From our first gentle stirrings that things may not be
as they seem, to our personal enlightenment, to the eventual awakening
of the whole of Humanity and our quantum leap as a species into a shared
destiny beyond present human imagining, waking up from the meme-dream of
life is a gradual process with at least four broad but clearly discernable
stages.
STAGE ONE:
INDIVIDUAL-SLEEPING (PEACEFULLY)
I have labeled the first stage of awakening, the stage
at which the vast majority of Humanity functions on a daily basis, Individual-Sleeping
(Peacefully). This is the stage of the meme-possessed dreamer, sleepwalking
through life, perhaps having mildly, or even profoundly, experienced the
insight that something’s gone terribly wrong here… regarding the state
of the world or of their individual lives, but still mostly satisfied to
blame themselves or others for perceived inequities, thus enabling them
to remain reasonably attached to, and comfortable in, pseudo-reality as
they know it.
But Individual-Sleeping (Peacefully) is no simple state
of mental stupor. The sleeping human brain is at all times incredibly
active.
Every day, our brains pass through four levels
of functioning, or states of consciousness, from the sleep of nighttime
dreaming Delta Consciousness, to the illusory waking dream of our normal
daytime Beta Con-sciousness, to the timeless Alpha Consciousness of daydreaming,
TV watching, relaxation and some forms of meditation, to the visionary,
twilight state Theta Consciousness we pass through briefly as we fall asleep
at night, and then again in the morning as we move back toward Beta.
In each of these states of consciousness, our brains reshuffle the “reality
deck,” providing us with a very different experience of the world.
Think of waking, night dreaming, daydreaming and mystic
vision modes of consciousness as similar “games” with wildly differing
“rules.” The rules define what shape the external sensory input and
internal memes available to us in any given moment will take when our brains
animate them into our personal 3-D, internal simulation of reality.
When we are in Beta Consciousness, our brains weave available
stimuli into our daytime world of homes and families and jobs, and all
their concomitant tedium or drama. In Delta Consciousness, the same
stimuli generate the sometimes dull, often fantastic worlds of our sleeping
dreams – we fly, fall from skyscrapers without dying, or meet creatures
of legend. Twilight state Theta Consciousness can turn those very
same stimuli into crystalline visions that make mud of ordinary dreaming,
or physically awaken us to what appears to the eye in every way to be the
solid, rational, waking Beta world, except with angels or aliens beside
us, teaching great truths or perpetrating atrocities. In relaxed
Alpha Consciousness, gentle whispers of insight guide us to reconsider
our experiences of all the other states and intuit an overall "meaning”
or “purpose” for our lives.
In each case, the “world” we experience is constructed
from the same constituent parts – external information gathered by our
senses (which includes bodily sensations, like digestion, itching or pain),
mixed with memes, as “shuffled” according to the divergent rules of differing
“games.” Though science generally extols Beta Con-sciousness as the
highest state for measuring reality, with various religions/spiritualities
elevating one or more of the others, in fact, no one Stage One reality
simulation is more real, sacred or valuable than any of the others.
For the most part, we have been trained by our memetic
domestication, which includes, in the West, the supremacy of science, to
accept our daytime Beta perceptions as the only true description of reality,
and never to trust the content of our nighttime dreams, intuitions received
in moments of unfocused relaxation, or direct mystical experiences.
But the truth is that all these states of consciousness, from deep dreaming
to full wakefulness (in the ordinary, daytime Beta sense) are of the exact
same substance. They are all aspects of the dream as defined in this
book, meme-infected illusions spun up by possessed brains, which are in
no way connected to, or accurately descriptive of, real reality.
At the Individual-Sleeping (Peacefully) stage of develop-ment,
there are two important lessons we can draw from a careful consideration
of our sluggish and deluded daily journeys through Alpha, Beta, Delta and
Theta states of consciousness.
The first lies in applying the understanding that all
four states, at this initial stage of awakening, are equally illusory to
help discern the “bait” of scientific, pseudo-scientific, Traditional
religious and New Age spiritual memeplexes dropping daily lines into our
"cranial lakes,” seeking to reel us in for energetic exploitation.
Taking anyone’s side in the debate over which state of con-sciousness best
describes reality is a pointless distraction from the real work of awakening.
