People get to live their lives on a scale two or three times bigger than they otherwise would have been. That’s a large claim, but the mechanism is quite simple: meditation elevates a person’s base level of focus. By focus, I mean the ability to attend to what’s relevant in a given situation. By base level, I mean how focused you automatically get in daily life when you’re not making an effort to be focused. If you’re consistently two or three times more focused in each moment of life, then you’re living two or three times bigger, two or three times richer.

I call what I present here a “science of enlightenment.” By science, I mean an experiment that is reproducible by anyone. Meditation is something that human beings all over the world have been doing for a long time. Done properly, under the guidance of a qualified teacher, the results are—to a certain extent—predictable. Science can also refer to a structured body of knowledge, which the path of meditation definitely represents. The other noun in the title is “enlightenment.” Defining enlightenment is notoriously tricky. Almost anything you say about it, no matter how true, may also be misleading. Having said that, here’s a place to start: you can think of enlightenment as a kind of permanent shift in perspective that comes about through direct realization that there is no thing called “self” inside you.

The Most Fundamental Skill

A person’s baseline of focus can be elevated through systematic practice. The discovery that extraordinary focus can be intentionally cultivated is one of the most significant findings the human species has made and has enormous ramifications for both our personal lives and our world. The systematic training in focus is called meditation practice; it is the basic tool in the science of enlightenment.

Cultivating focus is very much like doing a physical exercise. To begin, you have to learn the procedure or form of the exercise. Then you have to make the exercise part of your daily regimen and continue to put some effort into it for a long period of time. As a result, your muscles get stronger, and you can utilize those improved muscles for many activities in your life. Your focus muscle can be strengthened by much the same process. To do so, you need instruction in certain procedures that increase concentration power. Then you need to put some work into them on a regular basis and keep it up for the long term. And as a result, your concentration muscle becomes permanently stronger.

The central feature of any meditation system from anywhere around the world is that, by developing an extraordinary degree of focus and presence, it allows you to live your life two or three hundred percent “bigger.”

Meditation is not just something that is practiced on a special cushion or in a special posture; a meditative state can be entered during any ordinary activity. With the combination of formal practice in stillness, formal practice in motion, and informal practice in daily life, your meditative skills grow in two dimensions. On one hand, deeper and deeper meditative states become available. On the other, you are able to maintain those states throughout more and more complex activities of life. We might refer to the first dimension of growth as depth and the second dimension of growth as breadth. Eventually, a delicious figure-ground reversal takes place. In the beginning, meditation is something that happens within your day. Eventually, the day becomes something that happens within your meditation.

I like to describe concentration as the ability to focus on what you deem relevant. In terms of space, concentration can be narrow or broad. An example of narrow: you are able to focus on the tiny sensations of breath at your nostrils. An example of broad: you are able to hold your whole body in awareness at once. In terms of time, it’s good to be able to focus on one thing for an extended duration, but it’s also good to learn how to taste “momentary concentration.” With momentary concentration, you let your attention be pulled from thing to thing, but you consciously taste a few seconds of high concentration with each of those things. So there are actually four subskills to concentration: learning how to restrict attention to small sensory events, learning how to evenly cover large sensory events, learning how to sustain concentration on one thing for an extended period of time, and learning how to taste a momentary state of concentration with whatever randomly calls your attention.

Meditation allows us to experience pain without suffering and pleasure without neediness. The difference between pain and suffering may seem subtle, but it is highly significant. Let’s go over it again. When physical or emotional pain is experienced in a state of concentration, clarity, and equanimity, it still hurts but in a way that bothers you less. You actually feel it more deeply. It’s more poignant but, at the same time, less problematic. More poignant means it motivates and directs action. Less problematic means it stops driving and distorting actions.

I started to meditate back in the 1960s, when a catch phrase said that you were “either part of the problem or part of the solution.” It is a very good expression, although perhaps the current understanding of it—an exhortation to political correctness—may be somewhat limiting. There is a fundamental way for anyone to become part of the solution on this planet, regardless of their political perspective, and that is to snip the cycle of suffering and distortion. This cycle has a name: the law of karma. Meditation makes it possible to break the cycle of karma. Imagine a woodcutter whose job it is to cut down many trees, year after year, yet who refuses to spend twenty minutes each day to sharpen his ax. Then he wonders why he can’t cut as much wood as he needs to, and why it is such hard work. He never realizes that he is using a dull ax, a less than optimal tool. If we look at the big picture, this is the general human condition. Meditation sharpens the ax of awareness, allowing one to cut the karmic cycle, the cycle of pain propagating pain.

Mysticism in World Culture

Several themes dominated my life from a very early age. One was that I hated the idea of wasting time. My idea of hell was standing in line, or being trapped at an airport, or any other unproductive use of time. But after learning to meditate, I realized I would never waste time again, because, even if I was just waiting in a line, I could use that time to work on deepening my samadhi. I could literally make use of every waking moment, because during the dead moments when I wasn’t engaged in something specific, I could use the time to cultivate my concentration.

It dawned on me that techniques for attaining states of high concentration were central to all the religious traditions of the world. All the world’s religions have a meditative core, which is sometimes referred to as the mystical or contemplative side of that religion. Suddenly, I realized my own personal experience in Buddhism was part of a phenomenon that is universal for human beings.

Very broadly, there are three aspects to religious or spiritual experience around the world. The first is what I call the spirituality of thought. The vast majority of people have their religious experience centered around concepts, belief systems, prayer, dogmas, faiths, credos, and so on. This is the most common form of spiritual experience because adult human beings are very centered in their thinking process.

The second type of religious experience, I call the spirituality of feeling. It is characterized by devotion, piety, and what we might call the heart. We human beings are after all not just thinking creatures, we’re also feeling creatures. People have always felt a sense of what the Romans called the numen, the mystery—that which is awesome, awe-inspiring. We experience feelings of love, awe, and devotion with respect to the spiritual Source. We feel love and devotion for Jesus or Krishna. A spirituality centered in feeling is called pietism in the West or bhakti in the East. Currently on planet Earth, most religion is either based in feeling, based in thinking, or a mixture of the two.

But there is a third kind of spirituality, which is the one that I find most interesting. The technical term for it is mysticism. Unfortunately, in everyday, colloquial English, the word usually implies something occult, weird, airheaded, New Age, impractical, or obscure. However, this is not at all what scholars of religion understand by mysticism, a term they have borrowed from Christianity. In Christianity, spirituality centered on states of high concentration was referred to as “mystical theology.” Scholars then generalized the term to cover the worldwide phenomenon. We might also call this kind of spirituality “cosmic consciousness” or the “spirituality of enlightenment,” although these terms can also lead to misunderstandings. What sets mysticism apart from the spirituality of thought or feeling is that it involves the cultivation of high concentration.

