The Logic of Nonduality, the Nature of Ego and the Human Condition

The logic of nonduality simply says that the true nature of the perceiver cannot be some perceivable thing that the perceiver can perceive. The kind of logic that we’re talking about here is mathematical logic, like the mathematical logic that operates inside a computer. The reason mathematical logic is the operative kind of logic is because everything that the perceiver can perceive in its own holographic world is just like whatever appears in a computer-generated virtual reality. This is a quantum computer, which allows for the expression of potentiality and the possibility of choice, and so the mathematical logic is a bit more complicated than a deterministic classical computer, but we’re still talking about mathematical logic. The important point about mathematical logic is that computer generated logical statements can be proven to be true or false.

An excellent example of this kind of proof are the Godel incompleteness theorems, which prove that any consistent set of computational rules can never prove their own logical consistency. The proof of consistency is always outside the rules. This proves that the perceiver of the logical statements operating within a computer cannot itself be reduced to a logical statement generated within the computer since the perceiver knows about the mathematical consistency of those logical statements. The way the Godel incompleteness theorems prove this is by showing that if the proof of consistency could be reduced to a logical statement, that would imply a logically inconsistent paradox of self-reference that would undermine the foundation of the whole logical structure. The proof of consistency of the logical statements cannot itself be reduced to a logical statement, which tells us that the perceiver of the logical statements who proves the mathematical consistency of those logical statements by knowing about their mathematical consistency cannot itself be reduced to a logical statement. The perceiver of that logic is always outside that mathematical logic. In terms of a computer-generated virtual reality, the perceiver of the computer screen, which is the output device of the computer, is always outside the computer screen. The logical statements are always displayed on the computer screen and can be reduced to bits of information encoded within the computer and on the computer screen, but the perceiver of the logical statements who knows about the mathematical consistency of those logical statements is always outside the computer screen and cannot itself be reduced to any form of information that is mathematically processed or generated within the computer.

In other words, the computer screen, as the output device of the computer, cannot be perceived by the computer. The computer can never know about the logical consistency of its own operation. Only the perceiver of the computer screen, who is always outside the screen, can know about the logical consistency of that mathematical operation. The reason for this fact is quite simple. The logical statements must be projected like images from the computer screen to the point of view of the perceiver of the computer screen, which is always outside the screen. Only the perceiver of the computer screen, who is always outside the screen, can know about the logical consistency of the logical statements that are generated by the computer and displayed on the computer screen.

Once you realize that there is nothing in this world which you can call your own, you look at it from the outside as you look at a play on the stage or a picture on the screen. To know the picture as the play of light on the screen gives freedom from the idea that the picture is real. In reality I only look. Whatever is done is done on the stage. Joy and sorrow, life and death, they are real to the man in bondage. To me they are all in the show, as unreal as the show itself.-Nisargadatta Maharaj

In terms of the logic of nonduality, the big question is where is outside the computer? If the true nature of the perceiver cannot itself be a perceivable thing and everything that the perceiver can perceive in its own holographic world is created in terms of a computer-generated virtual reality, then where does the true nature of the perceiver actually exist? The answer of course, which is the only logically consistent possibility, is the absolute nothingness of the void. As Sherlock Holmes succinctly stated, when you’ve eliminated everything that is impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable that seems to be, must be the truth. The absolute nothingness of the void is the true nature of the perceiver. In some sense, the undifferentiated consciousness of the void is focalizing itself into a focal point of perceiving consciousness. That focal point of perceiving consciousness arises at the central point of view of its own holographic world. When that focal point of perceiving consciousness begins to move relative to the motionless void, which is called an observer’s accelerated frame of reference in theoretical physics, an event horizon arises that limits the observer’s observations of things in space. When that event horizon encodes qubits of information, that horizon turns into the observer’s holographic screen. Everything the observer can observe in its own holographic world is a form of information that can be reduced to qubits or quantized bits of information encoded on its own holographic screen. Those forms of information are projected like images from the observer’s holographic screen to its own point of view at the center of its own holographic world and are animated in the flow of energy that arises from the observer’s own accelerated motion.

To be born means to create a world around yourself as the center.
You are that point of consciousness.
By your movement the world is ever created.
Stop moving and there will be no world.-Nisargadatta Maharaj

Why isn’t the focal point of perceiving consciousness at the center of its own holographic world the true nature of the perceiver? The answer is even this focal point of perceiving consciousness is itself perceivable. This focal point of perceiving consciousness carries with itself its own sense of being present as it perceives its own holographic world, which is its sense of individual existence or I-Am-ness. That sense of individual existence is perceivable, and so by the logic of nonduality cannot be the true nature of the perceiver. That sense of individual existence only arises when the undifferentiated consciousness of the void focalizes itself into a focal point of perceiving consciousness at the center of the holographic world that it perceives. The individual existence of that point of consciousness arises at its own individual point of view. The important point about individual existence or being is that individual being always arises at its own individual point of view at the center of its own holographic world, and is always perceivable in the sense of the perceiver being present. The true nature of the perceiver is the undifferentiated consciousness of the void, which can only be described in terms of negation as absolute nothingness or pure undivided being.

In pure being consciousness arises. In consciousness the world appears and disappears. Consciousness is on contact, a reflection against a surface, a state of duality. The center is a point of void and the witness a point of pure awareness; they know themselves to be as nothing. But the void is full to the brim. It is the eternal potential as consciousness is the eternal actual.-Nisargadatta Maharaj

The basic problem of nonduality, in the sense of spiritual enlightenment, is that once this focal point of perceiving consciousness is created and has a taste of its own individual existence, it does not want to become uncreated and return to undivided existence. That return to undivided being is a dissolution, like a drop of water that dissolves back into the ocean. The experience of spiritual enlightenment is nothing more than that return to undivided existence. Once a focal point of perceiving consciousness is created and has a taste of its own individual existence, it really does not want to become uncreated and return to its source of undivided existence. This unwillingness of the perceiver to return to its source of undivided existence is the basic problem of the ego.

As long as you take yourself to be a person, a body and a mind, separate from the stream of life, having a will of its own, pursuing its own aims, you are living merely on the surface and whatever you do will be short-lived and of little value, mere straw to feed the flames of vanity.-Nisargadatta Maharaj

Ego is really nothing more than a presence of individual consciousness emotionally identifying itself with its mentally constructed, emotionally energized, body-based personal self-concept. That presence of individual consciousness is the focal point of perceiving consciousness at the center of its own holographic world. That presence of individual consciousness is called the Self and carries with itself its own sense of being present or individual existence, the sense of I-Am-ness, which is why ego has its own sense of individual existence. Ego is really nothing more than the Self emotionally identifying itself with its personal self-concept. That emotional self-identification arises since the Self feels emotionally self-limited to that emotionally animated personal form.

The Self perceives the emotionally animated personal form of its body as that personal form is projected like an image from its own holographic screen to its own point of view at the center of its own holographic world and as that personal form is animated in the flow of emotional energy that animates it in that holographic world. The Self creates that self-limiting emotional energy as it moves relative to the motionless void. In reality, the emotionally animated personal form of its body is only like a vehicle that allows the Self to have a sense of motion as its body appears to move in that holographic world. As that personal self-image is projected, a cloud of personal self-concepts is created around that self-image. In reality that cloud of personal self-concepts is only like the self-referential narration of a movie that the Self perceives from its point of view out in the movie audience as the central character of the movie narrates the movie. The central character is only a projected self-image. That cloud of personal self-concepts falsely tells the Self that it is its personal form. When the Self believes this false belief about itself that it is its personal form, the ego is created. Those false beliefs are only believable because of the perceivable emotional energy that makes them feel real.

We have enclosed ourselves in a cloud of personal desires and fears, images and thoughts, ideas and concepts-Nisargadatta Maharaj

Ego is only an illusion of individual existence or being that’s created as the individual consciousness of the Self emotionally identifies itself with its personal self-concept. The cloud of personal self-concepts the Self falsely believes about itself that it is a personal self-image it perceives are only false self-limiting beliefs it creates about itself due to its expression of self-limiting emotions that arise from its own motion relative to the motionless void. As long as the Self believes this false belief about itself, the ego can never be convinced that it doesn’t really exist due to its sense of individual existence. No logical argument can ever overcome that emotionally energized conviction or false belief that the ego has about itself that it really exists, even though that belief is delusional, and in reality, is nothing more than a false belief that the perceiver believes about itself for the simple reason that perceiving is believing, which underlies all the false beliefs of delusion. Ego can never be convinced that its own sense of individual existence is an illusion, and that in reality, only undivided existence really exists.

The timeless and spaceless reality is undifferentiated, the infinite potentiality, the source. It cannot be perceived, but can be experienced as ever witnessing the witness, perceiving the perceiver, the origin and end of all manifestation, the root of time and space.

In reality only the Ultimate is. The rest is a matter of name and form. As long as you cling to the idea that only what has name and shape exists, the Supreme will appear to you non-existing.

Names and shapes are hollow shells.

What is real is nameless and formless, pure energy of life and light of consciousness.

The witness-consciousness is the reflection of the real in the mind. The real is beyond.

In reality there is only the source, dark in itself, but making everything shine with the light of consciousness.

Absolute reality imparts reality to whatever comes into being. It is the very source of reality. It is what is, pure being, the timeless reality.

It is not perceivable; it is what makes perception possible.

Unperceived, it causes perception. Being nothing it gives birth to all being.

It is the immovable background of motion.-Nisargadatta Maharaj

The basic problem is that ego does not want to hear the truth that its individual existence is an illusion because it does not want to be destroyed. No matter how powerful the logical argument is that ego does not really exist, ego will come up with an emotionally driven argument to avoid hearing the truth, no matter how logically inconsistent that false argument becomes. That logical inconsistency is what emotional convictions are all about. Individual consciousness does not want to dissolve back into undivided consciousness, and the best way to avoid that happening is for individual consciousness to emotionally identify itself with its mentally constructed personal form and self-concept, hence the creation of ego. In practical terms, what this means is that no matter how serious some people pretend to be about hearing the truth, they’re totally under the sway of their ego and really don’t want to hear the truth. They’re not really serious about hearing the truth. They’re just accessorizing and collecting all possible concepts, including logically inconsistent concepts. They’ve surrounded themselves with a cloud of contradictions and inconsistencies. That’s how ego defends its own survival. If they were really serious about destroying their ego, they’d have to see through all the lies and falsehoods. They’d have to discriminate between the true and the false and reject the false. They’d have to reject all the false beliefs they believe about themselves, accept the truth of what they really are, stop accessorizing and surrounding themselves with a cloud of lies and falsehoods, and aim for the truth in a serious way, like a single pointed arrow of truth directed at the heart of truth, aiming for the annihilation of ego.

The way to truth lies through the destruction of the false. To destroy the false you must question your most inveterate beliefs. Of these the idea that you are the body is the worst.

Self-identifications are patently false and the cause of bondage.

Destroy the wall that separates, the ‘I-am-the-body-idea’

Your questions are about a non-existing person. Realize that whatever you think yourself to be is just a stream of events; that whatever happens, comes and goes, is not real; that you alone are, the changeless among the changeful. Separate the observed from the observer and abandon false identifications. Be a fully awakened witness of the field of consciousness.

As long as you are locked up with your mind and ego, you cannot go further. Were you really at war with your ego, you would question its reality. You don’t question because you are not really interested. You are moved by the pleasure-pain principle, fear and desire, which is your ego. You are going along with your ego, not fighting against it. You are not even aware how totally swayed you are by personal considerations. Be in revolt against your ego, for the ego narrows and distorts. It is the worst of all tyrants. It dominates you completely.

Ego is in resistance until the very end.

In the end you get fed up with the waste of time and energy.

When you refuse to play the game, you are out of it.

The world is but a show, glittering and empty. It is there as long as I want to see it and take part in it. When I cease caring, it dissolves. It has no cause and serves no purpose. It appears exactly as it looks, but there is no depth in it nor meaning.

To the Self the world is but a passing show. The world just sprouts into being out of nothing and returns to nothing. As long as the Self is merely aware, there is no problem.

You can stop it any moment by switching off attention.

You make it possible by giving it attention.

Do not undervalue attention. To know, to do, to discover, or to create you must give your attention to it.

Give your undivided attention to the most important in your life, yourself.

Attention comes from the Self.

All you can do is to shift the focus of consciousness beyond the mind.

It is disinterestedness that liberates.

If you lose interest, you break the emotional link that perpetuates the bondage.

As long as there is the sense of identity with the body, frustration is inevitable. It is because of your illusion that you are the doer.

As long as you have the idea of influencing events, liberation is not for you. The very notion of doership, of being a cause, is bondage

There is no such thing as free will. Will is bondage. You identify yourself with your desires and become their slave.

Some unknown power acts and you imagine that you are acting. You are merely watching what happens.

From my point of view everything happens by itself, quite spontaneously. I do nothing. I just see them happen.

What begins and ends is mere appearance. The world can be said to appear but not to be. It is your memory that makes you think that the world continues. Memory creates the illusion of continuity. I see the world as it is, a momentary appearance in consciousness.

Everything is a play of ideas. In the state free from ideation nothing is perceived. The root idea is I Am. It shatters the state of pure consciousness and is followed by the innumerable sensations and perceptions, feelings and ideas which in their totality constitute God’s world. The I Am remains as the witness, but it is by the will of God that everything happens.

Your world is created with the emergence of the I Am idea. In your world everything has a beginning and an end. Timeless being is entirely in the now.

Once you are well established in the now, you have nowhere else to go.

Wherever you go, at all times, you carry with you the sense of being present and aware, here and now. It means that you are independent of space and time. Space and time are in you, not you in them. It is only your self-identification with the body, limited in space and time, that gives you a sense of limitation. In reality, you are limitless.

Struggle to find out what you are in reality. To know what you are you must first investigate and know what you are not. Discover all that you are not: body, feelings, thoughts, time, space, this or that. Nothing, concrete or abstract, which you perceive can be you. The very act of perceiving shows that you are not what you perceive. The clearer you understand that on the level of mind you can be described in negative terms only the quicker will you come to the end of your search and realize that you are the limitless being.

If you seek reality you must set yourself free of all patterns of thinking and feeling. Even the idea of being human should be discarded. Abandon all self-identifications, abandon all self-concern, abandon every desire. Stop thinking of achievement of any kind. You are complete here and now. You need absolutely nothing.

When you are in dead earnest, you bend every incident, every second of your life, to your purpose. You do not waste time and energy on other things. You are totally dedicated, call it one-pointedness of the mind.

You must begin by being the dispassionate observer. Then only will you realize your full being. Only in complete self-negation is there a chance to discover our real being.

The urge must come from within as a wave of detachment.

