From: Shinzen Young
And The Math of Enlightenment!
Stacy described her experience at Chennai airport:
"I was inside every molecule, every aspect of the scene... inside the people. There was no 'me' per se— it was the all that was all. Both infinitely small and vast at the same time."
Shinzen responded:
"To me, this sounds like something called projective geometry... It's not an altered state. But your natural trait. You've come to realize, wait a minute, it's always like that down there deep."
He also quoted Rilke's poem about the Buddha:
"Center of all centers, core of cores, almond that enclosed itself to sweeten—all of this, to the furthest stars, is your fruit flesh."
In normal geometry, parallel lines never meet. In projective geometry, parallel lines meet at a "point at infinity."
The key insight: projective geometry treats the infinitely far away and the infinitely close as connected. There's a duality where "point" and "plane" can be swapped, where inside and outside become interchangeable perspectives on the same structure.
Stacy's experience—being simultaneously the infinitely small center inside everything AND the infinite vastness containing everything—isn't mystical nonsense. It maps onto a real mathematical structure.
In projective geometry, there's a precise sense in which:
...are dual to each other. Flip your perspective and one becomes the other.
He's saying enlightenment experiences aren't "altered states" (weird aberrations). They're glimpses of how reality actually is—and mathematics has independently discovered the same structure. The mystics and the mathematicians found the same thing from different directions.