“Knock on the sky and listen to the sound.” — Zen Proverb
I just read Douglas Adams’ 1979 cult classic The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. In this provocative book, the supercomputer Deep Thought concludes—after processing for 7.5 million years—that the Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything is 42. When the programmers are left perplexed by this unsatisfying response, they realize they never actually knew the Ultimate Question. Deep Thought explains that to calculate the question itself, it must design an even greater computer—a project that will take another 10 million years.
It’s remarkable to me that Adams came up with the idea of Deep Thought computers almost 50 years before the arrival of Deep Seek, Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, Mythos, and other super-intelligent AI agents. What was scientific satire at the time has become our reality today.
The Hitchhikers Guide brilliantly used the genre to mock bureaucracy, philosophy, and human absurdity. I loved the idea that we invest most of our time confidently formulating answers when we are probably not even living in the right questions. It made me wonder about how open we are to even asking hard questions that might challenge our beliefs about who we are or that might threaten our sense of identity. Reading the book made me realize that our technology has evolved more rapidly than our state of being. And it was a stunning reminder of how long it takes to evolve from one state to another. Hopefully, it won’t take us 17.5 million years to figure out the right questions to be asking. This post explores how we might reduce that time.
In nature and biology, an organism must shed its outer protective layer to accommodate physical growth, as these rigid structures cannot expand on their own. For example, a caterpillar must completely dissolve its current form inside a dark, confined cocoon before it can reorganize its biology and emerge as a butterfly. On a spiritual level, we humans have had a difficult time shedding the protective layers that keep us from opening up to new possibilities.
But what does it mean to be open? We often treat openness as a binary —either you are receptive to the world or you are defended against it. Real transformation is more stratified. It is a vertical ascent, a ladder of shedding. As we move to spiritual spaciousness, we don’t just accumulate new insights; we outgrow old beliefs and self-limiting narratives or identities.
As a reader of this blog, you know I often use 1-5 scales to help me organize my thinking. in this case, I want to explore what spiritual ascent might look like – how you can recognize each stage of growth. Here’s my scale for assessing where we might be on our spiritual ascent, how open we are to change, and why we might have difficulty evolving.
Level 1: Nope: The Closed Mind (“Don’t confuse me with facts”)
At the foundational baseline, consciousness is a fortress. Level 1 is characterized by rigid dogmatism, survival-driven ego defense, willful ignorance, and an absolute refusal to look beyond the parameters of our existing mental conditioning. Here, the mind mistakes its tiny window for the entire horizon.
In literature, this state can be represented by the tragic paralysis of T.S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock, who measures out his life in coffee spoons – trapped in a neurotic, claustrophobic loop of self-consciousness and fear. There is no receptivity here because any influx of the new threatens to shatter his fragile, tightly managed ego. It is a state of psychological paralysis and doubt-free certainty where the blinds are drawn tight against the light of alternative realities and possibilities. Think Plato’s Cave and the dangers of unquestioned beliefs.
Level 2: OK: Mental Readiness (“I’m Willing to Look”)
Level 2 represents the first crack in the fortress wall. It is the birth of intellectual curiosity and cognitive willingness. We do not yet understand or embody anything new, but we are willing to pause active resistance. We take a chance and peek through the blinds. We begin to open up.
This level mirrors the early stages of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays on Self-Reliance and Intellectual Life, where the individual begins to question societal conformity and turns their gaze outward toward nature and philosophy. It is a tentative, exploratory stance. It says, “Perhaps my paradigm is incomplete.” It is the crucial transition from defensive ignorance to vulnerable seeking and thoughtful reflecting.
Level 3: Ohh: Intellectual Clarity (“I Get It Now”)
At Level 3, the mind experiences an intellectual breakthrough. This is the realm of epiphany, philosophy, and cognitive comprehension. The pieces of the puzzle suddenly snap together, and we experience a rush of mental clarity. We understand what connection means; we can speak the vocabulary of enlightenment.
