What’s Bigger Than the Universe? Hang On, What’s Bigger Than Everything?
(This essay was originally published by Shift on March 7, 2015. It has been revised.)
I’ve noticed with the universe it’s haunted. There seems to be more going on than what we see, as if there’s something hidden, and I’m not talking about the molecular and subatomic levels. The sense is not so much of hidden mechanisms but that “all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players,” to quote Shakespeare. Who has not a time or two, at least in some bedeviled moment of childhood, looked over their shoulder like Truman Burbank of the film The Truman Show and wondered, “Am I in front of an audience?” That the sense is the centerpiece of many people’s mental illness may have more to do with that being an underlying sense we all share than of being the isolated-to-them sense of their illness. We have peopled the hidden audience with nature spirits, gods and demons, more recently aliens, and now, with the advent of computer technology and the debate over artificial intelligence, with computer scientists and AI creators. Though the question will be quickly qualified with something like, “It’s just a hobby mind you, an interesting sideline of thinking not at all important to us as scientists in the least” (least it be seen as a concession to or indulgence in superstition), but it’s still being asked, and by respected members of mainstream science: are we living inside a computer simulation?
Such an idea can have us thinking of some sinister scenario like in the film The Matrix, where, to say the least, the simulation was not in the best interests of the people living in it, whom we’d now call avatars since only their consciousness or ‘mind’ was in the machine, and their body was elsewhere. As the question is being posed today, however, the entire universe and all its bodies would be within the simulation, which has caused some to suggest that, if that’s the case, we don’t need to know it, since knowing it would make no difference to us existentially. We’d still be us doing what we do every day. If it’s true knowledge is power, however, and I would hope few doubt that truth, then it could make a world of difference, and I’m not only speaking in terms of the revolution in thought and idea it would bring about, a bigger one perhaps than discovering or re-discovering the Earth revolves around the sun and not vice versa, or that we live upon a huge revolving spherical island of life traveling some seemingly trivial temporary distance through the infinities of time, but I’m also talking about a revolution in being human itself, since, however remote, the possibility would be there of us reaching out of the simulation and getting in our hands the very keys of destiny.
The possibility is there too that it wouldn’t be some sinister matrix or one created by people very much like ourselves to see what they are, the how and why, but one created by ‘people’ quite a bit more advanced than us, in comparison on our scale of being say a whole lot more different from us than we are from other animals, and the simulation wouldn’t be to our detriment but the very opposite; it’s in the design that we would reach out of it and get our hands on those keys, however many trials and tribulations we had to undergo to get there (making perhaps ultimate virtual reality video game more an apt description than computer simulation). In such a scenario, the creators would not likely be either gods as we like to think of them—benevolent beings asking some token of our appreciation even if that is just being good—or conscientious scientists vastly technologically superior to us conducting some experiment, who gave their creation such power because it would be the proper thing to do, because it was part of the experiment, although we’d imagine they’d have some protection in place because of the threat to them we’d pose if we got out of the simulation and into their undefiled heaven or ordered laboratory, not all that different in essence than the threat AI poses to us now in our speculation over it. The creators I’m speaking of would be something else entirely.
Understand here I’m using the concept creator because we as yet have no other adequate one to describe a being in such a relationship to us, using it in the same way we use the term computer simulation to describe the possible symbol stage we live and move upon, because we can only get an idea about it by using ideas we know. The actors involved and the actual thing-in-itself may be in essence quite different than the ideas we are familiar with. Though it’s certainly not new to human thought, in fact has been around thousands of years in esoteric spiritual teaching in one form or another, and here the idea of the virtual reality video game would be more expressive for our purposes than a computer simulation, we might just be avatars unawares for a person on a level of being bigger not only than us but the universe, bigger not in physical terms but in terms of not being bound by the conditions of the cosmos in the scope and capacity of consciousness, that ungraspable substance that might prove to be what matter revolves around rather than the other way around as it appears to our scientific senses and speculation (in the same way it appears to our corporeal senses the heavens revolve around the earth), who would in turn be an avatar for someone larger, again using a known concept to capture the unknown and here simplifying the process to just personhood but meaning in fact the person and his whole field, person not limited to human being if you wanted to split hairs, and we might could keep going with avatar upon avatar until we reached the Unimaginable, which we could never really do since we are speaking of something larger than time itself because it has no beginning or end, those for our universe notwithstanding, and any amount of time would be no time compared to it, unless you give serious consideration to the proposition that at some point in absolute nothingness something popped out and at some point what is will just completely and absolutely disappear and never appear again. Either way you meet a paradox; infinity forever defies logic. From the proposition of timelessness, if we are on a stage, it’s not just a hidden audience we’d be romping in front of but hidden infinities, infinities within infinities within infinities.
