Hello Tom,

It is a normal mistake to infer from my criticisms of conceptual understandings that I do not accept the facts those understandings are attempting to explain. But that is not the case. I just see things differently today, than perhaps you and others, but certainly different from an early version of myself once saw things:

To accept “spooky action at a distance” is to live in an interpretive fantasy that is broken. Einstein was right when his mind revolted at the idea.

To live closer to the truth is to accept “action at a spooky distance,” because this perspective accurately designates the feeble part of that statement — i.e., it is “distance,” which is a conceptual interpretation, that has been broken by the facts. The action of entanglement is the fact.

Personally, I’ve learned to accept facts, and see ideologies as a symptom of tightly-boxed-up minds. So I don’t accept the interpretive structure we humans today have built up for ourselves, and when facts arise, I follow the facts, rather than what “people think” about the facts — especially those that tell me what to think, or try to corral me into some ideological party line.

In my own case, I tried for the better part of three decades to integrate my meditational imperiences and insights into the understanding that “everybody knows is true,” and failed, just as Einstein failed trying to make sense of everyday experience by putting micro-scale events together. He despaired of ever finding a workable solution, until he changed his perspective and worked from everyday experience. I, finally, realized the same lesson, and I stopped trying to integrate the fruits of my meditation practice into the common understanding, and instead turned it around and tried working everyday facts into my meditational insights. My understanding today is still a creative attempt at getting closer to the truth — all understandings, and the ideologies that accrete onto them, are creative attempts at getting closer to the truth — but I no longer despair of having a cohesive and coherent understanding.

Someone might think, “Oh, he is an idiot because he has said there is no separation and now says there is no distance too, when everyone knows that they are both obviously true!”

What is obvious to me is that everything is entangled, but not always directly. Thus “things” exist in an infinitely complex tapestry of entanglement, to the point that there is only a single (platonic) time-form of each “thing” — and since everything is a form of time, not in time, the ‘unfolding’ of these entanglements — to go from ‘here’ to ‘there’ in a particular way, along a coherent plexus of entanglement, much as we advert our attention from one thing to another, “takes time” because it is an “unfolding” of our formal time.

I feel very confident in this because, not only can particles be entangled together and instantly “communicate” over astronomical “distances,” but the fact that light “travels” at the same speed — regardless of the “speed” of an observer traveling towards the light, or away. That breaks the understanding called “distance.”

So, rather than distance, I’d say we are dealing with a complexity of entanglement. Two photons that once “touched,” have a very simple and direct entanglement. You and I are in a much more complex ordering — and the universe is a plexus of entanglement of almost infinite complexity.

So, “action at a spooky distance!”

Thanks Tom, I find our interactions very useful in helping me to better express myself.