When was the last time any of us experienced space, or time, and not had the simultaneous experience of thought and emotion?
I’m willing to entertain the argument that some practitioners of meditation may experience space-time without what we normally term thought and emotion, but even then, there is the root cause of thought and emotion which does not suddenly disappear (or we would have no meditator) – being.
So let me re-phrase the question: When was the last time you experienced space-time without the underlying experience of being (being: shorthand for both thought and emotion, despite the former not being defined entirely by the latter)?
Right … my point exactly. You haven’t. As in the example above about the meditator who can at times become so free of thinking and emotion that they achieve “no self”, there is still something there saying, “this experience is one of no differentiation from the rest of the universe”. You must Be before you may report any kind of experience whatsoever.
So far, so good. Hard to argue with that last statement, no? Here’s where I think things get a little more interesting: our conventional ways of thinking about “where” we are describe three dimensions of space and one of time… and not a word about Being. But as we just covered, you must Be for the experience of time and space (or to relate to the rest of us, or to read this word, or … etc.) to have any meaning. Fundamentally we have not merely three dimensions of space plus one of time, but also one (or more?) of Being.
My intent is not to point out a non-existent flaw in our mathematical models of the universe as we know it – it was never the intention of mathematicians or physicists to account for living beings with their models, no one seems to have a clear enough grasp on being to model it comprehensively at all, not to mention mathematically (maybe some day we will have a quantum or string theory account of consciousness to incorporate into the Standard Model? Maybe being is a key element of physical reality that has yet to figure into any search for a Grand Unified Theory of the universe?)
This is my point exactly: to properly account for our experiences the models we use to “see” ourselves should include the element of being, consciousness, thought and emotion. Without these terms and understanding of space and time (no matter how many dimensions we may account for, be it four or four thousand) will be decidedly flat and dry.
Thinking and feeling, for the majority of us (the enlightened aside), are forces every bit as fundamental as gravity and the sub-atomic particles so hotly sought after at the LHC.
If we are ever to understand what it is to Be (note – to understand what it is to Be is not a pre-requisite to being, and being very well indeed thank-you-very-much) our understanding will have to grasp consciousness and mind with the same resolution as it does the elementary forces of nature.