Nowhere in particular

The infinitude of space and time, in pictures, with the fear of missing out as the worked example.

Richard, the founder of actualism, has a recorded conversation called Infinitude Is The Boundlessness Of Space And Time. In it he makes a simple claim with large consequences. The universe has no edge. A thing with no edge has no centre. So nobody is near the middle of things, and nobody is out on the margin.

This page walks through that claim with drawings. It does the same for time. Then it applies both to one ordinary feeling: the sense that life is happening somewhere else, that time is running out, and that you are missing it.

1. A room tells you where you are

Richard starts with the couch he is sitting on.

I am sitting here, on this couch. I can locate this body, locally, in reference to these walls; I am one metre from this one and three metres from that one and so on. The boundaries of this room give me a location, a position, a place in space.

2. Take the walls away

The physical infinity of the universe has no boundaries, so we are not ‘somewhere’ in relation to some edge. There is no edges to the universe, so there is no place ‘inside’ of ‘something’ – like this room – to be.

This is the sentence the page is named after:

I do not locate myself anywhere in relation to the universe, because there is nowhere in particular to be. When one realise that being here is to be nowhere in particular, then here is anywhere at all ... this is what infinite and eternal means.

3. No edge means no centre

A centre is found by measuring in from the edges. A circle has a centre because it has a rim. Remove the rim and the word “centre” has nothing to point at.

4. The same is true of time

Time has no beginning and no end. So it has no middle either. We place ourselves in time by yesterday and tomorrow, the same way we place ourselves in a room by its walls.

Just as there is no centre to the infinity of space, there is no middle in time. We locate ourselves in time, locally, in reference to yesterday and tomorrow. With infinitude, there are no reference points at all ... either in space or in time.

Richard treats the two as one understanding.

Understanding the infinity of space helps the understanding of the eternity of time.

And when the questioner says he finds time the easier of the two, Richard is content to start there: “For it amounts to the same thing: if you understand one then the other falls into place.”

Elsewhere he says how time is to be approached.

One of the main keys to success is a focus on time itself as a sensate experience. My oft-repeated refrain is this: ‘The first step to being free is the actual understanding that this moment in time is the only place where being alive happens. The past, although it was actual when it did happen, is not actual now. The future, although it will be actual when it does happen, is not actual now. Only now is actual ...’

“Sensate” is the word to notice. He means something done with the senses. It is what the eyes, ears and skin are taking in at this moment. It is a different thing from an idea about time, and no amount of thinking about time will stand in for it.

5. So who draws the map?

If the universe has no centre and no edge, the feeling of being at the centre, or at the edge, has to come from somewhere. Richard says where.

It is conceptual thinking predicated upon there being a boundary, a limit to space and time. ‘I’, being a centre, create those boundaries, those limits.

He writes ‘I’ in quote marks on purpose. He means the sense of being somebody, the felt identity, as distinct from the body sitting on the couch. The body has a local position in a room. The identity draws a map of the whole world and puts itself on it.

6. The worked example: fear of missing out

Here is an ordinary case. Someone is at home doing something they enjoy. The afternoon is going well. Then a pull arrives: I should be out. Things are happening and I am not there. The thing they were enjoying goes flat. Being alone starts to feel like wasting time.

The feeling has two halves. One is about place: life is happening somewhere else. The other is about time: I am wasting it, and it is running out.

Take the first half. It needs a place where life is really happening. It needs that place to be somewhere else. And it needs a line between the two. That is a map with a centre and an edge.

Richard describes this exact picture when a questioner compares a person to a fingertip on a body. He turns the comparison down, and in doing so says what it feels like to stand on the margin hoping to be let in.

That god – ‘my’ brain – is the centre of the universe, and ‘I’ – as the finger – am on the periphery getting a look-in ... if ‘I’ am so graced.

“Getting a look-in” is the important phrase. A look-in is a chance to take part. The person on the margin wants a share in what the middle has. For one person that means being included. For another it means having what the others are having. For another it means being noticed. Whatever form it takes, getting it does not settle the matter, because the map is still there afterwards, with the middle still somewhere else.

Now remove the rim, as in Figure 2. The clock goes the same way, as in Figure 4.

Richard’s reply to the fingertip comparison:

I am the universe experiencing itself. I am not some small – therefore insignificant – part of the greater, the whole.

7. The fear underneath

Under the fear of missing out there is usually a plainer fear: that the world goes on perfectly well without you. That you are not needed.

Richard met that fear himself, and says so in the same conversation. He is talking about the future there, but it is the same worry.

Years ago, when I first experienced the non-being of a future, my stomach gulped in apprehension of non-existence.

What will become of ‘me’? ‘I’ am important – in that ‘I’ am needed – in order to steer this body along the correct path ... or so ‘I’ think and feel.

