Human development progresses through three basic stages. At our current evolutionary moment, almost everyone makes it to the second stage. Almost no one makes it to the third.

We all begin as primates - biologically human, but still animals. That's the first stage.

Immerse a human animal into a cultural community, and within a few years they'll acquire the cognitive infrastructure needed to become a full-fledged person. At a minimum, they'll pick up some sort of language, develop a working model of reality, and form a basic sense of self.

Having a sense of self is pretty useful. It allows you to be one of the gang, engaging in cultural practices and doing your part to keep the whole project going. That's what people do. Thinking of yourself as a person, one among many, is the second stage.

It's possible, along the way, to discover that you're not really a person after all, or not merely one. Just as you have a body and a mind, you have a whole person: a personal identity, a persona, an ego, a self. You have those things, but you are not merely any of those things.

If not merely a person, what then are you? Discovering an answer to that question is part of how one begins the transition to the mysterious third stage.

I wish I could give you an answer right up front. I hope, by the end of this piece, to give you several. But there's a perennial problem I have to work around to do so. Language itself evolved in service of personhood. It distinguishes subjects from objects, nouns from verbs, and past from future. Whatever life is like in the post-personhood stage, it calls all of those distinctions into question, and more. It defies straightforward linguistic description.

The 'what are you' question turns out to be important, however. When you're a person, you spend a lot of time working to understand who you are. When you stop identifying primarily with your personhood, you are concerned more with what you are.

Words derived from Asian spiritual traditions, such as 'awakening', 'enlightenment', or 'liberation', exist as clumsy labels for the transition into the third stage of human development. The same built-in limitations of language make these terms notoriously difficult to define. The process of awakening, as a result, has historically been shrouded in spiritual mystique. We're going to try to uncouple the post-awakening developmental phase from its spiritual origins and see if some things become simpler and clearer.

Three stages, then:

1. An initial animal stage that's pre-personal, before you're a full person.
2. A second stage - being a person - where most of us hang out most of the time.
3. And a still mysterious third stage that's post-personal, subsuming your sense of self into a wider frame we have yet to talk about.

The cultural technology to take this further step, into the post-personal, has been around for a very long time. It is systematized, for instance, in Buddhist, Yogic, Tantric, Vedantic, and Taoist traditions. There are also clues and techniques to be found in the mystical offshoots of the Abrahamic religions, in Western philosophy, and in a thousand indigenous shamanisms scattered across the land.

With rare exceptions, the means for progressing to this further stage of human development have been embedded within religions. In theory, it should be possible to extract the active ingredients of awakening from these religions, and to disregard the rest. Unfortunately, it's never clear whether a bit of knowledge, or a spiritual practice, can be isolated from its cultural tradition without losing something essential. Religions each have their own ecological integrity. Not all their parts make sense when taken out of context.

Fortunately, we have two sets of clues to help us get beyond this conundrum. First, we live at a time when we can draw parallels between traditions, and discern themes across them that aren't bound to a single system. Second, we can find patterns among the many individuals who have awakened. Quite divergent traditions manage to facilitate awakening, and some people find their own way without any religion at all. As a result, I can confidently say that no beliefs in deities or supernatural entities are required, nor deference to spiritual authorities or scriptures. No rites, rituals, or dietary restrictions are necessary. No moral code beyond your own need be adhered to.

What is required is that you find some way to gain direct, experiential insight into your own true nature, and the nature of reality.

There is not one, single insight that produces awakening. There are many. In fact, if you want to do more than merely peek over the edge of the third stage, you'll probably need a couple dozen.

To demonstrate the great variety of awakening insights, I'm going to offer you 68 of them that I'm partial to. Before perusing such an inventory, however, let's study a couple in detail so we can understand what an insight even is, and why many more than one is needed.

What Makes an Insight?

Awakening does not consist of a single realization or flash of insight. It is made up, rather, of a series of inter-related insights. Each such insight is the discovery of something about what's always been happening, but that you've somehow failed to notice.

Consider the common trope that tells us that only the present moment exists.

All memories of the past, and all predictions about the future, are happening right now, in the present. That makes both the past and the future imaginary, in the sense that they exist only within present-time imagination.

