Quantum Entanglement and Why We Need More Meditation Gardens
A scientific look at the altruistic nature of mindfulness
Recently I became fascinated with deep physics.
Not in any real academic sense but more as a leisurely activity that stimulates the imagination, like relaxing into a riveting fantasy novel. Except, in addition to opening up space in my mind, letting it wander into a new realm, it reveals capital T truths about reality.
Like how a brief foray into quantum entanglement made me realize the world needs more meditation gardens.
I’ll preface this by saying I don’t know much about physics. I have no interest in really learning the field. I don’t care to use Newton’s laws to solve equations, quantifying energy efficiencies or computing projectile trajectories.
However, I’ve become captivated by the more abstract side–the parts that go beyond mere operational mechanics, becoming more philosophical in nature as they call into question the most basic fundamental realities of this world.
It’s become a hot yoga class for my brain; stretching out my intellectual faculties, working up a mental sweat as I contemplate the essence of existence itself.
It all started with a Tim Ferriss podcast with Donald Hoffman, a world-leading physicist who posits reality as we know it is just a convenient interface we’ve adapted and not the unassailable, objective reality of the universe. As someone who’s spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about what’s real vs. the stories we tell ourselves, this opened my eyes to how cold hard science can confirm my very unscientific felt experience.
During their conversation, they mention this idea of quantum entanglement, a truly mind-bending concept that makes you think twice about all you’ve believed to be possible.
The idea is that you can have two particles, inextricably linked such that the state of one instantly affects the other, regardless of the physical distance apart. It could be a room or a galaxy away. It doesn’t matter.
Einstein called this “spooky action at a distance” and a recent experiment in the Canary Islands used light from stars 8 billion light years away to create the necessary preconditions of randomness to essentially confirm this theory.
This implies that any action can have an instant causal relation to anywhere else in the universe. Like rolling two dice that always land on the same number, two random processes that should be uncorrelated act in unison irrespective of physical location in the universe.
So yes, magic is real.
Which brings me to Encinitas California. A brief stop on a road trip at the Self Realization Fellowship Center and former home of Yogananda, the author of one of my favorite books, Autobiography of a Yogi.1
The center is nestled up on a cliff overlooking the expansive Pacific in a sanctuary of supreme serenity. A real-life garden of Eden. Every flower, fern, or succulent along the path felt imbued with intention, meticulously placed there to invite an acute awareness of the timeless now.
My natural instinct was to take a picture, capturing this pristine moment. But that would mean diverting my gaze from these exquisite plants, many of which look like they were dropped off from a Jurassic Park set2, while also requiring me to take out my phone–an unwanted intruder in such a place, like inviting a boisterous drunk uncle to a poetry reading.
Eventually, I found myself caught in the gravitational pull of a stone bench that felt like an appendage of the wise, stoic, ficus tree it’s tucked under. Sitting down, my body and mind were brought to a full stop, making my inner world reminiscent of the outer as I dropped into the garden of my mind.
I’ve spent hundreds of hours in meditation. One would think they’d start to blend together but the more you train perceptual awareness, the more each sit becomes its own short film with a plot and cast of characters consisting of the emotional texture and thought patterns that arise. And today, this movie could have made it to Sundance.
A seemingly clairvoyant lucidity washed over me as I became hyper-present. The voice of the inner roommate normally looking on experience itself, casting judgment, projecting thoughts, dissipated. I was simply experiencing. Not as an outsider, moving through a separate environment, but rather as one watches a play, viewing the entire performance as a single cohesive happening.
When I returned to my body, I could feel my cheek muscles activated in a soft but sturdy smirk, my face frozen in a more joyous, cheerful state. Altogether lighter than when I’d first arrived.
I expected the post-meditation glow to subside but it persisted. And it wasn’t just me. I walked into the gift store after and was welcomed with an uncharacteristically warm greeting from a stranger like they had been expecting a long-lost friend. It went beyond mere hospitality, the authenticity feeling like a verbal embrace transcending the typical customer façade. Each question she asked me, a genuine interest in learning a small piece about my truest self, inviting easy, carefree responses, and a desire to know more about this woman helping me out as I meandered aimlessly picking up small statues and trinkets in her store.
At first, I thought I’d just found a particularly kind human, not all too unsurprising for a Self Realization Fellowship bookstore. But the rest of the day, I sensed a difference in the demeanor of everyone I interacted with.
There was deeper eye contact from strangers on the sidewalk, accompanied by a smile as if to say I see you and acknowledge your existence. The gas station attendants seemed thrilled to facilitate the purchase of water to quench my thirst. The friends I went to dinner with were exceptionally excited about life, giddy to share life updates and prospects for the future. I swear even the dogs I passed had a more jolly wag to their tail and keenness for pets.
Everything I interacted with seemed to be vibrating on a higher frequency.
It was as if my meditation had a ripple effect on everyone in my immediate surroundings, altering their brain chemistry, giving them a dose of natural MDMA, eliciting a more joyous, connected state.
But that couldn’t be true, right? There’s no viable explanation for how me sitting on a bench could possibly affect anyone not even in my general vicinity. I tried rationalizing it, and I guess you could make the argument that people respond more positively to positive people so if I’m smiling, they’re more likely to smile.
Yet this felt wholly unsatisfactory. There was something deeper going on.
And then I remembered that we took photons from 8 billion light years away to unequivocally randomize an experiment showing how two particles can be connected, instantaneously changing the state of the other even if they’re separated from galaxies apart, so who am I to say there can’t be a seemingly impossible connection between humans on the same planet based on the very real experiments in the laboratory of my lived experience.
This may feel like a far-out-there, woo woo idea, ungrounded in any scientific backing. But the truth is we still know so little about the physical world. It’s natural for humans to firmly believe we’re at the peak of scientific breakthroughs, having discovered all there is to know, rejecting ideas that go against our previously conceived notions. That’s why Galileo was prosecuted as a heretic for suggesting the planets revolved around the sun, Alfred Wegener was ridiculed for thinking the continents were once a unified land mass, and Gregor Mendel’s discovery of genetic inheritance was ignored until decades after his death.
I like to think the same could be true of this idea of human entanglement and that one day in the future we’ll think of ourselves as heathens for not knowing the infallible truth that our energetic state has a measurable impact on the world around us.
Since that afternoon in Encinitas, my conviction in this idea has only strengthened. On days when I feel down on myself, beholden to lower-level emotions, those around me seem to reciprocate. Juxtapose that next to days when I tap into that post-meditation garden state and all of a sudden it’s like I stepped through the closet into Narnia where everyone means well and while life’s still no Utopia with rainbows and sunshine and good vibes where nothing bad ever happens, there’s a persistent intention by people to play their part in getting us marginally closer.
And so the world needs more meditation gardens. I don’t just mean cute parks with pretty flowers to sit and watch your thoughts but the idea it represents–deliberate space to come in, leave your worries aside, connect to the present, and uplift your state. Maybe this is more gardens. Maybe it’s bringing mindfulness to schools. Maybe we train our parrots to intermittently chirp “Here and Now” like the birds on Huxley’s Island.
The point being that work on ourselves isn’t just for us. There’s an altruistic component to putting in the time and effort to approach the world more mindfully, cultivating compassion for our inner world, finding our proverbial meditation garden in whatever form that takes, that creates multiplicative effects that doesn’t just change our state but positively influences those around us, promoting a network of serenity that transcends physical boundaries, raising the collective consciousness of this world
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