For theta’s sake, smash up your TV and go for a walk
You can get experienced meditators to produce, on demand, feelings of timelessness and spacelessness. Tell them ‘Try to be outside time’, and ‘try not to be in the centre of space’, and they will.
These sort of sensations tend to happen together – so strikingly so that Walter Stace proposed, as one combined element of mystical experience, ‘non-spatial-and-non-temporal’.1
Why should that be? asked an Israeli research group in a recent and fascinating paper. And was the generation of these sensations related to alterations in the sense of the body?
The answer to the second question was yes: as timelessness and spacelessness invaded, perceived bodily boundaries dissolved. And the answer to the first question was: theta waves. Both timeless and spacelessness used the theta bandwidth. The authors concluded: ‘[O]ur results underscored the specificity of theta activity, and emphasize theta’s unique role in altered experience of time, space and the body. Taken together, the results reported here support previous suggestions of the psychological integrative role of the theta band…..and provide further understanding of deep meditative states, reported frequently to invoke enhanced theta activity.’
So what? Well, perhaps the paper signifies nothing, and should simply be yet another exhibit in the well-stocked cabinet of neuroscientific curiosities. But here are a few wholly speculative, evidentially unsupported suggestions and assertions, woven artlessly into a crude argument with an ethical conclusion, all of which cravenly ignore objections based on the derivation of an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’.
(a) The brain’s use of the theta band to modulate both timelessness and spacelessness indicates that timelessness and spacelessness are linked fundamentally: they are two sides of the same neurobiological coin.
(b) The association of timelessness and spacelessness with the dissolution of body boundaries likewise suggests a tight, probably evolutionarily ancient, and significant relationship between all three phenomena.
(c) When meditators experience any of these phenomena – and particularly when they experience more than one of them at the same time – they tend to describe the experience as good; as an improvement on the workaday baseline. Indeed they often struggle for superlatives. Words such as ‘bliss’ and ‘Nirvana’ pepper the narratives. Meditators typically emerge from the meditation hall glowing and restored.
(d) (Here’s the first real leap). Meditators are better people as a result of their meditation. They are less selfish, more altruistic and more empathetic.
(e) (And here’s the second). This is specifically because:
(i) Timelessness gives long perspectives – tending to put into context the meditators’ own pre-occupations, and hence to generate concern for times other than the meditators’ own.
(ii) Similarly for spacelessness: shift the focus away from the immediate neighbourhood, and one shifts focus away from oneself, making a genuinely general, universal benevolence more likely.
(iii) Similarly for the dissolution of a sense of our bodies’ boundaries. The dissolution makes meditators fanatical, mystical communitarians.
(f) Welfare (described in (c) above) and morality are themselves inextricably entwined. The welfare experienced is, at least in part, a consequence of the timelessness and spacelessness and anti-atomism, which are themselves drivers of a better ethic. It is welfare-good to be ethically-good, and ethically-good to be welfare-good. If your face glows from being on a metaphorical mountain-top, your behavior will glow too.
(g) The mountain-top needn’t be metaphorical: the meditation needn’t be intense and disciplined. When we get away from our screens and the crushing littlenesses of our lives, and stride into a physically bigger landscape, our sense of our own importance diminishes: we begin to feel ‘at one’ with the world around us. I bet there’s a lot of theta sloshing around our heads as we look up at a glowering mountain. Which explains why shepherds make ethically better decisions than politicians, why suits are so dangerous, why you needn’t check your change at a farmers’ market, why folk musicians are all nice people, and why you should take a sledgehammer to your TV.
1. Stace W.T. (1960), Mysticism and Philosophy. Los Angeles, A: Jeremy P. Tarcher, p. 109, cited Berkovich-Ohana et al (2013): see link.