All such philosophical culture wars – logic VS feeling, religion VS science,
prayer VS meditation, scripture VS revelation, or the question of whether
dreams, intuition or reason best reveal our “true selves,” etc. – are memes
battling memes, a lose-lose struggle from which we can never benefit by
joining the fray. Observe all such “lures” through the lens of this
understanding, and stay focused on the daily work of identifying and eliminating
parasitic memes.
The second lesson to be found in a close study of our
personal experience of Alpha, Beta, Delta and Theta states of consciousness
lies in awakening to what we are missing. Using 100% of our brains
(though at minimum “wattage”), passing every day through four wildly differing
states of consciousness, we spend, at most, two thirds of the 24 hours
in any given day in focused Beta Consciousness, the daytime waking state
most people identify as the only real reality. Factor waking-hour,
unfocused Alpha consciousness entertainment activities like watching TV,
playing video games, listening to music and daydreaming into the mix and
that percentage drops to half, a third, and often even less.
So, where did the rest of our lives go? Why do
we remain, on a day to day basis, mostly oblivious to its absence?
What are our brains up to while we look away? How much of our full
potential as human beings lies unexamined and undeveloped behind this strange
iron curtain of our own habitual inattention? A driving hunger to
discover and reclaim this lost potential can become a powerful motivator
rousing us from our peaceful Stage One slumber.
Freed from the constant energy drain of meme parasitization,
our re-energized brains can become powerful tools for grasping and willfully
crafting a personal and planetary destiny we cannot even begin to imagine
while mesmerized by the static, lackluster dream of Stage One sleep.
But so long as we remain content to disregard three of the four states
our brains pass through every day, along with the time we spend in them,
and to operate in the fraction of our lives we embrace as real with a 90%
deficit in psychic energy (because memes are draining us dry), direct experience
of such higher states of consciousness will forever elude us, no matter
how many books we read, Masters we follow, or belief systems we try on
like shoes in a department store, looking for something that will fit us
just as we are.
“Just as we are,” and, consequently, the world “just
as it is,” is the dream. To awaken, we must change. Only by
awakening can we change the world.
STAGE TWO:
INDIVIDUAL-SLEEPING (FITFULLY)
Stage Two: Individual-Sleeping (Fitfully) typifies the
“seeker,” the individual for whom the insight something’s gone terribly
wrong here… has twisted the world into an unnerving question mark.
A person experiencing this stage continues to live his life pretty much
as he did when he was sleeping peacefully, but without contentment.
Recognizing on a deep level that things are not as they seem, that reality
is a trickster, and finding himself unable to look away from the contradictions
between his expectations and experience, or to ignore mysterious synchronicities
or brief but transitory mystical visions, he wanders frantically through
one illusory dreamscape after another, obsessively searching here, there
and every-where for THE ANSWER.
Whether as a consequence of ground-shaking life events,
intentional introspection, an encounter with genuine, transformative truth
like, but by no means limited to, The Simplest Path, or even simple memetic
imitation of other “seekers” or their writings, the fitful sleeper finds
himself in the uncomfortable position of having at least partially seen
through and broken the hold of his major childhood memeplexes, thereby
liberating a measure of psychic energy memes had previously consumed, but
so filled in their absence with existential anxiety, with not knowing what
is valuable or how to conduct himself without the black and white guidelines
his overthrown memes once provided, that he quickly proceeds to expend
all his reclaimed psychic energy hopping from teacher to teacher, belief
system to belief system, lifestyle to imitated lifestyle, wrapping himself
ever more tightly in a warm blanket of promising new memes until he finds
his way back to a peaceful, comforting relationship with the dream.
Now he has “spiritual dreams,” in which he plays the
self-flattering role of the enlightened devotee, the guru, the sincere
student of Traditional or New Age wisdom. He may be the church-going
"Prodigal Son" who, having wandered for a time from his “spiritual home,”
now breathes a contented sigh at returning to the familiar embrace of “God’s
family.” Alternately, he may dream one branch of science, school
of philosophy, alternate lifestyle or political or social movement promises
to cure all the world’s ills, and relax into the role of researcher, scholar,
activist, organizer.
For a while, he is happy. But sooner or later his
expectations and experience become sufficiently dis-sonant that the realization
something’s gone terribly wrong here… dawns again, his reverie is shaken,
and the happy dreamer returns to tossing and turning, to overthrowing memes,
to grasping franticly for replacements, to peaceful slumber in the comforting
arms of new gods.
