The Stable Illusion

As a child, as happens to many, I believe, I felt a deep, wordless fascination with space, the cosmos, the open. It wasn’t just the rockets or the astronauts that drew me in, though they did, it was the nature of the whole thing. I remember imagining the universe as something infinite, stretching in all directions forever, without edge or end. I accepted that image as if it were self-evident, but I couldn’t quite understand it. How could something simply not end?

That discomfort didn’t go away; instead, it sharpened with time. At some point I found myself reading about the Big Bang. I was probably too young to grasp its full implications, but I remember getting my hands on A Brief History of Time by Hawking. I can’t recall much of the book itself (it’s been a long time), but I do remember how the idea of a universe with a beginning, expanding ever outward, didn’t solve the puzzle for me. It deepened it.

What does it mean for everything that is to be growing into something that is not? What is it expanding into? That question haunted me not because I wondered what drives the expansion, but because of the deeper, stranger implication: that the whole of existence might be unfolding into something with no substance, no form, not even emptiness, but the absence of space, time, or any conceivable frame. A sheer outside to which no concept applies.

That idea pressed itself into my imagination, and with it, an image: the Flammarion engraving. I’ve always remembered it inaccurately, as a colorful scene rather than a woodcut. A cloaked figure leaning past the sky, reaching beyond the firmament into another order of reality. That image became a kind of symbolic shorthand for the feeling I carried, the sense that whatever we see, whatever we call “the universe”, is framed by something wholly other, and perhaps inaccessible.

Back then, I took refuge in the thought that the limitation was mine. That if I couldn’t conceive of what lay beyond, it didn’t mean there wasn’t something there. But even then (without knowing anything about Occam or his razor), I sensed there was something deeply strained about the whole construction. Both infinity and finitude, in their naive forms, felt untenable. One was ungraspable; the other, ungrounded.

The Wall of Flesh

A few years later, something shifted, or rather, something cracked. I can’t say exactly what caused it. Some fragment of thought, a question read or half-heard. But what followed was a long stretch of existential discomfort. Years, in fact.

It began with the body. The raw fact of being made of flesh. Skin that feels the rain falling on it. A tympanic membrane vibrating to the sound of a favorite song. A cornea accepting the relentless bombardment of photons from the sun, and from everything those photons bounce off of. Light has shape and color, but those photons never make it inside the brain. And that, supposedly, is where I am. That’s where I exist.

Interfaces. Everything becomes an interface. A translation. Wave to impulse. Photon to ion flow. Experience to experience. But never the thing itself. The light I see is not the light out there, wherever that light may be outside me. It’s a representation, a reconstruction. That realization gave birth to a feeling I couldn’t shake: a kind of solitary confinement with no door. No tunnel. No way out.

All that translation, all that processing, it felt like a wall. A massive stone wall, stretching miles wide between me and the world I longed to reach. And worse, perhaps the thing I longed for wasn’t even real, but a construct generated inside the very cage I was trying to escape.

The discomfort doubled. If there’s nothing out there, if there are no others, no world, just a solitary mind hallucinating itself into company, then this whole avalanche of sensation is for nothing. Just noise echoing in a sealed chamber.

But if there is a world, if there are others, then what if the contact I feel, the tenderness, the pull, the shared rhythms, are all just echoes within a shared illusion? A representation layered over something I can’t quite touch. Echoes bouncing back from a wall I never knew was there. And what if the other minds are just like mine: desperate to connect, tossing messages in bottles across a universe that sits only centimeters away, and yet might as well be unreachable?

The Still Point

In early adulthood, spiritual practices became a sustained area of inquiry. Yoga, meditation, elements of Tantric frameworks, Buddhist texts, not adopted as a belief system, but engaged experimentally. These traditions often overlapped, sometimes contradicting one another, sometimes reinforcing certain intuitions. Alongside them, other factors played a role: physiological shifts, cognitive intensity, perhaps even a kind of ambition that could be described as spiritual, though not in a devotional sense.

One early ability that proved useful was the suspension of immediate judgment. Not indefinitely, but long enough to allow the practice to operate without prematurely assessing its meaning or legitimacy. This wasn’t about embracing a new system of beliefs, but about entering a space where things could be tested directly. It often felt like leaving a trail behind, a way back in case the process became destabilizing.

