by Scott Adams
His face said that he didn’t need to know the details of foosball table design.
“Anyway,” I continued, “we talked about foosball for twenty minutes, how we both played it in college but hadn’t seen a foosball table in years. I can’t remember the last time I uttered the word foosball. Fifteen minutes later, I’m walking home and something catches my eye in an upstairs window of a neighbor’s house. I’ll be darned if it wasn’t a bunch of kids playing foosball. I’ve gone past that house a thousand times and never seen that foosball table in the window before.”
“Your brain can only process a tiny portion of your environment,” he said. “It risks being overwhelmed by the volume of information that bombards you every waking moment. Your brain compensates by filtering out the 99.9 percent of your environment that doesn’t matter to you. When you took notice of the word fescue for the first time and rolled it around in your head, your mind tuned itself to the word. That’s why you heard it again so soon.”
“It’s still a coincidence. I don’t think people are saying fescue around me every day.”
“Yes, probability is still involved. But fescue and foosball were only a few of the unusual words and ideas that you tuned your brain to this week. The others didn’t cross your path again so you took no notice of their absence. When you consider all of the coincidences that are possible, it is not surprising that you experience a few every day.
“A person who does affirmations takes mental tuning to a higher level. The process of concentrating on the goal every day greatly increases the likelihood of noticing an opportunity in the environment. The coincidence will create the illusion that writing down the goal causes the environment to produce opportunities. But in reality the only thing that changes is the person’s ability to notice the opportunities. I don’t mean to minimize that advantage because the ability to recognize opportunities is essential to success.”
“Well, maybe that’s part of it,” I said. “But I’ve heard of some pretty amazing coincidences that happened for the people doing affirmations. One of my friends was writing affirmations to double his income and he got a phone call out of the blue from a headhunter. Two weeks later he’s in a new job at double his salary. How do you explain that?”
“Your friend had a clear goal and was willing to make changes in his life to accomplish it,” he responded. “His willingness to do affirmations was a good predictor of his success, not necessarily a cause of it. The headhunter in your example increased the pay of many people that month. Your friend was one of them.
“People who do affirmations will have the sensation that they are causing the environment to conform to their will. This is an immensely enjoyable feeling because the illusion of control is one of the best illusions you can have.”
He continued. “Another way to look at affirmations is as a communication channel between your conscious and subconscious mind. Your subconscious is often better than your rational mind at predicting your future. If your subconscious allows you to write ‘I will be a famous ballerina’ fifteen times a day for a year, it’s telling you something. Your subconscious is saying it likes your odds, that it will allow you to make the sacrifices, that it will give you the satisfaction you need to weather the hard work ahead. On the other hand, if you try writing your affirmation for a few days and find it too bothersome, your subconscious is giving you a clear message that it doesn’t like your odds.”
“I don’t see why my subconscious would be better than my conscious mind at predicting my future. I thought the subconscious was irrational,” I said.
“The subconscious is an odds-calculating machine. That’s what it does naturally, though not always to good effect. If your subconscious notices that you lost money on your last three business dealings with people who wear hats, you’ll never trust people in hats again. Your subconscious isn’t always right; it depends on the quality of the information you feed into its odds-calculating engine. Luckily, the topic your subconscious knows best is you, because it has known you since you were in the womb. If your subconscious allows you to spend ten minutes out of every busy day writing, ‘I will double my income,’ your subconscious likes your odds and it is qualified to make that prediction.”
“Couldn’t affirmations be more than that?” I asked. “You made a big deal about saying things aren’t exactly what they seem, but who’s to say that concentrating on your goals doesn’t change probability?”
“Go on,” he said.
“Okay, imagine you’re a sea captain but you’re blind and deaf. You shout orders to your crew, but you don’t know for sure if they heard the orders or obeyed them. All you know is that when you give an order to sail to a particular warm port, within a few days you are someplace warm. You can never be sure if the crew obeyed you, or took you to some other warm place, or if you went nowhere and the weather improved. If, as you say, our minds are delusion generators, then we’re all like blind and deaf sea captains shouting orders into the universe and hoping it makes a difference. We have no way of knowing what really works and what merely seems to work. So doesn’t it make sense to try all the things that appear to work even if we can’t be sure?”