If you can get this basic idea, you can start to spend more of your time "living in the present" - or being less caught up imagining the past or the future. If you really dig into the implications, this insight can change the quality of everything you experience in unexpected ways.

There are two important things to note about such an insight.

First, even though I can describe the idea to you in a few short sentences, that doesn't mean you've had the insight for yourself.

An insight is not merely a piece of information. When you "get" it, there's an "aha" moment. You suddenly see how much you've been living as if the past and future are real, and how much those preoccupations have structured your sense of yourself and your world. Then you slowly start to recognize the implications of the insight in every aspect of your moment-to-moment experience.

A sudden realization, followed by a gradual integration of what it means.

A second thing to notice is that this insight is mundane. It's related to our everyday experience of the present moment and the nature of time. No articles of faith are required. You can verify it for yourself, right now. You are just as qualified as anyone to investigate it through your own process of introspection.

There might be some value in defining such a mundane insight as 'spiritual'. We could distinguish religion from spirituality by saying that religion requires belief, specifically beliefs that are handed down to you. Spirituality, in contrast, can be thought of as the science of insight, and perhaps the set of practices that allow a person to integrate insights, rather than simply holding them as ideas.

An Example - Living in an Experience

Insights are moments when you come to see and recognize things that had previously escaped your notice. Some of the most profound insights, however, do not involve the discovery of something new. They are more like anti-realizations. They involve a kind of turning away from a belief you have always carried, a belief you have been conflating with reality.

I'd like to try to introduce you to an anti-realization.

As a simple experiment, pick up a nearby object, like an apple or a pipe or a teacup. Hold it. Feel it. Inspect it.

Now try relating to it in two different ways:

1. First, consider that it is the simple object it appears to be, made of matter, there in your hand. State out loud, "This is a teacup." Notice whatever you can about the cup and what it's like to hold the cup.
2. Second, consider that it is not an object at all. It is, rather, the experience of an object. Instead of imagining that it is made of matter, recognize that the cup is made entirely of sense impressions. That's all you know, and can know, about the cup - color, reflection, smoothness, heft, all elements of sensory experience. The hand holding it is equally made of experience. This time, state out loud, "This is an experience of a teacup." Notice whatever you can about the experience of the cup and the experience of holding the experience of the cup.

Is there any difference for you between these two ways of relating?

If you want to take a sip of tea, it probably doesn't matter. Whether you think the cup is made of matter, or made of sensations and perceptions, you'll go through the exact same motions: bringing the teacup to your lips, blowing on it if it's too hot, gently slurping. On a pragmatic level, these two modes are functionally identical.

Try a different version of the same experiment. This time, put down the object, and look around the room, or whatever space you're in, in two different ways:

1. First, look around the room in your usual way of making sense of a physical room, as if it is just how it appears. Say out loud, "I am in this room." Register what it is like to be situated within a physical space.
2. Second, look around the room as if it is not physical at all, but experiential. Rather than there being a room made of space and matter, you are inside of an experience that is shaped like a room. There are only sensory perceptions of a room, supplemented by some ideas about a room - all made of your experience. Say to yourself, "I am in the experience of this room." Register what it is like to be situated within an experience.

Once again, check it out. Is there any difference for you between those two modes of relating?

If you want to walk out of the room, you'll travel the same route to reach the door, regardless of whether you imagine you're in a physical space, or a space made from experience.

On a pragmatic level, there really is no difference between these two modes of relating. It seems to be a difference that makes no difference at all. That's why I can't simply say to you that you're not actually living in the world. You'll probably just squint your eyes and look at me sideways.

On a more fundamental level, this difference is one of the biggest differences there is.

You never walk down the street. You only walk down your experience of the street. You never get on an elevator. You only get on your experience of an elevator. You never sit in a chair. You only sit in your experience of a chair.

You're not living in the world. You are living in an experience.

Some people, when they attempt the simple exercises above, have no clue what I'm getting at. Some people do the exercises, and they can tell that something changes, but they can't describe what.

The experience of a teacup seems somehow less solid. It's the same teacup, but now you recognize that all a teacup has ever been is an assemblage of perceptions and sensations. In this new mode, rather than being made of a mythical substance called "matter", the cup is composed of sense impressions.

The experience of the room feels less stable. It's the same room, but all you know of the room is your perception of it. Now, rather than existing by itself in the mythical land of "out there", the room is made up of perceptions - your perceptions!