The difference between Individual-Sleeping (Fitfully)
consciousness and genuine awakening is the difference between dreaming
we are awake – especially on those
nights when our bladders are full to bursting, and our
dreams consist of passing one defective toilet after another as our frustration
escalates – and actually open-ing our eyes, throwing off sheets and
blankets, and taking care of business. The Stage Two dreamer’s rhythmic
oscillation between a wakefulness he can never quite secure and surrender
to the dream that he can never long maintain robs him of peace in either
realm. Millions of people spend their whole adult lives bound beneath
the razor-sharp pendulum of restless Stage Two sleep, receiving painful,
energy-draining cuts with every swing of the axe, psychic wounds of disappointment
and betrayal that seldom find time to fully heal before the tortuous blade
returns.
STAGE THREE:
INDIVIDUAL-AWAKE
Stage Three: Individual-Awake marks the first level of
development that is recognizable as genuine awakening. The Stage
Two “seeker” has intellectually and emotion-ally recognized the illusory
nature of pseudo-reality, has unearthed working instructions for shaking
off his personal meme-dream, and has managed, through their diligent application,
to reclaim sufficient energy to verify realty’s illusory nature through
personal experience, and thereby to step his brain up to a permanently
brighter level of illumination.
This is where the 3-way light bulb metaphor breaks down.
Within the very broad spectrum of Stage Three Awakening, there are a potentially
unlimited number of attainable intermediary “wattage-levels” that would
all qualify as awakened, and individuals, once they have entered this Stage,
will continue to grow, move and change amongst them in pursuit of continued
evolution.
Stage Three is the realm of the Bodhisattvas, the Zen
Masters, the Rinpoches, Yogis, World Teachers, Saints and Saviors produced,
if only rarely, by every religious/spiritual tradition on Earth.
Any attempt to rank such individuals according an externally-imposed system
of relative value (Was Jesus more enlightened than Buddha? Was Paramahansa
Yogananda more awake than Krishnamurti?) is a meme-inspired waste of energy,
a pointless “my guru can beat up your guru” distraction that has all too
often succeeded in derailing the unsteady quests of Stage Two “seekers.”
What matters far more than measuring any difference in
the specific “wattage” of historical or present day Avatars is identifying
the one thing that every en-lightened human being in every tradition and
era has in common – a human potential as available to every person reading
these words as it was to Jesus, Mohamed or Buddha. Having verified
the illusory nature of pseudo-reality through direct personal experience,
the Stage Three individual’s relationship to the dream is forever changed.
Where the Stage One dreamer takes life at face value, never questioning
the directions of his memetic controllers, and the Stage Two “seeker” accepts
intellectually that there is more to life than meets they eye, but repeatedly
fails to break through and experience his conjecture as real and convincing,
the person entering Stage Three: Individual-Awake consciousness has done
the work to cut away sufficient enslaving bonds of memetic control that
he succeeds in crossing an irreversible energetic boundary into the world
beyond the bubble of his personal meme-dream.
For the sake of clarity, let me spell out that this is
not a crossing from one physical world, natural or supernatur-al, into
another. It is a dramatic shift in the way the human brain perceives
the one world we all share when supplied with sufficient energy to leap
into a higher mode of functioning. The awakened individual directly
per-ceives both external and internal reality as it is, beyond the limits
set by his imposed memetic meanings, judgments or categorizations.
And what he finds beyond his personal meme-dream is the
dream of the planet. Having awakened individually, the Stage Three
human discovers the collective dream continuing just as it was, without
so much as a pause for breath, running full-throttle all around him, and
himself as unremittingly ensnared within it as he had been by his private
dream...
