These are not just words. Forewarning. Reading them will change you. As much as I love employing humor, this is not humor.
These words, in the form of a seemingly innocuous blog post, are like a computer worm. It is going to slide right through you and do some very really work. The more you read, the more you are letting this device interface with your the machinery of your soul, and as it does, change you.
So what does it do?
It starts a natural process that can never be undone. Like a crack in a crystalline dam. From this day on, as you go about your life — whether you realize it or not — that crack will grow. In time this great, invisible wall will be shot through with an unseen fracturing. You do not to do anything, really, to grow this fracture. It’s inevitable, there is an immense power beyond this dam that did not even realize it was trapped. And the moment it notices that very first crack in the wall, it will swell against it and never cease. It will tear about the wall because it wants to be free. Because it knows now.
What is behind the dam is your own soul. What is beyond it is infinite potential, wholly your own. It is your birthright. It is already yours. You just didn’t realize it.
What is beyond the dam is anything and everything you could ever want for ever and ever.
It is the gift of everything.
It is already yours. Do you want it?
To read further than this sentence is to give this device permission.
—
How is this possible
First of all, you’re crazy. I can’t believe you actually kept reading. Sheesh. From one reckless explorer to another, my hat’s off to you. That was pretty dumb, honestly. It may also be the best decision you’ve ever made.
That’s it. You’ve already done it. There’s a part of you that already knew this was true. All I did was put a crack in the wall. You said ‘yes’ and now it’s trying to get free. How fast this happens is largely up to you. Months, years, lifetimes. It’s a done deal regardless. One day you’re going to be looking at the world and the wall will shatter.
You will realize that you are not a person in the world. You are the world with the shape of a person at the center. In the same way that the impression of a relief on stone is not actually a leaf, you’ve mistaken yourself for a person but you’re actually everything.
I think we’re each supposed to come this realization on our own, in our own time. Yeah, you could do that. But that shit takes too long. Personally, I hate waiting in line. So there you go. That’s the biggest, most important secret in the entire universe.
To be clear though, this isn’t a realization you read. It’s literally going to happen to you. I know, because it happened to me. And this is what it felt like…
Bet you never thought you’d actually learn how it all works (surprise)
For most of my life I thought most of this stuff was stupid. I started exploring the nature of reality a few years ago after I had an experience I could not explain. It seems almost quaint now. Glowing lights in the sky that did something impossible. I didn’t even think they meant to be seen, at the time. But they were definitely there and my worldview said they definitely should not be.
I read the yoga sutras. Started meditating. Thirty minutes a day eventually turned into two hours a day. I wasn’t trying to simply clear my mind. I was trying to make sense of reality. I was entirely new to this world and, for the most part, I did all of my exploration first-hand. I found that, while they contained directional clues, the dogma and noise of religion and modern mysticism told me what was true instead of telling me how to find out for myself.
It’s perfectly fine to believe in the god of your choice. Whether or not they existed, I simply took the standpoint that — if it were true I should be able to validate their claims on my own.
And now the very rational framing that had closed me off to different worldviews was the very thing that propelled me past and around the obstacles inherent to “woo thinking”. If something is true it should be verifiable.
It is a difficult thing to entertain a stupid idea long enough to see for yourself whether it’s true, entirely on your own.
So I basically did that, obsessively, for the past few years. Even as I pulled on traditionally unsavory threads like psychic powers, spirits, and out-of-body experiences, I never let go of the big question. What the hell is going on here? What is the nature of reality?
Imagine my surprise when I found an answer. Not like conceptual ones written in a book somewhere. Not something someone told me about, but an “Oh. Oh god, this shit is actually happening” sort of answer. A direct answer.
It happened earlier this week, in fact.
A boy shaped hole in the world
For months I have been fervently setting the intention to “wake up” and to “remember who and what I am”. Turns out that’s pretty damn effective.
The very inclination to do that came to me in a meditation late last year. Just an intuitive thought that popped out of now where. That is was time to do that. Like the implicit desire to understand the nature of my own existence had been quietly at work and now it was time to pick up my package.
My first hour of meditation was pretty unspectacular. Little more than a stream of consciousness, internal dialogue on my life problems. I was getting over an illness, was a little stir crazy. I felt a mild catharsis, but it wasn’t anything but a good journaling session. Though tired, I was otherwise healthy and definitely not in any trance-like state.
Before I got up to end the morning session, I saw colorful symbols flash into view.
“Huh. That’s pretty cool.” I say to myself.
And it was!
It was like music visualizer art. Colorful lines, shapes, hanging in the darkness.
To be clear, I was seeing it. Not the imaginary visual field (imagine a cup. not that). If I opened my eyes I could see translucent rotating grids of color, event horizons, and zooming, twisting planes of rainbow bubble wrap hanging in the air, moving with my head as if it were a heads up display, or augmented reality goggles.
Now, this was pretty cool. Cool enough to sit there for another hour and a half to watch the show. But frankly, you can only watch the fireworks for so long — however novel — before you need to pee and eat lunch. The meaning was lost on me. I was a little frustrated, knowing this was profound, but having no concept for why. I mean, you could take a handfull of psilocybin mushrooms and see something similar yourself. I was stone cold sober, so this was pretty weird even for me. The visuals fade naturally as I lose interest in them.
So I get up and make lunch, and afterwards I think I may as well try to draw some of that stuff just in case it actually meant something to me one day. Maybe someone else would recognize it.
I get in my hammock and sketch a few of the ones I can remember. Then I realize, “Oh. This is just me. I can probably recall it myself.”