“You have potential,” he said.
I didn’t know what that meant.
Fifth Level
“Who are you?” I asked. I didn’t know how to phrase the question politely. The old man certainly wasn’t normal.
“I’m an Avatar.”
“Is that some sort of title? I thought it was your name.”
“It’s both.”
“Excuse me for asking this. I don’t really know how to phrase it, so I’m just going to come out and say it—”
“You want to know if I’m human.”
“Yeah. I apologize if that sounds crazy. It’s just that...”
The old man waved off the end of my sentence.
“I understand. Yes, I am human. I’m a fifth-level human; an Avatar.”
“Fifth level?”
“People exist at different levels of awareness. An Avatar is one who lives at the fifth level.”
“Is awareness like intelligence?” I asked.
“No. Intelligence is a measure of how well you function within your level of awareness. Your intelligence will stay about the same over your life. Awareness is entirely different from intelligence; awareness involves recognizing your delusions for what they are. Most people’s awareness will advance one or two levels in their lifetime.”
“What does it mean to recognize your delusions?”
“When you were a child, did your parents tell you that Santa Claus brought presents on Christmas Day?”
“Yeah,” I said, “I believed in Santa until kindergarten, when the other kids started talking. Then I realized Santa couldn’t get to all those homes in one night.”
“Your intelligence did not change at the moment you realized that Santa Claus was a harmless fantasy. Your math and verbal skills stayed the same, but your awareness increased. You were suddenly aware that stories from credible sources—in this case your parents—could be completely made up. And from the moment of that realization, you could never see the world the same way because your awareness of reality changed.”
“I guess it did.”
“And in school, did you learn that the Native Americans and the Pilgrims got together to celebrate what became Thanksgiving in the United States?”
“Yeah.”
“You figured it must be true because it was written in a book and because your teachers said it happened. You were in school for the specific purpose of learning truth; it was reasonable to believe you were getting it. But scholars now tell us that a first Thanksgiving with Pilgrims and Native Americans never happened. Like Santa Claus, much of what we regard as history is simply made up.”
“In your examples, there’s always learning. That seems like intelligence to me, not awareness.”
“Awareness is about unlearning. It is the recognition that you don’t know as much as
you thought you knew.”
He described what he called the five levels of awareness and said that all humans experience the first level of awareness at birth. That is when you first become aware that you exist.
In the second level of awareness you understand that other people exist. You believe most of what you are told by authority figures. You accept the belief system in which you are raised.
At the third level of awareness you recognize that humans are often wrong about the things they believe. You feel that you might be wrong about some of your own beliefs but you don’t know which ones. Despite your doubts, you still find comfort in your beliefs.
The fourth level is skepticism. You believe the scientific method is the best measure of what is true and you believe you have a good working grasp of truth, thanks to science, your logic, and your senses. You are arrogant when it comes to dealing with people in levels two and three.
The fifth level of awareness is the Avatar. The Avatar understands that the mind is an illusion generator, not a window to reality. The Avatar recognizes science as a belief system, albeit a useful one. An Avatar is aware of God’s power as expressed in probability and the inevitable recombination of God consciousness.
“I think I’m a fourth-level,” I said, “at least according to you.”
“Yes, you are a fourth,” he confirmed.
“But now that you’ve told me all your secrets from the fifth level, maybe I get bumped up a level. Is that how it works?”
“No,” he said, “awareness does not come from receiving new information. It comes from rejecting old information. You still cling to your fourth-level delusions.”
“I feel vaguely insulted,” I joked.
“You shouldn’t. There is no implied good or bad about one’s level of awareness. No level is better or worse than any other level. People enjoy happiness at every level and they contribute to society at every level.”
“That sounds very charitable,” I said, “but I notice your level has the highest number. That’s obviously the good one. You must be feeling a little bit smug.”
“There is no good or bad in anything, just differences in usefulness. People at all levels have the same potential for being useful.”
“But you have to feel glad you’re not on one of the other levels.”
“No. Happiness comes more easily at the other levels. Awareness has its price. An Avatar can find happiness only in serving.”
“How do you serve?”
