Three years ago was a turning point in my life, because I finally had everything I thought I needed to be

fulfilled, and I still had this voice in my head saying Ive got to do more to be happy. The more that I
looked at my own suffering deeply, the more I saw it in every single person around us. We have trouble
standing in lines, were impatient with our own children. Its as if we all think the future holds the promise
for our fulfillment. I come from a scientific background, and so I wanted to use that background to
understand the real root and source of why there is so much suffering. Where its led me has totally
changed my views of the current scientific paradigm. More importantly than that, its changed my views on
what it means to be a human being, and to be alive. I want to share this theory with you, and it is way out
there, so I ask you to have a critical but open mind for the next 14 minutes, because you might not
actually be what you think you are.
So who am I? Im a human being, and I am 33 years old. But if you take a microscope and you look at any
part of me, you see cells. I am a community of fifty trillion cells doing a magic dance, but if you look at any
one of those cells with an even closer microscope, you see twenty trillion atoms. So I am also a
community of a thousand trillion trillion atoms, but when you look at those atoms really up close they fade
away, and all you see is energy. And 13.7 billion years ago, at the Big Bang, everything that weve ever
found in the universe was was one infinitesimal, undifferentiated, pure energy.
All of us are energy. A human being is a very complex pattern of energy. I stand here as a 33 year old
basically motionless, but when you look at any single part of me, Im moving the speed of light, and Im
the age of the universe. So the question for me is: I know this conceptually, why dont we feel it? Why do
we walk around and we are so sure that we are a human being all the time, and we never feel like we are
energy? Because it sounds awesome. I think the reason that we dont notice it is because we are so
distracted by the human levels of our experience that we fail to notice what is always sitting beneath. So I
want to look at those distractions.
Take five seconds, and think about something that you are going to do tomorrow. What you just did is
something that as far as we understand, no other organism in the entire universe can do. You just built an
alternate reality inside your head. You just made a prediction about the future that has never happened in
reality. This power for prediction, when you can compare alternate realities, allows you to plan for the
future. From agriculture to your retirement, this has changed the face of the planet. Its probably the most
significant evolutionary step forward since walking upright.
I want to look at this tool in your head, because your mind is a thought generating machine, to make,
proliferate predictions about the future, to guide and goal-orient your behavior. What does this machine
look like in all of our heads in 2011?
Another experiment: take 10 seconds and stop thinking

Did anyone make it 10 seconds? I make it about two and then I start strategizing about how Im going to
stop thinking and then I think about that the whole time. What this means is you have such an
evolutionarily advantageous tool that its become completely compulsive, but youve got to remember, no
other organism does this at all. And the side effect of having the most evolutionarily advantageous tool in
the entire universe sitting in your head is that you have no control over it, and when you have no control
and you compulsively generate all these possible realities, you always compare them to where you are, to
try and goal orient your behavior. This creates an entirely new class of human suffering. Things like
jealousy, and regret about something that happened in the past, and anxiety about your future, no other
organism can feel. I want to understand if its possible to totally eliminate those sources of suffering from
humanity.
This is just a brief list of all those possible sources of suffering.
In order to find out if it is possible to remove those sources, we have to take a kind of scientific
experimental objective look at ourselves. We have to look at all the layers of our own experience and try
to be as objective as possible about them. This is amazingly difficult because were so emotionally
involved in our own lives. As any of you know, if you go to a movie and you are emotionally involved, two
minutes into it you totally forget that you are at a movie, and the lights turn on at the end and you are
shocked back into reality. So this is even more difficult because we have to look at our own movie, the
movie inside our consciousness.
We are going to do two quick experiments, which will only give a taste of something that takes much
longer to kind of understand the depth of.

The first experiment is with sight. From what we understand in physics, all light is a vibration of
electromagnetic field. None of those light waves intrinsically have any color, theres just this change in
frequency. But once those waves go into your eye and into your brain, you create the subjective
experience of color. What this means is that you all think that youre seeing me out here with a red shirt
on, but this red only exists in your head. This entire picture you are seeing is happening inside your head;
in a movie inside your consciousness, and if you remove a little bit of the attention from me directly, you
can start to have some attention on yourself noticing that you are seeing me inside your head.
So lets do a second experiment that is even more subtle than that one. Read this sentence twice, silently
to yourself
Its weird, right? But you can get this very weird, subtle perspective that you can look at your own
thought process objectively. You are actually listening to the soundtrack of thoughts inside your head; in
your movie of consciousness.