You don't need to understand why the two modes of relating feel different. You just want to see if you can notice that the second mode, living in an experience, tends to make everything a bit more surreal.

Note once again that I'm not asking you to believe in anything. It's almost the opposite. The exercise is an attempt to call two beliefs into question that you normally take for granted. Until now, you have believed there is something called "matter", and that there is somewhere called "out there".

Most of us have been embedded in a set of beliefs known as "naive materialism" or "naive realism". We have been trained to believe there is a physical world that exists independently of us. Materialism makes it seem obvious that the teacup is an object distinct from your body, made of matter, and that the room is outside of you, containing your body.

One contrasting perspective, known as "idealism", suggests that, rather than being made of matter, everything is made of consciousness. Or, to put it more simply, everything is made of experience. All you have ever known, and could ever know, about teacups and rooms, is your experience of them. Imagining that something exists outside you is an article of faith, something that can never be confirmed.

This kind of insight deconstructs beliefs we take for granted. When you believe less, you relax your habitual interpretations. You have the chance to discover more from your actual experience.

The Ecology of Insights

It's not difficult to understand this basic idea, that you are living in an experience.

Let's imagine that, beyond merely understanding it, you really got it. You looked around, and recognized, perhaps for the first time, that everything is made of perception and sensation and nothing more. It occurred for you as a legit insight. There was a moment when it clicked into place, and it felt like the ground shifted under you a bit.

Now you could go two ways.

The first is that the insight is a fun moment, but no more than that. The moment passes, and then, for better or worse, your old, familiar interpretive framework reasserts itself. You are just too well practiced at believing in an external, physically real world. The insight is temporary, and will live as nothing more than a curious memory.

The second is that the insight serves as a beginning point. You decide to practice seeing the world in this new way. You might shift back and forth between your old way of seeing and the new one, learning a little more each time about the difference between them. As you go deeper into the implications, you are likely to have . . . additional insights.

Wait - you might wonder - if the room I'm in is made of experience, am I really "in" the room? Or is the room, in some way, inside my experience? Could the whole room be an experience within my mind? Or perhaps the entire metaphor of containment starts to break down. Is one thing really inside another? Am I, myself, made of experience? What would that even mean?

We all make sense of our worlds via our working models of reality. Everyone has such a model, composed of thousands of interlocking beliefs. Just as you need sense organs in order to perceive anything. You need a model of reality in order to understand anything. Working models of reality, necessary as they are, possess certain shortcomings. One of their biggest limitations is that they tend to be invisible to you. Your beliefs about reality don't seem to be beliefs. They masquerade as reality itself.

Now along comes an insight, and it's a big one! It challenges one of your basic assumptions about reality. That assumption, however, didn't exist in a belief vacuum. It was networked in with many other assumptions, beliefs, and habits of interpretation. If a new insight is significant enough, and you take it seriously enough, it can begin to challenge other, subsidiary beliefs as well, leading to additional insights that support the first insight.

You had an ecology of beliefs that all fit together. Then one of those beliefs was disrupted. Now, one of two things will happen. Either all your other pre-existing beliefs will conspire to repair the rupture, restoring your old world view, your well-established model of reality. Or you'll gradually start to replace or upgrade or deconstruct a number of those old, interconnected beliefs. You'll form a new ecology of beliefs that supports your new insight.

Not all insights are of the same magnitude.

Some are game-changers. They change the very context through which you make meaning of all the contents of your experience. These might be the kinds of insights that accompany 'awakening experiences'. You see through the veil for a moment.

Such an insight, on its own, can get lost - swallowed up in old, more established ways of seeing. Unless you amass a range of smaller, supplementary insights to support the big ones, they don't necessarily stick.

This is the basic ecology of insights. Awakening requires at least one of the biggies. Integrating a big ticket insight only happens by discovering a series of related, smaller insights. Developing even further into this post-personal stage really only happens when you get more of the big ones as well, and the smaller ones that support them. There is no one, single insight that every person awakens through. Anyone who advances further in their awakening does so through an idiosyncratic collection of insights, understood in their peculiar way.