Surveying mystical experience across traditions and cultures, we are struck by two extraordinary facts. Fact 1: Despite enormous cultural and philosophical differences, mystics describe their experiences in rather similar ways. Fact 2: These descriptions sound counterintuitive and paradoxical to the average person. I believe that those two facts imply that enlightenment is something distinct and universal for humans. The English writer Aldous Huxley referred to this universal phenomenon as the perennial philosophy. I like this phrase. Perennial means something that is constantly coming back, constantly popping up again, in different ages, within different traditions, and within different cultures.

Calming and Clarifying

While concentrating and calming down is certainly a part of meditation, it is only half of the story. The other half of the process is clarifying, that is, observing, analyzing, and deconstructing sensory experience. Clarifying leads to insight. This clarifying aspect of meditation is known technically as vipassana. One way to think about meditation is as a dialectical interplay between a calming-concentrating aspect (samatha) and a clarifying-dissecting aspect (vipassana). For simplicity, I’ll just call these two sides of meditation the calming part and the clarifying part.

There are two main traps that prevent people from reaching their fullest potential on the meditative path. The first is mistaking the map for the journey. Thinking about and debating about the paths becomes a substitute for systematically practicing a path. The second common trap is getting caught in a good place: the path leads to something good, but growth slows after that. One of the main jobs of a teacher is to make sure that doesn’t happen. Tranquility that fails to mature into insight is a classic example of getting caught in a good place. The problem lies in an overemphasis on the calming aspect without enough of the clarifying aspect, leading to lopsided practice. The person is in a good holding pattern but doesn’t make dramatic strides over the years. Their growth is linear, not exponential. When I encounter this in a student, I tell them that there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that they are going into deep states. The bad news is that they are not bringing enough sensory clarity into that experience to foster dramatic growth. When I show them how to do that, it changes everything. It kick-starts their personal growth again, and their meditation practice vastly deepens.

The clarification/insight side of meditation involves analyzing sensory experience into components and then tracking how those components interact. For example, if you are going through an emotional experience and want to practice meditation, you could decide to use a clarification meditation and, moment by moment, analyze your emotional experience in terms of basic sensory elements and their interactions.

Let me make that tangible. At any given instant, you may have emotional-type sensation in your body or you may not. By emotional-type body sensations, I mean things like teary-sadness in the eyes, tense-anger in the jaw, queasy-fear in the belly, pleasant-smile on the face, enthusiastic-interest over the whole body, and so forth. These kinds of body sensations are important components of any emotional experience. Mental images are a second component. You mentally see the scene, the people, the situation. You get a mental picture of what your body looks like, and you get mental pictures of the scene around you. You relive the past or fantasize about the future. All involve mental images. So “image activity” is also an important component in an experience of an emotion. And in your head, you hear yourself or perhaps others speak, you rehearse what you’re going to say, or brood on what was said. You have judgments and rationalizations, and they come up in internal conversation. I call such thoughts “talk activity.” The three basic components of any emotional experience, then, are mental imagery, mental talk, and emotional-type body sensations. In order to have a quick way to describe things, I often refer to mental images as “See In,” mental talk as “Hear In,” and emotional-type body sensations as “Feel In.”

Well, there is an important and powerful payoff to the clarification side of meditation. The payoff is that it leads to insights—“aha” experiences.

Categorizing and labeling are a mundane and extremely useful part of our everyday lives. Nothing could run without our doing so. However, practically no one makes use of this powerful technique for cleaning up their inner world. I sometimes call this clarification aspect the “divide and conquer” strategy of vipassana. Ancient Romans used the phrase divide et impera to describe their strategy of breaking up a conglomeration of enemy forces into smaller units that could be defeated individually. If you will excuse my use of a martial metaphor in this context, I feel that this phrase neatly describes, in a nutshell, how vipassana works. Breaking a complex experience down into its components makes it easier to understand, thus giving us insight. It also divides up a difficult experience into smaller, less individually challenging pieces. And this makes it easier to cope with. This ability to make life experience both insightful and manageable is the sort of “conquering” that vipassana affords us. What gets conquered is suffering and the distorted behavior that comes from suffering. If divide and conquer sounds too imperialistic and violent, an alternative description of the same thing is “untangle and be free.” Personally, I like the phrase “divide and conquer” because scientists and computer programmers use it.

The more equanimity you bring to pain (or pleasure!), the more it purifies consciousness. In this context, equanimity refers to a relationship to sensory experience—the letting go of craving and aversion around each experience, the ability to allow any and all experiences to expand and contract, without interfering. So in terms of meditation strategies, the Buddha made two huge original discoveries: the liberating power of sensory clarity and the purifying power of equanimity.

As we have seen, the notions of concentration and calm have a natural relationship. It would be useful to have a single word that refers to calm and concentration as an integrated endeavor. In Buddhism, there is just such a word—samatha in Pali, or shamatha in Sanskrit. By way of contrast, there is a word vipassana in Pali (vipashyana in Sanskrit) that refers to the clarifying side of meditation.

The Buddhist emphasis on cultivating systematic sensory clarity represents a unique innovation in the history of world spirituality. Because of this, there sometimes can be a prejudice in Buddhism against the calming and relaxing aspect of meditation, technically known as absorptions. Some teachers will dismiss such practices out of hand, saying that absorption practices “will never get you anywhere.” But that’s not really true. There is no real conflict between these two sides of practice, between samatha and vipassana. The two mutually aid and reinforce the other. Most people, however, start out with one side or the other. You can work with the subtle, restful experience of mind-body self, which is a clever way to meditate. If you go into deep, pleasurable absorptions in meditation, this makes the senses seem porous, light, and open. Doing vipassana on such an attenuated experience leads to insight into impermanence, emptiness, and no self—and it’s pleasant to boot! On the other hand, you can work with the activated, solidified experience of mind-body self. It might seem obvious that you’d want to start out with the attenuated, calm, relaxed, samatha-influenced mind-body self, but that is not always true. For one, some people are not drawn to doing the pure samatha side of practice. Because of their personality, preferences, experiences, or some other reason, they simply like doing vipassana better. Furthermore, vipassana has the advantage that you can do it under any conditions. Samatha (at least early on) requires that you have a quiet room, time to really relax, aren’t under a lot of pressure from life circumstances, and so forth. Vipassana, on the other hand, is rough and ready for anything. You can do vipassana perfectly well at a rock concert or on your drive to work. It doesn’t have the hothouse-flower quality sometimes associated with the initial practice of samatha.