In a recent film about the married life of cosmologist Steven Hawking, The Theory of Everything, he draws a diagram on a blackboard for his professor, explaining as he does his theory of black holes, and the professor, obviously impressed with the theory, simply tells him it’s fine but now do the math to prove it. The whole scene is handled in such as way as to give as little credence as possible to the intuitive reason derived theory, or rather, put all the weight of it on a mathematical equation (really on the scientific method) and make the ‘hunch’ he had appear the flimsiest of things, something hardly necessary but it is, like a cough or a sneeze, and so it’s tolerated but not wanted.
Though science and technology have certainly benefited from human intuition, even from the content of dreams, the double helix and the sewing machine needle for example, today you’ll find the word counter-intuitive even in the submission guidelines of popular culture magazines such is the extent the war in ideas between the religious and the skeptic have made both paint themselves more and more into corners, and maybe the latter more so because, in technologically based societies, the dominant society on earth, it holds the field, after centuries of wrestling it out of the former’s hands, and they are trying to get it back now like never before. So it is no surprise that the ‘hobby’ of investigating the truth value of whether we live in a computer simulation or not is based in mathematics and not on trying to reach out of the simulation; in other words, it’s not based on personal firsthand experience.
I imagine, whoever you are and whatever you believe, that proving by firsthand experience that the universe is a representation, or to bring it closer to home, that we are representative creatures of entities beyond the cosmos, posing it that way as opposed to a computer simulation or video game so to perhaps move closer in idea to that possible unknown, sounds at first preposterous. Putting all method aside for a moment, it’s the most basic way the unknown for us becomes the known: one or more of us seeing something, a new continent or planet for example, with our own eyes or with the aid of instruments, and then able to convince enough of the rest of us it is there that it becomes part of our knowledge. The scientific method becoming the dominant means whereby we become convinced something one or more of us has seen is true or not—the apprehension of a rational ground for something universal and for the most part invariable—, has limited the investigation to the objective outer world, which has greatly increased our knowledge of it and consequently our security and comfort in it but at the same time dramatically decreased (atrophied really) our knowledge of the subjective inner world, our trust in it, and made the exploration of it for all practical purposes null and void in that the discoveries there don’t become part of our knowledge. In fact, the scientific method cannot be applied there without significant adaptation of it to the inner field, something mainstream science is not likely to do because, in a reaction to the current war in ideas between the proponents of science and the religious-minded, it’s both giving its method the absolute authority the religious give their scriptures and, like them with those, refusing to change, adapt it or bring it into question.
It would hardly seem needed to point out why the scientific method cannot easily be applied to what is seen or discovered in the inner life, but to my knowledge it’s not something generally discussed such is the degree we (of the dominant technologically based society) ignore the relevance of that subjective field, and so I will simply point out that the inner experience of one person, a lucid dream for example, or any dream or vision, not to mention largely unknown things like overhead experience or generally misunderstood things like enlightenment, the egoless mental silence, cannot be reproduced under laboratory conditions and be the exact same experience for anyone else reached in precisely the same way, the content of inner experience rising as it does from a fount we have not yet discovered to the degree we have our hands on the mechanism and can manipulate it at will. That doesn’t mean an inner discovery cannot be verified in a scientific manner by others seeing it for themselves, but they wouldn’t be able to apply the scientific method as it stands now to their subsequent verification because they could not follow the same procedure of the discoverer and would have to adapt their search to their own subjective inner content and conditions. When we are trying to prove something as all-encompassing as we are representative of someone beyond the universe, something that would include the inner as much as it does the outer because of the totality of our experience of being that representation entails, it should hardly go without saying the scientific method in its present form would not be an adequate means to use.
