THE META SELF
Nina Verkoeyen, Ph.D.
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CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
The Trap of Fate
CHAPTER 4
The Forgotten Choice
CHAPTER 5
The Transition
CHAPTER 6
Character
CHAPTER 7
Love
CHAPTER 8
Other People
CHAPTER 9
Money
CHAPTER 10
Purpose
CHAPTER 11
The Problem Dissolver
CHAPTER 12
The Anatomy of Emotion
CHAPTER 13
Direct Revelation
CHAPTER 14
The Meta Self in Action
CHAPTER 15
The New World
Next Steps
About the Author
Appendix: The Trial Behind This Book
Glossary
Before You Begin
On a single day, a thousand strangers sat down with the manuscript of this book. They had twenty-four hours of access to it, while another thousand were asked to wait. Both groups were measured before and after.
By the end of that day, the readers reported being 70% less nervous and stressed. The problems they had woken up with felt 63% lighter. Anxiety had fallen by 36%, and their sense of energy and vitality had risen by 51%. They were measured again a week later and a month later, and the effect was still there. All it took was a single reading.
The author of this book, Nina Verkoeyen, PhD, spent twenty years teaching inside the transformation industry and watched it run on faith. A book or a course promises to change your life, but no one measures whether it did, and the only evidence anyone prints is the testimonials they chose to keep. She decided her own book would be the exception. So she ran a preregistered randomized controlled trial on it, with more than 2,000 participants, before letting it reach you.
It is the largest randomized controlled trial ever run on a self-help book, and the first to measure what a single reading does.
The sole purpose of this book is to help you dissolve, in one day, the problems that burden you, by stepping out of the identity that creates them.
Introduction
There is a version of you that has no problems.
This version does not simply cope with problems better or solve them more skillfully. It has stopped creating them. It wakes up without anxiety, its relationships do not run on conflict, and life does not feel like an obstacle course that never ends.
Most people have never lived from this version of themselves, yet many feel it exists. And if something in you reached for this book, you are one of them. You too carry the feeling that the life you are living does not reflect what you are truly capable of. You may have dismissed that feeling as fantasy, but it is the truest thing in you. This book will turn that feeling into a life.
The transformation books that fill bookstore shelves all offer the same thing—one more technique to add to the pile. But if that were enough, you would already be where you want to be.
This book does something entirely different. It dissolves the “I” that creates the problems, and what remains is the version of you that no longer has them. Your problems have persisted for a reason, and it was never a lack of practices, effort, or discipline. Every method for dealing with problems—be it coaching, personal development, or spiritual teachings—asks you to solve them from the very version of you that created them. Each one is designed to improve the false self and make it calmer, richer, and happier.
But a happier false self is still a false self. It is still rooted in fear, lack, and limitation. This is the “I” most people mistake for themselves. I call it the Default Self. As long as you live from it, it goes on creating new problems, no matter how many of the old ones you solve. That is why self-improvement so often disappoints. The false self cannot be improved. It can only be dissolved.
There are no techniques to learn in this book and no steps to follow. These pages reveal a way of changing your life that almost no one is taught. It is a direct shift in self-identification: from the Default Self that creates problems to the version of you that does not create them—the Meta Self.
You will make this shift today. That is the promise of this book.
Every self-help book you have read promised to change your life, but almost none has been tested to see whether it actually works. This book was tested in a preregistered randomized controlled trial with more than 2,000 participants. The trial measured thirty-one separate states before and after a single reading, and every one of them improved. Readers’ agreement with the statement “I felt nervous and stressed” fell by 70%, their problems felt 63% lighter, their anxiety fell by 36%, and their sense of energy and aliveness rose by 51%. The gains were still there when readers were measured again a week and a month later. No self-help book has been tested at this scale, and none has measured its effect on the day it is read.
Shifting from one version of yourself to another does not require years of effort. The shift is a change in your paradigm of perception—the way you see the world and who you are in it—and this book was designed so that it happens as you read these pages. Darkness does not need a long time to leave; you turn on the light and the room changes. This book turns on the light and dissolves the old identity along with the problems it created.
The paradigm behind this book is called Meta Spirituality. I founded it in 2016, after a decade of teaching the methods and practices that only work for as long as you keep doing them. In the ten years since, Meta Spirituality has been taught to thousands of people around the world, has grown to more than three hundred certified facilitators in sixty-nine countries, and has been tested in several randomized controlled trials, one of them on this book.
