Listen to Chapter 1: Winning the Lottery!
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You’ve won the lottery. Congratulations!
The prize is enormous, $350 million. Yours is the only ticket with the winning numbers, so it’s all yours. After a lifetime of lack, owning few of the possessions you wanted, you’re now in a position to have them all.
Your lifestyle possibilities are endless. You can live any place you want. You can make friends with the rich and famous. The most exotic foods and drinks are yours for the asking.
You can afford any health treatment you desire. Enjoy the highest-quality superfoods. Have a masseuse on call 24/7. Train with the most exclusive coaches in the world. Enjoy the world’s finest medical care. Combine the best alternative medicine treatments with the best conventional ones.
You can quit your dead-end job. You’ll never need to work again. You can play, create, and engage in any project that takes your fancy. You’re set for life.
There’s only one problem.
You don’t know you’ve won the lottery.
You purchased the ticket in a grocery store on a whim. You threw it in the bag with the receipt and store coupons. When you got home, you tossed the papers in the same pile you use for all receipts. You never checked to see if you’d picked the winning numbers.
There, day after day, the winning lottery ticket lies. Weeks, months, and years go by. Your prize is unclaimed, your life unchanged. You actually own $350 million—a third of a billion dollars—but you don’t know it. So you live your life as though your prize doesn’t exist.
Eventually, you die, much the same way you’ve lived, unaware that you’ve been fabulously wealthy for decades.
That tragedy is the usual human story.
In truth, we’re all the possessors of wealth beyond our wildest dreams. We just don’t know it. We live our lives as though that wealth doesn’t exist. We live in a cramped dark basement of consciousness, never venturing above into the palace that is ours. We just don’t notice that it’s there.
A few people take the trouble to explore and consequently discover that we are all infinite. They travel in that infinity and inhabit the gorgeous heavenly palace that is theirs.
We call them the enlightened ones. They live in the light.
Yet that light is in each of us. We all possess the winning lottery ticket. The only difference between the enlightened ones and the rest of humankind is that they realize the preciousness of what they already possess.
Yogananda, author of Autobiography of a Yogi, said “[Y]ou realize that all along there was something tremendous within you, and you did not know it.” Jesus said, “The kingdom of heaven is within you.”
Enlightenment is not reaching some special place. It is realizing what you already are. It’s understanding that, even though you’re living in a mind and body, you are an infinite being. You have access to all the qualities of the universe: love, joy, peace, power, wisdom, and life.
Who You Are
You are the universe. Your consciousness, that which makes you aware, is a local expression of the consciousness of the universe. You are local, in the sense that you are living in space and time. You can tell me how old you are, what gender you are, and where you live.
The consciousness of the universe is nonlocal. It extends throughout all time and space. It isn’t limited to a particular time or to a particular region in space.
Because it is everywhere and everything, it is also you. It is everyone. It is who we all actually are.
But like throwing the winning lottery ticket into the pile and forgetting about it, we don’t know we are infinity. As a result, we live in suffering and limitation. Enlightenment is simply remembering who you actually are. It is claiming the reward that’s rightfully yours.
Crazy Happy
Living as the universe makes you crazy happy. You’re happy at a level you can’t even imagine before. Your happiness level simply explodes through the roof of what you thought possible and just keeps blasting higher from there.
You aren’t happy “because of ____________________” (fill in the blank). Your happiness is 100% independent of what’s going on around you. Good things happen … bad things happen … and you’re crazy happy regardless.
All the suffering you experienced in the musty basement falls away. As you explore the many rooms of the palace, daily delights await you. You start each day overflowing with crazy happy love. A researcher who has studied thousands of people in nonlocal consciousness says that the experience is “truly is beyond great. It’s the thing you’ve spent your whole life looking for without knowing it, as you search in so many other countless and fruitless directions” (Martin, 2019, p. 189).
Your heart is filled with gratitude, awe, and joy in each moment of each day. Love becomes your dominant emotion. You laugh and smile hundreds of times throughout the day. Your joy is so expansive that it infects everyone around you.
You look forward to a future filled with more of the same. Love and joy today, yesterday, and tomorrow. Your life is one long celebration of the exuberance of living in heaven.
This Course Reminds You
This Course is designed to help you remember the infinite being that you already are, the unlimited wealth you already possess, and the crazy happy state that’s rightfully yours. It’s full of quick little tips, exercises that bring that reality to your consciousness throughout the day. They remind you that you’ve won the lottery, so that you don’t lapse into the forgetfulness that has characterized your existence until now and miss out on the happiness and riches you already possess.
The exercises train you to align your local consciousness with that of the universe. When you do this, all the characteristics of the consciousness of the universe flow into your local consciousness.
Without the awareness that you are the consciousness of the universe in human form, you suffer. You are buffeted by physical and mental waves, going up and down. Your emotions are positive one moment, negative the next. Your mind is besieged by negative thoughts and you don’t have the ability to control them. They distract you from the reality that you already live in heaven.
When you use the techniques in this Course, you think differently from Day One. You feel differently right away. For a while each day, you remember your riches and enjoy them fully.
We all forget heaven sometimes, but using the tips in this Course, your periods of forgetfulness quickly become shorter. Eventually, you are living the lifestyle of a blissful multimillionaire each day. You relax into that reality. It becomes your everyday mental and emotional awareness.
This transforms your local reality. With this transformation, you begin to live your life as a local expression of the nonlocal reality field of the universe, which results in a very different life. No part of your life remains untouched. Love, career, family, health, money, and work all transform. They change to reflect the changed consciousness of the person at the center of all of them: you.
Gift of the Masters
This Course hasn’t been created by any one person. It is the end result of thousands of years of experimentation by thousands of master teachers. It summarizes their wisdom and distills their best techniques for remembering the riches you inherently possess. It is the millionaire giving you her millions—no strings attached.
Throughout recorded history, these wise human beings have asked the most profound questions. Who and what are we, and why are we here?
The exterior trappings of the world’s religions may look very different. But the answers they give to these questions are remarkably similar: We are individual local consciousnesses emanating from a single great universal nonlocal consciousness, and our purpose is to journey back to union with that source. While there are many paths that can take us to it, there is a single common destination.
Those who complete the journey have a direct and unfiltered experience of that source. These are the mystics. Religions are signposts pointing to the direct experience of union that the mystics enjoy. The ultimate goal of every religion is that oneness. While theologies may differ, mystics of every religion share an identical experience. They lose identification with their local selves and unite with the Infinite.
Mystic Andrew Harvey, author of The Direct Path, says that, “When you look past the different terminologies employed by the different mystical systems, you see clearly that they are each talking about the same overwhelming truth—that we are all essentially children of the Divine and can realize that identity with our source here on earth and in a body” (Harvey, 2000. p. 34).
True Masters are compassion embodied. It might have taken them decades to reach the goal. They may have gone through great suffering to get there.
They don’t want you to suffer. They want you to get to heaven quickly and easily. That’s why this approach is called the “Short Path.” You don’t need to spend decades slowly remembering that you’re wealthy and only then start enjoying your riches. You want to begin luxuriating in your inheritance right now. The Sufi poet Rumi marveled, “Why are you so enchanted by this world when a mine of gold lies within you?” This Course gives you your gold mine here and now.
The Masters who came before have experimented with hundreds of techniques. By trial and error, over millennia, they’ve discovered which ones lead to that internal gold mine quickest. They’ve described these in scriptures and sutras. This Course is their gift to you. You’ll find quotes and ideas from every major religion, since all religions provide signposts to move us toward that goal of union.
Not only is the path short, so is this Course. It’s designed to guide you through the Short Path as efficiently as possible. It consists of only a couple of hundred pages of reading, plus brief audios and videos. It’s the shortest possible distance between you and your gold mine.
PB and the Sages
Your primary guide to the Short Path is a man named Paul Brunton. He usually referred to himself as “PB.” He was born in England in 1898. After World War I, he began traveling in search of the answers to life’s great questions. He was already a seasoned meditator and he’d had extraordinary mystical experiences, though he did not yet understand them.
PB’s Quest took him first to India, then to Egypt, and eventually all over the world. At different times, he lived in Japan, China, Greece, California, Ohio, New York, Bolivia, Mexico, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Austria, New Zealand, and Australia. He sought out the great spiritual Masters of every religion.
Brunton’s first major book, A Search in Secret India, was published in 1934. Eventually, he wrote many others, including The Wisdom of the Overself, The Hidden Teaching Beyond Yoga, The Quest of the Overself, The Secret Path, and The Inner Reality.
During the 1930s, his books sold millions of copies, and continued to provide guidance in the decades that followed. They have been translated into over 20 languages. After his death in 1981, the Paul Brunton Philosophic Foundation published, in 16 volumes, The Notebooks of Paul Brunton.
PB kept pen and paper with him at all times. After he had spent a day or a year with a saint or mystic, he would write down the teachings he had received as well as his own inspired reflections. He understood the commonality of the mystical experience that transcends all religions and, with his vast experience, he connected the dots between them.
1. Paul Brunton
Due to his reputation as a philosopher and Sage, Brunton gained access to teachers and teachings that had previously been unavailable except to initiates. In volume 8 of The Notebooks of Paul Brunton, he describes himself and his life’s work in these words :
"Asiatic and African mystics, yogis and learned men, and even rare sages of whose eminence and existence the West still knows little or nothing have given me their confidence … I have thus had several teachers, yet ... my loftiest, strangest, most significant, and most elevating mystic experiences occurred before I had ever met a single teacher … In my youth and novitiate I could not understand them. I was dazzled by the light and so continued to grope as though I were still in the dark. Now at long last I have brought my mystic and philosophic wandering to an anchor.”
"And if I abhor the thought of forming a cult and making disciples, this is not to say that I abhor the thought of assisting my fellow man to find something of what I have already found.… For no one can come into even partial comprehension of the Overself which supports the existence of all living creatures and continue to sit smugly in self-centered enjoyment of his knowledge and egoistic enjoyment of his peace.… he has to [teach] those who aspire to a wiser and better life. Their service becomes his inescapable duty."
There’s Only One
Brunton’s book A Search in Secret India introduced the work of Ramana Maharshi to the West. Ramana Maharshi is revered today as a great teacher of nondualism. Nondualism refers to the concept that there is a single unitary consciousness. Nondualism transcends all perceptions of “I” and “other.” It is derived from the Sanskrit word advaita, which means “not two.”
2. Ramana Maharshi
The Short Path to this nondual state is also referred to by other names, including Mahamudra, Dzogchen, and the Direct Path. A tongue-in-cheek definition comes from the Sefer Yetsirah, the earliest Jewish mystical text: “Before the One, what is there to count?” (Vidich, 2015, p. 168).
PB’s Short Path teachings are scattered among his many books. Helpfully, his editors have gathered them together in a single volume called The Short Path to Enlightenment: Instructions for Immediate Awakening. They form the foundation of this Course. This transcription of a talk by PB describing the Short and Long Paths is used with the permission of the Paul Brunton Philosophic Foundation. It’s well worth reading: https://realization.org/p/paul-brunton/short-path-and-long-path.html
Brunton’s work gained him the trust of contemporary Masters. Ramana Maharshi said of him, “He is one of my ‘eyes.’ My shakti [spiritual power] is working through him. Follow him closely.” He encouraged students to read Brunton and remarked to him: “You are saying the same thing in your books that I say, only you say it in a modern way.”
Nondualism teacher Adyashanti observed that PB’s book The Short Path to Enlightenment, on which this Course is based, contains “profound teachings of immediate spiritual awakening that have the power to short circuit the seeker in us and reveal the true nature of reality here and now.” Gangaji said this book is “alive with supreme knowledge.”
Thus as you apply the principles from The Short Path to Enlightenment found in this course and practice the exercises that PB advocated, you benefit from the distilled wisdom of millennia.
The Neuroscience of Enlightenment
In the century since Brunton began to learn and write about the Short Path, science has discovered an enormous amount about how the brain and body work. In my book Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy, I review the research on the brains of modern adepts following the same practices as the old Masters whose wisdom PB recorded.
These include Tibetan Buddhist monks who have spent 10,000 hours or more in meditation over the course of their lives. Other groups include Franciscan nuns who have spent over 10,000 hours in contemplative Christian prayer.
We can now place these modern-day saints into an MRI scanner or hook them up to an EEG machine and map their brain activity. The technology continues to improve, just as the resolution on your phone or laptop screen or virtual reality goggles has reached higher and higher levels of clarity.
3. A monk getting an MRI
The capabilities of brain scanners have increased to the point that we can now map brain activity down to the level of an individual neuron. These studies have given us a clear picture of the remarkable brain activity of the Sages. Their brains function quite differently from those of people in ordinary consciousness. They engage four distinct brain regions. Together these make up “the Enlightenment Network.”
Brunton describes the phenomenology of the mystical experience. “Phenomenology” is a piece of scientific jargon used to name the subjective internal experience of a person. What the tools of modern neuroscience give us is the ability to match the phenomenology of mystical states with objective neurological changes.
This research shows that certain brain regions go offline during the mystical experience, while the Enlightenment Network comes online. Just as the mystical experience itself transcends religion, so, too, do these brain states. The parts of the brain that light up and those that go dark when living saints are in states of mystical union are similar whether the practitioner is a Christian, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, or Taoist.
The descriptions of extraordinary states handed down to us by the mystics use poetry, music and prose to describe their phenomenology. But empirical research uses scientific measurement to map the neuroscience of the Short Path. As adepts practice techniques, scientists can measure their effect on the brain in real time. This has enabled researchers to identify the practices that get us there efficiently. We can then guide ordinary people into extraordinary states quickly.
How quickly? Neuroscientist Andrew Newberg, coauthor of How Enlightenment Changes Your Brain, writes that, “Normally, we think that the brain changes slowly. … But the Enlightenment process suggests that your brain can change in an instant. … It is already in you to begin with. It is just a matter of finding it” (Newberg & Waldman, 2017, p. 42).
Newberg says that, “The ability to experience enlightenment … appears to be wired into our brain and consciousness” (Newberg & Waldman, 2017, p. 18). We don’t have to go to great lengths to find enlightenment. It’s hardwired into the brain you already have.
