PROLOGUE:

What's this book about?

There is a story, probably apocryphal, in which a handful of French policemen were in hot pursuit of a thief, who eluded them by ducking into a large building. They soon realized that there were more exits from this building than there were policemen to cover them, and that without more help, the thief could be expected to escape through an unguarded door. Next to this large building there was a smaller one with only a few exits, so the police converged on this building instead, confident that the thief would not be able to evade them; after all, they had all the exits covered. So they confidently assured the public that they had the situation well in hand.

This story is a parable about the official solutions to the problems we humans face today. In our case, the thief might represent the solutions to our global, environmental, social, and personal problems, the building the thief escaped into might be the unapprehended situation, and the policemen the experts of all stripes who would fix our problems for us, and whose occasionally clever but ultimately detrimental advice has had the effect of compounding the severity of the problems they have not really addressed (the thief got away and did more mischief). This parable is about why the state of the civilized world is moving swiftly to a new arrangement radically different from what we are all used to.

Civilization is reaching a turning point. The technological successes of the past few dozen centuries, culminating in this most stupendous twentieth century, have not only empowered humans beyond their wisdom, but also severely changed forever, and in unknown and perhaps unknowable ways, the very biosphere in which all life as we know it exists.

Doomsday scenarios are numbing, but viewed from a higher perspective, Life is very generous, providing each and all of us the perfect laboratory for carrying out our human experiments. Ironically, the very conditions which threaten the status of life on the planet are also those which we living humans now require in order to learn what we each need to learn; otherwise, our life situations would be other than they are.

The availability of information and alternative perspectives on life and the living of it has never been greater in history. The electronics revolution is bringing more people within reach of more information than ever before. With all these choices, and with more people promising us salvation or heaven or Nirvana, who should we believe? Whose views of life are the most correct, and therefore the most useful? Theologians? Business experts? Politicians?

The uncertainty arising from the popularity of all these alternatives reaches into the deepest corners of our lives, leading more and more of us to begin to question the root assumptions of our modern modes of life and the things we take for granted: continuous growth, annual crops of new electromechanical toys, more powerful wonder drugs, more and more of everything. All this comes at a cost far higher than the initial purchase price; it is a cost which has never been factored into the selling price, but a cost which "the nature" of the world nevertheless assesses. And mankind's bills are coming due with crushing insistence.

For generations, until the habit has thoroughly permeated the fabric of our culture, we have been taught to expect more and more. Of course, we've usually gotten something other than we bargained for, but that's quickly forgotten with every new wave of flowery promises. The staggering costs of our consumptive lifestyles are coming due, and are expressed in the rapid social and environmental change we find occurring all around us today. The foundations of modern life (meaning the family, the community, and the state) are not nearly as stout as we have been led to believe and expect. Drastic change, unforeseeable and uncontrollable by any human agency, is touching every area of our lives, and when our pillars crumble, we begin searching for something we sense that we should have looked for much earlier.

The growth of the self-discovery industry over the past several decades loudly proclaims the need for more than just more. As usual, however, when a good idea gets organized, it ceases to be alive, so these too have begun to grow into institutions and become pillars of their own sort, begging us to rely on them, when in fact they themselves are operating by the same old rules: growth as an indicator of worth, and as a source of ever-increasing income for those on the inside. These new pillars are only props, and quickly crumble when stressed. The Earth quakes in many ways when stresses get out of bounds.

This is a dangerous book because it calls into question some of the root assumptions which we Westerners have held for centuries, if not millennia, about the nature of human existence and our place on the planet. Calling these assumptions into question isn't dangerous in and of itself, but when a lot of people do so, the underpinnings of any artificially erected social arrangement are seriously compromised. The truth about the Emperor's new clothes is no longer a secret.

The way society is organized today (presuming we can call overpopulation, political corruption, economic instability, and religious intolerance "organized"), those who presently benefit the most from the existing structures are those who are least likely to make the changes which need to be made. The ideas in this book are dangerous to such interests, because the ideas contained herein empower individuals to seek the truth for themselves.

Whenever a power base is threatened, particularly one which fails the test of moral legitimacy, those in charge will take whatever steps necessary to minimize, or marginalize, that threat. Today, those organizations and agencies who are best empowered to catalyze meaningful change are also those least likely to initiate and support such change. Be they federal, state, or local governmental bodies, corporate helmsmen, professionals, religious leaders, or (most debilitating of all) educational systems, our leaders seem unable to present any fundamentally meaningful solutions to the mounting problems facing society. The various overt and covert goals of government, business, religion, and education are necessarily limited to the purview of those in charge.

This book is dangerous because it declares, as openly and clearly as possible, that people - and that means you, me, and everybody else - are not on this earth to wave a flag, or kill for God, or flip burgers, or convert the riches of the planet into scribbles on a ledger. Just how far out of touch with reality the public world is will become apparent in stages... the problems resulting from our traditionally skewed world views are surging down upon the race in these times, and only those who have sought more deeply than dogmas or intellectual arguments will find themselves equipped to deal with life in the 21st century. I want to be one of those, and you are reading this because you do too.

Humanity is entering a new era, a departure perhaps as profound as the first kindled fire or the first turns of the first wheel. Right now, new revelations and developments are modifying all areas and all levels of our earthly human experience, bringing changes that are far more profound and sweeping than anyone can imagine or foresee.

Isn't it possible that the long-building woes presently inundating all spheres of human activity might be related to some mistaken understanding of who we really are and why we are here? As with the saber-tooth tiger attaining extinction because its strength became a liability, isn't it possible that overpopulation, loss of individual sovereignty, physical and psychic pollution, and a multitude of other maladies might be signaling a necessarily drastic course change for our proverbial yet mightily foundering ships of state?

Societies all over the globe are being severely challenged by the consequences of their very existence. It is becoming clear to a growing number of philosophically unattached people that happiness, prosperity and meaning in life are the results of personal wisdom and action; they are not delivered by institutions like the state, the church, the economy, or the schools, all of which are based on untenable tenets, and administered by untenable tenants.

This book isn't intended to be a gentle pastel of how things ought to be, nor is it a diagram for enlightened self-interest - a term which turns out to be curiously oxymoronic. What is needed is not a new religion, or system, or technique, because we've already had to endure too many of those. What is needed is a major rethinking of our relationships with ourselves, each other, and the planet. It's an inside job all the way.

The phrase "the world is a mirror" no longer strikes us as irresponsible or trite, as it might once have. What we see in the world is what we think in our heads. It's a very simple concept, but it is also a two edged sword, and faultily wielded, it is cutting us severely. Hence, the blinding pain so common in modern life.

Neither is this book a new set of instructions, a new roster of definitions, or a step-by-step manual about building your own personal kingdom of heaven for fun and profit. It is more of a mirror - not perfectly clear perhaps, but lucid enough that if you are really interested in finding out who you are and what this world is all about, you will find within and between its words what you need to see at the time. What you find will, of course, change as you change, and as the world changes, but that's as it must be.

Because of all the transformations that are occurring in every conceivable corner of modern life, new systems and new arrangements will have to emerge to deal with the consequences of these changes. Increasingly, it will take conscious people in positions of responsibility to know what to do in a situation which has never arisen before, it will take people who have freed themselves from the misleading and often barbarous programming most of us have received since we were infants. Clarity of action requires clarity of being. If we would do justice to the promise of the future, then we have to learn about ourselves, who we might really be, and how to live in harmony, both inwardly and outwardly.

This book, to borrow from Zen imagery, is like a finger pointing at the moon. It contains no ultimate answers... it only points in as many ways as possible to the reality of being, the reality of your true being and mine, who we really are and what we might really be here for.

The Earth and its family of life forms are entering a new age. Right now, right where you are, is where to look for the next clue. Learning to be in the present, learning to be and hear and know is what this book is about. For when a person learns this, then it doesn't matter so much how miserable the rest of the world is, for all the things that make life wonderful and inspiring come forth as if by magic. We were meant to live joyously and prosperously; anything which prevents this is wrong. Or at least incorrect.

A Dangerous Book

by Rodger Stevens

Who Are You and Why Are You Here?

¥ Is a zebra a black animal with white stripes, or a white animal with black stripes?

Jerry Colonna

(Solution to follow)

Well, here you are, a resident of planet Earth, a human being with a name and a history and a social security number, a mysterious "something which is aware of itself," occupying a physical body, dealing with an often confusing personality, learning how to navigate the choppy waters of modern life, and wondering what it is all about.

As an adult, you are no longer allowed to bask in the pristine simplicity you knew in childhood. Throughout your entire life, your body has changed in strange, wondrous, and often confusing ways. Your awareness of the world, with all its quirks and wrinkles, has constantly grown and changed, and you are moving, perhaps hesitantly, perhaps boldly, into some of Life's countless corridors, finding things you like and things you don't like.

You are wondering how you fit into this strange place called the world, perhaps wondering how to rearrange yourself so that things feel better. You might be wondering what went wrong that your life is no longer as joyful as you have heard that it should be.

And, as if your own personal changes aren't challenging enough, the world itself is changing faster than it ever has before in history. Social institutions that haven't worked very well in the past aren't working very well today either:

Schools, with precious few exceptions and after centuries of professionally endorsed improvement, have become little more than modified detention centers in which kids are ground under the heel of conformity and don't learn much that's useful in the meantime. An endless parade of school reform measures invariably results in a glitzier form of the same old panaceas which haven't worked before. The people in charge, being themselves well-behaved and conforming products of the system, can see no further.

Churches and religions have become businesses that promise heaven but never deliver (heard of any saints or saviors coming out of the churches lately?)

The business of religion is a sacred cow, and while the ministers and bishops drive Cadillacs, the average believer is left to breathe and try to enjoy the exhaust of centuries of hot air.

Governments at all levels are morally, if not legally, corrupt and bloated. They wave the flag of democracies that aren't democratic while sinking the piers of consumerism ever deeper into the hearts of their populations. A well-funded police state is taking shape behind increasingly shrill calls for law and order, prisons are a Wall Street growth industry, and the news media, with precious few exceptions, are as selective and narrow-minded as the people who control them.

Economic systems exist increasingly for the benefits of the shareholders. The actual costs of doing business include bankrupted global resources and obliterated ecosystems, not to mention human suffering on an unprecedented scale. The refusal on the part of politics and business alike to even consider a steady-state economy belies the fundamental and as yet unacknowledged weakness of the system: unlimited growth is impossible in a finite arena, and fatal if vigorously pursued.

The hidden, off-budget costs of what our leaders proudly call economic progress have escalated beyond all reason, and beyond all comprehension as well. The energy required to maintain wasteful and inefficient systems has become a built-in drain on the bodies, minds, and spirits of people everywhere. The costly labor-saving machines that were created to serve us have grown into monsters which are now threatening our very existence.

The new century will dawn on a world much different than the one we live in today. The "bigger is better" mentality that has characterized and dominated human activity for the past several millennia has overdrawn its accounts with the planet and is rapidly going bankrupt. Business and government have become ends in themselves, more important in their own eyes than life itself. The day-to-day welfare of the average person has been subjugated to the economic health of Wall Street. Lawyers have a virtual strangle hold on all aspects of modern life, and the impersonal, money-driven marketplace has succeeded in reducing human beings to the subhuman status of percentiles, statistics, interest groups, constituencies, and market segments. The effects of this systematic emasculation are degrading to real people, and this is a big reason why people are as unhappy as they are today.