Nothing perceivable is real. Only the onlooker is real, call him Self or Atman. That which makes you think that you are a human is not human. It is a dimensionless point of consciousness.

All you can say about yourself is I Am.

At the root of my being is pure awareness, a speck of intense light. This speck, by its nature, radiates and creates pictures in space and events in time.

I am like a cinema screen, clear and empty.
The pictures pass over it and disappear, leaving it as clear and empty as before.
The screen intercepts and reflects the pictures. These are lumps of destiny, but not my destiny; the destinies of the people on the screen.
The character will become a person when he begins to shape his life instead of accepting it as it comes-identifying himself with it.
All this I perceive quite clearly, but I am not in it.
I feel myself as floating over it, aloof and detached.
There is also the awareness of it all and a sense of immense distance as if the body and the mind and all that happens to them were somewhere far out on the horizon.
To myself I Am neither perceivable nor conceivable.
There is nothing I can point out and say “this I am”.

You are the source of reality, a dimensionless center of perception that imparts reality to whatever it perceives, a pure witness that watches what is going on and remains unaffected. It is only imagination and self-identification with the imagined that encloses and converts the inner watcher into a person. The person is merely the result of a misunderstanding. In reality there is no such thing. Feelings, thoughts and actions race before the watcher in endless succession. In reality there is no person, only the watcher identifying itself.

You see yourself in the world, while I see the world in myself. To you, you get born and die, while to me, the world appears and disappears. It is your imagination that misleads you. There is a deep contradiction in your attitude which you do not see.

The source of consciousness cannot be an object in consciousness.

Realization is in discovering the source and abiding there.

To know the source is to be the source.

To the mind the light of consciousness appears as darkness. It can be known only through its reflections. The highest state of awareness is to be the point of light tracing the world.

Beyond the highest state of awareness is to be the source of light.

Even the sense I Am is not continuous, though it is a useful pointer; it shows where to seek, but not what to seek.

The witness only registers events. All experience subsides with the mind. Without the mind there can be no experiencer nor experience. In the abeyance of the mind even the sense I Am dissolves. There is no I Am without the mind.

The witness consciousness is not permanent. The knower rises and sets with the known. That in which the knower and the known arise and set is beyond time.

In silence, or void or abeyance, the three-experiencer, experiencing, experience-are not. Unidentified being remains.

When the mind stays in the I Am, without moving, you enter a state that cannot be verbalized but can be experienced. The sense I Am is always with you, only you have attached all kinds of things to it-body, feelings, thoughts, ideas. All these self-identifications are misleading; because of them you take your Self to be what you are not.

It is enough to know what you are not. You need not know what you are. What you are cannot be described except as total negation. Let go of your attachment to the unreal.

When the mind is quiet we come to know ourselves as the pure witness.
We withdraw from the experience and stand apart in pure awareness.
The personality continues, but its self-identification with the witness snaps.

Dive deep into yourself and find the source from where all meaning flows. It is not the superficial mind that can give meaning. You are not what you think yourself to be. You cannot think yourself to be what you have not experienced. You are the perceiving point, the nondimensional source of all dimensions, which is as nothing and yet the source of everything. You can know what you are not, but you cannot know your real being. You can only be what you are.

Be aware of being conscious and seek the source of consciousness.

The person is never the subject. You can see a person, but you are not the person. You are always the Supreme, which appears at a given point of time and space as the witness, a bridge between the pure awareness of the Supreme and the manifold consciousness of the person.

Everyone sees the world through the idea one has of oneself. As you think your Self to be, so you think your world to be. If you imagine your Self as separate from the world, the world will appear as separate from you and you will experience desire and fear. Your own creative power projects on it a picture and all your questions refer to the picture.

Your questions are about a non-existing person. Realize that whatever you think yourself to be is just a stream of events; that whatever happens, comes and goes, is not real; that you alone are, the changeless among the changeful. Separate the observed from the observer and abandon false identifications. Be a fully awakened witness of the field of consciousness.

Whatever you perceive is not you. It is there in the field of consciousness, but you are not the field and its contents.

The difference between the person and the witness is as between not knowing and knowing oneself.

You can see a person but you are not a person.

There is no such thing as a separate person. Everything is the cause of everything. Everything is as it is because the entire universe is as it is.

The entire universe contributes to the existence of even the smallest thing. Nothing could be as it is without the universe being what it is. Everything is as it is because the universe is as it is. The universe is not bound by its contents because its potentialities are infinite.

The universal trend towards balance, harmony and unity, at every moment, whatever is happening, is always for the best.

The law of balance rules supreme.

Every action creates a reaction, which balances and neutralizes the action. There is a continuous cancelling out, and in the end it is as if nothing happened.

By itself nothing has existence

All appearance and disappearance presupposes a change against a changeless background.

There must be a source from which all flows, a foundation on which all stands.

Consciousness itself is the source of everything.

Self-surrender is the surrender of all self-concern. It cannot be done, it happens when you realize your true nature.

When there is total surrender, complete relinquishment of all concern with one’s past, present and future, with one’s physical and spiritual security, when the shell of self-defense is broken, a new life dawns, full of love and beauty. Complete self-surrender by itself is liberation.

When the mind becomes quiet, if you do not disturb this quiet and stay in it, you find that it is permeated with a light and love you have never known, and yet you recognize it at once as your own nature. Once you have passed through this experience, you will never be the same again. Delusions and attachments end and life becomes supremely concentrated in the present.

You cannot find peace in the world, for the world is full of contradictions.

To imagine that you are in control is the aberration of the body-mind. There is a universal power that is in control. The illusion of personal control is in the mind only. Stand without desire and fear, relinquishing all control. This is the shortest way to reality.

One becomes self-conscious only when caught in the conflict between pleasure and pain, which demands choice and decision. The personal self by its very nature is constantly pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain. The ending of this pattern is the ending of the self. The ending of the self with its desires and fears enables you to return to your real nature.

Investigate your world, apply your mind to it, examine it critically.
Scrutinize every idea about it.
Everything must be scrutinized and the unnecessary ruthlessly destroyed.
There cannot be too much destruction.
For in reality nothing is of value.

Only in complete self-negation is there a chance to discover our real being.

The search for reality is the most dangerous of all undertakings for it will destroy the world in which you live.

The totality of all mental projections is the Great Illusion.
When I look beyond the mind I see the witness.
Beyond the witness is infinite emptiness and silence.

As long as you are interested in your present way of living, you will shirk from the final leap into the unknown.

Your true home is in nothingness.

The witness is both real and unreal, the last remnant of illusion, the first touch of the real. The moment you say I Am, the entire universe comes into being.

There is no such thing as an expression of reality. Neither action nor feeling nor thought express reality. I know that life itself is only a make-believe. I just watch events happening, knowing them to be unreal.

As life before death is but imagination, so is life after death. The dream continues.

There is nothing wrong with the world. What is wrong is the way you look at it. It is your own imagination that misleads you. Without imagination there is no world.

My life is a succession of events just like yours. Only I Am detached and see the passing show as a passing show, while you stick to things and move along with them.

Your attachment is your bondage.

You create bondage when you desire and fear and identify yourself with your feelings.
You identify yourself with your desires and become their slave.
Your bonds are self-created as chains of attachment.
Cut the knot of self-identification.

There is trouble only when you cling to something.
It is your desire to hold onto it that creates the problem. Let go.
When you hold onto nothing, no trouble arises.

All attachment implies fear, for all things are transient.
Fear makes one a slave.
Freedom from attachment is natural when one knows one’s true being.

Nothing stands in the way of your liberation here and now except for your being more interested in other things. You must see through them as mere mental errors.

Seeing the false as false is meditation.

Meditation is discriminating the true from the false.

Discrimination will lead to detachment.
You gain nothing.
You leave behind what is not your own and find what you have never lost:
Your own being.

Freedom means letting go.

Spiritual maturity lies in the readiness to let go of everything.

Liberation is never of the person, it is always from the person.

The reward of Self-knowledge is freedom from the personal self.

The dissolution of personality is always followed by a sense of great relief, as if a heavy burden has fallen off.

Everything is depicted in the pictures on the screen, including the person you take yourself to be; nothing in the light. You are the light only. You are the pure light appearing as a picture on the screen and becoming one with it.

I see only consciousness, and know everything to be but consciousness, as you know the pictures on the cinema screen to be but light.

It is enough to shift attention from the screen onto oneself to break the spell.

Awareness comes as if from a higher dimension.

You must realize yourself as the silent witness of all that happens. Your consciousness raised to a higher dimension, from which you see everything much clearer.

The witness that stands aloof is the watchtower of the real, the point at which awareness, inherent in the unmanifested, contacts the manifested.

When you refuse to open your eyes, what can you be shown?

Find the immutable center where all movement takes birth. Be the axis at the center, not whirling at the periphery. Nothing stops you except fear. You are afraid of impersonal being.

The Self stands beyond the mind, aware, but unconcerned. You are the Self, here and now. Stand aware and unconcerned and you will realize that to stand alert but detached, watching events come and go, is an aspect of your real nature.

What you call survival is but the survival of a dream. Death is preferable to it. There is a chance of waking up.

The unreal appears to be real only because you believe in it. You impart reality to it by taking it to be real. Doubt it and it ceases.

The world is but a mistaken view of reality, unreal to its core.

The world you can perceive is a very small world, entirely private. The world is but a reflection of imagination. Take it to be a dream and be done with it. What you call survival is but the survival of a dream. By forgetting who you are and imagining yourself a mortal creature you create so much trouble for yourself that you have to wake up, like from a bad dream.

Some go on a journey and come back, some never leave. What difference does it make since they travel in dreamlands, each wrapped up in his own dream. Only the waking up is important.

Once you have seen that you are dreaming, you shall wake up, but you do not see because you want the dream to continue. A day will come when you long for the ending of the dream. You become willing to pay any price. The price will be dispassion and detachment, the loss of interest in the dream.

When you see your dream as dream, you wake up. You need not bring your dream to a definite conclusion. All you need is to realize that you are dreaming. Stop imagining, stop believing. See the contradictions, the incongruities, the falsehood and the sorrow of the human state, the need to go beyond.

Desire for embodied existence is the root-cause of trouble.

Selfishness is due to self-identification with the body.

If you look into the living process closely, you will find cruelty everywhere, for life feeds on life.

Selfishness is always destructive. Desire and fear are self-centered states. Between desire and fear anger arises, and with anger hatred.

It is your mind that has separated the world outside your skin from the world inside and put them in opposition.

At the root of all creation lies desire.
The projecting power is imagination prompted by desire.
Desire and imagination foster and reinforce each other.

All limited existence is imaginary.
Even space and time are imaginary.
Pure being, filling all and beyond all, is not limited.
All limitation is imaginary.
Only the unlimited is real.

By desiring you take the shape of your desires. When no desires remain, you revert to your natural state. All desires must be given up.

Desire is merely the fixation of the mind on an idea. Just turn away, deny it attention. Give it up because you see its valuelessness.

Giving up is the first step. The real giving up is in realizing that there is nothing to give up, for nothing is your own. Give up all and you gain all. Then life becomes what it was meant to be: Pure radiation from an inexhaustible source.
In that light the world appears dimly like a dream.

The desire for realization, to put an end to all desires, is a most peculiar desire.

Externalization is the first step in liberation. Step away and look. Separate yourself and watch. The physical events will go on happening, but in themselves they have no importance.

Seeing that you are not the person you take yourself to be, step out and look from the outside.

As long as you are engrossed in the world, you cannot know yourself. To know yourself, turn your attention away from the world and turn within.

Give attention to the witness to break the spell of the known, the illusion that only the perceivable is real. As long as you believe that only the perceivable world is real you remain its slave.

To become free your attention must be drawn to the witness.

You can spend an eternity looking elsewhere for truth, all in vain. You must begin in yourself, with yourself. Realize that your world is only a reflection of yourself. All you need is to stop searching outside what can only be found within.

As long as you are engrossed in the world, you cannot know yourself. To know yourself, turn your attention away from the world and turn within.

Turn within. I Am you know. Be with it all the time, until you revert to it spontaneously. There is no simpler and easier way.

Know yourself as you are. Stay with the sense I Am.

Go back to that state of pure being, the I Am in its purity before it became contaminated with false self-identifications. Abandon them all. Focus the mind on pure being. In it all disappears: myself, the life I live, the world around me. Only peace and unfathomable silence remains.

To realize that is the end of all seeking. You come to it when you see all you think yourself to be as mere imagination and stand aloof in pure awareness. It is not difficult but detachment is needed. It is the clinging to the false that makes the truth so difficult to see. Discard what is not your own until nothing is left which you can disown. You will find that what is left is nothing.

In reality nothing happens. Nothing happens to space itself. In pure consciousness nothing ever happens. Onto the screen of the mind destiny forever projects its pictures, and thus illusion constantly renews itself. The pictures come and go as light intercepted by ignorance. See the light and disregard the pictures.

First we must know ourselves as witnesses only, dimensionless and timeless centers of observation, and then realize that immense ocean of pure awareness.

On the surface of the ocean of consciousness, names and forms are transitory waves. Only consciousness has real being, not its transformations.

As long as you are enmeshed in the tribulations of a particular personality, you can see nothing beyond it. Ultimately you will come to see that you are neither the particular nor the universal. You are beyond both.

The witness-consciousness is the reflection of the real in the mind. The real is beyond.

The witness is the door through which you pass beyond.

The door that locks you in is also the door that lets you out. I Am is the door. Stay with it until it opens. It is always open, but you are not at it.

Between desires and freedom from all desires is an abyss which must be crossed.

Cross the door and go beyond.

The witness is the door through which you pass beyond.

The I Am in movement creates the world; the I Am at peace becomes the Absolute.

The Supreme state is the very center of consciousness and yet beyond consciousness.

All that is, lives and moves and has its being in consciousness.
I Am in and beyond that consciousness.
I Am in it as the witness.
I Am beyond it as Being.

Before the mind happens, I Am.
Before all beginnings, after all endings, I Am.
All has its being in the I Am that shines in every living being.

The dreamer is one.
I Am beyond all dreams.
I Am the light in which all dreams appear and disappear.

The Supreme is both creation and dissolution, the beingness of all beings, the ground from which all grows, alone. Words do not reach there, nor mind

The experience of the inner void is an explosion into reality.

Realization is sudden and irreversible. You rotate into a new dimension. You see everything as it is. The world of illusions is left behind.

The Supreme reality is the void beyond being and non-being, beyond consciousness.

There is no journey to Supreme reality. One is undeceived only. One is left without questions; no answers are needed. There is nothing left to do. One’s work is done.

Do nothing. There is nothing to do. Just be.
To be, you must be nobody.
You make yourself mortal by taking yourself to be a body.
That which is alive in you is immortal.

The Supreme state neither comes nor goes. It is.
It is a timeless state, ever present.