So there is a complementarity between samatha and vipassana. If you do the samatha practice and experience wonderful, tranquil states, these represent a porous and attenuated self that can be relatively easily penetrated with vipassana. If you can’t get to the restful states, that’s okay. You do dry vipassana, and as a result, the blockages get deconstructed into their elements, and they lose their gripping force. After that, you automatically find yourself dropping into pleasant, absorbed samatha states simply because you’ve worked through the forces that would prevent those states from happening. It’s a win-win situation. Samatha helps vipassana, and vipassana helps samatha. If you really understand the complementary relationship between samatha practice and vipassana practice, you realize that, no matter what your situation, there is always something productive you can do.

Insight and Purification

Often meditation works this way: we measure its value in terms of the suffering that would have happened but didn’t—thanks to the fact that we have a practice.

Human experience is quite complex; just think of everything that has ever happened to you since the day you were born. Fortunately, there is a natural way to break down any experience into much simpler components. When we look at an experience in terms of these simpler components, it’s much easier to understand, to manage, and to gain insight. This sort of analysis is the secret sauce of mindfulness meditation.

In the West, we tend to think that there are five senses, but in Buddhist theory, there are six. The six senses in Buddhist theory are hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting, the feeling body, and the thinking mind. Personally, I like to slice up the pie of sensory experience slightly differently. I separate body experience into physical-type body sensations and emotional-type body sensations. For simplicity, I include the chemical senses, smell and taste, into the category of physical-type body sensations. I separate mental experience into a visual component (mental images) and an auditory component (mental talk). This creates a nice symmetrical system: the core subjective self—thoughts, emotions, will, conviction, confusion, judgment, reaction, memory, problem solving, fantasy—all arise through the “inner activity” of mental images, mental talk, and emotional body sensations. The perception that there’s a physical world around us arises through “outer activity”—physical sights, physical sounds, and physical body sensations.

The clarity aspect of mindfulness practice has several facets. One facet of clarity is discrimination skill, the ability to separate. Another aspect of clarity is detection skill, the ability to pick up on what’s subtle. A natural place to begin observing the mind is by discriminating image versus talk. At some point, surface pictures and explicit words tend to die away. At that point, you begin to detect a subtle undercurrent, a sort of subterranean stirring in image space and talk space. That’s your subconscious mind! You don’t see explicit images or hear explicit words, but you know which part is visual and which part is auditory by its location. Unblocking the natural flow of this subtle mental activity nurtures intuition, wisdom, and creativity. But you can’t unblock it until you can detect it. Parsing thought into image and talk opens the door for that possibility.

Turning from the mind to the body, we see a similar potential. Embodied experience is a very complex phenomenon, but we can break it down into two main constituents: physical-type body sensation and emotional-type body sensation. Physical-type body sensation requires no special explanation. A pain in your knee, the feeling of your muscles working, the sensation of cold, and an itch on your scalp are all physical-type body sensations. The notion of emotional-type body sensation is, at first, an unusual concept for some people. As a culture, we don’t often talk about emotions as something that occurs in the body. We tend to think of them as mental, cognitive events. However, if we have a very strong emotion, it’s quite easy to contact the body sensations associated with it. Those body sensations are the primitive “juice” of the emotion.

If you want to be happy independent of conditions, you’ll need to learn how to have a complete experience of each basic type of body sensation. On the spiritual path, we have to learn how to have a complete experience of anger, so that anger does not cause suffering which then distorts our behavior. For the same reason, we have to learn how to have a complete experience of fear, sadness, and so on. We even have to learn to have a complete experience of physical pain, as well as other unpleasant feelings in the body such as fatigue and nausea. When I say, “Have a complete experience of x,” it’s just a quick way of saying, “Experience x with so much concentration, clarity, and equanimity that there’s no time to coagulate x—or yourself—into a thing.” You and x become an integrated flow of energy and spaciousness.

Clarity gives us the ability to detect sensory events that are subtle, or not very intense. This combined with equanimity allows us to have a high degree of fulfillment on demand during the day. So subtle pleasures can be very significant. On the other hand, subtle discomforts can also be very significant. If the spread of a subtle discomfort is not detected and “equanimized,” it might coagulate into enormous perceived suffering. Thus, the combination of clarity and equanimity applied to subtle experiences is helpful both for elevating fulfillment and reducing suffering.

The basic model for the mindfulness-based spiritual path is to take some type of experience and infuse it with a high degree of concentration, sensory clarity, and equanimity. Concentration means to focus attention on just what you deem relevant. Sensory clarity involves discerning the components that constitute an experience and detecting their subtle essence. Equanimity means that we give permission for these components to expand, to contract, or to be still—to do whatever they naturally would do. Equanimity is a radical noninterference with the natural flow of our senses. In other words, we can take any type of experience and attempt to be focused, precise, and allowing with it. Greeting experiences this way—both in formal practice and as we are doing things in day-to-day life—catalyzes a process of insight and purification.

To sum up, infusing concentration, clarity, and equanimity into an experience functions like a catalyst facilitating a natural process of insight and purification that is just waiting to happen. Thus, the Fundamental Theorem of Mindfulness is: Concentration + Sensory clarity + Equanimity + Time = Insight + Purification

Any experience—simple or complex, pleasant or unpleasant, internal or external, bizarre or banal—can be greeted with concentration, clarity, and equanimity (or not). It would be convenient to have a word that indicates the degree to which a given sensory event is being experienced mindfully. The word I use for that is “completeness.” When we greet a sensory event with little mindfulness, our experience of that sensory event will not be very complete. If we experience a sensory event with a medium level of mindfulness, that experience gets closer to being complete. If we greet an experience with the fullest possible mindfulness, that experience becomes as complete as can be. Regardless of how ordinary a sensory event may be, when it is experienced with radical completeness, it becomes utterly extraordinary—indeed, paradoxical.