The Meta Self is the doorway into this paradigm. It is written for those who are tired of one problem after another, of the stream of life hacks, spiritual practices, and manifestation techniques that do not bring lasting results, and of books that inspire them for a few days but change little in their real lives. This time will be different. This may be the last book on transformation you will ever need.
Turn the page and test it for yourself.
CHAPTER 1
Meta Self
You are tired in a way sleep cannot fix. It is the exhaustion from a life in which the struggles never end, no matter what you do—and you have done a lot: coaching, therapy, meditation, books, retreats, and everything the people around you swore by. Perhaps you did grow, after all. You understand yourself better now and see your imperfections more clearly. Yet the struggles themselves remain. Your relationships keep repeating the same scenario, and you still have the same resentments, the same fears, the same background anxiety. Deep down, you are the person you always were, only now you understand your problems a little better.
After all those years and all that effort, you may even begin to believe that you did not try hard enough, that it is all your fault. That conclusion is wrong. Trying harder was never required. Every method you have ever tried, every practice, every book, including the most brilliant ones, was created to help you cope with problems. None was created to dissolve the “I” that generates them.
The problems in your life have a source, and it is not karma, bad luck, or a curse. They grow out of the way we habitually perceive ourselves and the world. This way of perceiving produces problems as reliably as a Swiss watch keeps time, and like the watch, it runs on a hidden mechanism. In human beings, that mechanism is the individual “I”—the Default Self. It is the self-identification we carry from birth, the one we live from without ever suspecting that another exists. No matter how many problems we solve, the mechanism keeps running. The only thing that can stop it is dissolving the Default Self into another, larger self. Most of us have never known this was possible, much less how to do it. You are about to find out both.
Two Layers of Reality
The “I” you identify with is not the only one available to you.
When we live as the Default Self, we see only the first layer of reality, the Default Layer, where life seemingly happens to us. Everything feels predetermined. Relationships start from need and end in conflict. Money never comes easily. Problems accumulate, and when one is solved, another replaces it the next moment. I call this Default Reality.
The person living in this reality—the Default Self—is that tired version of you: always tense, always fighting, always one step behind the life you intended to live. This is what life looks like when the Default Self is the only identity we know.
But there is a second layer of reality, the Meta Layer, one most of us do not know exists. On that deeper layer lives the version of you that sees that life is created by your own hands. Or more precisely, by your perception. I call this Meta Reality.
Perception is not a mental activity at all—not a thought, a belief, or even a feeling—and confusing it with one of them is why so much inner work fails. Perception is the source of them all, the deepest layer from which thoughts, beliefs, and feelings take their shape. You see the world as the one you take yourself to be, and that is why perception and identity are one and the same thing. Changing it is the only thing this book does. Working on thoughts, beliefs, or feelings—the byproducts of perception—changes the surface and leaves perception untouched, so the problems return. Most of us have only ever worked downstream, because we did not know perception itself could be changed.
When perception is not distorted, neither are the beliefs, thoughts, and feelings that form from it, so events do not become distorted either, and problems are not created. The chronic problems of Default Reality begin to disperse, the scenarios stop repeating, relationships are built from wholeness rather than need, and money stops being a struggle. The “I” that created all of it is gone.
The difference between these two realities is enormous. But they do not differ in circumstances, in the amount of effort, or in luck. They differ in identity.
This other identity is the version of you that you feel as your potential but cannot seem to reach. To begin living it, you must first recognize it. The terms you might already know, such as Higher Self, True Self, or Authentic Self, only point in its direction. None of them precisely describes it. What each of them names is still an individual and separate “I,” and the version we are speaking about is not. So in Meta Spirituality, the paradigm I teach, we call it the Meta Self.
“Meta” comes from Greek and means “beyond.” Beyond your separate identity, beyond the problems and fears the old individual self calls its life, is the Meta Self. It is a deeper identity and a different self-perception altogether, and it should not be confused with an improved version of your personality, a more positive mind, or an imaginary ideal version of you, healed through therapy and perfected by years of inner work. It lives from another position and does not create the problems that belong to the “I” you are living from now.
The Default Self is the expression into the world of an identity that does not know what it truly is. The Meta Self is the expression into the world of an identity that knows.