In the timeless state there is no Self, no I Am, no witness.

Awareness is beyond all.
Awareness is primordial; it is the original state.
Awareness is undivided, aware of itself.

Death gives freedom. To be free in the world you must die to the world.

I Am dead already. Physical death will make no difference. I Am timeless being.

The realized man is beyond life and death. Life and death appears to him but a way of expressing movement in the immovable, change in the changeless. He has died before his death and he saw that there was nothing to be afraid of. The moment you know your real being you are afraid of nothing.

Reality is essentially alone.
To know that nothing is, is true knowledge.

For the path of return naughting oneself is necessary.
My stand I take where nothing is.
To the mind it is all darkness and silence.
It is deep and dark, mystery beyond mystery.
It is, while all else merely happens.
It is like a bottomless well, whatever falls into it disappears.
-Nisargadatta Maharaj

What you see is not the truth, it is a projected lie. Your world is created by a self. Your world is a projected world. You are using the world as a screen and projecting your own ideas on it.

We know only this world, we don’t have any comparison. This is the only reality we know. That’s why when Buddha says the world is Maya, illusion, it is difficult for us to understand.

We are not really in the world. The world consists not of things outside us but of our dreams. Everyone lives in his own dream world. If suddenly all dreaming disappeared from the consciousness your world would disappear because your world was your dreaming.

You cannot exist without desire, without striving. The phenomenon of the ego, of the self, is not a thing, it is a process. It is not a substance sitting there inside you; you have to create it each moment. The ego exists because we go on pedaling desire, because we go on striving to get something, because we go on jumping ahead of ourselves. That is the very phenomenon of the ego, the jump into the future, the jump into the non-existential creates the ego. It comes out of the non-existential like a mirage. It consists of desire and nothing else.

Your ego is the bondage. You can be free only when ego disappears. When there is no ego, you become one with existence, and only that oneness can be freedom. When you exist separately, this separation is false. You are not separate. You are part of existence. Your ego gives you a false feeling of separate existence. Because of that false feeling, you start fighting existence. When you fight you are in bondage. When you fight you are bound to be defeated, because the part cannot win against the whole. Because of this fight with the whole, you feel limited. The wall is nowhere in existence. It moves with your ego, a part of your separate feeling. In your struggle against existence you will be defeated; in that defeat you feel limitation.

You are not separate. You cannot be defeated because there is no one to be defeated. You cannot die because there is no one to die. You cannot be in misery because there is no one to be in misery. The moment you surrender the ego, the whole nonsense, misery, bondage, limitation, is surrendered. You are no more. It is not that you become free. When you are not, freedom is. Freedom is not freedom of the ego, it is freedom from the ego. Surrender and freedom are the same. You become one with existence. That oneness is freedom.

Man is asleep. You are not conscious about yourself. You do not know yourself. You know many things in the objective world but you do not know the subject. Your state of mind is as if you had gone to see a film. On the screen the film is running, and you have become so absorbed in it that the only thing you know is the film, whatever is appearing on the screen. Dreaming is just the film. It is the mind reflecting the world. In the mirror of the mind the world is reflected. You are so deeply involved with it, so much identified with it, that you have completely forgotten who you are. The dreamer is lost in the dreaming. This self-ignorance is the sleep. Dreaming creates a film over the consciousness. Unless dreaming ceases completely you cannot awaken unto yourself.

Enlightenment is nothing but awakening. For the enlightened person all our lives are just dreams. They may be good dreams, they may be bad dreams, they may be nightmares, but all the same they are dreams.

Existence cannot be forced to go according to you; it flows its own way. Mind is always afraid of the unknown. Mind consists of the known. The unknown is not part of the mind. Life is always moving into the unknown and you are afraid. You are afraid of death because you are afraid of life. The mind wants one thing and denies the other. Life cannot exist without death. But the mind says “I want only life, I do not want death, life is good, death is bad”. The mind moves into a dream world which exists nowhere, and it starts fighting with everything. Surrender means that you surrender the ego. You surrender the separating wall. You become one. That is reality. Whatever you surrender is just a dream, a concept, a false notion. You are not surrendering reality, you are surrendering a false attitude. The moment you surrender, you become one with existence.

One who is ready to lose will gain. One who clings will lose everything.

Man has become incapable of love because he has become incapable of death. He cannot die to anything. He clings to life. Love is death, death of the ego. Man is afraid of death. Surrender is death. Surrender is not a method. You surrender only when every method has become futile. You have done whatever you can do and now you feel helpless. In that total helplessness surrender happens.

You cannot ask how to surrender; the very question is absurd. Can you ask how to love? Love is being totally open, vulnerable. It is dangerous. Love happens, surrender happens. Love and surrender are deeply one.

The secret of love is surrender. Ego creates the barrier. Ego wants to control everything. You become scared of what you cannot control. You become afraid, you close the door. You cannot lose yourself, and love is losing, dispersing, dissolving, melting.

With love you cannot be in control. You have to let yourself go. To move beyond yourself, surrender is the way, let go is the path.

Life is a flux. Ego can only exist when it fights. The river is not fighting with you, you are fighting with the river. You are trying to float upstream. If you just let go and start floating with the stream, then you become part of the stream, your identity is lost, you become a drop in the ocean.

Energy is just natural, the basic energy you are born through, the energy you are born with, the energy of your body. It is your energy. Be aware of the desire; do not create any fight. When you move into desire with full consciousness you transcend it. If you fight then the ego will be there. Accept the world, accept the body, accept everything. Accept death. Through acceptance you become one, not through fight.

No-fight is the central teaching.

How is it that you have not surrendered? The real problem is your defense structure, how you have lived without love. We live with the ego, centered in the ego. Without knowing who I am, I go on announcing ‘I am’. This ‘I-am-ness’ is false because I do not know who I am. This false ‘I’ is the ego. This is the defense. This protects you from surrendering.

You cannot surrender but you can become aware of this defense measure. If you have become aware of it, it dissolves. The moment you come to feel ‘I am not’ surrender happens. Surrender happens when you are not, so ‘you’ cannot surrender. You are the hindrance. When you are not, surrender is there. If you can surrender everything to nature then there is no effort, then you don’t do anything. You just float. You are in a deep let go. Things happen to you, but you are not making any effort for them. Whatever happens, happens. Life flows by, you flow in it.

If you surrender, this very moment you are out of time, and all that can happen will happen. The body is part of the karma, it is part of the mechanical circle of cause and effect, but the consciousness can be beyond it, it can transcend it. Witnessing is not an interference. You go beyond; you become a watcher on the hill. Things go on, but they don’t belong to you. You are just an onlooker. It is as if they are happening in a dream, or in a film on the screen. You are not interfering. You are not within the drama, you have come out. Now you are not an actor, you have become a spectator. You are just a witness. If you interfere you will create more misery for yourself. Don’t interfere with karmas, but go beyond, be a witness to them. Take them as a dream, not real. Just look at them and be indifferent. Don’t get involved. Don’t be identified. Simple awareness is inclusive of all. When you are non-doing then everything happens around you. Nothing disturbs you. Everything happens and you know it, you witness it.

Every enlightened person will have a deep silence. Whatever happens makes no difference to his contentment. He will not have any questions left, not that he knows all answers but all questions have dissolved.

Enlightenment happens in silence. How can you bring that silence into words? The moment truth is asserted it becomes false. There is no way to communicate truth.

We call Buddha the awakened one. This awakening is really the cessation of inner dreaming. When there is no dreaming you become pure space. This non-dreaming consciousness is what is known as enlightenment.

If you go on inquiring ‘Who am I?’ you are bound to come to the conclusion that you are not. This is an inquiry to dissolve. There is no answer. Only the question will dissolve. There will be no one to ask ‘Who am I?’ And then you know.

When the ‘I’ is not, the real ‘I’ opens. When the ego is not, you are for the first time encountering your being. That being is void.

You fall into an abyss, and the abyss is bottomless: you go on falling. That is why Buddha has called this nothingness emptiness. There is no end to it. Once you know it, you also have become endless. At this point Being is revealed: then you know who you are, what is your real being, what is your authentic existence.

The inner emptiness itself is the mystery.
When the inner space is there, you are not.
When you dissolve, the inner emptiness is there.
When you are not, the mystery will be revealed.
You will not be a witness to the mystery, you will be the mystery.

That Being is void–Osho

Conventional Science Has the Whole Thing Ass Backwards

Conventional science has the whole thing ass-backwards. Conventional science mistakenly assumes that a world of matter, energy, space and time exists; that in that world the emotionally animated form of a person comes into existence; and that within that personal form personal consciousness emerges. This idea is just flat-out wrong. In reality, a void of undifferentiated consciousness timelessly exists, motionless, unlimited and undivided. In that void, a point of perceiving and illuminating consciousness arises at its own individual point of view. When that individual point of consciousness moves relative to the motionless void, an event horizon arises that surrounds the observer’s central point of view and limits its observations of things in space. The observer’s event horizon becomes its holographic screen when its horizon encodes qubits of information. The observer’s holographic world only appears to come into existence from its point of view at the center of that world due to its own motion that gives rise to its event horizon that becomes its holographic screen as its horizon encodes information. The observer’s holographic world appears to come into existence like the projected and animated images of a computer-generated virtual reality that’s displayed on a computer screen. Everything the observer can perceive in its own holographic world is a projected form of information that’s animated in the flow of energy that arises from its own motion. The emotionally animated form of a person that appears within that holographic world is like the central character of a movie or an avatar that appears in a virtual reality movie. There is only an illusion that the form of the person has personal consciousness when the observer emotionally identifies itself with that emotionally animated personal form.

Conventional science has to make invalid assumptions all over the place in its attempt to explain the nature of the world. The number one invalid assumption it has to make is that consciousness is something that emerges in the physical world. Enlightened beings tell us that the physical world is something that emerges within consciousness, like a dream that emerges from a dreamer. The holographic principle is the only known scientific concept that is both consistent with all valid scientific knowledge and with the testimony of enlightened beings. The physical world always appears and disappears within consciousness, which is the point of view of an observer. You have to start with a discussion of the observer before you can discuss the physical world. The source of the observer’s consciousness is not the physical world that it perceives, but can only be discussed in terms of negation as absolute nothingness, which is best understood as pure undivided and unlimited timeless being. There is nothing inconsistent with the testimony of enlightened beings and the way the holographic principle describes the nature of the physical world as emerging within consciousness. The bottom line is that the reality of what you are, which is the true nature of your being, is not the reality of what you perceive, which is the virtual reality of a holographic world. Unless you get your assumptions correct, you’re just spinning your wheels and wasting your time.

In a jesting sort of way, Jed McKenna says “there is no reality in reality”. What he means is that the reality that you perceive is not the reality of what you are. The reality you perceive is a virtual reality, like the images of a virtual reality world being displayed on a computer screen. The reality of what you are is the reality of the consciousness that perceives the images of that virtual reality world. Only the reality of what you are really exists. Consciousness exists. The images of that virtual reality world only have an apparent momentary existence, like the animated images of a cartoon character that appears in a movie that you perceive, as that movie is being displayed on a computer screen. Bugs Bunny doesn’t really exist except as part of the cartoon. Underlying the images of all the characters in the movie are the bits of information encoded in the computer and on the computer screen that give rise to the appearance of the images, and the flow of energy through the computer that animates the images. Information and energy exist within the computer, just as consciousness exists at a point of view to which the animated images of the movie are projected from the computer screen, but the cartoon character doesn’t really exist except as a part of that virtual reality world.

The holographic principle explains how that virtual reality world is created. That creation begins with an accelerating observer in an accelerated frame of reference, which gives rise to the observer’s event horizon that becomes its holographic screen when qubits of information are encoded on its horizon. The observer is at the central point of view of its own holographic world, and in effect is creating a quantum computer that gives rise to the appearance of its own holographic world:

The holographic principle tells us that every observer creates its own quantum computer that gives rise to the appearance of its own virtual reality world that’s created when the observer, present at the central point of view of its own holographic world, enters into an accelerated frame of reference that gives rise to its event horizon that becomes its holographic screen when qubits of information are encoded on its horizon, just like bits of information encoded on a computer screen. Even the animating energy that flows through the computer arises from the energy of the observer’s own accelerated motion. A consensual reality shared by many observers, each at the central point of view of its own holographic world, is created when their respective holographic screens overlap like a Venn diagram and share information, just like the information sharing that occurs in a computer network. Each observer creates its own virtual reality world, but what appears in that virtual reality world is no more real than the projected and animated images of a movie being displayed on a computer screen. Even the information and energy inherent in that virtual reality world can only arise due to the accelerated motion of the observer. The observer’s virtual reality world only appears to come into existence due to its accelerated motion. In the end, when that accelerated motion comes to an end, that virtual reality world disappears from existence from the observer’s own point of view and only the consciousness of the observer ultimately exists. When everything in your own world disappears from existence from your own point of view, what remains? The answer is nothing. That absolute nothingness is what you ultimately are.

Nothingness

The irony of spiritual awakening is that there is nothing to know about yourself other than the true nature of your own being. To know yourself is to be yourself. What you are is not something that you can externalize away from yourself and see it from an external point of view. You can’t know it by seeing it. You can only know it by being it.

At the level of your Self you can only know your Self to be a presence of consciousness at the central point of view of the world you perceive. That world is just like a virtual reality movie that’s being displayed on a computer screen. Everything you can perceive in that world can be reduced to bits of information encoded on the computer screen. Everything you can perceive in that world is like an animated image of the virtual reality movie that is animated in the flow of energy through the computer and projected from the computer screen to your own point of view outside the computer screen.

This sounds like an interesting analogy, but this can’t really be the way the world is created and constructed, can it? We don’t really live in a computer-generated virtual reality world like the Matrix, do we? Au contraire, mon ami. The scientific evidence is that we do indeed live in a virtual reality world. The scientific evidence is called the holographic principle of quantum gravity. The holographic principle is the most fundamental scientific concept known to man, as it not only explains the nature of all the elementary particles that appear to exist in the world in the sense of quantum theory, atomic theory, and the fundamental electromagnetic and nuclear forces, but it also explains the nature of the dynamical curvature of the space-time geometry of the world in the sense of relativity theory and the gravitational force.

Let’s give a brief scientific overview of the holographic principle in the simplest possible terms. We have to start with an observer, which is the perceiving consciousness present at the central point of view of its own holographic world. The observer’s holographic world is always constructed on a holographic screen that surrounds the observer’s central point of view and displays all the images of its own holographic world, just like a computer screen displays all the animated images of a virtual reality movie projected to the point of view of an observer. The observer’s holographic screen always arises as its own event horizon due to its own accelerated motion. The observer’s event horizon is a two dimensional bounding surface of space that limits its observations of things in three dimensional space due to the limitation of the speed of light as the maximal rate with which information can be transferred in three dimensional space. Nothing is observable to the accelerating observer beyond the limits of its own event horizon. The observer can only be understood as the perceiving consciousness that is present at a point of view that follows an accelerating worldline through its own space-time geometry.

