Part Two: Spiritual

Where we part ways

Part one was the polite part. Everything in it holds up whichever way you think the universe works. This part is where we part ways.

One thing first, because it changes how you read everything after it. I’m not religious, and I’m not asking you to adopt anybody’s religion. What I will do is quote a lot of traditions: Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Daoist, Greek, and a few people with no religion at all. They use different words, and sometimes different gods, and they keep coming back to a few of the same ideas. I’m using them as witnesses.

One more thing, about how I’ll argue. A world, real or invented, has to be coherent within its own rules. The rules can be as odd as you like, and what makes the world believable is that everything that happens in it follows from them. This is the test I’ll run on the picture of reality in this part. Take one assumption about how things are, and ask whether everything else follows from it without exceptions. You don’t have to agree with the starting assumption for the test to work. Coherence is the first test, and your own life is the second, so the end of this part has a check and a prediction you can test on yourself.

Two ways of reading a life sit at opposite ends. Most people stand somewhere in between without noticing.

The first starts from observation. Look around and you see a world of things, and underneath them particles, or quantum fields if you want the physicist’s answer. I look in a mirror, see one of those things, and feel like a person: me in here, everybody else out there. From that you get an assumption, that matter is the basic stuff, that a mind is something a brain does, and that consciousness depends on that activity. Follow it through and you get materialism, and often determinism, the idea that earlier causes fix everything that happens. When the brain stops, the experiencer stops. This view built hospitals and phones, and I live inside it for most of my day. In my body it feels like the plain truth. Me, Alex, a separate entity. Hello.

The second view sits at the other extreme, and it starts from a different assumption: that we are all one. Everything is part of a greater whole, and that whole is experiencing separation through the individual experience we call our lives. On this reading I’m not a thing inside the world. I’m the world, looking at itself from one position, with the memory of the rest switched off for a while.

Two assumptions at opposite ends. Neither can be observed from outside, since the observing is done by the same mind.

Both of these are assumptions. Nobody has observed that matter is all there is, because every observation was made through the same mind we’re trying to explain. The first view predicts well, and the working assumption that experience depends on brain activity has strong evidence behind it. What nobody has is an accepted account of why that activity feels like anything from the inside, which the philosopher David Chalmers called the hard problem in 1995. The second view finds experience easy, since it is the basic ingredient, and takes on the opposite question: if everything is one, why does separation feel so convincing? That question is most of this part.

Why this idea is worth a closer look

Here’s why I think the second view deserves the effort. People were saying it long before anyone had a long weekend in the mountains, and something close to it turns up in each of the big religions. Hindu texts say it outright. Judaism, Christianity and Islam say it in their mystical layers and in a few plain verses, Daoism says that the many come from one, and Buddhism and Jainism come at it from another side.

The base, tradition by tradition

Hinduism: in the Chandogya Upanishad, one of India’s oldest philosophical texts, a father tells his son Svetaketu that the finest essence is the self of the whole world, and that he is that (6.8.7).
Buddhism comes at it from another side. The early discourses teach that none of the five parts that make up a person is my self, and later schools say that nothing exists on its own. The Huayan school of Chinese Buddhism pictured that as a net of jewels in which each jewel reflects all the others.
Jainism, the Indian religion of non-harm, starts from the idea that souls are alike in nature, and its ethic rests on that likeness. Its oldest conduct text, the Acharanga, tells the reader that whoever you intend to kill or torment feels as you would, and the Tattvartha Sutra, a standard Jain summary of the faith, says that souls render service to one another (5.21).
Judaism: the Shema, the central prayer, says that the Lord is one (Deuteronomy 6:4), and Chabad, a Hasidic movement of Jewish mysticism, reads that unity in its founding book, the Tanya, as including the world: from God’s own point of view the world is as nothing before him, while it is real from ours.
Christianity: Jesus prays in John that his followers may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you (17:21), and Paul ends his account of the end with God being all in all (1 Corinthians 15:28).
Islam: the Quran says that wherever you turn there is the face of God (2:115), and the influential Sufi (Muslim mystic) Ibn Arabi, whose followers took the idea furthest, called all things “He/not He,” meaning that each thing is God and also not God.
Daoism: in the Daodejing the Way gives birth to one, one gives birth to two, and the sequence runs on to the ten thousand things, the Chinese phrase for everything that exists (42).

People with no creed have said it too. Spinoza argued that there is only one substance, which he called God or Nature, and that everything else is a form of it. When a rabbi cabled Einstein in 1929 to ask whether he believed in God, Einstein said he believed in Spinoza’s God, meaning the lawful order of nature, nothing that cares what we do. Erwin Schrödinger argued that the plurality of minds is only apparent and tied that to the Upanishads. And Carl Sagan, about as far from a mystic as a famous person gets, said on television in 1980 that we are a way for the cosmos to know itself.

These people don’t hold exactly the view I’ll use, and they share the base: what looks like many is not as separate as it looks. I’ll take that base as the axiom and follow what comes out of it. If it’s right, the ideas people usually file under “spiritual” come out as logical consequences, one after another. The traditions got there from many directions. Here the same ideas are laid out in the order they follow from one assumption.

The axiom and the machine

The axiom has three clauses.

We are one. There is a single whole, and everything is a part of it.

The whole experiences separation. It looks at itself through individual lives, each one a position with its own point of view, which each of us experiences as “my life.”

The separation ends. Being separate is a phase, and it returns to knowing itself as one.

The first two clauses describe how things are. The third says where they go, and it is the one the rest of this part leans on most.

But why would it do that?

Here explaining runs out, for me and for everybody else. The materialist picture has the same edge: the Big Bang is where our equations stop, so asking what came before it, or why it happened at all, leaves the question nowhere to stand. The axiom has its own version of that edge. It says that the whole experiences separation, and it can’t really say why a whole would want to.
What I do have is a story Alan Watts used to tell, and I enjoy thinking about it this way. Watts was the British writer who spent his life explaining Eastern philosophy to Western audiences, and the talk is usually called “The Dream of Life.” Suppose that every night you could dream any dream you wanted, and pack seventy-five years of experience into a single night. The first nights you would have every pleasure you could think of. After enough of those you would get tired of always knowing how it goes, so one night you would dream something you don’t control, where things happen to you that you didn’t plan. Each night you would hide a little more from yourself and take a bigger gamble, because the not knowing is where the excitement is. Keep going, Watts says, and eventually you would dream the life you are living today.
That’s the second clause told as a story, and it makes the forgetting part of the fun. A dream like that only works if the dreamer forgets, and a whole that still remembered being whole would be wearing a costume and knowing it. So if you ask me why the whole would bother, that is my favorite answer: it got bored of knowing how everything ends. Like watching The Big Lebowski for the twentieth time. Still great, but you know what happens to the rug.

I’ll hold it with a computer, because Part one admitted that I spent years in cyber security, so I can’t help it. Picture one machine running thousands of programs. Each program gets its own private memory and believes it has the whole thing to itself. The operating system maps all of it onto the same physical chips, and the hardware enforces the walls, which is what keeps a random app away from your password manager. The walls are real, though engineers built them, and in 2018 the Meltdown and Spectre flaws showed that information could leak across. Underneath, there is one machine.

Now picture the screen. Two windows sit in opposite corners, and there seems to be a distance between them. There is a distance, on the screen. Both windows are computed on the same machine in the same moment, and the machine has never heard of that distance.

