The Evolutionary Import of Meditative Awareness If it is part of the evolutionary glide path of us humans to progressively know ourselves better, thereby inhabiting a bit more the name we gave our species1; if it is also part of the evolutionary glide path of us humans not to destroy ourselves or create nightmare dystopias beyond those we have already managed to perpetrate, we will need to take on a whole new level of responsibility for ourselves, for our own minds, for our societies, and for our planet. When 21 Lessons for the twenty-first Century was reviewed on the front page of the Sunday New York Times Book Review on September 9, 2018, by Bill Gates, under the title, “Thinking Big,”2 because Harari is nothing if not a deep and creative thinker and synthesizer as an historian, Gates asks rhetorically: Apparently, he understands the power of mindfulness from the inside. * The way I would put the basic message of this book is that before we give up being human in the face of what is very likely on the horizon, i.e. artificial intelligence, intelligent robots, and the prospect of digitally if not also biologically “enhanced” humans, and much more, as Harari describes in great detail, we might do well to explore in depth what being fully human, and thus, more embodied and more awake might really mean and feel like. ...it is inviting a very personal engagement on your part, in the sense that each one of us has a responsibility, not only to ourself but to the world, to do our own inner and outer work through the regular cultivation of mindfulness—as a meditation practice and as a way of being—and thereby come to recognize and inhabit the full dimensionality of our being and its repertoire of potentials right here and right now, as best we can. Since elements of the universal mindfulness meditation-based dharma perspective I am referring to run through wisdom streams within every human culture, mindfulness is intrinsically inclusive, capable of dissolving barriers to communication and finding common purpose rather than promoting divisiveness.