Elsewhere he tells how it turned out. In 1981 he was washing dishes, not wanting to, while the sun through the window was “beckoning me, enticing me to hurry-up and get the uninteresting and unlikeable job over and done with so that I could scamper outside.” That is the fear of missing out, at a kitchen sink.

What happened next was sudden, and it was not a decision. Nothing about the chore changed. His experience of it did.

... all-of-a-sudden, whilst standing there with my hands in the sink being anywhere but here, at anytime but now, it was a delight and a joy to be doing exactly what it was I was already doing anyway ... standing in the golden sunlight with hands immersed in delicious, tingling-to-the-touch, hot soapy water.

I find myself looking at what the hands are feeling (the hot soapy water) and become aware I have never seen hot soapy water before – have never really seen hot soapy water before – and become fascinated with the actuality of what is happening: it is as if the hands know what to do without any input from me ...

Notice his phrase for where he had been: “anywhere but here, at anytime but now.” It names both halves of the fear, place and time, in one breath. Both ended together.

The place he had wanted to escape from had become the place to be. The pull to be outside was gone, because there was no longer anywhere better to go. And then came the discovery this page is about.

I am not required at all; I am a supernumerary; I am redundant; I can retire, fold in my hand, pack in the game, depart, disappear, dissolve, disintegrate, vamoose, vanish, die – whatever – and life would manage quite well, thank you, without me ... a whole lot better, in fact, as I am holding up the works from functioning smoothly.

‘I’ was not needed ... ‘my’ services were no longer required.

Richard later counted this among the everyday experiences that led him to devise the actualism method. His word for what happens in such a moment is apperception.

The Oxford dictionary defines apperception as being ‘the mind’s perception of itself’. It is where ‘I’, the self, cease to function as a perceiver and perception happens of itself. This is known as a ‘pure consciousness experience’ (or PCE for short) and is remarkably obvious during a peak experience.

The fear is right about the fact. The world does go on without ‘me’. The dishes get washed. The day carries on. The fear is wrong about what the fact means. It reads being unneeded as a loss. Richard found it was a relief, and what he found on the far side of it he puts in eight words.

Ultimately nothing can go wrong – and this is where security lies.

8. Two ways to get this wrong

Holding it as an idea. Richard is blunt about the limits here: “I fail to see how anyone can grasp all this as a concept.” He does not say to stop contemplating it. He says where the contemplation stops working, and what it is still good for.

To contemplate being here in space and now in time as being everywhere all at once is where conceptual thinking breaks down. But it is useful inasmuch as one can disabuse oneself of the notion that there is a centre. Then, when the centre is seen for what it is – an illusion or a delusion – it vanishes. Then one understands infinity and eternity ... the infinitude of time and space.

So the contemplation has one use. It can show you that there is no centre. The understanding he speaks of comes after the centre has vanished, and it is not reached by more thinking.

Feeling vast. The questioner reports having felt an ever-expanding vastness. Richard’s answer: “That is the centre in operation.” A self that swells to fill everything is still a centre. What he describes is the opposite of swelling.

Whereas the experience of the infinitude of space and time is of an utter stillness. There is no movement.

9. How to use it

The questioner in the dialogue finds his own method. He repeats one short sentence to himself: “There is no outside.” Richard tells him where that leads.

If you do keep that going – as a mantra-type phrase – constantly realising that there is no edges, no boundaries, no ‘outside’, you will come to realise there is no middle, no centre.

Applied to the fear of missing out, it comes down to three plain questions, asked when the pull arrives.

None of this is a rule about staying in. Going out is always allowed. The point is only to know what the going is for.

And if the questions do not help, there is what happened to Richard at the sink. He found himself looking at the hot soapy water as if he had never seen it before, and being here turned out to be a delight.

1. The pull arrives: life is elsewhere, and time is running out.
2. The pull needs a map with a centre and an edge, and a clock with a start and a finish.
3. The universe has no edge, so it has no centre. It has no beginning or end, so it has no middle.
4. The map and the clock were drawn by the sense of being somebody.
5. Without them, there is only here and now, and it is still.

10. Being here now

Everything on this page is a device. The drawings, the three questions, the sentence to repeat. They are useful for one thing, which is getting to what they point at. Richard is plain about the difference.

Being here now is to put your money where your mouth is, as it were. All other actions are methods, devices, techniques ... which are, in effect, delaying tactics.

What it is like, in his words:

This moment has never happened before and never will happen again ... thus life is always ever-fresh, novel, original, unique, peerless, matchless and impeccable.

That sentence was his answer to a question, and the question is the one this page began with. Someone asked him: “So, your experience is always fresh and no boredom or fear is possible.” He replied:

No boredom or fear whatsoever.