"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." (read more)
Friday, August 29, 2014
Alan Lightman: "My Own Personal Nothingness"
"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." (read more)
"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." (read more)
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Here's the link if anyone's interested.
Conversely, I had the strangest sensation of somethingness, of profound belonging, of sureness of my place in the vastness of the universe and known perfectly.
It went like this.
Suddenly I was awake in a dream and I find myself moving across the sands of an achingly bright and hot desert with a group of people.
The people were all sad.
Terribly displaced. Like how migrant children must feel lost within a group pushed out from where they were born but not pulled into the United States. Utterly hopelessly lost in a desert with nothing to latch onto in the immediate future, and nothing to hold onto in the past. The entire group lost.
Except me.
I did not share their despondency.
And then a friend appeared who is always good natured no matter what the sorry conditions, no matter how awful the events resulting from his sorry ass decisions, always cheerful. And seeing him cheered me immediately. i suddenly felt impervious to the large group's despondency. They could not possibly drag us two down.
We made it out of the desert and now are walking single file down a sidewalk the houses to one side are on elevated lawns and there are goods offered for sale along the way, mostly fruit and vegetables. But the travelers would not touch them, as if the available goods are not available to them. I wondered why did they feel shut out. I could not imagine why their frame of mind. I grabbed an apple off a table while walking by and offered it to the child with their parent in front of me but the child would not take it. I switched to Spanish and still the adult admonished the child to not accept the apple.
Then I realized the cash in my pocket could remedy any situation we got into. Maybe they didn't have any cash in their pocket, and that caused me to slip away, slip up and away from the scene. No longer observing the line of people, no longer observing the town, no longer studying the planet I slipped well beyond the orbit of the moon and looked back at the Earth like a marble and knew, absolutely knew, that I can never be lost down there, that my place is known, that I am perfectly placed and my place is known absolutely. Then I woke up for reals.
When I mentioned this to the person who appeared in the dream he was very well pleased to hear it. He said, "F'k'n ace! I feel that way too."
I had similar dreams involving strange cities and houses and being lost but not lost -- being oddly absolutely sure of being found, secure that my whereabouts are known no matter what, within being misplaced geographically. In one case feeling sure of a strange Canadian border city, in another case being certain about various confusing houses on an unknown hill in an unknown city, and a third one being sure of my place in an unfamiliar family. In each case I woke up for real feeling incredibly secure within the most emotionally trying and dire circumstances of being utterly lost and displaced.
Damn -- he had Feynman as a thesis adviser, and got the famous "cargo cult science" speech for graduation? I'm jealous.
It was probably a seizure.
I have experienced out-of-body experiences twice in my life. The first one was one afternoon when i was driving my car on the interstate in the city where I live, running work-related errands.
I saw my self driving. I was watching me drive my car. This went on for several minutes, me watching my hands and feet guide the my car, brake, accelerate, change lanes, etc.
I was in my car, but not in the driver's seat, although my body was. I was floating somewhere above my body, not constrained by metal and glass.
When I became myself again I was still driving on the interstate, on a road I have driven thousands of times since I was sixteen. And I was completely lost. I had no idea of where I was, I recognized none of the buildings or signs or landscape or anything. It was if my brain has been wiped utterly clean of everything it had ever remembered. Nothingness. It may have been the most terrifying minutes in my life.
I continued to drive for, I don't know, another half-hour, following the highway, desperate to find something, anything I could remember. I finally saw an exit sign I recognized, and slowly, my memory returned. I knew where I was, (some 20 miles away from where I should have been) and made it home.
I was so rattled and puzzled that I called my MD and made an appointment for an exam, wondering if I had had a neurological event, or a seizure, or worse, was at the beginning stage of dementia. There was nothing wrong with my body.
It hasn't happened again, thank goodness.
Wow.
I have an image that eternal life involves being lost (or found) in the great and vast cosmos.
It feels vague and I cannot comprehend. Like my understanding of God.
When I was younger, I remember on occasions while trying to go to sleep, falling as it where into some kind of waking trance, I don't have the words for it, where I would have the ability to imagine I was very thin or very fat.
At first when this occurred I recall I didn't have the ability to make the switch. The switch between fat (fat is not the right word for it, more like larger) and diminutive or thing would occur without my apparent assistance.
Until I would go to sleep and be in some other state of consciousness.
To the best of my recollection this happened between my teens and early twenties.
Lightman writes that the awareness was not the usual awareness coming from the "three pounds of grey matter" in his head.
But there is no source of awareness other than the brain. Which invalidates every claim ever made for a spiritual "out of body" experience.
But there is no source of awareness other than the brain. Which invalidates every claim ever made for a spiritual "out of body" experience.
He's describing how it felt, not saying it was actually an out-of-body or spiritual experience.
So a 9-year-old boy formulated all these sophisticated concepts? Come on man, sounds much more like over the years he burnished the memory to suit his developing worldview.
I have felt something like what is described here on two occasions, one was a near growing experience when I was a child. One was climbiing a mountain when I almost slid into a crevasse.
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