When I first saw that the “I,” the “me,” the alleged General Manager, the doer and thinker, the Command Center of the Universe is an idea that does not exist as I thought it did, I looked around and described what I saw. The best way I could paint a word picture was to use the image of a computer virus. I could see how this belief in separateness distorts the view of what is happening; I could see how much it affects human life. I could see how this belief in separateness is not necessary, how it is diminishing the whole experience of life to a contracted, ill, uneasy, and tiny space—a painful place, one that feels wrong. This thinking is like a prison without a door. I saw the simplicity of life and the struggle and difficulty it takes to see it, when all the while it is right in front of our noses, as close as it gets, the obviousness of what is.
I wrote down what I saw and named this disease of the human condition the “I Virus.”
Don’t take it too seriously. It is just a metaphor.
Imagine life as an organic computer system governed by software, in which each piece of hardware is run by a specific program. All cats behave like cats, as their programming dictates. All monkeys behave like monkeys, and all humans behave like humans—only the human software has been corrupted by the I Virus.
The I Virus corrupts the very core of the program, the main intelligence, the organizing structure. Human beings have lost direct access to the intelligence program, even though connectedness and oneness are the natural ways of being.
The I Virus overrides the program, and as a result the infected human thinks that it is the “I,” the person, the self who owns and runs his separate piece of life. He assumes the self is something real, something special and very important that must survive. Infected humans feel disconnected from life, and they can be destructive to themselves and the environment.
The I Virus installs itself early in childhood, bypassing the immune system so there is not even a shadow of a doubt in any human’s thinking (software) that there is an “I” at all. Because “I” makes itself at home in the mind, it is taken to be the organism’s default program. The virus is a bit like Windows, OS X, or Linux—an operating system.
“I” exists in the mind as a separating agent. Resistance to what is, is the signature behavior of the I Virus. From an infected point of view, there is “I” on one side and everything else on the other side. One, separate from all, disconnected from everything else, in opposition to all; one who needs to fight for survival. One who needs to always be right, in control, safe, accepted, and loved.
Imagine that you put your finger in the ocean; you take it out and there is a drop of water hanging off your fingertip. You give the drop a name and a story. That’s a separate entity now, a “me” that thinks, I’m a drop, I’m not the ocean, and I am the nicest, most important drop. Look at me, me, me, me. This is what the story of a separate entity, an “I,” looks like: a separated self who owns his or her story—past, present, and future. An “I” who lives life and makes things happen. An “I” who has problems and little time to solve them.
If you see yourself as a separate being to whom life is happening, as one who is trying to keep everything under control, you are infected. If you think that something is wrong with you or the world around you, you have the I Virus. It can show up as fearful thoughts and worries about how you are too much of this and too little of that; it makes you think life is unfair and that all should be different. If you are trying to escape your present conditions and are looking for a happy tomorrow, you have the I Virus.
The I Virus is very clever; it attaches itself to your very core, to the operating system files of human software, and creates a lens through which humans see the world. It becomes the master organizer of experience, and it’s through this process that suffering begins as the never-ending illusion of “not enough” in varying degrees and stages. Suffering mixes a cocktail from the heavy emotions of sadness, hopelessness, despair, clinging, shame, anger, and guilt. You name it. And as you drink that cocktail, you end up feeling like I don’t want this, get me out of here! Not again… Why me?
Infected humans live in constant frustration, fighting unwanted intense emotions. Their main fears are of death, nothingness, nonexistence, lack of control, pain, and bad things happening in the future. From these, other fears are spawned, and, like a spider’s web, fear connects to all areas of the infected human’s life. Another great fear is, paradoxically, the fear of life, the fear of living and loving freely.
Self-centered humans always feel like something is wrong with them. They compare their assumed selves to other assumed selves and try to become better, improved, and more like someone else all the time. The feeling of wrongness comes from the deep knowing that there is no separation, but the I Virus never allows any kind of questioning of the existence of “I.” It’s just not in the programming. Such questioning can’t happen by accident.
Infected humans know that there is something wrong with the “me,” but they do not see what it is exactly. They think that happiness is connected to the quality of “I,” so they try to improve themselves, to become a better I, an I who is always right and wise beyond measure. They think that they have an ego; they feel that happiness is somewhere outside, that it has to come from someone or something else, that there is someone or something out there that can give it to them—and that they have a right to it, whatever it is.