Accelerating Observer’s Event Horizon

The accelerating observer’s event horizon becomes its holographic screen when it encodes qubits of information. A qubit is a quantized bit of information mathematically represented by a matrix. A matrix is a two dimensional array of numbers that must be encoded on a two dimensional surface of space, which always arises as the observer’s event horizon. A qubit is like a spin variable defined in quantum theory that can only be observed to point up or down. Unlike a classical bit of information that can only take on the values of 1 or 0, a qubit has the property of quantum entanglement that represents rotational symmetry on the surface of a sphere. In quantum gravity, the smallest possible event horizon is a Planck-size event horizon that encodes a single qubit of information. Larger event horizons encode more information, but always in terms of an integral number of qubits, which is how information is quantized in quantum gravity.

Qubit of Information Encoded on a Planck-size Event Horizon

Holographic Principle

Everything observable that an observer can perceive in its own holographic world is a form of information defined on its own holographic screen. Those perceivable forms are all reducible to qubits of information encoded on the observer’s own holographic screen. The forms are projected like images to the observer’s own point of view at the center of its own holographic world and are animated in the flow of energy through that world.

The Observer’s Holographic Screen

How do we explain a consensual reality shared by many observers? The answer is information sharing, just like the information sharing that occurs in a computer network of connected computer screens. Each observer perceives its own holographic world from the central point of view of that world as the images of that world are displayed on its own holographic screen, but when the respective holographic screens of different observers overlap like a Venn diagram, they can share information.

Information Sharing Among Overlapping Holographic Screens

The thing to be clear about is that the true nature of your Self is nothing more than the perceiving consciousness present at the central point of view of your own holographic world. You create your own world when your Self undergoes accelerated motion, which is how your own holographic screen arises as an event horizon. At the level of perceiving your own holographic world, you are that presence of consciousness at the central point of view of that world. Perception always occurs in a subject-object relation. The true nature of the subject is your Self, which is the presence of consciousness at the central point of view of your own holographic world. The nature of all the objects you perceive are forms of information encoded on your own holographic screen. Those forms are all reducible to qubits of information encoded on your own holographic screen and are projected like images from your own screen to your own point of view. Those forms are animated in the flow of energy that arises from your own accelerated motion.

Understanding the animation of the images only requires understanding the accelerated motion of the observer. Not only does the flow of energy through its own holographic world arise from the accelerated motion of the observer, but so too does the course of time through that world, which is perceived in terms of the animation of the forms. More difficult to understand is the projection of the forms. Understanding the projection of the forms requires another concept about the nature of consciousness, which is the idea of the light of consciousness. You are not only a point of perceiving consciousness at the center of your own holographic world that perceives the images of that world, but you are also the source of the light of consciousness that illuminates that world and projects all the images of that world from your own holographic screen to your own point of view.

All Seeing Eye

Universal Observer

If what you really are at the level of perceiving your own holographic world is a presence of perceiving consciousness at the central point of view of that world, then why do you have the impression of being a person in that world? The answer is called delusion. Each observer has its own personal form, which is the central form of information that appears in its own holographic world. The observer’s personal form is called a body and is always emotionally animated relative to all other forms that appear in that world.

Delusion is created due to the way the observer’s personal form is emotionally animated relative to all other forms that appear in its holographic world. As the observer perceives the flow of emotional energy that emotionally animates its body relative to all other forms that appear in its holographic world, the observer feels emotionally self-limited to the personal form of its body due to those perceived feelings of emotional self-limitation.

The observer’s personal form is only the central form of information that appears in its own holographic world, but due to perceived feelings of emotional self-limitation to the form of its body, the observer mistakenly identifies itself with its body. The observer’s mistaken self-identification with its body is purely an emotional self-identification due to perceived feelings of emotional self-limitation to its body. The expression of emotions that emotionally animates its body is inherently self-limiting in nature and leads the observer to emotionally identify itself with its body. In reality, the observer’s body is only a form of information that appears in the world it perceives. In reality, the observer is only a presence of consciousness at the central point of view of that holographic world.

The problem of the personal self-identification of the observer with its body, which is the problem of delusion, is compounded due to the self-defensive nature of emotions. The easiest way to understand the self-defensive nature of emotions is with the ideas of Darwinian evolution, natural selection, and the survival of the fittest body. Darwinian evolution is not just about genetic evolution, but is also about emotional evolution. Not only does the genetic information encoded within the body evolve, but the emotions expressed by the body also evolve. Natural selection in turn then selects those bodies for survival that are best able to survive, which is called the survival of the fittest body.

Body survival not only depends on generic evolution, but also on the evolution of emotions. This is an inevitable consequence of living in a body-eat-body world. At the most primitive level of body survival, the body must eat other bodies in order to survive while it also avoids being eaten by other bodies. Body survival is an energetic process that requires the expression of emotions. Body survival is really nothing more than the coherent self-replication of the form of the body in a recognizable way while the body is emotionally animated. The body must coherently hold together as a recognizable form of information over a sequence of observable events in order to appear to survive.

The only way the body can appear to coherently hold together as a recognizable form of information over a sequence of observable events as the body is emotionally animated is if the body adds organizing potential energy to its form. The addition of organizing potential energy to the body is called eating, which is necessary for body survival. This fact has a simple thermodynamic explanation. Work must be performed within the body in order to maintain the coherent organization of the body while the body is emotionally animated, and the energy that allows this work to be performed requires the addition of organizing potential energy to the body. If this organizing potential energy is not added to the body, the random flow of thermal energy through the body will disorganize the body and the form of the body will eventually fall apart as its form will no longer be coherently self-replicated in recognizable way. The thermal disorganization of the body must be counterbalanced by the coherent organization of the body, which requires the addition of organizing potential energy to the form of the body if the body is to survive.

Bodies only survive because they eat other bodies. That’s the only place they can find the organizing potential energy they need in order to survive. The addition of organizing potential energy to the body is emotionally expressed as the desire to eat another body. At the same time, if the body is to survive, the body also needs to avoid being eaten by another body, which is emotionally expressed as the fear of being eaten by another body. This unfortunate state of affairs is an inevitable energetic consequence of living in a body-eat-body world, where bodies must eat each other in order to survive.

Natural selection has selected those bodies for survival that are best able to eat other bodies while they also avoid being eaten by other bodies. At the most primitive level of body survival, that’s what the survival of the fittest body is all about. There is an inherent emotional conflict in the expression of these survival emotions. The expression of the desire to eat another body is a movement toward another body, while the expression of the fear of being eaten by another body is a movement away from another body. There is no way to resolve this emotional conflict at the level of the motion of bodies.

The emotional expression of fear and desire are always driven by the pleasure-pain principle. Whatever promotes body survival, like eating, feels good and gives pleasure, while whatever threatens body survival, like being eaten, feels bad and gives pain. The survival of the fittest body is always driven by the pleasure-pain principle, as whatever promotes body survival and gives pleasure is pursued while whatever threatens body survival and gives pain is avoided. That pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain are ultimately what the emotional expressions of fear and desire are all about.

The human life-form is a social animal, and not only expresses the primitive emotions of fear and desire, but also expresses social emotions, like emotional attachments. The immature body of a child is not able to fend for its own survival, but must emotionally attach itself to the body of its mother or caregiver in order to survive. The expression of the social emotions of emotional attachments are just as necessary for body survival as are the expression of the primitive emotions of fear and desire.

The thing to be crystal clear about is that all the primitive emotional expressions of fear and desire are self-defensive in nature as they defend the survival of the body. Even the expression of social emotions, like emotional attachments, are self-defensive in nature as they defend the survival of the body. The body only appears to survive in the world as the coherently organized form of the body is self-replicated in form in a recognizable way over a sequence of observable events while the body is emotionally animated.

The big question you have to ask yourself is: Who exactly is recognizing the form of the body as its own form as the body is self-replicated in form in a recognizable way over a sequence of observable events while the body is emotionally animated? The answer of course is the observer, but the observer is not its body. The observer is a presence of perceiving consciousness at the central point of view of its own holographic world. The observer’s body is only the central form of information that appears in that world. The observer only mistakenly or emotionally identifies itself with the form of its body due to its perception of emotional feelings of self-limitation to the form of its body as its body is emotionally animated relative to all other forms that appear in its own holographic world.

This is the basic problem of delusion. The observer emotionally identifies itself with the form of its body due to its perception of emotional feelings of self-limitation to its body as its body is emotionally animated relative to all other forms. Those emotional expressions are all self-defensive in nature as they defend the survival of the body. Once the observer emotionally identifies itself with its body, it then feels compelled to defend the survival of its body as though its existence depends on it. This creates a vicious cycle that leads to the expression of more self-defensive emotions, which perpetuates the observer’s emotional self-identification with its body. The observer’s false assumption that its existence depends on the survival of its body is the primary false belief that underlies the nature of delusion. The observer’s delusion is this false belief that the observer believes about itself that its existence depends on the survival of its body. The very act of self-recognition and emotional self-identification with a body is delusional.

To be clear about things, consciousness does not evolve. Consciousness is, which is often stated as I Am. Consciousness is the ultimate nature of existence, which is the nature of your own being. The ultimate nature of your own existence is timeless being, which does not evolve in time. The ultimate nature of your own being is that timeless being. At the level of perceiving your own holographic world, you can only know your Self to be a presence of perceiving consciousness at the central point of view of that world. The only true thing you can ever know about your Self is your own sense of being present as you perceive that world. Whatever you perceive in that world constantly changes over time, but your own sense of being present as the perceiver of that world is always the same sense of beingness and presence. As the perceiver of your own world, you always exist in an eternal now, which is a reflection of your own timeless being.

On the other hand, delusion does evolve. Your delusion that you are a person that appears in the holographic world that you perceive evolves in the sense of Darwinian evolution, natural selection and the survival of the fittest body. That evolution is how the expression of your self-defensive emotions evolve that make you feel emotionally self-limited to the form of your body as your body is emotionally animated, which leads you to emotionally identify yourself with the form of your body. When you suffer from delusion, you come under the sway of the conditioning of Darwinian evolution, which makes you feel that your own existence depends on the survival of your body.

When you come under the sway of Darwinian evolution, you’re being conditioned by Darwinian evolution. That conditioning takes the form of self-concerned thoughts. Your self-concerned thoughts are emotionally constructed in your mind as a body-based personal self-image is emotionally related to the image of some other thing that appears in the world you perceive. Those emotional expressions are all self-defensive in nature in the sense that they defend the survival of your own body as though your existence depends on it. This is the inevitable result of emotionally identifying yourself with your body. You’ve been conditioned to think these self-concerned thoughts about yourself.

Delusion evolves because the self-concerned thoughts you think about yourself evolve. This conditioning has evolved over millions of life-times. In reality, you are a presence of perceiving consciousness at the central point of view of the world you perceive, and your thoughts are only emotionally animated forms of information that appear in that world. Your self-concerned thoughts are like the self-referential narration of a movie by the central character of the movie. Your self-concerned thoughts are personal in nature because you’re emotionally identifying yourself with the personal form of the central character of the movie. Your self-concerned thoughts are all about whatever personal troubles the central character finds itself to have in the movie and how the central character can get out of those troubles. Your self-concerned thoughts are delusional because you are not a person. You are not the central character of the movie that you’re watching. In reality, you are a presence of perceiving consciousness that is watching the movie from your own point of view as the animated images of the movie are displayed on a movie screen and are projected to your own point of view outside the screen.

The problem of the mentally constructed and emotionally energized body-based personal self-concept or ego is only created when the expression of self-defensive emotions are exaggerated, amplified, distorted and perpetuated in a nearly continuous inner running monologue of self-concerned thoughts emotionally constructed in the mind. Self-concerned thoughts are self-referential in nature, as they refer to survival of the body, and are like the self-referential narration of a movie by the central character of the movie. Whatever personal troubles the central character finds itself to have in the movie, the self-referential narration of the movie by the central character is all about how the central character can get out of that trouble. That’s the nature of self-concerned thoughts. Self-concerned thoughts have been conditioned over millions of life-times by Darwinian evolution and natural selection, which is all about defending the survival of the body. The bodies that survive in the sense of the self-replication of their forms and the sexual reproduction of their forms are the bodies that are best able to defend the survival of their forms through the expression of self-defensive emotions. That’s what the survival of the fittest body and the expression of fear and desire are all about. Body survival is really nothing more than the coherent self-replication of the emotionally animated form of the body in a recognizable way over a sequence of observable events.

The ego has evolved over millions of life-times because the ego is a way of ensuring the survival of the body. The self-referential construction of the ego in the mind is always emotionally energized, as a body-based self-concept or self-image is emotionally related to the concept or image of some other thing. The other thing is in emotional relationship with the body. Since the purpose of the ego is to defend the survival of the body, these emotional expressions are self-defensive in nature. Unlike a self-defensive emotion that naturally occurs in the moment, these self-concerned thoughts are nearly continuous in nature, and create an inner running monologue in the back of your mind. They’re often referred to as automatic thoughts that you may only be vaguely aware of. They are not unconscious, but you may only have a dim conscious awareness of them.

A key aspect of delusion is personal bias. As you express self-defensive emotions and emotionally identify yourself with your personal form, you’ve been conditioned by Darwinian evolution to express self-defensive emotions that defend the survival of your body as though your existence depends on it. That false belief that you believe about yourself that your existence depends on the survival of your body is the nature of your personal bias. That personal bias is expressed with the expression of personally biased emotions that defend the survival of your body as though your existence depends on it.

The expression of that personal bias arises from personal bias in the focus of your attention. As you focus your attention on the life your character appears to live in the world you perceive in a personally biased way, you express personally biased emotions that animate the life of your character. You’ve been conditioned by Darwinian evolution to express your emotions in that personally biased way because you’re defending the survival of your body as though your existence depends on it. That false belief you believe about yourself, which is inherent in every self-concerned thought you think about yourself, is the nature of your personal bias in the focus of your attention.

Personal bias is only possible because you always have a choice about what you can perceive in your own world. You make that choice as you focus your attention on things in your own world. Whatever you focus your attention on is what you perceive. That choice is inherent in the quantum state of that world. At the level of ordinary quantum theory, the quantum state of your own world can be understood as a sum over all possible paths that connect two points in that world, and you always have a choice about which path you will follow. The quantum state is a state of potentiality that only specifies the quantum probability about how likely it is that you will follow any particular path. The classical path, which is called the path of least action, is only the most likely path in the sense of quantum probability, but even the classical path assumes that choices are made in an unbiased way. If personal bias arises in the way the choices are made, then all bets are off and the quantum state loses its classical predictability.