In fact it would be by inner means we would more easily reach what we are representative of beyond or bigger than the universe if it isn’t a separate being from us but us at a higher stage of being and therefore be reachable by inner exploration and not outer. I have to add here that in discussing such a remote unknown as this, the terms inner and outer might not apply there or not in the same way as here, and so the duality of inner and outer might not be a condition of the larger us. That it is a dual world of inner and outer we live in escapes our notice quite easily because it’s the outer world we are focused upon, what we feel over, think about, and dream about too. If you simply witness it a moment, though, you won’t find yourself, your person, your identity, your ego, or however you care to call yourself, in the outer world. Your body is there, but however much you identify with it, you yourself live somewhere somehow inside it in the phenomenon called consciousness, the wrench in the system of science, what it can’t adequately explain but what it believes is a result of material process, what it reduces to chemicals and electro waves in the brain and down the spinal column, without yet having turned upon consciousness itself to gain an understanding of it, without having explored the phenomenon to discover its limits within and without us.
On basing all of science on the outer world, which would include material process inside physical bodies animate and inanimate, include also molecular and subatomic processes because they are observable outer phenomenon however remote they are from our corporeal senses, we aren’t basing our science on our reality, which is inner and a matter of consciousness. It’s no wonder, then, that we have failed to answer the most basic questions of our existence: who or what we are, why we’re here, where we came from, where we’re going, and how we get there. If it’s true that we are representative creatures of entities beyond the universe, and we can discover that in the exploration of consciousness, meet or be momentarily ourselves on high as it were, then the answers to those questions come into focus, and the keys of destiny appear upon the horizon of the human endeavor, what, if you’ve been yourself on high, in the exploration of your inner self have reached that height, is not rhetoric but reality.
Before finishing my last time in college, in the fall of 1989, on the most fateful and wonderful day of my life thus far, at 28, I was in Texas of all places, in a pickup truck of all things (not far from NASA), driving down the street at night negotiating a long slow curve. Apartment buildings lined both sides of the street, and I had almost made it home to my apartment. I was looking up at a crescent moon that had a bright star or planet resting directly on its bottom horn, and I was listening to Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” on the radio, and the song was in the middle of the weird sound sequence it has, and I was stoned on some Christmas skunk (potent marijuana), but that wasn’t unusual because during those years I was stoned as much as conditions allowed me to be. I wasn’t an airhead though but was in post-baccalaureate studies at the University of Houston focusing on the language Classical Greek, having just dropped out of a program (I’d just began) to earn a Masters in the History of Science because my metaphysical and spiritual experiences had reached the extent I knew science didn’t have a clue as to what was going on with us, but I kept at the Greek to maintain an outer focus engaging enough to keep my mind occupied with the outer world on the advice of my Greek professor who was a close confidant, although she was a skeptic. Driving under that horned moon and under the spell of that sound, I felt a sensation between a sudden lift like a blastoff and being beamed up that lasted less than a second it happened so fast, and then I was several meters above my head, only I was no longer me—that imprisoned fellow continued to drive the truck the whole time, negotiating that slow curve—but who I really am, the realization that was who I was and that I’d forgotten that the most hit-me-over-the-head part of the experience, but that was far from all.
How I knew that was the real me I could only explain if I were still up there, but although I was extended into the universe by being attached to the little I driving the truck, I wasn’t in the universe but beyond it, however impossible that sounds. I realized in that ‘up there’, that to become myself again was the goal of the whole journey, the journey of the little lives down there where that truck was. There was so much more to thought there than here, and that realization contained in it all the lives the little I driving that truck had, and to go any farther would be to put interpretation of it, something almost impossible to completely avoid.
The utter ecstasy I felt did not disturb in the least the utter stillness, calm and peace that was my station, and although the truck was moving below me, I wasn’t. I could see through the roof of the truck the little I driving, and anywhere I pointed my vision, which was from up there, I could see through whatever I looked at to the molecular level, see through the walls of the apartments I was driving past, into and through not just the minds of the people sitting in them but their natures, could see the heart of anything I looked at.