Self-Focus and Negative Emotion in the Brain
During mystical experiences, one key part of the brain that goes dark is the Default Mode Network or DMN. Other regions such as the parietal lobe, which processes the location of your body in space, downregulate dramatically too. But neuroscientists consider a quiet DMN a signature of the mystical state.
The DMN constructs our sense of self. It focuses on the past and the future. Its activation is associated with negative thinking in the form or rumination on past problems and their projection into future worries. It’s called the Default Mode Network because it is the state the brain defaults to when not occupied with a task.
4. Primary nodes of the DMN. The mid-prefrontal cortex in the front, and the posterior cingulate cortex in the back of the brain.
When we’re doing something, such as kicking a ball, building a spreadsheet, composing an email, strumming the guitar, or navigating through an unfamiliar town, a different set of brain regions lights up. It’s called the Task Positive Network or TPN because it is engaged when we focus on a task. When we stop, the brain diverts that energy from the TPN to the DMN.
The past and future focus of the DMN is also associated with negative thinking. A large-scale Harvard study found that people’s brains are stuck in negative thinking 47% of the time.
Research shows that focusing on self usually means suffering. Thinking about past disasters and threats to the self produces unhappiness, as does worrying about disasters that might befall the self in the future. The term that neuroscience uses for this is “self-referential thinking” or SRT for short.
Think of your apps (software) and your phone (hardware). In a similar way, SRT is software and the DMN is hardware. SRT is one of the mind’s software programs. It’s the “suffering self” app. The DMN is the specialized chunk of neural hardware that runs the app.
“Self-referential thinking” is that whiny, petty, self-absorbed, critical inner voice that’s always yammering away inside our heads. Researcher Jeffery Martin quips that, “If it were another person, you wouldn’t want to be stuck in an elevator with them.” Unfortunately, since the voice is inside our own skulls, there’s no way to step out of the elevator. Our only way to escape SRT is to dial down the DMN that runs the app.
This Short Path Course weaves the insights of neuroscience into the teachings of the mystics. For example, MRI scanners can now measure the level of activity of the DMN, and the self-referential thinking app it runs. Rumi, Ramakrishna, Lao Tsu, and Saint Teresa knew nothing of these brain regions. Ancient traditions refer to this type of mental activity as “the ego.”
A thousand years ago, the Sufis, the mystical branch of Islam, defined different stages on the path to enlightenment. The first of these is called “the annihilation of the ego.” That’s the phenomenological experience of releasing the self-absorbed chatter about past and future typical of the DMN. It’s understanding that the old self trapped in the dark basement isn’t who you are.
The way this shows up on a brain scanner is that when a mystic enters that phenomenological experience of oneness, the DMN goes dark. With practice, these adepts are able to shut it down within seconds of closing their eyes.
Your inner commentator — providing an endless stream of criticism, judgment, evaluation, and description — shuts off. Past and future fall away and you’re left with only the timeless present moment. The brain’s Enlightenment Network lights up. This opens the door to the inner peace described by the mystics.
5. Parts of the brain changed by an effective long-term meditation practice. These include those involved with attention (insula and anterior cingulate cortex), regulation of stress and the DMN (ventromedial prefrontal cortex and limbic system), empathy (insula), and self-awareness (mid prefrontal cortex)
In this Course, I compare the phenomenological experiences described by the mystics, such as the annihilation of the ego, with the insights of science, such as the shutdown of the DMN we see in MRI studies. It’s an exciting example of science and spirituality describing the same event from different perspectives.
Self-Transcendence
Abraham Maslow was one of the towering figures of 20th-century psychology. Along with Ida Rolf, Fritz Perls, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Carl Rogers, and many others, Maslow helped create and define the “human potential” movement of the 1960s. His most famous contribution is the “hierarchy of needs.”
6. Maslow’s pyramid as most people know it
Maslow’s pyramid has physiological needs at the bottom and self-actualization at the top. Basic survival needs such as food and water must be met if a human being is to focus on higher level needs such as friends, family, and community (the need for belonging).
Maslow’s concept of a hierarchy of needs became enormously influential in psychology and popular culture. At the top of the pyramid is self-actualization. This represents the highest order of motivation. It drives us to express our full potential and actualize our ideal self.
What few people realize, however, is that Maslow, near the end of his life, revised his hierarchy of needs. As he inhabited that state of self-actualization, he began to experience extraordinary states of consciousness. This led him to the realization that there was a step above self-actualization. He called it “self-transcendence.”
Maslow associated self-transcendence with peak psychological and spiritual experiences. These are filled with “great ecstasy and wonder and awe, the loss of placing in time and space with, finally, the conviction that something extremely important and valuable had happened” (Maslow, 1970, p. 164). It’s realizing that you’ve won the lottery. These are the same characteristics identified in large-scale studies of ordinary people who’ve reached peak states (Newberg & Waldman, 2017).
7. Maslow’s updated pyramid
Maslow came to see self-actualization as “a step along the path to the transcendence of identity” (Maslow, 1961). This language echoes both the “the annihilation of the ego” of the Sufis and the “release of self-referential thinking” that occurs as the DMN shuts down in deep meditation.
The early stages of the Short Path as described by Paul Brunton focus on these peak experiences. Brunton’s many exercises guide you to the experience of the elevated states described by Maslow. The later stages of the path, however, have a different focus. PB emphasizes practices that bring self-transcendence to everyday living.
Maslow recognized this progression as well. He wrote that ecstasy, awe, and release of self-preoccupation need not be confined to periods of meditation. He said that they “transformed and strengthened even … daily life” (Maslow, 1970, p. 164).
Maslow began to formulate his ideas on self-transcendence in 1967. But later that year, he had a major heart attack. Weak and convalescing, and preoccupied in his role as president of the American Psychological Association, he had little time or opportunity to develop it. A second heart attack in 1970 meant that he was unable to publish this critical development to his theory before his death.
While other psychologists like Ken Wilbur, Michael Washburn and Robert Assigoli developed models of the stages of transformation, Maslow’s remained the most influential. Even today, most people still believe self-actualization to be the top of Maslow’s pyramid. Neuroscience research and the writings of the ancients are now coming together to point us toward the greater capstone of self-transcendence. PB’s exercises, articulated in his books and this Course, give us a path from one to the other.
Harvard University’s adult psychology department has performed many studies mapping the stages of human mental development. The longest running of these has been going for over 80 years and includes several generations of participants.
Robert Kegan, former chair of the department, says that making the shift from an identity embedded in self to viewing self from above — self-transcendence — is the single most powerful driver of personal transformation. Kegan calls it the “subject-object shift” (Kotler, 2014).
That’s because you’re now seeing yourself from a transcendent perspective, objectively. You’re no longer enmeshed in subjective experience, a miserable ego stuck in a dark basement, deludedly believing that’s all you are. PB calls this stage awakening to your “witness-self” (NB 23-6-88).
Andrew Newberg says that “neurological enlightenment [is] our ability to observe ourselves being separate from our daily thoughts and feelings” (Newberg & Waldman, 2017, p. 19). The “witness-self” identified by PB is its neurological equivalent.
These inner states are thus not just the pinnacle of spiritual evolution, but of psychological maturity as well. Enlightenment is more than an esoteric spiritual aspiration. It’s the summit of human psychological evolution and brain development.
Looking at My Body from a Million Miles Away
At one EcoMeditation workshop, participants were hooked up to EEG machines. After the meditation we recorded statements about our subjective experiences. One woman named “Julie,” who suffered from depression, described hers like this :
“At first, having my eyes closed was annoying. I could feel every little scratchy itchy feeling in my skin. My throat tickled, and I wanted to cough. I could hear the guy next to me breathing, and that was annoying too. But then I began to forget about all that stuff, and a feeling of peace came over me.
“I could feel the breath going inside my body. And going out again. It felt like a river flowing. I started to float, like I was a helium balloon or something.
“I seemed to go to another place, and it was beautiful. I could feel the rocks and trees and ocean, and I seemed to be part of it all, like I was absorbed into this perfection of everything there is in the cosmos.
“These four huge blue beings drifted near me, and I felt incredible love and connection flowing out of them. They were like outlines of people but transparent and about 15 feet high. Made out of a beautiful royal blue mist.
“I’ve been so worried about all the stuff going on in my life lately, but one of the beings drifted close to me and I felt reassured. Like she was telling me everything is going to be okay. My heart filled up with love, and I realized that love is everything.
“She gave me a shiny diamond crystal to remind me that she’s always there for me. I put it in my heart. It melted all the miserable, depressed pain that’s been living there for too long, and the pain became drops of water that fell into the ground.
“When you told us to come back into the room, I felt like I was a million miles away. I brought that feeling of peace back into my body. It was hard to come back, and I realize part of me is there all the time.”
That kind of subject-object shift, where you ascend in awareness to a beautiful place, often brings with it a sense of peace. You discover powerful resources there, like Julie’s blue beings. They frequently leave you with gifts that symbolize transformation, like the shiny crystal. When you return from “a million miles away,” you have a new perspective on your life.
States, Traits, Stations, and the Brain’s Enlightenment Network
The fields of both psychology and neuroscience distinguish between states and traits. A state is a temporary experience. A trait is an enduring characteristic.
For instance, bad news might put you into a state of anxiety, but after a while, you recover. You entered into the state of anxiety, then left it. Anxiety was a temporary phenomenon.
That’s quite different from having the trait of anxiety. That trait means you’re an anxious person. Anxiety is an enduring personality characteristic.
When you experience a psychological state, the neurons associated with that state fire in your brain. That’s what allows scientists to measure the brain activity of the DMN, the Task Positive Network, or the Enlightenment Network
As everyone now knows, neurons that fire together wire together. Light up a particular network often enough by experiencing a state, and you begin to hardwire the neural tissue in that part of the brain.
8. State anxiety. A woman is anxious having just read the newspaper.
9. Trait anxiety. She has an anxious outlook on everything.
In this way, you can create a trait. Your personality is now stable in that configuration. Meditators produce extensive rewiring in their brains. The process starts after just a few minutes. It’s measurable on an MRI within days. Brain anatomy can change substantially in as little as four weeks.
The Sufis made a distinction between states and traits. They called traits “stations” to indicate that they were permanent. On the Short Path, states are temporary glimpses of the Infinite. Stations are stable and continuous characteristics. They regarded the “annihilation of the ego” as a key station.
That sounds terrifying to most of us. Annihilation of the entire local self? The death of everything that makes “you” you? It seems extreme, and the harshness of such language has deterred many people from even starting the Quest.
Neuroscience, however, gives us a much more detailed picture. What the Sufis called “annihilation of the ego” today’s science would call the “downregulation of the DMN” and the “cessation of self-referential thinking.” It’s the release of that old “you” that threw the winning lottery ticket in the pile and continued living in the gloomy basement. You’ve stepped from suffering subjective self to the objective “witness self.” That’s a much more reasonable way to view this milestone on the Quest.
Once you’ve practiced that state for long enough, firing those neurons enough to wire them together, you reach the first station. A low-activity DMN, coupled with a high-activity Enlightenment Network, is now one of your brain’s enduring traits. The first set of exercises in this Course are designed to fire the circuits of the “witness self” repeatedly, wiring them together.
In this way, you can create a trait. Your personality is now stable in that configuration. Meditators produce extensive rewiring in their brains. The process starts after just a few minutes. It’s measurable on an MRI within days. Brain anatomy can change substantially in as little as four weeks.
Stepping out of the ego-self brings an end to all the suffering it encapsulates. You experience ecstatic emotional states, the “Bliss Brain” that we measure in MRI scans of adepts.
Once you can light up your Enlightenment Network at will, like the Tibetan monks and Franciscan nuns studied in MRI research, you’re “reborn in your Higher Self.” The metaphor of rebirth is found in virtually all religions. In the book of John, chapter 3 verse 3, Jesus says: “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”
Sufis use the same language. A key station is “Rebirth in the Beloved.” Once you’ve attained that station, getting to union with your Higher Self is easy and routine. You’re now on the Short Path, and your Higher Self guides you from there. While you’re still living an ordinary life as a local self, rebirth confers union with your Nonlocal Self and the ecstatic states that go along with it.
PB characterizes the rebirth stage as a step beyond the “witness self,” and says that our “next task is to discover that [we are] not merely the witness of the rest of existence but essentially of one stuff with it” (NB 23-6-88). That leads to the final stage of union, in which “we can feel our own source to be the single and supreme principle” of the universe. We embody our “oneness with the entire universe in its real being” (NB 21-5-178).
The Trinity of Self
When you describe yourself, who is it doing the describing? When you say, “I am a gardener … a sister … a football player … an engineer … a Christian … a Spaniard” … or any other characteristic, who is it identifying the self in that particular way?
Who is the “who” describing who you are?
The Masters know that it is the universe. It is consciousness describing itself, but few people living in a body understand that. This Course brings you to the awareness that you are the universal web of wisdom expressing as an individual human being. Its exercises train you in how to live as that every day.
Consciousness can be considered in three distinct forms. One is universal consciousness. That’s the infinite intelligence inherent in the universe. It makes the planets spin and the seasons change. You don’t need to understand it, though we all know it’s inherent in everything.
The second form is the consciousness that is describing yourself. That’s the “you” that says “I am a…” and ends the sentence with a noun. You recognize a self that is different from the undifferentiated consciousness of the universe. It’s the Nonlocal Self that says “I am.”
The third is the self being described: “…a gig worker … a foodie …a lover …an historian …a yoga teacher” and so on. That’s the local self.
Paul Brunton calls the middle form of consciousness the “Overself.” It’s the part of yourself that is beyond the body, beyond time, and beyond space. It’s the perspective from which you say, “I am…” In this Course I call it the Nonlocal Self. The distinction between local and nonlocal consciousness was first articulated by my esteemed friend Larry Dossey (Dossey, 2013).
The Overself is what connects the nonlocal consciousness of the universe with the local consciousness of self as a gig worker or a foodie. PB also uses other terms for the Overself, such as the Soul, your Higher Power, Infinite Intelligence, the Presence, the Knower, and your Higher Self. He describes the Overself as:
“That element in [a person’s] consciousness which enables him to understand that he exists, which causes him to pronounce the words “I Am,” … the spiritual element …” (NB 8-1-1). The Overself is “the life-power from which we derive our capacities and our intelligence.” (NB 22-3-175).