At that time, the discipline could be rigorous to the point of obsession: extended fasting, long meditative sessions, altered states of perception. Over time, certain effects became evident. Not vague impressions, but concrete experiences. Shifts in attention, in bodily awareness, in emotional tone. And curiously, the practices that aimed to dissolve the sense of self occasionally had the opposite effect: they introduced a kind of agency, a sense of inner command or clarity that, while unintended, was difficult to ignore.

That tension, between dissolution and intensification, became increasingly apparent. What began as an effort to reduce identification sometimes led to new forms of attachment. The experience of a certain kind of “power,” however subtle or private, introduced risks: self-inflation, confirmation bias, misattribution. The line between insight and self-deception proved thinner than expected.

Over time, though, a form of equilibrium emerged. Once the nervous system settled and the novelty wore off, a different quality began to surface, silence, stability, and a clearer sense of observation. Many of the symbolic descriptions found in ancient texts began to make experiential sense, though always approached with caution.

Throughout, skepticism remained a constant. If anything, it structured the approach: not an eagerness to believe, but a deliberate neutrality. There was no attempt to convince oneself that certain phenomena were real. If they were, they would show themselves. The only commitment was to suspend disbelief long enough to let the process unfold. That position, neither belief nor disbelief, allowed certain patterns to emerge.

Some of those patterns were difficult to explain. Specific correlations, sequences of events, shifts in timing or perception that exceeded what could comfortably be attributed to chance. Occasionally, interactions that occurred within the practice internal dialogues, imagined resolutions, symbolic gestures would seem to produce subtle but measurable effects in later, concrete interactions with the same individuals. This raised questions: if these are private simulations, confined to an internal space, how can they influence events that belong, ostensibly, to shared external reality?

It’s possible, of course, to invoke psychological explanations. A resolved inner conflict may change one’s posture, tone, or behavior, which in turn alters the dynamic with others. This is plausible. But in many cases, the adjustments felt disproportionate to the expected causal range. Too specific. Too coherent. And too recurrent to be comfortably dismissed as anecdotal.

Still, the Western mind not rejected, but intact continued to seek physical explanations. Perhaps all of this takes place within a perceptual enclosure. A model constructed by the brain. A personal hododek, in metaphorical terms. And if so, the question becomes: what synchronizes these enclosures? Not just in basic, physical ways, but at the level of abstract coherence, where experiences seem to line up without direct communication or causal link.

That’s when the usual metaphors begin to appear: quantum entanglement, non-local phenomena. These references are often misused, and ideally avoided. But at a certain point, the impulse becomes difficult to resist. A hundred years ago, one might have turned to electromagnetism. Today, the analogies come from quantum theory. The metaphors shift. The underlying question doesn’t.

Forms Without Subject

The idea that consciousness ends at death assumes that consciousness is generated that it is a product of matter, localized and bounded. But if mind is fundamental, if experience is the base layer of reality rather than an emergent property, then death is not the termination of a substance, but the dissolution of a structure. The self, in that view, is a configuration: a temporary dissociation within a broader field of mind.

What dissolves is not the content, but the boundary. What disappears is not experience, but the particular shape it had taken. Patterns may persist. Not as a soul, not as a person, but as a form: a set of tendencies, of resonances, capable of reintegration. In that sense, death becomes less of an annihilation and more of a return.

Some traditions suggest that through intense and disciplined inner work, certain individuals might learn to sustain coherence even as the structure dissolves. Not survival in the personal sense, but continuity of form a subtle persistence of informational integrity. Perhaps this is what lies behind accounts of wisdom without source, of insights that arrive not from within but from something that has no author. Presence without personhood.

This isn’t a matter of belief. There is no need to convince oneself that these structures persist. But the possibility itself reshapes the way death and life are held in the mind. The question is no longer what remains? but what was ever separate? And once that is asked, something begins to move.

In some cases, the shift comes gradually. In others, abruptly: a click, a moment in which the world inverts. The dancer spins in one direction, and then, without warning, in the other. And once seen, it cannot be unseen. The axis has turned.

Distance Is Representation

One of the most difficult problems in modern cosmology is not how the universe works, but what it’s working in. The image of a universe that began at a point and is now expanding raises the question: expanding into what? Into emptiness? Into a void that holds it? But if time and space are not primitives, then the question dissolves. There is no “into” if space is not a thing but a pattern.

The discomfort produced by imagining a finite universe expanding “into” nothing, or an infinite universe with no edge, begins to ease once space is understood not as a container but as a representational framework. If spatial and temporal dimensions emerge from a deeper order, one that is relational, not geometric, then what lies beyond is no longer relevant. The universe doesn’t sit on anything. It is something: an expression of structured relations rendered into perceptual terms.