Most people live their entire lives in the Default Self and in Default Reality. They improve it, arrange it, squeeze the best out of it. They learn to survive in it, even succeed in it, but they never leave it.
This book is for the one who cannot live this way anymore. It is for you.
CHAPTER 2
The First Correction
Before we begin, I am going to ask something unusual of you. I want you to read this book as if you wrote it.
When we live in the Default Self, we identify only with the individual “I” and perceive ourselves as a separate personality. We see the world through eyes that separate us from other people and divide everything into inner and outer. We receive all information as if it came from outside, and this book as if it were written by someone else. Today, we will break this habit.
Do not receive the words in this book as mine, reaching you from outside. Receive them as your own words to yourself. They are being born inside you as you read. You are reading the book you authored. This is a real shift in perception, and you are making it right now. I call it the First Correction. It is the foundation for everything that follows.
The dissolving of problems, and of the Default Self that generates them, begins now, between you and this page. The instant these words start to sound like your own voice, the mind’s habitual resistance begins to go away. That resistance is the part of you that evaluates, agrees, argues, and sorts information into categories. Once it is gone, you stop defending yourself against these words and begin to receive them at a level much deeper than the mind.
These two modes of reading are not the same thing: one is merely reading a book, the other is living through a shift in perception. And what you are doing now is your first taste of what the Meta Self is: a lived meta-position. The Meta Self does not perceive the world as separate from itself; it lives in unity with everything, including this book.
It may feel strange to read these words as your own rather than mine. Do it anyway. If you hold this meta-position, everything that follows on these pages will reach you differently, and if you learn to live from it, your whole life will change.
As long as a situation or an event appears separate from us in our perception, we cannot change it. This is why manifesting from the mind usually fails, and when it seems to work, the effect does not last. It makes no difference whether it takes the spiritual form of affirmations, visualization, and vision boards, or the practical form of goal-setting, mindset work, and willpower. It is a drop trying to change the weather over the ocean, while still identified as a drop, still separate from the water it is asking to move. Only when you know yourself as the ocean does any of it become possible. To begin creating an entirely different life, one without problems, we must stop perceiving the outer and the inner as separate. A situation you perceive as outside you can only be pushed against; a situation you know as part of yourself can be changed from within. For this, your perception must expand radically, though in a grounded, natural, and sober way.
This will allow you to enter a new reality in which the problems you have now do not exist, a reality created by expressing the Meta Self. And the First Correction, perceiving this book as your own, is the first step in building your new life. Other books, courses, retreats, practices, insights, and altered states of consciousness did not change your everyday life because the one who went through them was your old self. You learned through the individual “I” and read books through the individual “I.” But the individual “I,” the Default Self, is incapable of transformation. Transformation would require it to dissolve itself. The Default Self is the mind in its default state, and dissolving it means the mind leaves that state, or rather, that you expand beyond it and begin to operate from a wider vantage point. The mind itself remains and goes on calculating, planning, and organizing your days, as it always has.
The Default Self, the ego-mind, the individual “I”—all names for the same thing—is a program. And like any program, it cannot do what it was not designed to do. It can accumulate information, process concepts, and file insights away. But none of that changes its main function. The individual mind’s main function is to maintain itself by maintaining the Illusion of Separateness—the story that you are a small, limited being, separate from everyone and from the outside world. The purpose of the individual mind is division.
The Illusion of Separateness is a distorted perception of yourself, of others, and of the world. It is the only real problem that exists. All other problems are derivatives of it.
No matter how we decorate the Default Self with new practices, theories, and knowledge, we do not change what this program is. It is like asking the left hand to become the right. It can imitate and pretend, but it cannot become what it is not. That is why the mind does not create reality, contrary to a central claim of modern manifestation teachings. Nor can it solve most of the problems in our lives. When we solve one, another appears behind it, because they all spring from the same unaddressed root.
Your individual mind, your Default Self, is the guardian of the illusion that keeps your reality unchanged. And it performs this task regardless of how many years you meditate, visualize, or spend in coaching. You can do it for decades, read hundreds of books on transformation, and still feel that something essential is missing. Because it is.
The part of you that was learning and improving was never capable of learning the most important thing. Every teaching you encountered, every insight you received, no matter how liberating, was processed and perceived by that same identity, that same individual “I,” which has always considered itself separate. Everything you have tried has hit this ceiling. We rise above that ceiling when we read this book through the First Correction, in unity with these pages, as its author and its reader at once. Then the reading happens through something larger than the mind: the version of you that authored this book and authors your entire life.
