You can do it to relieve tightness in your body or other unpleasant and painful sensations.
It also works to help relieve worried, anxious thoughts.
You can center yourself with this exercise whenever you feel distracted and scattered.
Various practices in yoga and Zen Buddhism bring the body under control through sheer focused awareness. When you felt your heartbeat and breathing, for example, you took the first step to controlling both processes at once through the vagus nerve, one of the ten cranial nerves that extend from the brain to the rest of the central nervous system.
The vagus nerve is a wanderer, tracing its course like the trunk line of an old-fashioned telephone system from brain to neck, down into the chest, past the heart, and extending into the abdomen. It is the longest cranial nerve, and its fibers both send and receive sensory information. Most of the sensations you experienced in the exercise you just did were channeled through the vagus nerve.
You can take advantage of this knowledge in a practical way through “vagal breathing,” which consists of inhaling to the count of four, holding the breath to the count of two, and exhaling to the count of four. This simple rhythm of 4-2-4 is easy for a normal healthy adult, and no one should try to force it to the point of gasping or feeling uncomfortable. To the great surprise of medical researchers, vagal breathing is the best way to reduce stress, particularly the immediate signs of ragged breath, increased heart rate, and muscle tension.
It turns out that chronic, low-level stress is more important and more pervasive than acute stress. In modern life, being in a state of chronic low-level stress is so common as to be accepted as normal. But your body doesn’t experience it as normal at all; the earliest beginnings of heart disease, hypertension, sleep and digestive disorders, and probably some cancers can be traced to chronic stress.
It is no accident that the location of these disorders parallels the course of the vagus nerve, which serves to communicate stress to the heart, stomach, digestive tract, and then the rest of the body as the nervous system branches out. Vagal breathing brings the state of the body back into balance and relieves tension. So even if you haven’t come to the realization that everything physical and mental happens in consciousness—meaning that our body happens in consciousness—here is an unmistakable clue.
We accept that a skill like walking and riding a bike is permanent once it has been learned. But, at a more basic level, the biorhythms that sustain the bodymind as a whole were learned and absorbed millions of years ago by our hominid ancestors. Modern life pushes us to unlearn them, as witnessed by the huge number of people with digestive and sleep disorders. Both of those functions are controlled through built-in biorhythms. Once your body has forgotten how to express a biorhythm, the effect is like one trumpet or violin playing a different piece of music from the rest of the orchestra—the whole symphony is ruined.
Vagal breathing may wind up being very useful beyond its ability to normalize heart rate, lower blood pressure, and make breathing more regular. It’s a good practice to use in bed just before you fall asleep. Mild to moderate insomnia can often be eased or totally healed. General stress is eased, including stressful thoughts and a racing mind, which countless people experience when they try to go to sleep.
I’ve gone into a little detail (the whole topic is covered in depth in The Healing Self, which I coauthored with Rudy Tanzi) to make the point that a physical map of the nervous system, the operation of the vagus nerve, consciously intervening in its operation, and sensing the results directly are all one thing. The direct path leads us back to that one thing, which will, in time, completely end the state of separation and allow us to rest in wholeness, which is reality.
Once you begin to experience your body in awareness, transformation starts to occur. You are moving out of the separation between mind and body toward wholeness. You need to be whole to be who you truly are. The direct path is experiential. It’s not theoretical, nor is it therapy or a spiritual journey.
As you experience your body in awareness, you have taken time out from your story. This seems like a modest thing, a moment or two spent in doing nothing but being here. Yet there’s no other way to dismantle your story that is this direct. Millions of people benefit from therapy and walking the spiritual path. But eventually we must all face the fact that everything we do, even in the name of healing and spirituality, is taking place inside our story. As a result, we can get glimpses of wholeness—these are often quite beautiful and uplifting—yet they do not carry us to metareality as our home.
At the moment you are your story—it can’t be helped—and this keeps you trapped in separation. The word separation may not come to mind; you might not even consider it a problem. To illustrate, consider the following sentences, which all of us have said or heard:
I hate my body.
You’re only as old as you think you are.
Youth is wasted on the young.
I used to have a perfect figure.
The statements express different sentiments, but each reflects the separation of mind and body. “I hate my body” comes from someone who feels trapped in physicality. The person is bemoaning what she has done to her body, or what her body has done to her. The state of separation is obvious. “I” is playing the part of the victim, and “body” is the culprit.
“You are only as old as you think you are” is much more optimistic, asserting that the mind can overcome the deterioration of aging. Yet, as we all know, this is in part wishful thinking. Aging is an inexorable process. It is much better to have a positive attitude toward it than a negative one—society is benefiting from the “new old age,” which envisions every stage of life as vigorous, productive, and healthy. But a thought or a belief isn’t the same as a state of awareness. “You’re only as old as you think you are” cannot substitute for the true self. When established in your sense of self as a permanent state, aging holds no threat because you identify with the timeless (we will go into what the timeless state means in the next section). A good attitude toward the aging process still leaves you trapped in your story.