Whatever you may have been told, you are a valid human being, but the chances are excellent that you are also bewildered as to how you fit into this sometimes frightening, sometimes wondrous, but always changing world, and what you can do about it. You have left behind the toys of childhood and are still figuring out how to use those of adulthood. No matter your age, you are wondering what you are going to be doing for what remains of your earthly life (let alone afterward), and hoping you are right.

The world is highly confused, and highly confusing, for normal people. Far more than a faster car, a colder refrigerator, or a sneakier sneaker, people need the little things, the unmarketable and untaxable things like love, family and community, and something meaningful to do with our lives.

For the vast majority of human time on the planet, our families and local communities were the ultimate realities in our lives. For all but a handful of adventurous souls, there was only mystery beyond the boundaries of our local territories. Family and community were the world. But in recent years the family and the community, in lockstep pursuit of some fleeting materialistic ideals, have surrendered their autonomy to an abstraction called society; the family and sense of community have ultimately withered as a result. The public debate over family values conveniently overlooks the fact that public, majoritarian, popularized values have actually replaced family values, which ought rightly to be different for each family.

The fragmentation of the family institution, aided by a market-driven "stay ahead of the Jones's" mentality, is what the so-called generation gap is all about: the most practical and usable knowledge changes so rapidly these days that parents and grandparents become little more than repositories of sometimes interesting but largely useless trivia. They used to be able to show the way, but now they are just in the way.

Like you, every human being who ever lived has experienced life from the perspective of being at the center of the local universe. For an entire lifetime, we are each the main character in the most important drama on Earth: our own lives. But knowing this intellectually doesn't seem to help when we are trying to make sense of what's going on around us, and it is especially difficult when all the forces of society are marshaled against this feeling of being in the center. Society, the church, and the state have replaced humans - family and the local community - as the official centers of gravity. This conflict - between inside- and outside-centeredness - is perceived as tension in our lives, so the baffling question of the real nature of one's very being usually gets sluffed off as too troublesome to pursue. That is, until circumstances force us to address it.

Of all the people we know, the genuine ones, the ones who are really worth knowing and listening to, are those who have experienced times of profound self-doubt and soul searching, those who have had to dig within themselves when they couldn't get by on just talent or good looks. These special people have experienced what is often called the dark night of the soul, which is how we experience the final death throes of our crushed illusions.

It is always darkest just before the dawn, but the dawn always comes eventually. The dawning of real (which is to say, divine) human consciousness comes from a yearning deep inside each one of us that requires us to integrate, to unify, to become one with, to understand, to be who we really are, and to discard the cumbersome baggage of what we aren't.

Perhaps this yearning is prompted by a personal tragedy, a sudden shift in career prospects, or any of countless other possibilities. The important thing to note is that, for a rapidly growing segment of Earth's populations, this is a time of great change, a great prompting for us to move in new directions.

We know by way of some inner reckoning that things should be, can be, and ought to be better. We sense that there is something within that is trying to get out, something that will make a difference. We can free our innate creative capacities only by finding out who we are, which is not as simple as it sounds. It's not as hard as it sounds, either, yet to do so is vitally important today, because world peace is impossible unless the people comprising that world are at peace.

It has never been, and never will be, that a peaceful world will make people peaceful. People will never be peaceful unless they know who they are. Discovering who we are and why we are here, even in settled times, can try the patience of the best of us, and yet today, we must all deal with vast and sweeping changes which nobody can foretell.

To be happy, each of us has to be doing what we came here to do. How are we to know what that is? Can we take an aptitude test that will tell us who we are? Is there anyone to whom we can turn to obtain this kind of wisdom? Many otherwise sensible people still believe so.

You probably have many life questions for which you haven't found adequate answers, answers based not on some external authority which at some point must be taken on faith, but on your own innate and superhuman feel for what is right and proper for your life. Somewhere deep inside you know that unless you are at peace with yourself, you will never find peace and fulfillment in the world.

That's why I have written this book, for I too have searched for most of my life for the truth about who I am and why I am here. I have been what the world would call modestly successful in several widely varying occupations, but none of them was "IT," none of them was what I am really here to do, so none of them brought me the happiness I sought.

So I scoured the dusty archives of philosophy and religion for something that boiled down to more than just narrow-minded dogma and blind faith. I have asked tough questions whenever I could. I have taken chances; I have sat on mountain tops and shivered, in deserts and watched rattlesnakes crawl across my legs. I have turned my back on the world of money and popularity. I have thrown my fate to the winds looking for wisdom, and for those special answers that resonate with something deep inside me. This book exists to help me share some of what I have discovered.

While I did find a few vague clues about the real essence of life in the more traditional places like religion and philosophy, I found the most in unexpected and unofficial regions, like the occasional lyrics to a popular song, casual words or glances from a stranger, a cold, babbling stream at dawn, the laughter of a child, the stench of a road-kill possum rotting in the sun, a passage in some little known book. That's why this book is sprinkled with quotes; they are windows which can open new panoramas for those who are tired of the same old wallpaper.

What I discovered in my own way is what all the masters and seers throughout history have been saying all along, but which has been effectively buried beneath the dogma of every organized religion. Reality is here, and if from time to time someone breaks through the illusions and gets a good look at it, then comes back and tells his friends about it, chances are pretty good that when you filter out all of the cultural flavorings (figures of speech, idioms, local slang, etc.), that having seen the same reality, each such seer would be describing pretty much the same reality. Beneath the rhetoric, what they have all been saying is this:

What you are looking for is who you already are.

Now, I know that sounds simple, but when you investigate, and I mean really dig deep within and ask yourself "Who am I?" and when you don't settle for the usual labels that you've been conditioned to regurgitate, then you will begin to perceive the limitless depths available through the portal of that simple statement. You will discover that happiness, purpose, and meaning in life are never the results of the right beliefs or techniques, they do not depend on social connections, money, reputation, education, circumstances of birth, or any of the other surface things we humans are taught to worship. You will discover that you've always had what you needed, and that your only problem has been that you were taught, and convinced, that you needed something you didn't already have.

This book, therefore, is a modest restatement of the same truths which have been known by the wise since the dawn of human existence, potent and vital perspectives which have somehow survived the spiritually withering process called civilization.

¥ He who knows others is wise. He who knows himself is enlightened.

Lao Tzu

Synonyms: enlightened, Self-realized, saved, reborn, awakened, anointed, ascended. These are simply different labels for the natural, the intended, and the nowadays thoroughly misunderstood status of human beings on the planet we call Earth. These are just different ways of referring to the goal which is always at hand, the main message of all the masters, the inalienable birthright of all human beings. These are what we came here to be, and these are what most of us have traded away in pursuit of God, country, and a larger share of that big apple pie in the sky.

More synonyms: Heaven, Nirvana, Moksha, the Elysian Fields, the Happy Hunting Grounds, the real world. These are different labels for what a realized being realizes. It's the same world, but how you see it depends on how you see you; and how you see you depends on who you think you are.

This simple question - Who am I?... is really the most profound question a person can ask. It may sound too simplistic, too obvious to lead to any real insight into the practical problems of life, but unless you can answer it, unless you even begin to ask it, then the glowing promise which lighted your infancy goes dim, and life soon degenerates into a badly written and poorly played soap opera, a futile struggle for survival against overwhelming odds.

Consisting of only three simple words, just six letters, "Who Am I?" is in fact a huge question, the ultimate inquiry. Unlike most of the bland, factual questions we are used to, this one cannot be answered in any number of words. Yet once it occurs to you what it really means, this question will lead you to the discovery of why you are here and what this life is really all about.

¥ It is impossible for anyone to learn that which he thinks he already knows.

Plutarch

This is about YOU. It is not about your name, your education or reputation or job prospects, your social or cultural background, your blood line, your personal history, or anything else so superficial. It is about that mysterious sense of consciousness that resides at and as the very center of who you take yourself to be.

Yet the best that can be expected of all the words in this or any other book is that they might have the effect of holding a mirror up to that consciousness within you in order that you might catch a glimpse of the profound mystery which you really are.

A Dangerous Book

by Rodger Stevens

Some words about words

¥ The truth which can be spoken is not the true truth.

Lao Tzu

¥ Beware of language, because it is often a great cheat.

Peter Mere Latham

¥ Words cannot express what words cannot express.

Anon.

Like other books, this one makes use of what we call language. Language is a system of conventional symbols which, when arranged in a consistent manner, tend to convey meaning beyond themselves. Language is cultural; the meanings of words depend on the prevailing social values, and knowing what words mean can often be helpful.

But the major problem with this or any language is that our ponderous reliance on it makes it deceptively easy to forget that the world doesn't exist according to the rules of sentence structure, the manner in which we are forced, by convention, to discuss it. When this is forgotten, then language becomes an invisible, and therefore all the more powerful modifier of how we perceive the world around us. It is as though we have been wearing colored glasses over our eyes for longer than we can remember, glasses that allow us to see only certain colors. Eventually it becomes a matter of common sense that only those colors exist in the world, which, when we take them off again, is obviously untrue. Any language, taken at face value, will ultimately give us a false, or at best misleading understanding of everything we describe in that language, including who we are.

To cite a simple but potentially shocking example, consider the sentence "The lightning flashed." Its meaning is clear, if not thunderously electrifying.

If one looks no further, then it will be presumed that lightning is a thing which does the verb flashing. According to the rules of sentence structure, "The lightning flashed" is quite proper and correct... it contains a noun and a verb. That's why we can understand the sentence, if not its referent.

What is hidden, what is made invisible by the convention of our linguistic structure, is that lightning isn't a thing which sort of hangs around in a cumulonimbus trench coat and occasionally does the verb flashing. In the case of real lightning, there is no such separation of its reality into the categories of noun and verb, because flashing isn't something that lightning just does: it's what lightning IS.

Additionally, a dependence on language usually lulls us into the presumption that, having once given something a name, a superficial label, we actually know and understand what it is. We all know the label "lightning;" we all use it casually. Yet even scientists whose careers are spent studying lightning are not so bold as to claim to know what it is; that's why they are studying it.

But in the spirit of oversimplification which has characterized the last few thousand years of law, religion, politics, and media, we humans and the world around us have been reduced to discrete adjective-laden nouns which spend our lives doing verbs adverbially, if not ad nauseously.

When everyone around us unquestioningly does something all the time, we eventually cease to have questions about it, we accept it, it becomes a norm. Oversimplification is appealing to the spiritually drowsy because labels are far easier to grasp than the realities to which they pretend.

After a while, we just assume that the labels are true.

This is conventional thinking, wherein people convene (come together) and agree to call this "this" and that "that." When somebody asks you who you are, for example, don't you usually answer with your main label?

Most people aren't really interested in anything but your labels, and they might even get seriously irritated at you if you present anything but the right one. But that's just your name, a tag which someone stuck onto you before you knew what had happened. Your name isn't who you are. Who are you?

