We are all aware of the challenges facing us as we enter together into the 21st Century:
World oil supplies are running out.
Global warming is transforming the Earth into a steamy greenhouse.
Even as our technology connects the world, ideological extremism, terrorism and militarism divide us as never before.
Headlines bombard us with news of war, famine, pestilence and death until we feel overwhelmed and unable to respond.
Time is running out...
This is not a book about the world’s problems. This
is a book about the thinking we used when creating the problems we face.
It offers powerful keys for unlocking some of the major “boxes” our thinking,
as a species, has been trapped within for millennia. Unlocking those
boxes and breaking free of the concepts around which we have organized
the present state of our world will allow us to return to the consideration
of global events with a new mind. From that new perspective, our
difficulties will be, if not always less serious, at least consistently
different from our current understanding. They won’t be the same
problems, because we will have changed. Our reality must follow.
Because of the transformation of our thinking, we will be free to design
and implement creative solutions to the challenges we face that will surprise
and delight us. Our global shift from stagnation to inspiration will
trans-form the world.
These keys work equally well for transforming our personal
lives. Our daily difficulties, from holding the wrong job (or not
having one at all), to fighting with our spouse, to lacking love, to financial
worries, spiritual emptiness, physical illness, or any of a million other
troubles in between, all share with the global challenges now facing our
species a single deep, common root – our beliefs about reality.
Whether we are aware of it or not, we experience every
moment of our lives within the framework of a complex set of personally-held
beliefs about what reality is, how it functions, who’s in charge, what
is possible within it – for ourselves, of course, then often with a very
different set of standards for others – plus a long, long list of accepted
limitations, of what is never, ever possible for ourselves or anyone around
us. These beliefs about reality are so deeply ingrained and all-encompassing
that we live within their enveloping embrace much the way we bustle all
day long through a thick blanket air and light and humidity and sound but
call it "empty space," going about our lives largely unaware that we have
any set beliefs about reality at all. We think reality actually is
the way we have come to define it, that it’s the same for everyone, everywhere,
and that it would continue to be that way if we, personally, stopped breathing
and seeing and sweating and listening tomorrow. We’ve got the world
all figured out, and within the context of how we understand things to
be, choosing amongst the limited options that context makes available to
us, we build the best lives for ourselves that we can.
Some people wind up princes, and some paupers.
Some build empires while others destroy them. Some find love while
others are lost to loneliness and rejection. Observed outcomes of
behavior often contradict our expectations regarding what is “right” or
“good” or “fair,” as when obviously “bad” people make fortunes bilking
folks we consider “good,” or when the promised freedom of material prosperity
winds up imprisoning us behind steel bars of “busyness,” overwork and debt.
But when faced with such contradictions, we most often hold even faster
to our beliefs, rejecting the evidence of our senses and refusing to believe
that things really are as they appear – surely the “bad guy” will get it
in the end, or maybe those “good people” aren’t so good after all.
And, of course, if we just work a little bit harder, it’s all bound to
pay off in the end…
If you take only one thing away from this book, let it
be this: Nothing – not one single thing – that you currently believe
about reality is true, at least not in any pure sense. Our deeply
held beliefs, especially about limitations – our own, other people’s, or
those binding the larger reality we all participate in – make up the confining
walls, floor and lid of the claustrophobic boxes we have been thinking
in for most of our lives, the very boxes out of which every problem in
our lives has emerged.
And we can’t solve our problems with the same thinking
we used when we created them. We need to unlock our boxes and break
free of the concepts around which we have organized our lives to date.
We need new minds.
This is a book of keys. Use them to open your “belief
box” and set your mind free, and your problems will be transformed.
Looking at our lives with new minds, we will come to see as obvious many
exciting, creative solutions to puzzles that once vexed us. We’ll
tap inner reservoirs of joy and satisfaction we never imagined could exist
within us, yet there they were all along, waiting patiently just outside
our boxes for us to discover them. Our personal shift from stagnation
to inspiration will trans-form our experience of ourselves and the world.
KEY ZERO
There are actually 11 keys in this book – the ten keys
advertised on the cover, plus a free bonus key I’m going to share with
you right here in this opening chapter. I call this opening key Key
Zero because, like the Hebrew letter Aleph, which, in Kabala, bears the
numerical value of zero – the infinite, non-manifested emptiness out of
which all manifestations arise – it both encircles and contains all the
other keys, acting as both the beginning and ending points of the journey.
Like a treasure map, all the destinations you will visit as you travel
are contained within Key Zero, along with all the “X’s” where you’ll dig
before you turn your sails homeward once again. Key Zero is a kind
of psychological/spiritual catalyst, a fundamental, baseline statement
about reality with the power to push the buried locks now limiting your
worldview up into the light, and to enable the keys described in the chapters
ahead to do their work of opening and release.
