Culture December 4, 2023

A FRIEND OF MINE—the Canadian scholar of Buddhism David Drewes—once observed that we exist at different levels of magnification. Every moment of existence is susceptible to practically infinite expansion—or to shrinking almost to nothingness. We mostly speak and think at a conventional degree of magnification where experience appears to fit into conveniently labeled boxes—“tired,” “successful,” “female,” etc. But around the time that science was discovering the mysteries of cosmic scale—the fact that surfaces, for example, exist at some levels of magnification, but not at others—writers began to explore different scales of experience. Two basic methods emerged, which are still with