The sum over all possible paths of the quantum state is a superposition of observable states that represents quantum entanglement. At the level of the holographic principle, quantum entanglement represents that all the qubits of information encoded on your own holographic screen are entangled. Again, this entanglement of the qubits is a state of potentiality that specifies how likely it is that you will observe anything in your own holographic world, but that likelihood assumes that you’re making your choices without any bias. If you observe things with personal bias, then you’re making your choices in a personally biased way. You make your choice about what you will observe in that world as you focus your attention on things that appear in your own holographic world.

Your focus of attention is directly related to the light of consciousness that illuminates your own holographic world and that projects the images of that world from your own holographic screen to your own point of view, like the light of a movie projector. The illuminating effect of the light of consciousness is directed with your focus of attention on things in your own holographic world. This illuminating and projecting effect of the light of consciousness, which is directed with your focus of attention on things, is the solution to a famous problem of perception, which is called the qualia problem.

Both quantum theory and the holographic principle tell us that at the level of the quantum state information is encoded in terms of quantities. A qubit of information is a quantity. The problem is that we do not perceive the world in terms of quantities, but rather in terms of qualities. We do not perceive quantities, like the wavelength of light, but rather in terms of qualities, like the color of light. At the level of the quantum state, which is a state of potentiality, the qubits are all entangled, but when we perceive the form of something in the world, we are disentangling the quantum state and perceiving an actual observable state. The observation of the form of something is only possible because we are disentangling the quantum state as we make our observations of the world, which is always a choice, like the choice about which path to follow.

When we make our choices about what to observe in the world or which path to follow through the world, and thereby disentangle the quantum state, we are directing the light of consciousness through the focus of our attention. In terms of the holographic principle, information is encoded on a holographic screen in terms of entangled qubits, but when we make our choices and disentangle the quantum state, we’re directing the light of consciousness through the focus of our attention. The illuminating effect of the light of consciousness is how images of our own holographic world are projected from our own holographic screen to our own point of view. In the process, we do not perceive quantities, like the qubits encoded on the holographic screen, but rather qualities, which characterize the form of things. The qualities of things are inherent in the images of things that are projected through the illuminating effect of the light of consciousness.

This solution to the qualia problem goes a long way toward explaining the nature of personal self-identification. The problem is personal bias in the observer’s focus of attention. The observer’s perception of feelings of personal self-limitation to the form of its body is an emotional quality. Just as feelings of pleasure and pain are emotional qualities, the feeling of personal self-limitation to a body is also an emotional quality. That emotional quality arises with personal bias in the observer’s focus of attention. The observer’s focus of attention is personally biased because the observer is emotionally identifying itself with the emotionally animated form of its body due to its perception of emotional feelings of self-limitation to its body that arise as self-defensive emotions are expressed. That personal bias arises from the false belief the observer believes about itself that its existence depends on the survival of its body, which leads to the expression of more self-defensive emotions, perpetuates the vicious cycle of personal self-identification, and reinforces the observer’s false belief that it believes about itself that it is a person that appears in the world it perceives. That false belief is created as personally biased self-concerned thoughts are emotionally constructed in the observer’s mind. Personal self-identification is only possible because of personal bias in the observer’s focus of attention that leads to the expression of personally biased emotions.

The personal bias of personal self-identification is the nature of delusion. Delusion evolves in the sense of Darwinian evolution, natural selection and survival of the fittest body because that’s how the observer’s mind has been conditioned over millions of life-times to think personally biased self-concerned thoughts about itself. The inherent emotional nature of those self-concerned thoughts is self-defensive in the sense of defending the survival of its body as though the observer’s existence depends on it. That false belief the observer believes about itself is the big lie at the heart of delusion.

The true nature of the observer is not its body, but consciousness. Consciousness does not evolve. Consciousness is. Consciousness is the nature of being, which ultimately is timeless being. Delusion can evolve over millions of life-times, but not consciousness. Consciousness can only be what it really is, which is the ultimate nature of existence.

Consciousness can only realize the true nature of what it really is when delusion comes to an end. Just as delusion can evolve over time, delusion can also come to an end. Delusion can evolve over millions of life-times, but eventually must come to an end. The end of delusion is called spiritual awakening. When consciousness awakens to the true nature of what it really is, delusion comes to an end.

Every observer creates its own virtual reality world, but what appears in that virtual reality world is no more real than the projected and animated images of a movie being displayed on a computer screen. Even the information and energy inherent in that virtual reality world can only arise due to the accelerated motion of the observer. The observer’s virtual reality world can only appear to come into existence due to its own accelerated motion. In the end, when that accelerated motion comes to an end, that virtual reality world disappears from existence from the observer’s own point of view and only the consciousness of the observer ultimately exists. When everything in your own world disappears from existence from your own point of view, what remains? The answer is nothing. That absolute nothingness is what you ultimately are.

Nothingness

The true nature of what you are is what remains when everything else disappears from existence. That absolute nothingness is the ultimate nature of existence, which is best described as pure undivided and unlimited timeless being. That pure timeless being is the source of your own consciousness that arises at the central point of view of your own holographic world. Your holographic world always appears to come into existence and disappears from existence from your own point of view. The source of your own consciousness is not the physical world that you perceive, but that pure timeless being.

The direct experience of that timeless being is called spiritual enlightenment. Spiritual enlightenment is only possible because you can withdraw the focus of your attention away from the world that you perceive. When you focus your attention on events in that world, that world appears to come into existence, and when you withdraw your attention away from that world, that world disappears from existence from your own point of view.

Preamble to The Human Condition

The basic approach taken here is to understand things at a scientific level, which is the most trustworthy conceptual approach, since scientific concepts have the greatest chance of being free from personal bias. This essay is primarily based on biology, but unlike the usual biologic discussions, which are based on the much too simplistic ideas of genetics and information, the approach here is much more dynamic, as it’s based on an understanding of emotions. The idea of Darwinian evolution is not just about genetics, but about the dynamical evolution of emotions, which is how the body is emotionally animated as the body struggles for survival in whatever environment it finds itself within. Natural selection and the survival of the fittest body are just as much about emotional evolution as they are about genetic evolution. The thing to be clear about is that this genetic/emotional evolution has taken place over millions of life-times. That is what you’re up against as you try to awaken to the truth of what you really are. What you’re up against is the emotional intelligence of your own ego, which really has only one purpose: its own survival. Jed McKenna says that your ego is way smarter than you are. What he means by that is that your ego has evolved over millions of life-times to defend its own survival, which it defends through the expression of self-defensive emotions. Survival is the only purpose of your ego. The only real advantage you have over your ego is the truth. McKenna says that you have to illuminate the falseness of your ego with the full force and power of your focused attention and awareness and see for yourself that your ego never has and never will exist. It is only an illusion of existence. Your ego is an illusion of your own existence. Your ego is a shadow dweller, and you have to shine the light of consciousness on it in order to clearly see it for what it really is, like a shadow projected on the wall. Your ego thrives in the half-light of ignorance. That ignorance is only ignorance about the truth of what you really are. Banish shadow with light, and see for yourself that it never really existed.

If you are to awaken to the truth of what you really are, you have to examine and see your ego for what it really is. Your ego is like a parasite that has attached itself to you for no other purpose than its survival. The trick your ego has played on you is to trick you into emotionally identifying yourself with your ego so that your attention is totally focused on defending its survival as though your existence depends on it. This trick is propagated through the expression of self-defensive emotions, which make you feel emotionally self-limited to your body as these emotions are expressed. This essay is called The Human Condition because it’s about how your own mind and psyche have been conditioned by Darwinian evolution and natural selection that leads to the survival of the fittest body. Body survival is defended by expressing self-defensive emotions. In the moment, there is nothing wrong with the expression of self-defensive emotions. If a mountain lion or grizzly bear jumps toward your body, it’s natural in that moment to express fear and run away. If your body is starving, it’s natural to search for food. The problem of the human ego is only created when these normal self-defensive emotional expressions are exaggerated, amplified and perpetuated in a nearly continuous inner running monologue of self-concerned thoughts emotionally constructed in your mind.

In addition to biology, thermodynamics is also being utilized, as is naturally incorporated within the holographic principle. The expression of emotions arises from the intersection of thermodynamics and Darwinian evolution. Also in terms of the holographic principle, the observer is understood to be the perceiving consciousness present at the central point of view of its own holographic world, as the images of that world are being displayed on a holographic screen, much like the animated images of a movie that are being displayed on a computer screen. If you want to get philosophical about it, this is also the basic idea that Plato tried to explain in the Allegory of the Cave. Plato was also interested in the nature of the human condition, which he understood in terms of the observer mistakenly identifying itself with its character in the movie. Plato referred to the self-identified observer as a prisoner since that personal self-identification is inherently false and creates a false state of personal self-limitation, bondage and confinement.

The Human Condition

The human condition is a direct result of the nature of Darwinian evolution, which is how the human condition is conditioned. Darwinian evolution can only proceed through the effect of natural selection, which results in the survival of the fittest body. There is always genetic diversity at the level of encoding information within a body, and the bodies that are best able to survive as they self-replicate their forms and sexually reproduce their forms are the bodies that are best able to defend the survival of their forms in a recognizable way as the body is emotionally animated over a sequence of observable events. The self-defensive nature of body survival is always expressed in terms of self-defensive emotions with the expression of fear and desire.

The expression of fear and desire are in turn driven by the pleasure-pain principle. Whatever promotes body survival, like eating, feels good, while whatever threatens body survival, like being eaten, feels bad. As a body expresses fear and desire, that body either moves toward whatever gives pleasure and promotes body survival, which is an expression of desire, or moves away from whatever gives pain and threatens body survival, which is an expression of fear. The expression of desire, which is movement toward something, is always in emotional conflict with the expression of fear, which is a movement away from something. This emotional conflict becomes unresolvable at the level of the motion of the body when the same thing gives both pleasure and pain.

At the most primitive level of the body, the expression of fear and desire are expressed in terms of the desire to eat another body and the fear of being eaten by another body. This is an inevitable consequence of living in a body-eat-body world. The nature of a body-eat-body world is that the body must add organizing potential energy to its form in order to maintain its form in a recognizable way as the body is emotionally animated over a sequence of observable events. The addition of organizing potential energy to the body allows work to be done within the body to maintain the coherent organization of the form of the body in a recognizable way. The form of the body must hold together while the body is emotionally animated. If the body does not add organizing potential energy to its form, the body falls apart due to the disorganizing effect of the random flow of thermal energy. When the body becomes disorganized, it is no longer recognizable as a distinct form. This is the reason why the body must express the desire to add organizing potential energy to its form in order to survive and self-replicate its form in a recognizable way, which is emotionally expressed as the desire to eat another body.

The only place this organizing potential energy can be found is within other bodies, which is why the body must eat other bodies in order to survive and self-replicate its form in a recognizable way. At the same time that the body expresses the desire to eat another body, the body must also express the fear of being eaten by another body if the body is to survive. The desire to eat another body is always in emotional conflict with the fear of being eaten by another body, which is an inevitable consequence of living in a body-eat-body world. This inevitable consequence is simply a result of the energetic need the body has to add organizing potential energy to its form in order to coherently self-replicate its form in a recognizable way. That coherent organization of the body must be maintained through the addition of organizing potential energy to the body, which allows work to be done within the body. The addition of organizing potential energy to the body is the only way the disorganizing effect of the random flow of thermal energy can be counterbalanced, which allows the body to coherently self-replicate its form in a recognizable way. The body must express the desire to add this organizing potential energy to its form, which is expressed as the desire to eat another body. At the same time, if the body is to survive and self-replicate its form in a recognizable way, the body must express the fear of being eaten by another body. This emotional conflict between the expression of fear and desire is an inevitable energetic consequence of living in a body-eat-body world as the body is coherently self-replicated in form.

Darwinian evolution naturally selects those bodies for survival that are best able to eat other bodies while they also avoid being eaten by other bodies. That’s the nature of the survival of the fittest body, which is driven by the pleasure-pain principle. Eating gives pleasure, which promotes body survival, while being eaten gives pain, which threatens body survival. At the level of Darwinian evolution, that’s all that’s really going on.

Darwinian evolution takes place over millions of life-times. Over the course of those eons of life-times, the mind becomes conditioned until it reaches the level of the human condition. The problem with the human condition is the ego. The ego arises from self-concerned thoughts that are constructed in the mind. The purpose of the ego is to ensure body survival, and as such, is only another instrument of Darwinian evolution and natural selection. The way the ego ensures body survival is by emotionally relating a body-based self-concept or self-image to the concept or image of some other thing as self-concerned thoughts are emotionally constructed in the mind. The nature of those emotional relationships are self-defensive expressions of fear and desire, which have as their only purpose the defense of body survival. With the construction of the ego, the body-based concept of self is emotionally related to the concept of another, and the nature of those emotional relationships is inherently self-defensive. The ego is all about defending the survival of the body. Unlike a natural expression of fear or desire that may occur in the moment, with the expression of the ego, there’s a nearly continuous stream of self-concerned thoughts constructed in the mind that create a nearly continuous inner running monologue. The purpose of this running monologue is to defend body survival.

This running monologue of self-concerned thoughts often occurs in the back of the mind with only dim awareness of its ongoing nature. This stream of self-concerned thought is referred to as automatic thoughts, which are not strictly unconscious in nature, but for which there is only dim awareness. The ego is constantly commenting about events that occur in the world, and whether those events are good or bad for body survival. The pleasure-pain principle tells us that the only way good and bad can be defined is in terms of body survival, since whatever promotes body survival feels good and whatever threatens body survival feels bad. There is no such thing as absolute good and bad. What is good for me might be bad for you. Good and bad are purely emotional qualities, which vary depending on your point of view. Human society may try to make them into a rigid moralistic code of conduct, but that is only the majority imposing their will on the minority. There can be no human ego without this emotional characterization into good and bad, since at its core, the ego is only defending the survival of the body through the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain as fear and desire are expressed. The ego is inherently personal in nature, and has as its only concern the survival of the personal form of the body. The way the ego expresses these personal concerns is in terms of the self-defensive expression of the emotions of fear and desire.

The problem of the ego is that the expression of fear and desire are in emotional conflict. Desire is expressed as a movement of the body toward whatever feels good and promotes body survival, while fear is expressed as a movement of the body away from whatever feels bad and threatens body survival. The problem of emotional conflicts arises when the same thing sometimes feels good and sometimes feels bad. For example, the desire to feel close to another, which feels good, can come into emotional conflict with the fear of being controlled by another, which feels bad. Human relationships are inherently characterized by these kinds of emotional conflicts.

