The name of this one thing is second attention.

Whether you call it personal growth or spiritual evolution, it would be helpful to disentangle the threads of advice, myth, mysticism, outworn traditions, and stubborn conditioning that block a person’s progress. For that purpose, there is one thing needed for personal growth and also spiritual evolution. With this one thing, the experiences of daily life can be easily sorted out and underlying reality revealed.

The name of this one thing is second attention, and even if the term is new to you, you already have second attention. The issue is how to use it. First attention is directed at any experience you might be having. Whatever you are paying attention to right this minute occupies first attention. Reading this post will lead to another experience, perhaps getting up to stretch or have a cup of coffee, and then you might make a phone call, and in this way first attention guides you through your day.

Second attention lies behind the screen of first attention. It is there in the background all the time. When you pretend to be listening but are actually thinking of something else, you have fallen back on second attention. If you leave home on a trip and are nagged by the worry that you didn’t lock the back door, this too is second attention. The human mind is designed to maintain first and second attention at the same time, yet the spiritual significance, along with the possibility for personal growth, is largely hidden.

That’s because the examples I’ve just given illustrate second attention as a thought at the back of your mind. While pretending to listen, the thought might be “This is so boring.” The deeper, hidden possibility that makes second attention so valuable is only revealed when the mind is quiet, as in meditation.

Then you experience what is called your sense of self or simple awareness. Second attention comes from here. It is the unchanging witness that doesn’t get involved in all the things that first attention cares about, whether it is work, family, or relationships.

As involved as you are with first attention, the reason you are conscious at all is second attention. It tells you that you are real, alive, alert, and aware. Without this foundation, the mind can produce no thoughts at all, not even a simple sensation or feeling. Second attention fulfills the axiom “Be here now.” This sounds so basic that you’d hardly suspect the enormous potential that exists behind the screen of first attention.

Here are some glimpses when second attention makes itself known in a positive way.

In all of these examples, the same thing happens. You override what your mind habitually thinks. In place of the same old response, opinion, belief, or emotional reaction, awareness sifts. This isn’t second attention intervening, because it doesn’t act out in any way. What happened instead? You chose to pay attention deeper than your thinking mind.

Thanks to second attention, impulses of love and compassion emerge of their own accord; we notice the beauty, see the truth, have a moment of insight, or feel inspired. None of these things are thoughts. They go beyond thoughts to another level of awareness. This movement is known as transcendence. Typically the moment passes, which is natural. First attention always produces the next thought, feeling, or sensation.

Yet if you pause to look at the situation, you will see that you naturally have the ability to transcend. I’ve devoted a whole book, Metahuman, to the promise and possibilities of going beyond the thinking mind to reach the field of pure awareness that is our source. But the essence of all spiritual experiences, along with experiences of love, compassion, empathy, beauty truth, and creativity, is second attention.

This opens up the path of personal growth immediately. If you favor second attention easily and naturally, you are on the evolutionary path. By the same token, if you favor the same old repetition, routine, habit, and reflexive responses that first attention automatically falls back on, you will remain stuck. Evolution depends on aligning yourself with fresh responses that arise as soon as you fall back on second attention.

There are three basic ways to fall back on second attention.

Most everyone has had the bitter experience of being betrayed, when someone we trusted violated that trust.

After being betrayed, most of us want two things, usually at the same time. We want to get even with the person who hurt us or we want to rise above the situation and offer that person forgiveness. But neither of these impulses usually helps. Getting even with someone usually boomerangs and makes you feel as bad as the person you wanted to hurt. Forgiveness, especially if half-hearted, tends to come off as condescension.

What is really needed is emotional intelligence, which works in two ways. First, you realize the probable outcome of what won’t work — as we just saw, the impulse to get even or to forgive predictably won’t work. It’s good to know this in advance, but emotional intelligence also has to tell you what will work, and why. That’s the second step if you want to recover emotionally after being betrayed.

