The Zero Point

Black holes, quantum tunnelling, and finding your soul

General relativity is the most precisely-tested theory of gravity and large-scale phenomena we have. Quantum mechanics works at the very small scale. Loop quantum gravity is one attempt to find a framework that encompasses both. None of them has found a soul, and I'm not claiming they have. But when we follow either road far enough, outward through material knowledge, or inward through contemplative practice, we arrive somewhere that's described in similar ways...

How I started to find my soul

I was 18, an atheist, and a keen student of science. I'd read the bestseller The Tao of Physics – An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism and was hungry for meditation experience. I met a man who seemed to have a glow about him. His name was Lee James. I said to him, "You must have contact with other worlds to be like you are." He replied that he was a 'Raj Yogi', and explained that the foundation of his meditation style was contemplating the inner self as an infinitely tiny point of spiritual light above and behind the eyes. I was at work at the time, so we didn't talk long on that occasion. He gave me his phone number.

A week or two later, unable to sleep, I tried unsuccessfully to phone Lee at 2am. I decided to attempt reaching him through a meditation experiment. At that stage, my only experience of meditation had been progressive muscle relaxation exercises in my drama classes. So that's what I did, lying on my back on my lounge-room floor. I then focused on the point of light above and behind my eyes. I instantly found myself flying outside my body, to where Lee was. I floated above him. He was asleep, on his back, with his glasses on. I thought it was odd that he was wearing his glasses. With my mind, I reached down and picked up his pinpoint of light. Then we were two tiny stars flying. We could feel each other's thoughts. I was so happy to be 'soul travelling', and he was happy for me. I said to him, "Where are we?" He replied, "We're everywhere, but nowhere." Instantly, we were two stars in a black void. I became very frightened, and immediately returned to my body.

I lay there for a minute, wondering if it was just a dream. Two things convinced me it was more: 1) My eyes were wide open, like a baby's. I felt myself to be a soul looking out of windows called eyes. 2) I got a drink from the fridge, and had the profound experience of moving my body as if I was a crane operator, holding the milk jug with an instrument called a hand. I went to bed and slept.

When I woke up, I rang Lee. I said to him, "What happened last night?" He said, "I don't know." I told him about my out-of-body experience. (I didn't mention that I'd seen him sleeping with his glasses on.) I asked him if any of it made sense to him. He told me that he almost never wakes up in the middle of the night, but that the previous night he had. He said he'd started to read a book of spiritual classes and that he'd fallen asleep, wearing his glasses.

Since then, understanding and experiencing this tiny spark of consciousness has been a fundamental part of my existence. I see it as a gateway to a life of wisdom, meaning and happiness.

The point where the map runs out

At the centre of a black hole, Einstein's theory of general relativity predicts a singularity: a point of zero volume and infinite density where the laws of physics break down. The maths works flawlessly all the way down to that point, then produces an answer, infinite density, that's not physically comprehensible. This is where the general-relativity map runs out.

And there's a floor beneath which it's impossible for science's instruments to explore. To observe at the sub-atomic level, physicists fire particles at their object, and measure how they bounce off. The tinier the object, the higher the frequency needed for the probing particles – requiring extremely high energy. The floor is the Planck length, and it is unimaginably small: twenty powers of ten below the nucleus of an atom. To see anything smaller, you would need to concentrate so much energy into so little space that it would collapse into a tiny black hole - swallowing the rebounding particles that would normally enable physical observation.

What are the parallels between this, and the point featured in my experience at the start of this piece? A dimensionless point can never be found by a physical probe. Not because we lack the technology. Because looking outward, at matter with sub-Planck-length dimensions, is looking in the wrong direction. There is one other way of looking, and meditation is its laboratory:

Awareness turned back toward the one who is aware.

The passage through

Ever since Einstein's equations were first solved, the singularity at the centre of a black hole has been a dead end. Recently physicists started asking what light quantum mechanics could shed on it. Carlo Rovelli and his colleagues, working in loop quantum gravity, propose that a black hole does not end at its centre but passes through it, emerging as a white hole: the black hole's mirror twin, which nothing can enter and everything pours out of. Matter falls in, crosses the threshold, and continues forward in time. Nothing is destroyed. Nothing is rewound. Everything passes through.

The classical picture of a black hole joined to a white hole. In recent quantum gravity proposals the two are the same object at different times, rather than joined in space.

The mechanism proposed is quantum tunnelling, the same principle that lets protons in the sun's core fuse when classical physics says they can't. (The positively-charged particles repel each other, and classically the protons have nowhere near enough energy to overcome that repulsion.)

The movement from black hole to white hole is still theory, not observation. But take a moment to imagine this, and how it might link to finding your soul:

Descent to a point.

Passage through a place that's invisible to physical observation.

Emergence.

Zero

The concept of zero was first treated as a number, with rules for calculating with it, by Brahmagupta in 628 CE. It took the older, metaphysical word shunya, emptiness. It was written with a dot, the shunya-bindu, the emptiness point. Bindu is the same word the yogic traditions use for the dimensionless point through which creation emerges and returns. (Only later did the dot open out into the oval we write today.) In the twelfth century the mathematician Bhaskara II examined division by zero, found an unchanging infinity, and wrote that it reminded him of God the Sustainer at the creation and dissolution of worlds.

"We're everywhere, but nowhere."

For those of us that don't have particle accelerators and who have only a foggy memory of high-school calculus, meditation can take us to our own Zero Point. I invite you to find a quiet place where you won't be distracted. Take a moment to just breathe and to turn your awareness towards itself. Imagine the one who's imagining to be a tiny spark of conscious light. Contemplate the following:

At the centre of a black hole, the vast mass of a collapsed sun concentrated into no space. Everything, and nowhere.

In quantum tunnelling, a particle arrives on the far side of a barrier it shouldn't breach. It was here, then it was there, and the crossing itself has no story.

And the emptiness-point that the Eastern mystics named became the number at the meeting point of negative and positive.

If you'd like to continue the journey, please visit my SoundCloud for a range of original meditation audio tracks.