Chapter 8: “Space and Time”
When I first began to wonder if certain experiences in meditation were providing any hints of deeper truths about the nature of reality, the fact that I was even contemplating this came as a complete surprise to me. I had always considered any type of personal, subjective experience to be more or less useless as a tool for probing scientific truths—not necessarily for research in psychology and neuroscience, but certainly for fundamental physics. Through my work with neuroscientists over the years, I had learned just how indirectly we’re in contact with the outside world. In fact, many of the things that seem like the most direct channels to reality, as we’ve seen, turn out to be what Anil Seth rightfully refers to as “controlled hallucinations.”
But there’s a hitch. Strangely, when we place careful attention on our moment-to-moment experience in a very discipled way, some of our perceptions—including those of space, time, and self—actually begin to shift or drop out altogether and, surprisingly, our window onto reality can be transformed into a more accurate one, at least in some cases.
As I followed the advances in quantum physics—learning about theories that suggest space and time are emergent rather than fundamental—I was reminded of some of my and others’ timeless / spaceless experiences of consciousness in meditation. In Chapter 8, I become curious about the avenues we might explore as we address this new scientific question: If space isn’t a fundamental aspect of the universe, what is it that’s giving rise to the domain we call space in the first place? And just as our experience of color is a mapping of light frequencies, what might our experience of space be mapping for us as it relates to the underlying reality?