In the same way, you are not your body, which changes from moment to moment with every breath and twitch of muscle. Neither are you your mind, your ego, your personality, because those too change with every experience you have. Who are the YOU who has been there unchanged all along? Who is your life happening to? Unless you can discover this, then you will have no choice but to live in the painfully ineffective and maddeningly insubstantial illusion of who you think you are.

In the reality of your being, you are not a noun or a verb; you are as far beyond a label or some grammatical form as a bolt of lightning is beyond the little words used to indicate it. So is God, Truth, Life, or whatever you may choose to call IT.

But this is a book, and to be intelligible it must make use of the available language, whatever its inherent limitations. So, if we would transcend those limitations, then you must listen within yourself for that silent but - once you learn to recognize its feel - unmistakable ring of recognition when you hear something that in your bones you know to be so.

Perhaps it may even feel like lightning, but without the revolting side effects.

A Dangerous Book

by Rodger Stevens

So, who are you, anyway?

¥ To know that you do not know is best. To pretend to know when you do not is a disease.

Lao Tzu

¥ If a man begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.

Francis Bacon

¥ To know anything well involves a profound sense of ignorance.

John Ruskin

It is simply the belief that we know who we are that keeps us from discovering who we really are. We have all spent our formative years developing and refining our egos. Egos are the personalized roles we learn to play, the convenient identifiers of who we are supposed to be.

Like a job description, these life description labels are tiny enough to be grasped by our understanding, and once we get a handle on "who I guess I am," it crystallizes into what is called an ego, a responsible and duty-bound member, first of the family and later of the society. Our loyal performance of these roles is thereafter required, and over the centuries we have elaborated all sorts of social, religious, and legal structures to hold ourselves and each other to their dutiful execution.

The label called you is knowable (it has fingerprints, a certain physical appearance, certain personality traits, and so on), but what the label is affixed to remains a mystery. Understanding the label while ignoring the reality may give us a momentary sense of security that we know what it is, but the realization that we "don't really know" is what begins the search called self-inquiry.

Since we take our own egos so seriously, we take everyone else's seriously as well. We have become convinced that these egos are real and are who and what we really are. We learn to take things personally; we get angry whenever our egos are questioned or misunderstood, and we get disappointed when other egos turn out to be something other than what our egos thought they were. Based on a false understanding of the players, the dynamics of human interaction quickly become bewildering and frustrating, giving rise to whole generations of psychologists, counselors, and advisors to provide our egos with excuses for why things are not right in our lives.

The problem, of course, is that we have forgotten who we are; we only know who we think we are, something that turns out to be very insubstantial. When who we think we are fails, we are naturally at a loss as to where to turn or what to do about it. If the disrupting event is a biggie, then we might even lose it and have to go spend time with the nice man at the funny farm.

To see this point more clearly, to see how bewildering these multiple images of ourselves and of each other can become, and to get a perspective on the extent to which we all engage in this game of unintended interpersonal deception, let's pretend that you and I are talking face to face to each other. It will seem to a third person that two people are having a conversation. If we look a little more closely however, we soon discover that, even though there are only two bodies present, there are a great many of us involved. The dynamics of this phenomenon are active in every personal relationship you have.

First, there is who we will call You #1. This is who you really are, the you who you have been since before you became who you think you are, the eternal and unchanging consciousness which knows that it exists, the innermost witness to your life.

This part of you is the ultimate mystery in the cosmos. It is the doorway to Truth. Religions have called this mystery by such diverse names as the Atman (the presence of the infinite Brahma in individual form), the Holy Spirit, the Buddha nature, and countless others, but these terms are really just metaphors which all refer to the mystery which exists at the very center of all your ideas about yourself.

To the extent that we haven't yet recognized it, to the extent that we still believe in something outside of ourselves, a god or something, then the inward search is still just an inverted outward search. You #1 is the innermost witness of all this.

By contrast, You #2 is who you think you are. This is the you with whom you are most familiar. It is your idea of who you are, including your body, your mind, your personality, everything that makes you a temporally continuous member of the human species.

But You #2 is actually a highly subjective selection of everything that everybody has ever told you about yourself; you have retained what you believed and agreed with, and discarded what you didn't. This personalized mental/emotional construct, this character-in-the-play-of-your-life, is called the ego (Latin for I am). It is the feeling of selfhood, the identification of You #1 (consciousness) with a name, a body, a personality, and a personal history.

In a way, our lives are like a necklace strung of our personal experiences, and the continuity that we feel in our lives, the so-called stream of consciousness (I am the same one who last night went to sleep) runs like a thread through the beads of those experiences.

However, in the glitter of the beads, this unifying thread is largely overlooked. The beads may be luxurious or tragic, stunningly brilliant or as dull as ditch water, but it's that mysterious stream of consciousness that holds everything together, including your personal perspective of it. The beads, which taken together are known as You #2, come and go, but the string running through them is essential and eternal; this is who you really are: You #1.

So, when our parents told us that we were angels or idiots, the minister that we were as dumb and helpless as sheep, the neighbor kids that we were dweebs, our big sister that we were a pain in the butt, and so on, we were learning who we are, and how we rank in society. We were learning You #2.

When we were small children and weren't yet interested in learning how to work the earthly ropes, we didn't know who we were, and what's more we didn't much care; we just were. Experiences were neither good nor bad; they just were, and Life always replaced one with the next.

But soon enough, as a necessary (for the aims of society's managers) part of the process of socializing us into the family and community, we were taught to accept as gospel the information and opinions which came from our "olders and betters." To a tiny infant, that effectively means everyone else on the planet. We were told by everybody and every condition around us who we were expected to be, and it was our sacred duty to make sure we measured up. A major irony in this is that probably none of these people had even the slightest idea who they really were, yet we were browbeaten into believing in their assessments of who we were and what the world is.

Now, as adults, having learned well our early lessons in political correctness, we dutifully put on different and appropriate faces for different people. None of us presents quite the same persona to our parents as we do to our friends, or to our bosses or teachers or siblings. In fact, if we look closely and honestly, we will see that we have a slightly different face, a slightly different act for everybody we know, because we have had different experiences with each of them.

If our acting is self-consistent, then things run more or less smoothly; but if inconsistencies should creep in, our relationships become cumbersome and unwieldy. As a result of trying to cater to each different personality we know, each of us effectively becomes a whole congregation of egos (ministers usually have altared egos). You #2 is really You #2A, 2B, 2C, and so on. There are many, and which one is really you?

¥ No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Finally, there is You #3, which is who I think you are. While you have an inside view of you, I have an outside, and therefore much different view of you, a view that is heavily influenced by the contents of my mind, my world views, etc.

Have you noticed that people never see us the way we see us? And we can be sure that we never see them the way they see themselves. So in effect, everyone sees everyone else differently. There is a different You #3 for everyone you know. And no two are alike. Ultimately, there are as many You #3's as there are people on the planet, and as many for each of them, and every single one is different.

As we sit there and talk, I eventually develop my own personal You #3, the way(s) I see you, the attributes I note and ignore. It is a view of you which changes slightly with every word and gesture I receive from you, or even just think I receive from you, a view of you which you will never understand for the simple reason that you would have to see my world through my eyes to understand it. You cannot see my world while living in yours, and vice versa.

Of course, there are many of me as well: Me #1, who I really am, Me #2A, 2B, etc., who I think I am, and your personal Me #3, who you think I am.

So while we sit there and interact with each other, who I think I am (Me #2) talks to who I think you are (You #3), both of which are just ideas in my head. And who you think you are (You #2) talks to who you think I am (Me #3), both of which are just ideas in your head. Two separate pairs of illusions are carrying on two mutually exclusive conversations between themselves, passing vague words and indistinct body language back and forth, all of which mean different things to both of us. Is it any wonder that we so often fail to understand each other and end up frustrated and fighting?

¥ To others we are not ourselves but a performer in their lives, cast for a part we do not even know that we are playing.

Elizabeth Bibesco

We have identified ourselves so completely with these various Me #2's that we have confined and limited our experience of the vastness of Life to those small, isolated enclaves. We have cut ourselves off from more than 99.999% of our being by accepting the tightly defined roles we are playing as the actual limit of who we really are. And when we are playing so many different (and often contradictory) roles with so many different people, it is very easy to become lost.

In a way, we humans are like waves in the ocean of life. Each wave starts small and grows to some extent as it crosses the ocean, picking up shape and definition, and also picking up whatever flotsam and jetsam it may encounter. Waves learn to believe that they are real and independent, so it's better to be big, because then you can be influential and throw your weight around, you will amount to something, you can make a real splash in life, and be looked up to by lesser waves.

Sometimes waves travel unimpeded for thousands of miles, sometimes they hit a shallow reef and are momentarily tripped, but eventually they all impact and die on a beach somewhere (their reflected echoes are called ghost waves). In the course of their odysseys, these waves have learned to think of themselves as unquestionably and quite obviously separate and independent, as things in and of themselves. Some of them believe that there is some great god called the Ocean out there somewhere which it is their duty to seek and serve. They are firmly convicted in their beliefs about death. In truth, of course, no wave is ever apart from the Ocean it exists in and which is ultimately responsible for its very existence. Their anguish is the result of their having totally accepted the illusion that a wave can and should and does exist as an independent thing.

This is what Jesus probably meant when he said "I am the vine and you are the branches" (it is not recorded that he also said "I am the ocean and you are the waves", but he might have). The "I" from which he was speaking is the same "I" that each of us experiences as pure consciousness, our awareness, the central-most feature of our existence, our US #1.

Impersonal and beyond the comprehension of the petty ego, that "I" is the vine, it is Life Itself in all its forms, and our egos, our self-imposed definitions and limitations, these are the branches which think of themselves as independent agents. If we are centered in the branch, then we will miss the fact that a branch is just a branch.

A branch that thinks it's independent is a cutting, and in the extreme, a dead one. The branch will not thrive if severed from the vine, and though we may continue to exist for a while, we can never thrive severed from the truth of our being. If you cut yourself off from food and water because you believe you are separate from these, you get dead. Likewise, if you cut yourself off from the larger part of your real Self by believing that you are just a name, an ego, a separate and fragile personality struggling against injustice and weakness, then you will wither. Why would anybody choose to harm another human being, whatever the excuse, unless they were a diseased branch that thinks it's a whole vine?

There is only one whole vine, and it's called "the universe and everything in it." When you hurt another person, when you callously step on a flower or kick a dog or shout at a child, you are ultimately hurting yourself, because we're all connected, the separations between us are strictly a matter of convention. This is a truth which society and its managers don't want to learn, which is one of the reasons why so many social institutions are falling apart.

The ego is a servant which has been elevated to the rank of master, a part claiming to be the whole, which is why the ego will always lead us astray, whatever its announced motives. The ego is a function, a direct consequence, of the presumption that we are separate beings. Since it is simply not true that we are separate, anything based on that presumption will necessarily be wrong, and will necessarily lead to imbalance.

That doesn't mean that the ego ought to be scorned, improved, repaired, or discarded, although there are many people who firmly believe this too. Because of the general stress levels in society today, and because these stresses, by their very nature, will easily upset a normally sane person's equilibrium, there is ample room in the system for a lot of professionals and charlatans making a lot of money by claiming to have access to a cure, regimen, vitamin, or talisman which will totally perfect your ego. These remedies don't work because they are all founded on a false presumption: the belief that the ego is real. The purpose of self-discovery is not to discard the ego or to somehow perfect it; the purpose is to recognize the ego for whatever it is, but to do so from an awakened perspective which is behind or beyond the ego. Who is having the dream called you?