Under the axiom, you and I are programs. “Me over here, you over there” is the screen. My private memory is the self I feel from inside. The wall around it is the felt edge of me. The whole is the machine that was running both of us all along. The computer is a picture. It doesn’t mean the universe is a simulation or that anyone is running it. (But it is a fun way of looking at it!)

Far apart on the screen, side by side in the machine. The distance is a property of the drawing.

From these three clauses I want to build the rest one step at a time. Each step uses a clause of the axiom, an earlier step, or both, and in a few places I add something I have observed, and I’ll say where. Under each step I’ll show you what the traditions say, so you can judge for yourself whether they meant the same thing. Here is the whole chain on one page.

The chain. The arrows show the order. The tags on the right give the premises each step uses, which are not always the step above.

1. Separation is a way of looking

If everything is one, and the whole experiences separation, then being separate can’t be a fact about what exists. It has to be a fact about how the whole is looking at itself. So the separation is real as an experience and misleading as a final description, and that’s what I mean by illusion. The word gets misused, so let me be careful: it doesn’t mean nothing is there. The distance between the two windows is real, and you can measure it with a ruler held to the screen. What’s wrong is the reading, the thought that two separate things sit that far apart inside the machine. The walls between programs work the same way. From inside a program they are completely real, and they still don’t mean the machine is in pieces.

Why would a whole do this at all? The traditions give answers, and they rhyme. Hindu texts call creation lila, play, an activity with no need behind it. Which makes the universe the biggest hobby project ever, and like every hobby project, nobody can explain why it took this long. A whole that looks at itself needs positions to look from, and a position is a separation. Knowing needs a gap.

Physics is a fun place to look here, though it comes with a warning label. Mostly the label says not to let a guy from cyber security explain quantum physics to you. I’m going to do it anyway. For a few centuries the picture was tiny separate balls, atoms and electrons and so on, each one a little thing with its own properties. Quantum field theory, the framework behind the Standard Model of particle physics, starts somewhere else. There are fields that fill all of space, a bit like the ocean fills a bay, and what we call an electron is a ripple in the electron field. A wave is the water doing something. That is also why every electron in the universe is exactly like every other one, since they are all ripples in the same field. And two particles prepared together and sent far apart behave as one thing with a joint state. John Bell showed how to test that, and the people who ran the tests got the Nobel Prize in 2022. It carries no message, so please don’t use it to explain your cousin’s premonition. I’m not claiming any of this proves that we are one. What I take from it is that the best physics we have says the picture of many separate things is wrong at the bottom, and that is the shape of the axiom, turning up in physics without anyone asking it to.

Real as an experience, misleading as the last word

Hinduism calls the appearance maya, and teachers of Advaita, the non-dual school of Hindu philosophy, warn that “illusion” translates the word badly: the world depends on something deeper for its being, so it is neither fully real nor simply unreal. Plato’s prisoners in the cave take shadows for the world, and in the Heart Sutra, a short Buddhist text, form is emptiness and emptiness is form, which Buddhists read as saying that things have no fixed independent nature of their own.
The Brahma Sutra (2.1.33), a classic Hindu text on the Upanishads, is where creation is called lila. Sufis quote a saying, “I was a hidden treasure and I loved to be known,” which scholars of hadith, the reported sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, do not accept as his. Its logic is the one I just gave: a whole that wants to know itself needs a point of view.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, who had left the pulpit, wrote in The Over-Soul in 1841 that we live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles, and that meanwhile within man is the soul of the whole.

2. How a whole turns itself down

Step 1 ended on the claim that separation is a way of looking. That leaves the question this step is about. How does something whole manage to look at itself as a part? Nothing outside the whole could do it to the whole, because there is no outside. So whatever happens has to be something the whole does, and the question becomes what that would take.

My answer is that it takes doing less. A whole that can do anything can also do less than everything, and that ability belongs to being whole, since a whole that couldn’t lower its own settings would be limited by that. So picture it turning down a few settings for one point of view. Turn down what that point of view can know, so it sees only what is near it. Turn down what it can do, so it acts only on what is within reach. Give it a clock, so its life has a before and an after. Give it a need, a sense of not having enough yet, so that it reaches for things. Set all four low enough and you get an experiencer who knows a little, can do a little, lasts a little and wants quite a lot, which is a fair description of me before coffee.

Operating systems do this all day. A program is given its own private memory, a short list of things it may do, a slice of processor time and a limit on what it can use. The machine still has all of it. The program has been granted a part, and from inside that part the limits look like the way things are. A program doesn’t wake up wondering where the rest of the memory went. That is all forgetting has to be: a limit you are inside of, which for that reason never shows up as a limit.

Your own body does it too. Almost every cell in it carries the complete plan for you. A liver cell holds the instructions for an eye and for a nerve, and it uses a small fraction of them. Being a liver cell means having nearly everything switched off so the liver work can get done, and nothing is deleted. John Gurdon put the nucleus of a tadpole’s gut cell into an egg that had been emptied of its own, and the egg grew into a frog. In 2006 Shinya Yamanaka showed in mouse skin cells, and a year later in human ones, that a handful of genes can switch a cell back into one that can become anything. They shared a Nobel Prize for it. A cell with every setting on would be no use to the body, so the lowered settings are what give the part its job. A cell also stays well only while it keeps listening. Cells in a body pick up signals from their neighbors that say when to divide and when to stop. How much of the signal from the whole a person still picks up is a matter of degree, and I am somewhere on that scale myself.

Turning the settings down is half of it. The other half is the world the point of view looks out at. A part with fewer settings could still suspect that it belongs to something bigger, unless everything it touches tells it otherwise. So the whole builds the experience of separation to be convincing. Every body hurts on its own, every object has an edge, every life has its own bills and its own birthday, and every time you check, all of it agrees that you are in here and the rest is out there. The traditions call this lila, the play from step 1, or maya, the appearance. It is made so well that the whole, looking through it, starts to believe it. Nothing in it is broken. We are still one, and we built a world that is very good at helping us forget it. Honestly, it is the best software ever shipped. Zero bug reports, mostly because nobody can find the support page.

There is one more thing the whole has to do, and without it none of the rest would work. Picture a part with every setting turned down, inside the most convincing world you can imagine, and still running a script the whole wrote in advance. That part isn’t separate at all. It is the whole reading a story to itself, a well-prepared plan that just executes. For the separation to be real, the whole has to hand over the steering, and that is free will, the biggest unknown it could give itself. Watts’s dream, in the fold under the axiom, says the same thing: on the night you get tired of knowing how it goes, you dream something you don’t control.

A game makes the difference easy to see. Under the materialist view from the start of this part, a person is like an NPC, a character the game moves by itself. Everything it says and does comes from the code and from what happened just before. It can feel like choosing, but nobody is holding the controller. Some thinkers keep the word free for the NPC by redefining it as not being forced from outside, and that is fair, though it isn’t what anyone means when they feel themselves decide. Under the axiom you are a player’s character. The game sets the rules, the board and what every move costs, and someone really is holding the controller: the whole, at your position, with the steering handed over on purpose.

Free inside the rules is still free. You don’t choose the rules, the board or the price of a move, and you do choose the moves. The steps that follow put a lot of machinery around a person: a drift, a signal that flips, lessons that keep coming back. None of it forces anything. It makes one direction feel better and shows where the work is, and you can ignore it for a whole life, or for several. If the return were forced, the separation would never have been real in the first place. What stays open is the pace and the way. Spinoza, whom I quoted at the start as a witness for the one substance, disagrees here. He held that people think themselves free only because they know their own actions and not the causes behind them. On this point the axiom parts ways with him.