The Overself is an eternal presence, pure essence, not bounded by time, and “does not have or need thoughts” (NB 8-1-143). It is simultaneously “infinite spirit” and also the “holy presence” in the individual human heart. It is every human being’s “nonpersonal identity” (NB 28-2-89). The local self is always connected to the Overself, whether or not a human being is conscious of that fact.
According to Brunton, most people are unaware of the Overself. Instead, they live their lives as time-bound egos. Believing that local self is all they are, they’re unaware of the gold mine of love and bliss that is Nonlocal Self. The local ego is wrapped up in self-referential thinking, and usually suffering. Activated by the brain regions of the DMN, it is obsessed with the past and future. Quieting the self-absorbed chatter of the ego, the “monkey mind,” is the first step toward enlightenment.
The Overself is one with the nonlocal universe. When you join in passionate union with your Nonlocal Self, you’re automatically one with the universe. Eckhart Tolle says: “You are not in the universe. You are the universe.”
Gaining Perspective
Getting distance between you and your local self — making the subject-object shift to self-transcendence — changes your perspective. In my book Mind to Matter: The Astonishing Science of How Your Brain Creates Material Reality, I borrow the word ex-stasis, the act of moving beyond yourself, from Steven Kotler (2014), author of The Rise of Superman. “Ex-stasis” means leaving the static perspective of the old you and gaining the insights that come from a higher perspective. You see your life through the eyes of your Higher Self.
This is a shift from the “subjective you” to the “objective you” — the type of leap described by the Harvard project’s former director as the most important accelerator of transformation.
That elevated perspective changes your consciousness, much like astronomers looking at the vastness of space. There’s even a name for the consciousness that results from stargazing: Galaxy Brain (Koren, 2020). It overwhelms viewers with a sense of awe.
“Some people do have the sense when they’re looking across millions of light-years, that our ups and downs are ultimately meaningless on that scale,” according to David Yaden, a psychopharmacology researcher at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
Yaden has researched self-transcendent experiences, including the Galaxy Brain experienced by astronauts. This perspective makes you aware of meaning and purpose you can’t perceive when enmeshed in your local reality.
10. Spiral galaxy
Research has shown that gaining distance from the local self is associated with delta waves, the slowest waves our brains produce. They oscillate between 0 and 4 times per second, or 0-4 Hz. In delta sleep, our brains prune old neural pathways that are no longer being used.
If your focus is on your Higher Self, and you’ve stopped using the old self-referencing pathways that used to process your misery, they start to disintegrate in about three weeks. One researcher calls 0-4 Hz the “IP address of the Sublime” (Wheal, 2020).
One morning after I had just begun writing this Course, I woke up to find a piece of paper next to my bed. I must have perceived this insight as so important that during the night I got up, stumbled about for pen and paper, and wrote these words in the dark:
There is a SINGLE THING in life that is important. Everything else is unimportant.
CONSCIOUSNESS KNOWING ITSELF is important.
Everything else is unimportant. You can divide all of life into these 2 categories.
CONSCIOUSNESS KNOWING ITSELF is important.
Everything else is unimportant. You can divide all of life into these 2 categories.
When we’re asleep, our brains alternate between delta and theta. Most of the night, we’re in delta. Our eyes are also stationary during these periods. About once an hour, for a few minutes, our brains speed up into theta, 4-8 cycles per second. Our eyes move around even though our eyelids are closed, so this stage is called “rapid eye movement” or REM sleep. We then drop back down to delta. Our eyes stop moving as we fall into deep sleep, so delta is also called non-REM or NREM sleep.
While delta is the state in which our brains are pruning old unused neural pathways, theta is the state in which it’s creating new ones. It’s the learning, problem-solving, and integration phase of sleep. In these brief theta periods, we have vivid dreams. Dreams are the brain’s way of solving problems symbolically. We also turn short-term learning into long-term memory as our brains hardwire new connections.
11. Rewiring can occur with startling speed. These scanning electron microscope images show how fast two neurons wire together. Top: beginning of stimulation. Middle top: after 7 seconds. Middle center: after 8 seconds. Middle bottom: after 11 seconds. Bottom: after 12 seconds. Watch the video here.
Most people are unaware that this process is going on in the brain every second of every day, reinforced by dreaming during REM sleep. Neural pathways that you use frequently are reinforced. If you’re using your brain to conduct the signals of peace, joy and love, you build up those neural highways. If negative emotion, you reinforce those circuits. MRI research shows that within 4 weeks of starting a daily EcoMeditation practice, significant rewiring occurs.
Pruning is not as rapid, but is occurring continually nonetheless. If you stop using a neural bundle, it begins to disintegrate within three weeks. This process of wiring and pruning is reshaping your brain on an ongoing basis. The states you cultivate in your mind become the traits you hardwire in your brain.
This Course is designed to speed up both wiring and pruning. We want to integrate new learnings, like the insight I wrote on that scrap of paper. Writing that statement meant that while I slept, my brain was integrating, during my theta REM sleep periods, the insights I’d gained reading PB before I went to bed.
Secondly, we want to prune old habits and behaviors that no longer serve us. That’s what your brain is doing during NREM delta sleep. A Course like this one is a way of taking conscious control of the process of wiring and pruning.
Gamma and the Brain Waves of Ecstasy
Delta is also the foundation of gamma, the fastest brain wave. A truism in meditation research is that “big gamma rides on big delta.” When we hook people up to EEGs, we often see flares of delta first, followed by flares of gamma.
Gamma is the signature wave of insight. It is also associated with learning, happiness, integration, perspective, creativity, brilliance, innovation, and play. In Mind to Matter, I call it the “Einstein wave.” EEG researchers see it in highly creative people, meditation Masters, and athletes in “flow” states. Adepts in deep meditation produce enormous amounts of gamma. They’re not just happy, they’re in Bliss Brain.
That’s one of the challenges of explaining these states to people who haven’t experienced them. The degree of bliss you feel is so enormous that it’s impossible to explain to people who don’t share it. An ancient Hermetic axiom states: “To the person who has had the experience, no explanation is necessary. To the person who has not, no explanation is possible.”
The experiences of awe produced by Galaxy Brain and other ways of gaining perspective are also associated with gamma. We know from EEG research that your brain is likely to begin producing much greater amplitudes of gamma as you journey along the Short Path.
While one task of the DMN is to create our sense of “self,” with all the suffering that usually accompanies it, this brain network also performs other important functions. It can integrate information from different regions to produce insight. Once we’re done with a task and the TPN powers down, the DMN can light up and produce “aha” moments during times of reverie when we’re “lost in thought.”
In adepts, when the ego-bound self is no longer running the show, the DMN can produce these flashes of integrative insight, accompanied by gamma brain waves, during everyday consciousness. EEG studies of mystics show sustained gamma even when the eyes are open in ordinary awareness.
2500% Happier
Richard Davidson has been studying meditators at his neuroimaging lab at the University of Wisconsin since the 1980s. In one study, he tested 21 adepts. The most experienced of these, a Tibetan monk called Mingyur Rinpoche, clocked over 62,000 hours of meditation before the age of 42.
When Davidson first hooked up Mingyur to an MRI, he gave him a number of exercises to complete in order to determine which brain regions were engaged by each one.
When Mingyur was given the cue to engage compassion, Davidson and the other researchers in the lab’s control room were stunned. The level of activity in Mingyur’s empathy circuits rose by 700%. “Such an extreme increase befuddles science,” wrote Davidson (Goleman & Davidson, 2018, p. 78). On average, the adepts had 25 times the amount of gamma as the control group.
Take a breath and think about that research finding for a moment. Wouldn’t getting twice as happy as you are today be great? Perhaps three times? Can you even imagine being 25 times as happy?
Most of us cannot even imagine such a possibility. Yet that’s exactly what science shows us is possible when we shift our perspective from the ego-bound sense of self that suffers in the basement and ascend to the palace above.
12. Mingyur Rinpoche
Jeffery Martin’s study of thousands of Finders (discussed below) shows that awakening brings with it “An unimaginable level of contentment and well-being (even if you already think of yourself as very happy)” (Martin, 2019, p. 32). That’s why I use terms like “crazy happy” and “bliss brain” to describe the experience. A 2500% increase in happiness is so far beyond the ordinary that it’s incomprehensible to people in ordinary consciousness.
The Long and Short Paths
The Short Path is called short because it involves seeking enlightenment directly from the Higher Self. The Long Path is one of self-improvement. It involves steps, techniques, initiations, skills, and self-purification. It is a gradual and incremental process.
The Long Path uses practices to advance the Seeker’s spiritual development. These take the form of physical exercise such as yoga or qigong; dietary restrictions like vegetarianism, fasting, and abstinence; mental training in various forms of meditation; study of the Scriptures; obedience to a spiritual teacher; moral awareness; vows, and other forms of discipline.
On the Short Path, you abandon your attempts to improve your local self and turn your attention inward, to focus exclusively on your Higher Self. PB quotes Rumi’s spiritual teacher, Shams of Tabriz: “Keep God in remembrance until the self is forgotten.”
Though PB taught the Short Path, his work emphasizes the value of the Long Path. We need to discipline our urges, refine our character, and prepare our minds for the Short Path. The Long Path accomplishes this. The Short Path and the Long Path are not alternatives. They’re complementary.
During a personal interview, PB explained the Short Path to Jeff Cox, one of his students, as follows:
“In essence the short path is this. Rather than concerning oneself with the ego and its developments, the struggles with its ups and downs as taught on the long path, one should inwardly turn 180 degrees and attend to the light of awareness which is the Overself (our true identity in PB’s language). As we turn away from egoic processes to the Overself as our refuge and reality, we invite the Overself to take its rightful place in our lives and we surrender that which we are not. The path is called “short” because it considers the goal to be present here and now, and the Overself to be the self we have always been instead of us being the person struggling to attain something bigger and better. This orientation acts as a catalyst and provides an opening for the Overself to reveal itself in a temporary glimpse or permanent awakening. It is a powerful act to remember its presence and surrender to it with loving attention as we go about the endless details of our daily living. Even the briefest glimpse of our true nature makes the short path easier to understand and more compelling because we actually taste something of what the goal is.
“PB explained that the ego is perpetuated on the long path by the very act of seeking, which thereby keeps it in control. By design, the long path does the essential work of preparing our personalities to become suitable vehicles to express reality, since it reduces the power of obstructive complexes. But by itself it will not take us to enlightenment—no matter how ‘spiritual’ the ego becomes it will not enter the light but stays in the gray. The ego is literally a whirlpool, a vortex of thoughts, feelings, impulses; and it is the non-recognition of our true self as distinct from this vortex that holds the masquerade together. Especially mesmerizing is the ‘I am the body’ thought.
“Short path practices are different than long path practices, for the latter produce more predictable results. On the long path, if you do x, you can expect y. The long path changes your karma or patterns of action and reaction. By contrast, short path practices are an invocation of grace, and the results are in the Overself’s hands, as it were, not ours. The grace which clears the attachment to the ego and reveals the ever-present Overself as one’s true identity is not something that can be willed from within the limited personality, because what is gained by this grace is freedom from that which is willing.” (Excerpted from The Long and the Short Path (2014) by Jeff Cox, a board member of the Paul Brunton Philosophic Foundation, www.paulbrunton.org).
The Three Great Realizations
For thousands of years, adepts have been curating the knowledge of enlightenment in monasteries, secret societies, and religions. Experience by experience, they worked out the steps on the path. This body of knowledge constitutes the first great realization. It gives us the awareness of self as consciousness—a self infinitely vaster than a skin-bound ego locked in a perpetual struggle for survival.
13. Traditionally, withdrawal from everyday life was required to attain enlightenment.
PB’s enormous contribution was to summarize and integrate all this knowledge. He gathered teachings public and private from East and West, North and South. His genius was to show us how it all tied together. He understood, then taught, that despite how very different religions look on the outside, they all have a common core. That core is the direct experience of the Infinite.
Aldous Huxley defined this core in his book The Perennial Philosophy. Evelyn Underhill, Alan Watts, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Paul Brunton, and other notable teachers popularized this second great realization in the West. While the first realization took tens of thousands of years, the second realization took just a single century.
The third great realization is that the mystical experience is not simply spiritual. It is biological too, and is thus the domain of science. As researchers have discovered how the brain and body work, we’ve come to understand that mystical experiences aren’t confined to consciousness. They produce direct and measurable effects in our bodies and brains.
Our brains in turn have structures, such as the brain’s Enlightenment Network, that facilitate mystical experiences. Andrew Newberg finds that “Enlightenment appears to involve a sudden shift of consciousness that temporarily interrupts the way the brain normally responds to the world” (Newberg & Waldman, 2017, p. 25).
Body and consciousness dance in an upward spiral. During the first month of walking the Long Path, the anatomy of our brains begins changing. Having a brain more capable of carrying the signals of bliss accelerates the process, and we jump to the Short Path. Though the second realization required 100 years, spiritual evolution has produced the third great realization in just a decade. We’re now able to harvest the fruits of all three great realizations in just a few weeks of practice.
Trying to accomplish spiritual development using willpower and intention is hard. Many people try to establish a meditation practice and fail. We all know we “should” devote time to prayer, contemplation, altruistic endeavors, and the other hallmarks of a good life. But we can rarely turn our intentions into reality using self-talk and motivation.
Knowing how your brain works is a game changer. You now have biology on your side as you leverage thousands of years of human wisdom and PBs powerful exercises to accelerate the process of turning states to traits.
Terminology: The Overself, Nonlocal Self, and Divine Beloved
Many of PB’s terms are esoteric and non-intuitive. They’re unfamiliar to most readers. One example is “Overself.” When I first read his work when I was 13 years old, words like that made PB’s work unapproachable for me.
In this Course, I use contemporary terminology. For “Overself” I substitute the terms “Higher Self” or “Nonlocal Self.” It’s quite easy to grasp that you have a local self, because that’s who you think you are for everyday practical purposes. But when you’re describing that local self in a phrase like “I am a florist,” it’s also easy to see that there’s an “I am” presence behind that identity. That’s the Nonlocal Self or Higher Self.