Key Zero is by no means original to me, or to The Simplest
Path. If your journey to encountering this book passed through almost
any variety of religious, spiritual, New Age or even psychotherapeutic
experience, study or practice, chances are you’ve heard it before – though
you may not have taken it seriously at the time.
Pay attention – here it comes!
Right now, this very moment, you are asleep. Even
if you are reading these words in broad daylight – sitting at your desk
or beside the kitchen table, your feet firmly planted on the floor, eyes
open, senses alert, feeling the weight of this book in your hands as sounds
of life rise and fall rhythmically around you – you are deeply asleep,
and dreaming furiously. The unique 3-D, Technicolor dream you are
spinning around yourself is your life, with all its dramas, successes and
failures, bliss and heartbreak, relationships, winnings, worries and woes.
Everyone else is asleep, and dreaming, too. All
our individual dream lives, taken together, create the world as we know
it – which, at least in part, explains why our global situation is always
such a mess. Billions of people are dreaming private dreams, all
the while mistaking their personal dream world for some external objective
reality everybody else lives in, too. And no one understands why
nobody ever seems to understand anybody…
This is not metaphor. This is fact.
Before you slam the covers of this book, thinking, Oh
no! Not that old New Age saw again…, let me explain exactly what I mean
by the word dream. You’ll discover that this idea that we’re all
asleep and dreaming, and that our perception of the world around us is
just plain wrong, is not only not far-fetched, its literal truth is supported
by both of the great twin engines of human exploration of reality in our
time – Religion/Spirituality and Science.
LIFE IS BUT A DREAM
At least some whisper of this core psychological truth lies at and unifies the deepest roots of all the world’s Major Religions:
Aboriginal/Spiritist: According to Australian Aboriginal tradition, our world was dreamed into existence by god-like ancestors who now reside in the Sacred Dreamtime, the land we visit during our own nocturnal journeys, a realm by definition more real than our own for having given ours birth. Many indigenous African, Indo-European, Native American and other original culture spiritual tra-ditions contain similar beliefs.
Buddhism: The Buddha taught:
Thus shall you think of all this fleeting world,
A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream;
A flash of lightning in a summer cloud,
A flickering lamp, a phantom, a dream.
– Diamond Sutra 32
Christianity: From the Bible:
Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.
– 1 Corinthians, 13:12
Hinduism: From the Upanishads:
This whole world the illusion maker projects
out of this [Brahman].
And in it by illusion the other is confined.
Now, one should know that Nature is illusion,
And that the Mighty Lord is the illusion maker.
– Svetasvatara 4.9-10
Islam: The Prophet (SAW) once said: “People are sleeping; only when they die do they wake up.” In his classic work, "The Bezels of Wisdom,” Sufi mystic Ibn Arabi expanded on this passage, adding that “The whole of life is a dream within a dream.”
Verification of the physical reality of Key Zero is also to be found in the conclusions drawn by a growing list of modern scientific disciplines:
Quantum Physicists tells us that reality is mostly vibrating empty space, sculpted on the tiniest scale by waves of energy in motion, by "uncertain," "fuzzy" and "spooky" subatomic particles that bubble up out of nothing and return to it in a “reality dance” bearing no resemblance whatsoever to the macro-world we experience with our senses.
Consciousness research proves that “the world,” as we each uniquely perceive it, is but a virtual simulation wholly constructed within our individual brains, an internal representation of our immediate environment spun from waves of energy (light, sound, smell, etc) gathered by our sense organs – a short-range, personal interpretation of reality that excludes many energies just as much a part of the makeup of our environment, such as ultraviolet and infrared light, magnetism or gravity, for which we have no physical sensory apparatus.
One important branch of evolutionary biology observes that we may all be little more than "meat puppets" for our DNA, "survival machines" so constructed by our “selfish gene” masters as to experience our selves and our environment in whatever way works best to drive us toward successfully spreading our genetic materials far and wide across the landscape. If our personal (mis)-interpretation of reality grants us a procreative advantage, genes run with it – however deluded those interpretations of reality may be. Survival, not accuracy is the determinant.
The man behind “selfish gene" theory is a British biologist
named Richard Dawkins. In the final chapter of his 1976 classic study
of genetic evolution, The Selfish Gene, Dawkins hypothesized the existence
of a new likely player in the grand drama of the human evolutionary journey
– the meme. An amalgam of the Greek Mimeme, meaning, "something imitated,"
and the French word même, relating the new term to the function of
memory, a meme (rhymes with gene) is, by its most basic definition, a unit
of cultural information that is transmitted from one mind to another by
way of words, imitated actions, written instructions, advertisements, etc.
