Transcendence of Time and Space

[Vouthon]

"Those who walk in the Divine Light discover in themselves the Unwalled"

- Blessed John of Ruysbroeck (1293-1381), The book of the Twelve Béguines

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The feeling that one has Transcended Time and Space corresponds to loss of everyday spatial and temporal awareness and a sense of vastness, continuity and eternity. This is a staple element of the Mystical Experiences Questionnaire (MEQ) (Pahnke and Richards, 1970; Maclean et al., 2013), used by scholars to critically assess and scale mystical experiences.

Have you ever undergone this kind of experience? Has it changed your life?

In a study published earlier this year, a group of Neuropsychopharmacology researchers at Imperial College London's Division of Brain Sciences, (looking at correlations between psychedelic experiences while on the drug DMT, mysticism and NDEs), explained how:


DMT Models the Near-Death Experience

Recent work has consistently shown that the occurrence of mystical-type experiences is predictive of long-term therapeutic benefit (Maclean et al., 2011; Garcia-Romeu et al., 2014;Griffiths et al., 2016; Carhart-Harris et al., 2017, 2018; Roseman et al., 2018) and similar mechanisms may be at play in relation to improved mental well-being post NDE (Moody, 1975; Noyes, 1980; Ring, 1980; Groth-Marnat and Summers, 1998). It is pertinent to ask therefore, what common features shared between these states may be responsible for mediating the apparent long-term psychological benefits that follow them. Evidence suggests that that the experience of unity – which some have claimed is an inevitable counterpart to ego-dissolution (Nour et al., 2016) – may be the core component binding them both.

The so-called ‘unitive experience’ was originally identified as the core component of the mystical experience by its most influential scholar, Walter Stace (Stace, 1960) and it is also recognized in descriptions of the ‘peak experience’ – an overtly secular equivalent of the so-called ‘mystical experience’ introduced by Maslow (1959), as well as the ‘oceanic feeling’ coined by Romain Rolland in conversation with Sigmund Freud, who believed the feeling to be regressive, recapitulating the state of consciousness inhabited by infants prior to the development of the ego (Freud, 1920).

It is possible that complete ego-dissolution and the parallel unitive experience that accompanies it may be the common factor that can bridge between these different states and is also responsible for the longer-term psychological benefits associated with them. Another recent thought, is that a return of the brain to ‘criticality’ (Atasoy et al., 2017), albeit temporarily, may offer a reminder of one’s closeness with nature (Carhart-Harris, 2018) and so what is left afterwards is as much an epistemic ‘reminder’ as anything else.
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(FYI, there is a veritable renaissance of academic and scientific research being plugged into the study of mystical experiences at the moment (including those had while under the influence of psychedelics), as well as their relationship to near-death experiences and concomitant effects upon long-term mental well-being. It's a live field).

 

[Sunstone]

Yes and yes. Such experiences can be grossly confusing since they contradict so many fundamental assumptions about reality.

 

[Vouthon]

Yes and yes. Such experiences can be grossly confusing since they contradict so many fundamental assumptions about reality.

Do tell Sunstone! I need to know more (especially if it involves G-strings).

 

[Sunstone]

Do tell Sunstone! I need to know more (especially if it involves G-strings).

A mystical experience -- if you are not prepared for one -- can be thoroughly disorientating You don't know what happened and may suspect you went insane or are now insane. For instance, you just witnessed the dissolution of the self. How much sense is that going to make without having at some point been told to expect it?

If you come to such an experience with a lot of assumptions about reality, but with little or no preparation for having those assumptions challenged, you are most likely going to take a long time to sort things out. I'm assuming a spontaneous, non drug induced experience here.

 

[Vouthon]

Yes and yes. Such experiences can be grossly confusing since they contradict so many fundamental assumptions about reality.

Oddly enough though, 'reality' at the smallest scale (quantum level) also contracts so many fundamental assumptions we make about our classical, macroscopic 'reality'.

Not suggesting there's any connection but it is worth thinking about.

 

[Vouthon]

A mystical experience -- if you are not prepared for one -- can be thoroughly disorientating You don't know what happened and may suspect you went insane or are now insane. For instance, you just witnessed the dissolution of the self. How much sense is that going to make without having at some point been told to expect it?

If you come to such an experience with a lot of assumptions about reality, but with little or no preparation for having those assumptions challenged, you are most likely going to take a long time to sort things out. I'm assuming a spontaneous, non drug induced experience here.

Sounds familiar:

Blessed Jacapone da Tori O.F.M. (ca. 1230 – 1306), Franciscan mystic ​

• There is no other action at those heights;
  What the questing soul once was it has ceased to be.
  Neither heat nor fiery love
  Nor suffering has place here.
  This is not light as the soul has imagined it.
  All it had sought it must now forget,
  And pass on to a new world,
  Beyond its powers of perception.

• 
  
  
  • On achieving their desired end
    Human powers cease to function,
    And the soul sees that what it thought was right
    Was wrong. A new exchange occurs
    At that point where all light disappears;
    A new and unsought state is needed:
    The soul has
    what it did not love,
    And is stripped of all it possessed, no matter how dear.