The body holds the limits in place. The belief that I’m separate is held as tension, and the felt edge of me is the wall. Clench a fist and you feel like a small hard object among other objects, and when you loosen it the feeling softens.

The wall, as it shows in the body. Hold less of it and you sit higher on BE.

That also explains a pull most of us know. A world built to help a whole forget keeps doing its job, so the default direction is toward more separation. Do nothing in particular and you end up a little more separate every year, more guarded and more sure of where you end. Give it enough years and you become the guy who starts every sentence with “back in my day”. I can feel it starting already. Settings that were lowered stay lowered, and nothing in the program’s own routine raises them. On its own the drift only goes one way, so something else has to start the return.

Cloaks, contraction and things switched off

The traditions describe the wall as built, veiled or forgotten. Buddhism says the self is built. What feels like one solid “me” is described as a bundle of parts: body, feelings, perceptions, intentions and habits, and awareness, working together, and the first thing the path asks you to drop is the belief that there is a solid, permanent “me” behind them.
Jain teaching describes karma as fine matter that veils the soul’s own natural knowledge, as clouds veil the sun, so the perfection was there all along.
The letter to the Ephesians says that the non-Jewish world its readers left behind is alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them (4:18). In the Quran (7:172) God asks the descendants of Adam, “Am I not your Lord?”, and Sufis read that moment as the origin the soul has forgotten and longs to return to.
Kashmir Shaivism, a school of Hindu philosophy whose name, Pratyabhijna, means recognition, teaches that the One narrows itself into a person through five cloaks: limited power to act, limited knowledge, a sense of lack that makes us reach for things, time, and a fixed order of cause and place. Its short text, the Pratyabhijnahrdayam, presents the path as recognizing what you are.
Isaac Luria, the sixteenth-century Kabbalist of Safed, taught tzimtzum: the Infinite withdraws into itself to leave a space in which a world can exist.
In the Chandogya Upanishad (6.13) a father has his son put salt in water and come back the next morning. The salt can’t be seen, and it is in every sip. Then comes the refrain from 6.8.7: that is the self, and you are that.

Foreseen, and still chosen

In the Mishnah, Rabbi Akiva says that everything is foreseen, and freedom of choice is given (Avot 3:15, numbered 3:16 in some editions). As I read it, that is this whole point in one line: the whole sees everything and still hands over the steering.
In the Bhagavad Gita, after teaching Arjuna everything, Krishna tells him to meditate on it and then act as he wishes (18:63).
The Quran tells the Prophet to say that the truth is from the Lord, so whoever wills, let him believe, and whoever wills, let him disbelieve (18:29).
Pico della Mirandola, the fifteenth-century Italian thinker, has God tell Adam in the Oration on the Dignity of Man that he was given no fixed seat, no face of his own and no special gift, so that he could have whatever seat, face and gifts he chose. Every other creature is bound by laws set for it, and Adam alone decides his own nature by his own free choice.

3. The wall, felt from inside

Step 2 built the wall and a world that keeps it convincing. The next question is what the wall feels like from inside, and the axiom has a definite answer to it. The answer covers two things we usually keep in separate drawers, pain and love.

Start with pain. Some of it is just the body doing its job. You touch a hot pan and your hand pulls back before you’ve had a single thought, and that kind of pain keeps you alive. Then there is the part we add on top. Step 2 said that the wall is held in the body as tension, and Part one called that tension a tax. When something hurts, the same tension closes around the pain and says that this shouldn’t be happening. Most of what we call suffering is that: the pain, plus our fight against it. So suffering measures resistance. The more you push against what is happening, the more it hurts.

That gives suffering a job. Step 2 ended on a pull that only goes one way, toward more separation, and nothing in an ordinary day turns it around by itself. So something has to tell us what the wall is costing, and it has to be a message we can’t simply ignore. Suffering is that message. It works like the warning light on a car’s dashboard. Nobody enjoys seeing it come on, and it is the only reason anyone opens the hood. Putting a piece of tape over it is also an option, and most of us have tried that at some point.

The same signal reads the other way too. If pain is what the wall feels like when it is held tight, then what you feel when it drops for a moment is love. A child runs at you and you pick them up, or a friend says exactly the thing you needed to hear, and for a second you don’t notice where you end. Nobody has to explain to you that this feels good. Under the axiom it feels good because for that second you are acting as what you are, a part of one whole, and the wall isn’t in the way. Part one called being in love the preview of the far corner of its chart, and this is what the preview is showing.

That’s also why love is strongest with the people closest to you. With your children, your partner and your oldest friends the wall is at its thinnest, so it doesn’t take much for it to drop. It helps to tell love apart from the need from step 2, since the two live in the same relationships. Need says, I need you so that I feel whole. Love says, you are part of what I am. Most of us have plenty of both, me included, and the work is to grow the second. Love also grows outward a step at a time, from your own people to friends, to strangers, to the people who are hard for you, and further. In my field, two programs sharing memory without permission is a vulnerability. With permission it’s a feature, which is also a decent description of a good marriage.

That leaves the hardest question this part has to answer. If we are one, why would a whole allow cruelty? The axiom answers it in its own terms. There is nobody else, so the whole is never doing anything to a stranger. It is on both sides of everything that happens, the one who hurts and the one who is hurt. And step 2 handed over the steering, and a steering wheel that could only turn toward kindness wouldn’t be a steering wheel. What we call evil is what a point of view does when its wall is at its thickest. It acts as if the other is no part of it at all, and it no longer hears the signal that would tell it otherwise. Augustine, who thought about this question as hard as anyone, said that what we call evil is the absence of good and has no substance of its own. A shadow works the same way, since it is only a place where the light isn’t getting through. Under the axiom that is exactly right: evil is love that is missing, the wall standing where the whole should be felt. None of this makes cruelty fine, and none of it asks anyone to stand by. It says what cruelty is, and step 6 says where it lands.

So pain and love are one signal, read in two directions. The more wall you hold, the more it hurts, and the less you hold, the more love gets through. Over one evening that’s a mood. Over a year it is a direction, and the next step is about the moment the direction changes.

A post-mortem, the way we do it at work

In software, when something breaks, the team writes a post-mortem. The habit is to keep asking why until you reach the cause that, once fixed, stops the whole problem from coming back. Taiichi Ohno made it famous at Toyota as asking why five times. Try it on a wish. Why do I want a new car? Mine is getting old. Why does that matter? I’d feel I’m doing well. Why do I want that? Then I could finally relax. And why relax? Because then I’d be happy. Every chain I’ve tried ends there, whatever it starts from.
Now try it on a pain. Why am I irritated with my colleague? The credit went to someone else. Why does that sting? I need people to see what I’m worth. Why? My worth feels like something out there that I have to win and defend. And why would it be out there? Because I feel like I’m in here, separate, and everything else is out there. That’s the wall from step 2, and every chain of this kind I’ve tried ends at it too. Run it on something of your own. It takes about a minute.

Two arrows, and the absence of good

In his first talk the Buddha names the truth of suffering, its origin in craving, its ending, and the path that leads to that ending (Samyutta Nikaya 56.11), which is the shape of a post-mortem: the problem, its root cause, the fact that it can end, and the fix. As I read it, craving is the need setting from step 2 in his words.
In the Sallatha Sutta he says that when something hurts, an untrained person feels two pains, the physical one and the mental one added on top, like a man struck by one arrow and then by a second, while a trained disciple feels only the first (Samyutta Nikaya 36.6).
Augustine asks in his Enchiridion what we call evil if not the absence of good, and compares it to a disease or a wound in the body, which is the absence of health and does not exist on its own (chapter 11).
Irenaeus, a second-century bishop, taught that people were made unfinished so that they could grow, and that they come to know the worth of good by having tasted its opposite (Against Heresies IV.38 to 39).
At the end of the book of Job, after the voice from the whirlwind, Job says to God that he had heard of him by the hearing of the ear, and now his eye sees him (42:5).