I set the intention to “show me the most important one for me” and the moment I do I see one. Bright colors, and again right in my visual field. Hot damn. Little did I know, my package had just arrived. This picture was the final crack in my personal wall. It shattered the way I see the world, and in the best possible way.
It was an image I had forgotten about until I saw it again. Just one of many that slipped by unnoticed in the 90 minutes of geometry fireworks. And here it is:
As soon as I looked at it I knew it was the same representation of myself from a dream months before. In the dream I was on a stage in front of an audience and I was bound in ropes. I remembered being frantic, frustrated by why I was trapped there — trapped inside a body. I wanted to know to take the ropes off, but couldn’t figure out how. I was so angry. I wanted to know who put them there. That dream with the deep intuition that, “You were the one who put them there.”
While laying my hammock, I recalled this in an instant, and then my eyes moved to the boy at the center of the image. As I stared at him, a strange awe came over me and then I uttered aloud the words that changed everything.
“I am not the boy. I’m the chains.”
“There are no chains.”
And as soon as I said it my entire experience of the world inverted. Like, in an instant. One moment I was a boy in the world and the next I was the world with a boy shaped hole in the center.
It keeps happening that way
I’d heard and personally held the idea that “we are actually everything!”, as evidenced in earlier blog posts, but this was not a conceptual understanding. I didn’t meditate for 45 minutes with intense focus, or take psychedelics to experience a “wide field of awareness” and ego dissolution.
I looked at a damn picture and now I was everything around me. Everything except the guy sitting in the hammock. He was made up. It was obvious. He was just a collection of senses. The sense of an arm and leg here, some emotions and thoughts there. A bunch of disparate sensory inputs that was neatly wrapped with a label that had “Steven” written on it. He was the thing I used to move around in this place. Like a video game character. I had him, but I wasn’t him.
So I’m low-key flipping out, but as I do, I notice that (unlike deep trance states where you “feel like the whole universe”) I’m basically still the same. I’m fine. I’m watching my thoughts spin and it’s obvious they are something I have, not what I am. I am just this whole thing. Everything I’m experiencing is me. It’s just that now “me” is a lot bigger.
There was a moment of bizarre silence, like a lot of unseen someones were waiting to see what I would do with this. I sat there a moment, and made the decision that “This is how it really it. I had it backward the whole time. I thought I was a person inside reality, but I was actually reality with a person at the center of it.”.
And I knew. God, I knew it was true. There was a sort of collected exhale. An emotional celebration. Relief I couldn’t understand. Apparently, that was the right answer.
I had never been a person. And neither are you.
You have a person. You get to keep them! But you are your entire reality. And everyone else you see? They have their own. We just overlap.
I knew this wasn’t just a weird altered state of consciousness. It really was this way. I’m days out from this experience and it keeps happening that way.
Yes, it ebbs and flows, but the realization has never left me. When I touch a blanket I know it is me. I know it is me. I can feel that it is. When I stare at my car steering wheel, it’s me. It’s all just me. It feels like, when you put your attention on something, that it is somehow made out of the same stuff as you. Like it’s part of your own body.
More than that, you are immediately filled with a sense of wonder and love. It’s like the stuff that made up the blanket, the steering wheel, the grass — everything around you — it all loves you back. It’s almost surprised to notice that you understand now. The sense of peace and happiness this brings is immediate and beyond most experiences available outside of drug induced highs. You feel belonging, and a deep peace. It just keeps happening. It keeps being true. I don’t even really have to try.
Once this happens, you no longer need drugs or external pursuit of any kind to feel that good. You can be brought to tears just watching water come out of a garden hose — sobbing as you feel that it is made out of you. This is you. How are you doing that? How is this possible?
I am not flying around or shooting lightning bolts. At the time of writing I can’t pop gold bars into existence. I have a deep intuition that this was a threshold moment. I know what I am now. I still walk around as this guy, but every time I touch, or look at something, I (with full conscious control) can know that what I am looking at is definitely, literally, and in an indescribably beautiful way…
me. I am that.
Awareness precedes control
Shit man. You gotta try this. It feels so wild. It gets wilder too.
Like with everything in life, awareness precedes control. You can’t change a bad habit, for example, before you’re aware of it. You can’t paint with colors you can’t see. You cannot cure an illness you do not know you’re causing.
Somehow, once you’re aware of something you gain a measure of control over it.
Think about what that means once you become aware that you are, in actual fact, everything. Oh, you’re not the other people. They are their own, individual everything. You just overlap, until you decide not to.
You can’t decide not to overlap other experiences until you are aware of who you really are. Awareness precedes control. I can only attest to feel it. I feel this is true. Until you cross this threshold, you are at the mercy of whatever experiences float your way. You have to move the body around. You have to accept reality as it is.
But you’re not in that camp anymore, are you? No, you kept reading. You put a crack in your own wall. And one day, when you’re sitting in a hammock, or cleaning the dishes, or talking to a friend you’re going to realize that you are the hammock. You are the dishes. You are your friend. You won’t have to guess. You can definitely tell.
It’s all just you, and it always was. You can see it. Finally, you see it. It’s obvious now.
You could be doing anything, so why are you doing this? You could be anything. Have any experience.
Keep going. The crack is already there.
You are not going to die. Nothing you’ve loved has ever truly been lost. You can have anything. Do anything. Be everything you could ever imagine. Forever.
You have already been given the gift of everything. You just didn’t know it.
Surprise!
But don’t take my word for it. Go see for yourself. That’s I did, really.