That perspective is called being: the experience of consciousness, pure and simple. This was the place from which Jesus, Buddha, and all the rest were speaking when they shared their parables and metaphors. Since you are conscious, you are already connected, so there is nothing further to be done to real-ize (make real) that connection. Once you see it, then you understand how you can still play your ego like a role, forming and reforming it as needed. But you will no longer take that role too seriously, you will no longer be impeded by the old habits and personal fears in which that role may have believed in the past. It is your right, and your responsibility, to reshape your role into whatever feels right, so long as you allow others the same freedom.

A Dangerous Book

by Rodger Stevens

Don't Take It Personally

Here's another group of related words which have something to teach us. We are considered, by ourselves and everyone else, to be persons; we take things personally, we have personalities. These words all come from the Latin word persona, which was originally the mask that was held up to an actor's face while playing a dramatic role (from per, meaning "through," and sona, meaning "sound"... it was the mask through which the sound came). If you go to a copy of a play, you will find listed in the front the Dramatis Personae, the persons, or personalities, taking part in the drama.

We use many other theatrical idioms when referring to our lives and activities: we act out certain roles, life is but a stage on which we must play our parts, we must develop our character, enjoy our time in the lime light, get our act together, and not make too much of a scene before the final curtain comes down. The metaphor of theatre, when not taken too literally, points directly into the experiences of living our lives. We are taught by the world of our early years to doubt our own natural, inherent character and reshape it so it might more closely reflect the role assignments we get from other people, and then we wonder why we are having so much trouble playing them. Incidentally, most people don't even play the roles they have: they work them, all the way to death.

As children we were taught, by adults and institutions everywhere, that as we were, we were not good enough for life, for society... we must first be improved, educated, taught, instructed, and molded in such a way as to become docile, well-behaved citizens, reliable consumers, and net assets to the economy. Few of us can recall the early day when this process began; it's all we've ever known. There is something innately wrong with us that needs to be fixed. Religions sometimes call this condition original sin, meaning that we are damned for the simple reason that we exist. To me that kind of treatment hardly seems likely from a loving God.

But as a result of having been muffled, muzzled, and stifled, we have become like actors who have forgotten that we are playing in a play. We have, perhaps quite willingly but probably unwittingly, agreed to forget that we are just playing roles. This quite naturally leads us to consider our roles as being ultimately real, as who we really are.

Because these roles are not who we really are, we are not very comfortable with them - they are like shoes that no longer fit us comfortably, but we don't dare break a cosmic taboo and take them off. As a last resort (and this usually happens at a relatively young age), we resign ourselves to what everybody else is doing: we learn by example to take everything personally.

The good actor, when he recalls that he's just playing a part, won't just quit the play; he will continue to play his part, but he will do so with an inner confidence and a barely detectable detachment which will make his contribution notable, whatever his role. He will never lose sight of the fact that the whole drama is a performance, that he is not really about to be killed, maimed, or slandered.

And the actor can play the role all the more effectively only if he maintains the awareness that at root it's a pretense, just a play. Taking the role too seriously and trying to hard to conform to the standards of so-called normalcy lead to confusion, frustration, unhappiness, and usually a dreary botching of the play.

¥ Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and become absurd, and thus normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last 50 years.

R. D. Laing

Consider Shakespeare's Hamlet, with Lawrence Olivier playing the lead. If we were to interrupt the play in the last act and ask Hamlet how he is doing, he would tell us in a nervously heroic voice that he just got cut on the arm with a poisoned sword, he has about a dozen lines left, and he is about to die on that "X" over there. At this point in the play, death is imminent for him, and every other detail in the plot clearly supports his impending demise.

But if we were to ask Sir Lawrence how he is doing, he would have a totally different response; it would have nothing at all to do with the drama and pretense on the stage and, within the context of the play, his comments would probably sound ludicrous. He might say that he had done better Hamlets, that the crowd tonight was limp, or that after the curtain comes down, everyone - good guys and bad guys alike - would get out of their costumes and go out for a late dinner. This response certainly doesn't resonate with the plot or the characters in the play, and yet which view is the more realistic, the more truthful, the more ultimately real of the two?

We have all been brainwashed into believing that our roles are real, that who we really are is a fragile, mortal personality encased in a porous, vulnerable bag of skin, plopped down in the midst of this enormous and impersonal universe to do the best we can against overwhelming odds. We are taught to become egocentric (as though that illusory ego were the real center of who we are), trying to match that fragile individuality against the whole rest of the cosmos, while at the same time subjugating that ego to the highest interests of the society we happen to live in. It sets up a contradiction which frighteningly few people ever see through.

¥ This is the sort of English up with which I will not put.

Winston Churchill

But it is this perception of relative helplessness that allows all the experts - the ministers, lawyers, doctors, and politicians - to keep us down and maintain their social and economic dominance. Since they are lost in the same dream of isolated consciousness that we are lost in, their livelihoods and self-images depend directly on their ability to keep themselves, and us, ignorant of who we really are. It just wouldn't do, for instance, for the churches to admit that we needn't consult them, that God (or Truth, or whatever you choose to call IT) is eternally and immediately accessible to everyone. That's why saviors are never popular with church authorities until they have been killed - saviors can't be manipulated while they are still alive, but when they are gone, their words can be molded to suit just about any ambitious pursuit.

We have been coerced into allowing others to define for us who we are and what roles we ought to be playing. We have turned our backs on the reality of why each of us is here "as who we are here as." We have learned to suppress our own inner directions and listen instead to experts whose business depends on our continued ignorance and reliance on them. We have let them tell us who we are when they don't know who they really are. Then again, as long as we can be fooled, perhaps we deserve to be.

¥ You got some great dreams, baby, but in order to dream you gotta be asleep. When you gonna wake up?

Bob Dylan

The critical time in life for each of us comes when we begin to honestly ask ourselves, "Who the heck am I, anyway?" If we have identified ourselves with some passing attribute like youthful beauty or political advantage, then there will inevitably come a time when that special attribute will have faded again, for nothing which exists in time and space - the ground rules of this earthly drama - is permanent.

As a result of our attachment to a temporary condition, to an ill-defined and psychologically dependent role, we will eventually have what is called an identity crisis, which is the often sudden, but sometimes only creeping shock of realizing that "I am not who I thought I was!" This can be a highly magical moment if you are intent on understanding who you really are, and a highly disquieting one if not. (Has-beens are people who, having identified with a temporary condition which is now past and gone, spend the remainder of their lives reminiscing about the good old days when they were valid. Now, by virtue of their own definitions of themselves, they're invalids).

What about You #1 and Me #1? Therein lies the mystery, and it is a mystery which can never be squeezed between the pages of a book. Who you really are is cosmic, eternal, and boundless, which is the nature of consciousness. You are the Actor. The best that any words can do is to point in the general direction of truth. This is the intent of the Zen story about a disciple who came to the master and asked, "Master, what is the moon?" Instead of providing a factual, verbal, informational answer, the master simply pointed his finger at the moon, as if to say, "There it is... my words are not the moon; if you want to know what the moon is, look and see."

There, all around you and within you, is Life. Look and see what it is, look and see that beneath and beyond that small package of human fears and desires called you-the-person there lurks the splendor and magnificence of the cosmos itself, by whatever name you prefer to call IT. Each of these human lives that we so fearfully protect are simply another novel variation of the game of finding one's Self over and over in countless disguises.

¥ Remember: We're all in this alone.

Lily Tomlin

A Dangerous Book

by Rodger Stevens

The One Thing Everybody Knows

Right now you are reading these words. Maybe in your mind's eye you even watch yourself taking them in. Who is it who is reading? If you say, "it is me," then I must ask, "Who (is it who) knows that it is you?" That knower is consciousness, the baffling awareness of awareness which we have labeled as You #1 or Me #1.

¥ To be conscious that we are perceiving or thinking is to be conscious of our own existence.

Aristotle

¥ I think, therefore, I am.

Rene Descartes

¥ When asked in a coffee house if he would like another cup, Descartes replied, "I think not," whereupon he disappeared.

Anon.

The one thing that everybody knows without a doubt is I exist. But who am I? What is this I which I perceive to exist?

Try this one: With my index finger, I can touch lots of things - the keys on my computer, my nose, and so on. I can do this only because these things are not the tip of my finger. The one thing I cannot touch with the tip of my finger is the tip of my finger.

In the same way, I can touch, look at, or perceive many things with my consciousness: I can objectify my surroundings, my fingertip, my thoughts, even who I think I am (my ego). I can do all this because these things are not my consciousness. I cannot, however, objectify that same consciousness which is aware of these things. It is, as Alan Watts once remarked, like trying to bite your own teeth or sniff your own nose.

We can't be aware of consciousness in the same way we are aware of the objects of consciousness, just like we can't be aware of our fingertips in the same way as we are aware of the things we touch with our fingertips. Consciousness can never be made the object of its own inquiry because it is beyond the polarity of objectivity and subjectivity.

That is the clue. You #1 is that which is aware of all the rest, including who you think you are. You #1 is like a microphone which picks up all the sounds in a concert but is unaffected by and makes no judgments about any of them. You don't hear the microphone, even though you couldn't hear anything without it. Consciousness is the infamous still small voice, the one that doesn't use words.

Unlike You #2, You #1 cannot die because it was never born. It is eternity masquerading as a human being, it is the kingdom within, it is both the ultimate reality and the consciousness thereof.

Now, the implications of these ideas probably hurtle headlong into the face of most everything you have ever been told about who you are and what this world is all about. Religions and philosophies, where most of us got the low-down on life, insist that we think of them as ultimates, as literal revelation, but their own self -importance blinds them to the possibility that their so-called truths might have been intended to be metaphors.

Your first impulse in pondering these ideas might be to dismiss them as heretical hogwash. They aren't, and that's one reason I have included quotes by other thoughtful, if not profound thinkers and seers. But if you are really concerned about your life, about experiencing a happiness which is not dependent on the stock market or the government or the whims of some other person, then enough of what you read here will stick.

The important thing is: Don't believe a word you read here! Find out for yourself what is true, for if it is true, then Life (call It God, Reality, Atman, Brahma, whatever) will ultimately find countless other ways of getting the word to you.

¥ The next message you need is always right where you are.

Ram Dass

A Dangerous Book

by Rodger Stevens

What's So Great About Consciousness?

Compared to the glorious attributes of the human mind, its capacity for imagining and creating magnificent and sublime thoughts, the silent microphone of consciousness seems almost bland, hardly worthy of mention. It has no age, no sex, no color, mood, or morality; it has no attributes whatsoever. One reason we overlook it is because it isn't exciting, its nature is beyond the bounds of conceptual thinking.

Since consciousness has no attributes in the same way our bodies or intellects have attributes, it is neutral, unattractive - it doesn't attract our attention. As far as the concert is concerned, the microphone which picks it up is perfectly transparent. The projector which projects the movie onto the screen is likewise most effective when it remains in the background.