There is a deep complementarity between having complete experiences and purifying consciousness. By trying to experience each event in life as completely as possible, we purify consciousness, but the more consciousness gets purified, the easier it is to have complete experiences. When there is maximal concentration, clarity, and equanimity, an experience becomes maximally complete, and any maximally complete experience is much like any other complete experience. They all have “one taste”—the taste of rich vacuity combined with dynamic tranquility. Which is totally paradoxical. Complete pain causes rather little suffering and doesn’t turn into aversion. Complete pleasure brings lasting satisfaction and doesn’t turn into neediness. A complete experience of confusion creates a basis for spiritual intuition. A complete experience of desire is desireless. A complete experience of boredom is endlessly fascinating. A sensory experience is just some tiny part of the universe—the wind touching your face, an act of making love, tying your shoes, being angry with a student—yet when we experience any of these completely, it links us to the fullness of Creation and the vacuity of the Creator.

Here’s the top-page summary: Ordinary experience, when greeted with concentration, clarity, and equanimity catalyzes a process of insight and purification which culminates in the ability to have complete experiences whenever you want. This theory is quite elegant. It has all the marks of good science. A good scientific theory has simplicity, generality, and power. Simplicity means that it is not overly complicated. Generality means that it applies to a wide range of circumstances. And power means it gives you a good handle on what is going on. The theory of meditation has all these marks. It well deserves the name “science of enlightenment.”

The Many Faces of Impermanence

In early Buddhism, impermanence was closely linked with another concept, dukkha, which is usually translated as “suffering.” The Buddha said that human suffering is caused by grasping. One way grasping can cause us to suffer is when we pin our happiness on things that cannot and will not last. Most people depend solely on things like health, wealth, reputation, relationships, appearance, family, or children for happiness. The problem is that these things are not eternal. People change; our health eventually deteriorates; wealth comes and goes; war may follow peace. All sources of conditional happiness are impermanent. In the words of Ecclesiastes, “All things must pass.” If we make these impermanent things the cornerstone of our happiness, then we set ourselves up for inevitable suffering, or dukkha. So in early Buddhism, impermanence had a negative connotation. We suffer because we count on impermanent things for our happiness. We pin all hope of happiness on things that will not last. But is there an alternative? Yes. Go ahead and pin some, even most, of your happiness on things that won’t last. But be sure to allocate at least some time and energy for exploring the dimension of happiness that does last. Ironically, the dimension of happiness that does last is itself a facet of impermanence. It’s the positive face of impermanence—the flow of Creator Spiritus that is always present, surrounding each moment of conditional happiness, embracing it from within and from without.

When we look carefully, we discover that the sense of self is not a particle that never changes, but rather a flow, a wave of thought and feeling that can increase and decrease and is therefore not permanent. Because it is a fluctuating wave, not a solid particle, the Buddha described it as anatta. An means “not,” and atta means “self as thing.” It’s not so much that we don’t have a self, rather it’s that the self we do have is not a thing. It is an impermanent, fluctuating activity, a process not a particle, a verb not a noun.

When we really attend to what is, we become aware that impermanence is characteristic of all our experiences, even the experiences that seem very permanent. If we look carefully enough and patiently enough, any experience will show us its impermanence. That is important and useful, because impermanence can turbocharge our spiritual growth. In order for that to happen, we have to be able to detect the impermanence.

When Buddhists talk about having insight into impermanence, they just mean appreciating the normal changing-ness of experience at deeper levels of poignancy. One way to think about this is in terms of three aspects: the trivial aspect of impermanence, the harsh aspect of impermanence, and the blissful aspect of impermanence.

At first impermanence may present itself in a kind of trivial way. For example, you are meditating, and you start feeling an itch. You get preoccupied with it for a while. Then something distracts you, and when you come back, the itch is gone. You didn’t actually feel it go, you are just aware that something previously present is now absent. Your attention was broken, but you still noticed that something changed. This level of understanding impermanence is based on a lack of continuous concentration. A deeper appreciation of impermanence comes about through continuous concentration.

As your concentration skills grow, and you are able to focus on things more continuously without being distracted, you begin to appreciate how things continuously change. But continuous change does not necessarily imply smooth change. At this stage, your experience of change may be abrupt, jagged, perhaps even harsh. For example, you are watching a pain in your leg, and you notice that it is pounding, twisting, stabbing, shooting, crushing, or exploding. Now these are very abrupt and uncomfortable modes of movement, but they are movement nonetheless. They are ways in which the pain sensation is changing. It seems like somebody has stuck a knife in your leg and is twisting it to the right, to the left, jabbing it in, pulling it out. It is harsh, it is abrupt, it is jagged, but it represents a continuous contact with changing-ness. This doesn’t happen only with painful experiences. The same can happen with intense pleasure.

Eventually, your concentration and equanimity skills mature to the point where your experience of change is not only continuous, but smooth as well. A softening takes place. The impermanence becomes fluid, soothing, bubbly, more like an effortless breathing in and out. This is because your focus is like a high-resolution monitor or a high-definition TV screen, and you are able to perceive subtler movements with clarity.

At some point, you will experience the gentler aspects of impermanence, the soft-massage style. I describe this third stage of impermanence as a pleasant flow of energy—a smooth, effortless effervescence that’s nurturing and enlivening. At this point, we are on the edge of an important transition, because now we can yield to the flow and let it “meditate us.” The perception “I am meditating” fades into the background and is replaced by the perception that “impermanence is meditating me.” You can think of impermanence in this guise as your helper in meditation.

Here is where we start to perceive an aspect of impermanence that is more positive than the earlier association of impermanence with suffering. Instead of only representing a pessimistic philosophy, we are now talking about a helper along the path. As far as I know, the Buddha never explicitly talked about impermanence in such terms. I think we should have a name for the positive side to impermanence, so in my system, I call it “Flow.” I find having a word that emphasizes the positive side of impermanence very useful in teaching anicca to the modern world. Flow itself comes in many different flavors. The main forms of Flow I like to distinguish are undulatory Flow, vibratory Flow, and expansion-contraction Flow. Undulatory Flow is continuous, wavy movement, like a jellyfish, an amoeba, or a lava lamp. Most people initially experience this flavor of Flow over their whole body. The whole body feels like seaweed in a tide pool. Vibratory Flow is like champagne bubbles or sparks of electricity. If you have ever experienced the “high” that runners enjoy or the “pump” that weightlifters speak of, you have contacted this flavor of Flow. A similar feeling is the vibratory sensation you get after taking an invigorating shower, or the glow feeling you have after making love, or the endorphin rush some people seek. If you have enough microscopic clarity, you’ll discover these pleasure types are really Flow in the form of scintillating mist or effervescent champagne bubbles throughout your body.