Can you identify the moment when a young human first becomes a person? There really is not a single breakthrough event. There are many, like their first word, or the first time they recognize themselves in a mirror. But there is no single, paradigm-shifting moment. There is a gradual transition from primatehood to personhood, consisting of many pieces falling into place, and many new capacities strengthening and stabilizing.

Becoming a person is obviously just a beginning. Children continue to develop new capacities for years, and become able to participate in their communities in more and more ways. We hope, at some point, they'll develop into adulthood, but that's really not a given. Some people just become older children. Others continue to mature, but each person does it in their own way, through an idiosyncratic ecology of strengths and resources.

The same is true of the transition from personhood to the post-personal stage during and after awakening. There are no awakened clones. It's really the opposite. Awakening frees people to detach from old identities and discover newer, and often stranger, ways of moving through the world. This stage is just as vast and varied as personhood is. When nothing is impeding it, development never ends.

68 Insights

Here are a range of insights a person might have as a part of their awakening, or as a further deepening into the post-personal stage of development.

I have limited myself to a few dozen items that fit within my particular ecology of insights. I've grouped them together in ways that make sense to me. I tried to include a range of different kinds of insights, but also to show how they all inform and reinforce one another. Some happen in a sequence, each building upon the previous.

Many of these are my idiosyncratic ways of getting at something. Some come from various teachers or traditions I've studied or practiced. Regardless of where each insight comes from, you probably won't like them all. You won't agree with some. Others might not fit with your aesthetic or style. Some, for that matter, will seem to contradict others. None of that matters in the end. These are only examples. Your journey, different from mine, and from anyone else's, entails assembling your own ecology of insights, in ways that make sense to you.

Each of these items can be understood intellectually, or theoretically, but understanding alone does not an insight make.

For something to become a full-fledged insight, you primarily need to experience the new way of understanding, and you may very well need to discover some practice that applies the insight to your ways of moving through life. Insights change how you experience yourself, life, other people, and the world. They influence how you use your attention, what states of consciousness you tend to hang out in, how you respond to things, prioritize, make decisions, interact, and interrelate.

I'll only devote a couple sentences to each one - the smallest amount I can say to convey the basic idea. I'll start with one we've already touched upon, and fan out from there.

Living in an Experience

1. You're not living in the world. You're living in an experience. The world as you know it, and everything in it, is composed entirely of perceptions and sensations. What appears to you as the world has been constructed by your mind.
2. Your mind is an experience generator. It can just as easily synthesize an experience from sensory input, as it does when you're awake, or from random neural firing, as it does when you're dreaming. Everything you experience as your body, or as the physical world, you experience through your mind.
3. Creating experiences is the fundamental source of enjoyment, and it is always available. The act of creation is deeply satisfying, and every moment of experience is something you create. If you step outside, look in, and marvel at how real and rich and intricate every experience is, you will always be in awe. You made this entire experience! How cool is that?
4. There is no such thing as raw perception. All perception is interpretation. It takes months before a blind person, seeing for the first time, can make sense of visual information. We learn to use our senses, and everyone does it differently. Your senses themselves are heavily biased by past experience, motivation, and habit. Every sensory faculty is filtered, embellished, distorted, interpreted, and then made to seem real and natural.
5. There is no such thing as raw experience. Experience is always organized. Some streams or elements of experience are filtered out or marginalized, while others are emphasized or brought to the foreground. There is no one, typical way to organize experience. Any two people do it differently, and any one person does it differently from one moment to the next.
6. You're always in one state of consciousness or another. Each state is a different way of organizing experience. There is no universal, default state of consciousness, but you have a personal default state you tend to revert to. Your default state changes as your capacities for mental action and attentional agency mature.
7. Exposing your model of reality as a model, and not reality itself, introduces much-needed ambiguity. You really do confuse your model of reality with reality itself, and it gets you in all kinds of trouble. It's well worth questioning absolutely everything you have come to believe about life and the world, at every possible level.
8. Direct experience may not be possible, but it can be approximated. Some of your experiences are thoroughly mediated by your ideas about them. Some are less mediated, closer to direct experience. Ever deeper inquiry into the composition of your experiences helps you sort out your representations from what they are representing.
9. You are not the ever-changing contents of your consciousness. You are the never-changing context in which those contents come and go. You are the space within which all experience occurs. Some people call this space 'awareness'. You can learn to experience yourself as the context by gradually opening your attention wide enough to evenly, non-preferentially, and simultaneously include all body senses and all mental experiences. This opens the spotlight of attention until it becomes as wide as all awareness.