Halves, and a ladder

In Plato’s Symposium, Aristophanes tells a comic story in which humans were once whole and were cut in two, so each of us goes looking for our other half, and he says that love is the name for the desire and pursuit of the whole (192e to 193a). Later in the same dialogue Diotima describes a ladder of love that climbs from one beautiful body to all of them, then to beautiful souls, to laws and knowledge, and finally to beauty itself (210a to 212a).
The first letter of John says that God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him (4:16).
The Metta Sutta, the Buddhist discourse on loving kindness, says that just as a mother would protect her only child with her life, one should cultivate a boundless heart toward all beings (Sutta Nipata 1.8).
Ibn Arabi wrote in a poem that his heart had become able to take on every form, a pasture for gazelles and a convent for monks, and that he follows the religion of love wherever its camels turn (Tarjuman al-Ashwaq, poem 11).

4. The turn

So far that was the second clause, the separation, what holds it up and what it feels like from inside. The third clause says the separation ends, step 2 says the drift only goes one way, and step 3 says the wall keeps reporting what it costs. So the whole needs something built in that turns a point of view around once it has gone far enough, and I think that is exactly what we find.

Picture the run in two halves. In the first half separation is new, and it is the thing being learned. Getting more separate feels good here: my own room, my own money, my own name on the door, winning. Nobody is doing it wrong here. This is the half of the game you came for, and the happiness you get from it is real.

Somewhere there is a bottom point, the most separate a point of view gets, and past it the signal flips. The same moves stop paying. A step toward unity starts to feel good in a way that lasts, and standing still, or taking more for yourself, starts to feel empty. Nobody announces it. It shows up as a flatness that no new result can touch, and a quiet question of whether this is all there is. I call it the turn, and it is the moment the third clause starts working on a particular person.

The turn doesn’t belong to one room of Part one’s chart. Any room can hit that bottom point. In Driven it usually looks like the crash after reaching the goal. In Drifting it looks like the plateau, years of calm and then the sudden sense that the whole thing is a waste of time. In Default it can come with no drama at all, as an emptiness in a perfectly ordinary life. For me it was the weekends I mentioned in Part one, when every free hour felt empty and none of my results could reach it. Some people go through the turn after a successful run, in this life. Others seem to be born after it. They never quite fit a society that still runs on separation, and they start searching young, which from the outside can look a lot like being a difficult teenager.

The switch is strange and hard, because everything in you was trained to move the other way. The old moves still look right, and they stop feeling right. That is why a driven person at this point often doubles down first, since more of the same is the only direction they know. It is like pressing the elevator button harder. Everybody knows it doesn’t help, and still we all do it.

I should say what I mean by happiness here, because it is easy to mishear. A moment of fun or pleasure comes and goes. The happiness I mean is the state you live in over months: fulfillment, steady good will toward people, wanting to get up in the morning. It can include a pleasure that lasts. The test is simple. Over the last year, have I become more fulfilled, or more bleak, with more negative thoughts and more emptiness? After the turn, that is how the direction gets reported. It is the signal from step 3, read over months instead of moments. So the sense of happiness, and the emptiness or depression on the other side of it, is about as close as we get to a compass. Each of us carries our own, nobody else can read it for us, and it works from wherever a person happens to be standing.

None of this makes anybody better. Before the turn and after it are two parts of the same game. Think of two players, one at level five and one at level forty. The one at forty has simply played longer. The one at five will get there too, in different circumstances, and will meet the same things on the way. Moving toward separation doesn’t make someone bad, and moving toward unity doesn’t make someone good. Each of us is playing the part of the lila we are in right now, and every part is needed, which is also why the paths look so different, as I explain near the end of this part.

Restless until it rests

The Buddha tells his own version in the Anguttara Nikaya (3.39). He describes a delicate life in his father’s house, with lotus ponds made just for him, a house for each of the three seasons and musicians for the four months of the rains. Amid all of it he reflected that he too would grow old, get sick and die, and the vanity of youth, of health and of life fell away from him. Later biographies tell the same moment as the four sights: an old man, a sick man, a corpse and a wandering monk.
The Teacher of Ecclesiastes made himself great works, built houses, planted vineyards, gathered silver and gold and kept nothing from his eyes that they wanted. Then he looked at everything his hands had done, and all was vanity and a striving after wind (2:4 to 11).
Augustine opens his Confessions by telling God that he made us for himself, and that our heart is restless until it rests in him (1.1).
Rumi opens his Masnavi with a reed flute that cries because it was parted from the reed bed, and says that everyone who is left far from their source wishes back the time when they were united with it (Book I, 1 to 4).

Leaving home, and coming to yourself

As I read it, the story of the garden at the start of the Bible tells the same arc in its own words: the fall is the step down into separation, sin is acting from the wall, and salvation is the way back.
In Genesis, Adam and Eve eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, their eyes are opened, they cover themselves and hide from God among the trees, and they are sent out of the garden (3:6 to 8 and 3:23).
The usual Greek word for sin in the New Testament, hamartia, comes from a verb that means to miss the mark, and the Hebrew chet has the same sense: the book of Judges uses its verb for slingers who could sling a stone at a hair and not miss (20:16).
In the parable of the prodigal son, the younger son takes his share, leaves for a far country and spends everything. When a famine comes and he is feeding pigs, he came to himself (Luke 15:17). He goes home, and while he is still a long way off his father sees him and runs to him (15:20). That is the turn, almost word for word.
Western Christian teaching, shaped above all by Augustine, calls the state humanity inherited from the fall original sin, and Paul puts the whole arc in one line: as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive (1 Corinthians 15:22).
Isaac Luria, whose tzimtzum is in step 2, taught that the vessels made to hold the divine light broke and scattered sparks into the world, and that tikkun, the repair, gathers them back, with every good deed raising a spark.
In the Hymn of the Pearl, an early poem in the apocryphal Acts of Thomas, a prince is sent to Egypt to bring back a pearl, forgets who he is and falls asleep, and wakes when a letter from home reminds him.

5. Something carries over

Step 4 says that every point of view turns toward home sooner or later. Look around, though, and most people never get as far as wanting to, let alone arriving. By step 4 they are still in the first half, going deeper into separation, which is the part they are playing right now. The third clause says that every piece returns to knowing itself as the whole. Put that next to what we can observe, and one human life is usually not enough for it. The idea is older than I am: near the end of The Education of the Human Race, in 1780, Lessing, a thoroughly Enlightenment sort of person, asks why he shouldn’t come back as often as he is capable of acquiring fresh knowledge.

So the process has to go on past a single life, and the traditions offer two ways for that to happen. In the first, it goes on after death in some other form. The Catholic Church teaches purgatory, a purification after death, Rabbi Akiva in the Mishnah gives the judgment of the wicked after death a limit of twelve months, and the Quran puts a barrier, the barzakh, between death and the day of resurrection. In the second, the same traveller comes back into this world of forms, life after life. Hindu texts call the round samsara. As I read it, a soul goes deeper into separation over many lives until it reaches the turn, and even after that the way back can take more lives, until it has returned to experiencing the world as one and has no more need to come back. That release is called moksha.

If the process is a return, and most people do not finish it in one life, it has to run longer than one life.