Various traditions have other names for this “I am” presence. In Mahayana Buddhism, it is “Buddha nature”; in Zen Buddhism, it is called “original nature”; in Sikhism, it is referred to as Sat Naam or “Ultimate Truth”; and in Sufism, it is Haq or “truth absolute.” The understanding that there is an “I am” presence behind our ordinary experience is universal, obvious, and intuitive. Without getting into theological distinctions, we can simply consider the Higher Self as the “ground of being” from which our local identity springs.
Another term I use for the Nonlocal Self is the “Beloved” or the “Divine Beloved.” This lyrical concept of the Higher Self as the Beloved is found in many spiritual traditions. St. Teresa of Avila wrote about her relationship with God in terms of marital bliss. Rumi exclaimed, “I learned how to be a lover of God … All I hear is the call of my Beloved.”
14. Ecstatic mystical experiences are common throughout history. In 1601, Renaissance painter Giovanni Baglione depicted “The Ecstacy of St. Francis.”
When Saint Francis of Assisi had a vision of light, he cried out, “Oh my dear husband, You have wedded me.” Similarly, Saint Catherine of Siena declared, “I am already wedded to a most noble spouse” (Vidich, 2015, p. 39). In the next section, I’ll share with you how passionate yearning is more than a sexy metaphor; it’s one of the three practices that changes your brain the fastest.
I adapt other terms used by PB. He used the word “mystic” to refer to someone who occasionally touches the ecstatic experience of union, but then falls away, and spends most of his or her time searching for the next spiritual high. He uses the term “philosopher” for someone whose local self—body, mind, and emotions—comes fully into unity consciousness.
In the century since PB recorded his insights, these words have acquired different meanings. The word “philosopher” is usually used to indicate a person who remains focused on theoretical understanding, not practical application. So instead I use one of PB’s synonyms, “Sage,” which has stood the test of time.
I also use the word “mystic,” in its modern form, to describe a person who has not only “touched the face of God” but is there on a continuous basis.
15. We can be in an elevated place during everyday life.
PB uses the masculine form throughout his work, as in “he” and “man.” I’ve changed this to use either “your” or “his and hers” and similar modern terminology. When there are long passages where the use of both genders would be cumbersome, I use either the feminine form for the entire passage, or the masculine form, alternating between the two.
The references you will find throughout this course, such as (NB 23-1-92; SPE p. 15), are there to indicate where in PB’s many books these concepts are to be found. The first set of numbers indicates the category, chapter and item number of The Notebooks of Paul Brunton (abbreviated NB) from which the idea is sourced.
The second item is the page number in the book The Short Path to Enlightenment (abbreviated SPE) in which the excerpt appears. Using these sources, you can go deeper into any concept that calls to you and read PB’s original explanation.
You can also purchase his books from the foundation’s bookstore at https://paulbrunton.org/store.php. You might find a hard copy of The Short Path to Enlightenment useful as you move through the Course, though this is optional. The foundation has also placed all of PBs writings in a database. This makes it easy to search for any topic you’d like to investigate further: https://paulbrunton.org/notebooks/
The Three Accelerators of Neuroplasticity: Passion, Community and Compassion
My book Bliss Brain covers the neuroscience of enlightenment. It focuses on the practices that get you there quickly. There are three of these: intensity, community, and compassion. MRI studies show that these spark growth in the brain regions associated with bliss and enlightenment more quickly than other practices.
Intensity of emotion is one of the three. It’s fine to feel good during meditation. But to stimulate fast neural growth, crank up positive feelings to the highest possible intensity. Mild attraction to your Nonlocal Higher Self produces mild results. The kind of wild infatuated passion the saints talk about produces rapid brain remodeling. Rumi said, “I once had a thousand desires. But in my one desire to know you, all else melted away.” That’s the kind of abandoned yearning you can bring to the Quest for your Higher Self, your Divine Beloved.
16. Sufi dancers can whirl themselves into ecstasy.
PB says that the success of the Short Path is dependent on “how much love … a person brings to it.” He continues by stating that you must have “fallen more deeply in love with [your Higher Self] than anything else” (NB 23-1-90; SPE p. 24). A century after he wrote those words, we know from MRI studies that passion enhances the activation of neural circuits. It’s like the dimmer switch on a light bulb. The greater the current of emotion running through a circuit, the brighter it glows.
The second accelerator is community. Studies of monks show that those who meditate together have greater and faster neuroplastic change in the Enlightenment Network than the hermits who meditate in solitude.
Community is the reason we go through this Course as a group. You’ll begin with a cohort of like-minded travelers. Connecting with others will spark insights and speed your journey. You’ll also have a Mentor who serves as a guide for the journey. Even when done virtually, connecting through apps and video classes, connection with others accelerates your progress.
17. Empathy is a neurological event, not simply an emotional state.
The third accelerator of positive neural growth is compassion. MRI studies show that compassion sparks neuroplastic growth in the brain’s Enlightenment Network more quickly than other types of meditation. Although forms of meditation that do not include compassion can be useful, our goal in this Course is to make rapid progress in firing and wiring the neural circuits of joy and peace in your brain.
Your Stealth Superpower for Brain Change
When we read about monks who’ve spent 10,000 hours and do the math, the time commitment required to become an adept is daunting. That equates to eight hours a day for five years. If you meditated for an hour each day and never skipped a day, it would take you over 27 years.
Traditional Tibetan Buddhist retreats last three years, three months, and three days. Participants meditate for at least 12 hours a day. That’s the degree of commitment required to reach the 10,000-hour goal. These numbers put advanced spiritual states out of reach to ordinary people.
18. The traditional training for Tibetan monks can produce advanced brain states.
So how can you get to Bliss Brain without leaving your everyday life, cloistering yourself in a monastery, and spending years in meditation?
The answer is obvious yet completely overlooked. You can use your sleeping hours to change your brain.
Several of the exercises PB recommends have you slip into communion with your Higher Self just before falling asleep. Once you make this a routine practice, you increasingly sleep and dream in Bliss Brain. During delta sleep, when your brain is pruning unused neural circuits, you dissolve the hardware of suffering. During theta sleep, when your brain is wiring, you construct the hardware of bliss. You “reconsolidate” experiences — like the nocturnal note I wrote myself — in your neural network.
19. During the memory reconsolidation process, memories are changed before moving back into long-term storage.
After a year of this, you’ve racked up almost 3,000 hours of practice. That’s almost as much as Tibetan monks who go on a three-year retreat!
The numbers get even better from there. The exercises in this Course will prompt you to inhabit the identity of your Nonlocal Self often throughout the day. You’ll quickly find yourself moving into this perspective spontaneously.
By practicing PB’s exercises consistently, you’ll quickly start spending hours of each day in a meditative state. In this way, you wire and prune not just during sleep, but also during many of your waking hours. You shape your brain by pruning the circuits that activate the DMN, while building those that engage the Enlightenment Network.
As you exercise this stealth superpower, you rapidly remodel the cells inside your head. You find yourself becoming a whole new person even though you haven’t taken the traditional 10,000-hour route.
How’s that for cool!
The Journey of Awakening
I had many challenges in my early childhood. My father was a minister, first in the Baptist then in the Episcopalian church. He and my mother went on many missionary journeys, and our family was rarely in the same place for more than a few months. The religious cults in which they were involved believed in a punishing God who would judge us all after our deaths and damn sinners eternally to a lake of fire. Damnation didn’t wait till the afterlife, however; God was judging us constantly each day. My parents’ child-rearing philosophy was drawn from the Bible: “To spare the rod is to spoil the child.”
During our travels, we stayed at the homes of other clergy. I saw the behavior of priests and bishops up close. I marveled at the gap between their public and private behavior. On Sundays they would be preaching inspiring sermons from the pulpit at church. On Mondays they would be abusing their wives and children in the privacy of their homes.
By the age of five, I was disillusioned with God, the church, and everything to do with spirituality. Living in an intolerant and dogmatic fundamentalist community, I had to hide my atheism and my pain. I spent the next part of my life anxious and depressed.
When I was 12, I made my first real friend, a boy named Michael Harris. His older sister Wendy was a voracious reader of spiritual books. She shared Paul Brunton’s ideas with me. At 13 I tried reading them, but found them, in one of PB’s own favorite words, “impenetrable.” Another of her favorite authors, mystic Lobsang Rampa, was more approachable. I devoured his books.
They showed me a lived spirituality, not a dogmatic black-and-white set of commandments against which a stern God judged us. I would sometimes sit in Wendy’s room for hours, listening to her insights. Occasionally, her mother drove us all to meetings at “New Thought” centers. This group of philosophies became popular in the mid-1800s. It includes Unitarianism, Science of Mind, Unity, and dozens of similar churches.
Their common thread is summarized by the 1916 mission statement of the International New Thought Alliance:
“To teach the Infinitude of the Supreme One; the Divinity of Man and his Infinite Possibilities through the creative power of constructive thinking and obedience to the voice of the indwelling Presence which is our source of Inspiration, Power, Health and Prosperity.”
The “indwelling Presence” of New Thought is the “Overself” of PB and the “Divine Beloved” of the Sufis. New Thought believes in a single universal consciousness of which individual human beings can partake. They emphasize the importance of thought in creating reality (Duignan, 2020). They focus on an orderly and loving universe, and see traditional Christian concepts like hell and sin as states of mind in the here and now rather than the afterlife.
Stuck in my personal teenage misery, I found New Thought concepts idealistic and unrealistic. My family soon moved again, and I lost touch with Michael and Wendy.
Then, one afternoon, when I was 13, I had an experience that changed my life. I was sitting on my bed doing nothing in particular. Suddenly, I felt as though I was floating weightless in the universe. I was looking at an infinite web of light. I understood at a level beyond mind that the universe was love itself and that nothing but love was real.
20. The infinite web of light.
When I returned to ordinary consciousness later that day, I didn’t need proof or explanation. The direct experience was enough.
However, I could not relate this transcendent experience to my daily life. There was no one in my family I could talk to about it.
After high school, I went to live in a spiritual community. We studied the Perennial Philosophy of Aldous Huxley and the works of great Masters. When Ram Dass’s book Be Here Now was published in 1971, it inspired me and millions of other people. I took mail-order courses in psychology from a distance learning university.
21. Ram Dass
I soon discovered that the hypocrisy and abuse that characterized the church was also rampant in my spiritual community. Though I spent decades in loose association with various spiritual schools, they all suffered from the same gap between their lofty ideals and their dysfunctional reality. My experience of light and love had no echo in this dismal environment.
When I was 45 years old, I was still far from happy. I had kept a journal since I was 15, and reading 30 years of journals showed me how little progress I had made, despite decades of studying psychology and spirituality.
In crisis, I made a commitment to meditating every day. That’s when my life truly began to change. Within a few months, every part of my life showed signs of change: money, relationships, health, and career. I was an imperfect meditator, my mind wandering constantly. But my practice was consistent, and I often felt the earlier sense of the light and love inherent in the universe.
I continued my study and practice of New Thought, taking many courses on topics like Charles Fillmore’s Dynamics for Living (Fillmore, 1967) and Ram Dass’s The Journey of Awakening (Ram Dass, 1990). I was especially inspired by a group called Teaching of the Inner Christ. Like PB, they emphasized cultivating a relationship with one’s inner Master. In my 50s, I was ordained as a minister at Unity Village, Missouri.
22. The ordination ceremony.
I became involved in the field of Energy Psychology and retrained myself as a researcher. Over the next 20 years, I conducted a series of scientific studies of increasing sophistication.
I wrote a series of award-winning popular science books, including The Genie in Your Genes, Mind to Matter, and Bliss Brain. I developed EcoMeditation, which suppresses the wandering mind and uses physiological cues to move people into deep states quickly. I trained thousands of people to acquire advanced “flow” states. I also served as science columnist for Unity magazine.
As a best-selling author, I was privileged to share the stage with many transformational leaders. I became friends with some, while others mentored me. I basked in the information and energy of luminaries like Donna Eden, Jack Canfield, Joe Dispenza, David Feinstein, Marci Shimoff, Tony Robbins, Lissa Rankin, John Gray, and Lisa Nichols.
23. High fives with Tony.
While writing Mind to Matter I reviewed the science of transcendent states. I intensified my own practice of the techniques of meditation Masters. That led to a deep dive into the brain changes these produce. I wrote Bliss Brain to dramatize just how quickly these techniques can change the brain. I was also amazed at how consistently happy I’d become over the previous few years of practice, and I wanted to share that possibility with as many people as possible.
Mapping Cloud Nine
After the turn of the twenty-first century, an increasing number of studies used sophisticated imaging devices such as high-resolution EEGs and MRIs to study the brains of adepts. These showed that as their consciousness changes, their brain function changes too. Firing produces wiring and, within a few weeks, the anatomy of their brains alters.
As I reread Paul Brunton 50 years after I’d sat in Wendy Harris’s room, I was excited to realize that many of the exercises he had advocated a century earlier were aligned with modern neuroscience. They weren’t just inducing altered states; they were producing altered traits.
Altered Traits is the title of a book by Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson. Davidson and his lab at the University of Wisconsin have more than three decades of experience researching the brains of adepts, primarily Tibetan monks. I incorporate their key findings in my book Bliss Brain. Davidson pioneered the discovery that neural firing produces neural wiring. As we practice elevated emotional states consistently, temporary states of bliss and creativity become hardwired traits (Goleman & Davidson, 2018).
Another source of empirical information is neuroscientist Andrew Newberg, one of whose books is How Enlightenment Changes Your Brain (Newberg & Waldman, 2017). In 2008, he began running a web-based survey of ordinary people who have had “enlightenment” experiences. Participants provided accounts of their personal experiences as well as data about their belief systems and personal history.
Newberg’s lab has now compiled these into a database that contains the experience of more than 2,000 people. He’s analyzed these by subject and theme. They have five characteristics in common. These are:
- A feeling of oneness with the universe
- Emotional and sensory intensity
- Permanent large-scale change in core aspects of awareness, behavior, or belief system
- A newfound clarity about life purpose
- A sense of surrender
These five characteristics are universal. They’re typical whether the person is a Buddhist, a Baptist, a Jew, a Sufi, a Daoist, or a Hindu. They’re the same in atheists and agnostics; belief in God is not a prerequisite for enlightenment.