Attention & Awareness

10. Awareness is a wider frame than experience. Experience, as I have defined it, is the domain of the mind. Awareness includes awareness of everything within experience, but transcends it to include awareness of things that cannot be experienced.
11. You are aware, right now, of things that you are not experiencing. If, for instance, you just look around the room you're in, you can easily notice all the empty space in the room. You can't see or feel the empty space, but you know it's there just as readily as you know the stuff in the room is there. The empty space can not be experienced directly. It is implied by what is there.
12. Attention is the spotlight of awareness. You are always doing something with your attention. You can direct it so it alights upon one aspect of experience and disregards another. You can focus it narrowly in on one object at a time, like a person, or a thought. You can expand it to include a wider field of experiences all at once. You can widen it so far that it becomes identical with the totality of awareness, at least temporarily. These abilities, taken together, are known as "attentional agency".
13. Attentional agency is fundamental to becoming conscious. You can become more conscious by strengthening this capacity. The states of consciousness you default to are largely determined by how you use your attention.
14. To increase attentional agency, learn to defuse urgency. Your biological motivation systems commandeer your attention in order to mitigate threats and maximize survival. As a result, your emotions and limbic feeling states are often overpowering. Basic development into human adulthood requires you to regulate strong emotions and lessen your reactivity. More advanced development requires skepticism about any feeling of urgency at all, and the capacity to slow it down.
15. To further increase attentional agency, learn to tear your attention away from experience. In much the same way that emotions direct your attention by creating a sense of urgency, experience demands that you devote your full attention to it. Experience is captivating, but you don't need to remain its captive. You can learn to allocate more and more of your attention to that which can not be experienced.
16. You are aware of the background behind experience, even when you don't notice that you're aware of it. This background is not itself an experience. It can be understood as the context in which experiences occur. It can also be understood as the negative space needed for experiences to stand out: as in the silence between sounds, or the space around thoughts.

Nothingness

17. The background behind experience is a kind of nothingness. Experience is the domain of difference. Something you don't experience has no qualities to differentiate one part of it from another. There is effectively nothing there, and this nothing is boundless, changeless, and infinite. It is sometimes called "emptiness" or "formlessness". But it can also be understood as infinite potential.
18. Nothingness is not experienced, but it can be apprehended as vividly and completely as anything within experience. Everywhere something exists, nothing also exists. Anytime something is happening, nothing is also happening. Awareness of nothingness may seem like it would be boring and useless, yet this awareness profoundly changes how everything occurs.
19. Nothingness, stillness, silence, spaciousness, and the infinite are fundamental to transcending experience. The more awareness is trained to recognize these ever-present features of reality, the freer the mind becomes, the less suffering is present, and the more blissful life feels.
20. Contemplating the infinite expands the capacity of the mind to remain open. The infinite leaves nothing for the mind to contract around. An open, uncontracted mind functions spontaneously and effortlessly.
21. Nothingness is not only the background of experience, but permeates the foreground as well. As you become increasingly attuned to nothingness, everything becomes an interplay between nothingness and experience. Sensory experiences which previously seemed solid and stable reveal themselves to also be filled with emptiness, almost fluffed up by it. All phenomena become more surreal.