I’m not going to argue for one of the two here, because they need the same thing. If anything happens after death, it has to happen to someone, and if the process continues, something has to carry what this life learned into the next stretch. That something can’t be the body, which stays behind, and it can’t be one more separate thing, since there is nothing separate at the bottom. It is the part of you that was never really separate: the whole, at one position, going through the separation and keeping the record. The traditions call it the soul. Hindu texts have two names here: the jiva, which goes from life to life with what it has gathered, and the Atman, the self underneath it that was never separate at all. Buddhism holds that there is no fixed soul and still says that something continues, and an old Buddhist dialogue has the image I like most for it: a lamp lit from another lamp, where nothing passes across and the second one still burns. In the machine it is the saved state. The program shuts down, the window closes, and most of the session is gone, while what was worth keeping is written to disk. The photos, the passwords and the browser history stay behind, which honestly is a relief. In the game picture from step 4 it is the level you have reached, which is how two people can walk into the same kind of life at level five and at level forty. So the soul follows from the axioms, the same way the turn did.

There’s a fair question here: if there is only one mind, who carries over? The Advaita answer is that individuality belongs to the level of appearance, which in the machine is the process, and the processor underneath is the same for everyone. So there are two pictures, a saved state for the process and a single witness for the processor, and each is true at its own level.

That also changes what dying is. If something carries over, death is the end of one session, and the one who lived it goes on. In the machine, the window closes, the saved state is written, and the machine was never switched off.

Most of us are still afraid of it, and the axiom says why. A separate self is sure of one thing it will lose, which is itself. So the fear of dying is the wall’s strongest reflex, the wall defending the wall, and that makes it a fair reading of how much wall a person holds. It eases as the wall eases. That’s why so many traditions treat letting go as a practice for dying: every small thing you stop defending while you are alive makes the last letting go a little more familiar. None of this makes me keen to test it early, to be clear. I still look both ways before crossing the street, twice.

Lives, afterlives, and the one who goes through them

In the Bhagavad Gita, the Hindu scripture in which the god Krishna advises the warrior Arjuna, he says that the yogi who keeps striving is perfected through many births and then reaches the highest goal (6.45), and he compares the self to a person putting on new clothes and discarding worn ones (2.22). The Buddha says that samsara, the cycle of birth, death and rebirth, has no discoverable beginning and that it is not easy to find a being who has not at some time been your mother (Samyutta Nikaya 15, in one of the oldest collections of his talks).
Jain teaching has each soul reborn until it is freed, Sikh scripture teaches rebirth with liberation by grace, and the Kabbalists, the Jewish mystics, taught gilgul, the cycling of the soul through new bodies.
The three big Western religions mostly settled on one life, then resurrection and judgment. Even so, the story doesn’t stop at death for them. The Catholic Church teaches purgatory, and Gregory of Nyssa, a fourth-century Church Father, taught that the soul’s progress toward God never ends, because God is infinite. The Mishnah records Rabbi Akiva saying that the judgment of the wicked in Gehinnom lasts twelve months (Eduyot 2:10). The Quran says that behind the dead is a barrier until the day they are resurrected (23:100).
In the Myth of Er that closes Plato’s Republic, souls choose their next lives and then drink from the river of forgetfulness before they are born, which is one old answer to why you don’t remember the last one, and the best explanation I’ve heard for Monday mornings.
On the question of who carries over, Advaita points the other way. In the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad the Self is the witness in every being, and there is no other witness but him (3.7.23).
The lamp comes from the Milindapanha, a dialogue between King Milinda and the monk Nagasena, where the one who is reborn is neither the same nor another, like a lamp that burns all night without being the same flame from one hour to the next.

Practice for dying

In Plato’s Phaedo, Socrates says on the day of his death that those who practice philosophy rightly are practicing nothing other than dying and being dead (64a), and that this is why death frightens them less than anyone (67e).
In the Katha Upanishad the boy Nachiketa asks Death himself what happens after a person dies. The answer he is given is that the self is not born and does not die, and is not slain when the body is slain (1.2.18). The Bhagavad Gita repeats the verse almost word for word (2.20).
Paul asks, O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting? (1 Corinthians 15:55).
Rumi writes that he died as a mineral and became a plant, died as a plant and rose to an animal, died as an animal and became a man, and asks why he should fear, since he was never less by dying (Masnavi, Book III, 3901 to 3906).

6. Karma, or the fingers

If we are one, there is nobody else. Everyone I could harm is part of the whole I belong to. Hold up your hand. If the index finger and the middle finger start fighting, pressing and scratching, they hurt the hand, and the hand is the only thing either of them can be a part of. Nobody had to appoint a judge.

Karma, with the courtroom taken out.

Most of us have felt this from the inside at least once. You see a small child about to fall into a well, and you feel a jolt of alarm before you have thought anything. Nobody decided to care about that child. Wang Yangming, the Chinese philosopher, used this very example in 1527, and for him the jolt is what forming one body with the child feels like from the inside. For a second the wall isn’t there, and that second is the love from step 3.

Step 2 says the whole built the separation to be convincing, and it did such a good job that the fingers really do believe they are separate. Each one gets on with its own business, and every scratch it gives another finger lands on the same hand. That is what I think karma really means. The word is Sanskrit for action, and in everyday use it has turned into a ledger kept somewhere, with a judge and a sentence. The version I was taught has no judge. What happens to you works like a mirror. How you think and what you feel come back to you, and they come back right away, in the same life. Someone irritates you, something hurts, and that shows you a place in yourself that hasn’t been mended yet. The mirror only shows, and it does nothing else. The machine has a picture for it too: a program that corrupts shared memory reads the corrupted data back and has nobody to blame, because it was the same memory all along.

The mirror works in both halves of the game from step 4, and it reads differently in each. Before the turn, it mostly shows the cost of being separate. That is the lesson of the first half: a program has to find out what running alone costs, and every bruise adds to the bill. Nobody is doing it wrong there, any more than a player is doing it wrong by being on level five. The bill grows until the bottom point, and the emptiness of the turn is what it feels like when the bill finally lands. After the turn, the same mirror becomes practical. The compass from step 4 tells you whether you are heading home, and the mirror tells you where the work is. The irritation, the old fight with your mother, the colleague you can’t stand: each one marks a spot where you still act as two.

The mirror also picks its material on purpose. The sharpest lessons tend to come from the people closest to you, family, children, parents, because that is where it hurts most. So the work starts on my own side. When I stop reacting the old way, the other person stops getting the old reaction, and very often the whole pattern between us shifts, which is what you’d expect if we are parts of one whole. That never means staying where someone keeps hurting me. Old and heavy things take time, and I may have to come back to them more than once. And this is no reason to wait. If someone close to me is sick or in trouble and I say it’s their karma, I’ve stopped helping, and the word for that is indifference. The better reaction is to make what is happening better, because something in me is part of it too.

Step 5 gives karma its long form. What carries over is the record, and the record includes what wasn’t mended. So a lesson that isn’t learned comes back in a new costume: a new boss with the old boss’s habits, a new relationship with the same argument, and, if this life runs out first, a new life with the same homework. In the machine picture, the thread that carries over keeps meeting what it left unmended, and by the time it sees the whole it has stood in the place of everyone it once called other. That is my reading of the axiom, and it goes beyond what I was taught. If you take it up, take it as a reason to be kind, and never as an explanation for why someone else is in pain.