Yet, nothing is the same. With Stage Three awakening
come several critical enhancements to the individual’s perception of dream
"reality":
He is no longer at the center. While trapped within
our personal dream-worlds, the on-going narrative our brains weave from
the sensory information coming into, and the personal memes possessing,
our minds is inevitably a story about us. We are always personally
center-stage in the dramas of our own lives, with what we think of as “the
world” being a picture constructed by connecting the tiny number of “dots”
of infor-mation we perceive to effect us directly. Events not impacting
us personally, we filter out or minimize, which is why a romantic breakup
can be experienced as a world-shattering disaster, while an earthquake
in a distant country that kills tens of thousands rates, at most, a charitable
donation before vanishing altogeth-er from our personal radar. We
take in such distant events much the way we politely half-listen to the
account of a friend’s nighttime dream – once we have measured the relevance
of the dream to our own lives (Did my friend dream about me? What
does the dream say about what he thinks of me?), we seldom linger long
on the narrative or change our beliefs or behavior based on what we’ve
heard. Instead, we quickly return to our obsessive self-focus, perhaps
recounting, in exchange, a dream of our own – to which our friend will,
at best, politely half-listen…
In stark contrast, the newly awakened Stage Three individual,
while he may not immediately perceive whether the collective dream possess
a physical or psychic center at all, and if it does, quite where it lies,
will, immediately upon making the leap from Stage Two to Stage Three consciousness,
know one thing with crystal clarity – if a center exists, it’s nowhere
near where he’s standing! He sees that the words and actions of other
people, which he used to take so personally, have nothing really to do
with him; people are acting out their own dreams and dramas, and relating
to him largely as to a phantasm of their own creation. He recognizes
that the great drama of the global dream, with all its violence and compassion,
its political and economic upheavals, its brutal wars and passionate outcries
for peace and justice rise and fall around him without reference to his
personal existence, in no way concerned with his happiness or misery, and
utterly oblivious to his individual fate.
Life becomes impersonal in a way which, to those still
caught up in the self-involved flattery of individual dreaming, might appear
to be unendurably cold. But, in fact, the exact opposite is true
– the inarguable personal experience of his own miniscule size and significance
within the collective dream frees the awakened individual from all the
previously unrecog-nized shackles in which believing himself to be the
most significant being in the universe once held him. No more must
he stay continually puffed up, investing most of his energy in defending
his sense of self-importance. He no longer has to be God, or be like
God, or even much think about God one way or the other. He knows
that if such a being as God exists, only God’s opinion of God matters anyway,
so there’s no point wasting precious psychic energy on such dalliances.
He may laugh to remember how, while he slept, he dreamed of crashing heroically
through the towering fortress of lower consciousness; now awake, he knows
himself to be so small that, in reality, he has escaped psychic imprisonment
by slipping, unnoticed, through the tiniest keyhole – a knowledge generating
a gratitude and joy unparalleled in the personal dream-world he inhabited
just moments before.
He is no longer controlled by memes. Having broken
the hypnosis of Stages One and Two sleep, the awakened Stage Three individual
sees memes for what they are, and because of it, they no longer have power
over his mind. The dream of the planet continues around him, but
he does not mistake it for objective reality. He knows it to be a
collective dream spun up by billions of meme-possessed human brains, all
acting out dramas largely beyond their control. He becomes, for the
first time, capable of true compassion, free to echo Jesus' words from
the cross, "Forgive them, for they know not what they do…," because he
perceives as observable, objective fact that they do not. His heart
breaks to witness the unremitting veil of suffering memes have wrapped
around the whole Earth, twisting every human being, and the natural world
through human machinations, into damaged and diseased dream-caricatures
of their full potential. His mission shifts from sole focus on achieving
personal enlightenment to the larger goal of awakening the world.
He has gained the potential to willfully shape the dream. As he now knows the dream of the planet, in fact, to be a dream, so he recognizes every facet of his own self and life within that larger dream to be composed of "dreamstuff" as well, and therefore no longer subject to the limitations with which he once allowed memes to enshroud his understanding. Individually awake within the collective dream, he is freed to endlessly reinvent himself and the circumstances of his life. Reality becomes malleable in varying degrees, depending on his continued evolution within the spectrum of Stage Three awakening. At barest minimum, he is liberated to choose his own values and intentionally restructure his character in accord-ance with his goals and ideals. Where once he was weak, he assumes strength. Cowardice is easily transformed into courage, timidity into confidence, selfishness into compassion, foolishness into wisdom. At peak development, the collective dream’s sub-jugation to his personal will makes available to the awakened Stage Three individual all the miracles and magic of legend, from the manifestation of physical objects out of thin air, to the power to calm storms, communicate telepathically, be in two places at once, walk on water or through walls, etc.
The persistence of the collective dream once his personal
dream has ended reveals a great truth – all Humanity functions together
as one interconnected "super-brain" that must awaken en mass before the
dream of the planet can be dispelled. It hints, as well, at the existence
of even larger organisms – the biosphere, the Earth, the solar system,
the Cosmos – in which humans may be complexly embedded, and from whose
evolutionary cycles and destiny our species' fate can never be divorced.
Inspired by this unifying vision, he commits himself to the pursuit of
three simultaneous goals: crafting an ideal physical life for himself within
the planetary dream, maximizing his personal Stage Three evolution, and
working ceaselessly toward the individual and mass awakening of his fellow
human beings.