What do humans infected with the I Virus want the most? Attention, energy from others, praise, compassion, understanding, love, and…peace, even though there is a great fear of peace. Peace, in fact, feels threatening.
The antidote to this madness is truth. Truth is seen by looking at experience, at what is actually happening right here, right now, in experience, underneath all thoughts.
Humans who become free of the virus are plugged back into the main power supply—life. They no longer need to feed on the energy of other humans. Some people call this “enlightenment.” I’d say it’s more like en-Life-enment.
Once enlifened, humans slowly or suddenly come back to their natural state, free from neediness and dissatisfaction, and find themselves out of the drama, out of “not enough,” and look around with fresh eyes. Everything is the same but looks different. There is lightness and a feeling as if some heavy baggage was dropped. The story changes. Truth is realized. Truth is recognized. The symptoms of the I Virus start to loosen up and eventually, in time, disappear.
Let’s imagine for a second (please don’t take this too seriously) that the I Virus is a small code that attaches itself, unnoticed, to the core human life program, just like a malicious computer program that gets into the operating system without your knowledge and damages the machine. Some computer viruses can replicate themselves and use a lot of memory, bringing the system to a halt. Some attach to your e-mails and spread to other machines, bypassing security. In a similar way, the I Virus takes control of the Infinite Intelligence Program (life itself) and makes the host think that he or she is a separate self. This new “self” comes with the illusion of free choice.
In natural life, what is free choice? For example, there is the seed of a tree containing a genetic code that activates itself when the requirements and conditions for growth are met—soil, water, heat, light, air. The seed contains all of the tree’s information, which is deployed at the right time. Now what choice does the tree have? To be a tree or to not be a tree… ? A tree is always a tree, not a bee or a bird. In whatever form or shape the tree comes, it is dependent upon genetic code and environmental conditions.
Infected humans think that they are self-regulating managers who can manipulate life and have independent choice. These people think that it is up to them to decide what they are and what they want to be. They compare themselves to others and follow those they want to emulate. Whole fashions and followings are born. Suffering arises when a voice in the head says, I have a choice. But life shows us that it is not like that. No matter what humans want, all they can ever get is what life brings to this present moment.
Choices like whether or not to have a pizza or a green smoothie are just preferences determined by past experience in a given situation. Everything is dependent on everything else. Choices to study or to work are not up to the human; they are decided by the pattern, by the software code that runs the human. Skills and talents are not up to the human; no matter how much one likes to sing, if talent is not there, the song may be a funny noise or an annoying sound (as seen on TV talent shows). Only infected humans feel that independent choice is real. The free human completely surrenders to what is and is at peace with the flow of life. He or she no longer sees separation. Actions are taken without owning them. Everything that happens is okay.
Infected humans cannot control life, even though they believe deeply that they can and that they must be able to. One day, they hope, everything will be just as they want it. Permanently. Happy forever. They will be at peace when all wishes and desires are met. It will happen one day in the happy tomorrow. The hope is so strong. The mind dreams endless what-if scenarios and creates hope and desire as well as fear—fear that a desired outcome may never happen. But if you look at nature, there is no such thing as hope. Hope is the life preserver that the drowning human tries to grab. Hope is a symptom of delusion; it’s mind-fog, a glorified hypnotic thought, the opposite of hopelessness.
Infected humans want something else all the time. They are the flow, but the I Virus in the mind says otherwise. People want to choose what is best for themselves, but how can they ever know what is best? From the point of view of people who believe they are separate, it’s definitely not what is that would be best for them.
The solution to the I Virus? The surgical removal of it, one human at a time, by running an antivirus program that goes through the files, destroying and deleting the infected parts. Then the system can be started afresh.
To start the healing, all you need to do is look with honesty and courage into the truth, into the obvious.
There is no “you” that you think you are. There is flow of life—effortless, spontaneous—happening by itself, right here, right now. Sensations are happening, thoughts are passing by; they are not your thoughts; there is no thinker. The thinker isn’t someone special—the thinker is nothing but the thought.