Although we don’t often think about it, each of us inhabits two realities. One is the physical world, the other is our personal reality. Once you state this apparently simple fact, mysteries immediately arise. If two cameras photograph a tree, star, the sky or a cloud, the photos will be exact duplicates (assuming that the two cameras are set identically), but if two people gaze at a tree, a trained botanist will see something very different from somebody lost n the woods. If you are distracted, you might not notice the tree at all, since looking is a voluntary act, not an automatic one.

If you have ever sat down and seriously asked, “Who am I?” you’ve done something few people ever get around to. To seriously ask the question implies that you don’t already know the answer, and everyone does—or thinks they do. We use the word “I” all the time without finding any mystery to it. ‘I” is the identity that points to you, the individual. ‘I” is the skin-enclosed ego in the body you see in the mirror. “I” is the separate mind that makes you uniquely different from all the other people who walk around with their own version of “I.”

There has never been a better time to reach a state of higher consciousness than now. On the surface this seems like a paradox. Modern secular society is far removed from the pursuit of higher consciousness, whether we call it nearness to God, enlightenment, awakening, or living a saintly life. This has the effect of placing it out of reach of our ordinary life experience.

Putting higher consciousness back into everyday life can happen in our own times, because what is involved is a process that anyone can undertake. The most basic way to define this is as a reset of the mind, and there is abundant evidence about how resetting the mind works—it has similarities to undertaking any project that focuses the mind in a new direction, such as training for a marathon or adopting an anti-aging program, while at the same time there are significant differences. 

Human beings made a bad bargain when we gave up our wholeness. Every other living creature takes wholeness for granted, meaning that bacteria, ferns, horses, and chimpanzees survive and thrive simply by being who they are—they have no other choice. The material processes, from cell to tissue to organ are the foundation of their existence.

Although falling in love is perhaps the most intensely blissful experience anyone will have in a lifetime, this hasn’t worked to promote love as a way of life. Falling in love is temporary, and soon the real world returns, imposing all kinds of demands that seem impervious to love. Turning the other cheek doesn’t work in wartime. Feeling compassion for a mass murderer defies human nature. Loving someone who hates you hardly makes sense.

In anxious times the focus on fear seems constant and yet extremely unhelpful. Neither the body nor the mind can adapt to fear for long stretches of time without causing bad effects. If you feel fearful and you want to feel differently, what path should you take? 

People tend to be unsuccessful at finding a way out of anxiety.  That’s because the two most common responses to anxiety are denial and distraction. By ignoring your anxiety or doing something that takes your mind off it, you might find temporary relief. But is there something more permanent and effective? 

The messages that society sends about change are two-edged. On one side is the marketing strategy that uses new and improved to spark sales. On the other hand are life insurance companies selling financial security in old age. You can divide almost anything between those two messages, the allure of change and the anxiety it arouses. 

Everyone feels the pull of these two forces, and in anxious times, what looms larger is fear of change. But human beings are designed to embrace change, because we are the only creatures who can choose a creative life. A cat is content to eat, sleep, and lie in the sun. It was designed to be a creature of instinct, and very little free choice is allowed.

Rationality is the most ingenious invention ever devised by the human mind for extracting order out of chaos. As raw experience, the physical world is chaos soup. We are bombarded by billons of perceptual bits every minute—the retina at the back of your eye alone receives trillions of photons a minute. Chaos is totally disorderly and disorganized. It makes no sense; therefore, the world makes no sense unless something steps in to organize things so that everyday life doesn’t feel like a storm-tossed ship.

Reason did the trick. You can gaze out your window and see trees, sky, buildings, and other people, giving each a name. You can hone your reason, go to graduate school, and become an expert in botany so that you know everything about trees or architecture so that you can build a house or skyscraper. The modern world has been engineered by the rational mind. So what could go wrong?