My identity was the One, not God, as strange as that might sound, although I knew too I was only an expression of the One, and although the experience lasted only several seconds, so much I saw in that time—I saw Earth—, but the most poignant part of the seeing was that I knew it would be impossible for me to remember the experience as I experienced it because it was not limited to three dimensional reality. What I mean to say it was bigger than sizes. You can only see it when you’re actually there, and you can only bring back some pale reflection of what you saw. One thing, however, was apparent on my return to this prison house of sense, and that was that I knew everything had consciousness, even inanimate matter, or, more how it appears, that everything is consciousness at varying degrees of movement and play.
In a flash I was suddenly again the little I driving the truck, but the experience revolutionized my life, not, as you might expect, instantly, but over long slow years, although I parked my truck immediately after, cried tears of pure joy, and made getting back up there again, not for a moment but forever, the goal of my life. I was so surprised. But knowledge takes the longest time to reach all the way down into the darkest deeps of your ignorance, become the will of your heart and hands, the travel of your feet, and my ignorance is particularly dark and deep, and maybe that’s why I saw what I saw, or really, was for a moment who I truly am; if you’re that being on high and want to lift a world of little I’s up towards your station, you’d be wise to begin the work at rock bottom, with the bad apples, and go up from there, but this is of course a lot of interpretation.
The greatest value of human experience possible as beings with a physical body is what we need to experience. We won’t, or can’t, if we don’t turn and explore the field of consciousness, which we avoid because our science doesn’t understand it or trust it, can’t apply its method to it to the letter. Adhering to the spirit of the law, however, we can investigate the validity of this overhead experience I describe. Way beyond the splendors of science and the spirituality of religion, it’s been the most hidden aspect of our humanity, the higher self, what reveals to us what’s going on with us, where we come from and where we’re headed, what the Indian poet, philosopher and explorer of consciousness Aurobindo Ghose called the supramental, meaning beyond Mind, who was the first to talk about it openly and to map out a way to get there, interestingly enough around the same period of time Einstein was formulating his theories and that science was reeling over the discovery of the quantum field. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that it’s been known since earliest times and has formed the basis of the esoteric tradition in spirituality, that inner knowledge getting lost and becoming the worship of the outer sun, since it’s symbolized as the sun by our own inner creative sense that fashions dream and vision, which seems to be universal. When the Sufi poet Rumi says “None but the sun can display the sun,” and “But the Sun of the soul, beyond this firmament,” is he speaking under the stress of inspiration what images it brings him, or is he speaking of the overhead sun of which we speak, what he himself has seen in the only way possible, by being the sun, since it’s beyond the universe and all conceptions concrete or abstract?
But neither Rumi, if he did indeed experience it, nor Sri Aurobindo, who most certainly did, nor anyone else for that matter, has described an experience of it nude of symbol or what might be called in post-spirituality terms, the straight take on it. I’m perhaps the first in regards to describing a supramental experience thusly, naked, though I might be the last person you’d expect given my moral track record. Here, however, it’s not outer conditions one has to meet in order to experience Supermind, how good you are or how pure, though triggers of sight and sound and such seem to act as quickening a (that “Whole Lotta Love” was a trigger should show the path to Supermind is wide open); it’s inner conditions, namely two: to have reached all the way through dream into the deepest innermost keep of your inner life; to have opened the top of the head and gone to the top of Mind. Each of them require quite a comprehensive exploration of yourself, and it would stand to reason that if you were to reach out of the representation and be who you represent, to put it in known internet terms, who you are an avatar of, you would have first had to have touched bottom inside yourself and broken the lid at the top of yourself that separates your mind from the universal mind, each of which are almost as unknown as that of which we speak, unknown to even the spiritually-minded. The skeptical science-minded will just have to hear me out asking the question: is it wise to refute inner experience you have not explored when it’s possible for you to do so, but you haven’t because you’ve adopted a belief it’s of little value?
