All Together Now

Why we can't do more than one thing at a time.

Photo by Kevin Luke on Unsplash

If I wanted to hear all of the tunes that I’ve archived in playlists on Spotify, I discovered that it would take me 69.8 hours without breaks. Each week that list gets bigger. I also already have way more books than I’ll ever be able to read, yet I compulsively add more to the pile all the time. For me, this phenomenon often gives rise to the weird sense that I want to do it all at once—I literally want to hear multiple songs at the same time and concurrently read a bunch of books all at once on top of it. All of this is, of course, impossible. 

As odd as this urge may seem, however, maybe there’s something to it. Working with the assumption (as I do) that physicality is just one facet of existence, and that our consciousness extends far beyond it, I’m inclined to entertain the idea that some part of me—the non-corporeal part—presently exists in a state that is unbound by the limitations of the material world. One important feature of that unbounded world is the capacity for simultaneity—for many things to occur simultaneously.

Jorge Luis Borges beautifully captured this idea in his mysterious short story “The Aleph.” As the protagonist conveys it:

The Aleph was probably two or three centimeters in diameter, but universal space was contained inside it. Each thing (the glass surface of a mirror, let us say) was infinite things, because I could clearly see it from every point in the cosmos. I saw the populous sea, saw dawn and dusk, saw the multitudes of the Americas, saw a silvery spider-web at the center of a black pyramid, saw a broken labyrinth (it was London), saw endless eyes, all very close, studying themselves in me as though in a mirror, saw all the mirrors on the planet…

This goes on for quite some time, and then he concludes:

“[I] saw the Aleph from everywhere at once, saw the Earth in the Aleph and the Aleph once more in the Earth…I had a sense of infinite veneration, infinite pity.”

Now, lest we come to think that this idea is no more than the quixotic musings of mystics and storytellers, I would argue that it’s even a facet of physicality itself. In the principle of Quantum Superposition, we are told that, unlike what we learned in high school, particles are not little balls of matter that spin around in a very tiny space. Rather, they are more akin to probabilities—a kind of cloud where all the possible states of the particle exist simultaneously. Only when a measurement is made is the cloud said to “collapse” into a particular, observable particle. Strange, but true. 

It also seems to be the case that psychedelic states and various other experiences can induce our capacity for simultaneity. It is only our own highly restricted ability to “see” properly that creates the linear, moment-by-moment sense that we all have. In this regard, our material natures are burdens—shackles that block the light of truth. As Fellini said of his psychedelic experience:

Objects and their functions no longer had any significance. All I perceived was perception itself, the hell of forms and figures devoid of human emotion and detached from the reality of my unreal environment. I was an instrument in a virtual world that constantly renewed its own meaningless image in a living world that was itself perceived outside of nature. And since the appearance of things was no longer definitive but limitless, this paradisiacal awareness freed me from the reality external to myself. The fire and the rose, as it were, became one.

It’s my belief that each of us has had an experience of this sort—even if it was only fleeting. The material world may indeed be a cage of sorts, but it’s one that if you fix your eyes just right through the bars, you can catch glimpses of the Infinite, ultimate reality. 

For more on this idea check out How Can You Be Me? By Dr Bernardo Kastrup

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Have a great week!

Adam