The Octopus: Who You Are
In twenty years of teaching, I have found no clearer way to show a person who they truly are than the metaphor I am about to give you. Imagine an enormous octopus. It is so big that its head rises above the surface of the ocean, and so vast that its edges cannot be seen. Its tentacles reach into the depths, and each one lives its own life down there, from its individual position. From the point of view of one tentacle, everything looks like this: “I am separate. I see other tentacles around me, and I have no idea that we are connected. They all seem to be independent beings with their own destinies, goals, and problems.” The tentacles spend their lives looking sideways, at the tentacles they love, fear, and compare themselves to. Sometimes they look up. Tentacles have always looked up; they have built whole religions out of the sense that something is there. But even looking straight at it, they cannot see it. The head is too vast to fit into a tentacle’s narrow angle of perception, the way an eye cannot see the face it belongs to. So they interpret the glimpses they catch as distant gods, higher powers, something sacred and forever separate—anything except the unthinkable, that this immensity is what they themselves are. And so each tentacle lives from its own limited vantage point rather than from the head they all share. The octopus has always known what the tentacles were born not knowing: they are all one being, one awareness.
This is how human beings live. There are eight billion tentacles, each one a human life, certain it is a separate individual and seeing only what its own small corner of the ocean allows. The separateness is real only as experience: every tentacle truly feels separate. But it is a distortion of perception, because they are all parts of one being and always have been.
You are one of the tentacles. And this book is you, looking up. You created this book to expand your angle of perception and your sense of identity, so that you know yourself as the tentacle and as the head, as the fragment and as the whole. It moves you from the small, separate “I” that experiences life as something that happens to it, the eternal victim of circumstances, into a larger, freer version of yourself that experiences life as its author—the head that creates this life and lives it at the same time.
Each of us, in our truest self, is this immeasurable octopus, both tentacles and head, the many beneath the water and the one above it. We are whole.
The Tree: What Fear Is
The Default Self, the identity that perceives itself as a separate tentacle, sees itself as small and deprived of real authorship over its life. It looks at the world through the lens of separateness. And through this lens it creates what it sees: a world of struggle, uncertainty, and endless problems that seem to fall upon it from outside. This is life in Default Reality, the life of all the tentacles beneath the water that do not yet know who they really are.
And when we live in this state, when the Illusion of Separateness rules us, and we perceive ourselves as small and alone, fear becomes our only driving force and the only reasonable response. Fear, then, is the essence of our false self-identification. It is not weakness or neurosis, and no amount of therapy alone will fully resolve it. It is what each of us feels when we believe we are separate from everything, at the mercy of an uncertain world that is indifferent to our existence.
The Default Self lives in this perception. And everything it creates from it carries the imprint of fear. We build relationships out of fear: the fear of being alone, of going unloved, of never receiving the attention and care we need. These are relationships built to manage a deficiency rather than to share love, so they fill with problems. Financial decisions made from that same deficiency rarely bring us anything of real value. Chronic anxiety with no specific cause settles in. This anxiety is the background hum of experiencing ourselves as a small “I” in a vast, unpredictable world. And all negative emotional states, from anger to jealousy to constant stress, are variations of the same thing. They are how fear feels at different levels of intensity. Fear is nothing other than how the Illusion of Separateness feels from within.
There is an image that will forever change the way you understand what fear is. Imagine a tree suspended in midair, its roots torn from the soil, exposed and dangling. For a tree, soil is more than just the place where it grows. It is what the tree belongs to, the foundation it draws its nourishment, stability, and safety from. The uprooted tree may still be alive, but it has no support, and every gust of wind becomes a catastrophe, every change in the weather a threat. It is thrown from side to side because there is nothing beneath it to hold it or feed it.
This is what a person looks like when they live in Default Reality, in the Default Self, and do not know who they are. It is what all of us feel deep down, even if we look successful from the outside. We are the tree. The unity we belong to is our soil, the healthy foundation of our being. Yet unlike the tree in this metaphor, we have never actually been separated from it. The separation exists only in our perception. From the moment we are born, we are taught to perceive ourselves as separate from this foundation. And we feel what a suspended tree feels: fear.