Mindstuff

22. There is a domain of awareness between experience and nothingness. It can be experienced as a kind of noise or texture or turbulence comprising all sensory experience and all mental experience. If you close your eyes and observe the activity or granularity making up the darkness, you are close to perceiving it. If you then open your eyes and can notice the same buzz coloring all vision, you are even closer. These are like the pixels or threads or quanta of experience. I like to call it 'mindstuff'.
23. All experience occurs in the same medium, or is made out of the same mindstuff. All sensory experience (visual, felt sense, movement impulses, sound, etc.) and all mental experience (thoughts, imagery, etc.), when studied closely enough, seem to be made of the same fabric. It has a texture to it that is subtly turbulent, and always in flux. It is almost as if you are carving, or sculpting, each moment of experience out of mindstuff.
24. You're not really thinking thoughts. You only think you are. If you study the medium in which thoughts are formed, and the lifespan of thoughts, you discover that they are ephemeral, barely there at all. The involuntary mental act of contracting around these mere hints of thought makes the thoughts appear to be really happening. As you learn to keep your mind open and uncontracted, it becomes quieter and quieter.
25. The amount you don't know dwarfs the amount that you do know. This will always be true, no matter how much you learn. It therefore behooves you to develop a direct relationship with the vastness of the unknown. At a basic level, this means maintaining humility and beginner's mind. At a deeper level, it means deliberately orienting to the unknown, rather than habitually fixating on the little you know.
26. No belief is true. All beliefs are models of an underlying reality. Some models do a better job than others at representing what they model, but models, by their nature, are always imperfect and incomplete. Everything can be understood in more than one way.
27. Meaning isn't out there in the world until you put it there. You have inherited many of your ways of interpreting, evaluating, and prioritizing what matters. Nonetheless, it is now you who assigns those meanings to things and events. Nothing inherently means anything.

Time

28. The past exists only in your mind. Memories are made of imagination. Under the right conditions, you can imagine new memories that feel just as valid as any other. Your memories are never complete or accurate representations of what happened, and they inevitably change over time.
29. Your memories aren't yours. They are merely memories you've inherited, no different than if they had been implanted in your brain. You may choose to identify with the main character in those memories, but that's not really you. It's just the person whose memories you've inherited.
30. Continuity is manufactured by the mind. Infants don't yet have the capacity to chain moments together into narratives. Anyone can lose that capacity under numerous circumstances. You artificially overlay uniformity onto a diversity of inner states that don't otherwise fit together. You patch over gaps in consciousness that happen at least every night when you sleep, and over vast omissions of memory.
31. Your self is a kind of story you tell. The story manufactures a sense of continuity atop instability and change. You are certainly not, for instance, a baby or a child, but you tell stories about your childhood, as if that young person is you. You are not even the person you remember from yesterday. It is only the character that persists, and only as long as you keep telling their story.
32. The future exists only in your mind. All predictions, expectations, anticipations, and anxieties are made up of imagination.
33. You can never become anything different than what you are now. We can imagine some future person, with your memories, who is different from you, but that will no longer be you. You can only be this person. Hoping to become something better than what you are now is a trap.
34. You are not in control. Freedom from free will is also freedom from anxiety and anticipation. You will always have preferences, and you will always act in whatever ways you can to bring life into alignment with your preferences. Given the extreme limits upon your influence, however, you'll suffer a lot less if you're open to all outcomes.
35. Life has no destination. It just keeps happening. The quality of the journey determines the quality of your life, not any of the temporary stopovers along the way.
36. You have already arrived. The long and challenging journey you've been on was all so you could finally arrive at this moment and be exactly who you already are. This is it. You made it! Congratulations. There is no need to wait for anything else.
37. The present, far more than you realize, also exists only in your mind. You can not experience reality directly. You only experience your representations of it, mediated by the thousands of beliefs that comprise your working model of reality. All temporal constructs, including the so-called present, are acts of imagination.

What You Are

38. The separation between subject and object is only one way to organize experience. It is also possible to experience the observer, the observed, and the act of observation as a single, indivisible phenomenon.
39. There is no real boundary between the inner world and the outer world. Any apparent dividing line only occurs as a convention in which you classify some elements of experience as internal and some as external. Honest and persistent attempts to locate that boundary expose it as merely an experience-organizing habit.
40. This is all in your mind. More accurately, this all is your mind. Everything you perceive is your mind. The world is an interior experience.
41. You are infinite capacity. There is no limit to the kinds of experiences that can occur within the scope of what you are
42. You are made of information. Information consists of patterns of organization changing over time. It is substrate-independent and not limited to a single location. That's why it's valid to speculate that this is all a simulation, or a dream, or an illusion spun by a Cartesian demon, or wired directly into your brain by a mad scientist. These are informationally equivalent scenarios. For a being of information, there is no way to tell the difference.
43. You are made of energy. Your brain is a dance of synchronized electricity. Your senses receive light, vibrations of the air, and electromagnetic interactions with the surface of your skin. Imagination is electricity. Movements are electricity. There may be more subtle forms of energy we can perceive as well. Everything becomes more fluid and resonant when you learn to perceive life as shifting patterns of energy, and to perceive the energetic nature of your own being.
44. You are not a thing, but a process. Many things we consider things are actually happenings. A river, for instance, is not a thing, but an ever-changing movement of interacting processes. You are river-like - an unceasing, dynamic interweaving of occurrences. Our tendency to personify, objectify, and reify often interferes with our ability to see things as they are, especially our ability to see ourselves as we are.

