So all my life I’ve been waiting for a transformation of human consciousness. I didn’t know what that would mean, didn’t know what I was talking about, just knew through every cell of my body that that’s why I showed up on the planet and that’s why I stayed on the planet at times when I wanted to get off was this transformation of consciousness. And I always thought that maybe it would be a gentle and beautiful awakening where just a whole bunch of people would experience essentially what the Buddha experienced at his enlightenment and we’d all go, “Oh, maybe we should stop killing each other and share resources.”

I guess in some universes it might happen that way. In the universe where I find myself now, what I’m seeing is a massive upheaval and disruption. It’s happening in nations, it’s happening globally. It’s certainly happening in my home country, the U.S. It’s happening in neighborhoods and families and even individuals. A state of fear, a fear of scarcity, the competitiveness and anxiety that comes out of the idea that we are scarce. We are not supplied well. We’re not going to be cared for. The culture that wrapped itself around the world after the European Age of Enlightenment is one in which we are considered to be nothing but matter. And that means nothing matters but matter, which means money is what matters.

Right now, wherever you fall on the political spectrum or the spiritual spectrum of beliefs, what you’re seeing is a massive disruption in that aspect of the world. The way in which wealth is distributed, it’s more uneven now than it’s been for except in times of social collapse, like right before the fall of Rome. And also there is a tremendous amount of conflict going on based on people’s experiences of how to be safe in the world. People deeply believe in absolutely different sets of concepts, and we are at each other’s throats, so many of us: online, over family dinners, in friendships that are becoming ex-friendships. This is a time of enormous breakup, breakdown. Many, many social scientists, such as—I pride myself to be something of an amateur social scientist, educated, but amateur—things are looking bad if you want to stay in the state of consciousness that created what we call modern society.

However, in the middle of this chaos is the potential for so much rapid transformation in all those areas, in nations, in neighborhoods, in families, in individuals. But I think while a lot of the impact of the breakdowns are coming in on us, they come from large entities like governments that individuals don’t control and they’re coming rippling through policies and unintended consequences of a shift in policy or people having their funding removed or their job made obsolete. All this stuff is coming in at you.

The good news is that as a breakdown comes in at you, a breakthrough can come up and into you. It comes from the marrow of your bones. It shifts the way you see the experience you’re having right now here today, wherever you’re watching this. So in a minute I’m going to do one of our visualizations that will help us all in this moment go from whatever breakdown we’re experiencing to a breakthrough into something much sweeter and calmer and more reassuring and relaxing than, for example, the news.

We’re going to do that in a minute, but first I want to talk about one of the pivot points of science in our time. And when I first encountered it in the 1980s, I was saying to people, “For 50 years we’ve known this.” It freaks me out that now I can honestly say for over a hundred years we have known this. It was in 1923 that someone first conducted the double-slit experiment.

Now I want to tell you a metaphor based on the double-slit experiment, but that means I have to tell you about the double-slit experiment, which blows a lot of people’s minds and it should, but I have a point. So here’s how they did it. They took a panel of solid matter and they put two slits in it and they put a sort of film behind it so that it could capture electrons as they were fired through the slits.

So what happened is they put this little machine together and they started firing electrons out of a little machine into the film in back of the two slits. And just as you’d expect, the electrons went through one slit or the other, and they’d created two parallel lines. After they’d shot hundreds and hundreds of electrons, what you got is like if you shot a paintball at two slits and it would go through and it would hit the wall behind it.

Now that’s what happened when they were measuring and looking at what was happening in the experiment. But when no one was observing the machine as it shot the electrons through the two slits, something completely different happened. So now imagine that you’ve got a piece of plastic or something with two slits in it and you put it in the sink and you let water slosh through it. What happens is that the water goes through the two slits, but then it rejoins itself on the other side, and so it makes ripple patterns.

And indeed what they saw when no one was observing these electrons being fired through the two slits was that they created on the film at the back of the machine a wave pattern just like water would make if you poured it through two slits. This was inconceivable. It meant that the electrons were going through the slits as matter when they were being watched, basically, but when they were not being watched, the electrons were acting like a fluid. They were just a wave potential. They were pure energy. There was nothing solid about them at all. They were fluid.

Okay, so here’s a visualization I want you all to do: Think about anything that’s going on in your life where you have two apparent choices or you may have two choices to make or you may have two ways of looking at what is happening around you.

So for example, imagine, bring up something to mind that has happened in large-scale, global economic politics. Or even a disruption in your relationships, an argument with someone, somebody said something, you can’t believe they believe that, and you’re just not as close to them as before. There’s disruption.