• 
  
  
  • In God the spiritual faculties
    Come to their desired end,
    Lose all sense of self and self-consciousness,
    And are swept into infinity.
    The soul, made new again,
    Marveling to find itself
    In that immensity, drowns.
    How this comes about it does not know

 

[SalixIncendium]

The feeling that one has Transcended Time and Space corresponds to loss of everyday spatial and temporal awareness and a sense of vastness, continuity and eternity. This is a staple element of the Mystical Experiences Questionnaire (MEQ) (Pahnke and Richards, 1970; Maclean et al., 2013), used by scholars to critically assess and scale mystical experiences.

Have you ever undergone this kind of experience?

Yes.

Has it changed your life?

I cannot say if it changed my life, as I have nothing to measure that against. But in all likelihood, it did, because it changed my worldview entirely and has led me to explore religion and spirituality to an extent I likely never would have in order to understand my experience.

 

[crossfire]

The first three arupa (formless) jhanas (infinite space, infinte consciousness, nothingness) seem to fit your description. If knowing them for what they are changes your life, then yes, they did change my life.

Arūpajhāna - Wikipedia

One thing that really did affect me was my being instructed to meditate on "absolute space" (Not infinite space.)
I took this "absolute space" to be "non-relativistic space." {Try wrapping your mind around that one!}

 

[Windwalker]

The so-called ‘unitive experience’ was originally identified as the core component of the mystical experience by its most influential scholar, Walter Stace (Stace, 1960) and it is also recognized in descriptions of the ‘peak experience’ – an overtly secular equivalent of the so-called ‘mystical experience’ introduced by Maslow (1959), as well as the ‘oceanic feeling’ coined by Romain Rolland in conversation with Sigmund Freud, who believed the feeling to be regressive, recapitulating the state of consciousness inhabited by infants prior to the development of the ego (Freud, 1920).

It is possible that complete ego-dissolution and the parallel unitive experience that accompanies it may be the common factor that can bridge between these different states and is also responsible for the longer-term psychological benefits associated with them. Another recent thought, is that a return of the brain to ‘criticality’ (Atasoy et al., 2017), albeit temporarily, may offer a reminder of one’s closeness with nature (Carhart-Harris, 2018) and so what is left afterwards is as much an epistemic ‘reminder’ as anything else.
​

It is interesting you brought this topic up pretty much a day after me having a discussion with somebody about this "oceanic bliss" and talking about Freud's view of this as the infantile state. He may have considered it as a regression, but there is a partial truth to understanding this as the pre-verbal experience of reality we all had prior to being introduced and born into the world of language through our families in our lives.

Before our minds had developed sufficiently in order to process language and the meaning of words, our experience of the world and ourselves was through pure sensation without the boxes of words. Every pore of our bodies acted as receptors to the world. It was an awakening from the state of a formless reality into the world of form. Sense and sensation was all there was filling our brains with data about the world. All was just vague, magical, and at times terrifying images filling our conscious minds without context. It was a major download of data into brains through our conscious awareness.

And then came words. When our brains developed the capacity to create and hold concepts, we were told "this is a chair. This is a car. This is the color red," and so forth. This vast Openness that was reality was now becoming reduced and contained into word objects. "This is a tree", pulled it away from pure sensation to a thought that could be stored in the mind in memory to be experienced. The reality of the tree, and the mental object called tree became fused to each other, and reality shrunk down in size.

This process of course continued and expanded at blinding rates, objectifying as many objects as possible into a vast complex of mental objects with names attached to them. Even our own self-identities became one of these metal objects, especially pronounced during early adolescence entering into puberty and the accelerated socialization that goes along with that. The collapse of our experienced reality moved from pure subconscious awareness, a pure pre-verbal reality, into a world of words and mental objects.

The ego or self-identity became a projection of concepts about one's own self on the screen of mental objects, pulling us further and further away from this Oceanic state of just simple pure awareness without the judgement of words and ideas. We then naively began looking "out there" from something that had been lost "in here", that "hole" that got created for something that slipped away from us unawares through this gradual process of enculturation.

So what is the mystical experience? It is similar to the Oceanic state of the preverbal mind, but rather than being seen as a regression, it is an awakening to a natural state in us that got suppressed underneath a mountain of words and mental objects which replaced reality with an image of reality in our minds. The mystical state is a less a return to that, than it is a move forward into a transverbal reality, where we understand the error of mistaken identities created by words.

It is a recapitulation reaching back into the formless, but in the service of forward integration, and not a regression backwards. It is finding what was lost, and bringing it forward into the developed mind with a healthy ego, aware of the nature of the "self" as a differentiated individual in the world, but not mistaking any longer the truth about who and what we are. It is literally, like that birth experience into the world as an infant before words collapsed the world, expect now with the mind of a fully aware adult, no longer confusing the fingers pointing at the moon, with the moon itself. That Oceanic state is a reclamation of the truth of our own existence, now held as an Awakened adult.

The next question then was all this necessary? Did we have to "fall from Grace" as part of the growth process? I don't believe it is necessary, but I doubt anyone has ever not "fallen" this way, caught into the currents of the worlds created through words. So few understand the problem, so we all just repeat the same error.