The Emergence of I

Summary

The universe wakes up through you.

We see history as an unceasing flow of causality and time; an endless series of past events leading up to the present. We feel ourselves as the detached observers of it, somehow standing on the outside watching the world go by. But the truth is we’re not on the outside. We’re at the very center of it all.

Interweaving history, mythology, psychology, and mystical experience, author John Payne charts the journey of I from its Paleolithic origins through the emergence of language and literacy, forward through the worldviews of the Greeks and Hebrews, and on to the present time.

The premise of this book is that the Universe’s most sincere project is the creation of a self-reflection point called I. Climbing up out of the universe’s primordia using the rungs of matter, animal biology and cultural enterprises such as myth, religion, literacy and science, Consciousness has constricted itself to a place two inches behind your forehead.

And it has been waiting for you to wake up.