And yet this mysterious something called consciousness is the whole secret of wisdom and sagacity, this is the pearl of great price, this is what life really is. Where better to hide the truth from an eager, clever, and intelligent seeker than right out in the open? Each one of us knows one thing for sure, and that is "I am." That's the basis on which everything else is built, and if this basis remains unconscious, well, look around at the misery and suffering in the world, and you will see what rampant unconsciousness can accomplish.

The most profound insights about life rarely permit themselves to be lassoed by words and reduced to bare and coarse "facts" as we call them. The more exacting our words, the further from the Truth we stray, which is why poetry is generally more precise about human experience than is prose, and why music can be said to be even more exact. We'll stick to words here, though, and in the realm of words, the analogy, the parable, the story of what something is "like" is likely our best bet.

¥ Though analogy is often misleading, it is the least misleading thing we have.

Samuel Butler

Jesus, Buddha, Lao Tzu, and the other great teachers told stories and parables because they knew not only that facts and tedious details would be lost on the people they hung out with, but also that what they were describing - a relationship, a process - could not be reduced to mere facts and figures. So they told parables.

The word parable comes from the Greek word parabole, which literally means comparison. In mathematics, a parabola is a plotted line representing the range of solutions to a given formula; every point on the parabola satisfies the formula. But since a formula represents a relationship between unfixed variables, no single solution, no particular set of values, is considered to be final and ultimate.

Likewise, a parable is a wisdom story which can be solved at any point along its curve, and while all interpretations are relatively correct, none are final, ultimate, or conclusive. The great teachers used parables because they knew that their disciples were all coming from different places in their understanding and experience, that they could relate to a story much more comfortably than to a theory, and that they would learn the parable's highest lessons by learning to listen to their own being.

Theories based on precise facts are easy to botch. If you forget part of a theory, or get just one of the facts or numbers wrong, then the final results will be meaningless, if not misleading, and you may not even know it. But you can paraphrase a story and it will still retain its meaning. Each person who hears a parable will come away with something appropriate to their level of understanding, a meaning which resonates with their experience, even though it might be slightly different for everyone.

Here's a parable, an analogy, which comes from India, from the Upanishads, and is thousands of years old. It presents a parabolic answer to the root question of all religion and philosophy (Who am I and what is this?), and does so in a way which everyone can relate to.

In the beginning of the world (and though it probably had no ultimate "beginning" as we think of them, you have to start somewhere), there was only Brahma. Being all there was, and therefore totally known to himself, Brahma soon realized that this totality of awareness would eventually become extremely boring... after all, when you know everything there is to know, then there's no surprise, nothing to keep you interested. It's like reading the same book for the seventy-eight millionth time! Anyway, since he was omnipotent (all-powerful), omniscient (all-knowing), and omnipresent (all-everywhere), Brahma decided to create a diversion for himself, a way of introducing the elements of surprise, intrigue and drama into his experience. (When referring to deity, I recognize that it is not politically correct to assign gender, so I should probably be covering all the interest groups by saying "She-He-It." But if you say She-He-It too fast, the meaning becomes alimentary, my dear Watson).

He thought, "What would it be like to forget who I really am?" So, he invented the game of cosmic hide-and-seek. According to the rules of this game, Brahma would pretend to break pieces of himself off from the whole so that to all appearances they would seem separate. That's the "hide" part. Then, as the apparently separate consciousness at the center of each of those apparently separate pieces, and through their apparently separate and unique perspectives, he would "seek" to rediscover who he really was, which was, of course, everything.

Imagine seeing yourself from an infinite number of different perspectives, each one initially ignorant of its relationship to all the rest. Imagine going to sleep and dreaming a different lifetime each night, each lasting for more or less years, each complete with the full range and variety of emotional life and death details. Imagine having the same dream but playing a different role in it each night, seeing it through different eyes each time.

Well, guess who those apparently separate pieces are? Since there is only one I Am in the universe, one consciousness, it's all a game of hide-and-seek, and each one of us is in the same state: I'm IT AND You're IT!

¥ We are the universe experiencing itself. That's why we're here.

Carl Sagan

¥ We are awareness that transcends all identifications. Our unique selves interconnect and interanimate with all other selves and with the universe.

Jean Houston

A Dangerous Book

by Rodger Stevens

What Are Children?

We were all children once; we have all had the experience of entering into humanhood from some other orientation, and of then learning about ourselves from those around us. The word "child" is, of course, simply a label, a phonic sound, a literal tag, a categorical concept. The tag is easy to understand, but the reality is quite another matter.

In truth, children are mysteries; their bodies apparently come from or through the body of their mother with a token contribution from a father, but their spirits, their consciousness, the mystery of their being, where do these come from? Do they emerge full blown, or do they develop gradually over time, or some mysterious mixture of both? If a child is a novel and original seed planted by the divine into the earthly soil, then what is the meaning and purpose of that seed? What fruit will it ultimately bear? A mystery!

Each child is like a plant which has never before existed, a plant with its own set of likes and dislikes, its own unique mix of talents and abilities, some pronounced, others latent. The best way to raise a child is to pay attention to it, to see what it is here for, and to assist it in being that.

Unfortunately, our societies have for centuries believed that children are innately inferior, and that adults, by virtue of chronological seniority, can and should pull rank on children whenever it seems fitting or convenient to do so.

¥ Till society is very differently constituted, parents, I fear, will still insist on being obeyed because they will be obeyed, and will constantly endeavor to settle that power on a divine right which will not bear the investigation of reason.

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin

This is not a manual on how to raise children, but sometimes if we can see how we got into a certain mess, we have a better chance of getting ourselves out of it again. Our parents all meant well when they raised us as they did, regardless of what they thought they were doing, but their methods were primarily centered, either pro or con, on how their parents raised them, and on how the society at large viewed children. Our parents misled us to the extent that they tried to change us into something that we weren't.

Now, we must live our own lives and try to sort truth from fiction about who we really are. By examining from a different perspective some of the things that all of us have been through, we can discover a deeper appreciation and understanding of just what it means to be a human being. This is what world and local events are increasingly pressuring us to do.

Each of us is the cosmos reborn as each of us. We don't come into being, we come out of it. Even the idea of some connection between us and the cosmos is too distant. In those early months before we got talked out of ourselves and learned who everyone else thought we ought to be, we were still cosmic beings, we hadn't yet developed a personality, an ego.

This is one reason why we can remember events from our fourth, third, perhaps even second years of life, but not much further back than that. Before we had learned how to construct and identify with our egos, our points of reference were cosmic, not personal. We had not yet learned of any socially defined boundaries. This cosmic orientation is the one we experience in sleep, but we don't remember the time as spent consciously because we are tightly bound to our human egos, which exist only while we are awake. A little child hasn't yet drawn the lines of demarcation which will later tell him that the rug he is crawling around on is separate from him; to a little child, everything is everything.

Since we developed our egos, however, our memories have become personal, like our present self-images; we think of ourselves as persons, having personalities, so this is the context within which we view our experience. We have personal memories dating from the time when we first became persons.

By contrast, our cosmically oriented memories are timeless and eternal, however buried, and once you learn to recall them, they are a whole lot more reliable.

But even though we now consider ourselves to be persons, we still retain a dim, almost visceral memory of what life was like before it was chopped into pieces for us. The tension between this memory, and our now truncated perceptions of reality, is what we interpret as discontent. We remember what things ought to be like - living in peace and harmony with the world and with each other - but when we look around our worlds, we see very little of this.

¥ In the little world where children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt as injustice.

Charles Dickens

Our parents themselves were a product of this error of identity, so it is not surprising that they raised us accordingly. It has become a vicious circle which must be broken somewhere if there is to be any real peace in the world or in our personal lives. That's why the direction of your life must be up to you; it cannot be left to your parents, or worse, to some impersonal organization.

¥ We can't form our children on our own concepts; we must take them and love them as God gives them to us.

Johann von Goethe

This requires real trust and awareness - trust that Life knows what it is doing, that each person is who they're supposed to be, and the awareness to see that, with our minds, we can only guess at what is best for ourselves or those around us. Parents want their children to be happy, and yet parents are rarely happy themselves. You must be allowed to be who you are, and you must likewise allow those around you to be who they are.

¥ If there is anything that we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves.

Carl Jung

We see in the world around us what we are; or, more precisely, we think we see what we think we are. If we have no sense of the mysterious within us, then we won't notice it in other people. Neither will we notice weakness, or faults, or anything else that we ourselves do not already have traces of within us. When you have reached into your own depths to the point of realizing how mysterious and magical you really are, then you will gratefully and thankfully extend the same sense of awe and wonder to everyone else around you, whether or not they are aware of it. You will have recognized that who you really are is, at its very root, also who they really are. Life is not a competition, though competition is very popular among egos.

Furthermore, before they become brainwashed by the conflicting value judgments of their society, children are naturally sensitive to the vibrations, the "feel" of others in their surroundings. Just as you can't fool an animal by acting out something that you are not, you can't fool a little child. Children are not impressed with politics or rational argument, they don't feel the need to project an ego into the world around them, so they are still clear enough to see what is. This is, no doubt, the reason behind those stories you sometimes hear of children being temporarily adopted by some wild animal which, had they been adulterated like the rest of us, would have killed them. Children are relatively clean and clear mirrors in which we can see ourselves.

¥ Better to be driven out from among men than to be disliked of children.

Richard Henry Dana

¥ Some of my best friends are children. In fact, all of my best friends are children.

J. D. Salinger

There is a lot of interest being paid today to the "inner child," as though this perspective was a recent discovery. Of course, most of the excitement is marketing hype, but beneath it, people are coming to recognize that perhaps we were never intended to become adults, particularly if being an adult is to be miserable and frustrated.

Healing the inner child really means bringing the frustrated adult back to his or her realities, because the child within each of us is eternal, even though the bodily costume may grow old and wrinkled. Healing the inner child means giving up the illusion that we are separate, that our egos are real, or that life is intended to be deadly serious. It isn't.

Healing the inner child means learning to live in the moment, not being continually obsessed by the past and the future, learning to give your whole being to whatever is happening in the Now, in whatever Now happens to be. Since they aren't born with the attachments that they will later make, children enjoy a happiness which is pure and natural, it is not conditional on such outer things as purposes and goals.

Healing the inner child means being honest rather than political about your feelings. When a child is angry, he doesn't suppress it just because it might not be politically correct not to; he screams! It is an honest scream, which is why he can scream at the top of his lungs all day if he wants to, and never get hoarse. How many of us can say that? But once he is done with his tantrum, it is almost as though nothing had happened, he is once again playing happily.

Healing the inner child means being able to let go of the past to accept a new present, for the present is always new and novel. The squeals of delight and surprise which accompany the play of children spring from their unadulterated joy at not just seeing, but experiencing from the depths of their being, the wonder and mystery of creation without making the fatal attempt to try to figure it out. They haven't been around long enough to see through habituated eyes. Whatever is simply is. Even outwardly familiar activities are always new and exciting ("Tell it again, Daddy!"), and children delight in them because that's the way they still see the world.

¥ Everything's incredible, if you can skin off the crust of obviousness our habits put on it. Every object and event contains within itself an infinity of depths within depths. Nothing's in the least like what it seems - or rather, it's like several million other things at the same time.