The need for advances in mental health is growing, and the problems are reaching more people than ever. No one would be shocked to hear that nearly 30% of Americans have seen a therapist during the pandemic, according to one online survey. “Those most likely to seek help include victims of layoffs or furloughs (46%), Gen Zers (39%) and millennials (37%), and men (34%).” The survey, by ValuePenguin, reflects a critically stressful time. But this spike in numbers isn’t adequate to represent the number of people in mental distress that is either temporary or chronic. According to a poll conducted by the American Psychiatric Association, more than half of parents are worried about their children’s mental well-being.

All the methods to prevent or reverse aging begin with the same assumption: aging is universal. It happens to everyone. But that isn’t strictly true. The only processes that age are rooted in time. Your mind has thoughts, your cells in your body undergo thousands of changes per second, and even your genes, which are permanent, trigger all kinds of activities that are temporary. This whole structure rooted in time will age.

What if you could make aging, the bane of human existence, a blissful process instead of a painful one? This question is almost never asked, certainly not by researchers into aging. No matter what new scientific track holds promise—and there are dozens of them—one assumption is never challenged, the assumption that aging is a negative process, like getting sick. The two go together, since the elderly are subject to conditions like cancer and heart disease far more than the young, and eventually most people die from a final illness.

We live in a time when breakthroughs are sought to prevent or reverse aging. For the longest time aging itself, although a universal process, was a deep mystery. There is no gene for aging, and nothing is completely predictable, because no two people age alike, not even identical twins.

Some years ago it was considered a secret that explaining the universe had reached a dead end. Only the most informed scientists talked about it, but eventually a major shift occurred, and the public caught on. Instead of a Theory of Everything, which had been the holy grail of physics, a state of confusion, conflicting theories, advanced mathematics, and wild out-of-the-box speculations defined the mess that had come about. No one could say where space, time, matter, and energy came from, and they still can’t.

There is a creative state of confusion that is incredibly special: bewilderment. Ordinary confusion bothers us because people find it hard to live with uncertainty. Stress is increased if you don’t know what’s going to happen next. But instead of being an anxious state like ordinary confusion, bewilderment is the exact opposite: it leads to creativity, wonder and awe. If you are really bewildered, you will experience bliss.

What if time doesn’t exist? That’s a new question in physics that has become a hot topic. There are no viable theories about where time came from, which is a huge difficulty if you want to explain the universe. At the instant of the Big Bang space and time suddenly appeared, either out of nowhere or out of some complex “pre-reality” that is unimaginable. The only hope is to find a mathematical formulation that might or might not need for time to exist.

At one time or another everyone experiences the modern version of fear, which is anxiety. Our ancestors experienced physical threats that made the fight-or-flight response useful. That’s no longer the case. In modern life, largely thanks to increased stress, we endure a low-level pressure on the nervous system. When this chronic, nagging response rises to the surface of the mind, a person notices the telltale signs of modern fear: worry, insomnia, an absence of happiness, distraction, all of which can build into chronic anxiety.

The way we deal with modern fear determines to a great extent how creative, fulfilling, and contented daily life is. Many billions are spent on tranquilizers, which can reduce the symptoms of anxiety, but they are only a stopgap. Take away the drug, and anxiety almost always returns.

The question of evil can crop up almost anytime, but it becomes pressing when war, with its mass violence and atrocities fills the news. Violence comes in many other forms, as we all know, so settling the questions about evil needs to be addressed.

Evil manifests in the world through actions, and although an evil act almost always is associated with violence, there are other aspects, such as destructiveness, oppression, and victimization. Yet to understand evil, we need to stick with actions. Having bad thoughts, bursting out in anger, and saying in the heat of an argument, “I could kill you” fall short of an evil act.

Choosing your personal lifestyle became critically important starting only a few decades ago, after it was realized that your well-being, and especially your health, depends on your lifestyle. This was the most important turning point for the wellness movement. Previously, maintaining physical health was centered on preventing risks like smoking and high cholesterol diet, and medical training in wellness was practically nil.

Most of the worst risks are still connected with bad choices. You have the freedom to choose a lifestyle that includes tobacco and alcohol, no exercise, and a diet heavy in processed foods, hydrogenated fat, and sugar. But there’s enough information available to give pause. As a result, better choices are being made by most people, and an improved lifestyle is the result.