Is our existence comparable to a black hole?
Vic Shayne
author
Consciousness: The Potentiality of All Existence: Exploring reality and belief as a subjective experience
NASA defines a black hole as a place in space where gravity pulls so much that even light cannot get out. Beyond this, there’s a peculiar aspect of black holes that seem to be analogous to how consciousness — our existence —works.
One day I was listening to an account of how Stanford professor of theoretical physics Leonard Susskind changed the mind of Stephen Hawking who claimed that once information is sucked into a black hole, it is lost forever. Susskind disagreed.
One rainy and humid evening Professor Susskind was driving home when he came to a stop light. And then it all came to him in a revelation. He used his index finger on the inside of his fogged-over windshield to scribble down a mathematical equation proving that information is never completely lost despite being drawn into a black hole. The information, he showed, is retained on the rim, or horizon line, of the black hole.
It’s no small feat to prove Stephen Hawking wrong, but Leonard Suskind turned him and the world of physics in a new direction.
Although everything eventually gets sucked into a black hole, its memory or impression remains behind.
What does this mean about our reality? Physicists have not yet determined whether our existence — our lives, phenomena, objects, expressions, experiences, etc. — is only a memory or whether it is real, whatever “real” means. As a memory, all of what seems to exist, including us and our minds, may be a holographic representation of what used to exist.
Are black holes a metaphor, or perhaps what we fundamentally are? It’s an interesting thought.
What is information?
Physics writer, Fraser Cain explained that when physicists are speaking of information, “they’re referring to the specific state of every single particle in the universe: mass, position, spin, temperature, you name it.” In my book Consciousness: the potentiality of all existence, I describe consciousness as the totality of all that is, and this includes all expressions, movement, birth, death, creation, destruction, ideas, thoughts, memories, emotions, experiences, phenomena, and nature.
Consciousness is all-inclusive, with nothing omitted, containing everything that can be described, known, sensed, remembered, ongoing, growing, decaying, expressed, created, destroyed, and imagined. In this sense, consciousness, which is mysteriously found emanating out of emptiness, is the creator, destroyer, changer, and perpetuator of information. It is also a word that stands for all of its contents, including phenomena, expressions, forms, feelings, thoughts, ideas, emotions, and memories, which are as universal as they are personal.
Thought, too, is information, and we can say that information is that which creates and defines all beings, inanimate objects, the weather, the planet, and so on. Where science once considered existence to be fundamentally made of energy it now recognizes that everything is information when broken down into its fundamental existence.
Where has the past gone?
Through intense observation of what we are, it becomes obvious (at least in my experience) that everything in the past — personal, interpersonal, and world history — both exists and does not exist. Consider this analogy: When you drive down the street you will notice that all of what is in front and on the side of you is sucked into your awareness and then disappears beyond your view, never to exist again. Even if you see the trees, houses, bushes, and birds behind you if you turn your head or look in your rear-view mirror, they are not the same experience that used to be in front of you. It’s as if everything disappears into the void of a “me,” a witness, never to be seen again in the exact same way. Where did everything go? Is it gone forever? Or it is retained in or on your own “horizon,” which we commonly call memory?
All that happened is still alive and happening
The memory that we have following the disappearance of an event, vision, perception, thought, comment, color, shape, sound, light, form, experience, or anything sensorial, is more alive than we may realize at first glance.
Psychology, hypnotherapy, somatic therapy, neurolinguistic programming, and neuroscience recognize that memory retains and evokes feelings so that the actual event that gave rise to them, despite being long gone, continues to exist as a sort of residue — and a powerful one at that. In her groundbreaking book, Molecules of Emotion, neuroscientist Candace Pert explained that a person’s past experiences remain ever-present, not only in the mind, but also embedded within the cells of the body. Memory is a copy of an event.
The stuff of memory creates what may be analogous to a hologram in your mind that you can see, hear, smell, taste, and touch. Is it imagination or is it real? And where is it stored? It’s easy to say that it’s stored in the brain, but thus far science has no way to prove this even though researchers and psychologists may be able to trigger a memory. The same question is asked by physicists about the information that we call life and all expressions once they have already passed into a black hole: Is the life we are living no more than a hologram, a representation of what once existed?
Are we all remnants of the past? It seems that we are. Our whole existence and sense of self is founded on thought, and as soon as it arises out of consciousness thought is immediately of the past. This means that as soon as our brains notice a thought it is noticing something that is not current, not in the now.
Are you now, or have you already been?
When we make the statement, “I am” it is already the past, because the now that gives rise to the experience of existing is quickly turned into a memory just before we are aware of it. As neuroscience has shown, when a thought occurs to us it takes an interval of time before we are consciously aware of it. Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, has shown that several seconds before we consciously make a decision its outcome can be predicted from unconscious activity in the brain.
