Diane Hamilton: Zen, Meditation, and Development (Archived Interview)

At the worldcentric level, nationalism loosens its grip. The reflex of sorting people into us and them starts to fade. Something is traded away in the process, though. Some of the finer qualities that come with ethnocentrism can weaken, and you sometimes notice a thinning of duty, obedience, loyalty. Still, reaching worldcentric brings a kind of room to breathe. Different values move into the foreground: equality, for one, along with a willingness to take up human rights, questions that affect women, concerns that stretch across all of humanity rather than one group.

Erik picked up on a thread Diane had mentioned in passing, about a stage of development that sits past space and time altogether. He figured plenty of listeners would be curious what that even means.

Diane answered carefully. Depending on which model you follow, only a tiny slice of the population is genuinely settled above the worldcentric level. We mostly catch hints of it by watching rare individuals. She pointed to Shreya Bindu, whose work Ken Wilber has studied closely, as offering descriptions of what these higher stages might look like.

Some of it opens up through spiritual practice and meditation, she said. The hold that space and time have on us begins to loosen. You find yourself able to picture enormous stretches of time: the universe unfolding across 13.8 billion years, and then, pushing further, no time at all, or something infinite, eternal. What does eternal time actually mean? What would it mean for space itself to collapse?

Inside that frame a single human lifespan shrinks to almost nothing. You stop reading evolution as the story of one species and start seeing it as life examining life. How did life ripen to the point where it could turn and reflect on itself? Life that photographs itself. Life that reaches out into the universe, that builds machines and points them back at the Earth to take its picture. All of that, she said, is life doing it.