Metahuman summary

What if someone told you they believed the world is a flat disc in the ocean, surrounded by a giant sea serpent biting its own tail? You’d probably have trouble keeping a straight face. As far as belief systems go, this one’s not very realistic, right? Yet, medieval Norse people accepted it as fact.

That doesn’t mean you have a better grip on reality than a medieval Norseman. It simply illustrates the fact that no belief system is realistic. See, our mind-made reality isn't just made up of all the data that gets filtered by our senses. It's also constructed from all the ideas and impressions that we filter through a complex matrix of beliefs. This matrix helps us to organize and understand the world we live in. Furthermore, it shapes our understanding of the past, our experience of the present, and our attitudes to the future.

Look out the window. Say you see a bright yellow car there. You know that "yellow" is an artificial category you use to organize and understand your reality – for that matter, so are "car" and “bright.” The car is part of your mind-made reality, and your mind-made reality is a sophisticated simulacrum.

Does this mean there’s no such thing as that car? No such thing as fixed reality? 

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart composed a staggering 50 symphonies that changed the face of music. Richard Feynman revolutionized physics with the theory of quantum electrodynamics. Chess Grand Master Bobby Fischer won a match dubbed the “Game of the Century” at the tender age of 13.

What do all these exceptional humans have in common? Mozart intuitively created harmony out of infinite variations of musical notes. Through physics, Feynman glimpsed the infinite vastness of the universe and distilled it into tangible scientific principles. Fischer forged a winning strategy from a virtually infinite number of possible chess moves. Mozart, Feynman, and Fischer all channeled infinity. In other words, they all accessed the infinite possibilities of metareality to become metahuman. As a result, they accomplished feats outside the bounds of mind-made reality.

Neuroscientists can tell us a lot about the brain. But there are some seemingly simple questions that even the most esteemed scientists find themselves unable to answer. Questions like, for example, “What is a thought?” 

Why are thoughts unpredictable? Where precisely are different memories and pieces of information – like the memory of our favorite birthday or the spelling of the word ‘“cat” – located within the brain?

Metareality is eternal, timeless, and infinite. Your access point to this infinity is the here and now, wherever and whenever you happen to be. The first step on your journey is to ground your body and mind in the present, letting constructs of the past and future fall away; the best way to achieve this is by practicing mindfulness.

Mindfulness is a form of waking meditation. When you practice mindfulness, you bring pure, unmediated awareness to your experience of your body and your thoughts. 

Humans persistently translate immaterial concepts into material forms, to endow the abstract with concrete presence. We translate intangible concepts like money or love into tangible physical things, like a $50 bill or a wedding ring. The technical term for this process is reification, the tendency to reduce an immaterial idea to its concrete representation.

The human self is also an infinitely vast, immaterial experience. Physically, we are ever-changing beings made up of an intricate variety of biological processes. Yet, our minds reify our self into a fixed form, that of “the body.” 

Over the course of human existence, many have tried in vain to identify and define the source of human creativity. For the Greeks, it was the nine muses, goddesses that gifted select mortals with artistic talent. For Romantic poets like Wordsworth and Coleridge, creativity was an erratic flash of inspiration that only manifested for a lucky few. 

In truth, the source of creativity lies in metareality, which is accessible to all of us. Profound creativity occurs when an individual perceives that which lies beyond the conventions of everyday reality. William Shakespeare didn’t just employ Elizabethan vocabulary to create his plays. He arranged this vocabulary in a new and unconventional way. Vincent Van Gogh didn’t just combine different colors in his paintings; he used color, shade, and tone to innovate a unique way of representing the world that surrounded him.