Ok, hear me out! I’ve had a crazy idea. @NgXinZhao and @mikenz66 you may be interested!
In DN 23 Payasi Sutta we find a rather striking description about the nature of time. Apparently time moves differently in the realm of the gods than it does in the human realm.
The question comes up in a discussion of the correct empirical means for testing the hypothesis of rebirth. The proposal is that a dying person might be urged to return to this world and let people know that there is a world beyond. Not so fast, the objection follows. Once born in that realm, only a short time might pass, and it would be many years in the human realm, and it would already be too late to return.
You might recognize this story. It’s the plot of (spoiler alert!) The Planet of the Apes. Astronauts go off on a mission where they are flying near the speed of light. By the time they return to earth, things have … changed.
This is, of course, based on Einstein’s special theory of relativity, which posited a number of curious qualities or properties of entities as they approach the speed of light. There are three main variables:
- time slows down
- mass increases
- length shortens
Now, the experience of the gods as per the Payasi Sutta is basically the same as the results of relativistic time dilation. In fact, so far as I know, it is the earliest expression of relativistic time anywhere. And it is essentially identical to that posited in The Planet of the Apes:
- one starts out here.
- one goes to another realm (space or the heavens)
- there time moves differently relative to here.
- upon return, only a short time has passed for the travelers, whereas a long time has passed here.
So that’s interesting. I wonder if there are any hints as to the other aspects of special relativity? It turns out, there are.
In AN 3.127 we find the curious story of the god Hatthaka, who when manifesting in the human realm, isn’t able to maintain a solid form. They basically just melt away like ghee on sand. Only after the Buddha’s encouragement can they achieve solidity.
This tells us a number of things. First, in line with everything we know about the gods from a Buddhist perspective, they are conditioned and imperfect creatures not too dissimilar to us. They’re not omniscient (they require advice from the Buddha) nor omnipotent (they have to learn skills), nor, of course, eternal.
This also tells us that there is some kind of what appears to be a gravitational mismatch between the realm the gods inhabit and our realm. Hatthaka was perfectly able to maintain a normal form there, but when he came here, it all went awry. One is reminded of, perhaps, astronauts used to zero G having to return to earth.
Now, as for length, in SN 56.41 we find another curious story, this time a cautionary tale about someone who was speculating about the world. While trying to figure out how the world works by thinking, they saw something unexpected: an army of asuras (ironically perhaps, parallel to the “titans” of Greek myth) entering a lotus stalk. Understandably, they thought they’d gone mad, because such a thing doesn’t exist in the world.
It’s an odd narrative, because the moral of the story is “don’t speculate about the world or you’ll go mad”, but the Buddha says he did not, in fact, go mad. He actually saw something real. In this case, an empirical observation upended the speculator’s (apparently atheistic) theorizing. Perhaps the moral is that with excessive and ungrounded speculation you will no longer be able to tell the difference between madness and reality.
In any case, we have the rather striking revelation that the asuras are very small! Now, elsewhere we know that they are comparable in size to the devas. And at least some of the devas are said to have very large bodies. So it seems that spatial extension, as with time and mass, is relative.
I don’t know about you, but to me this seems pretty remarkable. The same physical properties that, according to the special theory of relativity, are relativistic, are in fact treated as relativistic in the Suttas. Obviously it’s not exactly the same. The Suttas lack Einstein’s mathematical precision, and the descriptions are far more vague and couched in mythological terms. Also, spatial dilation affects only length, not total size. But there is a pattern there. I think it would be churlish to over-insist on details. It’s not just random.
If we are to take these observations seriously, where might we go from here?
The Suttas propose two aspects of the material world: coarse matter, which is the kind our bodies are made of, and subtle matter, which is the kind the devas’ bodies are made of. The gods are not immaterial (with the rather exotic exception of the formless realms).
The fact that they are limited in their physical extent and capabilities is emphasized in, for example, the story of Rohitassa, the god who tried to travel to the end of the world. No matter how fast and how long he traveled, he never got there. This again would agree with a relativistic world, where a form-bound entity could travel at speeds approaching, but never exceeding, the speed of light.
But what exactly is this “subtle matter”? Well, no-one knows. But it clearly has something to do with “energy”. Perhaps it is a blanket term for more subtle aspects of the physical realm, like light and gravity. We can’t solve this yet, but the important point is that there is a material dimension to the heavenly realm, and that material dimension is subject to the laws of physics.
The gods are able to do a range of things that we cannot. They can appear and disappear, move between realms, and so on. One of their defining characteristics is light. The word deva ultimately harks back to the same root as “day”, and the gods are always said to appear with a great radiance.