And you’re standing next to a wall and there are two doors in the wall, and if you go through one of the doors, what you see is a world where everything is breaking down. Not only are governments and economies and policies shifting in a way that is really, really dramatic, more than we’ve ever seen in my lifetime, and also people’s interior life is being more tugged around. No one knows exactly what’s true anymore. People believe what they see on the internet, but what they see on the internet is funneled toward them based on what they already believe. So people’s realities are separating more from each other. The people who are encountering evidence that disproves what they thought the world was.

Like for me, one of the things I’m realizing is I’m grieving my imagined country. The place I thought I lived, it wasn’t exactly like this, and I have to grieve that it isn’t. So that’s a breakdown. And it can hurt in your heart, it can in your wallet, it can hurt anywhere. It’s painful.

There’s another door. And through this door, what you see is a hum of living, moving, joyful, wild-with-love consciousness playing in matter. It’s playing in the cells of your body. It’s playing in the discussions with your family. It’s playing with your pets. It’s playing with people who are going through catastrophic upheavals. It’s loving people as they’re grieving, it’s supporting them and saying, “It’ll be okay. I’m with you. We’ll find a way. This is going to be an adventure. You’ll be all right.”

It is full of magic, this world. It is full of connections with people that you’ve known all your life, even though the two of you have never met. It is filled with gatherings like this one, golden filaments of energy, just connecting people all over the world to support those who are in pain, to smooth the path for those who are changing, to hold those who have lost. And it is nothing but beautiful. And in that world there is no death. There is only sometimes playing in form and then leaving form and then playing in form and then leaving form. So there’s no fear and there’s no decrepitude and there’s nothing except joy, love, beauty, all the things that we all crave.

Now, what you’re being told is that reality is the door of breakdown. That’s what we actually see around us. I read a lot online where people are like, “Just buckle in and deal with the fact that this is what’s happening. This is it. It’s bad. You’ve got to just take this on the chin.” And they have a lot of physical evidence that that’s true. So I go through that door, can’t go through that door and the wonderful fluffy consciousness door, maybe when you’re dead, you can. No, no, no, no, no. You don’t have to wait until you’re dead.

This is what I want you to do. We’re going to do the Stillness, Silence, and Space meditation. We’re going to step out of matter with our attention and direct it toward what is deeper than matter: pure consciousness. So the first thing I want you to do is sit quietly, breathe deeply, trigger that alpha brain state by saying to yourself: Can I imagine the distance between my eyes?

And then from the distance between your eyes, can I imagine the space inside each atom of my body? So bring your attention all through the body and know that every atom is mostly empty space, and even that tiny particle of matter dissolves into energy when it’s not being watched. So seek refuge in space that is vibrant, alive, and loving, and then feel that in the space is a matrix of stillness in which everything you experience is occurring.

Space, stillness, and silence is the next portal. Listen to the silence below my voice and below all of the sounds around you. Now you have become space, stillness, and silence. I think I quoted you already one of my favorite memes online. It said, “When I’m caught between a rock and a hard place, let me be water.” Let me be water. Let me be water.

So as you move to space, stillness, and silence as your identity, you can wash forward toward both the doors in front of you. You’re a huge soft force of light, a field of light going through both doors at once, seeing the separation and then rejoining itself on the other side and feeling ripples and patterns emerge in your psyche as you experience the material world that is experiencing so many breakdowns and then the spiritual world that is creating so many reunions and so much healing and so much support, and you become this fluid pattern of both.

This, I believe, is why we became human, to feel the interplay between these two ways of existing. And when you become the fluid, you can see all the breakdown and use it for the pattern of new beginning.

So you’re bringing, as you step through both doors at once, you become light, and you become capable of illuminating everything on both sides. You become one with the whole catastrophe, both sides, spirit and matter. And the patterns you make are like, imagine the sun on the sea at dawn or sunset with the glassy waves and the gorgeous sprays of foam and the thunder of the water and the texture of it and the life it breeds and the wildness of it. It doesn’t need to fear. You are the ocean. You can see both things at once, breakdown and breakthrough. And as you walk in the consciousness of the fluid, the breakdown doesn’t have to hurt as much, and the breakthrough comes much, much faster.

And things begin to form in the space beyond those two doors that we’ve never ever seen before in this particular slice of history. Things like life joining all of life in mutual support, not because we’re being virtuous, but because that is the physics of how a fluid works, a fluid substance.Things like people knowing each other before they meet because they’re part of the same sea.