Based on my many conversations with Andrew, I’ve modified EcoMeditation over time. I’ve also developed the Transcendent Experiences Scale, which measures those five characteristics. It’s one of the questionnaires you filled out on the way into this course. It’s giving us valuable information about the precise degree to which the Short Path Quest increases these five factors.
When designing the survey, Newberg also collected information that correlates with brain states. If a participant described a state of bliss, he assumed that there was intense stimulation of the positive emotion areas of the brain. If a person became lost in oneness with the Infinite, he assumed that the parietal lobe was involved. If a participant felt indescribable love and compassion, Newberg expected that the insula and other areas of the brain associated with insight and positive feelings would be engaged. These associations correlate subjective phenomenological states with objective brain function.
Steven Kotler is a futurist whom I’ve interviewed several times. He’s an expert on “flow” states. He finds that both peak performance and meditation can put people into ecstatic states of flow. He shows how the work of neuroscientists is giving us a picture of the objective changes occurring in the brains of Masters. He calls this “mapping cloud nine.”
Neuroscience also allows us to evaluate which traditional practices make the greatest contribution to brain change. That’s how we know that group meditation, emotional intensity, and compassion are the three components that accelerate neuroplasticity the most.
With talented colleagues at Bond University in Australia, I performed a randomized controlled trial of EcoMeditation (Church, Stapleton, Baumann, & Sabot, 2021). We used high-resolution MRIs to study the brains of people before and after four weeks of practice using a 22-minute audio track. Compared with a group using a mindful breathing control track, two key areas of their brains changed.
The mid-prefrontal cortex, one of the two nodes of the DMN, was quiet. The suffering self had gone dark. Simultaneously the insula, which is central to our feelings of love and compassion, lit up.
24. In the EcoMeditation group (right), the mid-prefrontal cortex (blue) of the DMN has deactivated and the insula (red) has activated.
Ecstasy Is Trainable
This was a remarkable brain function change from just 28 days of practice (Church, Stapleton, Baumann, & Sabot, 2021). As we use MRIs and EEGs to measure the results of various practices, we’re able to determine which ones are most effective at changing the brain. Coupled with profiles of the brain states of adepts, we can now train ordinary people into these states in just a few weeks or months. The EcoMeditation MRI study showed that in just a month, non-meditators can be trained to reach Bliss Brain.
Jeffery Martin is a professor and entrepreneur. For two decades he’s been studying people who have made the transition to the persistent happiness of the nondual state. He calls them the “Finders.” Before they crossed the threshold into what Martin calls “fundamental well-being,” they were “Seekers.” Once they entered that state, they became Finders.
Martin’s data show that Finders experience a level of happiness that people in ordinary states of consciousness can hardly comprehend. Fundamental well-being is the bedrock of their existence. While they have good days and bad days, and there are many levels within fundamental well-being, the Finders live with a basic sense that they are okay and the world is a safe and nurturing place (Martin, 2019). This echoes the 2,500% increase in gamma found in MRI studies of the brains of adepts.
Like other researchers, Martin has found that people can be trained into this evolved state. His research demonstrates that, using effective exercises, over 60% of people can reach this state within a couple of months of practice.
In other research I’m conducting, I show that people can be trained to reach flow states routinely. After just seven days of practice, their scores on the Flow States Inventory improve significantly. They have transcendent experiences. Their sense of a meaningful life, at one with the universe, increases dramatically. A study of a group of 208 people at an EcoMeditation workshop found that their happiness levels increased significantly in just a single day. On three-month follow-up, they were even happier (Church, Stapleton, & Sabot, 2020).
This data means that it’s highly likely that the exercises in this Course will take you to a new state of consciousness. We’re not just hypothesizing that states of happy well-being might occur. Research involving thousands of people shows that effective training reliably produces persistent changes in consciousness.
Turning Brunton’s Insights into a Teachable System
Re-reading Paul Brunton after completing my MRI study reminded me of just how valuable his techniques can be, and how quickly they can help people change their basic brain function. However, scattered through dozens of volumes, out of sequence, and couched in often-obscure terminology, PBs exercises are hard to implement. I decided to organize them into a logical and sequential program, along with EcoMeditation tracks and video instructions.
That way, people wouldn’t have to stumble about for decades as I did. People could apply PBs techniques quickly and easily, using a series of clearly articulated steps to elevate mood and spark rapid brain change.
This Course uses a selection of PB’s exercises that are most aligned with the discoveries of modern neuroscience. I’ve added other exercises that I’ve found effective in the workshops I’ve offered over the years. I’ve also fleshed out PB’s often-sparse instructions with elaborations based on EEG research.
For instance, we now know that “sensualizing” an experience by adding information from all five physical senses engages many different brain regions simultaneously. This whole-brain engagement promotes rapid learning. So when PB advocates “remembering” an experience of the Beloved, I expand that recommendation to have you “sensualizing” the memory using five or more senses.
25. “Sensualizing” with a flower—smell, sight, and touch
Another example: One of the milestones on the Short Path that PB identifies is when the Nonlocal Self reveals itself fully to the local self. He describes it as a revelation of light. Light is indeed an experience common to all mystical traditions. One study found that 65% of people are visual (Busan, 2014), and light engages their dominant visual sense. Other studies using different methodology find visual learners are a minority, with just 16% having a primarily visual learning style (Venkatesan, 2015).
However, the brains of other Seekers process information through channels other than visual. At least 25% of the population is auditory, having hearing as their primary modality, while for a significant percentage it is touch (Busan 2014, Venkatesan, 2015). So the section on the Revelation of the Beloved includes experiential channels not mentioned by PB.
26. Learning channels
Some of the exercise instructions in this Course are designed to induce gamma brain waves and promote the integration of information from disparate brain networks. Brain hacks like these enhance the effectiveness of the exercises.
Take the Teachings and Run
The deception, hypocrisy, exploitation, and abuse I witnessed in the church while growing up is not unique to Christianity. Every year, stories emerge of abusive teachers from other religious traditions. The teacher-student relationship is fraught with opportunities for misunderstanding and power differentials. Mystic Andrew Harvey believes that “Most of those the new age calls enlightened gurus or avatars are not divine or divinized beings at all, but powerful and unscrupulous occult manipulators” (Harvey, 2000, p. 55).
In the case of PB, he did not call himself an “adept” and never claimed to be a guru; instead, he referred to himself as a “philosopher” and “spiritual researcher.” He emphasized that the true teacher is your own Higher Self. Yet many of those who interacted with him personally treated his words as gospel, rather than the opinions of a fallible fellow-Seeker. Some became angry at him when their projections failed to materialize.
One of Brunton’s acolytes named Jeffrey Masson wrote a book called My Father’s Guru. Traveling with Brunton in India, he met famous gurus who attracted thousands of followers. For the most part, he found them to be self-important frauds. He eventually became disenchanted with PB and the very concept of a spiritual teacher.
Teachings come in many forms, and one of the traditions I’ve most enjoyed is the Native American sweat lodge. In my thirties, I did a “sweat” with a Lakota Sioux medicine man I’ll call “Red Hawk.” Laurie, a friend of mine, had invited him to stay with her for a week. He gave several talks and Laurie collected donations for his work
I and a group of five fellow-journeyers met with Red Hawk early on a Saturday morning. I listened carefully to his teachings and tuned in to his energy. He was soft-spoken and self-deprecating, yet wisdom, sincerity, and compassion flowed from the depths of his words. I felt that Red Hawk was a teacher I could trust through the intensity of the sweat that lay ahead.
After the talk, he led us in lining a big outdoor pit with rocks. We mindfully stacked wood on top, and lit the sacred fire.
27. Sweat lodge
By early afternoon the rocks were red-hot and the sweat began. Red Hawk took us through the “four directions”—North, South, East and West—as he threw particular herbs on the fire for each stage of the journey. Late that night, we emerged together from the lodge, feeling profoundly changed. Laurie had arranged beds for us all in her house and we were grateful to transition quickly to sleep.
In the morning, Laurie took the six of us out to breakfast at a nearby restaurant. Red Hawk’s wife, Sara, who had not attended the sweat, joined us. Sara was a young Jewish woman from Brooklyn, New York, who had recently married Red Hawk. During the meal, she asked Red Hawk and Laurie how much money had been received from the donations. The amount was modest and Sara became agitated. “You do all this work,” she chided her husband, “and never earn any decent money.”
Energized by long-held grievances, Sara became angrier. Eventually, she was screaming at her husband. After trying unsuccessfully to placate her, Red Hawk withdrew into embarrassed silence. The rest of us watched the scene with horror, the sacred atmosphere of the day before shattered.
A few days later, I talked to Laurie about the incident. She’d hosted many teachers and gurus over the years. She shrugged her shoulders and summarized her experiences with them in five succinct words: “Take the teachings and run.”
The teachings in this Course represent thousands of years of accumulated wisdom. But they’re not entwined with any particular guru, religion, or cult. They’re the Perennial Philosophy that underlies and transcends all teachings and teachers. You’re connecting with your own Higher Self for guidance, not depending on a fallible human being.
Your Higher Self resonates with all the love and intelligence of the infinite universe. As your local self cultivates a conscious and continuous relationship with your Nonlocal Self, all that love and intelligence flows into your local experience.
Living Examples
Though there is plenty of chicanery in the guru business, there are also genuine spiritual teachers. One of the exercises that PB recommends is to find a living human being who, to you, represents Higher Self embodied in local self. This becomes a person on whom you can model your personal journey.
Howard Goodman, one of the New Thought teachers I studied with when I was 15, was just such a person. While I gathered a great deal of information from Howard, what was more important was his living embodiment of wisdom, humor, and compassion.
I was also close to an uncle of mine, Alan Butler. Alan served in the Anglican (Episcopal) church for decades, mostly as a missionary priest in the African country of Botswana. Alan and my aunt Hilda occasionally stayed at our house.
28. Portrait of Alan Butler by his daughter, artist Eleanor Turvey. My children gave me this portrait as a Christmas present years ago and it hangs in my office where I see it every day.
One visit, when I was 19, changed my life. Part of the dinnertime ritual was to invite visiting clergy to “say grace,” the mealtime prayer, and my father asked Uncle Alan to do so.
This was usually a dry and meaningless exercise to my ears. I’d heard so many hundreds of empty prayers from so many dozens of empty souls that I hardly listened anymore.
But as Uncle Alan prayed, I realized something extraordinary. Uncle Alan wasn’t praying to God. Alan was with God. He was speaking from inside the experience of union with the All That Is. In the ensuing years, I observed him closely. I realized that he seemed to be there all the time.
The year before Alan’s death, I asked my aunt Hilda, “Do you think Alan is enlightened?” I figured that if anyone had the dirt on a saint, it would be the spouse!
Hilda thought for a long moment and answered yes. She then described many instances of Alan’s consistent anchoring in that place, despite the many difficulties he’d faced in his life. My book Bliss Brain is dedicated to Alan.
Having such a “living example” of mastery can inspire, motivate and direct us. But we have to do the work of awakening ourselves; we cannot outsource it to a guru, coach, therapist or hero. PB wrote: “Ultimately, there is only one real Master for every spiritual seeker, and that is his own divine Overself. The human teacher may assist him to the extent of giving him a temporary emotional uplift or a temporary intellectual perception, but he cannot bestow permanent divine consciousness on another individual. All that the teacher can do is to point out the way through the labyrinth; the journey must be made by the seeker himself” (NB 1-3-102).
After college, I was a local organizer for the Human Unity conference. These conferences were started by Sant Kirpal Singh in 1974. Kirpal Singh was the lineage holder of a tradition called Sant Mat, and another example of a genuine enlightened Master. As I read his words, their timeless truth opened my mind and heart. I met one of his students, Andrew Vidich, who has been a lifetime friend ever since. Andrew has both a brilliant mind and a keen ability to explain the path to others.
29. Sant Kirpal Singh
His book Love Is a Secret (Vidich, 2015 [1990]) was one of the first books to show how the mystical experience is common to all religions. Using hundreds of quotes from all the world’s religions, Andrew demonstrates the common features of all mystical experiences. When I edited the first edition in 1989, Andrew’s writing brought the concept of the Divine Beloved vividly to life, and imparted a new level of passion to my spiritual journey.
I’ve drawn heavily on Andrew’s wisdom as I’ve written my books and courses, including this one. The stages and stations of the Quest described below are illuminated by many inspired poetic quotations from adepts of every period and tradition. These are drawn from Andrew’s work. Though the language differs, these quotes show us that the Quest is a universal human journey.
During this Course, you’ll be asked if there’s an actual human being who can serve as a template for you (NB 23-6-177; SPE p. 92). It’s worth considering this question starting now. Make a list of names of people who’ve inspired you. They might be historical figures, archetypes, saints, or mentors you’ve known.
If you’re looking for a living Master, use the instructions in Andrew’s book. At the end of chapter three of Love Is a Secret, he provides a meditation that guides you through this intention. Just the way Alan Butler and others guided me, and the way Kirpal Singh gave Andrew a living example, an enlightened Master can catalyze your progress on the Quest.
The experience of meeting an authentic Master in person seems to be one of the triggers for awakening. Jeffrey Martin reports that most Finders “had been actively working toward Fundamental Well-being for some time, but the shift did not occur until this direct contact. In some cases, they were just one person in a large audience the Finder was speaking to. Yet, for some reason, the shift occurred during or after seeing the person” (Martin, 2019, p. 162). So whenever you have the opportunity to spend personal time with a Master, even at a distance, grab it with both hands.
Acknowledgements
I’m deeply grateful to Andrew Vidich and also to Jeff Cox. They read through the first drafts of this Course, and made many suggestions for improvement. They pointed out where I’d misplaced milestones or exercises, made me aware of new resources, and corrected my many errors of understanding of spiritual traditions and the Quest itself.
My inspiring EFT Mentor friend Jackie Viramontez helped me design the flow of the material leading up to this Course. We realized that people needed a clear Glimpse of these elevated emotional states, as well as the opportunity to clear their basic psychological trauma. I designed the seven meditations that generate dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin and other neurochemicals in the brain to give novices a “felt sense” of what mystics experience. You’ll get these meditations at the very beginning.