Expansion-contraction Flow involves inward and outward movements, stretching and squeezing forces, effortless puffing out and equally effortless collapsing in. It’s not uncommon in meditation for people to get a sense of vastness that encompasses everything and a sense of lightness that pervades everything. But look carefully. That immense vastness is not static; it’s a dynamic force that spreads outward. And that pervasive lightness is not static; it propagates a flavor of contractive thinness, constantly calling consciousness back to the dimensionless point whence it arises. Expansion-contraction Flow is fundamental in that it underlies all other flavors of Flow. All three—undulation, vibration, and expansion-contraction—are often present at the same time.

When a body worker massages you, that person’s fingers move through the substance of your muscles and transfer energy into them. This works out the kinks and lumps in the substance of the muscles. This is a good analogy for the Flow of impermanence. When you let impermanence work on you, the energy in its waves and vibrations softens the substance of consciousness, works out knots in your soul. It breaks up the coagulated places in all your senses: visual, auditory, and somatic. This is impermanence as a purifier, something that breaks up blockages, cleans out impurities, refines the ore of who you are. As this is happening, it may seem as though consciousness is becoming porous. Within that porosity, you can feel anicca’s waves and vibrations churning up gunk from the depths of your soul. They push gunk up, digest it, then excrete it from your being. You can feel your senses being scoured by the Flow of impermanence. The cleansing of the doors of perception is not a poetic metaphor, it’s a palpable reality.

This idea that impermanence can be a positive, purifying force is revolutionary. At first, the notion of impermanence may scare us a little bit because it seems to remove all sense of security. If everything in the universe changes and vanishes, then there would seem to be nothing upon which we can rely. The only thing that doesn’t change and vanish is the changing and vanishing itself. But as we have seen, that changing and vanishing can become a powerful source of comfort and security. There is a sort of “taste” we get when we become aware that the Flow of impermanence is purifying and cleansing us. For lack of a better term, I call it the “taste of purification.” The ability to taste purification is the sign of a mature spiritual palate, so to speak.

To develop this taste, you have to start somewhere. You can begin with experiences that are relatively easy and not too overwhelming. For example, you can sit and watch itches or little aches and pains come and go in your body. When we meditate, often we will simply observe an itch without necessarily scratching it, or we will sit with a straight back even though the muscles may be a bit tired. These are little things that anybody can do. If we do this enough, we start to get a sense of what that taste of purification is like. Then we are not afraid to do the same with sensations that are a little more intense, or perhaps a lot more intense. We do not have to actively seek out uncomfortable situations in order to purify our consciousness. We can just wait for life to give them to us, which it always does sooner or later.

In order for insight into impermanence to occur, we have to make the following correlation over and over again: An ordinary, solid, sensory event arises. We greet it with concentration, clarity, and equanimity. As a result, it eventually breaks up into Flow. In order to go through this three-step process enough times, we have to be willing to look at the parts of our experience that are still solid and separate. That means that we have to be willing, and indeed enthusiastic, about the prospect of focusing on what is solid and opaque, and not want to focus only on what is fluid and transparent.

For human beings, world and self seem to be solid objects, time and space seem to be a rigid always-existing platform. This occurs for enlightened people and for unenlightened people. However in the case of the enlightened person, a paradigm shift, a shift in interpretation has occurred. Before enlightenment, when self and world arose as solid objects, that person believed they really were solid. After enlightenment, self and world still arise as solid objects a lot of the time, but the enlightened person now knows that they appear to be solid only because he or she is not paying close attention right now.

Freedom lies in being able to live in both of these worlds—the normal paradigm and the enlightened paradigm—and to know when to go to which, and to be able to do so anytime. This is why enlightenment is sometimes referred to as liberation. Liberated people live a lot of the time in their body-mind just like anybody else, but they are not confined to it.

The Realm of Power

What characterizes ordinary experience? We have the sense that there is a thing inside us called a self; the self is surrounded by other selves that are also things; material objects are solid; and these are all fundamentally separate. Moreover, events in the objective world and subjective states of thought and emotion arise and pass along a continuum of time that seems to extend in a linear way endlessly forward and backward. Finally, ourselves, the other selves, and material things seem to be embedded in a rigid framework of always-existing space. So at the surface of consciousness, self is a thing, objects are solid, space is rigid, and time is a two-way, endless line. This is the ordinary view of things; it’s the perspective that is natural at the surface of consciousness.

There is nothing intrinsically problematic about this ordinary perspective. The problem comes when it is the only perspective available to a person, which unfortunately is the usual case. Enlightenment, or freedom, comes when we also have a complementary perspective that we can access at any time. To have this complementary perspective, we must come into direct contact with the third level of consciousness, the Source. When we are in direct contact with the Source, self is not perceived as a separate particle, objects are not perceived as solid, and space becomes elastic and can collapse to a dimensionless point, taking everything with it to the Unborn. And time is cyclic—self and scene arise from and return to that unborn Source over and over. We can call this perspective many things, such as God, Brahman, the Tao, the Unborn, the Undying, the nature of Nature, Zero, Emptiness, Completeness. The words don’t really matter. What matters is direct contact.

So one way to describe the spiritual path is as a journey from ordinary surface experience to the ground state, the Source of all states, both ordinary and altered. The vehicle we ride, that carries us from the surface down through intermediate layers of consciousness to Source, is that of concentration, clarity, and equanimity.

We can look upon consciousness as having layers to it, like a many-layered cake or the geological strata of the earth. Our ordinary experience of self and world arises on the topmost layer. Our spiritual Source is the deepest layer. In between surface and Source, there is a thick slab that must be traversed. Therefore, a turn in the direction of our spiritual Source would be a turn of 90 degrees. Instead of just moving along the surface of experience, we begin to burrow down into experience toward its Source.

While moving through the intermediate level between surface and Source, some people encounter unusual phenomena which may be either frightening, empowering, or both.

One view of the intermediate realm is that it is where the blockages lie, and when we direct the light of sensory clarity and pour the water of equanimity into any experience, the brightness and softening percolate down into those areas to clarify and dissolve the blockages. The surface gets closer and closer to the Source until, finally, the two touch in the experience of enlightenment. From that time on, the ordinary experience of day-to-day life rests in contact with the ground of all experience.