Level 3, however, remains confined to the intellect. In The Perennial Philosophy, Alduous Huxley warns against getting stuck at this level when he distinguishes between the description of a thing and the experience of it. You can understand the map perfectly at Level 3, but you are still sitting in your armchair. You have not walked the terrain.
In discussions with my younger daughter about this phenomenon, she helped me understand the difficulty of moving from level 2-3. She pointed out that the shift can be very painful because it requires challenging the beliefs, narratives, and identities that not only keep us in our comfort zones, but also keep us from moving up the scale. Moving past Level 3 requires a fundamental shift from the head to the body, and ultimately, from the psychological self to the cosmic self. This is where the real possibilities of Ahh and Aum come alive.
Level 4: Ahh: The Emotional Experience (“I Feel It Now”)
This transition requires us to move from theory to direct, somatic embodiment. It is no longer enough to know that all things are interconnected; we need to feel the weight of that connection pulsing through our nerve endings and the energy behind it moving freely through our meridians. It is the sudden drop from the mind into the heart and the senses.
This is the ecstatic, wild receptivity of Walt Whitman in Leaves of Grass. To paraphrase: “I invite my soul, and I lean on my ease observing a spear of summer grass.” It is the raw experience of the present moment—the Ahh of awe. My sense is that, at Level 4, spirituality is deeply alive, rich with mysticism, emotional depth, and a profound harmony with the sacred beauty of creation.
Level 5: Aum: The Spiritual Realization (“I Have Transcended”)
Yet, even Level 4 contains a subtle trap. To experience Ahh, there must still be an “experiencer” separate from the “experience.” There is still an identity tightly holding onto its beautiful spiritual experiences, its hard-won beliefs, its sacred labels, and its theological frameworks.
As I understand it, this level is the realm of vestigial transcendence. In biology, a vestigial organ—like the appendix—is something that was once useful but is no longer needed. In the ultimate stages of the spiritual path, our very beliefs, spiritual definitions, and identities become vestigial. They are rafts that helped us cross the river, but if we insist on carrying them on our backs once we hit dry land, they become an exhausting burden.
At Level 5, we drop the raft. We let go of the need to “be spiritual,” the need to hold dogmas, and the need to identify as a separate ego seeking enlightenment. As the contemporary spiritual philosopher Eckhart Tolle notes in The Power of Now, true liberation is the stepping out of the psychological mind-structure entirely.
This is the Aum—the primordial hum of non-separation. Level 5 is feeling entirely at home with just breath and being. It is the realization of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, where the self empties until nothing is left but the flow of the Tao itself. There is no longer an “I” experiencing the Universe; there is only the Universe experiencing itself through a body that breathes. Aum is pure being—no separation. This transcendence requires us to shed beliefs, identity and whatever narratives are holding us back.
Transcendence is the deliberate, radical letting go of psychological and spiritual functions that were once vital for our growth but have ultimately become more limiting than freeing. In short, the evolutionary arc of openness is a process of subtraction. We begin by opening our eyes to look (Level 2), then our minds to understand (Level 3), then our hearts to feel (Level 4). But the final, most radical act of openness is to open our souls and let go of everything we think we are (Level 5). In that ultimate shedding, the boundary between the self and the cosmos dissolves, leaving only peace, harmony, and the quiet rhythm of All.
So if it’s true that we are just hitchhikers in the Universe looking for a ride Home, then perhaps we might want to start asking a different question. Instead of asking, “How do I dominate materially, misogynistically, and militarily?” perhaps we should ask, “How can I evolve spiritually?” It shouldn’t take 10 million years to figure out the Ultimate Question. Homo Sapiens have been on planet Earth for about 300,000 years. Over that period of time we have generated lots of answers that have advanced “progress,” but too few people are asking the right questions.
About a year ago, I wrote a post describing how I introduced the idea of opening to my grandson on a hike in Olympic Park in Washington. I used Ok, OH, and Ahh as a simple way of to explain what opening might feel like. I’m hoping this post may provide a helpful way to think about how we might open up to transcendent possibilities. I’m also hoping that when we knock on the sky and listen, we only hear Aum. May it be so.