This also reframes our understanding of physics. Relativity already tells us that time dilates, that space contracts, depending on velocity and mass. These are not symbolic effects; they are measurable. And if something can dilate, curve, or compress, then perhaps it is not absolute, at least not in the way we once believed. It is contingent. Which is to say, not fundamental in the classical sense.

Within this framework, even quantum entanglement becomes less perplexing. “Spooky action at a distance” loses its spookiness if there is no true distance. If two particles remain coordinated across light-years because, at the deepest level, they are not two. They are one structure appearing in separate places within a representational field.

More provocatively, perhaps space as we experience it is simply the interface through which these relations appear. Perhaps we do not live in space. Perhaps space lives in us, or rather, in the minds we currently inhabit.

And if space is a mode of appearance, then so is dimensionality. The fact that we speak of three spatial dimensions and one temporal one reflects the limitations of our perceptual apparatus, not the ultimate structure of reality. There may be more. There almost certainly are. But more dimensions don’t mean more volume. They mean more complexity, more ways for things to relate. More structure to render.

The world may not be made of things in space, but of relations giving rise to appearances, of form without substance, distance without separation, and movement without departure.

A Change in Direction

What does the spinning dancer have to do with all this?

At first glance, it’s just an illusion, a visual trick. You see her spin one way, then, with effort or luck, she turns the other way. But once you’ve seen it happen, even by accident, the mind begins to grasp something deeper: perception isn’t fixed. It never was.

The same applies here. What began as a philosophical intuition or a meditative glimpse that everything is connected, that separation is representational, eventually became something unshakable. The idea that “we are all one”, cliché as it sounds, revealed itself as not only experientially real, but also logically inescapable under a certain frame.

At some point, almost accidentally, everything turns.

The question stops being “how could space, time, and matter not be real?” and becomes “how could they possibly be real in themselves?” They appear not as foundations, but as appearances. Not as ground, but as gesture.

And after that shift, strange as it seems, the dancer begins to spin in that new direction. For a time, it feels natural, as if she had always moved that way.

But even after that change, after perception flips and a different ontology asserts itself, the old orientation sometimes returns. Like the dancer reverting to her original spin, the world reclaims its former texture. Space feels like space again. Time resumes its flow. Matter, once understood as appearance, begins to harden back into substance.

These reversals are not failures. They are reminders. What shifts is not a belief, but the way things present themselves. And just as the illusion of solidity once felt unquestionable, so too does the intuition of unity when it arrives. The difference is that now both modes are visible. The world has two faces, each revealed in its time.

Convincing oneself of either view “everything is made of particles” or “everything is made of mind” is not the same as seeing. Belief is cheap. Both frames can be rationally defended, and neither can be decisively proven. But only one emerges through experience as something that reconfigures the fabric of meaning itself.

We are not talking about persuasion but about alignment, a state in which perception, emotion, and meaning converge with such clarity that what is seen is not believed, but lived. In deep states of ego-dissolution, this alignment can become overwhelming. What is revealed feels more real than the ordinary world ever did. And yet, once the body reasserts itself, once the organism reclaims its boundaries, doubt can creep back in. The mind, with good reason, begins to wonder: was that hyper-reality merely a vivid illusion, the byproduct of deactivating certain mechanisms designed to protect us from something too vast?

But that very reasoning that the system filters reality for survival can also apply to the everyday world we take for granted. Perhaps what we call “ordinary consciousness” is not the baseline, but a safety mode. A simplification. A necessary lens for navigating a physical and social environment shaped by evolutionary pressures. The mind hides the world not out of cruelty, but out of pragmatism.

There’s no need for certainty, only coherence. What once felt like a contradiction, between a glimpse that felt more real than anything else and a world that kept pulling everything back into form, begins to dissolve when perception and reasoning stop pulling in opposite directions. That shift doesn’t produce an answer, but a kind of settlement.

The framework that emerges isn’t something adopted. It’s something that starts to make sense in light of what’s been seen. The same experiences that once felt impossible to hold now seem perfectly aligned with a view of reality that doesn’t contradict them, a view in which relation precedes object, structure precedes substance, and appearance is not deception, but expression.

In that alignment, what once felt irreconcilable finds rest. Not because one has to believe anything, but because the pieces stop resisting each other. The intuition and the argument begin to mirror one another.

And if the dancer still turns, it’s not to convince. It’s just what she does when the light shifts.