There are actions you can take to heal yourself. Every hurt has its own story, and so does every healing. But we can say this: You can heal yourself when you’ve filled the hole left behind by a betrayal, and you can heal the other person when you sincerely drop the need for revenge.

Why does betrayal create a hole inside? The only betrayals that inflict seriously, lasting damage are the ones where an intimate bond has been torn. Intimacy leads to empathy, and empathy makes you merge with another person, able to feel their emotions as keenly as you feel your own. So when an intimate bond is ripped apart, it’s as if you’ve lost part of yourself.

So how can you get out of torment and heal this hole inside?

It requires a good deal of objectivity to set about these seven steps. Nothing is easier than doing nothing, but the cost of inertia is high. Wounds fester unless healing is brought to them. In the absence of emotional intelligence, it is also easy to do things that are guaranteed not to work.

So here are seven tactics you should discard immediately.

These are all self-defeating behaviors that only make a betrayal linger.

If you find yourself in the position of being the wronged party, sit down with the seven healing behaviors and the seven self-defeating behaviors in front of you. On a piece of paper write down all the ways you are following the healing program. Then write down all the ways you are sticking with self-defeating behaviors. Be candid and objective. It is healing in itself to write down these things, because the key to psychological healing is self-awareness. You can only change what you are aware of.

The two lists are in stark contrast, but real life is blurry around the edges. One day you are on the right track; the next day you are an emotional train wreck. The key is to keep being kind to yourself. You are being kindest when you begin to feel better toward the person who betrayed you.

I know this sounds impossible when your pain is acute, but you can’t heal yourself unless feelings of ease, acceptance, tolerance, and non-judgment extend beyond your own self-interest. Otherwise, pretending to heal is simply a mask for egotism. The idea of “I’m getting better, and I hope he rots in hell” is an unresolvable contradiction. The same is true for “I’m totally fine, and I’m glad if she gets what’s coming to her.”

In the end, when you reach the stage of being healed, you will see how fortunate you are. The role of self-healer is invaluable. It shows that you have reached a state of emotional intelligence. As horrible as betrayal feels, forgiveness belongs to those who know how to love in the first place, and how to return to love after being wounded. Healing is just another word for the return to love.

History is filled with powerful forces that change the face of the Earth

Right now we are experiencing one, an explosion of a new coronavirus that has upended daily life. Forecasts of a change world are in the air once the pandemic is over, but no one really knows what the reset will be, if there is going to be one.

I think the best reset would be over happiness. There is an unquenchable drive for humans to seek happiness, but this means very different things at different times. A day laborer hauling stone to build a cathedral in the Middle Ages was happy, even inspired, by backbreaking physical work that never changed and ended with the breakdown of the body.

That way of being happy is unimaginable to modern people. In developed societies our formula for happiness generally involves the following: physical comfort, ample leisure, scientific medicine, higher education, endless distractions through entertainment and social media, and a steady supply of consumer goods. In the developing world these values are dominant, not as what people already have but what they aspire to have.

There have been many complaints about our way of being happy. It excludes the poor and widens the income gap around the globe. It is racially unjust; it dumbs down traditional education, flattens various cultures into one media culture, and wipes out local history and customs. Yet for all that, our way of being happy felt inexorable, and it was even branded as “the triumph of the West.”

Now that very inexorability has raised fatal risks, because Nature is complaining. The despoiled environment resulted from careless, reckless behavior that is difficult to reverse because all of us participate in it. The two centuries since the Industrial Revolution has raised global temperatures by a seeming fraction, perhaps 2 degrees Centigrade, moving so slowly that six generations were able to march to the tune of progress without thinking about the Earth.

Our way of being happy isn’t a modern trend, however. It goes back to the notion that human reality is the only reality, that animals and plants exist to serve us and don’t live on our high level. (This issue is very well articulated in a recent TED talk by British historian Greg Anderson. A human-centered reality goes to extremes when Nature itself is diminished to nothing more than a background, the scenery decorating the main event on stage: us.

