In the previous post, I waved a flag for Brian Greene’s book and PBS series, The Fabric of the Cosmos, especially the segment on space. I’m still waving. However, responding to some of your comments, here’s what may be a clarification.
(What follows is quoted from the book Dancing Past the Dark: Distressing Near-Death Experiences, which should be available online early in 2012.)
Suppose, says Greene in the video, suppose we took away everything in the physical universe—the buildings, people, objects, the planets and stars, down to the smallest atoms of gas and dust; what would be left? We would say “Nothing.” If we took its picture, it would be empty. And as Greene agrees, we would be right; but we would also be wrong. He asks, “How do you make sense of something that looks like nothing?” At this point, experiencers of the Void sit up and take notice.
“As it turns out,” he tells us, “empty space is not nothing; it’s something.”
(Buddhists are nodding and smiling.)
“Empty space is not nothing; it’s something with hidden characteristics as real as all the stuff in our everyday lives. In fact, space is so real it can bend; it can twist; and it can ripple—so real that empty space itself helped shape everything in the world around us and forms the very fabric of the cosmos.”
In the book he summarizes (p. 32), “Space is unavoidably suffused with what are called quantum fields and possibly a diffuse uniform energy called a cosmological constant—modern echoes of the old and discredited notion of a space-filling aether.” There’s a lot going on, beyond our ability to see it with our own eyes.
I am not suggesting that Nirvana is outer space, nor that it is located in outer space, nor that an experience of the Void is an actual trip into outer space any more than a blissful NDE is a voyage to a physical heaven. However, there is this curious resemblance among space, the Void, the Godhead, and Nirvana, that what seems so empty may be full of everything there is, that it may be, in fact, the fabric of the cosmos.
In the play Our Town, the young people are fascinated to discover that a letter can be sent to them at an address beginning with their house number and ending with the Mind of God. I wonder if this conception of space doesn’t have a good deal in common with that idea.
There are no answers here, but intimations of likenesses suggesting that there may be more to this whole business of spirituality than confirmed skeptics admit.
One of the many hard things to wrap our minds around in this world is the concept that space and time is a thing. It is vibrant, and quite ‘alive’. It warps, bends, and moves in relationship with our speed of travel in relationship with other objects. I’m sure that for most folks reading this blog, this is old news.
The kicker, as Greene points out, is how much energy and substance there is lying within the fabric of space. Put more crudely, there’s a lot of “stuff” in that vacuum popping in and out of existence at a mind-boggling rate. Some of it has even been captured recently:
http://dvice.com/archives/2011/11/physicists-mana.php
Yet according to current mainstream cosmology, prior to the beginning of the creation of our universe, there was no space, no time. As I wrote in a previous post, there wasn’t even any “nothing”. Hard to imagine.
Personally, for reasons too involved to get into here, I believe that consciousness existed prior to this creation, and therefore isn’t constrained by space/time. It exists in a way that can’t be measured or described by our materialist mindview and methods. Hence, the descriptions of travels in an ineffable infinite void that surpasses time and space, that deep-experience NDEr’s struggle to describe. They can’t accurately describe what they experienced because in an NDE, these materialist constraints no longer apply. Stripped of the ego and freed from the body, the “I” is little more than pure consciousness.
I believe that consciousness existed prior to this creation, and therefore isn’t constrained by space/time.
Believe it or not, That’s what I believe as well. As they say on the street, “good lookin’ out” Rabbit Dawg.
Dave Woods
Yup Dave, when I’m feeling really metaphysically minded, I wonder if all these radically different near death experiences, ghosts, poltergeists and various other paranormal phenomena aren’t manifestations of this jam-packed full of energy vacuum, and/or the multiple universes some physicists are enamored with right now. I can’t make much of it, but I wonder.
In case ya missed it in the text of the first version, here’s the other two links to the story of the photons coaxed from the vacuum:
http://blogs.nature.com/news/2011/11/light_coaxed_from_nothingness.html
http://www.kurzweilai.net/creating-photons-from-a-vacuum
Seems to me that getting coaxed from a vacuum would about do something unpleasant.
Yeah,….. my vacuum got so riddled with bed bugs, I threw it out.
LOL