Originally we planned to have people complete a 12 module EFT course to clear trauma, but we realized this was far too much information for this basic purpose. So we designed the brief Personal Peace Procedure course to meet this need. Clearing trauma before starting the Short Path makes a Dark Night experience much less likely. I’ve done many studies of EFT or Emotional Freedom Techniques. It combines elements of talk therapy with acupressure. Over 100 studies show that it rapidly reduces many types of distress, including anxiety, depression and PTSD.
I’m also grateful to a group of friends who were the first to go through the Course. I interviewed them at various stages of the journey, assisted by my friend Amanda Miller. These wonderful friends also became the first Mentors. Their feedback was invaluable in making the course user-friendly and engaging.
My gratitude also goes to Kapil, Shailendra and the rest of the Webmobril team. They built the Course in the Learning Management System during the worst of the 2021 covid pandemic in India. They managed to remain cheerful, professional and responsive in the most tragic of circumstances.
Embodying Enlightenment
Many traditional paths focus on disembodied experience. Medieval Christianity refers to “mortifying the flesh” in order to find God in a realm more exalted than the physical body. Buddhism, Hinduism, and other ancient religions have a similar focus on asceticism as a hallmark of the sincere devotee. Extreme schools of Hindu nondualism regard the external world including the body as a delusion.
Today we’re called on to embody the light fully. That includes our bodies and our ordinary lives. No longer do we remove ourselves from human affairs by going to live in a monastery. We remain active in the world. The whole last part of this Course is focused on bringing the luminous self into ordinary human life.
We’re also called to live fully in our human bodies. We don’t need to become ascetics, denying or minimizing our physicality, our sexuality and sensuality, our enjoyment of food and drink, our love of play and dance, and all the delights of being in a body. We bring our Nonlocal Self fully into the body.
Judith Blackstone is a psychotherapist who has written insightfully about enlightenment. The subtitle of her book The Enlightenment Process is: A Guide to Embodied Spiritual Awakening. The key word here is “embodied.” She states that “enlightenment—the experience of one’s own nature as subtle, unified consciousness—is revealed through deeply inhabiting one’s body” (Blackstone, 2008, p. xxii).
In working with thousands of clients, she’s found that the Quest leads to awakening in the body, not transcendence of the body. She writes, “it is our own skin that awakens to touch, our own chest that softens and fills with love. It is literally that we have been numb … and now we are waking from that numbness” (Blackstone, 2008, p. 32).
That analogy of waking from numbness is a powerful concept. As we awaken, the consciousness of Nonlocal Self pervades our whole physical body, bringing our cells to full aliveness. It’s tuning fully into the body, the opposite of the body-shunning of traditional paths. This echoes PB’s philosophy. In this Course, you’ll do one of his exercises that has you inhabit all of your cells as living light.
In his book The Direct Path, mystic Andrew Harvey writes that, “Being conscious of the sacredness of the body slowly turns the whole of life into an experience of feast and celebration; every walk or meal or deep sleep or joy the flower or beautiful face becomes a form of praise and prayer” (Harvey, 2000, p. 169). In stark contrast to the body-denial of the ancient ascetic traditions, the Short Path brings us full circle, to experience oneness in delicious embodiment.
In Andrew Newberg’s database of over 2,000 people who’ve had transcendent experiences, he identified five of their common characteristics. One of these is a sense of meaning and purpose (Newberg & Waldman, 2017). It infuses the life of the Sage, whether she’s at home or at work. She doesn’t have to leave home and work to live in a convent to find meaning and purpose. She’s able to express them in ordinary life.
Likewise, in Jeffery Martin’s study of Finders, he emphasizes that most Finders seem “ordinary” from the outside (Martin, 2019). Going from a Seeker to a Finder does not often result in dramatic external change, even though the inner transformation is radical. The “numbness” is gone and they live fully present in their regular lives.
A thousand years ago you knew exactly where to look for Sages. They’d be in the cloister, hermitage, and other special places removed from the everyday world. Today you’ll find them in the classroom, bakery, office, library, gas station, and everywhere else in the ordinary world. We embody our transformation in the bodies, professions, families, and lives we already have.
In the later stages of the Quest, you’ll be bringing nonlocal awareness into your business, marriage, parenting, money, friendships, health, sexuality, and every other part of your ordinary physical life. That awareness will fill your material existence with delight, transforming it into the vehicle through which you express the Infinite in concrete physical form.
This first chapter has been all about the what and why of the awakening experience. In the next chapter, the second in Part I, I’ll share with you the mechanics of navigating easily through this Course. Then, in Part III, we’ll dive into PB’s exercises and begin happily checking off the “Milestones” of the path.
We’ll then take two steps that prepare you for the Short Path. Together these form Part II of this Course.
The first step involves using 7 very special audio tracks. Though I call them “meditations,” and they’re based in EcoMeditation, they’re actually brain exercises. They give you the Glimpse of ecstasy that the Sufis describe. They do this by stimulating your brain to produce the 7 most pleasurable neurochemicals known to science. Even though you’ve had Glimpses before, these exercises are designed to raise your brain to new heights of ecstasy.
After spending this time in bliss, you then go through the Personal Peace Procedure. This uses EFT acupressure tapping to clear away the negative emotions from past experiences. This second preparatory step makes it highly unlikely that you will have a Dark Night experience once you start the Short Path itself.
You’ll practice the 7 meditations for 3 days each for a total of 21 days. The Personal Peace Procedure will take you about the same amount of time. The next chapter, Chapter 2, is short. It will take you about 30 minutes to read, and about twice that time if you listen to the audio version.
At the end of Chapter 2 there’s a summary of all the milestones and exercises on the Short Path. You can mark this complete without reading it; it’s just there so you can see them all at a glance if you want to review the structure of the Short Path course at any time.
In the box below, please share any “aha” moments you’ve had while reading this first chapter. Once you’ve saved what you’ve written, click “Mark Complete” and you’ll automatically find yourself in chapter two.
Sharing Your Experience: Write a paragraph or two about any epiphanies you’ve had about the awakening process while reading chapter one. What was surprising to you? What concept amplified your understanding of the process?
When you’re done, click “Mark Complete” and you’ll get access to the next chapter.
141 Comments
This was absolutely wonderful and priceless!
I have always had amazing dreams throughout life, while asleep. I often get excited before bed, because i look forward to what might occur in my dreamscape that night. To learn that we can change our brainscape while sleeping, is truly exciting!
I really identified with all the facets and experienced that were shared especially about the religious world, having been brought up in a family that is still entrenched in religious cults and condemns anyone who is not like-minded. Having said that, I see it in so many other religions as well and even the spiritual communities, due to being rooted in the ego self.
Three weeks ago I was thinking about my 10 year plan and drew out Maslows Perimid. I did Not know that he revised and added Self Transendence. There is a long and short path to seeking enlightenment. We need both. I am looking forward to my growth throughout this course.
Loved the reminder of trying to see everything in an objective way rather than subjective, that which makes us more conscious in just seconds. Just by imagining shutting down the DMN brings the focus back to the present moment; and enjoyed reading the science and biology behind it as well.
I am everything n nothing at the same time. What matter is not my local self identity but the love that we are here to spread.
Thank you for such an inspiring mystical journey of chapter one, looking forward and grateful to be part of it 🙏🏻
I love the thought that we are already more abundant than we give ourselves credit for. I love the fact that we get to choose how we feel and whether we let go of what is holding us back and claim that abundance or not.
Thanks for this, you are very generous with your knowledge.
I LOVE to think and sense that we are part of the universe, it such a challenge to me to embody this concept, it is still in my head, and look forward to embody this belief.
I like the part where it talks about the numbness is gone. That’s a day I’ve been waiting on for a long time.
Not necessarily an epiphany but WOW! I had no idea that this would be the beginning of my experience with this training. So much said and so much to think about! “That analogy of waking from numbness is a powerful concept.” This was something that really stood out to me because of what my experience of life is right now. It seems that so many are truly numb, without emotion and unaware of what is happening around them. Not only does it seem that there is no awakening but it also seems that so many of us as humans have forgotten not only the past, and how being awake even feels anymore but so many no longer care. Ordinary is enough and pain is just a part of that. I found EFT 14 years ago and knew that it was something that could change my life. At that time I did not fully understand why I suffered with the symptoms that I had and had very little understanding of trauma. Now I am at a point where moving forward has stopped once again, and the knowledge I have gained has brought me back full circle. I am a Coach and trained in being trauma informed but that has brought me back to what I once knew would change my life and didn’t know how.
As a little girl I would lay on the floor of our diningroom and stare for hours at the rainbows from the crystal prisms that bounced off the crystals. I would float away into them.
Growing up Catholic in the 60’s U.S. with so much corruption and do what I say NOT do as I do.
I left the church at 13. I’ve floated through different lands and spiritual practices.
The course sounds intriguing.
It’s hard to grasp the bliss brain that is described. I’m so excited to go through your course and eventually find a place that is a calm in the midst of the storm
When I was younger I would be outside by the pool and always talk to the trees and if they started to wave I would know that we are one, or our energies aligned. At the age of 23 I was outside talking to the Univeral Flow through the tree, then on the diamond shaped cement patio, inside of it I wrote shooting star, two days later was halloween night. I will never forget, there was a shooting star maybe 10-15 feet above this house that was the brightest and beautiful. words cannot describe.
I have always known that I AM the I AM. but truth be told like everyone else, you tend to forget it or stuff creeps in and you keep pretending that your still connected to the ONE. I read the books to keep me reminded that it is my own imagination in which creates my reality.
That’s how I got interested in the EFT practices, from a book I read and decided that this is how I want to live and teach people.
One of my favorite passages from a book goes like this: There were some GODS talking and asking each other where they think they should hide the secret of life, one god states; in the mountains humans will never find it there, the others disagreed and stated humans would find a way to dig into and find it. Another suggestion was the depths of the ocean, again the answer was no people would find a way, the moon/space was suggested; again no. Finally one god said hide it inside them they will never look for it there…
Thank you for this course I am looking forward to all of the information.
very thoughtful and provoking. I like the science element of this. The fact that there is the DMN in the brain that controls our negative thinking (which is where I am at) and the Enlightenment Network we can use to dial down the DMN….I did not know that that the brain could be re-wired in such a short time to prune the negative. I’m keen to know more and get started. Very excited.
I liked the explanation of the short path of teaching or Enlightenment by Paul Burton. Non dualism (single unitary consciousness) by Sri Ramana Maharshi stood out for me. The distinction between States (temporary experience) and Traits (enduring characteristics). We are the universal Web of wisdom expressing as an individual human being. The Overself is beyond body, space or time. The Overself connects the non local consciousness of the Universe with local consciousness of the Self.
At 13 years old, the week after my Anglican Church Confirmation, I started going to the Unitarian Congregation in Toronto. Later to be given the book “Be Here Now” by Baba Ram Das, just as I was about to depart for Europe then India for a year and a half, where I would meet many authentic gurus and teachers, including (on day 5) my beloved Neem Karoli Baba. However, here I am 50 years later, feeling such gratitude from finding Dawson Church and his research and EcoMeditations to bring me full-circle back to my Path to Oneness. Thank you for your decades of commitment to and passion for the Truth of the Self, and your gift of sharing it with us, to intensify our longing for Oneness with our Higher Power.
Chapter 1 have me an in depth overview of different perspectives on valuing my life and keeping my light burning. I am in control of my emotional journey.
Growing up in the 70’s and 80’s and hearing/reading ofr modern guru’s it’s great to know that not all were fooled in the 1800’s and before with the religions. Man made structures that have lead us away from ourselves.
I’m excited and motivated after listening to Chapter 1 twice! I feel emboldened learning for the first time about Maslow’s Self Transcendence stage of personal development. It truly gives credence to the Higher Local Self.
Thank you for creating this legacy life changing course. As I read and listened to the first chapter many names of persons I know flash before me who would also benefit by taking this course. May God bless you with many more discoveries to help His ailing world.
Found this at the right time. I was recommended EFT and tapping for childhood trauma done time ago but didn’t go any further. Today, I coincidentally found this course and downloaded it, not knowing why and felt a little agitated that I’d given myself more work to do in my already overwhelming life. Tonight however, I went into overload and revisited my repeated pattern of trauma and took myself off to take time out. I started to read chapter 1 as I wanted to avoid myself and had an epiphany moment when I realised the timing was perfectly set for me to find my peace. Thank you.
I love learning that the goal of all spiritual teachings is to become One with God. I also love that we hope to learn how to carry Enlightenment into our daily life. I have some significant childhood trauma, and some finicky genes. I overcame depression and lived a full life for years, only to find myself in depression again now that I am 60. I am grateful to learn how to transcend, or be enlightened each day. I love God and my Savior Jesus Christ, and I look to “Keep God in remembrance until [my] self is forgotten.” Thank you for creating this course!
I felt encouraged and hopeful!
I a ready to reconnect with my no local self
I always knew that life on earth was meant to be joyful. Now I Know it is!
I have even working towards this all of my life. I am 72 now and I always knew that there was more to,life. After reading thi I know there is.
The idea that one can progress toward enlightenment during sleep is an encouraging revelation! Thank you so much fir this program; I’m looking forward to the next step!
That neuroscience is now able to support the mystical is key….
I am ready to short circuit the brain and experience pure bliss! Currently Heart Math and Joe Dispenza’s “The Formula” are helping tremendously! Onward!
First, I’m surprised to learn that a long time ago Paul Brunton wrote a book setting down his learnings about a path to enlightenment, but I’m thrilled to learn about it now. Even more, I’m delighted that I took Dawson Church’s course “Bliss Brain” and that many ideas in his course align so well with PB’s book. Indeed, I am excited to learn about this course and feel that this is what I’ve been looking and hoping for ever since I took the “Bliss Brain” course. For most of my adult life, I have been searching for meaning as I’ve made a life journey filled with hills and valleys. Now, at age 75, I want to do my best to end well–learning to love, give, and enjoy life more fully. My great gratitude to all those great minds and souls who have contributed to making this course possible!