Without changing our way of being happy, the pernicious effect of how we find happiness will continue and get amplified as developing economies in china and India adopt it for themselves. There will never be a return to religious traditions that revere the Earth as a goddess and Nature as the domain of divine forces. Religion isn’t going to resurface with any power over our consciences. Corporations are going to be driven by the need to satisfy their shareholders with rising profits.

The challenge is to raise our own well-being in such a way that we can pursue happiness in a sustainable world. This is going to be like reassembling a puzzle with new pieces put in place. Stop and ask yourself, would you be happier if…

It seems to me that a wide swath of the population would say that these measures, far from being onerous, would make them feel happier. Certainly each would have the effect of raising the total well-being of Earth’s human population.

As long as we insist on maintaining our present way of being happy, people won’t change. They will hide their heads in the sand not so much out of greed, stupidity, or selfishness as out of fear that cleaning up the planet will hurt them personally.

It is pure fantasy to believe in a magic-bullet technology that will make global deterioration go away overnight. Advanced technology will certainly play a part, but at bottom people want to be happy. If we can save the planet’s future by improving our own, a real solution will take place. I seriously doubt that any other solution has a chance.

One hears a lot about the power of now and the value of living in the present.

To achieve this state of awareness requires a major change in everyday life.

This much is clear, but producing such change is confusing and frustrating. When people seek personal change in their lives, they often don’t get very far. Even in this day when online advice is bewilderingly abundant and self-improvement books are at our fingertips, change eludes us. One way to remedy this is to start from the ground up. Normally, we feel compelled to start where we are right now, and that’s a tremendous problem.

No matter how different people are, each of us woke up this morning to the same situation. We are constantly involved in thinking, feeling, and doing. No one starts this activity afresh. Instead, we are heavily invested in habits, beliefs, opinions, hopes, dreams, and fears collected from the past. So our thinking, feeling, and doing is entangled with the past even when we want something new, better, fresh, and different.

You can’t always use will power or desire to cut the ties that bind you to the past, but you can do something that will lessen the influence of the past: You can start to see yourself clearly. With that one intention, you are starting from the ground up, because seeing yourself clearly happens here and now. You detach yourself from your story, which is the accumulation of your past. You take a fresh look at what is generating all this thinking, feeling, and doing. The process has to have an origin, a source, a wellspring that sets the active mind going every minute of the day.

Normally, if we try to see ourselves clearly, we are actually looking through a lens. We filter and arrange our experiences. Some experiences we reject, ignore, judge against, or censor. Other experiences we encourage, value, appreciate, and allow to enter our minds. The lens you choose is critical, yet people often don’t realize they have a choice. It doesn’t strike them in the first place that they see themselves — and everything around them — through a lens.

The lens you see through can also be called your mindset, worldview, or simply your state of awareness. Your perspective, on life, family, relationships, work stem from it. Things become confusing because we are caught up in the conflicting stories, explanations, and belief systems that everyone gets exposed to. This confusion can be sorted out once you start to see yourself clearly. Cutting through all the clutter, you discover that you actually know what’s going on. Deep inside, you are fully aware already.

According to Anoop Kumar, my fellow M.D. and an excellent writer on consciousness, there are three lenses you can view life through, configured as Mind 1, 2, or 3 at this moment.

The leading indicator of Mind 1 is the sense of localization within the body. As a result of being limited by the body, Mind 1 can only detect a world of localized things. As we see ourselves, so we see the world. You localize yourself in your body, and as a result you see a world of separate things. Other people live inside their own bodies, which gives them their own sense of separation.

In Mind 1 you provide fertile ground for the ego. “I, me, and mine” become all-important. This makes perfect sense, because your agenda as a separate person is all about the experiences of pleasure and pain that emanate from the body. Even a mental state like anxiety is rooted in the body, because what you fear comes down to a painful feeling “in here.” In every respect Mind 1 is dominated by yes and no to the experiences that come your way. To achieve peace, you must successfully compete in the arena of separate people and things, experiences and events.