Whatever the experiences may be, it’s how we relate to them that really matters. Indeed, it could be said that one litmus test for spiritual maturity is how a person relates to the experiences of the intermediate realm. The spiritually mature person treats all events encountered on the path from surface to Source in exactly the same way: greeting them with concentration, clarity, and equanimity. The spiritually immature person develops cravings and aversions with respect to these phenomena. They fear certain types of experiences and desire other types of experiences. Or they worry they won’t have any special experiences at all.

Meditation teachers tend to fall into three categories vis-à-vis how they deal with the intermediate realm. Zen or vipassana teachers tend to caution people about it. Hindu or Tibetan teachers tend to be positive about it. Personally, I like to take the middle ground. It’s good that you are experiencing the realm of power. For one thing, it is a sign that you are dropping deep, and for another, it’s a platform from which you can do some very profound insight and purification work. But in order to do that, you have to be able to treat it like any other phenomenon. Break it up into body sensation, mental image, and internal talk, then break those up into waves of impermanence, and then watch where the waves go to when they cease. When you are directing attention to the place where things go when they cease, you are directing attention toward the Source where things come from when they arise.

The Real No Self

One of the most perplexing and potentially off-putting teachings of the Buddha is the teaching of anatta, often translated as “no self.” In the Pali language an means “without,” and atta means “self” in the sense of thing, essence, or separate particle. The Buddha taught there is no thing inside us called a self.

Actually, there are several scales we might use to analyze the experience of our finite I-am-ness. At the broadest scale, we tend to identify with any and all mind-body experience: I am my mental image, mental talk, and body sensation. At the narrowest scale, we tend to identify particularly strongly with self-referential mental image, mental talk, and body sensation. Self-referential mental images are mental images of your own appearance. Self-referential mental talk is your judgment about how cool or uncool you are. Self-referential body sensations are the emotional sensations associated with being praised or blamed. Between the broadest sensory scale of self (“I am any and all mind-body states”) and the narrowest sensory scale of self (“I am self-referential mind-body states”) there is a midrange scale: I am thought plus body emotion. That’s the system of mental image, mental talk, and emotional body sensation that I described in chapter 4. That’s the system that my students mostly work with for gaining insight into no self.

There’s a reason that I mostly have people work at the middle scale. The reason is that mental image + mental talk + body emotion represents a natural system—a system that can be reactive, proactive, interactive, and occasionally inactive. Here’s what I mean. When you have the perception of seeing the external world, hearing the external world, and being touched by the external world, the sense of an “I” that sees externally, hears externally, and feels externally arises because the inner system reacts to those outer stimuli. When the inner system is not reacting to outer stimuli, it may begin to proactively spin memories, plans, and fantasies. Also, it has an interactive mode. A mental image may trigger mental talk or body emotion. Mental talk may trigger a mental image or body emotion. Body emotion can build up until it drives us to form mental images and mental talk. So the system interacts with itself. Is there anything else this system does besides reactivity, proactivity, and interactivity? Yes, it sometimes goes inactive, creating one kind of no-self experience.

It’s often said that if we practice meditation, we lose our ego, or we get rid of the ego. That is not quite accurate because we can’t get rid of something that was never there. Instead, we simply see the sensory situation as it is. Just because the sense of self as a thing goes away does not for a moment imply that the activity of personality goes away. The enlightened people who constantly talk about no self often have strong, charismatic personalities. You might think that’s paradoxical, but it is a logical consequence of the experience of no self. It happens because the sense of self as something material has gone away, and all the energy that was bound up in that is now freed up for a fluid expression of personality.

When we talk about the experience of self-consciousness, it usually implies something uncomfortable. When you think about it, that is very strange. Why should self-consciousness be uncomfortable? Look carefully at the experience. What causes the discomfort is holding on to or interfering with the natural flow of self-referential thoughts and feelings—a kind of viscosity within inner see-hear-feel activity. The self-as-wave cannot flow smoothly. Once we can experience self in terms of its sensory components, we can then allow those components to arise uninhibited moment by moment. When we do so, our subjective experience of who we are becomes wave-like. Experiencing our inner see-hear-feel self as an effortless activity is extremely fulfilling, but it is also empty and vacuous because it doesn’t congeal into a thing. So enlightened people often have expressive, engaging, and charismatic personalities. That’s because their internal fluidity manifests as external spontaneity. They possess the doingness of self as opposed to being possessed by the somethingness of self.

The Power of Gone

Which technique would I pick as the quickest path to enlightenment? It’s a difficult choice, but I think it would be the technique I call Just Note Gone. Most people are aware of the moment when a sensory event starts, but are seldom aware of the moment when it vanishes. We are instantly drawn to a new sound, or new sight, or a new body sensation, but rarely notice when the previous sound, sight, or body sensation disappears. This is natural because each new arising of sensory experience represents what we need to deal with in the next moment. But to always be aware of sensory arisings and hardly ever be aware of sensory passings creates an unbalanced view of the nature of sensory experience. It also causes us to miss one of the more interesting ways to contact the Source.

Practicing Just Note Gone is pretty straightforward. Whenever a sensory experience suddenly disappears, make a note of that fact: clearly acknowledge when you detect the transition point between all of it being present and at least some of it no longer being present. You can use the mental label “Gone” to help you note the end of the experience. If nothing vanishes for a while, that’s fine. Just hang out until something does. If you start worrying about the fact that nothing is ending, note each time that thought ends. There is only a finite amount of real estate available in consciousness at any given instant. Each arising somewhere causes a passing somewhere else.

My simple one word label for detected endings is “Gone.” But as with many of the labels I use, we have to be careful, because the meaning is not identical to the meaning in colloquial English. Gone does not imply gone for good. Gone doesn’t mean that every single part of what you were observing disappears. It means that all or part of something suddenly subsides. And it doesn’t even have to subside all the way. It might just abruptly diminish to a lower level or a smaller size.

There are four factors that facilitate having a clear and deep experience of Gone: the totality of your momentary focus, the totality of your momentary equanimity, the quickness of your momentary focus, and the quickness of your momentary equanimity. Here’s what I mean. The totality of your focus refers to pouring the whole bucket of your awareness on each new arising. The totality of your equanimity refers to how deeply you open to each new arising. To pour the whole bucket of your awareness on each arising while simultaneously opening to it could be described as affirming that arising—saying “Yes” loudly in response to nature’s “Yes.” The ability to do those two things at the very instant when something arises could be described as saying “Yes” quickly. This brings us to the basic axiom of noting vanishing. The more quickly and completely you affirm each arising, the deeper and clearer will be your experience of its passing.