Then every thought comes wrapped in anxiety and every decision in doubt. Relationships become unstable, and problems accumulate in every area of our life, again and again, because we are a living tree trying to grow without the soil it belongs to. Of course you can try to teach the suspended tree not to be afraid, to adapt and cope while hanging in midair, and it will. But it will never feel whole until it is returned to the ground. The moment the roots reconnect with the soil—the moment our identity reconnects with what we truly are—our fear leaves.
The weather affects a rooted tree differently. It is harder to break, and it has far fewer problems than a suspended one. Fear is what the tree feels when it is hanging in the air. It is the absence of knowing who we are and what we belong to, and absence is like darkness, which has no substance of its own and is only the absence of light. Remove separation, and fear dissipates. The old version of us, the Default Self, dissolves into the larger Meta Self, and the problems it created go with it. Whatever problem is troubling us, it is generated by this fear, and fear is generated by the perception of ourselves as separate, by the Default Self.
This is what the trial of this book, with more than 2,000 people, showed. After a single reading, participants’ agreement with “I felt nervous and stressed” fell by 70% and their anxiety fell by 36%, and the changes were still there when they were measured again a month later. The reading was not designed to treat stress or anxiety. It was designed to change the perception of self from which, as this book proposes, they arise. As the perceiver changed, as the Default Self began to dissolve into something larger, the fear and inner tension of that old identity faded with it.
Our problems are not accidental. They come from a particular way of seeing ourselves. Today you have begun to change that way. For the first time in your life, you are reading someone else’s book as your own and hearing another person’s words as an echo of the words you have chosen to say to yourself. At this moment, you are already perceiving the world differently than you did before you opened this book. You will soon find out how profoundly this shift in perception can change your life, and how many of your problems it can free you from.
The Architect: How Problems Are Built
You have seen who you are and where fear comes from. Now you will see how your problems are built, and why they return no matter what you change. Let me give you an image to illustrate this: the architect.
Imagine that you are an architect. Creating and building are your nature—this is who you are. Every moment of every day, automatically, even without knowing it, you design and construct the structures that make up your life. Now imagine that on the very first day of your life, someone put a pair of glasses on you. It was not your doing, and you did not choose them. You never noticed you were wearing them, because you have worn them since the first moment you opened your eyes, and you do not know what it is like to be without them.
There is one problem, though. These glasses have the wrong prescription and distort your perception. They bend every line and skew every angle, so every measurement you take is wrong. Because you have worn them all your life, you do not know that anything is distorted. You think a world full of problems is simply what the world looks like and is meant to be, for everyone.
And you build. You build the buildings of your relationships, your health, your career. You build constantly and with total dedication because you are a creator. But every building comes out crooked and sooner or later falls apart. You wonder whether you are a bad architect, do not try hard enough, or have clumsy hands. None of that is true. You were born to create.
The glasses are the problem. Whatever you build, the distortion goes into it. This is how the Default Self builds our lives. Everything it builds comes out crooked, no matter how hard you try or how talented a creator you are. The same problems keep appearing in every area of life. The place, the people, the circumstances, the economy: none of them is the cause. You move to another city, but the same problems follow you. You leave one relationship and begin another, only to find yourself dealing with the same things. Even when your finances improve, you eventually hit the same ceiling, perhaps a little higher this time. The glasses have never been taken off. This is what brought you to this book. All your life you tried to repair the buildings with better materials, different cities, new relationships. But the architect kept drawing the same crooked blueprints.
You are about to take off those glasses and see everything through the eyes of who you really are. This is how the Meta Self is born. Your vision becomes clear, and the measurements you take become accurate. The buildings you begin to construct will be harmonious and beautiful. And the crooked ones will stop appearing.
That is all it takes for everything to change: the shift from the Default Self to the Meta Self. You do not need practices or special circumstances, and there is no right moment to wait for. A firm and uncompromising choice is what moves you from one version of yourself to the other, and from the first layer of reality, Default Reality with all its problems, to the second, Meta Reality, where those problems dissolve.
Why, then, do we not make this choice? Because after wearing the glasses for so long, we cannot even see it. We do not know we have it or how to make it, and after years of struggling in the Default Self, we may no longer have the strength to make it with the conviction it requires.
This book dismantles, one by one, the traps that keep choice out of your reach. In the next chapter, we begin with the trap that hides it best: the belief that our lives are predetermined