It is interesting how the dimension of space is related to the expression ‘curiouser and curiouser’. The word ‘curiouser’ does not belong to standard English. Some established dictionaries don’t regard ‘curiouser’ as a word by itself and accept it only in the phrase ‘curiouser and curiouser’.
The phrase was first used by lewis Carroll in Alice in Wonderland in 1865. Here’s the quote featuring the phrase from Carroll’s book: ‘’’Curiouser and curiouserr!’ cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English); ‘now I’m opening out like the largest telescope that ever was! Good-bye, feet!’ (for when she looked down at her feet, they seemed to be almost out of sight, they were getting so far off).”
So the word ‘curiouser’ joined English when exclamation had to be expressed at space — mentioned in terms of the length of Alice’s feet in her own perception - being a variable and not a constant. Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity lending the status of a variable to space came much later in 1905. How do the perceptions of Alice and Einstein about space variability compareIJ I will attempt to show here just how.
Two experimentally verified fallouts of Einstein’s special relativity theory are length contraction and time dilation. I will very simply put across length contraction here through an example. In length contraction, if a 100 m long object travels at 99 per cent of the speed of light in space, it will appear about 14 m long to a person seeing it from earth. The object obviously would not actually contract in length, it will just appear to have contracted. It is an issue of perception. And that perception will look real from earth.
I don’t know the stand of the scientific community on this, but I propose that the reverse holds too. And the reverse of length contraction is that a 14 m long object on earth will appear, and appear is a key word here, to be about 100 m long to a person traveling in space at 99 per cent of the speed of light. Again it will be a matter of pure perception. The object will not expand in length, it will only appear to have expanded.
I come back to Alice. I believe she was having an out-of-body experience when her feet appeared to be getting far off. Actually lewis Carroll might have had that experience and his creation Alice became the vehicle for its expression. Indeed, Carroll suffered from migraine which is one of the causes of the Alice-in-Wonderland syndrome (AIWS), a neurological disorder named after Carroll’s novel because sufferers have experiences similar to the one that made Alice exclaim “curiouser and curiouser”.
I too had such experiences in my childhood in very high fever, with objects close by seeming to get very far away. The reverse can also happen in this disorder, with things appearing to get much closer than they actually are. So where does Einstein come in all thisIJ We will come to it shortly.
let me put forward a hypothesis, just my perception of what the case could be. In many streams of spirituality, consciousness is said to operate at various levels of existence. One is the physical body, where we have sensory perceptions. Beyond this, yoga talks in terms of the subtle body which has the prana or life force, mind and intellect, apart from other constituents. In yoga there is also a causal body made of the ego arising from ignorance about the true nature of things.
In Buddhism and Hinduism, a person while being in his physical body can rise to the level of devas or divine spirits. These spirits are said to have bodies made of light, just like the physical body is made of gross matter and the subtle and causal bodies are made of the energies of thoughts and emotions.
In parapsychology and some spiritual traditions, it is the energies of thoughts and emotions that envelop the physical body with aura which some people say they can see just like the physical body is commonly seen.
And a section medical science says this vision of aura is just a hallucination happening due to migraine, epilepsy or other causes. It is rather unfortunate that medical science dismisses various kinds of unusual perceptions as hallucinations.
If it probes deeper, it might find some basis for them that cannot just be termed pure imagination. And if we have to stick to imagination, then the length contraction we have seen above arising from Einstein’s special relativity is also mere imagination, a matter of perception. Medical science will sure not treat it as hallucination.
But let us get back to the different kinds of bodies spirituality says a person has. Different levels of consciousness accompany these bodies. The consciousness or world-view that works at the commonly understood human level of the physical subtle and causal bodies would be very different from the consciousness operating at the level of divine bodies made of light.
Indian, Tibetan, Chinese and Mongolian spiritual texts refer to the body of light and talk about ways to actualise it. These references predate the first century Gnostic accounts of the body of light. In many spiritual disciplines it is said that a person can access different levels of his existence corresponding to different bodies and planes of consciousness.
If this accessing happens in a regulated manner that is understood by the person experiencing it, then there is no disorder. But at times, in freak cases, this accessing may happen involuntarily with neither the person undergoing the experiences nor the people around him having any understanding of the phenomenon. This can disorient the person having the experiences and they may remain only a disturbing disorder for him due to lack of correct understanding and monitoring of the situation. But Einstein has still not come in the picture. Here he does.
I propose that if a person voluntarily or involuntarily takes a quantum jump from the so-called normal states of consciousness associated with his physical body, mind and emotions to a state where his consciousness is in the zone of his body of light, he would actually be in a body travelling close to or equal to the speed of light.
The length expansion I postulated above will operate now. The perception actualized in his body of light will work through his physical eyesight and it will appear to him that things just a little distance away, like his feet from his eyes, are quite far off.
It would be interesting to note here a thought experiment Einstein conducted when he was all of 16. He imagined pursuing light at the speed of light. He says in his Autobiographical Notes that “the germ of the special relativity theory is already contained” in this little experiment.
For all practical purposes then, Einstein’s awareness or consciousness was in a body of light during his thought experiment. That’s a consciousness very unusual from the ordinary one associated with the body of physical matter. Alice, too, was in an extraordinary plane of consciousness when she cried “curiouser and curiouser”. There is a big difference though between the experiences of Einstein and Alice. Alice’s journey was involuntary. Einstein’s trip was voluntary.
More about all this later.
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