Despite our seven billion stories, we are united in one life. The fate of the planet depends on realizing this fact. Once we do, the human race can evolve to metahuman. How close are we, right at this moment? The answer isn’t clear. Life never settles down enough. If a daily newspaper had been available in ancient Rome, medieval France, or Shakespeare’s London, the same drama would be seen. The best aspects of human nature always seem precariously balanced against the worst. We are the only creatures capable of self-pity, and the only creatures who feel they deserve it.
Instead of focusing on how humans behave or animals behave or even how quarks and bosons behave, we should ask how consciousness behaves. Consciousness unites everything. All objects, whether a brain cell, a limestone cliff, or a prehistoric flint knife, represent mind in motion. The play of consciousness is infinite, but there is unity holding the play together.
If the dense and challenging ideas in this book leave you baffled, I sympathize. The last thing I want to do—or could do—is to force anyone to accept anything I say. But it is critical to wake up to the one life we share. If you consider yourself a modern person, you live and behave the way the modern world does. As a point of pride, the modern world has been wildly successful at amassing knowledge, one fact at a time. It hasn’t been two decades since the number of human genes was counted and the entire human genome mapped. In the coming decade, the brain’s trillions of connections will be mapped through a huge, concerted, scientific effort.
So it must be shocking to hear me say in this book that anything you can count, measure, calculate, and reduce to data is part of an all-encompassing illusion. Perhaps even more shocking is my argument that whatever you can perceive, imagine, or think about in words inhabits the same illusion. I am not an enemy of the illusion. I believe that people have a right to upgrade it all they like, and I feel sorrow for people whose portion of the illusion is so degraded that they suffer.
But only waking up allows for the unity of one life to be experienced directly. Otherwise, the world will always be a clash of opposites, founded on the certainty that humans are capable of the best and the worst. What makes us capable of listening to our demons one day and blessing the angels the next day isn’t really human nature, though. It is the state of separation we keep reinforcing, generation after generation.
I don’t foresee Homo sapiens taking a collective leap in its evolution, but I know it can. Our evolution shifted from the physical to the mental domain tens of thousands of years ago, even when early humans were naked and vulnerable, leading an existence as fraught with threats as any animal caught up in the contest of predator and prey. It’s a total mystery how we acquired self-awareness. Once we did, or our hominid ancestors did, the mind was poised to triumph in every aspect of life. But the active mind isn’t the same as consciousness. A thought, feeling, or sensation is like a wave that rises and falls; consciousness is the ocean.
This analogy goes back thousands of years in India, and I can’t remember as a child when I first heard it. The words felt like a cliché, however, the way that “Love thy neighbor” or “To be, or not to be, / That is the question” feels like a cliché. Repetition leaches meaning away, even from the most profound sayings.
I pondered this obstacle and decided that the direct path has to bring a small awakening every day; waking up shouldn’t be held out as the ultimate reward at the end of the spiritual path. In my own life I aim at three kinds of experiences. If one of them happens today, I’ve achieved a small awakening. If two or all three happen, the small awakening becomes magnified. Here are the three experiences:
I see reality more clearly.
I feel less entangled in habit, memory, outworn beliefs, and old conditioning.
I stop clinging to expectations and external rewards.
How would these experiences apply in your life?
This is the experience of perceiving with fresh eyes. You give up old ways of interpreting the world around you and your own life. Interpretation is built into perception. It is unavoidable that you give names to everything, have opinions, draw on past experiences, and render judgments about whatever is happening. The world has been interpreted for you since you were an infant, and yet you have control over this now that you are an adult. The world doesn’t have to change. If you perceive freshness and renewal, if you wake up with a sense of optimism and feel open to the unknown, then every day is a world. You don’t have to try to live in the present moment—you won’t be able to escape the present moment. It will draw you in without resistance, because there is everything to gain and nothing to lose when a person lives here and now, rather than repeating the past and anticipating the future.
This is the feeling of getting unstuck. Virtual reality would be perfectly acceptable if people felt free to alter it according to their own desires. But a great deal of life is beyond our control, which leads to a feeling of being trapped, confined, limited, and even suffocated. I lump these feelings into the phrase “getting stuck.” By getting unstuck you disentangle yourself from the complicated web woven by the ego-personality. This web has become sticky through the process of identification. Anytime you say “I am X,” you are further away from being able to say “I am.” As we saw, X can be anything: your name, job, marital status, race, religion, nationality. These and much more become your personal story. “I am” is beyond all stories.
This is the experience of becoming your true self. The ego-personality is constantly on the lookout for external rewards to validate its worth. If you ask people, “Which would you rather be—happy simply to exist or rich?” their answer is obvious. The need for external rewards, not just money but status, the right neighborhood, a new car, social approval, and more, fuels our dependence on them. Over time the ego-personality has become a dominant force, even when someone considers himself unambitious or spiritual—the front pew in church feels better than the last row. But the ego is a false guide, because the total fulfillment it promises is always over the horizon. Living on expectation goes hand in hand with needing external rewards—there is always a mythical jolt of pleasure or triumph or wealth, the big score that will make life worthwhile once and for all. To cut the strings, you need to feel that the absence of external rewards isn’t painful, because it is offset by inner rewards. The greatest of these is the freedom to be yourself.
As a result of these three experiences, waking up becomes your life, little by little, and then, almost without knowing it, you are participating in the one life, which is real, radiant, and whole.
Because everyone can have small awakenings, the future of our species doesn’t have to be a grand project marked by the great upheavals of war and peace, revolution and backsliding, achieving greatness and losing it again, or playing the roles of oppressor and oppressed. One person at a time can awaken to reality. It will be enough. The mystery of being human has been hidden from each of us, which may be why it remains so tantalizing. We have never stopped being a self-created species. If we can create a world of glorious highs without being fully awake, imagine what we could do with our eyes wide open.