None of this is punishment. A system built to teach doesn’t punish anyone, and it doesn’t close a lesson before the lesson is learned. If karma were a person, it would be a very patient tutor who keeps setting the same homework until it gets done, and I have redone some of mine more times than I’d like to admit. The people who teach it this way add that, seen from far enough up, there is no karma at all, only the work in front of you. Until you get there, it is a useful name for the pull of what you haven’t mended. Living consciously and working on something bigger than yourself evens it out over time.

Deeds come back, and the other is me

The traditions differ on who administers karma. In the Buddhist account nobody does: the Buddha said it is intention he calls karma (Anguttara Nikaya 6.63). In Advaita, karma belongs to the world of apparent individuals.
The shape turns up elsewhere without any rebirth. Paul writes that whatever one sows, that will he also reap (Galatians 6:7), and the Quran says that if you do good, you do good for yourselves, and if you do evil, you do it to yourselves (17:7).
The image of the fingers is old too. Paul says the church is a body with many members, and that if one member suffers, all suffer together (1 Corinthians 12:26). Shantideva, the Indian Buddhist, wrote in his Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life that the hand and the other limbs are many and distinct, yet all are one, and that beings are in the same way all one in wanting happiness (Bodhicaryavatara 8.91).
The golden rule is the same logic read forwards: if the other is me, treating them as I want to be treated stops being a nicety and becomes consistency. Hillel, asked to teach the whole Torah while standing on one foot, is reported to have said: what is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah, and the rest is commentary (Shabbat 31a, in the Talmud). Most versions rest on reciprocity or empathy, but the Isha Upanishad goes further: the one who sees all beings in the Self, and the Self in all beings, recoils from nothing.
People with no creed get there too. Marcus Aurelius, who is in Part one as well, tells himself that difficult people are his kin, since we are made for cooperation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of the upper and lower teeth. Schopenhauer built his ethics on compassion, the recognition in another person of the same being you are, and put it in the Sanskrit formula tat tvam asi, that art thou. And Wang Yangming, whose child at the well is in the text above, wrote in the same passage that the great person forms one body with heaven, earth and all things.
Repair has its own rules. The Mishnah, an early Jewish law code, says that Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, atones for sins between a person and God, but for sins against another person only once that person has been appeased (Yoma 8:9). In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says that if you remember at the altar that your brother has something against you, you should leave your gift there and first go and be reconciled (Matthew 5:23-24). The words for repentance point the same way: the Hebrew teshuvah comes from the verb shuv, to return (it is also the everyday word for an answer), the Arabic tawba comes from a root for turning back, and the Greek metanoia means a change of mind.

One warning. The easy version of karma is blame: she had it coming, he reaped what he sowed. That’s spiritual bypassing with a calculator. The axiom doesn’t support it, because the person you’re blaming is as much a part of the whole as you are. The version that follows is responsibility: what in me is this showing, and what’s my next move toward the part of myself I’ve been fighting?

7. Energy

People say it all the time. This place has good energy, that person drains my energy, I need to protect my energy. Indian texts call the life force prana, which also means breath, and Chinese thought calls it qi. Most of the time nobody says what they mean by it, so here is what I mean. In this step energy is your capacity to act and to be present, the fuel behind DO and BE from Part one: how much you can make happen, and how much of what is happening you can actually take in.

Now look at how the separate self handles energy. It treats it like a tank. I have this much, I spend it, I run out, and I guard what is left. Everything in step 2 points that way: a point of view with lowered settings, inside a world built to say that you are in here and the rest is out there, naturally assumes that its energy is its own small supply. And holding the wall costs. Step 2 says the wall is held in the body as tension, and Part one called tension a tax. A good part of the tank goes on guarding the tank.

Under the axiom it can’t really work that way, because there is nothing outside the whole to take energy from and nowhere for it to leak to. A part that starts remembering the whole works more like a mill on a river. The mill doesn’t drink the river. The water turns the wheel, does real work and flows on to the next mill downstream, and the mill’s job is to let it through. A mill that clamps its wheel tight, which is the tension again, gets less flow. So the extra energy comes from two places, and neither one takes from anybody. Some of it is what you stop spending on the wall. The rest is access: from the point of view of one person, the river is the size of the whole, far more than any part could hold.

That also answers an obvious objection. Part one’s Driven room is full of very separate people with huge energy. They run on the tank, and they run it hot, on fear, proving and winning. It really works for a while, and step 4 says that before the turn more separation feels good. But a tank runs dry, and the crash Part one describes, burnout or depression after reaching the goal, is the tank hitting empty. River energy is quieter and steadier, and it doesn’t burn out, because it was never yours to spend. Everybody has tasted it at least once. The flow, the zone and being in love at the far corner of Part one’s chart are moments when the wheel opens and the river runs through.

Letting go is how the wheel opens, which is why so many traditions describe the way in as a kind of emptying.

Empty, and let it through

Hasidism calls it bittul, the nullification of the self, and the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism, read a verse in Psalm 16 as teaching equanimity, so that praise and insult feel the same. The Sufis speak of fana, the passing away of the self in God, followed by baqa, living on in God.
Christians have kenosis, Greek for emptying, their name for the emptying Paul writes about in his letter to the Philippians (2:5-8). There he says that Jesus, though he was in the form of God, did not treat equality with God as something to hold on to, and emptied himself, taking the form of a servant. Paul offers this as the attitude his readers should share. The medieval German preacher Meister Eckhart’s word for letting go was gelazenheit.
In the Buddha’s instructions on breathing, one step is to breathe in and out contemplating relinquishment (Majjhima Nikaya 118).
Mencius, the Chinese philosopher Wang Yangming took the child at the well from, told a student that he himself was good at nourishing his vast, flowing qi. It is exceedingly great and strong, he said, and when it is nourished by rightness and left unharmed, it fills everything between heaven and earth. It grows out of a long run of right deeds, and when the heart is not at ease with what you do, it starves (Mencius 2A:2).

God, asking, and grace

As I read it, the nearest thing in the axiom to what the traditions call God is the whole, met from one position. A part can only meet the whole as someone, which is why so many traditions pray to a You. Prayer is the part turning toward the whole, grace is the river from this step arriving without being earned, and gratitude is the part noticing it. Each tradition describes God in its own way, and the examples below are here for the shape they share.
In Advaita, Brahman is beyond every quality, and the same Brahman, seen from inside the world of forms, is Ishvara, the Lord who creates and is worshipped.
The Quran says that God is nearer to a person than the jugular vein (50:16). Psalm 16:8, the verse the Baal Shem Tov read for equanimity in the fold above, says in its plain sense: I have set the LORD always before me.
Martin Buber, the Jewish philosopher, wrote in I and Thou in 1923 that the lines of all our relations meet in the eternal You, and that every real meeting with another as a You is a glimpse of it.
The letter to the Ephesians says that by grace you have been saved through faith, and that this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God (2:8).
A prayer attributed to Rabia of Basra, the early Sufi woman saint, asks that if she worships God for fear of hell, God should burn her in it, if for hope of paradise, shut her out of it, and if for God’s own sake, not withhold his beauty from her.
Buddhism and Jainism have no creator God to pray to, and both keep devotion toward those who have fully woken up, the buddhas and the Jinas, mostly as examples of where the road leads.

8. Miracles, the levels of knowledge

My own road started with something I couldn’t explain. I was still a teenager, and a convinced materialist. I read psychology and physics, I believed that the physical world was all there is, and my philosophy of choice was Nietzsche’s idea of the Übermensch, the closest thing I had found to an answer to the question of why bother living. My mom had just received the second level of Reiki, the Japanese practice of healing by touch or at a distance, and asked whether I would take a session from a distance. I said I didn’t believe in any of it, which was no news at home, and agreed anyway, because I wanted to be a nice son who lets his mom practice. My mom was in the kitchen and I was in my room. During the session I started to feel things in my body that I had never felt before, a kind of squishing in my head and a heaviness in my chest. I didn’t feel better afterwards, so I can’t say it healed anything. I just had no way to explain it.

