The Light.

I have had a day, unlike any day that I have ever had before, in which I have seen things that I never knew I could see, all because some interpolation into The Mahabharata called The Bhagavad-Gita suggested that I try sitting up straight with my chin up and breathing deeply as a means to achieve perceptual clarity and relaxation.

Try this for long enough in a sitting position, and then see how long you can keep doing it while in your daily activities, and you will come to some insights that you didn’t realize yourself capable of: you will begin to realize that that bitch Jane at work was never the person bothering you; she never did anything wrong to you at all. You created that situation in your imagination. What Jane, or Bill, or Sancho, or whoever did was stand too close too you, causing your ancient, primate brain to start producing panic hormones which in turn causes your breathing to grow shallow, which creates more panic chemicals because now your brain is telling you that there is a threatening animal standing too close for comfort and that it isn’t getting enough oxygen. But no—for most people Jane’s just a bitch.

Breathing deeply calms the panic of the brain, which allows it to fall in tune with the senses, to become aware of the body in way it probably hasn’t been since the creation of an egotistical identity in early infancy. In turn, it begins to recognize things that were causing it be uncomfortable, that all this time the created identity of the ego was misdirectedly blaming on people and things outside of it. That’s right, you’re angry at Tom because you didn’t wipe well and have got an itchy bum; Juan is an asshole because you skipped breakfast; your boss is a tyrant because you’re hung-over, sleep deprived, nervous from the caffeine, winded and exhausted because you’re out of shape. You don’t need to change a single one of those other people, and you wouldn’t stay happy for very long if you did, because they weren’t the ones causing your unhappiness. You were and are causing your unhappiness. You are the problem. The world is fine, doing its own thing, as it has been for 4.5 billion years. It’s you. Get in touch with that idea.

Keep breathing, as you go out into the world—into Wal Mart, Costco, the local stadium, anywhere a lot of people can be found and just keep breathing, holding your head up, and looking at every single person that you pass. You’ll be able to do this now, without looking away, because you’re breathing and heart rate are going to tell your brain that you are calm and unafraid. Keep looking into the eyes of every single stranger you encounter, free from the chaotic maelstrom of your preconceptions, your ideas, your opinions, your past and future. Just look at them, and watch how their eyes shimmer and twitch. Keep breathing and don’t look away, stay in this place for as long as you can. Don’t worry; 90% of them will look away in terror in less than two seconds, because you have just issued them a challenge by rules of their DNA, by their long evolutionary history, stating that prolonged eye contact is a challenge to fight or mating overtone, just like it is for dogs. Just smile if they do look back, and you may unexpectedly find yourself in a very pleasant conversation. Do this for at least half an hour, carefully looking at the eyes and face of every person you encounter, the movements of their lips and nostrils. Don’t get scared; breathe.

No go to the zoo, or if you haven’t got that, the library to pick up an issue of National Geographic, or watch The Nature Channel. Start looking at apes and monkeys, the way their eyes move, the way they maintain or avoid eye contact, the way their eyes shimmer and twitch. If you can do this calmly, it’s gonna hit you like a ton of bricks: that’s right—you’re an ape, and I’m an ape, and you’re looking right at your-not-as-precocious cousins.

The incredible thing about the human brain is that its capacity for imagination and memory are so powerful that it can manufacture for itself an identity, commonly termed the ego, which believes itself separate from the larger organic entirety. To our knowledge, we are the only primate capable of doing this, but that’s only to our knowledge—because we can’t teach chimpanzees to speak or write. We can, and have, taught chimps sign language, and when we do they invent new combinations of words, including vulgarities involving bodily wastes and sex organs, just like their smarter cousins. Evolution is as real as the air you are breathing, but our imagination’s capacity for fiction is so powerful that billions of upright-walking, hominid apes, Homo sapiens sapiens have talked themselves into some crazy mass denial of what they are and where they came from, to a point where only scientists and philosophers are privy to the truth.

But because we can talk and write, drive cars, erect buildings, and have successfully outlasted all of the other hominid races, silly, vain, religious sects begin to craft the outlandish lie that they never existed at all, that the extensive and growing fossil record of their existence is all some kind of plant by a fictional character from Hebrew myth called Satan, or a persistent error on the part of deluded P.H.D. anthropologists who, after all, spend their whole lives studying the matter. The writing and the building and the talking just make us very smart apes with very dexterous forepaws, which is why evolution’s verdict is that we will eventually be the only apes, because that’s just how things work.

Something followed with this understanding, that these same “religious” folks’ understanding of the concept of God is so primitive, childish, and stupid that they deny evolution based on some crackpot belief in magic, that poof, one day man appeared, just like a group of nomadic Jews, eons before the dawn of science, living 5,000 years ago in a desert, with a language too primitive to contain punctuation, and hence impossible to accurately translate, concluded, without necessarily even believing that it was anything other than a convenient myth. They believe that an omniscient and omnipotent God could not possibly have had the foresight to include anything as wonderfully subtle, as splendid and democratic and fitting as natural selection in His divine plan. Idiots.

So there I was, an ape that took 32 years to recognize what it was, walking home from Wal-Mart, when it began to rain, rather hard. My rent check and a utility bill were in my knapsack, and my cell phone was in my front pocket, and so, rather than sulk, my ape brain wisely pointed out that perhaps my ape body should seek shelter. It did, finding, an awning attached to a building that once housed an office of some kind. The awning had a dry bed of straw underneath it, the perfect place to sit and wait out the rain, or at least the heavy rain.

We fight because there are too many of us.

It was like being struck by a bolt of lightning, but more painful. We fight bar fights and skirmishes and World Wars, thinking that we are fighting for France or Allah or Democracy or the Celestial Empire, when we are fighting because we are in a state of perpetual unease about being too close too one another, in a population so dense that 2 million years of hominid evolution is already telling us it is a state of territorial invasion, that we are already at war with one another based on violations of our instinctive, animal ideas about space. We are fighting because all territorial animals pushed too close to one another erect hierarchies of power, to dominate or submit to that which it can no longer escape. We’re monkeys flinging poop who have concocted the greatest delusion in all of the history of the natural world, that our capacity for language and hence accumulated learning makes us exempt from the rules that govern all other mammals, that we are enforcing and defending Higher Purposes with our wars, that only animals engage in wars over territory, that we are Human Beings, with names and jobs and iPods. Human Beings couldn’t possibly create imaginary verbal justifications for things we were naturally predisposed to do. Never mind that we look like primates, eat like primates, copulate like primates, eliminate like primates, share nearly all of out DNA with chimpanzees, and if you’ve ever seen too untrained guys slug it out, fight just like any other ape. Our reasons are different, because we say they are, and because we have the capacity that no other animal has—to tell lies to ourselves and others.

All this time, I was taught and came to believe, due to the belief’s very flattering nature, that I was something other than what I am. Today I have seen something with eyes that have never before seen it, that I am just a very smart ape, and so is everyone else, decorating ourselves to attract mates, fighting over whose patch of grass this is, living chemically dictated lives that we distort into the twisted logic of language. I cannot explain how terrifying and simultaneously liberating this understanding is.