Humans are social animals, and not only experience the emotional conflicts of the primitive expressions of fear and desire, but also the emotional conflicts of the social emotions. This is best exemplified by the immature nature of emotional attachments. The immature body of a child cannot fend for its own survival, but must emotionally attach itself to the body of its caregiver in order to survive. The body of a baby must emotionally attach itself to the body of its mother. This kind of immature emotional attachment creates its own emotional conflicts. The baby may want to control the behavior of its mother so that its desires are satisfied, but if the mother does not want to be controlled, this desire becomes counterproductive. If the baby expresses anger out of its frustration, this anger is also counterproductive. The desire to be in control only leads to more frustration when things can’t be controlled. The problem is that immature emotional attachments, like all other social emotions, are as self-defensive in nature as the expression of fear and desire, and create their own emotional conflicts.

The most important emotional conflict to confront in life is the fear of death, which leads to the denial of death. People deny death as they try to push away their fear of death and keep it unconscious. The fear of death is denied through the desire to be in control and have power over things. If you have absolute power over things, you have nothing to fear. The desire to be in control is always self-defensive and is a denial of death. The problem with the desire to be in control is the frustration you experience when you try to control what can’t be controlled. The only resolution for this emotional conflict is to accept death, which is a surrender. You have to give up your desire to be in control. Surrender directly leads to a state of integration.

The problem with the expression of all emotions is their self-defensive nature. All emotional expressions have been selected for in the sense of Darwinian evolution to defend the survival of the body. The body only survives because it expresses emotions. All emotional expressions defend the survival of the body. The bodies that survive in the sense of the self-replication of form and the sexual reproduction of form are the bodies that are best able to express self-defensive emotions. That self-defensive emotional expression is how the body survives. In the moment, there is nothing wrong with this kind of self-defensive emotional expression. The problem of the ego only arises when this self-defensive emotional expression is exaggerated, amplified, and perpetuated in the mind in a nearly continuous stream of self-concerned thoughts, as a body-based self-image is emotionally related to the image of some other thing. The only purpose of this nearly continuous inner running monologue of self-concerned thoughts constructed in the mind is to defend body survival, and as such, the emotional relationships are always self-defensive in nature. Defense of body survival is the only purpose of the ego.

The ego is a problem because it leads to personal self-identification. The question you have to ask yourself is: Who is identifying itself with its ego? Who is recognizing the form of the body as the body is self-replicated in form in a recognizable way over a sequence of observable events? Who is the observer of the body and the ego? Who is observing the self-concerned thoughts constructed in the mind that give rise to the appearance of an ego? The ego is only a body-based self-concept constructed in the mind. Whoever the observer is, it cannot be its ego because its ego is something that it observes. Whoever the observer is, it cannot be its body because its body is something that it observes. There is only an illusion that the observer is its body or its ego. That illusion is created when the observer emotionally identifies itself with its body due to emotional feelings of self-limitation to the body that are perceived as the body is emotionally animated. At a mental level, that illusion is created when the observer emotionally identifies itself with its ego as its ego is emotionally constructed and animated in its mind. The problem of personal self-identification is a problem because the observer does not know who it really is. This is the perennial question: Who am I? The observer is emotionally identifying itself with its body and ego due to its perception of feelings of emotional self-limitation, but in reality, it is neither its body nor its ego.

The problem of personal self-identification is a problem because the observer is mistakenly identifying itself with its body and its ego as the observer perceives the expression of emotional energy that animates its body and ego, which creates feelings of emotional self-limitation to its body. Those feelings of emotional self-limitation arise with the expression of all self-defensive emotions. This creates a vicious cycle. The observer emotionally identifies itself with its body due to its perceived feelings of emotional self-limitation to its body that arise as self-defensive emotions are expressed, and then feels compelled to defend the survival of its body as though its existence depends on it, which leads to the expression of more self-defensive emotions, which perpetuates the vicious cycle of personal self-identification. This is a problem because the observer does not know who it really is. Who is the observer? Who am I?

At its core, this is the problem of the human condition. The human condition is created as the human mind is conditioned by Darwinian evolution, which is only about ensuring the survival of the body. The human mind is conditioned over millions of life-times as the fittest body survives. The fittest bodies are those bodies that are best able to defend their own survival through the expression of self-defensive emotions. Natural selection selects those bodies for survival that are best able to defend their forms. Expressions of self-defensive emotions are incorporated in the mind with the mental construction of self-concerned thoughts that emotionally relate a body-based self-image to the image of some other thing. That emotional relationship is always self-defensive because all emotional expressions defend the survival of the body. The human ego emerges out of the mental construction of those self-concerned thoughts as a way to ensure body survival. Defending the survival of the ego is equivalent to defending the survival of the body. The only purpose of the ego is to defend body survival, but out of that emotional expression arises the body-based personal self-concept, which is at the very heart of the human condition of personal self-identification and personal self-defense.

The problem of personal self-identification only arises when you emotionally identify yourself with your ego due to personal bias in the focus of your attention. As you focus your attention on your ego with personal bias, you express personally biased emotions that emotionally construct and animate your ego in your mind. The expression of those personally biased emotions makes you feel emotionally self-limited to your body, which underlies your personal self-identification with your body. Once you personally identify yourself with your body, you then feel compelled to express more personally biased emotions to defend the survival of your body as though your existence depends on it, which only reinforces your personal self-identification with your body. The whole problem of your personal self-identification with your body, which is the problem of the ego, comes down to this mistaken belief that your existence depends on the survival of your body. Once you believe this false belief about yourself, you feel compelled to defend the survival of your body as though your existence depends on it, which you do through the expression of self-defensive emotions that arise from personal bias in the focus of your attention. Personal bias only arises because you believe that false belief about yourself. That false belief is the nature of your personal bias in the focus of your attention that leads to the emotional construction of your ego in your mind.

Your ego is like a parasite that has attached itself to you for no other purpose than its survival. The trick your ego has played on you is to trick you into emotionally identifying yourself with your ego so that your attention is totally focused on defending its survival as though your existence depends on it. This trick is propagated through the expression of self-defensive emotions, which make you feel emotionally self-limited to your body as the expression of these self-defensive emotions are exaggerated, amplified, distorted and perpetuated in a nearly continuous inner running monologue of self-concerned thoughts that are emotionally constructed in your mind.

To continue the analogy of your ego as a parasite, you feed your ego when you pay attention to it. When you pay attention to your ego with personal bias in the focus of your attention, you express personally biased emotions, which emotionally animate your ego as your ego is emotionally constructed in your mind. When you lose that personal bias in the focus of your attention, you stop expressing those personally biased emotions and your ego naturally dies away. When you withdraw your attention away from your ego, you also withdraw your investment of emotional energy in its mental construction that emotionally animates it. You feed your ego as you pay attention to it with personal bias in the focus of your attention, and you slay your ego when you lose that personal bias and stop paying attention to it, which only occurs through a process of surrendering and severing emotional attachments. You naturally lose that personal bias in the focus of your attention and stop paying attention to your ego when you see it as an illusion of what you really are and lose interest in paying attention to that illusion.

If you want to awaken to the truth of what you really are, you have to lose that personal bias in the focus of your attention and slay your own ego. You slay your ego when you stop paying attention to it. That’s when you can withdraw your attention away from your ego and refocus your attention on your own sense of being present as the perceiver of your own world, which is the only true thing you can ever know about yourself as you perceive your own world from the central point of view of that world. That’s where you have to stabilize the focus of your attention to awaken to the truth of what you really are.

The problem with all explanations about the nature of reality is that ultimate reality cannot be conceptualized. Ultimate reality can be directly experienced, but that experience requires you to make a journey from where you are right now as you read these words to the ultimate state of timeless being. At best, explanations can only play the role of a roadmap that points out travel directions in that journey.

That journey is called the path of return. Although ultimate reality cannot be conceptualized, the best explanation we have is the one given by Shankara in terms of the concepts of Atman and Brahman. The ultimate nature of what you really are is Brahman, which is the non-conceptual absolute nothingness. When you perceive your own world as a presence of consciousness, you are Atman. You have focalized your existence into a point of view, but the world you perceive is really no more real than a virtual reality movie that you’re watching. That point of view is moving relative to the unmoving absolute nothingness. This is where modern physics comes into the story, as it explains how that moving point of view is like an observer in an accelerated frame of reference that gives rise to an event horizon that acts as a holographic screen that projects all images of that world to your point of view. That motion also explains how images are animated like the frames of a movie. When that motion comes to an end, that world must disappear from existence from that particular point of view, and the unmoving point of view must dissolve back into the motionless absolute nothingness like a drop of water that dissolves into the ocean. Modern physics even explains this state of dissolution in terms of an observer in an ultimate freely falling frame of reference. The path of return is experienced as falling into and dissolving into the void. Ultimately, Atman is Brahman.

Discriminating the True from the False

When you were in kindergarten and the teacher called your name, you answered “present”. That sense of being present is the only true thing you can ever know about yourself. Whatever you perceive, including the events of your own life, you are always present to perceive those events. To awaken, you have to externalize yourself from the events of your own life and see that life with a sense of distance and detachment, like a movie that you’re watching. The key step in awakening is this process of externalization that discriminates your being from your life. Whatever appears to happen in the movie of your own life, you’re always present as the perceiver of the movie. The events of your life are constantly changing, but your sense of being present is always the same. Your sense of being present has truth in it, but the events of your life do not. This process of externalizing yourself from the events of your life and discriminating the true from the false is inherently a process of detachment. Only the true nature of your Self, which is nothing more than a presence of consciousness at the central point of view of your own world, has its own inherent spiritual being. Nisargadatta says timeless being is entirely in the Now. The true nature of your spiritual being always exists now, in the present moment. You always exist in an eternal now, which is a reflection of timeless being. When you are present, you can experience that spiritual being even as you perceive the events of your own life and world, which is an awakening within the dream. When you are not present and perceive nothing, you can dissolve back into the undivided and unlimited nothingness of that timeless being, which is an awakening from the dream.

Seeing the false as false is meditation.

Meditation is discriminating the true from the false.

Discrimination will lead to detachment. You gain nothing. You leave behind what is not your own and find what you have never lost: Your own being-Nisargadatta Maharaj

The true nature of what you are is a spiritual being, which is called I Am. You are not a physical being. Your physical body or life-form is like a garment or costume that you wear. You are the spiritual being that is wearing the costume. The costume wears out when the body dies, but the spiritual being never dies because it has timeless being. It does not exist in time. Your physical body, your thoughts, your memories and your emotions are all a part of the costume. Your costume and your entire world all exist in time, but your spiritual being does not. When your body dies, you still exist as a spiritual being. Your world is like a virtual reality movie that you’re watching, and your costume is like the central character of the movie. You’re totally immersed in the movie because the movie is a virtual reality. It is a total VR. In reality, you are only the watcher of the movie.

The only true thing you can ever know about yourself is your own sense of being present as the perceiver of the movie, the sense of I-Am-ness, the sense of beingness and presence. That sense of being present is where you have to focus your attention to the exclusion of everything else you can perceive. You have to bring yourself into focus and know yourself to be a presence of consciousness at the center of the world you perceive that exists now, in the present moment. You have to be with yourself and center yourself. You have to become aware of your own beingness and presence to the exclusion of everything else you can perceive. You do that by seeing the world you perceive as an illusion, like a movie that you’re watching, and losing interest in watching the movie. You have to withdraw your attention away from the movie and refocus your attention on your own sense of being present. You do that when you surrender and enter into a state of present moment awareness. You accept everything as it is and give up your desire to control things and have power over things. You accept everything as it is because it’s all an expression of God’s will and is for the best. You give up your desire to control things when you accept everything as it is with no desire that anything be any different that it appears to be in the movie. You see the movie as an illusion and lose interest in trying to direct the events in the movie. Your desire to be in control and have power over things is self-defensive because you’re trying to defend the survival of your character in the movie. Your desire to be in control and have power over things is a denial of death as you try to push your fear of death away and keep it unconscious.

You give up that desire to be in control when you surrender and give up your personal bias in the focus of your attention that expresses itself as self-defensive individual will. You do that because you see that you are only defending the survival of an illusion of what you are and that the true nature of your being and existence does not depend on the survival of your character in the illusion. The key aspect of surrender is that when you surrender you accept death as a natural part of life. When you surrender, you come to see that your spiritual existence does not depend on the survival of your character in the movie you’re watching, and you accept the death of your character as a natural part of the movie. That’s when you stop defending the survival of your character as though your existence depends on it. When you surrender and accept everything as it appears to be each moment you bring yourself into a state of present moment awareness within which your attention is only focused on the events of the present moment. In that state of present moment awareness, you turn your attention away from the events of the world you perceive because you see those events are an illusion, you lose interest in paying attention to that illusion, and you refocus your attention on your own sense of being present as the perceiver of the illusion. You sever your emotional attachment to the life your character appears to live in the illusion when you see that life as an illusion of what you really are and lose interest in paying attention to that illusion.

When you withdraw your attention away from the life your character appears to live in the illusion, you also withdraw your investment of emotional energy in that life that animates that life, which is how you sever your emotional attachment to your character. Your character becomes dead to you when you stop caring about the life your character appears to live in the illusion and stop emotionally animating that life. You become willing to do nothing at a personal level. You see that life as an illusion of what you are and lose interest in paying attention to the illusion. You have to become interested only in discovering the true nature of what you really are. That’s when you can turn your attention away from the illusion, look within, and refocus your attention on your own sense of being present as the perceiver of the illusion. That’s where you have to stabilize the focus of your attention. You have to bring yourself into focus, center yourself, be with yourself and know yourself to be a presence of consciousness at the center of the world you perceive that exists now, in the present moment. You have to stabilize the focus of your attention on your own affectionate feeling-sense of being present. That sense of being present, that affectionate feeling-sense of I-Am-ness, that affectionate feeling-sense of beingness and presence, is where you have to focus your attention to the exclusion of everything else you can perceive if you are to awaken.

The flip side of focusing your attention only on your own affectionate feeling-sense of being present as the perceiver of your own world to the exclusion of everything else you can perceive in that world is the process of externalizing and depersonalizing yourself. You have to externalize your own being from all the events that appear to occur in that world as your character appears to live a life in that world. The way you externalize your own being from the life your character appears to live in the world you perceive is by severing your emotional attachment to your character. That’s why you have to become willing to do nothing and die at a personal level as you stop emotionally animating the life of your character. You have to stop caring about the life your character appears to live in the world you perceive. Your character has to become dead to you. That’s how you sever your emotional attachment to your character and externalize yourself. That’s the only way you can separate and externalize your own being from the life your character appears to live in the world you perceive. You have to become willing to die and do nothing at a personal level. You can only externalize yourself as you sever your emotional attachment to the life your character appears to live in the world you perceive.

