Reality Is an Inside Job

You have used the word "Reality" ten thousand times. This book is about what happens when you finally look at it.




You know the day I mean. Light at nine, unbearable at noon, and when you check, nothing out there has moved. You have read the books, tried the practices and done the work, and somewhere along the way the managing of your own mind became a full-time job you never applied for. You may not call yourself spiritual, and have no plans to start. Good. This was written with you in mind.





Here is the strangest true thing I know: nothing outside you has ever caused a single feeling, and that includes the traffic, the news, and the person who said the thing they really should not have said. Your experience is being made from the inside, continuously, and you have spent your whole life blaming the weather on the window.




Once, everyone knew the earth was flat, and built careful, sensible lives around an edge that was not there. The map you are using for your inner life is that kind of map. This book does not hand you a better one. It shows you the paper every map is printed on, and once you have seen the paper, the managing has nothing left to manage. What that frees up in a life is yours to find out. I can only tell you it was more than I expected.




Leave the fact unlooked-at and nothing terrible happens. You simply go on checking the sky before you leave the house, for the rest of your life, for a feeling that was never coming from there.




Fair warning: there is nothing to do in here, no routine to keep and nothing to journal. If a book has to give you homework to be worth your money, this is not your book. This one only asks you to look at something that has been true your entire life, hiding inside the most ordinary word you own.




Thirteen short chapters. One sentence at the centre: Reality is generated, continuously, in the only place experience can ever happen. I spent the whole book on that sentence. By the last page, I hope it has stopped being a sentence.




It draws on the Three Principles, first articulated by Sydney Banks, on the Gene Keys, and on my thirty years of building complicated systems so that you will not have to.




Atmos Black is the author of the LUX · NOX · PAX trilogy. A free companion book, The Gifts of Separate Realities, is waiting at insidejob.one.