Metahuman by Deepak Chopra M.D

Author:Deepak Chopra, M.D.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Potter/Ten Speed/Harmony/Rodale
Published: 2019-09-30T16:00:00+00:00

7

PUTTING EXPERIENCE FIRST

The punch line to an old joke has gotten embedded in popular culture. As I first heard it, the joke involves a lost city slicker stopping his car on a country lane to ask a farmer how to get to a certain town. The farmer scratches his head with a bewildered look and says, “Sorry, mister, but you can’t get there from here.”

Why does the joke make us laugh? The humor is rooted in the fact that you can get anywhere on the map from anywhere else. But if the city slicker had asked the farmer how to get to metareality, he’d have gotten the same answer, only this time it wouldn’t be funny—at least not to me.

You cannot get to metareality by clinging to virtual reality. The reason for this has been expressed in various ways ever since Homo sapiens realized that there is a dimension of life beyond the everyday. Being stuck in virtual reality is like being under a hypnotic spell, and we can’t break the spell as long as it has us in its grip—there is no hypnotist standing by who can snap his fingers and break the spell for us. Or we are like dreamers captivated by the dream’s illusions, and we cannot wake up as long as the dream lasts—there is no one standing beside the bed to shake us awake.

Spells, dreams, enchantments, illusions, wizardry and witchcraft, mischievous gods—every culture has invented versions of the same idea that reality is deceptive. “You can’t get there from here” as long as you are entangled in a complete, all-enveloping trick of the mind. Figuring out how to wake up, therefore, has been a mysterious business. Up until now.

Life proceeds by knowledge and experience, and Part One was all about the knowledge of metareality. So where will the experience come from? Why didn’t we delve into it first? It’s easy to be impatient (the male sex, in particular, is notorious for not reading the manual or asking for directions when lost), but in this case knowledge and experience can’t be separated. You can’t jump into the deep end of the pool and figure out how to swim. Consciousness must be reframed from the ground up; perceptions must shift; interpretations have to be abandoned. Nothing can remain quite the same in the leap from human to metahuman.

As all-encompassing as virtual reality is, a loophole exists, which is nothing more than experience itself. What is an experience? Sailing the Atlantic in a one-man boat is very different from climbing the Alps, commuting to work, or baking an apple pie, so the face of experience is constantly changing. But at bottom every experience is the same thing—a conscious event. If you make the mistake of rooting your experiences in the physical world, you cannot wake up from the spell/dream/illusion, because the physical world is the spell/dream/illusion.

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