That night I lay in bed and tried to explain it anyway. The longer I lay there, the clearer it got that my worldview wasn’t missing a piece. Its basic assumptions said that this couldn’t happen at all, and it had just happened. That was enough to send me looking. The next morning I asked my mom to take me to the Reiki teacher, because I had some questions. That was the beginning of my road.

Every tradition keeps a list of things like that, and the lists are remarkably alike. Let me be clear about what I’m doing here, because this is the most controversial step in the essay. I’m not trying to prove that any of these things happen or are real. To be honest I don’t personally care. My claim is smaller and, I think, more interesting: the axiom leaves room for them, and the materialist view of separation leaves none.

Healing, by touch and at a distance. Reading minds. Seeing and hearing what is far away. Remembering past lives. Walking on water. Floating, or flying outright. Walking through walls. Being in two places at once. Feeding a crowd from a basket. Calming a storm. Going without food or sleep, and staying warm in freezing cold. The Buddhist discourses list walking on water as if it were earth and flying cross-legged through the sky, the Gospels have Jesus walking on the sea, Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras have reading the thoughts of others and rising above water and mire, and Teresa of Avila wrote that her body was sometimes lifted up from the ground.

If the world is made of separate things and a mind is something a brain does, then knowing what is in another head without being told, or moving something without touching it, breaks the rules the view is built on. So every report has to be filed under something else before anybody looks at it: illness, lying, luck, a bad memory, Photoshop. A careful sceptic says something fairer, that they don’t rule it out and just want evidence as strong as the claim. I agree with that sceptic. It is exactly where I was, lying in bed that night, and the honest conclusion I came to wasn’t that Reiki is proven. It was that my assumptions were wrong.

Under the axiom it looks different, and step 2 has already done most of the work. The whole turned down four settings for each point of view: what it can know, what it can do, its clock and its need. In this picture a miracle is one of those settings turned up a little. Reading minds and seeing at a distance are the knowing setting. Healing, walking on water and floating are the doing setting. Step 7 also says why any of it would happen: more of the whole flows through a part that holds less wall.

Concordia Antarova’s novel Two Lives, one of my favorite books, keeps coming back to a single line, which I would translate as: there are no miracles, only different levels of knowledge. That is this whole step in one sentence. A miracle, in this picture, is a setting turned up by someone who knows where the settings are. To everyone else it looks like hacking reality, which might explain my choice of career. My grandma already thinks I’m a black magician every time I fix the computer, so I’m halfway there.

There is a catch, and the traditions agree about it more than about almost anything else. Nearly every one that describes these powers also warns against chasing them. Patanjali lists them and then says that, however much they look like achievements to a mind still facing outward, they are obstacles to samadhi, the deepest absorption. The Buddha said that displays of psychic power horrified him, and that the miracle he valued was instruction. Jesus refused to give a sign on demand. Teresa of Avila, who was seen lifted off the ground, begged God to stop giving her favors that other people could see. My teacher says exactly the same: the powers are side effects of an inner state, and getting carried away by them ends badly. Chasing them is the separate self wanting more for itself, which is the tank from step 7 again. It’s like getting admin rights to the whole machine and using them to make the printer work. Fine, that one would actually count as a miracle.

Powers on the way, and warnings about them

The Buddha’s discourse on the fruits of the contemplative life lists the psychic powers of a trained monk: multiplying oneself and becoming one again, going through a wall as if through space, walking on water as if it were earth, and flying cross-legged through the sky like a bird (Digha Nikaya 2). In another discourse he names three kinds of demonstration, psychic power, reading minds and instruction, and says that he is horrified by displays of the first two and values the third (Digha Nikaya 11).
Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras give a whole chapter to powers. Concentration on the images in the mind brings understanding of the thoughts of others (3.19), and mastery of the upward life brings freedom from water, mire and thorns, and rising up (3.39). In between he says that to a mind still facing outward these powers look like achievements, and that for samadhi, the deepest absorption, they are obstacles (3.37). Numbering varies a little between translations.
In Matthew’s gospel Jesus walks on the sea, and for a moment Peter walks on the water too (14:25-29). When the scribes and Pharisees ask him for a sign, he answers that an evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, and that none will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah (12:38-39).
Teresa of Avila writes in her Life that her body was sometimes lifted up from the ground in rapture, that she ordered her nuns never to speak of it, and that she asked God to give her no more of the graces that could be seen from outside (chapter 20).

One thing is missing from this list on purpose: seeing the future. It is also connected to the knowledge dial but has a catch to it. The short version is that there is no future to see, only now. That one needs a longer conversation than this part has room for.

One more idea: how far the road goes

That is the end of the chain. One more idea sits next to it, and it is a different kind of thing: a map of how far the road goes. It doesn’t follow from the axiom the way the steps do. It comes from experience, mine and that of people further along, and from the staged maps the traditions drew long ago, a few of which are at the end of this section. Part one’s chart reads differently from here.

Every room on the chart is a separate program trying to run well. Default protects itself. Driven goes out and takes, from the outside, what it can’t feel on the inside. Drifting steps away from whatever pokes it and calls the stepping away peace. High agency runs well: it acts with honesty and kindness, and fear no longer makes the decisions. That is the small square, the area available to a separate self when it gets as good as it can get at being separate, which is a full life by any human measure. At the top of the small square the strain is mostly gone. What is left is the assumption that there is a wall to be behind, and nobody has questioned that yet.

Four rooms, one assumption underneath.

The big square, the zoomed-out map from the end of Part one, is something else. It begins when the separation itself stops being assumed. You can optimize a program for years and it stays a program, behind its own wall. At some point the question stops being how to run better and becomes whether the wall is real. In my field, cyber security, that move is called a sandbox escape, a program breaking out of the walled-off space it was locked into. It makes a researcher famous for a week and ruins the vendor’s afternoon. It also explains why Part one asked for a reason bigger than you: a reason about you can’t carry you out, because the reason is the thing you’re trying to leave. What carries you out is a point of support, the thing you live for that is bigger than you.

Part one’s chart can make the top right corner look like the finish. There is a longer scale behind it. It’s the same diagonal you’ve been looking at since Part one: the bottom left of the small square is the low end, the middle of the chart sits halfway along it, and the top right corner is where the line leaves the small square. Everything past that corner lives in the zoomed-out map. It shows the direction of your own life, and it ranks nobody.

The picture I use is space travel, and it’s about speed. Nobody here is literally going anywhere. The picture is there to show how different each step is from the one before it, and how big the jumps get. The measure is how freely you can move, and gravity holds you back. Under the axiom, speed is how much of the whole you can take in at once, which is the river from step 7 measured as a speed, and gravity is the pull of the one point of view you started with.

The same diagonal as speed and freedom of movement. Gravity is the pull of the position you started from, and each level above the corner is the speed that leaves the next, bigger pull behind.

At the low end, in Default, you can run, ride a bike and drive a car, and the ground decides where you go. Most of us live there, on the ground or just above it. As you let go, people learn to fly, and roads stop mattering. Then comes orbit. Astronauts in orbit are free of the ground, and the Earth still has them: they float because they are falling around the planet and missing it. In Part one’s terms, this is about the middle of the line.

