Science
Related: About this forumFrom a childhood hallucination to the halls of theoretical physics.
My Own Personal Nothingness
BY ALAN LIGHTMAN
My most vivid encounter with Nothingness occurred in a remarkable experience I had as a child of 9 years old. It was a Sunday afternoon. I was standing alone in a bedroom of my home in Memphis Tennessee, gazing out the window at the empty street, listening to the faint sound of a train passing a great distance away, and suddenly I felt that I was looking at myself from outside my body. I was somewhere in the cosmos. For a brief few moments, I had the sensation of seeing my entire life, and indeed the life of the entire planet, as a brief flicker in a vast chasm of time, with an infinite span of time before my existence and an infinite span of time afterward. My fleeting sensation included infinite space. Without body or mind, I was somehow floating in the gargantuan stretch of space, far beyond the solar system and even the galaxy, space that stretched on and on and on. I felt myself to be a tiny speck, insignificant in a vast universe that cared nothing about me or any living beings and their little dots of existence, a universe that simply was. And I felt that everything I had experienced in my young life, the joy and the sadness, and everything that I would later experience, meant absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of things. It was a realization both liberating and terrifying at once. Then, the moment was over, and I was back in my body.
The strange hallucination lasted only a minute or so. I have never experienced it since. Although Nothingness would seem to exclude awareness along with the exclusion of everything else, awareness was part of that childhood experience, but not the usual awareness I would locate within the three pounds of gray matter in my head. It was a different kind of awareness. I am not religious, and I do not believe in the supernatural. I do not think for a minute that my mind actually left my body. But for a few moments I did experience a profound absence of the familiar surroundings and thoughts we create to anchor our lives. It was a kind of Nothingness.
To understand anything, as Aristotle argued, we must understand what it is not, and Nothingness is the ultimate opposition to any thing. To understand matter, said the ancient Greeks, we must understand the void, or the absence of matter. Indeed, in the fifth century B.C., Leucippus argued that without the void there could be no motion because there would be no empty spaces for matter to move into. According to Buddhism, to understand our ego we must understand the ego-free state of emptiness, called śūnyatā. To understand the civilizing effects of society, we must understand the behavior of human beings removed from society, as William Golding so powerfully explored in his novel Lord of the Flies.
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http://nautil.us/issue/16/nothingness/my-own-personal-nothingness
pnwmom
(108,977 posts)DreamGypsy
(2,252 posts)...and I especially appreciated:
<snip>
What I feel and I know is that I am here now, at this moment in the grand sweep of time. I am not part of the void. I am not a fluctuation in the quantum vacuum. Even though I understand that someday my atoms will be scattered in soil and in air, that I will no longer exist, that I will join some kind of Nothingness, I am alive now. I am feeling this moment. I can see my hand on my writing desk. I can feel the warmth of the sun through the window. And looking out, I can see the pine-needled path that goes down to the sea. Now.
His concluding paragraph above captures what makes me appreciate every day...walking the dogs around the farm, experiencing the lush plant life of my green world, seeing the hawks circling above the fields (or the bats on the evening walks), hearing their cries, knowing that each leaf on a tree (or blueberry bush) or blade of grass or cloud in the sky or star at night that I see is the impression and interpretation of countless photons impinging on my eyes - photons of "visible light", a tiny band of electromagnetic radiation that is the predominant energy emitted by our sun...which caused evolving life on earth to develop eyes attuned to those frequencies. What a great story! And, yes, when the physical body that enables this incredible experience dies and decays...the infinitesimal bits and pieces that enabled my existence will survive and form new experience.
Thanks, N2D, for this post.
WHEN CRABS ROAR
(3,813 posts)and know all.
How is this possible?
It can not be put into words.
DreamGypsy
(2,252 posts)... perhaps you didn't note the statement:
There is no "non-material part." Love minus zero, no limit.
WHEN CRABS ROAR
(3,813 posts)all living substances are material.
It's that total conscious energy thing that can't be quantified, proven or denied.
WHEN CRABS ROAR
(3,813 posts)jimlup
(7,968 posts)My hands felt just like two balloons
Now I've got that feeling once again
I can't explain, you would not understand
This is not how I am
I have become comfortably numb
DirkGently
(12,151 posts)A sense of being untethered from personal identity -- like looking out of your own eyes for the first time and finding all of the specifics of life to be strangely random, and maybe even ... unlikely?
I've read descriptions of the Buddhist concept of nirvana (a stillness of mind) that seemed close. But mine seemed to pop up out of nowhere -- not a product of meditation.
Usually just a fleeting sensation, though, and not anything I'd characterize as a hallucination.
jimlup
(7,968 posts)I also had it happen once when I was extremely tired. I mean extremely no sleep for a week working on my Ph.D. experiment. When the data run was over I went to sleep and when I awoke BLAME! Full fledge instant karma! It lasted the whole day (which was only about 4 hours 'cause I was so sleep deprived.)
DirkGently
(12,151 posts)I think mine popped up when I hadn't spoken, or heard people speak, and had no internal monologue going on for a spell -- not necessarily a long one. Chatter of any kind seems to break the spell.
Never had it last for a whole day, but if I tried, I could hold onto it and sort of explore for a few minutes.
Edit: And those lyrics from Comfortably Numb do capture a bit of it, until they start sounding more like getting high, which is a different thing.
jimlup
(7,968 posts)"getting high" part...
DirkGently
(12,151 posts)I always thought they were going for more of a heroin vibe there.
I have ... heard others make similar suggestions to yours regarding LSD / mushrooms.
And yeah, not the time or place.
jimlup
(7,968 posts)I do think that song is a heroin song. It still succeeds in being one of my favorites. Kinda like Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man" with regard to favorites (not style.)
postulater
(5,075 posts)Just saying.
jimlup
(7,968 posts)postulater
(5,075 posts)AuntPatsy
(9,904 posts)Becomes unthinkable...