First, I’m surprised to learn that a long time ago Paul Brunton wrote a book setting down his learnings about a path to enlightenment, but I’m thrilled to learn about it now. Even more, I’m delighted that I took Dawson Church’s course “Bliss Brain” and that many ideas in his course align so well with PB’s book. Indeed, I am excited to learn about this course and feel that this is what I’ve been looking and hoping for ever since I took the “Bliss Brain” course. For most of my adult life, I have been searching for meaning as I’ve made a life journey filled with hills and valleys. Now, at age 75, I want to do my best to end well–learning to love, give, and enjoy life more fully. My great gratitude to all those great minds and souls who have contributed to making this course possible!
I have been on the path for over 55 years. I am eager to take this next step.
The notion that awakening leads to greater contact with, and enjoyment of, life through the body is a wonderful concept. It enhances desire to achieve this state.
The fact that you can experience the bliss and benefits quickly is also a wonderful thought and motivates one to engage in this process.
Every time I think I’ve read what I “need to read”, I discover something else to add….I suppose that is life, though, isn’t it, to constantly learn and grow. I related to being with so many people who were supposedly “enlightened” “hip” “got it going on” only to sense from the moment I met them that their outlook did not at all jive with mine. I was raised Catholic and never fully embraced those teachings either. I now feel comfortable picking and choosing what I can stitch together to help me be a humble, caring, generous, joyful human. So far, so good!
Grateful for Dawson’s work linking neuroscience to these states and traits. For me, understanding the brain science has opened up a felt sense that these shifts are possible. And as I have used EFT and other EP practices to clear old traumas, I feel curious and excited about experiencing the short path.
Confirmed by my life experience. Delighted to find these teachings and exercises.
After experiencing the hypocrisy and the abuse of various Christian Pastors, teachers, and so-called friends, I too, was very discouraged with religion, but never with God, only people. My childhood was also saturated in emotional abuse and traumatic events that produced many limiting beliefs inside my mind that have been controlling my life. And yet I could sense even then in my childhood as well as afterwards during my Christian experience that a very loving and sweet God was calling me, telling me that this is not who I am, that I was so much more, and that there was so much more to life. Family, associates, and so called friends used to get very angry with me for always being so happy! My mother always tried to make me feel guilty for being joyful and loving and having dreams and aspirations. Now I understand why!
What was surprising and very encouraging for me was how quickly our brains can rewire new connections. I am happy to report that I have been released from some limiting beliefs that no longer serve me through the grace of God because of this one desire:
“There is a SINGLE THING in life that is important. Everything else is unimportant.
CONSCIOUSNESS KNOWING ITSELF is important.
Everything else is unimportant.”
The Spiral Galaxy, the 5 Characteristics of people who have had enlightenment experiences, and understanding that starting on the long path before embarking on this short path was key have amplified my understanding of the process.
I have been exploring the body / mind connection for several years now and the book Mind to Matter is what led me to find this course, The Short Path to Oneness. I am excited about the prospects of methodically putting the work in to deepen my awareness and live a full and vibrant life.
I am looking forward to meditation and the benefits of non-local mind. I am looking forward to learning and growing in ways I could not have imagined.
The purpose of eco meditation was important for me. The words Consciousness Knowing Self, became a little clearer.
Realised I had an enlightened experience many years ago, felt overwhelmed and scared, and did not understand it. Today I would be curious.
Thank you
Thank you, I am so thankful that I am in this course.
So looking forward to this!!
Love love love!!
“I designed the seven meditations that generate dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin and other neurochemicals in the brain to give novices a “felt sense” of what mystics experience. You’ll get these meditations at the very beginning.”
Thank you!!
The addition of the Self-transcendence to Maslow’s hierarchy was a surprise to me. In all my years of work in psych, social work, and nursing I had never heard this. I think I had always felt that aspect was rolled into the original of Self-actualization.
I posted below. For some reason, it is not registering as completed.
I’m not sure I’ve had any epiphanies, especially after having read bliss brain where I did indeed have moments of insight. That is a wonderful book. As a psychotherapist and someone who has pursued spirituality, I have always searched for a scientific explanation for spirituality so that I may incorporate it it into my work. The first books I read that were better able to connect the two realms were by Eben Alexander (Proof of Heaven) and by Pin Van Lommel ( Beyond Life). Although these books were able to explain some of the physics and neurobiological aspect of connection to source, they were missing the “how to” part . This course seems to be what I have been looking for.
I had so many ‘aha’s’, but especially enjoyed reading about Galaxy Brain. I also was incredibly interested in the photos and information regarding the formation of neural pathways…how quickly in the right stage of sleep.
*sorry forgot to input name!
I had so many ‘aha’s’, but especially enjoyed reading about Galaxy Brain. I also was incredibly interested in the photos and information regarding the formation of neural pathways…how quickly in the right stage of sleep.
WHEN THE STUDENT IS READY THE TEACHER WILL APPEAR…
I AM READY AND HAVE BEEN DOING OVER 20 YEARS OF SEEKING IN THE EASTERN
PHILOSOPHY. I HAD LOTS OF “AHA” MOMENTS AND WAS ALSO FRIGHTENED TO DO THE ECO MEDITATION NOT KNOWING IF I WOULD GO CRAZY OR SOMETHING. BUT HEARING MOST FINDERS SEEM ORDINARY FROM THE OUTSIDE AND DOES NOT OFTEN RESULT IN DRAMATIC EXTERNAL CHANGE, EVEN THOUGH THE INNER TRANSFORMATION IS RADICAL. I AM NOW READY TO LIVE FULLY PRESENT IN MY REGULAR LIFE. THANK YOU
I recently discovered Tapping. It is fascinating and I came across this course so I am exploring it. But I am assuming I should first use Tapping and hopefully see results on myself, right? Thank you
I am fascinated and very interested in how the sleeping time could be used to change the brain! Thank you for sharing it!
I am also fascinated by dreams too but I have hard to understand their meaning. It is clear that we have different type of dreams some are “deeper” than other dreams and they seem to have deeper roots in our mind. The dream world is really mysterious and fascinating!
Interesting! I literally live few minutes walking from the University where dr. Andrew Newberg is working. I was a PostDoc in the same institution. I attend every year the Medical Yoga Conference in the same institution and it is where I saw dr. Andrew Newberg for the first time. I was really fascinated by Dr. Andrew Newberg book: “The ability to experience enlightenment … appears to be wired into our brain and consciousness”. But I still couldn’t find the right path to enlightenment. I believe I am still trying to understand and/or feel at which level of spiritual evolution I am at this point and which practice would be better in my case. Thank you.
Thank you so much for sharing Chapter one! Could you please let me know if there is way to edit and/or delete comments?
Very interesting! I am a Biologist, PhD, and since I was a student I was interested in finding the right mentor who could help me to bridge biology&neuroscience with psychology&spirituality. I started to meditate + yoga since in high school but I was never able to really improve my meditation and breath work. Lately I also practice Taichi (fantastic to improve balance and focus). When I was younger I was also very disappointed by all traditional religions and felt lost. I still have family trauma and serious physical conditions to overcome. So, I started now (and I hope it is not too late) to explore other kind of meditations.
Very interesting! I am a Biologist, PhD, and since I was a student I was interested in finding the right mentor who could help me to bridge biology&neuroscience with psychology&spirituality. I started to meditate + yoga since in high school but I was never able to really improve my meditation and breath work. Lately I also practice Taichi (fantastic to improve balance and focus). When I was younger I was also very disappointed by all traditional religions and felt lost. I still have family trauma and serious physical conditions to overcome. So, I started now (and I hope it is not too late) to explore other kind of meditations.
Looking forward to the possible transformations in my life.
I am finishing Mind Valley Mystic Brain. I am excited to start on this journey. I have already notice such a difference. A very impressive note from the mystic brain is that I have been in physical excruciating knee pain for the last 6 months as I await a knee replacement. 3 days ago I woke up and the pain was gone and movement was better. I am committed to continue this journey and committed to meditation daily! Thank you for sharing this this valuable work & chapter of The Short Path.
Thank you for sharing Chapter 1. The Short Path to Oneness course holds power to change. I resonate with many of the below comments.
I see that science is affirming the spiritual ideas that have been here since the beginning of this earth time, and I always find every new “discovery” exciting. I hadn’t realized how quickly we can rewire our brains and that it is so measurable. I have many practices I am encouraged to do, and this gives me a new sense of purpose and excitement to make full use of what I already have.
This reinforces what I’ve learned as a student of A Course in Miracles. Connecting with our Source (Love) and our true Self is everything. Our thoughts and beliefs create our reality.
I’m less interested in the science of it. More interested in experiences and living it.
I witness people being so ungrateful and unaware of how much they have and the beginning of this started with the story about the lottery win and never even knowing you have won. I actually do live my life full of gratitude and actually I dont physically need actual money in abundance to fill my heart, my head and soul as what I need is my family, my grandson, my pets and the sea, the trees and the beauty of nature. Having a roof over my head and heating, having a garden and being able to live my life free to be…me
Reading this reminds me of the book I’m reading, Evolve your Brain. Very interesting!
I found this course by accident I was in so much distress so much mental anguish that I wanted to die. Thank you so much for this course and looking forward to the meditation tomorrow morning.❤️❤️❤️
Loved the idea of “The states you cultivate in your mind become the traits you hardwire in your brain”
I am excited by the statement that if you stop using old self-referencing pathways that are used to process your misery, they start to disintegrate in 3 weeks
Aha moment: “Keep God in remembrance until the self is forgotten”
Reflecting on my life, I realize that I have been aware of the concept of a “higher self” for quite a while. It is as if I have been waiting to continue the process of living in “bliss”.
While the concepts of meditation and the short path to enlightenment are not surprising to me, I was surprised that MRI’s have been done to measure brain activity, and although a change is expected, it was surprising at the extent of the activity.
8
Very interesting, especially the history and work and how its evolved over time, so many more books to read! So much to learn but very exciting. Being able to rapidly rewirethe brain is so interesting.
Thank you. I am so glad I am in this course.
Thank you for the background information. A helpful step along the path.
I am thankful that I have had experienced enough to understand much of what is described here, glimpses and moments that let me know.
This was interesting to me. I think I need to read that book mentioned.
I am thrilled to learn about Paul Brunton and all the other mystics, sages and masters who have given us access to AWESOME spiritual tools for better life, health and well-being! I am excited!
Awakening or living in a state of brain bliss can be done through a short path.Enlightenment is possible as it is hardwired in our brain
Awakening downregulates the DMN
It is possible to be 2400% happier
Wow. Everything about this resonated….
From one who is well acquainted with the long path! So excited to shift to the SHORT PATH!
Thank you, Dawson….
thank you for this course!
I am thankful for this new knowledge. Being brought up in a cult, this is very helpful for me. I am ready for my new future.
xo JB
so for me what I continue to learn is this whole concept of enlightenment is old very old. When i first became aware of this I think was in the late 70’s with EST and Werner Erhardt. Then came the course in Miracles and it never has stopped since then. I think I did take a break from this for a while and in the early 80’s when aids became the fear of the world I started back again and have never looked back. I can’t get enough info fast enough. I loved ready this and I have new books to read. This afternoon I started to read an Abraham Maslow book I put it down and guess what happened next I found this in my inbox and came here to you. There are never any coincidences and I love that I am here reading this. loved the part about meditations. I do eight hour sleep meditations. They are the best and when i wake up i feel amazing and ready to start my day. Love reading this now maybe I will win the lottery. Thank you Ruthie
I was surprised to find out that Dawson was so involved with Unity church, as I have involved with my local Unity Church for over 40 years. I was also surprised to find that several of the spiritual teachers that he felt inspired by are the same ones that I have enjoyed and learned from over the years.
I was also surprised that the beginning of a course on EFT started with a spiritual foundation rather than diving right in to EFT practices.
I like learning that these concepts and practices are embedded in science and in how the brain works.
All this is just so intriguing to me. All religions looking for unity in the end, we are one.
The chapter inspires further development and transformation. Thank you!
Thank you for this amazing chapter! My most important realization is simply understanding more fully that it all starts within ourselves, and there is no magic formula to find our own path to happiness. It has always been present for us! I have considered myself extremely intuitive, and I’m so excited to have found this course from experiencing passion, community and compassion (as PB mentions) through EFT tapping. For the last five years, I have started experiencing more awareness and understand more about our core beliefs, which can prevent us from getting to the a state of enlightenment. It had been recent when I decided to study further and learn how to implement these teaching into my daily life. I cannot wait to experience even more transformation, and I’m so thankful to have discovered the Short Path! I completely understand how the Long Path can become difficult to most of us. I love the concept to use both and learned how to implement the Short Path into our ordinary lives.
The fact that EcoMeditation MRI study showed that in just a month, non-meditators can be trained to reach Bliss Brain is so promising and encouraging for humankind.
I had an enlightenment experience at age 23 (56years ago) which totally changed my life. There was not nearly the amount of support or understanding at that time! I have been on the path since. I have practiced many religions for over 50 years, have a Tibetan Buddhist master teacher and am a Sufi Healing Cherag. I am a mystic, long term meditator and a distance healer as well as a retired MD. I am an intermittent finder seeking to inhabit that brain state full time. It is so exciting and surprising to me to see the understanding and support that is now available! We are laying the foundation for a new way of being human.
It is a fortunate time on earth to have wisdom keepers, such as you, who are able to so beautifully and thoroughly provide foundational practices. I find such delightful validation for my own journey in these precious sweet and savory words. I feel my “crazy happy” bubbling like Champagne! Thank you for this profound summary analysis of the integration of science and spirituality.
I was astonished and heartened to know that I had similar experiences as a 5 year old with the disillusionment of the teachings of a harsh non forgiving Scottish Presbyterian religion and the large gap between ‘Pulpit’ preachings and the contradictory ‘Monday through Saturday’ behaviours.
Thank you for letting me be a part of this. I look forward to more interesting and meaningful information to better myself
Very insightful. It amazes me that everything we want is already present. The examples of the neurons connected made so much sense. Charging our minds is worth doing the work. I’m looking forward to becoming more enlightened.
I love reading on the topic of spirituality and on consiousness, the mind and our thoughts. It’s so powerful. the more I read the more intune and present I am in my day to day life. I am so excited to learn more about EFT !