You hear a cat meow, and that sound comes to an end: Gone. You turn on a light in a room, and the darkness comes to an end: Gone. A verbal thought goes through your head, you note it, and it vanishes: Gone. You may think that these are too quotidian, too banal to have any significance, but these are all covered by the definition of Gone. As you pay attention to these everyday Gones, you are gradually, gradually developing a sensitivity—the ability to detect the unborn Source of consciousness. Each one of those Gones represents a teeny tiny learning that in and of itself would seem rather trivial. But once you begin to sum that learning over many instances—over weeks, months, perhaps years of practice—you start to notice that those moments of Gone momentarily direct your attention toward something that’s actually not a thing, and therefore can’t really be experienced in the senses but can be contacted. That not-thing that you are contacting is the Source. The Source can be indirectly contacted through the vanishing moment of the senses, even though it, itself, is not strictly speaking an experience. Put another way, the aftereffect of each vanishing becomes more and more sensorially well defined.

Regarding Gone, there are some things that are intuitively obvious, and some things that are actually quite counterintuitive. It’s intuitively obvious that if you’re having an unpleasant experience in your body and/or mind and you’re able to pay attention to the moments when parts of it vanish, you’ll get a sense of relief. Noting Gone allows you to experience that this too is passing, which will give you a lot more comfort than just trying to remind yourself, this too shall pass. It also makes sense that noting Gone could create stillness and tranquility within you. Relief and tranquility are a natural consequence of the nature of vanishing. They intuitively make sense.

But some effects of Gone are not intuitively obvious. It’s not intuitively obvious that noting the vanishing of a neutral or pleasant experience can result in something delicious, but it can. Indeed when any sensory experience—whether it’s pleasant, painful, or neutral—vanishes, it can potentially leave a sense of satisfaction in its wake. This is hard to explain logically but can be experienced personally. In India, there is a word that means both “cessation” and “satisfaction” as a single linked concept. The word is nirvana. It means “to blow out,” like a candle flame. It also means to quench your thirst in the sense of being completely and totally fulfilled. Where things go to is where things come from. Each time you note Gone, for a brief instant your attention is pointed directly toward the richness of the Source. That is what’s behind the seeming paradox of “satisfying nothingness.”

It is intuitively obvious that noticing vanishings might reverberate through your senses as a restful experience, that as the result of noticing the moment when a burst of talk comes to an end, it might be followed by some quiet. The relative rest states—a blank mental screen, a defocused external gaze, physical relaxation, emotional neutrality, physical silence, mental quiet—may begin to pervade your sensory experience as the result of noticing vanishings.

Return to the Source

Bring concentration, clarity, and equanimity to your experience. Do that consistently for a long time. At some point, you will hopefully notice an ordering principle that’s so primordial that it can never be disordered. No matter how uncomfortable your body might get, no matter how confused or negative your mind might become, that discomfort, confusion, or negativity is always surrounded by an effortless spontaneity. Once you notice this, you realize that you never needed to train, never needed to search, never needed to improve. But—and there’s just no way around this one—it may require considerable training before you’re able to notice this, and noticing it should give you an optimal place from which to improve yourself.

This is how the Yoga Sutras begin: “Yoga is the cessation of the fluctuations of consciousness. Then and only then does the true observer abide in its true nature.” This cessation of consciousness is called emptiness, shunyata, or zero in Buddhism. But the best way to come to that cessation is to fully participate in each ordinary experience by quickly and loudly saying “Yes!” at the instant of its arising. For example, when you look at a flower or hear a bell or play with a dog, you so fully give your awareness to it that there is no time to fixate that awareness into a thing. When awareness is unfixated, you don’t have nouns like flower, bell, or dog. You have the activity called flower, or the activity called bell, or the activity called dog. When that activity completes itself, watch where it goes. All the contrasts gather together and cancel out, and there is time out of time. Zero. Gone. A momentary cessation of the fluctuations of consciousness.

If you are paying attention to your experiences, you’ll begin to notice how experiences are molded by affirmation and negation, by pushing out and pulling in, by expansion and contraction. Give yourself to that pushing out and pulling in, totally and utterly until you become that pushing out and pulling in. Don’t be afraid to let it tear you apart. Don’t worry. It may kill you as a noun, but it will give you life as a verb. You become the doing of you, the activity called you.

When we talk about observing arising and passing, it could imply that there is a separate observer who is watching the arising and passing. You, the fixated observer, sit over here, watching the arising and passing occurring over there. This sense of being an observer is good at first, because, initially, you need a meditating self to implement a technique. But in the end, it is a trap, because if the observer gets fixated, it becomes a kind of ego identity. The arising and passing is in a sense “flat” and objectified. Expansion-contraction, on the other hand, is round and encompassing. It rips away your center of gravity, breaking down the sense of an observer fixated in some specific place. Expansion, the father, spreads out to the right, to the left, front and back, above and below. Wherever we might try to fixate our sense of self, it is going to be yanked away from us. Contraction, the mother, pulls in from the right, from the left, front and back, above and below, but not to any specific point. This unfixated center of gravity becomes a new ordering principle that holds us safe in a motherly embrace. Our usual sense of order involves fixating some point as the center of our being and establishing a boundary to form the border of our being. But because expansion and contraction are all-pervasive, they won’t let us fixate a center or maintain a border. We have to completely let go and get pulled into that Flow, then we become that Flow—we become father and mother.

Zen people say that the ordinary mind is the way, the ordinary mind is the Tao. What is the ordinary mind? The ordinary mind is constantly scattered in many directions and cannot hold a center. We think this monkey-mind experience is awful. People feel tormented by this ceaseless turning of the mind. But when you look beneath surface appearances, the scattering can be interpreted as space effortlessly spreading, and the inability to hold a center could be looked upon as contraction gobbling up the solid ground beneath you. We are so preoccupied with determining the specific meaning of thought that we suffer because we can’t look at it in terms of its universal movement. Because we somehow feel we have to extract meaning from this motion, we suffer. But if we are willing to just let the mind scatter and pull in at the same time, letting go of any need to make meaning, we reframe the situation. It’s just another spontaneous space fountain, gushing and gathering. This puts us in contact with the universal meaning that underlies the meaning of every thought. It’s the meaning of a flower, the meaning of a galaxy.

