“What defines us as human is self-awareness. It’s our form of awareness that we extend out into the environment around us through our attempts to describe and define everything.

We’ve claimed this self-awareness as our own, a phenomenon belonging to each individual, who then investigates questions that inherently arise from a sense of self. Questions like: Who or what am I? What is this place? What is the universe, and how did it come to be?

Animals and other living things are aware too, often acutely so. A deer senses it’s being watched. A tree reaches for light through gaps in the canopy whilst its roots stretch toward moisture deep in the soil. All living things possess some level of awareness: insects, flowers, even microbes. That’s how green slime from over a billion years ago has, over time, become astronauts in space today.

But how plausible is it to suggest that a single-celled organism in an ancient pool held within itself the potential to one day build spacecraft? This mystery is why the great Eastern mystics and classical traditions speak of awareness as something fundamental, something that exists prior to biology.

Self-awareness emerged somewhere between 300,000 and 3 million years ago. Our predecessors, the hominins, were only aware of their immediate environment. They were completely unaware of their own existence.

That was about to change. Most likely after extended periods observing their own reflection in still water, the first instance of self-recognition sparked into existence. And so self-awareness was born into life on Earth.

This also marked the beginning of the storyteller age, the age of narrative and misperception, born from asking existential questions to which, for most of our history, we had no complete answers.

Until now. The book You Are Magnificent. Now You Know Why. traces a complete structural account of what reality actually is, from the simplest distinction possible into space, time, awareness, consciousness, and ultimately love. It provides the foundation that was missing.

The restlessness, the overconsumption, the conflict, the feeling that something essential is missing, these are not signs that humanity is broken. They are signs that our understanding has been incomplete. And that understanding is now available.

But just as hominins underwent a great metamorphosis millennia ago, another transformation is now unfolding. Each of the great mystics and spiritual masters throughout history discovered something beyond a personal story: an understanding marked by love, compassion, and a clarity that transcended the limitations of the self-model. And this number grows every day. Many live quietly among us, devoting their lives to service, helping others, caring for animals, tending to the Earth.

The next great metamorphosis is underway. Our very own caterpillar-to-butterfly moment.

During this transformation, we’ll be sharing this world with people at every stage of the process. This is not a division between the aware and the unaware. It is a species in transition.

So perhaps it’s this simple: self-awareness was the first great evolutionary transformation, and now this self-awareness is coming to know itself. The tension in our world is a temporary turbulence amidst an extraordinary event along the path toward a unifying understanding.

Some leading scientists have proposed that consciousness may be fundamental to space-time itself, a view which mirrors the teachings of the great spiritual traditions. And if awareness truly is fundamental, then perhaps love is not an emergent phenomenon, but the essential quality of that very awareness.

The microbe in primordial slime that becomes an astronaut in space reveals the presence of an underlying intelligence within all life, and that the arc of evolution is this intelligence becoming aware of itself, experiencing itself through form and senses for the very first time.

Which explains why we are drawn to beauty, and why we long for love. These are far greater than emotions. They are that fundamental awareness reaching for itself. And that is what evolution is.

If you were to ask a caterpillar, ‘What are you?’ it would answer with complete certainty:

‘I am a caterpillar.’

Until… Butterfly!

If you feel inspired to support humanity’s present transition, take the first step on the home page.

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