The Genesis of Now: Self Experiments with the Bible & the End of Religion

About this book

The Genesis of Now offers a series of self experiments that guide attentive readers directly to the unchanging and eternal aspect of any apparent moment: Now. Through guided focused attention on the structure, meaning and rhythm of biblical scripture, The Genesis of Now withers your own obsessions with self and tunes your attention into larger scales in which you are enmeshed—nature, planet, cosmos, beyond, loosening the body mind clench of ego into a healing expansive awareness: the unchanging consistency of Now. What the contemporary neurosciences label The Default Mode Network becomes deactivated through focused attention to the effects of language itself, which can be observed to be happening, and only happening, in the present moment, Now. With practice, effects of this “word yoga” emerge that are too remarkable to occur simply by accident. The bards and scribes who composed these powerful scripts for hacking your own brain into discovering its own ability to tune itself may not have always known why their techniques worked, only that they did. Contemporary neuroscience suggests that through such practice in “non dual” experience—where past and future dissolve into the eternal Now —healing and insight occur. While writers such as Benny Shanon, Gordon Wasson and Michael Pollan point to the possibility that The Bible describes psychedelic states—the strangely insightful fruit in Eden, the burning bush of Moses, the practically heavy metal visions of Revelations—The Genesis of Now suggests that an attentive and entirely self-directed reading of The Bible can, in symbiosis with other nondual practices or all by itself, alter your consciousness and allow for self-healing through focused and loving awareness, right Now.