The original event is gone by the time the mind is aware of it.
When we become aware of what’s happening now, it is no longer now. All that is happening right now is only known after it has occurred, so what we are experiencing is a memory of what we ignorantly call “now.” And physicists like Leonard Susskind argue what we are experiencing now, including every aspect of our lives and all phenomena, has already been sucked into a black hole. You can draw your own conclusions as to whether there is a correlation or analogy between our living in the past and the memory left on the rim of a black hole.
Nisargadatta and the black hole phenomenon
Nisargadatta was an enlightened mystic who entertained guests from all over the world in his cramped and hot little flat above the din of Bombay. On April 1981, one of his visitors told him, “Scientists have been talking of the ‘black hole’ into which everything in the universe finally goes.“ Nisargadatta answered, ”You are that Absolute, you swallow the entire universe.”
Nisargadatta’s message was succinct: We are fundamentally that which is behind, within, and out of which all things seem to arise, exist, and disappear.
And now we teeter on the razor’s edge of the ineffable. A black hole sucks everything into it, including light. When and if you can realize that you, prior to the egoic sense of self, are essentially a void, emptiness, a capacity for existence, and not really a body in the world, but that the world is actually in you as this void, the whole game changes. This void has been explained by experienced gurus, Buddhist monks, Zen practitioners and certain meditators as that which contains everything yet is of itself emptiness.
Go to the light?
In my experience, when the self has dissipated as well as everything except awareness, out of the interminable emptiness arises a pinprick of light. It seems that if you come closer and closer to this light you notice that this light contains all that exists in what we call reality. Many near death experiencers have described this as well. This phenomenon leaves us with at least three questions: First, what is it that comes closer and closer to the light? Second, what is reality? And thirdly, are we coming closer to the light or is it instead being drawn into us? Fourth, who is this “we” that is the experiencer of this phenomenon? In my experience, we who are the vast, silent, still emptiness of the Absolute are giving rise to the awareness as well as the light that it perceives.
The eternal mystery is that this light of consciousness does not actually come from or go anywhere. It is only awareness that perceives it, and this awareness, when unalloyed, is pure consciousness, sometimes referred to as the silent witness. When the awareness is judging and assessing something then this awareness is alloyed to the self. When completely in, or as, the emptiness there is no witness, thought, phenomena, or reality of any kind. When awareness arises it begins as the “I am” of consciousness, or the one that knows and feels that it exists.
Nisargadatta and consciousness
The scientific concept of black holes is consistent with Nisargadatta’s description of consciousness, described in his book I Am That. The title encapsulates the idea that what we truly are is not describable or knowable: We are not this, not this, and not this: We are That — something else and everything else and nothing else.
The ancient Indian Hindu mystics taught that when you completely eliminate anything that can be known then you find what you are — not as a thing, an entity, or a person, but rather the essence that is behind the facade of the self and of all movement expressed as existence called consciousness. This has been called the void, the Absolute, emptiness, silent stillness, nothingness.
Physicists have described the holographic residue on a black hole’s horizon line as made of waves. In comparison, Nisargadatta once said, “On the surface of the ocean of consciousness, names and forms are transitory waves…I am like a cinema screen-clear and empty…The pictures pass over it and disappear, leaving it as clear and empty as before…The screen intercepts and reflects the pictures.”
And Nisargadatta said, “There is also the awareness of it all and a sense of immense distance as if the body and the mind and all that happens to them were somewhere far out on the horizon.”
More about the black hole
The more information that falls into a black hole, the bigger it gets. The same is true of consciousness: As the eons go by, more and more information becomes a part of the body of consciousness. Does the void increase according to how much it has the capacity to contain?
Paradoxically, the void is emptiness and yet it contains more and more. Using another analogy, we can say that a movie screen can show us more and more information, yet the screen itself remains the same size. When the movie is over, the screen remains as an empty capacity and the movie now exists only as a memory in the minds of the audience that have left the theater.
Is our existence comparable to a black hole?
What does it take to realize you are the void (emptiness) and that consciousness arises from you in this capacity? There must be silent stillness to observe what “is,” because if you use thinking, figuring, analysis, memory, secondhand information, or even knowledge, you are identifying with the information instead of the void itself. In effect, you are living someone else’s idea of existence and this existence is of the past.
To know that the void — the absolute, silent stillness — is you is to be the black hole. The question remains whether this is a metaphor or a literal reality. Nisargadatta said, “You are that Absolute, you swallow the entire universe.”
“When you go deep inside, nothing is all there is. There is no ‘I am’. The ‘I am’ merges in the Absolute.”
— Nisargadatta Maharaj