Now imagine that I do this process for thousands of hours, and I just try to look as objectively as possible
at my thoughts, my emotions, my perceptions, and even the way that my brain has modeled space and
time. The more I pull the attention away from the thoughts and perceptions, the more I seem to notice
myself noticing these things inside my consciousness. Eventually maybe I can pull all of the attention way
from all of those layers of thoughts, perceptions, my body, my sensations and theres nothing left to
perceive. Theres nothing left that I can consider myself because I have seen it all in front as not me. Yet
the one thing that remains is this feeling of existence. I am remains. This feeling of I am. What I find when
I sit in that state is that what my identity is, is beyond perception. It cannot be perceived, but it is still
experienced. This I am is the root of our entire existence. I am is latent in every single aspect of our
existence, but just like a fish might never notice the water that it swims in, we might never notice the I am,
because its covered.
I am is a completely empty experience. Its devoid of any content, and when I experience it directly, on its
own, theres the possibility for a realization.
Maybe Im not a human being that has consciousness. Maybe Im consciousness that is shaped into a
human being.
When I see this totally empty experience, there is no content, form, structure theres not even a model of
space and time that is generated in the mind. Weve seen those conditions before. 13.7 billion years ago
when the entire universe was an undifferentiated pure energy. So just maybe theres the potential to
realize directly, I am that energy. I always have been that energy and I always will be that energy.
Einstein said that thoughts suffer from an optical illusion of consciousness. This illusion that there is a
separate person inside an environment, when in reality theres just energy in motion, everywhere. Just like
an ocean is water in motion we can call a certain part of that ocean a wave but that gives us the illusion
that the wave is a separate entity in the ocean. A wave is not in the ocean, a wave is the ocean. Similarly
we might not be waves, maybe were the ocean. Maybe all of us are energy and we can realize that
directly.
This experience could never be reduced to words because it makes words, but it could be experienced.
I think that is such an important experience that people have been trying to name it for thousands of
years. They call it spiritual enlightenment. I think that the first human beings started realizing that they
were fundamentally energy about 2500 years ago. All of them say the same thing it is the complete
ending of human suffering. Of course its the end of human suffering! All suffering is based on the illusory
separation that theres an individual in the environment, that theres a person that has to survive, that this
specific collection of a thousand trillion trillion atoms has to hold itself together. However, if I realize
directly that I am energy, and I realize that the body and the mind are a temporary manifestation of that
energy, then I can fully accept that the death of the body and the mind was never something that
happened to me, because I was always energy and I always will be.

If I were to experience that directly, this voice in my head that tells me I have to do certain things in order
to be fulfilled loses all of its power. At this very moment I never have to listen to that voice again.
Everything in life becomes a game, for fun; a play. Weve all experienced that, but its very hard to
remember, because we were so young. Maybe we were at the beach building a sand castle and the entire
world faded away because we were only building it to build it and we werent trying to get somewhere
else. We hadnt even learned how to plan, so the only moment that mattered to us was right now. I think
that this experience is so important and powerful that every religious tradition at its core has been trying to
convince us of its importance, and if its true. if the true end of all human psychological suffering is
actually possible it is the most important thing science could be studying.
When we look at monks and nuns who have meditated or prayed for thousands of hours we see
remarkable shifts on their brain scans. Trillions of neural connections have changed configuration. Along
with this quantifiable, objective change in the operating system of the brain, they describe a feeling of
undifferentiated, infinite, oneness. To me that sounds like they are having the direct experience of being
energy. Enlightenment science and enlightenment engineering would study these ancient technologies of
prayer and meditation as data sets to understand what has to change in the structure of a human brain for
a human being to understand that they are energy directly. We still have no idea how much modern
technology could completely change our ability to understand that. Maybe its possible that within our
lifetimes we could eradicate human suffering.
What would the world look like then, if every single one of us felt complete, felt whole, and felt
interconnected?
When you let go of individual survival, all of your priorities change because you actually see the entire
world as your body. You see the suffering of others as your own suffering and you want to help. What is
the actual power of a human being to really benefit the world, when they are able to put the priorities of
the whole system in front of themselves, even if that means they have to die in the process? How many of
us can do that right now?
What if seven billion of us did that?
Maybe the one thing that keeps us from actually solving all of the other problems in the world is this
persistent, flawed thought that we are separate from the world. Maybe its time we change our minds