Imagine
that we have learned to store experience in a big box. Only certain
kinds of experience fit in the box, but these fit very well, for the box
has been made to order, and each kind of experience has its own special
place. Encounters with substantial entities fit in the box; so do
thoughts and fantasies and memories; and so does our sense of
self-identity.
Now
something surprising happens: The experiences that we have carefully
been collecting and storing away are somehow transformed into phantoms.
Perhaps they are still there, but when we look at them they seem almost
transparent.
In
that case, what happens to the box in which we have been placing our
collection? Should we assume that its essential structure stays the
same? Or does it seem more likely that the box will be transformed as
well made newly transparent and insubstantial?
Inquiring
into the possibility of expanding space beyond conventional 'space
nothingness' is something like
turning to
look at the box in which we store experience. But how shall we do this?
If we look directly at the structure of the box, we make the box itself
into a thing, and our encounter with it becomes another experience of
the kind the box has been constructed to hold. In terms of space, we
could put it this way: We cannot advance our understanding of space by
turning it into an object of inquiry, for in that case we turn away from
the nothingness that makes space uniquely capable of accommodating
appearance.
There
is another way to proceed. We can simply open the box up. But 'opening
the box' does not mean lifting up the top, as we do when we store away a
new experience. We open the box by taking the
box itself apart.
We might imagine that the box is made out of cardboard, constructed
of flaps that have been glued or taped together. Now we undo the
flaps; we flatten the box. In doing so, something remarkable happens:
Even the space that the box once enclosed - which earlier seemed to have
its own particular kind of substantiality - disappears. With no
container, there is also no containing.
Something
like this is what we want to do with space. Without turning it into a
substance, we would like to open space up, investigating its nature:
questioning its nothingness to see what lies beneath it. How shall we
proceed?
It
is difficult to come at space directly, for we are trained from an early
age to focus on what has substance - what appears in space. For space to
make itself available, we must first invite it; in a certain sense we
must make
room for it, so that it can reappear. The thought experiment of the
previous chapter suggests a model for how we can do this. We can start
by inquiring into the nature of substance. As we open our usual
understanding of what is real, the openness of space will come more
readily into focus. By sharpening our understanding of the
substantiality of what appears in space, we allow space itself to
appear.
Our inquiry until now has suggested
that the objects we encounter and assign identities, with their
distinctive properties and qualities, are not solid in the way that we
usually imagine. But this suggestion does not accord with our
experience. Each object that appears before us specializes in being
itself. It proclaims its own reality, voicing a certainty of being that
we accept and draw on to compose the substance of our own lives.
Perhaps
there is no conflict between these two different perspectives. Even if
substance can be analyzed into 'nothing at all', objects continue to
affirm their 'realness', which our senses and our experience daily
witness and confirm. After all, no one seems able to say how matter came
into being or how the universe arose, yet this mystery does not prevent
us from treating matter as solid and substantial.
Let
us assume, then, that it makes perfectly good sense to regard objects as
substantial for at least some practical purposes. A fundamental question
remains: What is the nature of this substantiality?
We can start with the discoveries of
modern science, the prevailing arbiter of reality:. Here the challenges
to substance are well known. In physics at the subatomic level, the
objects we encounter in the world dissolve into 'particles' that can
only loosely be said to have shape and form or even mass. In certain
aspects of quantum theory, even such particles give way to waves of
probabilities.
In
biology a similar indeterminacy prevails. Structures and functions
that once seemed invariant have proved subject to manipulation and
recombination, with results that promise to affect our lives profoundly.
Technology, though it operates with a different set of concerns, also
tends to undermine the view that there is anything fixed and definite in
experience, for it creates a world in which the range of the possible
and the desirable is constantly shifting.
The
claim that reality is objective and substance is fixed can be challenged
from a more experiential perspective as well. Although the identities we
assign to make sense of the world invite us to think in terms of
substance, experience itself is marked by constant transformation. From
hour to hour and moment to moment the world is changing, and we know
firsthand that the mind that experiences it is changing as well. History
changes; specific appearances change, moods and attitudes change.
Features hold for a time and then give way, like ice dissolving into
water. In the end, nothing endures. The impression of solidity that
casual observation conveys proves to be something like the solidity we
feel underfoot when we walk the deck of an ocean liner: It belies the
movement beneath the surface.
Why do we have so much difficulty
bringing this constant transformation into play in the way we interact
with the world? The answer seems linked to our use of names and concepts
to label experience. Once specific identities have been assigned,
reality unfolds as the interplay of the entities that bear these fixed
identities. Referring shifting qualities and characteristics to objects
virtually compels us to accept the illusion of permanence. But we pay a
price for this deception, for our attempts to make sense of experience
in this way can never do more than approximate the ongoing flux of what
is happening.
If
objects do not exist or endure in the solid and substantial manner we
imagine, perhaps we can still found solidity on trends and directions
and continuity over time. After all, although appearance changes, we can
trace the source of what appears; we can point out its derivation and
its destiny, its 'from' and 'to'.
But
here a different difficulty arises. Directions can be calculated only
from a particular perspective: a location in time and space. Imagine
looking at activities on the earth from a point in outer space: Would
the up and down or forward and backward that we would ordinarily
associate with such activities still apply, or would there simply be
movement free from labels? More generally, if we could somehow stand
apart from the universe in space and time, the comings and goings that
help us make sense of things would no longer serve as points of
orientation. The trends we discern appear to be more a construct of our
concerns than an objective basis on which to found substantiality.
Suppose you are sitting quietly in a
moving car. Within your body there is movement at many levels, and
though your body as a whole is at rest, we can hardly claim that it is
completely still either. Then there is the movement of the car - not
just forward, but also up and down and from side to side. There is also
the movement that makes this movement possible: the revolution of the
tires, the pumping of the pistons, the circulation of gasoline and oil
and other lubricants. Beyond this, there is the flow of traffic around
us. Perhaps we should also consider the flow of events that contribute
to our being in the car, headed in a particular direction with
particular purposes in mind. And then there is the range of larger
movements that mostly go unacknowledged: the drift of the continent, the
rotation of the earth, the sweep of the planet as it orbits round the
sun, the movement of the solar system in the galaxy, the passage of the
Milky Way through cosmic space.
No
description that we offer can take all these aspects into account
simultaneously. Only when we settle on a particular set of concerns and
understandings can we speak of derivation and direction, of going from
and to, as though we were referring to a single objective truth.
Whatever specifics we seize on, it is our concern and our
interpretations that make them spring into being - not some solid and
unmoving foundation.
The
Whole of Reality