When you start to meditate, it seems like your mind and body are the abiding background, and within them, you are having various sensory experiences. But at some point, a striking figure-ground reversal takes place. Your mind and body become a transient figure, and the field of impermanence becomes the abiding ground. For a moment, you shift from identifying with the mind and body, which are the product of that field, to identifying with the field itself. For a period of time you un-become the product of impermanence, and you re-identify with impermanence itself. Impermanence viewed this way could also be called spirit or even soul. That is a profound change in your fundamental perspective of things. It seems as if you are participating in the activity of the Source. You become the Source; you realize that you are the Source. You realize that you are not your mind and body, you are the Source of your mind and body, which is also the Source of all minds and all bodies.

My Happiest Thought

Here’s my happiest thought: most likely, there are things that are true and important about enlightenment that neither the Buddha nor any of the great masters of the past knew, because to know them requires an understanding of modern science.

Traditionally, it is assumed that the Buddha-to-come will be an individual. I imagine that Maitreya will not be an individual enlightened being, but a team of enlightened beings, most of whom will be scientists, specifically neuroscientists. This team would use the power of post-twentieth-century science, combined with the depth of their personal experiences, to formulate a radically innovative paradigm for what enlightenment is and how to get there. That new paradigm should have two characteristics. First, it should harmonize with the discoveries of the Buddha and other masters of the past. Second, the innovative part should be powerful enough to alter the course of human history. Here’s what I mean: along with a new, neuroscience-based model of enlightenment would presumably come new neuroscience-based technologies that could accelerate the practice of meditation, making classical enlightenment available to a significant percentage of the world’s population.

When I give voice to my happiest thought, people often assume that I am advocating some process that automatically zaps you with enlightenment, circumventing any need for study or practice. There is nothing in my happiest thought that implies that. Even if a new technology-assisted path to enlightenment is developed, it is highly probable that there will still be a need for study and practice. But the amount of study and practice may be reduced to a level that is doable by just about anyone. Perhaps something like a yearlong course at any community college. During that time, a person would study and do focus techniques, in addition to receiving some sort of technology-based aid to their practice. The technologically boosted experience of liberation would be carefully integrated into that person’s life.

It turns out that certain very specific kinds of brain injury seem to knock out the sense of “self as thing.” Investigating the mechanism by which this happens might give us insight into the nature of enlightenment. Don’t get me wrong here. These traumas are pathologies. Such dysfunctional conditions are certainly not an enlightened state. However, some aspects of these conditions seem to imitate or emulate aspects of enlightenment. Since these conditions can be studied neuroanatomically and neurochemically, they may perhaps provide a hint of a direction in which to look in order to find the neurocorrolates of no self.

Over the years, I have watched with fascination as interest in TMS research has grown exponentially. The problem with TMS is that it is very difficult to focus the magnetic field narrowly enough to aim it tightly at pivotal structures. But perhaps at some time in the future, it may be possible to temporarily and reversibly induce effects like those reported by Dr. Taylor or the victims of athymhormia, using other more easily aimed modalities: transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), focused ultrasound, fine-grained neurofeedback, and such.

The Buddha formulated his path to enlightenment in terms of the four noble truths. Suffering has a necessary cause, meaning that there is a factor whose elimination will eliminate suffering. The Buddha named that factor trishna, usually translated as “grasping.” He claimed that he had found an intervention which would eliminate trishna, and he called that intervention the Path. The Path consists of sila (ethics), samadhi (concentration power), and prajna (insight). In other words, because the Path is sufficient for the elimination of grasping, and because grasping is required for there to be suffering, the Path is sufficient for elimination of suffering. Trishna is a characteristic of consciousness, but consciousness arises in the physical matrix of the brain. Is there a necessary physical condition in the brain that in turn is a necessary condition for the existence of trishna in consciousness? If so, then there may be a technological intervention that could eliminate the necessary physiological condition in the brain that gives rise to the necessary condition for suffering in general—any and all suffering.

Thus, if we unfold the logical structure of the four noble truths, the Buddha is, in essence, saying: There is a primordial well-being just waiting to show itself, but it is blocked by a habit of consciousness. There is something you can do to change that habit of consciousness. As soon as you do that, the primordial perfection presents itself automatically. I find this logical structure very interesting. One of the major themes in science and mathematics is what is known as generalization. Within the context of mathematics and science, generalization does not mean “vagueness,” but rather the process by which one goes from a single instance of a truth to a broad perspective that contains that truth as a special case. In the historical Buddha’s model, what needs to be eliminated in order for the primordial well-being to appear is specified as “grasping.” But in order for grasping to occur, certain neurophysiological events may be required. In other words, if we assume grasping is a necessary condition for suffering, then there may be one or several physiological conditions in the nervous system that are themselves necessary conditions for grasping. If that is indeed the case, then medical or technological interventions become relevant to the Path of Enlightenment.

Recently, neuroscientists have come to identify a physical parameter they call “stickiness,” which essentially refers to how long the brain hangs on to an experience before moving on to the next. This quality is related to a phenomenon called the “attentional blink.” Perhaps the base level of stickiness in a person’s nervous system can be radically reduced through biofeedback or direct intervention. Stickiness is a well-defined physical phenomenon that can be monitored by analyzing a person’s EEG signal. Perhaps stickiness is a necessary condition for grasping and, hence, a necessary condition for limited identity and suffering.

Some people say that the four noble truths represent a pessimistic view of things, but I derive a lot of optimism from them. On the surface, the formulation would seem to imply that life sucks, but the deeper implication is that enlightenment, unconditional wellbeing, is the natural state, just waiting to happen. All we have to do is negate that which is negating it. In other words, you don’t have to get enlightenment, all you have to do is get rid of what’s keeping you from enlightenment. Moreover, it is entirely possible that the unenlightened state requires many necessary conditions, and some of them are physiological. All we have to do is eliminate just one of those, any of those, and enlightenment will spontaneously show itself. This point of view could be seen as expanding the Buddha’s four noble truths into a more general paradigm. If we were to give scientists the task of creating liberation, it would be a daunting project indeed. On the other hand, if it is true that liberation happens automatically as soon as some necessary condition such as fixation has been eliminated, the project now becomes tractable. All the scientists need to do is identify what’s getting in the way and then devise a process to neutralize it.

My happiest thought involves two steps. First, discover a biophysical model for enlightenment (assuming one exists). Then, create technological boosts that reliably facilitate it (if that’s possible). Anything short of that is, in my way of thinking, insufficient—indeed, trivial. Causes have consequences. If my happiest thought is correct, the entire course of human history could dramatically change for the better. Enlightenment could go viral.