“Sometimes society’s delusions get out of balance, and when they conflict, emotions flame out of control. People die. If enough people die, God’s recombination is jeopardized. When that happens, the Avatar steps in.”
“How?”
“You can’t wake yourself from a dream. You need someone who is already awake to shake you gently, to whisper in your ear. In a sense, that is what I do.”
“As usual, I’m not sure what you mean.”
He explained, “The great leaders in this world are always the least rational among us. They exist at the second level of awareness. Charismatic leaders have a natural ability to bring people into their delusion. They convince people to act against self-interest and pursue the leaders’ visions of the greater good. Leaders make citizens go to war to seize land they will never live on and to kill people who have different religions.”
“Not all leaders are irrational,” I argued.
“The most effective ones are. You don’t often see math geniuses or logic professors become great leaders. Logic is a detriment to leadership.”
“Well, irrational leadership must work. The world seems to be chugging along fairly well, overall.”
“It works because people’s delusions are, on average, in balance. The Avatar keeps it so by occasionally introducing new ideas when needed.”
“Do you think an idea can change the world that much?” I asked.
“Ideas are the only things that can change the world. The rest is details.”
Going Home
Time and need dissolved in the old man’s presence. We talked for what could have been several days. I remember one sunrise, but there might have been more. I never felt tired in his presence. It was as if energy surrounded him like an invisible field, feeding everything that was near. He was amazing and confounding and, ultimately, beyond the realm of words.
We talked more about life and energy and probability. At times I lost the sense of belonging to my own body. It was as if my consciousness expanded to include items in the room. I stared at my hand as it rested on the arm of the rocking chair and watched as the distinctions between wood and air and hand disappeared. At times I felt like a kitten lifted by the fold of skin on the back of my neck, helpless, safe, transported.
I don’t remember leaving his house or walking to my van, but I do remember how everything looked. The city had bright edges. Sound was crisp. Colors were vivid. Objects seemed more dimensional, as if I could see the sides and backs from any angle. I heard a phone call being made a block away and knew both sides of the conversation. I could feel every variation in airflow.
I drove home by a route I wouldn’t normally take. I glided through green lights without ever touching my brakes. Pedestrians stayed on sidewalks and a policeman waved me around an accident scene. I knew that all the people involved were safe.
As my key entered the lock, I could see all the other locks like mine and all the other keys that were coincidentally the same. I could see the internal mechanism of the lock as it turned, as though I were a tiny observer inside, looking at industrial-sized equipment.
Everything in my apartment seemed three-quarters of its original size. It was mildly claustrophobic.
I sat down at my kitchen table with the package that the Avatar refused to accept and I stared at it for a while, wondering about its contents. I wanted to open it but didn’t want anything to spoil a perfect mood. In time, however, curiosity won.
A folded yellow note tumbled out of the box and into my lap. I unfolded it and read its barely legible message. It was just one sentence, but there was so much in the sentence that I found myself reading it over and over. I stayed up all that night, wrapped in the red plaid blanket that was also in the package, reading the sentence.
“There is only one Avatar at a time.”
After The War
“I love that rocking chair,” the young man said to me. “How old is that thing? It looks like an antique.”
“I got it one year before the Religion War,” I said.
“I’m glad that war ended before I was born,” the young man sighed. “I can’t imagine what it was like to be alive then.”
“You are lucky to have missed it.”
“Were you in that war?”
“Everyone was in that war.”
“Let me ask you something,” he said. “Why do you think the war ended? We learned in school that everyone just stopped fighting. No one knows why. Although there are all kinds of theories about secret pacts among world leaders, no one really knows. You were there. Why do you think everyone suddenly stopped fighting?”
“Put another log on the fire and I’ll tell you.”
The young man looked at his watch and hesitated. He had many more stops before lunch. Then he turned toward the fireplace and chose a sturdy log.
“If you flip a coin,” I said, “how often does it come up heads?”
THE END
I hope you enjoyed God’s Debris. If you would like to get the hardcopy version as a gift for a friend or family member, or its sequel The Religion War, just click the appropriate link below.
God's Debris
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Document ID: da4728a2-a6a0-4101-815d-14ea72e6981a
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Document creation date: 2007-01-18
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