STAGE FOUR:
THE LIMITLESS FRONTIER
Many processes in Nature unfold in stages marked by clear
"tipping points," a term first popularized by author Malcolm Gladwell in
his book The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference.
Gladwell observed that incremental changes within a system tend to accrue
without noticeable effect for long periods of time, until they surpass
a certain critical threshold, at which point they "boil over" like hot
milk in a saucepan, creating massive change that spreads with lightning
speed in every direction at once, often wholly transforming the original
system in an instant. We have already seen that the gradual work
of identifying and eliminating parasitic memes from our individual brains
follows the “tipping point” model, offering only slight benefit while we
struggle, potentially for many years, to reclaim psychic energy in hopes
of activating Stage Three consciousness, but then revolutionizing our entire
experience of reality in a heartbeat once sufficient "wattage" is achieved.
I have named the Fourth Stage of awakening The Limitless
Frontier, first, because it has yet to manifest on this planet, so any
attempt to describe it in particulars would be purely speculative, thus
making it, by definition, a true frontier, and secondly because, if all
Humanity functions together as one interconnected "super-brain," as the
unifying vision of Stage Three awakening suggests, it seems reasonable
to predict that the awakening of Humanity's communal "global mind" will
follow a similar “tipping point” pattern as can be seen in the lives of
individuals. Exactly what Stage Four consciousness – the mass awakening
of Humanity, the permanent overthrow of our memetic parasitization, and
the final dissipation of the dream of the planet – will look like when
it arrives is anybody's guess. But we can reasonably anticipate,
based on what we know about the evolution of individual consciousness,
that it will likely involve an exponentially greater transformation of
our experience of reality than we realized when transitioning from Stage
Two sleep to Stage Three awakening. So, just as our personal limitations
are undone when we step-up the “wattage” powering our individual brains,
so an awakened Stage Four Humanity can surely expect to discover, awaiting
us beyond the "tipping point" of our collective human meme-dream, a truly
electrifying horizon of limitless possibility to be explored. We
will live in a new world where literally nothing is the same, a world in
which the list of sad 21st Century global challenges with which this book
began will melt away like a forgotten dream before the inspiring vision
of our collective cosmic human destiny.
Our future looks bright, indeed!
But beyond this simple statement, there is little to
be gained from any extended speculation into the presently unknowable.
The Limitless Frontier will open to us when we reach it. It cannot
be jumped to, skipping any of the intermediary stages. Before we
can embrace Stage Four consciousness, all Humanity must awaken. Before
all Humanity can awaken, we must each take responsibility for doing so
individually.
THE SIMPLEST PATH
Everyone is familiar with the famous quotation from Taoist
sage Lao Tzu, “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”
In most areas of life, this ancient wisdom proves golden. But if
we view the process of global awakening – defined as the arousal of sleeping
Stage One and Two humans to Stage Three awakening in sufficient number
to surpass the global “tipping point” and awaken the world – as a journey
of a thousand miles, we are setting ourselves up for overwhelm before we
even begin. When we imagine such a monumental voyage lying between
us and the achievement of our goal, who could blame us for reconsidering
that first step? For marching, instead, to the nearest meme-marketplace
for a quick-fix of pseudo-enlightenment?
In truth, the journey from Humanity’s present mass sleep
to total global awakening is a journey of only two steps. Our future
as a species depends on individual humans completing this brief passage
millions, and potentially billions, of times before we reach our collective
“tipping point," but the good news is that each of us, personally, must
make the journey only once. And of the two steps involved, only one
requires effort on our part.
Awakening may not be easy, but it is very, very simple.
Step One: Identify and eliminate the parasitic
memes now controlling our minds, thereby reclaiming sufficient psychic
energy to step-up our brains to awakened Stage Three consciousness.
This first volume in the The Simplest Path series is conceived as a bare-bones
“how-to” manual for accomplishing that transition.
Step Two: Wait for the “tipping point.” While
we wait, there are lots of fun and interesting activities with which to
occupy our time, including guiding others through their introduction to,
and achievement of, Step One, crafting the unlimited, ideal life our achievement
of Stage Three consciousness makes available to us, and applying a variety
of spiritual technologies drawn from religious, metaphysical and scientific
traditions the world over, but stripped of their misleading memetic padding,
to expand the scope of our personal evolution within the broad spectrum
of Stage Three awakening. The achievement of all these goals and
more will be the subject of the second volume in this series.