Aldous Huxley

This is why Jesus is reported to have said words to the effect, "Allow the little children to come to me, because they are still in heaven, they haven't yet lost the awareness of their oneness with life."

Most of us, while growing up, have learned how to project ourselves as cool and in control. In our frantic rush to paint a good social portrait of ourselves, we have lost sight of that childlike innocence and wonder toward life, and we spend the rest of our days resigning ourselves to the lesser things that the world would provide. We are taught to always put our best foot forward, but we are never told how to walk that way because it can't be done. Children are reminders of how human existence is when we have the trust (in Life, or in some God) to jump into it with both feet, dancing to the beat of our own music. But we will not learn from children if we think we know better.

¥ The best way to make children good is to make them happy.

A Dangerous Book

by Rodger Stevens

Education & Instruction

There are many words in our language which differ diametrically in meaning, but which are commonly used as synonyms for each other anyway. Two such words are education and instruction. In this country, we take pride in what we call our educational systems and our institutions of higher learning, but in fact none of these are truly educational.

The word "instruct" derives from the Latin verb instruare, which means "to in-build" or build in from the outside. Properly understood, instruction is the "outside-in" process of implanting templates of thinking, imbuing in the learner certain specialized ways of looking at life which were not already there, like building into a sheet of canvas the structure which will make it a tent. Instruction comes from the outside, it is cerebral and specialized, its goals are conditional. The process is not organic, however, and is therefore an artifice; it is artificial.

There is a meaningful place in the world for instruction, but instruction is not education. Education comes from the Latin verb educere, which means "to draw out from." Education, at least as a category of learning, is "inside outward," it is not a process of installing something from the outside, but a process of drawing out that which is already there, to build the clothes to fit the child instead of down-sizing the child to fit standardized clothes. The purpose of education ought to be to show how to build one's own clothes.

Each child is born with an internal agenda for its life, sort of a pre-programmed schedule of experiments to be run. This agenda is not ordered or organized in any linear fashion, but it is there just as surely as our DNA is there to guide the maintenance and health of our physical bodies. The very mix of talents, abilities, and inclinations in each child, if we could but see it rightly, is a clear indication of the life purposes with which that soul incarnated. When a great athlete or scholar or musician emerges, everyone can readily recall clear harbingers of that greatness which were there from the start. Each and every child is a unique, once-in-forever expression (a pressing out) of the infinite, each is an essential ingredient. If that ingredient is to benefit the whole, then it has to be allowed its expression. When we taint those ingredients as soon as they arrive (by sending them through the meat-grinder of public schools and dogmatic religions), can there be any doubt about the results? Look at any newspaper.

The fact that our so-called educational systems are failing is ample evidence that the way we have been doing schools, and childhood itself, is wrong. In traditional school systems, the child is effectively the least important element in the arrangement. The child must conform to the system, instead of the system accommodating the needs of the child. Our institutional obsessions with power, prestige, and static stability, and the structures society has fabricated to ensure their continuation, have made real people secondary to abstract systems and ideals. Looking through a wide-angle lens, this is precisely why modern world cultures are in so much trouble.

¥ Education is the process of driving a set of prejudices down your throat

Martin H. Fischer

Fortunately, the educational system in this country is no longer entirely monolithic, for thoughtful and perceptive people are coming to understand that children can lead happy and successful lives without being subjected at a young and tender age to years of institutionalized boredom and regimentation, that education, in the true sense of the word, needn't be expensive or homogenized, and that universal education works only when it is voluntary.

Only a few children will learn when they have to; all will learn when they want to. More and more parents are home-schooling their children, and even a few widely scattered public schools, at the local level, are working to right a system which has become so top-heavy that it is now upside down. Our children are the future of the planet; there is no human resource more precious to the happiness, let alone the continued existence, of the human race. Power, prestige, and fame fall pitifully short of meaning when compared to the happiness of our grandchildren.

¥ Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be such arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinions in good men is but knowledge in the making.

John Milton

There is no best school system, just like there is no single correct shoe size. People are gradually being forced by conditions to realize this. Many different approaches are emerging, some better than others, but the theme seems to be greater local autonomy for parents and communities, and greater freedom and choice for children.

¥ Education... is hanging around until you've caught on.

John Ruskin

The children entering the world today must be allowed to be who they really are in order to properly change the systems which have created the turmoil we see around us. We will not save the world by turning out more of the kinds of people who messed it up in the first place; we can improve the world only by letting succeeding generations move freely enough to live their lives by their own lights.

If we can realize and recall how we began our experience in this time and place, then we might have the clarity to understand what the system did to knock us off course, because only then will we know how to get back on our tracks again.

A Dangerous Book

by Rodger Stevens

How We Got Lost

¥ There is a Hindu story of the child in the womb who sang, "Let me remember who I am." And his first cry after birth was, "Oh, I have forgotten."

Anon.

The Judeo-Christian story of the garden of Eden is really a parable. It isn't about some historical event that was supposed to have happened in a certain country on a certain date, though it still seems important to some religious sects to take it literally. It is a story about you and me when we first entered this physical dimension and put on these physical/emotional/intellectual disguises.

When we were babies, Life was a paradise. Our real needs were small and easily met, our nakedness didn't matter a whit because we hadn't yet learned how to feel guilt or shame, and we were never worried about making the wrong impression. Our experience was a continual banquet of surprise and discovery. We were fresh and unsullied arrivals, still unified with wherever it is that we came from. We saw Life as a whole - undifferentiated and all of a piece with us.

Not having learned to break the world up into nouns and verbs, right and wrong, us and them, everything was for us quite naturally and peacefully part of everything else. We were fully integrated with the cosmos, existence was one.

¥ God made integers; all else is the work of man.

Leopold Kronecker

But we can't stay in the cradle forever, so according to the rules of the earthly game, according to this parable, the time would have to come when we got symbolically kicked out of the garden. This happened to us when we began to understand our local language and, by extension, to understand and accept as our own the world views of those around us (initially, parents, siblings, and in-laws... soon enough, hundreds of total strangers, many of them outlaws). We learned how to reach out into the world and select very specific and tightly defined aspects of it, then mentally categorize them. We learned how define reality as that which can be reduced to mental and linguistic terms and symbols, and we learned how to ignore everything that couldn't be so reduced. Finally, we learned how to manipulate the symbols to get the things we had been taught were important.

¥ You shall have joy, or you shall have power, said God; you shall not have both.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Small children are powerful in an unconscious (that is to say, in a self -unimportant) way. Their power radiates from them as joy, innocence, spontaneity, and a magic which is powerful enough to bring monarchs to their knees. Imagine the President picking up a two year-old. Who do you suppose will play by whose rules? It won't be the child who says, "Oh, this is the President! I'd better behave." It will be the President who says "Goo-goo gaga." There is a tacit recognition on the part of both the President and the child as to who is really the more powerful, and the less powerful has no choice but to acquiesce.

The reason this power exists in a small child is because that child is still honestly what it is, it hasn't yet learned to try to be something or someone else, it is still consciously one with the entire cosmos, or, if you wish, with God, for "of such is the kingdom... ." Children are god-like in that, like God, children are not impressed with persons.

A small child is like a pure solution which is strong because of its innate and undiluted purity. Each child is different, each has not only a different DNA complement, but in much the same way a different agenda for its life.

Each one of us came into this world outfitted with a unique assortment of physical, mental, emotional, and psychic equipment. Despite the ideals which are constantly held up to us as standards for our personal development, there is no better or worse equipment for successful human being... a short-handled trowel might pale beside a steam shovel in physical power and mass, but the steam shovel cannot do the work of a trowel.

Each of us has a singular combination of talents and abilities, a completely novel balance of attributes and inclinations, because each of us came into this earthly theatre to play a completely novel and unique role in life, to contribute our special ingredients to the human banquet. We came here to learn the things that our equipment alone can help us learn, to see the truth of who we really are from an entirely new perspective, to boldly do what no one has done before. Each of us was born to be what we already are.

What happens in the course of growing up, however - and this has happened to all of us to one degree or another - is that the pure child becomes polluted. That formerly untainted, unique and powerful solution called a child is corrupted by the addition of things that don't belong there, things intended to make that child behave in a more standard and predictable, and therefore controllable way, things like attitudes, prejudices, judgments, biases, fears, guilts, and so on.

Well, here's an interesting observation: When children are no longer children, they are called adults. The term adult is a shortened form, sort of a catch phrase, for "adulterated child." The state of adulterated childhood - called adulthood - is routinely glorified to impress the children; chronological majority is elevated to make it envied, striven for, cherished, and protected at all costs. This tells children that there is something inferior about being who they are, but there's nothing they can do about it but wait for the day when they can begin their pay-backs. They are told, "When you grow up, then you can be adulterated like we are." Misery loves company.

Every one of us is a completely novel, never-before-tried version of those pure solutions. Each of us was born perfect, perhaps not by society's standards, but certainly by Life's. Each one of us is different, and those differences are mighty strong evidence that we came here to be different people and do different things.

Society gives endless rewards to people who "play the game," but society has never been particularly fond or tolerant of diversity. On the surface, society righteously proclaims that all people are presumed to be created equal, as though all people can and should be reduced to some lowest common denominator, a statistical norm, a complete list of acceptable attributes.

Beneath the surface, however, this allows society to treat us, and for each of us to treat each other and to some extent ourselves, as things. In this view, children are categorically viewed as imperfect; immature raw material which, only if properly molded and shaped by morality and social forces, might one day qualify as acceptable. Hence, we dutifully followed everybody else's lead and got lost.

Here's another indication of the problem, another one of those sly twists in the language. We have the same word for the place where we send small plants and the place where we send small people. It's called a nursery and, according to the derivation of the word, is ideally a place where nursing, in the mammary sense of the word, takes place. Nursing, cuddling, cooing, caressing, and those other loving and gentle human interactions are vitally important in the early months and years of human life. The fact that many kids today don't get them may just be related to some of the social problems we find around us.

In the interests of efficiency and economy, each plant in a nursery is reared under the same strictly controlled conditions: the same size pots, and the same amounts of water and light and food, as though all plants ought by nature to prosper and flourish under precisely the same conditions.

If any plant should show a desire to grow in unacceptable (i.e., non-standard) ways, that plant is quickly nipped in the bud (by the authorities, of course, and on the excuse of something which is generally dressed up as "the greater social good"). If such a plant should remain strong in its insistence to be what it is, then it is eventually tossed out onto the rubbish heap to fend for itself.

¥ The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

Henry David Thoreau

Most adults suffer a dull, indistinct unhappiness which is so habitual that it has become inseparable from their daily lives, however they may smile to mask it. They have been talked out of themselves. From the earliest age they have been brainwashed into the belief that as they were born, and as who they were born as, they aren't good enough, that they must continually prove their worth, that their bodies are fallible and liable to disease, that their passions are unnaturally sinful and must be harnessed and suppressed, that their duty is to serve the aims of the majority. Down deep, they are convinced that they aren't good enough.

Their consciousness started out cosmic, attuned to the oneness of all existence, but has since been pared down to a strictly utilitarian fraction of its totality. That naturally universal attunement has been filtered and reduced to a trickle, which is then called normal or ordinary consciousness.

¥ With ordinary consciousness you can't even begin to know what's happening.