Examples of memes sited by Dawkins include popular music,
catch-phrases, clothing fashions, artistic and architectural methodology,
etc. Where genes "leap" physically from body to body through the
vehicle of sexual reproduction, memes propagate between human brains by
"leaping" from mind to mind by way of imitation. He gives the example
of one scientist encountering a good idea and sharing it with his colleagues,
writing about it in professional journals, endorsing it in his lectures.
Others take the idea to heart, similarly championing it within their own
circle of influence, and soon the idea spreads exponentially to become
commonly accepted "fact." This same pattern visibly drives the majority
of human popular culture, politics and religious belief. Dawkins
warns that such "leaping memes" should not be construed as mere metaphor,
but as living structures within the brain, which, according to N.K. Humphrey,
who reviewed an early draft of Dawkins' text, likely propagate in a way
closely analogous to the method biological viruses use to parasitize the
genetic mechanism of a host cell. Humphrey offers the example of
the meme for "belief in life after death," which he sees as having literally
parasitized the minds of billions of men and women the world over, generation
after generation, for all of recorded history.
In the introduction to his landmark book Virus of the
Mind, Richard Brodie greatly expanded on Humphrey's suggestion of the parasitic
nature of memes, labeling them mind viruses, and concluding that they control
an appalling percentage of human behavior and belief, accounting for everything
from harmless fads like miniskirts and slang to such large-scale social
ills as oppressive cycles of poverty, the appeal of youth gangs, and the
success of Doomsday cults like the Branch Davidians or Heaven's Gate.
In the decades following the original publication of
Dawkins’ theory, a full-blown science of memes, called memetics (rhymes
with “genetics”), has dramatically extended the original thesis, establishing
a broad-based and respected theoretical and empirical science studying
the replication, spread and evolution of memes. Exactly what memes
are, and how they collaborate in our brains to create and direct our illusory
experience of reality is the subject of Chapter Two.
But to understand what I mean, for the purposes of this
book, by the term dream, please take note in the brief discussion above
that a meme is a thought or belief which enters our thinking through –
most often unconscious – imitation, and which then lives independently,
even parasitically, in our brains, thereafter influencing, and even controlling,
our every thought, choice, word and deed. We were not born with any
of the opinions or ideas that currently shape our worldview. None
of the “meaning” we assign to reality by way of our beliefs is intrinsic
to who we, or the world, truly are – or at least were, before our memes
got hold of us. It’s all “added on” through imitation of the far-from-objective
opinions, tastes, prejudices and beliefs of other human beings. Once
inside our brains, memes weave an illusory world – and an illusory us (a
notion we’ll explore in greater depth when we survey Key Question #3, Who
Do You Think You Are? in Part II of this book) – that we mistake, and usually
fairly early in life, exchange for, the real world and selves we were born
to know and be.
Thirty years of memetic research, at least a century
of cumulative findings in physics, biology and a host of other sciences,
and thousands of years of recorded human spiritual experience across the
globe work together to support the understanding that every individual
human being’s experience of reality can be divided into two base components:
1. What we and the world really are, intrinsically, measurably, before any opinions, judgments, beliefs or even thoughts about ourselves or the world are added on.
2. What we think about that first component – our opinions, our beliefs, our assigned “meanings” – in short, our memes.
And memes are not intrinsic to either us or the world.
They do not accurately describe the world or what is possible for us as
living beings within it. They don’t even try. As gene-like
entities with a “selfish” agenda of propagation in the “memepool,” subjective
categor-izations like “fact” or “fiction,” or the mental, emotional or
physical impact of beliefs on the quality of our human lives are irrelevant
to memes in the pursuit of their larger goal of getting copied and passed
on. Memes are myriad and colorful threads of illusion that achieve
their proliferation by weaving a sometimes beautiful, some-times horrifying,
but always false, or at least incomplete tapestry of pseudo-reality in
our minds.
That tapestry is the dream I am addressing in this book.
The unique pseudo-reality in each of our individual brains is the dream
of our life. All of our individual pseudo-realities working together
spin the dream of the planet. Real reality is what’s left when we awaken
from both.
Life is but a dream – a literal, meme-woven, hypnotic
dream from which we must choose to awaken if we wish to achieve true personal
freedom, see global trans-formation occur in our lifetimes, and reclaim
our ultimate cosmic destiny as human beings before the illusory ills listed
at the beginning of this chapter succeed in snuffing out our dormant potential.
This book contains keys to awakening. Awakening
from our personal dream shatters the solid “box” of limitation memes have
built around our lives, and frees us to fluidly craft our personalities,
environments, relationships, careers, etc. as an artist paints a landscape
or a sculptor teases form from formless clay. All of us awakening
together from the shared dream of the planet will mark the birth of our
species out of our current global nightmare of decline into a limitless
future literally beyond our present ability to imagine, even in our "wildest
dreams," indeed.