From 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
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...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.
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.
