The Book summary

When you consider the big thinkers who’ve tried to get to the bottom of human identity, you might think of Freud or Jung and their groundbreaking research on the unconscious mind.

However, these psychologists, as well as the majority of people throughout history, have been ignoring a basic truth about human identity. And this truth is so simple that it’s difficult to even express it with words.

When people think of “God,” many imagine an all-seeing person who lives in the sky and has the power to control everything. And yet, throughout the ages, there have been many other ideas of what God is.

In ancient India, many people followed the Hindu philosophy of Vedanta, which teaches that God is everywhere and part of everything, rather than existing in some separate realm.

We tend to think of a lot of things in binary terms. There’s either light or darkness, sound or silence. There’s one particular binary relationship of which we’re extra fond: cause and effect.

This is the belief that everything we see and everything that happens is the result of some other prior event. But if this were really the case, it would mean that we had no free will, because there would always be some earlier event causing the current one to happen. This means we’re always reacting and never making a decision that isn’t influenced by some other decision. Pretty crazy, right?

To understand how to see the big picture, it makes sense to first understand why and how we get bogged down in the details.

To begin with, looking at something is an active process since there are always different things to notice, even when they’re all part of the same object. So it’s not just a flower, there are the roots, stem and petals, along with the different colors of the stem, petals and so on.

Death is another persistent taboo in Western society. No one wants to talk about death or even think about it. If it were up to them, most people would stay eternally young.

You might think it’s understandable to be scared of death, but the real reason it frightens us is due to the way it’s presented in Western religions.

There’s a good reason science fiction is so popular. It gives us the chance to discover parallel universes, explore space with brilliant androids – the possibilities are endless. Every day seems to come with new scientific breakthroughs, so the question on many people’s minds is: what’s in store for human beings?

In one sense, technology will make us more connected.