I just did a wonderful podcast with a guy who grew up right where I am in Pennsylvania and is now in Costa Rica, another place I love. Never met him before, known him all my life. When we’re in the water, when we are the water, we are each other, and every meeting between the two of us is a reunion between love and love. And it’s always a little different because of the two doors we’ve been through. So it’s more beautiful than an ocean that is still and glassy, but it’s always unexpected, it’s always different and it’s always beautiful.

So I see we’ve got some trolls coming in, that’s always great for looking at the breakdown of whatever we’re using. I’ve only got one question here. So Ro is sending me questions, and the first one is, “How can we create inner stability in this time of change?”

Using little meditations like the one I just offered, little visualizations before you go into a situation. Like before you look at the news, before you go out of your bedroom in the morning, before you go into traffic in the morning, taking some time to stop, focus on space, stillness, and silence. Feel the love that is pouring, pouring into you from the ocean around you, which doesn’t differentiate you from it.

When you surrender your solidity to being fluid, and it joins the fluid energy of love in the universe, the exquisite joy, the incredible depth of love, even if you have to go into traffic, let a thread of that into your psyche and believe in it. Hold it like a lifeline, even if it seems like a spider’s web. Hold it. It will carry you. You can be pulled to safety by this lifeline. But it requires that you just straighten your spine if you can, relax your muscles if you can. Try not to be too worried for a moment and find this thread of consciousness that comes through silence, stillness, and space. That is as much what you are as the physical body you’re sitting in right now.

And when you know that, when you’ve got your hand around that luminous spider’s web all the time, you know you’ll always be safe. You may be dragged through the water for a while, but you’ll always be safe.

So, “Any more guided meditations,” someone asks, “or teachers to check out to experience the cosmic consciousness more in depth. Do you have a routine? Thank you.”

Okay, I learned to meditate from the recording called The Inner Art of Meditation by Jack Kornfield. He’s one of my favorites. I also love the work of Byron Katie, and she doesn’t do a lot of visualizations, but what she does is she guides your imagination. If you watch her, she does these live free broadcasts from her home. Just go to Byron Katie in Google and it will show you how to get to them. And what she does is she takes you through your pain at a breakthrough and pulls all the wool off your eyes and lets everything material go poof! And you become fluid and enter the space, and she walks in that she lives in that and you can feel it and that will pull you through. So I love her as well.

Do I have a routine? Yes, every morning, well, if I have time, I meditate, but no matter what I do this thing where for some reason for me it’s all about my spine. I have to straighten my spine really, really straight and get my head oriented so that the crown of my head is directly over my spine. And then I imagine a big golden ball of energy. And with every breath I pull that in and then I breathe out really long, kind of like I’m trying to fog up a mirror. So it’s like, and the out breath can last for a minute and a half.

And what I’m doing is taking that golden energy and any fear or constriction or pain that’s in me, I’m trying to just let it fog out around me. Sometimes this takes away all physical pain. Sometimes it doesn’t. But it always makes me remember, “Okay, this is my orientation,” and then I think to myself, “Please help me become what I already am.”

So I do believe we already are these creatures of pure space, stillness, and silence, pure light, pure fluidity. And every time you do a little practice like that, it shifts up your nervous system a little bit so that it can receive more of that.

Okay, someone says, “How in the world did you find this meditation? And also, why does my pain disappear doing that amazing visualization?”

Thank you for asking. I sit in meditation and I ask, “Please give me a visualization for The Gathering Room. Please tell me what the people out there could benefit from.” And then I just wait and I watch as if I’m sitting by my bird feeder waiting for the birds to come, and I try not to get too excited when something happens because you don’t want to scare the birds away. And images come into my mind and then I transmit them on The Gathering Room or wherever I am because I trust them.

And sometimes they’re kind of weird. Today I thought, “I’m going to have to describe the whole double-slit experiment.” And that’s kind of hard to understand in itself. I’ve stopped questioning as much. I trust you all to know what I’m talking about.

And why does your pain disappear? My pain disappears too when I do that. And I do believe it’s because our bodies are very sensitive instruments that detect whether we are living in pure alignment with what we know at every level of meaning-making. So this deep subconscious belief system that is rooted in the body. And when my mind doesn’t agree with that, what happens is that I get emotional pain, but if I keep going with it, I get physical pain as well. 

And I believe that the physical pain is a red light going, “Stop this. Reconsider what you’ve got in your mind right now. Reconsider what you’ve got in your schedule right now. Something is off.” And I will just be like a bloodhound on the scent. When I know something’s off, I go in, “Where am I believing what hurts? Where am I believing what does not jive at the deepest level? What are the flaws in my thinking? And what are the flaws in the logic?”