Oscar Wilde’s quip “Youth is wasted on the young” puts a witty face on a sad wish that many people have: If only I could go back in time, I’d live my life so much better. Regret over the past is mingled into everyone’s story, and the basis for this regret (and its opposite, which is nostalgia) is that the passage of time has power over us. “I used to have a perfect figure” states this more directly by connecting the passing of the years with a loss of physical attractiveness, while implying that “a perfect figure” is the same as self-worth and sexual desirability.
These examples of how the mind feels separate and different from the body could be expanded endlessly. The body is subject to all manner of judgment, and yet the underlying process, whether you love your body or hate it, hasn’t been examined closely. This underlying process is the inescapable way your body has absorbed every detail of your life story and now mirrors it. To be trapped in your story and trapped in your body are the same thing. Your brain has been shaped every minute since you were born, and it has communicated everything you experience to the body’s fifty trillion cells, which in turn pass the messages on to your DNA.
Wholeness, then, isn’t just a mental shift. It’s a revolution in the bodymind that undoes the past, beginning in the brain but reaching out to liberate every cell and influencing the genetic activity in each cell. To see how this revolution occurs, let me go to the heart of every story, which is time.
There was a period in infancy when your experience was original and authentic. You were too young to interpret the world on your own. All your development was occupied with the basics of walking, talking, exploring the world, and so on. Let’s call this the prestory period of life. William Blake divided one group of poems into “songs of innocence” and “songs of experience,” which were a nonbiblical narrative of the Fall from Grace. Like the romantics who were to follow, and who idolized him, Blake believed that the Fall didn’t occur to Adam and Eve; rather, it happened to children as they lost their innocence. The Fall was a repeated experience generation after generation.
What Blake saw in innocence was a fresh, simple, lyrical, and joyous perspective on the world. The tone is set in one of the most famous songs of innocence, “The Lamb,” where you can read infant for lamb:
Little Lamb who made thee
Dost thou know who made thee
Gave thee life & bid thee feed,
By the stream & o’er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing wooly bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice.
In contrast to this vision of a childhood Eden, the songs of experience are bitter and dark, reflecting the hardship Blake knew firsthand and saw all around him in eighteenth-century London. One famous poem, “A Poison Tree,” reimagines the tale of original sin as the dark side of human nature, in verse that could be a nursery rhyme:
I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.
And I watered it in fears,
Night & morning with my tears:
And I sunned it with smiles,
And with soft deceitful wiles.
And it grew both day and night,
Till it bore an apple bright.
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine.
And into my garden stole,
When the night had veiled the pole;
In the morning glad I see,
My foe outstretched beneath the tree.
Even without the benefit of Blake’s vision, we have all experienced the transformation from innocence to experience. All it took was time. Nothing else was necessary as we learned the standard interpretation of the world everyone around us accepted. A baby is never bored. He looks on the world with wonder. The hours don’t hang heavy; deadlines don’t make a baby rush through his days. He has no hunger for distraction so that he can escape from himself.
Being a visionary, Blake saw the possibility of liberation from the fallen state, which he called “organized innocence.” It’s a brilliant phrase, because it implies that a person’s experience can be as original, authentic, and untainted as a baby’s while retaining the organized mind, a mind we must have to perform higher functions as adults (which includes taking care of babies). Returning to innocence means embracing values like love and creativity, which become more valued as we reach maturity. Yet the years of maturity make it more and more difficult to journey back to innocence. For all the countless people who yearn for what it felt like to first fall in love, few find a way back.
The culprit isn’t experience, because experience can still be joyful and authentic at any time of life. The culprit is hidden in the texture of our lives—it is time. I said above that becoming embedded in the interpreted world (i.e., the spell/dream/illusion) only needed time, nothing else. By the same token, escaping the grip of time is the only way out. Far from being a mystical notion, you can be timeless right this minute—in fact, that’s the only way.
For most people, the two words timeless and eternal seem roughly the same. For religious believers in the Christian and Muslim traditions, Heaven is eternal, a place where time goes on forever. For the nonreligious, time ends with physical death. In both cases, however, ordinary clock time has ceased. But there are problems with all these concepts, and if we go deeply into the subject, time is very different from what we casually accept.
Physics has had a lot to say about time, thanks to Einstein’s revolutionary concept that time isn’t constant but varies according to the situation at hand. Traveling near the speed of light or drawing near the massive gravitational pull of a black hole will have a drastic impact on how time passes. But let’s set relativity aside for a moment to consider how time works in human terms, here and now. Each of us normally experiences three states of time: time ticking on the clock when we are awake, time as part of the illusion of having a dream, and the absence of time when we’re asleep but not dreaming. This tells us that time is tied to our state of consciousness.
We take it for granted that one kind of time—the one measured by clocks—is real time, but that’s not true. All three relationships with time—waking, dreaming, and sleeping—are knowable only as personal experiences. Time doesn’t exist outside human awareness. There is no absolute clock time “out there” in the universe. Many cosmologists would argue that time, as we know it in our waking state, entered the universe only at the big bang. What came before the big bang is probably inconceivable, because “before the big bang” has no meaning if time were born at the instant the cosmos was born. If you go to the finest level of Nature, to the vacuum state from which the quantum field emerged, the qualities of everyday existence, such as sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell, no longer exist, and there is also a vanishing point where three-dimensionality vanishes, along with time itself.