Mind 1 seems totally right and natural in the modern secular world. Mind 1 is reflected in science’s total focus on physical things, from microbes and subatomic particles, from the Big Bang to the multiverse. A bestselling book from 1970, Our Bodies, Ourselves, applies to all of us in Mind 1.

It isn’t necessary to see yourself confined to the physical package of a body. In fact, this mindset can be turned on its head. In place of isolation there is connection; in place of things there is process; in place of hard facts, there is an easy continuous flow. You relax into the flow of experience rather than slicing life into bits that must be judged, analyzed, accepted or rejected.

Mind 2 lets you see yourself more clearly, because in reality the mind-body connection is a single continuity. Every thought and feeling creates an effect in every cell. You can consciously create change in the whole system through a switch in awareness. Mind 2 is subtler than Mind 1 — you have moved deeper inside who you really are, and those aspects and abilities that were filtered out by Mind 1 begin to come into view. You are the one who experiences, observes, and knows.

For most people Mind 2 begins to dawn when they meditate or do Yoga, finding access to the quiet mind that lies beneath the surface of the restless active mind. With this discovery comes a way to see beyond the separate ego’s fruitless search for “perfect” pleasure, power, or success. As a deeper vision of self and life soaks through all experience, Mind 2 is established.

It is a radical redefining of what we mean when we use the indicator “I.” It places you in an infinite field of pure awareness, where all things exist as possibilities. This is not only a clear view, it is clarity itself, because there is no thing or process to obstruct your vision.

Boundaries don’t exist. There is no past or future. Even the idea of a present vanishes. the clearest view you can possibly have, because there are no boundaries to limit your vision. You are awake, you see things without any filter, your past no longer holds you captive, and therefore you are free, which is why Mind 3 has been known for centuries as liberation. There are no more “mind-forged manacles,” as the poet William Blake memorably called our self-imposed limitations.

Mind 3 is open to everyone, but there is a large obstacle that must be overcome, which is this: We are convinced by the lens we see things through already. Each mindset feels real and complete. You identify with physical things in Mind 1, the most important thing being your body. In Mind 2 you identify with your field of awareness as it brings experiences and sensations that rise and fall.

Because it takes an inner journey to reach, Mind 2 isn’t where the mass of humankind is, yet without a doubt anyone can go there. Mind 2 is a more natural fit than Mind 1, in fact, because if you see yourself clearly, you cannot doubt that thinking, feeling, and doing is constantly on the move, ever-changing, ever renewing itself.

But Mind 2 has its own peculiar limitation. “I” lingers and holds its own by experiencing “my” thinking, feeling, and doing. There is no need for this. Everyone alive, with the fewest exceptions, has been indoctrinated into Mind 1. In Mind 2 you escape this crude, second-hand, socially approved indoctrination.

But there is a subtle indoctrination that replaces it, which sees the spiritual life as higher, better, and more valuable than ordinary life. This leads to a subtle clinging, a desire to keep the spiritual goodies coming your way and a self-image superior to those people who have not yet seen the light.

The subtle tendency to possess any idea, however fine that idea is, keeps the ego going. Letting it go entirely feels threatening. Who will I be if there is no I anymore? But if you stand back, this fearful worry only exists because the ego is asking it. Of course “I” will never agree to its own demotion. “I” is about self-preservation. The shift into Mind 3 occurs when you see that there are countless moments when you did without your ego.

Every experience of joy, love, compassion, beauty, peace, and service sets the ego aside. You go beyond “I” in a simple, natural glimpse of who you really are. You are the field of awareness itself, unbounded and free. Every possible experience originates here, before the whole interference of ego, society, family, school, and painful memories even begins.

 That’s why Mind 3 has been dubbed the first and last freedom.  It is the freedom you attain when you realize that you had it all along. Clear away the clutter, and it is simply there. Mind 1 and Mind 2 are creations, while Mind 3 is uncreated. It is the womb of creation, and when we arrive there, the inevitable feeling is that we’ve returned home at last.