The top right corner of the small square is escape velocity, the speed at which you leave the Earth behind. Orbit and escape are not far apart in speed, and the difference in outcome is total: one circles forever and the other leaves.

Past the corner the picture keeps going, and each level is the speed that frees you from the next, bigger pull. The first leaves the Earth. The next leaves the Sun behind, and the one after that leaves the galaxy. The last has no pull left to leave, and every point in the universe is a place you can be at home, so the word every is doing some work.

That is the distance I want to convey. A life on the ground and a life among the stars are about as far apart as an ordinary human life and the whole map, and I believe a person can cross much of that distance in one lifetime, even though the whole return from step 5 takes longer. It is hard to feel this from the ground, which is why I use the picture.

Every step up shows you more of the whole, and that includes more of what still needs fixing, so the higher you go, the more there is to do. And the whole that comes back at the end knows more than the whole that set out, because in between it has been each one of us.

After the last of these comes something like a birth. The whole universe on this scale is still the inside of something, like a womb or an egg. To whatever grows inside, that is the whole world until the moment it is born, and what comes after can’t be drawn from in here. Many traditions have an image of a second birth for a decisive change in a person, and the old maps were scale maps as well.

Second births and staged maps

Several traditions tell the end of the story. Origen, a third-century theologian, and Gregory of Nyssa read Paul’s line that God may be all in all (1 Corinthians 15:28) as the restoration of all things. Zechariah has it that on that day the LORD will be one and his name one (14:9). The Quran has “indeed to Him we will return” (2:156). Buddhism calls the ending of greed, hatred and delusion nirvana, a word that means a flame going out.
In John’s gospel Jesus says that one must be born again, or born from above, since the Greek word can mean either. In the Hindu tradition the twice-born are those who received the initiation that counts as a second birth, and Meister Eckhart taught that God is born in the ground of the soul. The traditions use the image for different things, and I use it for the stage after the top of the scale.
Other traditions draw staged maps too, so a scale like this isn’t new. Early Buddhism has four stages of awakening, the Jains have fourteen steps of spiritual growth, and Teresa of Avila, the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic, described seven mansions of the inner castle. In Dante’s Paradiso the pilgrim rises through the heavens without noticing, and Beatrice tells him it would be stranger if, freed of what held him back, he stayed below, like a flame sitting still on the ground.

Why the paths differ

If one structure sits behind all this, a fair question follows. Why do the religions look so different from one another, and why do they keep changing?

The axiom answers both. The whole goes into separation through countless points of view, and the point of going is that each one comes back with something no other could have brought, which is where the map of the road ended. No two points of view are alike, so no two people meet the wall in the same way. What holds it up, and what loosens it, depends on temperament, on culture, on the century, and on what the person has already learned. A path is a way back, drawn for particular people at a particular time. One drawn for herders crossing a desert will sound different from one drawn for monks on a mountain or merchants on a trade road, and it still describes the same thing: a whole that lost track of itself, and a way home. The core stays because it comes from the structure. The forms change because the people do.

That holds for our own time too. A form made for a village that shared one story and one calendar fits poorly in a city of strangers, where the day is cut into pieces by a phone, a job and an inbox. People are more educated and more skeptical than they used to be, they have less spare time, and they are used to checking things for themselves. Every tradition has met a moment like this before, with its reformers, its new schools and its new translations, each asking how to say the same thing to people who no longer hear it. The modern world asks it once more, and there are many answers to it. Part three describes the one I chose.

Many names for one thing

A hymn of the Rigveda, among the oldest religious texts we have, says that to what is One, sages give many a title (1.164.46).
In the Bhagavad Gita Krishna says that whenever dharma declines he takes birth again, age after age (4.7 to 8). The Hindu tradition reads this as the divine returning to every age, and I take it as a teaching that returns for each one.
The Quran says that God gave each community its own law and way, and had God willed would have made them one community, and it tells them to race toward what is good (5:48). The verse also presents the Quran as the measure of the earlier books, so it speaks of many ways under one God without saying every way is equal.
In the Buddhist Udana (6.4), a king has men born blind each touch a different part of an elephant, and each describes a different animal. The Buddha aims the story at rival sects, as a warning against one-sided views, and I borrow the picture: each one holds a real part of something larger.

Why I want this

Part one’s zoom out ended on full human potential, and that’s what I’m after for this lifetime: the whole map, including everything past the corner of the chart. I don’t want to believe it’s there. I want to see it for myself, the way you see that a room is lit once you look up.

It started with questions. Why am I alive? What is happening here? How do the universe and the world work? Why am I, me? As I took steps on that road, I started losing some of my walls, and I felt, and then realized, how connected we are. That changed the way I feel toward people and the world. I wish to obtain knowledge of who I am and what it means to exist. And my desire is to share it with other people in a way that is effective and understandable, so that it benefits their lives and makes them happier, because that is what makes me happy. I also wish to build systems and institutes that help others do the same in the best way possible. That is my point of support, the thing I live for that is bigger than me.

What you can check

If the axiom is right, loosening the wall should leave marks you can check. In 1997 Robert Cialdini and colleagues found that how “one” people felt with someone in need predicted their willingness to help better than sympathy did. So the check for this part is the one in that study: how often do you feel at one with the person in front of you, and what do you do next when you do? In my experience, and in what people around me describe, the order is the same: first you start to listen, then giving shows up, unasked and without a tally, then perception clears.

The prediction is the interesting part. If the sense of separation is held by tension, then loosening it should make a person more generous without anyone telling them to be. It’s an experiment you can run on yourself, which is the nice thing about this kind of claim. Neither of these proves the axiom. What they test is whether the moves are worth making, and they can be worth making either way.

Where this goes next

That’s the map as far as I can draw it honestly. What I haven’t told you is how to walk it, and that is the next part, which has a lot less philosophy in it and a lot more everyday life.

Until then, one question that needs no equipment. Where, right now, does the border of you sit? Don’t quote me, but I’d bet it isn’t where you think.

Sources

Translations: Bible verses quoted word for word follow the English Standard Version (ESV). Quran 2:115 and 7:172 follow Arberry, A. J. (1955), The Koran Interpreted, and Quran 17:7, 2:156 and 23:100 follow the Sahih International translation. Other translators are named next to their texts below.

Where we part ways, and why the idea is worth a look

Chalmers, D. J. (1995). Facing up to the problem of consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2(3), 200-219.
Spinoza, B. Ethics, Part I (propositions 14 and 15, one substance) and the Preface to Part IV (God or Nature).
Einstein, A. Telegram of April 1929 to Rabbi Herbert Goldstein, reported in the New York Times, 25 April 1929.
Schrödinger, E. (1944). What Is Life? Cambridge University Press. Schrödinger, E. (1958). Mind and Matter. Cambridge University Press (the Tarner lectures of 1956).
Sagan, C. (1980). Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, episode 1, The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean.
Chandogya Upanishad 6.8.7. Deuteronomy 6:4. John 17:21. 1 Corinthians 15:28. Quran 2:115. Daodejing 42.
Tattvartha Sutra 5.21. The Acharanga Sutra, translated by Jacobi, H. (1884), Jaina Sutras, Part 1 (Sacred Books of the East, vol. 22). Cook, F. H. (1977). Hua-yen Buddhism: The Jewel Net of Indra. Penn State University Press.
Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Tanya, Part II, Sha’ar ha-Yichud ve-ha-Emunah (the Gate of Unity and Faith). Chittick, W. C. (1989). The Sufi Path of Knowledge. SUNY Press.