Your Pet Primate

45. You have a pet primate who accompanies you everywhere. It has hominid motivations, thinks hominid thoughts, and feels hominid feelings. As with any pet, you are entirely responsible for its well-being. Unlike other pets, in order to better care for your primate, you have privileged access to this primate's inner experience, and some capacity to move it around and direct its actions. Alas, this makes it easy to get confused and imagine that you are your pet primate. It is easy to believe that its motivations are your motivations, its thoughts are your thoughts, and its feelings are your feelings.
46. Emotions are not fundamental to human experience. Anything you call an emotion is actually an interplay between felt sense experiences and the meaning systems that interpret them, between somatics and semantics. Your mind generates thoughts to explain the sensations you feel. Your body produces sensations evoked by those thoughts. The two cycle back and forth. So-called emotions are sustained by this conspiracy between body and mind.
47. Pain is natural and needs to be experienced honestly. Suffering is optional and created by meaning. Suffering is pain trapped behind a wall of meaning. Suffering can be dissolved via a willingness to interrogate your meaning-making habits, combined with a willingness to allow painful feelings to travel through your body. Sorting out somatics from semantics makes it possible to metabolize suffering.
48. Survival is only another kind of bias. Your survival instincts encourage you to primarily notice threats and opportunities. This can lead to a kind of poverty of awareness, in which you miss out on everything that is not self-relevant. As you become less and less defined by your survival bias, the richness of existence opens more and more to you.

Where You Are

49. You are not in your body. Your body is in you. You encompass a physical body within the scope of what you are, but you also encompass non-physical elements of experience, like thought, imagination, and awareness. Something physical can be contained within something else that's physical, like water in a bottle. What would it even mean, however, to suggest something non-physical could be inside a physical container? You have never been in your body.
50. Your body exists in a location, but you do not. Your head, like a weather station, is bristling with instruments (eyes, ears, nose) that collect information about its immediate vicinity. Just as you can access weather station information from any location, you can access information about the area around your head without needing to be inside it. You are not where your head is. You are non-local.
51. Your physical body is situated within a physical scene, but you are not. Your body is in the scene, but you are not in your body. It might be closer to the truth to say that the scene is within you, as the entirety of it occurs within your experience, from your perspective. It is your scene. Perhaps it is even closer to the truth to say that both you and the scene somehow bring each other into being.
52. Consciousness is not yours, but it is happening from your perspective. Imagine a spectrum. On one end is impersonal, infinite consciousness. On the other end is the specific perspective from which your personal experiences occur. Where on the spectrum you focus determines the context for all your experiences.
53. You can't have no perspective. The nature of experience is to occur from a perspective. You can loosen your perspective, however, and become increasingly less identified with it. Trying to imagine what it would mean to have no perspective (or to have all perspectives at once), gets you closer to your true, infinite nature.