I am grateful that I was guided here. I desire to be completely free of the traumas of my early years in life. I see there is a path to live a different path free of all self-sabotaging unconscious thoughts. I am excited to be starting this program.
In my fifties, I learned how to love myself, live in a place of nonjudgment, and most freeing learn that the opinions of others does not define who I am.
I want more unconditional love poured in so I can pour out unconditional love into all situations every moment of the day.
I found this course “by chance” while studying neuroplasticity. I did some meditations on my own and read some books including those by Joe Dispense. I’m excited to begin this course and I am sure I’ll make good use of it.
There was so much to take in in this chapter, I will need to listen or read again. So much resonates with me and I am excited to continue the training. I had not come across PB before and love that the course offers so much wisdom in a modern style.
I can’t wait to get started!
I confess my ignorance: I did not know Paul Brunton but what I have read inspires me and I am very curious to try out this method that combines ancient knowledge with the scientific discoveries of our times.
Looking forward to experiment it.
Very interesting
Completed 21 day walk with you higher power course, and relistening as the deep meaning of the introduction and guide to telling us what we are going to be told is invaluable. Immersion and repetition and love are one needs to reach the goal.
Eddy: This preview resonates with me completely. Makes me feel that I am starting to embark ona Spiritual path I have been seeking for a long time.
Looking forward to enhancing my EFT training. Thank you.
Thank you, for the reminder of the kingdom being within us and to not have to have a reason for our bliss
The thing that surprises me the most is amount of time it will take to become possibly self actualized to states of awakening is reduced by an immense amount. That anyone who is willing to embrace these techniques can accelerate healing past hurts and live in the moment more happily and blissful. I am thankful to Dawson for taking us through his journey in how he discovered so much wisdom.
All I can say is wOW !!!!!
I have long ‘believed’ that source-is-within-me, yet I seldom tap into it. I love the science partnering with the spiritual aspect of what is being offered in this course – and I am fatigued with the ‘long path’!
There were a couple of aspects of the awakening process which struck me. I will focus on connection and community. While we often thinking of meditation as a solitary experience, the elevation that comes from meditation in community is significant. Likewise, connection to another through intense feelings of passion produces brain remodeling. And we also see that empathy is a neurologic event.
Teachings are taken from various religions and spiritual practices to embody your highest self.
Beautiful work Dawson. My husband Kevin and his partner Stephen interviewed you on their podcast titled ” Raising Our Vibration.” This booklet was filled with gems for me. A reminder that Trauma and Anxiety claim a lot of a person’s attention until released. I appreciate hearing about your journey with the Christian church. I had some similar experiences. Exposure therapy stood out to me as well for my son and I both to work with. Thank you for your work! Much Love,
Monica
Xx
Brilliant reading. The research is phenomenal.
Fascinating reading. Love all the research that has gone into it. Looks like I’ll be reading a lot of books in the next few months. Caroline, Australia.
I had no idea that this was a possibility for me. To imagine living in a much happier, more focused state of contentment would be bliss!
The aha I have is that ordinary moments can propel us to transcendence when we are passionate and mindful of what we are doing, fully attend to each moment, and experience them with as many senses as possible. What a wonderfully freeing concept to have an embodied awakening where we can fully participate in our lives without having to cloister ourselves away ! This encourages me to be more mindful, engaging each moment and experience as special.
So glad you emphasize community as an accelerator to enlightenment. When I have done group meditations, they seem “easier” to get in the zone and much more powerful than alone.
Thank you for the decades of work and study that have gone into producing this course!
Thank you for introducing me to the work of Paul Brunton and the many other sages and teachers who shaped your life and spiritual journey. I look forward to reading them and learning more on this amazing path. Since reading Blissbrain, I’ve been convinced that shutting down the DMN is essential and now we get to practice doing this!
Hallelujah!
The results of being in this state of oneness is what I have heard of before and I am looking forward to those.
My personal example is Byron Katie. I have been in her presence.
My most tangible experience of love was in the presence of a few sheep who were in a state of presence, that filled me with love and gratitude and it is my desire to offer this as a direct experience to other people.
Have been practicing EFT Tapping for almost a year. Find that I always feel great after doing the short tapping sessions.
Hope to become more consistent with practice through this course and clear some blockages that are from previous traumas.
Having read Bliss Brain and listening to Dawson for about a year now, I believe the Short Path is for me!
Confirmed for me what I have intuitively known for what seems like “forever”. Yet, somehow, I always got lost in the suffering. I am in what I consider crisis mode now. I need to explore this enlightenment path. My soul depends on it.!
Wow what a juicy chapter with so much to take in. I love the integration of the science with the mystical writings. I find it interesting that the DMN holds the keys to integrating suffering as well a-ha moments…and that meditation so amazingly can turn off the suffering DMN without also turning off the a-ha integration. Since the DMN is related to past/future thoughts…is it also related to integration of memories, good, bad and inbetween? Does it effect the perception of events and how they are remembered, ie. as suffering vs. an inspiring moment? Thank you.
P.s. actually for a few days before starting this course, I had been wanting to make a list of the inspiring teachers in my life. I’m really looking forward to that.
I am French. Even though I speak currently English, it took me a long time to go through all the information of Chapter One, having to open my dictionary more often than I thought I would have needed to. This was demanding!
However I was thrilled to learn that I could use my sleeping hours to change my brain. Furthermore, that I would sleep and dream in Bliss Brain.
As I love to meditate before going to sleep, I am just very excited to start these promising meditations.
As I read, I realized why I was not drawn to any religion. I was also looking for a unity above/behind religions, not a superficial and socially regulated manifestation.
This “awakening, light-conscious/enlightened body + soul” is much more sympathetic to me than when it comes to only the spiritual. That’s more believable to me.
Unfortunately, I cannot participate in the course due to distance (I live in Hungary), financial and language barriers (my friend is Google Translate). However, I studied EFT for 2 years with András Sághy and read the book The Genie in Your Genes in his translation, so the Inner Peace process is progressing nicely. I will see how far I can get with the 21 day meditation, the Bliss Brain meditation and the 7 published ECOmeditations. I plan each meditation for at least 3 days, and if some internal obstacle arises, I knock.
Thanks for everything. Love and peace.
The down regulation of the DMN and upregulation of love/compassion in Ecomeditation compared to mindful breathing was a surprise to me. Feeling grateful for those extra bonuses, also grateful for the progression from state to trait bliss. Looking forward to this course!
Yesterday I did the eco meditation and it was relaxing, peaceful filled me with love. I started it again tonight. Was interrupted twice: my husband looking for his anorak asking me where he could find it, and after 5-6 minutes coming back asked me if it was finished I said no but I stopped……..
I didn’t get angry, though.
Maria
My quest has been very long in my life. Started decades ago and in some way has never really ended. To know that there is a way that can take you to a a place of love and peace where you can dwell is of confort to me.
Maria
The information re theta being the brainwave that acts as a conduit for our local self to access our Higher Self was fascinating. Also found the MRI scans of monks while in a state of compassion exhibiting extraordinary amounts of gamma waves of great interest.
Thanks, Dawson, for combining your life long study of the mysteries of consciousness with a solid scientific understanding of the Higher Self.
I have visited this chapter more than once and each time I become more intrigued by the material. It is amazing how the brain operates while we are at sleep. Just recently I order PB book, “The Short Path to Enlightenment” and I am looking forward to reading it. The use of modern technology to verify the changes in the brain is just amazing to me.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading all of this. What a rich, profound overview of the spiritual journey, with all the diverse pathways to the infinite, and then to bring in the brain science was so very informative. Understanding the DMN (Default Mode Network) was particularly illuminating. Knowing that my negative thinking yatters on and on about past and future when it doesn’t ‘have a task’ is so helpful. Just reminding myself of the DMN doing its thing, (and remembering that brain diagram flashing red) brings my attention back to the present moment, and the goodness that is here now. As well, I love the idea of using the sleeping hours to change my brain. The sleeping hours are so precious, and so to move into sleep with the intention of moving deeply into Bliss Brain is a joyous possibility. As well, to have Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs move from Self-Actualization to Self-Transcendence was revelatory. Finally I appreciated Dawson sharing his life journey, and how all of this rich and informative material came together as it did. Wondrous. Thank you.
Very interesting
I’m familiar with the the process of awakening or enlightenment but the new information to me on the physiology of the brain, rewiring and responses during meditation and especially enlightenment was exciting to me and helped me understand what is happening to me in my meditation practice and fueled excitement and anticipation of future bliss and consistency in a new level of happiness in my daily life.
Processing. So much.
The unexpected title Short Path to Oneness’ grabbed my attention and I must say got my eye roll! I grew up in a traditional Hindu family in India, went to Christian Missionary English “convent schools”, married and embraced Islam and tried to understand the mystical path of Sufism! Certainly felt many times along this 60 year journey that the “long path” was not for me – just could not put my real life – be it school, college, career, wife, mother, bread-winner – on pause to pursue it!! Also did not think I had the discipline or ability for the sacrifice it called for. I read the chapter in one sitting! So much was familiar – except the actual direct experience! So intrigued that a short path is even possible! Omg, With a mentor too! Alleviated some fear… can’t wait to see where this takes me next…
I read through this chapter mostly looking for things that would let me know that this was a scam. Although I have been reading and practicing some of Dawson Church’s meditations for several years, I have recently been victim of an Internet scam and I have become even more cautious than I was before.
Nevertheless this chapter is quite convincing. When I briefly thought about the spiritual teachers who have affected me deeply, there have been two with whom I have had in-person contact. I have since thought of these two as genuine masters. I have not consciously connected my experiences with them until this chapter suggested starting a list.
The Section “Embodying Enlightenment” rings true. Our physicality is always changing, and this fact must be incorporated–not negated or denied–into any spiritual practice.
Epiphanies: I have always believed that there was a short path where consciousness realized shifted everything and that the spiritual long pathway lacked clarity re tools, techniques, habits, and a structured path that could be followed in ease, joy and grace.
I have read Bliss Brain and have done the 7 biochemicals and found personal evidence re does what is intended to do. And did not continue to practice until embodied. So what intriqued me most was what are the stepping stones. Part of it answered above with mentor & community. I had no one to share experience with or explore experiences with.
I had recently experienced the awakening of God being “in” me as opposed to this entity that was “somewhere” outside of me. This chapter inspired that reality more fully. The realness of that experience is overwhelming love.
I practice EFT every day using some of Dawson audios and I use his ecomeditation audios and I can testify that they have made a change in my life. I have no doubt that this course will change the many lives of those that are willing to embark on this path with their whole heart * the mind will follow *
I am so amazed how your info in combination with the meditation works for me – I am filled with awe. I can feel it:-)))
The bringing together of everyday life and transcendant experiences. It reflects where I would like to be.
Very informational and knowledgeable on how we manifest thoughts. Similar information that I have heard before feels differently, somehow. I’m looking forward to seeing what the training has to offer.
this was very interesting and informative. feeling grateful and very excited to take this course.
I loved reading this and feel empowered already! Would like to know/experience more!
I am a hypnotherapist and have heard most of this lesson before. It was long, but a good read. It also reinforced that learning different modalities starts with similar teachings.
What I have ached for, and this reminded me of again, is where to find this like minded community near me? I am in the middle of a very Christian area. Last time I had an amazing group experience was at a conference many years ago. It really is something that I hope everyone will get to experience in their own personal journey.
Arrives at a time of interesting personal growth. I have lived an amazing life. Have been a seeker since age two. Brief moments of Finder experiences but not there yet. Feel very close, think I can get there, but aha moment when realized resistances I have put in place keep me back. Looking forward to considering this course.
I started ecomeditation daily and I noticed changes within a few weeks of practice. The most remarkable is the fact that I can connect quicker to the non-local self.
I have experienced a few enlightment moments at different stages of my life, never really knowing wath to do with it. I was surrounded by a very superficial way of life and felt like an alien. No one pick up on my cues, with time , i drifted into fog brain. My environment have just started to reflect all of these enlightments. I am very grateful that now days there is this major awakening wich I can finally be part of and feel normal and empowered. Thank you!
We are all in a journey. We are shown the things we need to see in order to Learn and move forward. For some the journey is easier than others. Some Learn the lessons faster. There is no set order in which to face these things. Some learned the lessons and released the trauma years ago and do are already in a much lighter place. xx
Very interesting and inspiring. Looking forward to feeling the “Bliss”.
I realized that I get in my own way more than I ever thought…..there is a way past my old patterns
First “aha” moment: Jesus said, “The kingdom of heaven is within you.”
I believed for a long time that heaven is not a place at the other end of the universe. “The kingdom of heaven is near.” How near? It’s within you. How near is that? God is in you, and you are in God.
Second “aha” moment: Ecstasy Is Trainable
This was a remarkable brain function change from just 28 days of practice (Church, Stapleton, Baumann, & Sabot, 2021). As we use MRIs and EEGs to measure the results of various practices, we’re able to determine which ones are most effective at changing the brain. Coupled with profiles of the brain states of adepts, we can now train ordinary people into these states in just a few weeks or months. The EcoMeditation MRI study showed that in just a month, non-meditators can be trained to reach Bliss Brain.
I remember reading in the Bible, over 40 years ago, that you don’t need to be a believer to be saved. Unfortunately, I don’t remember where it is in the Bible. I was young and not smart enough to write it down. The point is that God is for everyone, that you believe or not. As far as I know, all religions tell us that we need to believe to be saved. Then, it might just depend on the version of the Bible you are reading. I’m quite sure I read that in the “Bible de Jerusalem”, in French, the Bible we were studying in High School.
I have experienced most of this at one time or another, including the dark night after bliss. I am looking forward to being able to experience the bliss without the dark night.
I’m struggling this week with how to resolve an issue in my marriage. I realized while reading this overview that I can look at the whole situation from a much broader and higher perspective. I’ve been so bogged down in the specifics, the dynamics, the words, the emotions, the fear, the sadness, the uncertainty, the mental spinning and spinning and spinning …..
But while reading this, I’m reminded that I am an eternal being and none of this petty stuff really matters. Love is the most important thing. I am love. When I embody that and embrace the truth of that, Love will shine through me in every conversation and every interaction.
