Prime Time - Jane Fonda [136]
In the days that followed Upaya I was aware of being kinder and more careful of others. Colors appeared more vivid, sounds more acute, and my thinking felt different. Changing your thinking is so hard. Joan had said, “Don’t believe your thoughts.” How to get out from under our thoughts? I learned from Upaya that slowing down the thinking process lets you feel beyond or deeper than the thinking process, and thus to avoid being a toy to conceptions. I was to see that this changes the experience of thinking itself.
But the change I noticed most was what happened to time. It seemed to have doubled in volume, and I know why. It is because during the eight days, I had learned to pay deep attention to the Now. This allowed me to see that on a subjective level, time is what we make of it. We’ve all read or been told umpteen times that time expands if we fill it with newness. Remember when you were a child and summer vacation seemed to last a year because things were new? My experience at Upaya showed me that even within the familiar, time expands when we are paying close attention to life, detail by detail, moment by moment. Perhaps this is another purpose of the Third Act. Assuming we are able and want to reduce the to-ing and fro-ing of youth, we have more time to make time for time.
Since my experience at Upaya, I have read books about quantum physics, met scientists, and attended their lectures. I have come to feel that there is a beautiful intersection between the place where meditation leads us, the general falling away of differences that tends to happen with age, and the new physics. It is as if, even before we die (and if we encourage it), we are pulled toward the undefinable totality of flowing energy from which we all emerged and of which we remain a part. It is a place where poetry and science meet. The Vietnamese Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh said, “The four elements of space live within my body. When I die, my elements will separate one from the other and return to the mother elements. We are not separate from any being or thing.” The physicist David Bohm wrote, “In a way, techniques of meditation can be looked on as measures which are taken by man to try to reach the immeasurable, i.e., a state of mind in which he ceases to sense a separation between himself and the whole of reality.” Like the teachings of Buddha and Jesus, quantum physics cannot be understood through books alone; it must be experienced—in our body, viscerally. How do you viscerally experience an abstraction like space, infinity, or dark matter? Apparently by transcending the mind. Albert Einstein, for instance, didn’t arrive at his theory of relativity through logic or deduction alone. Many have written about the fact that his theory came to him when he was in a deep, meditative alpha state.
To me, a layperson, it seems to go like this: For a long time, many in science took a mechanistic approach to what constituted the material world, believing that its “ultimate substance” would be found in the building blocks of atoms and even more basic particles, such as electrons, protons, and neutrons. These were thought to be distinct, unchangeable, independent entities. Einstein, with his theory of relativity, challenged the mechanistic understanding of the world. He said that instead of discrete particles, reality was made up of nonlinear, overlapping, ever-changing energy fields. Then scientists discovered that atoms, electrons, protons, and neutrons were not the “ultimate substances” at all, that they were continually transforming into a multitude of increasingly smaller, unstable particles called quarks and partons. Building on this, quantum science has revealed that everything we can see or touch or describe, including space and time, is