Several days before my overhead experience, I’d completed an inner journey that took a couple of weeks to complete and that I had to do in stages. I first learned how, in a lucid dream, to have the scenario fade (by doing a sitting meditation with pranayama), which would leave me falling in a tunnel-like blank darkness, not with a body but as a consciousness. This is a gateway in dream to the deeps, but at the time I only knew it was taking me somewhere not where it was taking me. Next I learned how to maintain that state of travel, which is quite difficult because you are so close to waking up and coming out of the experience you have only to open your eyes. I imagine the obstacles one faces are personal and would be different for everybody, but in order to arrive where I was going I had to overcome my greatest fears and let go of the most important people in my life, and if you wonder how that could be possible since this was in my inner life you perhaps do not know how real the inner can represent the outer, or how confused you can become between the two even when lucid. The more I overcame the obstacles the more real they became, as if there were an intelligence other than my own trying to prevent me from arriving. Finally I arrived, and though I can describe the experience citing its details, this was not in the world of forms, though a rudimentary single type of form floated there, which resembled two beamed quarter notes—a sound music would be a word too rough to use to describe it permeated the experience—, a form that seemed aware. This was in a totally other realm than ours, and if you go there you’ll know why a distinction is made between spirit and matter. Spirituality would call this the well of soul, or the seat of the soul, and if post-spirituality were to get there, it would likely keep that word soul since, like the word God, other words just can’t reach that far. I’d touched bottom, or rather, the innermost place in myself, and it acted like a springboard that was to send me over the top of Mind, but I must warn you, there is another bottom in us, or a bottomless pit more like it, that is not in but down, called the Void, the nothingness, or the eyeless waste, and you don’t reach it through that ‘falling place’ but by going down through inner worlds of nightmare, the Hells, and I don’t know if first you must experience this before you find your innermost deep, but I did, though that was in my earliest cycle of inner exploration as a child.
The other condition, opening the top of the head and going to the top of Mind, called Overmind by my yoga (albeit the lowest tier of Overmind), happened a year before, in 1988 on my 27th birthday on Spyrock Mountain in Northern California. After three intensive years of inner exploration, I took a psychoactive substance, LSD, for the first time, and I was an atheist and wanted the question answered if God exists or not, unlike the New Atheist who claims such a question is akin to asking if there’s a tooth fairy or Santa Clause, in other words a stupid question that has no place being asked by a rational mind. My inner experience had warranted that question, something to my knowledge New Atheists do not have very much of and think has little or no value. My set and setting were such that I not only experienced changes in perception but went beyond the boundaries of the normal human range, a possibility of psychoactive substances not generally accepted, that it can be a trigger for spiritual experience and not just be an imitation of one. I had the urge to lie down, and as I did the world in front of my visual field first filled with cracks then shattered with a resounding crack, and I found myself flying bodiless over a thought-grid that stretched forever in every direction, and I knew but did not know how I knew that I was at the top of Mind seeing the ideas that seed human thought and create, or evolve rather, civilization, ideas divine but not necessarily either religious or spiritual, though the ideas I witnessed there were. The sense is rather opposite than we normally think when we consider divine actors in the creation of our world. They weren’t creating the physical world but influencing and organizing it by seeding the earth-mind with ideas.
Each square of the thought-grid, though they were not exactly squares, had an unfathomable depth to it that contained in miniature beings and ornamentation impossible for the space they were in, beings and ornamentation that defied description in three dimensional terms, although they had size to them, were not out of the bounds of size, and from the forms inside I knew I was flying over the Buddhist idea because I could see that the general shape of a stupa was very rough imitation of the ‘original’ form I was looking at, though it wasn’t buildings I was looking at but beings and ornamentation, and it was the same over the Christian ‘house’ (cubicles I originally called them), its general shapes like a pointing steeple and such very inexact imitations of the original forms of the idea we call Christianity, though it’s interesting to note there was not the shape of a cross anywhere though there was a ‘slot’ for Jesus and other central personalities of the Christian idea. The two houses were next to one another, and my state of consciousness as I was above them was commensurate with the idea of each, peace and joy the dominating element of the Buddhist and love and joy of the Christian, though there was only a slight difference between the two houses in terms of consciousness, and the background of both was mental silence that was not simply a quiet or still mind but a state of consciousness unto itself. The Christian house held a contradiction in its center, an element of wrath it itself did not seem to understand, and that created a conflict in me that resulted in my return to myself lying down, needless to say no longer an atheist, but it took me years to interpret what I saw in relation to the being God: it’s not different religions interpreting differently the same God; it’s that God is bigger than name and form, too big for any man-made religion to encompass (since God is the not-God too), or for any human spirituality to discover in his totality, and the different religions each focus on different attributes of God, attributes that are so very creative that upon entering the universe they become beings unto themselves, and in such an identity with God they see themselves as God or some expression of the Absolute.