So let’s indulge in some quasi-scientific theorizing here and propose that the forms of the devas are made up of a kind of energy that is similar or related to light in some way. But it has mass (albeit very little) and can maintain an organized structure. Of course, it also acts to support consciousness, but that’s getting outside our scope for now.
I’ll let our scientist friends tell me if there is, in fact, a known form of matter that qualifies!
So our divine friends have this subtle form. Now, we know that they struggle to manifest in this realm, which suggests that they normally inhabit a realm more amenable for them. Given the time dilation effect, perhaps we can speculate that their realm is normally moving at very high speeds. If their bodies were made of a form of energy that was only slightly heavier than light, they would naturally approach the speed of light. At such speeds, their physical form would appear compressed to us, and their energetic bodies would take on concrete mass.
If so, though, why aren’t they just speeding off into the galaxy? We know that, generally speaking, the divine realms are associated with a single sun and moon, i.e. a single solar system. This suggests that, like the planets, the heavenly realms are held in a kind of orbit due to the sun’s gravity.
Perhaps, then, the heavens are orbiting the sun, but due to their extreme lightness, they rotate at speeds approaching the speed of light. Their speed increases their mass, which is how they are caught by gravity. Like humans on earth, they are not absolutely trapped in those realms. They can leave, but it is hard and requires a lot of energy.
Of course, to them it would be normal, just as our realm is normal to us. But in moving from one dimension to the other, it would be a massive adjustment, hence the effects observed in the Suttas.
This suggests an answer to another question that is rarely raised: what is it that powers the heavens? It can’t just be the kamma of the gods, because, like the earth, the realms exist independent of them.
If they orbit the sun, the obvious hypothesis is that they are powered by solar energy, just like the earth. So we are getting an idea of rings or bands of energy surrounding the sun. Call them “haloes”. There are multiple haloes, corresponding to the different heavenly realms, moving further out. All the haloes are rotating at very high speeds, sufficient that relativistic effects are observed. But they are not the same: the wider the orbit of the haloes, the faster they rotate and the greater the relativistic effects, and the longer the lifespan of the gods in those realms.
These realms are energized by the sun, so the form of matter that they are comprised of cannot be completely transparent to solar energy. In the Suttas, physical contact is characterized by “impact” (paṭigha). The sun, of course, produces lots of different kinds of energy at many different wavelengths. We know that these realms are affected by gravity, and presumably by at least some other forms of energy as well.
This is rather crucial, because it means that the realms are measurable. If my theory is correct, you could measure the solar energy inside and outside the orbit of a heavenly realm, and there would be a measurable difference not accountable by mere distance and other known factors. This would provide us with a rather simple way of testing for the presence of such realms. They are material and hence affect and are affected by gravity and other forms of energy.
Of course there are many difficulties: we have no idea what kind of energy we’re looking for, or what magnitude of variation to expect, or how far from the sun they might be, or how their orbit is aligned, and so on. But that’s science for you! None of it is easy, which is why it’s fun. The point is, this is an empirical hypothesis, which is made possible because the presentation of the gods in the Suttas is empirical. It’s testable in principle. Whether it’s testable in fact is a different matter. And whether it’s true is, of course, yet another matter.
If this is not too far out for you already, let me add yet another layer of speculation. We can extend this hypothesis to cover (at least some) of the lower realms as well.
Astronomers are familiar with the idea of the “Goldilocks zone”. This is a somewhat nebulously-defined region around a star where a planet might support life. It’s not too hot or too cold, but just right. When searching other solar systems for extra-terrestrial life, the first question is whether they have an earth-like planet in the Goldilocks zone.
It stands to reason that our haloes also have a Goldilocks zone. If they are powered by the sun, they can have either too much or too little. The realms we call “heavens” would be those in the Goldilocks zone, which have a suitable amount of energy for the kind of life enjoyed there.
The “hells” would be either too close to the sun, and hence hot and burning, or else too far from the sun, and hence cold and dark. Once again, the Suttas pave the path for us, as they refer to the existence of wretched beings in the cold dark void of interstellar space.
The traditional model of the Buddhist cosmos would suggest that the Goldilocks zone is physically related to the orbit of the earth: the hot hells are inside our orbit, the heavens outside, and the cold hells further out again. Given the very different physical nature of the haloes, however, it’s probably unwise to assume that this is the case. The Goldilocks zone for haloes may well be unrelated to that for earth-like planets.
The next step is to call NASA and get them to set up the experiment.
) and bring in a different perspective; starting from where we are instead of including further unknowns in what is already a speculation. This is definitely a biased point of view based on my own research trajectory, which started off with gravitational waves (big) then quantum fields and Bose-Einstein condensates (small) and eventually settled onto the scale of tangible things, a field called soft matter physics (middle).