The Illusion of Solidity
On Continuity, Speed, and Awareness
“Stopping is the basic Buddhist practice of meditation. You stop running. You stop struggling. You allow yourself to rest, to heal, to calm”
Thich Nhat Hanh
It was the end of my fourth year of university. My Buddhism and Psychotherapy course was coming to an end, and the Professor left us with one final piece of advice.
He urged us to cherish transitional moments.
To recognize the shift from classroom to outdoors, from being his current students to alumni. These junctures, often dismissed as mundane intervals, are the vital threads woven into life’s fabric. Waiting in line, changing tasks, changing jobs, moving cities — these are the moments that we rarely have the courage and respect to look at. And this is where the real magic of life is to be found.
Are the most memorable moments not transitions? That liminal space before there and after here? The moment after a great separation or before a great arrival?
It turns out, that the great investigators of reality, the contemplatives and the scientists, have recognized a curious truth: every moment is a transition, reality is fundamentally discontinuous and our perception of continuity is a convenient fiction perpetuated by our senses.
Consider your changing height from infancy to adulthood. At one point in time, you were every height between your birth height and your current height. A similar story rings true for our age, we have passed through every age prior to our current age. However, many fundamental properties of physics do not work like this. Nature has continually shown us that if we probe sufficiently deeply, the structures we uncover are discrete and quantized, not smooth and continuous.
Reality is jumpy, compartmentalized, and segmented — but it is so interconnected that it appears like a continuous set of happenings to our senses. One of the core properties of matter, along with mass, is known as charge. It was discovered that particles can only have values of charge that are integer multiples of a base value. On a more tangible level, when observing a candle flame or a light source that appears continuously to our eyes, what we’re actually seeing is the result of rapid fluctuations in the emission of light. These fluctuations occur at a rate that is imperceptible to human vision, and this creates the illusion of a steady and continuous glow.
Biological Discontinuity
Santiago Cajal was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in 1906 for his pioneering investigations into the structure of the nervous system. Among his revelations was the identification of discrete nerve cells termed neurons within the brain. This insight contradicted the prevailing notion of that era, which posited the brain as an unbroken and continuous network termed a reticulum. Similarly, our blood, though outwardly a uniform and rich crimson fluid, is comprised of trillions of minuscule cells.
On the molecular plane, our inheritance is not confined to generalized and nebulous traits inherited from our parents. Instead, we inherit a distinct and discrete sequence of nucleotides that intricately encode the directives for our organism’s functions (our genome). Our genetic makeup is fashioned from isolated units of information, each nucleotide akin to a microcosmic command laying down the blueprint of our being.
Quantum Discontinuity
A more dramatic transition from continuous to discrete occurred in the early days of Quantum Mechanics. It was found that small objects do not obey the same common sense laws as large objects (so-called classically sized objects). For instance, one can measure both the speed and position of an object without interfering with the state of that object. I can locate the position of my coffee cup by simply looking across the room. This, naturally, does not disturb the coffee cup in any way. R. Shankar writes in his foundational textbook Principles of Quantum Mechanics that:
“One can [however] think up nonideal measurements which do change the state; imagine trying to locate a [coffee cup] in a dark room by waving a broom till one makes contact”
This would certainly change the state of the cup, however, we thankfully never have to resort to such a method of coffee acquisition (except perhaps on a frantic Monday morning).
One of the incredible aspects of Quantum Mechanics, the field of physics concerned with the mechanics (the interactions and relationships) of quantum objects (small discrete entities), is that it is impossible, even in theory, to measure a particle in a way that does not disturb its state. There is a definitive, discrete moment when a measurement is made that changes the state of a particle irreversibly. This moment has been dubbed the “collapse of the wavefunction.” As such, there is an uncessing interaction between particles and their environment such that to distinguish between the two is almost futile. Transition and discountinuity are so baked into reality that it is difficult to even point to ‘things’ once we arrive at the microscopic quantum scale. Particles are continuously intereacting and transforming into each other.
The vital point being: reality is always in transition.
All of these realizations lead us to question the appearance of reality. They nudge us to look a little more closely at our experience. Continuity, it seems, is a convenient approximation of reality that our senses facilitate.
Psychological Discontinuity
The insights of mystics align with this recognition of discontinuity, but their perspective serves to bring you peace and well-being. Knowing discontinuity conceptually is but a stepping stone to knowing it experientially.
This journey, which is laid out clearly in the Buddhist tradition, begins with a sharpening of awareness such that you develop the capacity to hold in frame a highly differentiated vision of reality. This vision of reality enables you to notice very subtle transitional states — shattering the illusion of continuity. Mahasi Sayadaw, the great Vipassana master, writes that ardent practitioners begin to discern the subtle and rapid moment of transition from intending to move your body to actually moving it.
When you note an intention to bend or stretch the arm, you may find that the movement of bending or stretching seems to be delayed for some time. This means that your awareness has become sharp and powerful.
With an incisive mind, we can stop rolling in emotions and begin to see that all mental states are in fact rapid sequences of thought patterns and feelings. Thoughts and bodily sensations are chained together so tightly and swiftly that they produce concrete emotional states.
Yet we can sever the chain at any point.
This leads, one day, to an embodied unveiling of the futility of attachment. Our best science has shown us that reality is ever changing, ever in flux, forever on the move. As such, the roots of suffering are seen plainly as the clinging to what is ephemeral. All emotions ultimately resolve themselves. All events ultimately arise to pass away. Science has shown us that on the microscopic level discontinuity is reality. Macroscopic events seem to linger a little longer, but we can always rest assured that they too will transition. As Hermes Trismegistus so eloquently writes:
“As above, so below, as within, so without, as the universe, so the soul…”
The emboiment of this statement and the path out of suffering both begin with the gradual sharpening of our faculty of awareness.
It is as it is.
Sasha