Why Chatter about Delusion and Enlightenment

In the neo-Advaita literature you will find the expression “being-consciousness-bliss”, which Nisargadatta describes as the process of focusing your attention on your own affectionate feeling-sense of being present (the sense I-Am). McKenna describes this as “bringing yourself into focus”. The Self that you’re bringing into focus is a presence of consciousness. You are that presence of consciousness that exists now, in the present moment, at the center of your own world. You’re aware of your own sense of being present as the perceiver of your own world as you perceive that world. That world is just like a virtual reality movie that’s being displayed on a computer screen. This isn’t just the testimony of enlightened beings (beginning with Plato and extending through Nisargadatta and McKenna), but is also the natural conclusion of theoretical physics (as was concluded by Amanda Gefter in her book about the holographic principle). The flip side of bringing yourself into focus (as you focus on your own sense of being present as the perceiver of your own world), and knowing yourself to be a presence of consciousness at the central point of view of that world, is the process of externalizing yourself from everything you can perceive in that world, including your character (avatar) in the virtual reality movie you’re watching. Your character is the central character of that movie, which is the central form of information that appears in the virtual reality and which is always emotionally animated relative to all other forms that appear in the virtual reality. You’re only confused about what you really are because you’re emotionally identifying yourself with your character due to your perception of feelings of emotional self-limitation to the form of your character that arise as that personal form is emotionally animated relative to all other forms. That’s the nature of personal self-identification. When McKenna talks about destroying the ego (spiritual autolysis) he only refers to the process of emotional detachment that takes that emotional energy out of the mental construction of that personal self-identity. You sever your emotional attachment to your character when you stop expressing that emotional energy. You do that when you see your character as an illusion of what you really are, lose interest in paying attention to that illusion, and withdraw your attention away from the illusion, thereby withdrawing your investment of emotional energy in the illusion that animates the life of your character. That withdrawal of emotional energy is how you sever the emotional attachment and destroy your ego. In the process of severing your emotional attachment to your character, you externalize yourself and depersonalize yourself. You stop emotionally identifying yourself with your character. In this process of externalization, you see your character as no more real than an animated character in a movie that you’re watching. You see this from a higher level of consciousness, which is the idea of the ascension of consciousness to a higher level that both Nisargadatta and McKenna (not to mention Plato) speak about. The practice of focusing your attention on your own sense of being present as the perceiver your own world (to the exclusion of everything else you can perceive in that world) is the flip side of the same coin of externalizing and depersonalizing yourself as you emotionally detach yourself from your character and see the life your character appears to live in that world from a higher level of consciousness, like a movie that you’re only watching. The two processes of bringing yourself into focus and externalizing yourself go together hand-in-hand. Ultimately, when you totally withdraw your attention away from the world you perceive, while firmly focusing your attention on your own sense of being present as the perceiver of that world, that world disappears from existence from your own point of view and the individual consciousness and being of your Self (present at the central point of view of your own world) dissolves back into the undifferentiated consciousness and timeless being of No-self (the void) like a drop of water that dissolves back into the ocean. That’s the nature of passing through the gateless gate and becoming spiritually enlightened.

There’s one last interesting point that can be scientifically understood in terms of the holographic principle. The illusion of time is only created because the point of view of the Self is undergoing accelerated motion relative to the motionless void. That’s how an observer’s event horizon is constructed that becomes the observer’s holographic screen when qubits of information are encoded on the horizon. The observer’s character in this constructed holographic virtual reality world is a form of information that can be reduced to qubits of information encoded on the screen, just like in a computer-generated virtual reality world that’s being displayed on a computer screen, but unlike a classical computer network, this is a quantum computer network. The emotional energy that animates the observer’s character can be understood in terms of the energy of the observer’s own accelerated motion. When that accelerated motion comes to an end in an ultimate state of free-fall, the observer’s holographic world disappears from existence since the observer no longer has an event horizon that acts as its holographic screen. When the expression of that flow of energy comes to an end, the course of time also comes to an end. This naturally happens when the observer’s own accelerated motion comes to an end relative to the motionless void, which occurs as the observer totally withdraws its attention away from the holographic world that it perceives, thereby withdrawing its investment of energy in that world. Passing through the gateless gate can only occur in an ultimate state of free-fall. Once spiritual enlightenment occurs, it becomes possible to see how the illusion of a holographic world is created. Not only is that world seen like a virtual reality movie that is being displayed on a computer screen and is being observed by an observer at the central point of view of that world, but the motion of the observer relative to the motionless void is also seen as the nature of the energy that constructs and animates that world as the surface of the observer’s event horizon arises that displays all the animated images of that world, just like a computer screen. The observer’s event horizon is a bounding surface of space that arises within the void and acts as a holographic screen, which is like a surface of the ocean. The images of that holographic world are being displayed on the screen and are animated in the flow of energy that arises from the observer’s own motion. When that motion comes to an end, that animation also comes to an end, which is how the course of time comes to an end when that flow of energy comes to an end. Also seen is how the images of that holographic world are projected from the observer’s own screen to its point of view due to the illuminating effect of the light of consciousness that emanates from the observer’s own point of view, just like the light of a movie projector that projects the animated images of a movie from a movie screen to the point of view of an observer.

The illuminating effect of the light of consciousness, which projects the images, arises as the observer focuses its attention on the events of its own holographic world. When the observer withdraws its attention away from the events of that world, it also withdraws the illuminating effect of the light of consciousness away from that world. That world disappears from existence from the observer’s own point of view when the light of consciousness is turned off and that world is no longer illuminated. The bottom line is that the observer’s own world disappears from existence from its own point of view when that world is no longer illuminated or animated, which can only occur as the observer withdraws its attention away from that world. That’s when individual being is able to dissolve back into undivided timeless being. Once spiritual enlightenment occurs, all of this is seen from the emptiness, silence, stillness and darkness of the void.

If you carefully read Nisargadatta, Osho and McKenna, along with the Bhagavad Gita, Plato, the Tao Te Ching, Chuang Tzu, and the Ten Bulls of Zen, this whole incredible scenario is described by enlightened beings in exquisite detail. There are also elements of it in the Bible, especially the Book of Genesis, and in the Vedas. It’s amazing that the holographic principle is able to confirm this ancient knowledge at a scientific level.

Even without the holographic principle it’s possible to understand what’s going on here as long as you understand the world as a holographic virtual reality, similar to the Matrix. The key thing is to understand that your consciousness is not a result of your brain activity. Your thoughts are a result of your brain activity. Your brain and your thoughts are just another aspect of the holographic world that you perceive. You can only know yourself to be the perceiver of that world, which is the consciousness present at the central point of view of that world. Images of that world are being displayed on a screen, just like in a computer-generated virtual reality. The only true thing you can ever know about yourself is your own sense of being present as you perceive the projected and animated images of that world. The images constantly change, but your sense of being present is always the same. If you want to awaken, either within or from the dream, you have to ignore the images and focus your attention only on your own being.

Even the affectionate feeling of being present or the bliss of being-consciousness-bliss can be understood in terms of the holographic principle. That affectionate feeling comes from feelings of connection you perceive as you allow the flow of energy through your own world and your own motion as a point of consciousness to come into alignment. Your own motion as a point of consciousness underlies all your emotional expressions. When you feel connected, your own motion as a presence of consciousness at the central point of view of your own world is coming into alignment with the normal flow of things through that world. Your willingness to come into alignment and feel connected is always a surrender to God’s will. You experience that connectedness as you focus your attention on your own sense of being that presence of consciousness while allowing yourself to feel connected. The light of consciousness is in its purest state when you surrender and give up all your personal bias in the focus of your attention. That’s when the light of consciousness becomes free from all personal bias. You become aware of that light and love as you feel connected to all things.

The big question is why? Why does any of this happen? It’s common to say that life is but a dream: Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream, merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream. The better answer is to say life is but a game. Life is a virtual reality game that you’re playing, like the kind of virtual reality games that are displayed on a computer screen. Why are you playing the game? Why did you create the game? The answer is it’s all a spontaneous expression of creativity. Children create and play games in order to amuse themselves. Children create and play games for no other reason than their amusement and as a spontaneous expression of their creativity. The only purpose of the game is to amuse yourself. Inherent in the game is a joke. You’re playing a joke on yourself: There must be some way out of here, said the Joker to the Thief; there’s too much confusion, I can’t get no relief. No reason to get excited, the Thief he kindly spoke; there are many here among us who feel life is but a joke. But you and I, we’ve been through that and this is not our fate; so let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late. Life is a joke that you’re playing on yourself as you play the game. The joke you play on yourself is your emotional self-identification with your character in the game. Spiritual enlightenment amounts to nothing more than your refusal to play the game: When you refuse to play the game, you’re out of it. That’s the only way you can stop emotionally identifying yourself with your character in the game. That’s why it’s common for enlightened beings to have a good laugh about the whole thing after they become enlightened. All you can do after you’re done is laugh about the whole thing.

The Significance of Personal Suffering

Think of your personal struggles in terms of your emotional attachments. Life is hard because it’s based on the pleasure-pain principle, which underlies the whole idea of Darwinian evolution, natural selection and the survival of the fittest body. The key thing to understand is that the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain, which are emotionally expressed as fear and desire, only apply at the level of the body. You are not the body. Personal suffering only indicates an unwillingness to let go and move on. The way you overcome personal suffering is through surrender, which ultimately is the acceptance of death, and by severing your emotional attachments. Surrender and detachment are essential aspects of how you bring your own spiritual being into focus. This may seem like harsh advice when you’re emotionally identifying yourself with your body, but there is no other advice that leads to spiritual liberation.

The other thing to be clear about is that body death is not required for spiritual liberation. Body death can even be seen as an obstacle to spiritual liberation in the sense of reincarnation. Only ego death, which is the death of the mentally constructed, emotionally energized, body-based, personal self-concept is required for spiritual liberation. Even spiritual enlightenment, which is the ultimate state of awakening from the dream, is not required for spiritual liberation. Spiritual liberation occurs at an intermediate level when you awaken within the dream. That’s when you clearly see that your body is only like the central character that appears in a virtual reality movie that you’re watching from your own point of view outside the movie as that virtual reality world is displayed on a movie screen. Seeing that is itself spiritual liberation.

Once you realize that there is nothing in this world which you can call your own, you look at it from the outside as you look at a play on the stage or a picture on the screen. To know the picture as the play of light on the screen gives freedom from the idea that the picture is real. In reality I only look. Whatever is done is done on the stage. Joy and sorrow, life and death, they are real to the man in bondage. To me they are all in the show, as unreal as the show itself-Nisargadatta Maharaj

Aside on Psychoanalysis

In the most advanced understanding of dynamic psychoanalysis, there is the idea of the observing ego and the acting ego. In the sense of modern theoretical physics and the holographic principle, the observing ego is the observer, which is the presence of consciousness at the central point of view of its own holographic world. The images of that holographic world are being displayed on a holographic screen, just like the animated images of a virtual reality movie that are being displayed on a computer screen. The acting ego is the central character of that virtual reality movie, much like an actor on a stage. In psychoanalysis, there is the idea that progress is only made when the observing ego performs an examination of the acting ego. The behaviors of the acting ego are always emotionally animated. Those emotional actions are typically self-defensive in nature, and are fraught with emotional conflicts. The job of the observing ego is to make an examination of its acting ego, and clearly see the self-defensive nature of those actions and their inherent emotional conflicts. For this to happen, the observing ego has to stop identifying itself with its acting ego, which requires detachment. In effect, the observing ego has to step out of its own world, externalize itself, and see that world with a sense of distance and detachment. The detached observing ego sees the drama enacted by the acting ego from the outside, like a movie displayed on a screen or a play enacted on a stage. This detachment leads to a state of depersonalization as the observing ego stops identifying itself with its acting ego. This naturally happens as the observing ego clearly sees how the emotional behaviors of its acting ego are always fraught with unresolvable emotional conflicts and inconsistencies that result from the expression of self-defensive emotions. In psychoanalysis, there is the idea that this process of ego examination leads to a state of integration, which is very much like a state of surrender.

When the observing ego emotionally detaches itself from its acting ego and no longer emotionally identifies itself with its acting ego, the observing ego no longer has any vested interest in expressing the self-defensive emotions that underlie the emotional conflicts of its acting ego. Those self-defensive emotional expressions just come to an end. Like a state of surrender, the observing ego just watches from its own point of view as things tend to play out in the normal way. The observing ego loses its personal bias, and stops trying to defend itself and be in control of things. The observing ego is no longer interested in trying to direct events in the movie, but just allows events to play out in the normal way as it loses its personal bias. With integration, there is an equanimous and dispassionate acceptance of the good with the bad. In psychoanalysis, the state of integration is characterized by love and work. You do what you love and you love what you do. Unlike immature emotional attachments, like a baby emotionally attached to its mother, there is a sense of mature love, as everything and everyone becomes lovable.

The idea of integration in dynamic psychoanalysis fits right in with the idea of the denial of death. Freud thought that the most important emotional conflict to overcome in life was the Oedipal complex, which is obviously related to sexual reproduction. As a child, your desire to have sex with your mother is in conflict with your fear that your father will kill you. Otto Rank disagreed with Freud, and thought that the most important emotional conflict to overcome in life was the fear of death, which leads to the denial of death. People deny death as they try to push away their fear of death and keep it unconscious. The fear of death is denied through the desire to be in control and have power over things. If you have absolute power over things, you have nothing to fear. The desire to be in control is always self-defensive in nature, and is a denial of death. The problem is the frustration you experience when you try to control what can’t be controlled. The only resolution for this emotional conflict is to accept death, which is a surrender. You have to give up your desire to be in control. Surrender directly leads to a state of integration.

The Integrated State

The only good part of becoming enlightened is what Jed McKenna calls the integrated state and Bernadette Roberts calls the mystical union of the Self with God. You don’t have to destroy your Self to be integrated. You just have to bring yourself into alignment with the expression of divine will, which can also be called the normal flow of things. This is where surrender comes into play. When you express your personally biased individual will, you’re only interfering with the normal flow of things and making things worse for yourself. You’re creating an emotional disturbance in the normal of things. McKenna says the ultimate state has nothing to recommend it. McKenna recommends the integrated state for everybody and the ultimate state for nobody.

It’s worth discussing the nature of the integrated state in some detail. The normal flow of things does not mean that things are predetermined. There is always potentiality in the way things play out. In the language of modern theoretical physics, the computer-generated virtual reality is not governed by a classical computer but by a quantum computer, and there is always potentiality in the way events play out in the virtual reality. Potentiality is built into the operation of the quantum computer. You always have a choice in terms of what you’ll experience in the virtual reality as you focus your attention on things. That’s why you can express an intent, and as long as that intent is not self-limited and personally biased, the potentiality of the virtual reality will make that intent into an actuality. The intent has to be unbiased and best for all involved. You also have to focus your attention on expressing and manifesting that intent. You have to work to manifest that intent as you focus your time and energy on its manifestation. When you focus your attention in this way, you’re redirecting the normal flow of things to manifest the intent. Potentiality is becoming an actuality, which is pretty much guaranteed to happen as long as the intent is not selfish and personally biased and is expressed in a way that is best for all involved.