What lies beyond the quantum horizon is purely a matter of conjecture. The precreated state of the universe can be modeled almost any way you choose, as being multidimensional, infinitely dimensional, or nondimensional. So it must be accepted that time came out of the timeless and not just at the big bang. Everything in the physical universe winks in and out of existence at a rapid rate of excitation here and now. The timeless is with us at every second of our lives.
Yet something looks fishy in that sentence, because the timeless can’t be measured using a clock, so it makes no sense to say that the timeless is with us “at every second.” Instead, the timeless is with us, period. This world is timeless. There is no need to wait for death or Heaven to prove that eternity is real.
Once you acknowledge that the timeless is with us, a question naturally arises: How is the timeless related to clock time? The answer is that the two aren’t related. The timeless is absolute, and since it can’t be measured by clocks, it has no relative existence. How strange. The timeless is with us, yet we can’t relate to it. So of what good is the timeless?
To answer this question, we have to back up a bit. Clock time has no privileged position in reality. There is no reason why it should be elevated above dream time or the absence of time in dreamless sleep. Clock time is just a quality of daily life, like other qualities we know as colors, tastes, smells, and so on. Without human beings to experience these qualities, they don’t exist. Photons, the particles of light, have no brightness without our perception of brightness; photons are invisible and colorless. Likewise, time is an artifact of human experience. Outside our perception, we cannot know anything about time. This seems to contradict the cornerstone of science, which holds that “of course” there was a physical universe before human life evolved on Earth, which means that “of course” there was time as well, billions of years of time.
Here we come to a fork in the road, because either you accept that time, as registered by the human brain, is real on its own or you argue that, being dependent on the human brain, time is created in consciousness. The second position is by far the stronger one, even though fewer people believe it. In our awareness we constantly convert the timeless into the experience of time—there is no getting around this. Since such a transformation cannot happen “in” time, something else must be going on. To get a handle on this “something else,” let’s look at the present moment, the now, the immediate present.
All experience happens in the now. Even to remember the past or anticipate the future is a present-moment event. Brain cells, which physically process the conversion of the timeless into time, function only in the present. They have no other choice, since the electrical signals and chemical reactions that run brain cells occur only here and now. If the present moment is the only real time we can know in the waking state, why is it so elusive? You can use a clock as fine-tuned as an atomic clock to predict when the next second, millisecond, or trillionth of a second will arrive, but that’s not the same as predicting the now. The present moment, as an experience, is totally unpredictable. If it could be predicted, you’d know your next thought in advance, which is impossible.
As we touched on already, the present moment is always elusive because the instant you register it as either a sensation, an image, a feeling, or a thought, it’s gone. So let’s boil these insights down. The now, the place where we all live, can be described as:
the junction point where the timeless is converted into time
the only “real” time we know in the waking state
a totally unpredictable phenomenon
a totally elusive phenomenon
Now, if all these characteristics are being correctly described, it turns out that we have been fooling ourselves to believe that time is a simple matter of tick-tock on the clock. In some mysterious way, each of us occupies a timeless domain, and to produce a four-dimensional world for the purpose of living in it, we mentally construct it. That is, we create the world in consciousness first and foremost. Reality, including ordinary clock time, is constructed in consciousness as well.
We must not fall into the trap of saying that the mind creates reality. The mind is a vehicle for active thinking experience, and, like time and space, it has to have a source beyond something as transient and elusive as thoughts. If we trusted our minds, we’d equate going to sleep with death. In sleep the conscious mind gives up the world of solid physical objects and clock time. Yet when we wake up in the morning, there is a return of solid objects and clock time. They were held in waiting, so to speak, by consciousness, even during the eight hours a day that the thinking mind was out of commission.
If the direct path aims to take us beyond the illusion we accept as real, it must deliver the experience of being timeless. In its fullest state, the timeless experience is simple, natural, and effortless—it is the sense of self, which quietly lies inside every other experience. We are only partially there. The exercise in this chapter, which allows you to experience your body in awareness, thaws out one aspect of the illusion. The present discussion of being timeless thaws out another aspect. In both cases, as physicality and clock time start to lose their grip, you realize that there is another way to live: being metahuman.
When you start being metahuman, you exist at the timeless source of the self. It’s a huge step to know that the timeless is with us, beyond any belief in birth and death, age and decay. Things appear and disappear in our dreams when we’re sleeping. Yet we don’t mourn them, because we know that dreams are an illusion. What matters isn’t the things that appear and disappear, only that you don’t mistake the dream for reality.
Discovering that the same is true about our waking dream sets us free from the fear of death. Metahuman is about more than this. Liberated from illusion, we can be free of all fear. In the end, waking up leads to absolute freedom. We don’t just lead our everyday lives. We navigate the field of infinite possibilities.