Saul Bellow

After decades of propaganda and worldly and/or other-worldly teachings, the vast majority of adults have resigned themselves to trying endlessly to be what they are not, and the frustration they quite naturally feel is expressed as fear, hatred, intolerance, greed, and all of the other social maladies we see around us. (Look at almost anyone when they don't know they are being watched, when they are not performing. What sort of a face are they wearing, what does their expression convey about their prevailing thoughts? Their faces cannot help but mirror how they feel about themselves (even professional actors cannot maintain a false persona indefinitely, and habitual worry-lines are revealing.)

Most adults are ill-at-ease (another way of saying dis-eased) because they know something is wrong in their lives. They faintly remember their own personal gardens of Eden, but the rewards of social conformance haven't even come close to replicating it, and more of a non-solution is never enough. Their mental habits and belief systems won't allow them to face up to what has happened to them, and to what they are doing by perpetuating institutions that don't really work. Though they often mean well, they continue playing the charade seriously and often fearfully because they don't know what else to do.

¥ Grown-ups never understand anything for themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Young people have always retained a stronger memory of what things should be like, which may be why modem life always seems to include some degree of unrest in its younger citizens. And today especially, young people seem to have a stronger grip on the Edenic memory than generations past. Yet because of the subordinate role assigned to children and minors in general, their wisdom is universally dismissed as uninformed, childish, and impractical.

¥ Who is more foolish: the child afraid of the dark, or the man afraid of the light?

Maurice Freehill

We have all had our feet set for us into the steel-reinforced concrete of conformity, but we are also fortunate that it hasn't had time to set completely. We can always change, but it becomes more and more difficult the longer we wait.

The beauty of our human situation is that what we are looking for doesn't have to be brought into being from the outside; it is already full and complete, and we have no further to look for it than our own beingness.

We are not here to be clones of Michael Jordan or Madonna or anybody. Role models are generally held in some degree of usually myopic reverence, which is why people are so shocked, if not outraged, when it turns out that role models are just human after all. But none of us are here to try to become something we're not; we are here to be who we are. It's really that simple.

¥ He is great who is what he is from nature, and who never reminds us of others.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Look at the truly great people in our society, the artists, musicians, athletes, inventors, and freethinkers. Their charm and grace come from their having refused to conform; their strength comes from having held out 'in their own rights' against the stultifying effects of conformity, so the quality of their activities carries with it a magic which is quite beyond description. They are special not only because of their talents, which are often considerable, but also because what talent they have is expressed with a natural purity and simplicity which, though perhaps completely different, nevertheless reminds us of our own.

A Dangerous Book

by Rodger Stevens

Life is a Bowl of Flowers

There was once a beautiful bouquet of flowers, consisting of half a dozen daisies and a single rose. The daisies were intimidated by the beauty and elegance of the rose, they grew jealous of the rose's fragrance and charm, so as the cultivated, democratic race of flowers they fancied themselves to be, they held an election to determine which was the perfect flower. By sheer weight of numbers, the daisies easily carried the election and saw it as a great and famous victory for flowers' rights everywhere.

A decree, later known as a floral contract, then came out which pro claimed that the daisy was the perfect flower, and that it was the civic responsibility of all flowers to be perfect, which is to say, to be daisies. The poor rose was too much of a minority to deserve justice.

See the problem? If the rose tries too hard to be a daisy, or worse, is threatened with all manner of social, legal, and vital sanctions for not succeeding, then two things are certain: not only will the rose fail miserably to be a daisy, but it will also fail miserably to be a rose. Frustration and inner tension is created which that rose will carry throughout life.

This is precisely what happens to children when they are browbeaten into trying to be something they are not, trying to conform to an unnatural and morally unjust arrangement. When faced with such a dilemma, the choice is really quite simple: you can be what you are, which in a climate of enforced conformity is often dangerous but always honest, or you can try to be what you are not, which is both dishonest and ultimately fatal.

There is said to exist at the foundation of society something called a social contract. Though nobody has ever signed it, this contract is said to embody an agreement between the individuals forming that society which defines and limits the rights and duties of each. It is this social contract which determines that each person born into a given country is a citizen of that country. (When animals live in dens, they are called denizens. When they live in cities...)

And it is this social contract which is used by the control people of society to force conformity to what are called norms of behavior. It is a contract which nobody has ever signed, but also a contract which all members of a society are legally required to honor as if they had actually signed it. The aim of such an agreement is to foster conformity and predictability, to consider all people equal and thereby require from them equal behavior. This makes it easier to conduct commerce, which is what drives the whole superstructure of modern civilization. The results, in addition to the irreversible depletion of the planet and serious overpopulation, include societies which consist of people who have been systematically prevented from being who they really are, people who have forgotten what they are here on this earth to be.

¥ Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nonconformity is not simply doing the opposite of what everyone else does; that's called being contrary and is just as conformal as conformity. Nonconformity has rather to do with being what you are, whether or not it accords with what others are doing. Sometimes you will do like others do ... that's okay when it's appropriate; sometimes you will do what others don't do. That's okay too. If you are going to be true to yourself, then conformity is the last thing you want to be concerned about. Conformity means doing something the same way every time, without having to think, doing it automatically, and doing it exactly the same as everyone else is doing it.

¥ Fashion is the rush to conform more quickly than everyone else.

Alan Watts

Being what you already are is deceptively confusing, because it is both the hardest thing in the world to do and the easiest... hard because of the common sense you have accumulated thus far in your life, and easy because it's already the case.

The trick is to be who you decided to be when you decided to be who you are.

How easy is it for a rose to become a daisy? How hard is it for a rose to be a rose?

Earlier I mentioned our natural DNA complement (yes, DNA is complementary). DNA is short for deoxyribonucleic acid, which is the basic chemical form of the body's operating manual on how to be a body, how to make hair and skin and bones, how to digest food, how to record and recall memories, basically, how to be biophysically who you are. You can't live without this acid.

In the same way as we were born with DNA, each of us was born with what we call purpose, with a vital agenda, with something of a reference guide about what we are here to be and do. It, like our DNA complement, isn't something that we can develop or acquire; we are born with it. There is no exercise you can do to acquire what you already have. Science hasn't found it because it doesn't exist in terms of science.

¥ To take what there is, and use it, without waiting forever in vain for the preconceived - to dig deep into the actual and get something out of that - this doubtless is the right way to live.

Henry James

You #1 are actual. Who you really are is already the case; nothing is necessary to bring it into being. All that is necessary is for you to remove your attention from the illusion of who you have been told you are.

In a way, our lives in the world are like a movie projected on a screen. There is adventure, intrigue, personal challenges, conflict, fires and storms, high drama, birth and death. When you are entwined in the plot of movie, you forget for the moment that it isn't real. You believe in the pretense of the movie so strongly that you will laugh or cry, your body will become tense, your heart will pound, but all the while you are sitting comfortably in a darkened room watching light images which are substantially unreal dancing across a white screen.

This is how we have become: watcher/participants in a movie over which we have been told that we have little directorial control. We want to be able to tell the difference between fact and fiction, but the only choices the directors give us are the scenes projected onto the screen. When we are given a choice between one scene and another, it isn't much of a choice. It is hard to remember that everything on the screen is part of the illusion; it is temporary, one moment it is there, the next moment it is gone; one moment we are happy, the next we are sad.

If it is really our intent to find reality, then we must at least temporarily remove ourselves from the pretense of the movie; we need to learn to tell the difference between the witness who is watching the movie and the roles we are playing, the difference between the flashing, evanescent light images projected onto the screen, and the screen itself.

Our consciousness is like light, and the contents of our minds - our thoughts - are like the film we run through the projector of our imaginations. We project into the world who we think we are and what we have been taught the world is. But these projections, like the movie, are artificial, merely illusory. When you want to see reality instead of the illusion, when you want to see the screen instead of the movie, you turn off the projector.

What is artificial needs artificial support, but what is real needs no such support. When you turn off the projector, only what is real will remain. The screen has always been there, you are not creating it by turning off the projector; you are simply removing energy from the illusion. This is what meditation and prayer are really all about, though these, too, have been convoluted in the interests of philosophy and religion.

And this is why the path of self-discovery is so threatening to the establishment. When it is discovered that peace is not the result of the existence or actions of any government, police force, or religion, that health is not the result of any medicine, that happiness is not the result of any personal power or possessions, then people who are fed up with congenital civilized frustration will turn back to reality, and the artificial distractions of life, for which we all pay dearly, will wither. This is part of what is happening in the world today.

A Dangerous Book

by Rodger Stevens

Making Sense of Reality

Most of what we think we know about the world comes through our senses, those mysterious windows between what's inside and what's outside our bodies. Whether we assume that there are at our disposal the five traditional senses (touch, taste, smell, hearing, and sight) or the expanded modern lists which include such as the senses of time and of motion, we can all agree that our worldly experience would be fractional without the input provided through these various windows.

What we are inclined to forget, however, is that the tools available to us for our investigations into life are also the limits of what we can perceive. Our eyes, for instance, avail us of a visual awareness of form and spatial relationship, but our eyes do not show us everything that is there, they are sensitive to only a tiny portion of the electromagnetic spectrum.

When we humans look at a patch of blue sky, we see simply blue. A bee can look at the same patch of sky and, because of the structure of its polarizing and compound eyes, can tell precisely in which direction the sun is. Obviously, the same sky is there for both us and the bee, so it must be that the bee sees a different world and can make distinctions that we can't, although the converse is also true.

We see with our eyes only a tiny sliver of the spectrum. We hear with our ears only a tiny fraction of the vibrations there to be sensed. Our senses of taste, touch, and smell are likewise narrowly focused. We cannot be sensually aware of anything we don't have the facility to be aware of; you can't taste a turkey dinner on an AM radio.

Can a bird somehow see wind currents? Can a fish somehow feel an impending earthquake? There is growing evidence that they can, which ought to indicate to us that there is infinitely more to life than we humans have the sense to perceive. And because we don't have in our human arsenal any analog equivalents, we cannot conceive in what manner that fish becomes aware of the coming earthquake, or how birds can land lightly in the midst of swirling and, to us, invisible winds. The scientifically acceptable windows show us only a fraction of what's there, yet we have been convinced that that's all there is, and that our assumptions based on that fraction are correct. But they aren't.

And yet, we and our hallowed institutions have the audacity to claim that we understand life well enough to direct it. Again, check out the news.

It is widely acknowledged, by open-minded parents at least, that young children can often see things which we adults cannot see (or have forgotten how to see): imaginary playmates, auras, and other physical or spiritual essences for which we adults have no concepts. Just because we grown-ups can't see them is no evidence that they aren't there.

But we have fallen for the illusion that, if something can't be put into words or some other symbolic representation like mathematics, then it isn't real. We have accepted as reality the severe limitations of language and sensation, and have incorporated them into our mentative processes, so whatever comes through our senses is either immediately and automatically translated into terms we are comfortable with, or it is discarded as being unreal, imaginary.

We call this "making sense" of the world, putting our sensory input about the world through the filters of our beliefs and attitudes, and arranging the mental pieces we have chopped it into in such a way that we can feel like we understand them. Rather than really making sense of the world, however, it is perhaps more accurate to say that reducing the infinite world to our finite abilities to make sense out of sensory input is like trying to intelligently analyze a football game using a thermometer. Hence, poetry, which alludes to images which are not specifically expressible, is generally dismissed as being non-factual, as hypnagogic, and therefore something less than the meat-and-potatoes reality of facts.