I broke the lid over my mind and went to the top of Mind because I had just spent 4 years in the university earning a B.A. in English and History, spending more and more time in my intellect hitting against that lid trying to answer the big basic questions I sought to answer such as is there a God and where does humanity come from because the inner experiences I was having showed me infinitely more is going on with us than what universities teach or science-based literature and philosophy talk about. So it was only natural that when I ingested LSD (under such a compulsion) it would take me where I was most oriented to go, beyond that lid, since, like the out of body experience, once you leave the room you’re in, or the little known spiral force that seizes you in a lucid dream for that matter, the psychoactive substance takes you where you are set to arrive, though with many if not most that is only to play with ‘the doors of perception’.
It would be several years before I could corroborate my experiences by hearing they had been experienced by someone else, though at no time did I consider them hallucination or unique to me such was the overwhelming sense of the universality and reality of each one. During those years I was not part of any religious or spiritual group, and nor did I follow any system or path have a teacher. I read books and felt strongly that teachers and paths were part of the past and no longer needed for spiritual search, but it is true that when the student is ready the teacher will come. In no scripture or book on religion and spirituality, or of occult philosophy and experience, however, could I find even a hint of any of the three experiences, but of course it was the overhead one of seeing who I truly am which was the one I most ardently searched for in books and articles (no internet yet, that I was hooked into at least). Then at the very end of my years of study, which consisted of reading and inner exploration, I ordered a book by Sri Aurobindo that arrived just days before I went abroad for the first time on my own, in 1995, which was to Israel, Egypt, and India.
I not only found these three experiences discussed for the first time but a whole yoga based on reaching who we are on high, which has as prerequisites finding that innermost place of soul inside and opening the top of the head, and I also found my teachers. I mean I literally found them, in my inner life appearing in lucid dreams, which occurred in the course of reading that book and another I got as I left Israel for India that contained talks of Mirra Alfassaix, the Mother, who was his spiritual partner. They showed up in my inner life so much bigger than my little I that I had to swallow my pride and admit to be taught. I don’t know if after 30 years that pride has gone all the way down so much I’ve choked on it, but I have come to a place where I can relate my experiences without at the same time claiming to be so and so or such and such, stupidities so many of us fall into if we’ve had profound inner and spiritual experience. With me, thankfully, that just isn’t possible because I’m not a person anyone would look up to, believe me. I remain a student of my betters. I also have the good fortune to know what such a hard to define thing enlightenment is, and so I know I’m not enlightened, which in my yoga is, along with the soul change, one of the first steps on the path, the emptying before the filling as it were. I await that realized state of emptiness that contains God in its fullness.
To return to the question with which we started, do we live in a computer simulation? It’s more like we live and move in a soul simulation, that this entire universe is a proving ground for the soul, and it doesn’t matter if there is one island of life like earth or a dozen spaced apart in infinity such that it appears to any one of the dozen it is the only one until it reaches a certain threshold of knowledge or experience and it knows it’s not alone. That would be part of the ‘enigma of being’ creatures such as ourselves and others like us would have to work out, what when added with threats to our survival will eventually turn science and humanity towards exploring this experience of consciousness that we are more than the material envelopes that seem to contain and environ us. Inner space not outer space is the next frontier, what will make the latter more legible and perhaps even more accessible. For reasons beyond our limited gaze that timeless individual that we are representations of has put in each one of us a little portion of itself, of timelessness, in our very core, as the secret support of the rest of us, as what evolves—the human soul we know this as—, and once we find it, it’s a homing device propelling us up to who we truly are, or at least who we are in terms of the next great step of our evolution towards the Unimaginable, and here I’m almost quoting my masters, but they say it so well.
