Movement & perception
MARCH 20, 2019 (updated on February 20, 2024)
“Can a movement rooted in the universe of real ever reach the truth?” [1]
Table of contents
A few years ago, I experienced a rather unusual perception of movement. It was during a paragliding flight, an activity I was doing for the first time…
An experience between perception and reality
So far so good…
I was very apprehensive about the takeoff. I was totally focused on the idea that I was going to jump off into the void. And it’s not a small thing to say because at the time, void (vacuum) was absolutely empty for me! Still, when I took off, not only was I not thinking about the flight itself, but I was very far from thinking about landing.
To my great relief, I discovered that paragliding is not about jumping into vacuum. We run, let the wind get into the sail and take off just by letting ourselves be carried. Tranquilized by this finally very fluid departure, I started to relax and enjoy the flight. In fact, I alternated between relaxation and small frights skillfully given by a slightly teasing instructor. Two spins and a fortuitous takeover later, however, everything was going pretty well.
Nothing's going on anymore
That’s when the landing loomed. And something really, really unexpected happened. My physical descent was steady, yet I had the perception of coming down to the ground in jerks. It was as if the image I perceived of the ground was frozen and suddenly energy was released to form a different image.
There was no regularity in the timeline, so my brain experienced a gap between what it saw and what it expected to see. The images followed each other but were not linked. Intermediate images were missing. Paradoxically, I had the feeling that the ground was coming fast. Too fast. Because while my brain was trying to fill in the missing images, a new image was coming up. It was not in the continuity of the previous one, and it informed me that I was much closer to the ground than it had estimated.
This lack of consistency in my progress was very uncomfortable. I wish I’d closed my eyes to stop this weirdness. But this option was completely out of the question. Indeed, the instructor had insisted on one thing: as soon as my feet were in contact with the ground, I would have to run to accompany the landing movement. I was already having trouble assessing when this would happen with my eyes open, I couldn’t afford to close them!
I was also probably hoping that everything would be back to normal before the point of impact. But it wasn’t. So I was only able to start running when I felt the monitor running behind me. And above all tell me to do it energetically too! Finally, a few seconds after reaching land, my perceptions returned to normal.
Perception and physical interpretation
A little philosophy
In one of their dialogues, David Bohm and Jiddu Krishnamurti set out the basis of the relationship between the linear movement we perceive and take for reality, and the real movement, which is at the origin of linear movement.
Krishnamurti : “(…) Nothingness has (…) its own movement, in the form of an energy – still to be defined – which can then act within reality (…) The movement we know is time – the distance between here and there and so forth. (…) There is a nothingness whose movement is neither the movement of thought nor the movement of time.
David Bohm : There’s a theory that this movement you’re talking about – the “timeless” movement – exists. It is not inscribed in time, but it is in time that it manifests itself, that it reveals itself.
Krishnamurti : We say the same thing but differently (…)” [2]
A stubborn illusion
Nassim Haramein has a very similar point of view. For him, uniform rectilinear motion – dear to inertial reference frames and therefore to isolated systems – simply corresponds to our perception of movement at our scale of reality. But nothing moves that way. The real movement takes place towards the subatomic scale, which is why we do not experience it directly. More precisely, this movement is that of the feedback loop, of the continuous feedback at work between vacuum and matter.
It could be described as the fact that on a quantum scale light appears, disappears, appears, disappears… all the time. And each time, it reappears at a very close but nevertheless different location from the previous one, giving the impression, on our scale, that it has a uniform rectilinear movement as well as physical attributes such as a measurable speed. What actually happens is that matter is constantly being made and undone at the speed of light.
Therefore, the perception of this underlying movement escapes to us. And not only do we not perceive this movement, but we perceive instead a continuous movement. When we move our hand from point A to point B, for example, the movement then formed and “anchored in the universe of real” is not the real movement at work. Rather, our hand appears and disappears in a dynamic of expansion / contraction.
Real-life cinema
Cinema provides a good analogy for this process. Successive and slightly different images are printed and interspersed with “voids” on silver film. When the film is projected at the right speed for us – 24 frames per second in the cinema – it creates the illusion of continuous movement. This illusion of movement results from the so-called phi effect, which, combined with retinal persistence, allows the brain to automatically and coherently link two successive still images.
My experience in paragliding has somehow given me a glimpse of the movement underlying the one we perceive at our scale and which gives us the illusion of continuity in form.
The illusion of measurement
“Any measurement is an illusion.”
DAVID BOHM [3]
With illusory movement, illusory measurement. For example, when we calculate the speed of our hand moving from point A to point B, we implicitly consider that this movement is linear, and that it is related only to us. But if we consider, like Nassim Haramein, that reality is quite different and that everything is connected in the universe, we can no longer calculate the speed of this movement in the way we usually do. To the speed of movement between A and B, we must now add the speed of rotation of the Earth on its axis, plus the speed of rotation of the Earth around the sun, plus the speed of rotation of the galaxy etc.
In other words, not only is there no longer any uniform rectilinear movement, but the measurement made is no longer meaningful. Certainly, this measurement corresponds to the movement we perceive, and in this respect it is valid and useful in our frame of reference because the speeds are very far from that of light. However, if we are not aware that this framework needs to be broadened in order to have a more accurate view of things, we are missing an essential reality, namely the true nature of movement and the illusion of measurement.
Taking the measurement of consciousness
In a rather unexpected way, the problematic linked to the physical measurement brings us back directly to the questioning linked to the reality of consciousness. The point of view of the Dutch cardiologist Pim Von Lommel is enlightening on this subject:
“(…) Today science is limited only to what is visible and everything you can’t measure doesn’t exist. Then the problem of consciousness arises because consciousness cannot be measured. It is not possible to prove the contents of consciousness. Science must take into account the subjective criteria of the human being and not only the objective criteria. Transformation is the objective aspect of a subjective experience [for example: the change that takes place in patients who have experienced an NDE, who generally no longer fear death] (…) There is no measurement of consciousness for materialistic science, there is only matter, so for these scientists consciousness is an illusion.”
For these scientists, consciousness is an illusion, and measurement a reality. For Nassim Haramein, consciousness is a reality – it generates matter – and measurement depends on the frame of reference considered.
Stop infinity?
Finally, the problem of measurement leads us straight to that of infinity. The fact that our equations predict infinity, in the infinitely small as well as in the infinitely large, indeed raises a new question: to what extent can a measurement make sense in an infinite universe? As we shall see, for many physicists, this question does not arise precisely to the extent that they seek to stop infinity. In quantum physics in particular, they use, as we will see in the next article, a process of renormalization to make their calculations possible… and to legitimize the reality of their measurements.
Key points
- Any uniform rectilinear movement is an illusion created by our perception.
- The only movement that takes place is between vacuum and matter, through feedback loops.
Notes & references
[1] KRISHNAMURTI Jiddu and BOHM David, Les limites de la pensée, Paris : Le livre de poche, 2006, p.83, free translation
[2] Ibid., p.118
[3] BOHM David, Ibid., p.209
[4] VAN LOMMEL Pim. (August 2011). [Video]. Expérience de conscience et NDE- Dr Pim Van Lommel 6/9, free translation
[5] To explore the theme of consciousness further, see Mental & consciousness and Brain, consciousness & NDE.
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