Do all humans see the world the same way? Even though we all have eyes, do we see the same things? What are we hearing when we hear? What do we feel when we feel? Can't say. But the sky in Mona Lisa was no more or less real to Da Vinci than the sky in van Gough's Starry Night was to Vincent.

Science tells us that what we call matter is mostly space. If the average atom were enlarged to the size of the solar system, with the electrons out near the orbits of Uranus and Neptune, that atom would be far emptier than the solar system. If all the space in and between the atoms of your body were removed, so that the nuclei and electrons were packed up against each other, you would be a barely visible speck that still weighed what you weigh. What we call matter is mostly space, and what little matter there is may not matter quite the way we think.

And yet, when we come to a wall, our senses tell us it is solid. Despite there being so much space in matter, we can't walk through it. This isn't because of the matter which is there, but because of the electrical fields surrounding the atoms and molecules both in the wall and in our bodies. Our senses don't tell us this, because they can't; all they can say is "thou shalt go no further in this direction."

In short, senses neither lie nor tell the truth; they simply pass to our awareness a very narrow selection of the available information. Making sense of the world, that is, making the world into sensual information, is to make nonsense of the world, because our senses are partial, selective, and therefore exclusive, while the real world is complete and inclusive. Even though our senses have been trained to tell us otherwise, the truth is not a matter of common sense. Great discoveries are usually made by people who have sought beyond the bounds of what is popular or comfortable, and this means questioning everything.

¥ Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age awkward.

Albert Einstein

A Dangerous Book

by Rodger Stevens

Mind over Matter

We are consciousness, but we live in a world which happens to express itself in terms of something we call matter. This matter undergoes change under the influence of what we call energy. What is matter, what is energy, and what is this far stranger thing called consciousness which seems to be neither matter nor energy, but is nevertheless aware of both?

The apparent distinction between matter and energy on the one hand, and what is loosely called spirit on the other, has puzzled thinkers throughout the ages. Matter is roughly considered to be anything that can be perceived through either the senses or their technological extensions (microscopes, telescopes, computer imaging, etc.). Spirit, about which science has nothing to say, is everything else. Philosophies and religions, those institutions which have placed themselves in charge of spiritual matters, have become hopelessly complex in their efforts to explain life, not because Life is hopelessly complex, because it isn't, but because philosophies and religions have begun from a false premise. The false premise is: The universe is assumed to be a collection of mutually discrete and independent things, and therefore not a unity.

Since the unsensed is more mysterious than the sensed, we have traditionally assigned the superior position to spirit, a practice which has been supported by both science and religion, though not in the same ways. In science, intellect (a quasi-measurable function of consciousness) is seen to be superior to inert matter, and it is assumed that intellect's purpose is to control matter. In religion, the functioning of inert matter is seen to be the result of the intervention of spirit, with the same intent to control.

The schism between the physical and the spiritual is what gives strength to the idea that one can, or ought to be able to, control one's body with one's mind, although there is just as strong a case to be made that for the likelihood that one's body (its chemistry, shape, and neurological capacities, etc.) can also control one's mind (perceptions, attitudes, etc.). There is a growing body of evidence which indicates that body chemistry may be more significant to human happiness than was ever before imagined, by the experts anyway, because mystics and psychedelic explorers have known it for thousands of years.

The final reasoned assault on this artificial separation of matter and spirit began in 1905 when Einstein turned the rather staid and confident scientific community on its staid and confident ear when he published his Special Theory of Relativity. This theory put forward the astounding idea that matter and energy were equivalents, that each was an alternative form of the other. This formula for this equivalence is the most famous formula in the world: E=MC2, which means that energy is equal to mass times the speed of light squared.

We know that mass (matter) can be converted into energy because of the existence of the atomic bomb; a small percentage of the active mass of a bomb is converted to pure energy, while the rest becomes radioactive fallout. In the other direction, energy can be converted into matter as has been demonstrated by particle accelerators: the collisions between highly energized particles results in more wreckage than there were original contributors, as if two speeding buses collided head on, and when the wreckage was examined, there were found parts for more than two buses. Some of the energy of the collision was converted into mass.

In fleshing out his theories, Einstein had gone to the very limits of rational thought and mathematics, but he realized that there was far more in the world than his theories accounted for. What was missing was that major component of life which could be said to be the basis for both matter and energy.

Modern studies in quantum physics (the study of the behavior and possible nature of sub-atomic phenomena) seem to indicate that what we call matter and what we call energy, in addition to being essentially interchangeable, are actually alternative forms of something else, just as ice and steam are alternative forms of water.

What might that "something else" be? The smaller the pieces into which matter is chopped, the more these pieces exhibit behavior which can only be explained by saying that these ridiculously small bits of stuff are somehow aware of what is happening around them. They are, apparently, conscious.

The emerging wisdom indicates that what we call matter and what we call energy may ultimately be alternative forms of consciousness. This would neatly explain the astounding stories we occasionally hear of people who can manifest things out of thin air, or move objects without physically touching them. If you are conscious enough, you can convert that consciousness into either matter or energy at your discretion. As outlandish as this may seem today, it may not be too many years before countless people learn how to do just that.

Where we plain old average humans are concerned, the separation of our being into the categories of mind and matter is finally being challenged in the heart of science, and as a result of their deeper investigations into the nature of matter, the scientists are now saying what has been obvious to mystics for millennia: people are not composed of a mind and a body, as though the mind ran the body. Rather, it is becoming clear that the very concepts of spirit, mind, and body are just names for different aspects of the same thing, and that thing is you.

¥ The mind is the body looked at from the inside, and the body is the mind looked at from the outside.

Alan Watts

And when it comes to doing your life in pleasant, agreeable, and fulfilling ways, it soon becomes apparent that the mind is no more separate from the body than sound and light are separate from the lightning. You can't even begin to treat them as separate without immediately making a thunderous mistake. Body and mind are just alternative expressions of consciousness; they are aspects, not things in themselves.

The message is: when you carry ideas around in your head - any ideas - then these will create an actual biochemical response in your body. The chemicals produced by your body actually change as a result of what you are thinking. There is adrenaline pumping through the veins of everyone watching an exciting movie, even though their bodies are sitting comfortably in a darkened room. On the other hand, when your body is chemically out of balance, then your thinking is adversely affected.

In its complex simplicity, this interaction between mind and body belies the reality that mind and body are really just two different ways of looking at one thing. In its complex simplicity, this interaction seems to behave according to a principle called resonance.

A Dangerous Book

by Rodger Stevens

What is Resonance?

Do you remember the TV commercial in which Ella Fitzgerald broke the wine glass with her voice (maybe it was the tape)? Have you ever turned up the volume on your stereo and heard the windows clatter? Have you ever ridden in an old car and when you reached a certain speed, the fender or something would begin to rattle?

All of these phenomena are the result of what is called resonance, from a Latin word meaning, literally, "to sound again." In fact, it is resonance in the electronic circuits of the receiver which allows you to "tune in" to a radio or TV station.

Resonance isn't strictly a physical or electrical phenomenon. When we hang out with favorite people and we are all getting into a certain rhythm of conversation, or music, or whatever, there is a resonance, a like-feeling-ness enfolding all of us.

This is why musical concerts and ethnic religious gatherings can be so energizing - all those people in the same groove - the resonance goes far beyond just the physical. Angry mobs work the same way.

When a certain critical mass of people is assembled who are in the same groove, the energy so generated and focused is infectious, even to those who are not physically involved. This is a fact which has not been missed by the shapers of public opinion: fear, hatred, and animosity can be skillfully focused in support of cures which are materially far more damaging than the alleged illnesses (e.g., the arms race, the drug wars, religious fundamentalism).

Each of us is like a radio transmitter which is on twenty-four hours a day. This transmitter broadcasts what we are thinking, how we feel, our moods and emotions, all of the moment-to-moment contents of our consciousness. Many psychic abilities amount to little more than the ability to pick up on these vibrations in much the same way that a radio can pick up the electrical noise generated by an approaching car. The phenomenon of entrainment is when many people "lock into" the same ideas or activities. The flavor of humanity at any given moment is the sum total of the transmissions of each person alive.

Every thought you have affects your body and the way it works; it also affects the world around you. That's because your mind and your body are part of You #2, while You #1 is the consciousness which is both aware of all the rest and the fundamental reality of all the rest. When you spend time in the space of You #2, doing thinking, pondering, worrying, fearing, plotting, and carrying on all of the internal conversations that we do, you are automatically including not only your own body and your environment, but also the world at large in the discussion, you are actually broadcasting yourself to the world at every moment of your existence.

Almost nobody today will argue that stress has no effect on physiology. And when you unconsciously buy into the feelings of fear or uncertainty which presently entertain large segments of the earthly population, then you will be swept right along with the masses. Your body will respond to fear and anxiety with outpourings of chemicals which, if there is no immediate action to spend them on, will ultimately turn around and bite you instead of your imagined attackers. Worrying is like sitting in your car in your garage with the engine running, thinking about being chased down the road by the bad guys. You will gun your engine as though it were really happening, but all you are really accomplishing is burning gas, filling the air with smoke, and wearing out your engine, all to no purpose.

In the 1970's, Normal Cousins made headlines by audaciously announcing that he had healed himself of cancer by watching old comedies, by laughing a lot.

The medical profession, their power and expertise threatened by these revelations, nervously discounted the results, but thousands of people around the world found the same things to be true: by changing the contents of their conscious awareness, by changing their belief systems and common sense world views, they also changed the level of health of their bodies.

This is the principle of resonance in action. To make a little clearer how it works, let us consider the lowly tuning fork. A tuning fork is usually a brightly polished little two-pronged piece of metal roughly shaped like a pickle fork, which, when struck, emits a pure and exact musical tone. They are used for tuning musical instruments, but not usually fish... did you every try to tuna fish?

Suppose we had a tuning fork in the key of "A." If we were to strike that fork, making it hum, and then set it next to another "A" tuning fork, the second fork will begin to vibrate as well. We don't even have to strike it; it will pick up the vibrations of the first fork through the air, and will do so because the natural resonant frequency of both forks is the same. A "B" tuning fork would just sit there quietly and refuse to hum along.

If we were to strike an "A" tuning fork, then set it down in an array of many different tuning forks, only those whose natural resonance corresponds will begin to vibrate; the rest will remain unmoved.

This is just an analogy, but it is indicative of how Normal Cousins was able to heal his cancer, and how every thought you think has an effect on you and your world. Here's the connection:

First, the energy you use to strike the tuning fork is analogous to the degree of consciousness you bring to your thoughts, the amount of energy and attention you pour into them. Most people are only partly conscious, and therefore poorly focused, which is why their impact on the world is minimal. They spend most of their time dreaming, sending out conflicting thoughts which never accomplish much because the messages are so jumbled that they end up being self -canceling. Whereas we all know people who seem to be supercharged; the energy they bring to their affairs is palpable, you can almost feel it when they walk into a room. These people resonate strongly.

The more conscious you are, the more energetically you are ringing your fork.

Second, the tone of y