It would be understandably hard for you to believe me because I have only given food for thought not proof, but I have not only given philosophy but have given also a hands on way to find the soul inside, if you would put as much effort into your inner education as you do into your outer, and I’ve shown what it means to open the lid that separates us from universal mind. Fulfill those two conditions, and when the appropriate for you outer triggers are present, you should get the same results I did: reach out of the simulation and into who you are outside of it, who you will find is leaning down to meet you, else you would not have been able to meet those requirements so far outside the limits of the normal human range of consciousness they are, incredibly so.
The end of the world seems to have been expected since God knows when, considered upon us many times already, but today especially it’s on the human mind, not only because it appears we’re approaching environmental disaster because there’s too many of us and it seems we have damaged the environment beyond repair, or because we’re due to be hit by a comet or a pole shift or what have you, but also and maybe more because we’re losing our innocence and are no longer in the childhood of our species because we are waking up to the larger picture. Like for a child, that larger picture is made up of many smaller ones and takes a long time to come into view as an integral whole: our planet’s vulnerable position in space; that our reality rests upon the whims of whirling infinitesimals; that our health has so much to do with our decisions; that we have such a destructive impact upon the environment; that we each affect so deeply the lives of those around us; that we are a world and not just a nation or a people; that in the virtual world we can be instantly almost anywhere and talk to almost anybody in the world at any time; that we can create technology beyond our capacity to handle it; and I can continue. We fail to calculate in our end of the world scenarios the advent on earth of the supramental.
I doubt one such as I could experience it if it weren’t descending to be within reach of common people, meaning it’s not just who we are beyond the cosmos but who humanity will be here on the earth in some future time. We might call that our post-human stage now speculated upon by science, since supramental humans would be quite a bit more different from us than we are from other animals, perhaps be even a separate species, as it would entail naturally a further evolution of the body as well, such a more evolved stage of humanity, or (if you really wanted to name the animal) of the evolution of Nature becoming more self-aware, humans the pinnacle of that now on earth but by no means the highest reach. It wouldn’t be in our near future but perhaps thousands of years from now, unless we start maturing as a race much faster than we have up to this point. Of course it wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibility the world ends or we become extinct before it manifests, but that’s not probable given that the supramental is not bound by the conditions of the universe, and therefore nothing in the universe could prevent it from manifesting if that is indeed its intention, and as someone who has been it a moment, I can say it is, but my little voice will be meaningless to you now as well the bigger voice of my betters. Given our stubbornness and resistance to change, however, no doubt we’ll come to the very brink of the abyss before it does manifest.
What would certainly speed up our maturity is our discovery (or rediscovery I suspect) of the depths and heights of our inner life, what I’ve proposed will be the new frontier and not either space or technology as many say today, if not for the simple fact that it’s within ready reach of the least of us at no monetary cost and has the potential to entertain us more than any media we hook into (it is total immersion) and give us what our present entertainments so sparingly give us—meaning, education, enrichment—the more so the deeper and higher we go.
With it appearing that the world’s end is imminent, we might finally turn and look in the most obvious place for the answers we need: inside ourselves. If you consider the full spectrum of our experience in any given day, our attention is upon the experience we have when we are awake, and although we see that we have experience during sleep, which comprises a fourth or a third of our day, our attention is generally not focused there. It is beyond the scope of this essay, but it’s probable that at some point we, speaking of all but whom we call primitive or uncivilized, made that part of our experience off limits because it’s so irrational, and we decided to base humanity upon reason. It’s “where the wild things are”, but more importantly, it’s where fundamental change comes from, change in human identity, and I would bet that’s the reason it’s more or less taboo. Though it’s also beyond the scope of this present essay, that discovery would bring us to the next intermediate step of our evolution as a species, the inevitable discovery of the soul inside and the founding of human society upon our timeless essence, one in each and all, as opposed to the mere animal instinct to survive which in our distance from our animal origins we have abstracted to mean making a profit and made that the bottom line in our relations with others not significant to us and between nations, made that the main motivating factor in almost all of human endeavor. What a better world already that would be in the most basic sense, one based on our very soul.
The Unknown in Perspective 
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