Expression of potentiality is the reason expressions of creativity are possible. The computer generated virtual reality is a holographic world constructed through the creation of geometry. The Source of that world, which we call the void, has the potentiality to create geometry. That is the ultimate source of all creativity. Both information and energy are geometrically created. When you enter into the integrated state, you automatically partake of that expression of creativity. Wherever you are right now, you have the potential to redirect the normal flow of things by expressing a pure, unbiased, unconflicted intent, and you can end up wherever you want to be as long as that desire is not selfish and personally biased. Expressing creativity and manifesting desires is an inherent aspect of the integrated state. Right actions and feelings of connection are also inherent aspects of the integrated state when you allow yourself to come into alignment with the normal flow of things. To feel disconnected and express wrong actions, you have to create an emotional disturbance in the normal flow of things by expressing personally biased individual will, which you do as your focus of attention becomes personally biased.

When you become firmly established in the integrated state, you no longer know yourself to be a person. You can only know yourself to be a presence of consciousness at the center of your own world. That’s the inherent nature of the death-rebirth transformation that happens when you surrender to divine will. You die in identity to the body and are reborn of the spirit.

The potentiality you experience as you focus your attention on things in the virtual reality is the reason you can become enlightened. As you express this potentiality, what you are really doing is playing a virtual reality game. Everything you experience in the virtual reality game is a choice you make as you focus your attention on things. You always have the choice to withdraw your attention away from the game and stop playing the game. Becoming enlightened and entering the ultimate state is the end result of your refusal to play the game. When you are totally out of the game, you experience nothing, which is why McKenna says the ultimate state has nothing to recommend it and why the Buddha stated he attained nothing from total enlightenment.

The Ocean of Being

Inherent in the Book of Genesis is the idea that the creation of the world arises from an Ocean of Being. This Ocean of Being is referred to as the waters, the deep, the abyss, the formless, the darkness and the void:

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth
And the earth was without form and void
And darkness was upon the face of the deep
And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters
And God said ‘Let there be light’; and there was light
And God saw the light, that it was good
And God divided the light from the darkness

This Ocean of Being is also referred to as undivided or One Being in the sense of One God. The thing to be clear about is that the true nature of One Being is the nature of consciousness in the sense of the ultimate nature of existence. Consciousness is what ultimately exists when everything else disappears from existence. Since that ultimate existence can only be described in terms of negation as void or absolute nothingness, within which even the course of time comes to an end, that ultimate existence is also described as timeless Being. It is not only undivided, but also unlimited. This ultimate existence is referred to as Eternity and Infinity. This timeless existence is the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end of everything that appears to come into existence in the course of time. Since it is absolute nothingness, it is described as void. Since it is One and undivided, it can only be understood as undifferentiated consciousness.

The Book of Genesis also describes the nature of individual being. That individual being is referred to as the Spirit of God, which is best described as a point of illuminating and perceiving consciousness that arises at its own point of view at the center of its own holographic world. That holographic world is constructed on a holographic screen, which is referred to as the face of deep. The face of the deep is understood as a surface of the Ocean of Being. The Spirit of God is the observer of its own holographic world. The images of the observer’s holographic world are displayed on a holographic screen that arises due to the observer’s own accelerated motion relative to the motionless void that gives rise to the observer’s event horizon, which is the face of the deep. That accelerated motion is referred to as the Spirit of God moving over the face of deep.

The individual being of the observer is best understood as a point of illuminating and perceiving consciousness that arises at the central point of view of its own holographic world. That individual being is divided from the One Being of the Ocean of Being. That is what Genesis refers to when it says the light is divided from the darkness. The light of consciousness that illuminates the observer’s own holographic world is divided from the darkness of the void, just as the individual being of the observer is divided from the One Being of the Ocean of Being. The illuminating effect of the light of consciousness is what projects all the images of the observer’s own holographic world from its own holographic screen to its own point of view at the center of that world, just as the accelerated motion of the observer relative to the motionless void is the source of the energy that animates those images over the course of time. The key thing that the Book of Genesis is telling us when it says that the light is divided from the darkness is that the individual being of the observer must be divided from the One Being of the Ocean of Being before the observer’s own holographic world can appear to come into existence.

Perception always occurs in a subject-object relation. The true nature of the subject is the observer at the central point of view of its own holographic world, and the nature of all the objects the observer can perceive are forms of information that appear in that holographic world. The forms are like images that are projected from the observer’s own holographic screen to its central point of view and are animated in the flow of energy that arises from its own accelerated motion, which also gives rise to its holographic screen as its event horizon. The holographic principle tells us that the forms are all reducible to qubits of information encoded on the observer’s own holographic screen.

This subject-object relation of perception gives rise to a state of duality, which is the observer’s experience of self and other. The true nature of the Self is the observer, which is a point of illuminating and perceiving consciousness at the center of its own holographic world. The only true thing the observer can know about its Self is I Am, which is its own sense of being present as it perceives events in its own holographic world, but this state of duality is characterized by delusion due to the observer’s emotional self-identification with the form of its body that appears in its holographic world. The observer’s body is only the central form of information that appears in its own holographic world, but when that personal form is emotionally animated relative to all other forms that appears in its world, the observer feels emotionally self-limited to that personal form due to its perception of feelings of emotional self-limitation to its body, which leads the observer of emotionally identify itself with the personal form of its body and gives rise to its dualistic experience of self and other in its own holographic world.

Delusion can only come to an end when the observer’s emotional self-identification with the personal form of its body comes to an end. The observer’s holographic world only appears to come into existence when the observer focuses its attention on the events of its holographic world. When the observer withdraws its attention away from the events of its holographic world, its holographic world disappears from existence from its own point of view. When the observer withdraws its attention away from the events of its holographic world, it also withdraws its investment of emotional energy in that world that emotionally animates the form of its body within that world relative to all other forms that appear in that world. When the observer withdraws its attention away from the events of its holographic world, it also withdraws the focus of the light of consciousness away from events in that world that illuminates that world and projects all the images of that world from its own holographic screen to its own point of view at the center of that world. When the observer’s own holographic world is no longer illuminated or animated, its holographic world disappears from existence from its own point of view.

The disappearance of the observer’s own holographic world from its own point of view is always experienced as an ultimate state of free-fall. When the observer withdraws its investment of animating emotional energy in its own holographic world, the observer’s own accelerated motion relative to the motionless void comes to an end. The end of that accelerated motion is an ultimate state of free-fall in which the observer no longer has an event horizon that acts as its holographic screen, and therefore no longer perceives events in its own holographic world. In this ultimate state of free-fall, the observer’s own holographic world disappears from existence from its own point of view.

What happens to the observer in this ultimate state of free-fall? The answer is called spiritual enlightenment. The observer’s individual being, which is always present as a point of illuminating and perceiving consciousness at the center of its own holographic world, dissolves back into the Ocean of Being like a drop of water dissolves back into the ocean. The individual being of the observer dissolves back into the pure undivided and unlimited timeless Being of the void. Not only does the observer’s own holographic world disappear from existence from its own point of view, but the course of time also comes to an end. The observer’s individual being always exists in the eternal now of its own holographic world, which is a reflection of its own timeless being, and it is that timeless being that is experienced with the dissolution of spiritual enlightenment.

That unlimited and undivided timeless Being can only be described in terms of negation as absolute nothingness or void. It is described as motionless since it is the source of all animating energy. It is described as darkness since it is the source of the illuminating effect of the light of consciousness. It is not perceivable, but is the source of perception. It is the source of the individual being of the perceiver of its own world, which is the illuminating and perceiving consciousness at the center of its own world. It is the source of the perceiver’s own motion relative to the motionless void. It is the source of all individual consciousness. It is the source of the Self. Within the One Being of that absolute nothingness, there is no experience of self and other, hence it is called No-self.

After the dissolution of spiritual enlightenment, the observer again experiences its own holographic world, but that world is now experienced from the highest perspective of the emptiness, silence, stillness and darkness of the void. From that highest perspective of consciousness, it is seen how the observer’s world appears to come into existence due to the observer’s own motion relative to the motionless void that animates all the forms of that world, and how that world is illuminated due to the light of consciousness that projects all the images of the forms of that world from the observer’s own screen to its own point of view at the center of that world. The forms are animated due to the observer’s own motion, like the animated images of a movie displayed on a movie screen, and are projected from the screen to the observer’s own point of view, where the images are perceived, due to the illuminating effect of the light of consciousness that emanates from the observer’s own point of view, like the light of a movie projector. All of this is seen from the emptiness, silence, stillness and darkness of the void.

Nothingness

In the immortal words of the Bhagavad Gita:

The unreal has no being.
The real never ceases to be.

Never the spirit was born,
The spirit shall cease to be never,
Never was time it was not.
End and beginning are dreams.

Now I Am become death, the destroyer of worlds.

In the knowledge of the Atman, which is a dark night to the ignorant, the recollected mind is fully awake and aware. The ignorant are awake in their sense life, which is darkness to the sage.

In the last several lines of the Tempest, Shakespeare gives a description of spiritual enlightenment, just as Plato gives a description of spiritual enlightenment in the Allegory of the Cave:

We are such stuff as dreams are made on
And our little life is rounded with a sleep.

Life is but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil.

Shakespeare, like Plato, is almost universally misunderstood by those who read his works and then try to give them an interpretation, because those who try to interpret Shakespeare and Plato are not spiritually enlightened, and really have no idea what Shakespeare and Plato are really talking about.

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience.-Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

That which permeates all, which nothing transcends, and which like the universal space around us fills everything completely from within and without, that Supreme non-dual Brahman
That thou art

Brahman is the only truth, the world is illusion, and there is ultimately no difference between Atman and Brahman.
-Shankara

He must dare to leap into the Origin so as to live by the Truth and in the Truth, like one who has become one with it. He must become a pupil again, a beginner; conquer the last and steepest stretch of the way, undergo new transformation. If he survives its perils then is his destiny fulfilled; face to face he beholds the unbroken Truth, the Truth beyond all truths, the formless Origin of origins, the Void which is the All; is absorbed into it and from it emerges reborn-Eugen Herrigel

When the joy of my own emptiness began to wane I decided to rejuvenate it by spending some solitary time gazing into my empty self. Though the center of self was gone, I was sure the remaining emptiness, the silence and joy, was God Himself. Thus on one occasion, with full hedonistic deliberation, I settled myself down and turned my gaze inward. Almost immediately the empty space began to expand, and expanded so rapidly it seemed to explode; then, in the pit of my stomach I had the feeling of falling a hundred floors in a non-stop elevator, and in this fall every sense of life was drained from me. The moment of landing I knew: When there is no personal self, there is also no personal God. I saw clearly how the two go together-and where they went, I have never found out-Bernadette Roberts

In the silence and the void
Standing alone and unchanging
Ever present and in motion
I do not know its name
Call it Tao

Without form there is no desire
Without desire there is tranquility
Therefore the sage seeks freedom from desire

Being at one with the Tao is eternal
And though the body dies, the Tao will never pass away

Because there is no place for death to enter

Tao in the world is like a river flowing home to the sea

Returning is the motion of the Tao

It returns to nothingness
It leads all things back to the great oneness

Ever desireless, one can see the mystery
Ever desiring, one can see the manifestations
These two spring from the same source
This appears as darkness
Darkness within darkness
The gate to all mystery-Tao Te Ching

The great path has no gates
Thousands of roads enter it
When one passes through this gateless gate
One walks the universe alone-Mumon

Empty yourself of everything

The man of Tao remains unknown.
Perfect virtue produces nothing.
No-self is true self
And the greatest man is nobody–-Chuang Tzu

Scientific References

Quanta Magazine June 6, 2023 video in which Lenny Susskind and Adam Brown propose a new second law of quantum complexity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLOHdW7dLug

Tom Banks and Willy Fischler (2018): Why the Cosmological Constant is a Boundary Condition. arXiv:1811.00130

Raphael Bousso (2002): The Holographic Principle. arXiv:hep-th/0203101

Amanda Gefter (2014): Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn (Random House)

Amanda Gefter (2012): Cosmic Solipsism. FQXi Essay

Rebecca Goldstein (2005): Incompleteness (W W Norton)

Brian Greene (2000): The Elegant Universe (Vintage Books)

Gerard ‘t Hooft (2000): The Holographic Principle. arXiv:hep-th/0003004

Ted Jacobson (1995): Thermodynamics of Space-time. arXiv:gr-qc/9504004

J Madore (1999): Non-commutative Geometry for Pedestrians. arXiv:gr-qc/9906059

Juan Maldacena (1997): The Large N Limit of Superconformal Field Theories and Supergravity. arXiv:hep-th/9711200

Roger Penrose (2005): The Road to Reality (Alfred A Knopf)

Roger Penrose (2000): The Large, the Small and the Human Mind (Canto)

Roger Penrose Interview: New Scientist, Nov 14, 2022

Lee Smolin (2001): Three Roads to Quantum Gravity (Basic Books)

Leonard Susskind (2008): The Black Hole War (Little, Brown and Company)

Leonard Susskind (1994): The World as a Hologram. arXiv:hep-th/9409089

A. Zee (2003): Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell (Princeton University Press)

Anton Zeilinger (1999): Experiment and the Foundations of Quantum Physics. Rev. Mod. Phys. 71, S288.

Nondual References

The Bhagavad Gita (1909): Edwin Arnold trans. (Harvard Classics)

The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu (1968) Burton Watson trans. (Columbia Univ Press)

Plato’s Republic (2001) Benjamin Jowett trans. (Agora Publications)

Antonio Damasio (1999): The Feeling of What Happens (Harcourt Brace)

N. Gregory Hamilton (1988): Self and Others (Jason Aronson)

Jed McKenna (2002, 2004, 2007): Spiritual Enlightenment Trilogy (Wisefool Press)

Jed McKenna (2013): Jed McKenna’s Theory of Everything (Wisefool Press)

Nisargadatta Maharaj (1973): I Am That (Acorn Press)

Osho (1974): The Book of Secrets (St Martin’s Griffin)

Paul Reps and Nyogen Senzaki (1957): Zen Flesh, Zen Bones (Tuttle Publishing)

Bernadette Roberts (1993): The Experience of No-Self (State Univ of New York Press)

Eckhart Tolle (1997): The Power of Now (New World Library)

Lao Tsu (1989): Tao Te Ching. Gia-Fu Feng trans. (Vintage Books)

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