Enlightenment Is Everything, Everywhere, All at Once

Our brains can shed their evolutionary restrictions, allowing us a fuller life.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-meditating-mind/202207/enlightenment-is-everything-everywhere-all-once

Physics tells us that what we experience is not what reality is.

According to evolutionary biology, our brains evolved to help our ancestors survive and reproduce, but our brains can grow beyond that.

The core meditation experience is being unbounded by space and time, which rewires the brain to, over time, make that a constant experience.

Enlightenment can be physiologically characterized by an EEG pattern that shows evidence of being both unbounded and bounded by time and space.

Einstein’s theory of relativity and quantum theory are arguably the most successful scientific theories ever. They explain how everything works and predict how everything behaves. Relativity theory and quantum theory describe reality. But we do not live in and experience the reality they describe. Neuroscientists tell us that what we experience is not reality (see here and here), it is a construction of the brain partly composed of external stimuli, while the rest is constructed by the brain.

Our Brains Construct Experience Different from Reality

Evolutionary biology says that our brains evolved a skewed and incomplete perception of reality that helped our ancestors survive and reproduce. Is it possible for our experience of reality to grow beyond the one we needed for survival and reproduction, to evolve to a higher, true perception of reality? A perception of reality in harmony with relativity theory and quantum theory? I will argue that the state of enlightenment, the state of mind extolled by the Buddha and the Vedas, is that higher, evolved state.

To get beyond the constraints evolutionary biology built into our brains would mean that we would have to uncouple and dissociate those neural networks that skew and filter our perception of reality and grow new connections that allowed a true experience. The wiring of our brains would have to change for that to happen. Is that possible? It turns out that a long-term meditation practice changes our brains and how they are wired, which occurs based on neuroplasticity.

Meditation Rewires Our Brains to Experience Reality

According to Walter Stace, a scholar of mysticism, the core of meditation is the experience of being outside, or transcendent to, time and space, which he calls the experience of being “non-spatial and non-temporal.” According to Stace, the Buddhist concept of experiencing emptiness during meditation, or sunyata, is an experience of “no time, no space, no becoming.” Similarly, in Vedic philosophy, transcendental consciousness, which is a state achieved through the practice of Transcendental Meditation or other Vedic meditations, the individual's mind transcends all mental activity, thereby having the experience of being unbounded in time and space.

Time and Space are Constructs of Our Brains

Long-term meditators commonly report that they have the experience of “no time, no space, no becoming” and “being unbounded in time and space” during their meditations. Are these experiences of reality? Relativity theory and quantum theory say that in reality there is no time, no space, and no boundaries. The theory of relativity tells us that time is not absolute and can, and does, stop. It tells us that somehow, past, present, and future exist together, now, all at once. Einstein said the following about time: “the separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, although a convincing one,” and “the only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.”

Experiences of Enlightenment

Experiencing two contradictory things at the same time might seem confusing or unpleasant. The enlightened report that it is anything but that. They say enlightenment is what the Buddha and the Vedas said it would be. In his 2016 book, The Supreme Awakening: Experiences of Enlightenment Throughout Time—And How You Can Cultivate Them, Craig Pearson, Ph.D., interviewed a long-term meditator about his unfolding enlightenment.

“Pearson: How do you experience the past and the future now, the flow of time?

Meditator: I feel I’m outside of time. That is to say, the convention we call time has ceased to exist for me…time has no reality for me, as it had in the past…This is very refreshing…Living in the now is just simpler and easier. It requires less energy.”

In the 2002 study cited above, the authors quote one of their self-proclaimed enlightened subjects about their experience of reality.

“The flurry of waking activity comes and goes; the inertia of sleep comes and goes. Yet, throughout these changing values of waking and sleeping, there is a silent, unbounded continuum of awareness that is me; I am never lost to myself.”

Summary

In summary, relativity and quantum theory say that reality is being unbounded in time and space. Evolutionary biology has built into our brains the necessary experience of being bounded by time and space. The experience of both at the same time is part of what it is to be enlightened. Enlightenment is experiencing reality.