So I talk a good game, spiritual airy-fairy, but then I go in with my logical mind as hard as I possibly can and direct it at any belief that doesn’t match what feels like freedom in the depth of my being. And then pain is gone. And since I’ve had a lot of pain in my life, it’s a really motivating teacher. And it keeps me on my path.

Someone says, “Thanks for amazing stillness. I learned from you that beyond inferno is heaven if you keep your integrity. How to get back quickly to integrity in a total storm?”

Yeah, that’s a really good word for the way I see the physical world right now, a total storm. And we’ve done visualizations on this before, but one thing you can do to use in this one is look at the storm through one of those doors. And now when you transform, don’t become fluid, become light.

And what you’re going to do is, say it’s a storm at sea, you go through one door that’s pure consciousness, it’s pure love, it’s pure beauty. But you go through the other one as light, and you light the storm. The water becomes illuminated. The stars come out. There are people with lighthouses all the way along the shore. There are people shining lights from boats. There’s bioluminescence sparkling from under the sea. There’s all this light, and you are it. And this storm can’t hurt you. You are light. It can’t hurt you. In fact, it makes you that much more visible by being dark, and you can start to know yourself as light.

There’s this art installment I saw once and it was just—an artist had made a black box that had a vacuum in it, and that’s all it was. It was just pure black. But you could put your hand into this glove that was attached and put it into the box of darkness. And when you did that, your hand would be shown in brilliant, brilliant light because there’s a very strong light shining down. But until you broke into the darkness and had something for it to reflect off, the light was not visible. So for light to know itself as light, sometimes it enters the darkness and it puts matter in the place of space, and that matter goes boom, lit up by the light of consciousness. And that is a good way to imagine finding your integrity again in the storm, that all that jeweled chaos is safe for you because you are light.

Okay: “Can you speak about the part of us that channels pure consciousness? Is it the ego? I noticed this part of me trying to calm and care for my parts and trying to do love, but not always getting it right.”

That is so sweet. That is the most adorable thing about humans. The most gorgeous thing about us is that even when we’re scared, we try to calm and care for anything, anyone, who is frightened. But when we do that from a place of feeling little and in a state of scarcity ourselves, it drains us. And I spent years relating to people that way, relating to animals that way, relating to freaking inner objects that way.

So yeah, it’s not the ego. The ego—if any part of you says, “I have got this, I can do it. It’s my job,” sweetheart, that’s ego. And feel how it drains you and smile at it and say, “You adorable, sweet, well-meaning ego. I love you. You are so great, and your draining, performative love actually isn’t needed. So what I’d like you to do is pull that energy back into you and use it like a blanket to warm yourself up.”

The others are all being cared for, the other parts of you, the other parts of the world by Self with a capital S, which you don’t have to strive to become because you already are it always. It is caring for all the parts, including every facet of your ego. And really, I think awakening is just relaxing into the love that is caring for the ego all along, and then the ego kind of goes to sleep and never wakes up. I think. I’m probably wrong, but I don’t mind.

All right, last question: “How do you deal with the fear of the unknown when you don’t know what’s coming next? Well, we never know what’s coming next. And in the moments you say, “It’s okay, I know what’s coming next,” you’re wrong. But that’s okay. I mean, often nothing bad happens. Usually nothing bad happens. We spend so much time—this is my whole last book, Beyond Anxiety—being afraid of something that probably won’t happen.

We’re afraid of something that if it does happen, we can greet in the moment with presence and fortitude because we have become light through the way we handle breakdowns. So if you use this visualization to become energy, to become light, to become consciousness, then you can sit with the unknown and say to yourself, “Everything is unknown except this moment and in this moment, I’m okay.”

And if you can be the part of you that knows itself as light, that knows itself as energy, as space, as silence, as stillness, then for certain that what comes to you in the form of your material circumstances will simply be wrapped in the love of consciousness and you’ll be able to handle it when it comes. All the emotions, all the physical things you’ll have to do—if you go in as the love of the divine, which you already are, you’ll be able to handle everything, not knowing what’s coming. Then once the fear is gone from it, it’s an ongoing adventure. It’s just love at play.

So I will leave you with that. It is 3:33 on my clock here. I’m seeing all these repeated numbers and the guy who podcasted with me just said, “I’m seeing all these repeated numbers every time I look at the clock.” So I think ending at 3:33 my time is a great moment. And I know you might not be listening to it at that time today or whenever you hear this.

I love you all. Remember to go through both doors at once. It’s all real, and none of it’s real at all, except for love and except for the light we all already are. Stay happy out there. See you soon.