Identity

54. You identify with what you habitually fixate on. Identifying means you imagine an equivalency between yourself and whatever you identify with. If you are habitually oriented toward your thoughts, for instance, you will think you are your thoughts. If you are continuously concerned with the social roles you play, you will identify with those roles.
55. Changing what you identify with changes the overall context of your experience. You have been conditioned to identify with being a person: with your body, your mind, and the character you play. It is also possible to identify with the whole world: with everything that falls within the scope of your awareness. It is even possible to identify with the infinite, changeless background behind experience. Which of those is you?
56. Ultimately, it is possible to release all identifications. You get closer by holding existing identifications more lightly. You also get closer by practicing identifying with awareness itself, or with the context of experience rather than the contents, or with the infinite, or with emptiness.
57. Without identifications, you become indistinguishable from life happening. Life is equally within and without you. Everything you have ever thought of as "you" has only been life in motion.
58. Suffering is a malady of missociation. When you believe that you are something other than what you really are, suffering results. This is a pretty solid motivation to discover more about your true nature.
59. The self is a network of tensions. You can learn to scan for increasing subtle sources of tension, and loosen them. At a certain level, subtle somatic tension becomes indistinguishable from emotional and mental tension. Release enough tension, and the very sense of a self temporarily subsides. The network is quite resilient, however, and can snap right back into place.
60. The ego is not an entity, but a collection of habits for maintaining the appearance of an entity. The personal self is an imaginary construct that is regularly threatened, eroded, and destroyed entirely. The ego is a set of strategies for maintaining, repairing, and restoring the image.
61. A stable ego structure is fundamental to transcending ego structure. Nearly everything within your experience is changing all the time. Discovering what never changes is the key to learning about your true nature. A stable ego provides the basis for turning your attention toward even more stable aspects of reality.
62. There is nothing wrong with you being the way you are, and there never has been. You have been conditioned by approval, disapproval, and shame to condemn your own nature. You have been conditioned to pretend to be something you are not. You can only ever be exactly what you are. You can never be what you're not. It is possible to end the war against yourself, and unconditionally love your own nature.

Love & Nature

63. Unconditional love is the only real love. You can't earn it or deserve it, as those would be conditions to be met. Unconditional love is not a feeling, as feelings come and go. Unconditional love is not a transaction, as it is not in limited supply. Unconditional love is the way we naturally relate with each other, when fear and shame are not impeding us.
64. The principle of unconditional love means loving everyone. Choosing who to love and who not to love could only be based on conditions. This has implications for how you relate with each and every person you encounter.
65. The principle of unconditional love means loving everything. Love is not merely interpersonal. When taken to its logical conclusion, unconditional love expands to include everything that is. Love here becomes more like something you live within, rather than something you do. Being "in" love means recognizing love as a basic feature of existence.
66. The world is already perfect, and already changing to become even more so. This perfection perfectly includes any resistance you have to how things are, how things are not, and how things are changing.
67. Nothing should anything. No one, and no thing, is under any obligation to conform to your wishes, needs, or expectations. You, in particular, are under no such obligation. If you are angry, or disappointed, that the world does not obey your preferences, you'll be less likely to understand why it can't. Fight it all you like, but nature always wins.
68. Nature doesn't make mistakes. Nature also doesn't have preferences. Good and bad are only ever relative, contingent, and conventional. Things can only ever act in accordance with their own nature. Change can only ever happen in its own way in its own time.

The Technology of Awakening

This is one possible collection of awakening insights. I'm not inclined to call any of them facts. They are, rather, working hypotheses. Each is imperfectly formulated, but does a good enough job at connecting with the phenomenon it's meant to describe. Like any good hypothesis, each is subject to revision, or to ongoing refinement in how it is articulated.

Under a handful of the insights, I have suggested a practice that might allow you to reach the insight, or to explore it further. Most such practices are somewhat abstract, requiring you to do something unfamiliar with your mind or your awareness. The instructions I gave are too brief, and not really sufficient to the task, as that's not my primary purpose here. But all insights come from practices, or are deepened by practices. It's always possible to tailor-make a practice to accompany any such insight.

Many of these have been historically miscategorized under the heading of spirituality. That designation is not really so bad, provided we think of spirituality as the honest attempt to discover new truths about your own nature and the nature of reality. These are not meant to become articles of faith, however. Each is a starting point for inquiry and experimentation. Each is an invitation to check something out for yourself in your own way.

Long ago, humans were primarily animals, with only the rudimentary outlines of language or culture, just as we see in other primates. Now everyone born with a functioning brain gets a language and a culture. We all make the laborious transformation from primatehood to personhood. It doesn't matter, however, which cultural community you grow up in, or which mix of cultures. Each has its own solutions to the basic problems humans face, but if your objective is just to acquire personhood, any one will do.

Now humans are primarily persons, but that may not always be so.

When enough human primates had acquired personhood, it was easily passed on to the next generation. Perhaps it will be the same with awakening. People are progressing to the post-personhood stage with ever greater frequency. In coming generations, the cultural technology of awakening may be so commonplace as to guarantee everyone makes the transition.

I'm a fan of spirituality. I really don't mean it any disrespect. I'm just a bigger fan of making these insights and practices available to everyone, everywhere - no spirituality required!