Reflections on the Nature of Nature and Where We Fit In
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ORTHOGONAL ROTATION IN CONSCIOUSNESS
Reflections on the Nature of Nature and Where We Fit In Jon Kabat-Zinn 1
# Jon Kabat-Zinn 2020
When I was twelve, a small group of boys whose families spent summers in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, because their parents had ties to the laboratories there, used to hang out in what was in those days the coolest place in town, the MBL (Marine Biological Laboratories) Club; that is, when we weren’t tooling around on our bikes or at the beach or going home for lunch. In between Ping-Pong games and the like, in rooms decorated with colored glass globes, starfish, and big crab shells hanging suspended beneath the ceiling in fishing nets, in cozy alcoves lined with musty books and built-in cushioned love seats and chess sets scattered about, I remember long conversations about big topics. Jaskin’s Drug Store stocked a whole rotating rack of Mentor paperbacks for fifty cents each, with titles such as One, Two, Three . . . Infinity and The Birth and Death of the Sun by George Gamow, and Frontiers of Astronomy by Fred Hoyle. We bought them up and read them voraciously and were enthralled. We would sit around drinking Cokes from green bottles we got from the big red machine in the basement of the MBL, where you had to pull the large handle around to the right after putting in your nickel to make the bottle drop down, reading out loud to each other and debating the big bang and the steady state theories, the nature of the universe and consciousness, and what it all meant for our lives. I still have my copy of One, Two, Three . . . Infinity. It has that old paperback smell, its pages yellowed and brittle, its spine broken. Fast-forward (we all know that image, although it would not have made any sense in 1956) to now. In a lovely book that is the modern counterpart to those we used to read as kids, called The Elegant Universe, by the theoretical physicist Brian Excerpted from Mindfulness for All: The Wisdom to Transform the World by Jon Kabat-Zinn. Copyright © 2019 Jon Kabat-Zinn. Published by Hachette Books. All Rights Reserved. * Jon Kabat-Zinn [email protected] 1
Center for Mindfulness, University of Massachusetts Medical School, 55 Lake Avenue North, Worcester, MA 02421, USA
Greene, we are informed that the constraints imposed by superstring theory require the universe to be eleven-dimensional. This may be a little hard for some of us to absorb, given that we have barely come to terms with Einstein’s insight that the universe consists of four dimensions, the fourth being time. Nevertheless, physicists now believe (if this is the right term ever when speaking of physicists) or are giving serious consideration to the possibility that the universe that came into being with the big bang out of “nothing” in one infinitely short, unthinkably brief moment that defined the beginning of time some 13.8 billion years ago (stranger than any ancient creation myth, Babylonian or otherwise), is an elevendimensional universe. Apparently seven of the original eleven dimensions failed to “unf
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