Maarten Vergucht

During a migraine aura, patients experience sparkling, brilliant white light with vivid spectral colours — often described as shimmering, kaleidoscopic, and intrinsically beautiful. The conventional production model claims that Cortical Spreading Depression (CSD) generates this light through spontaneous excitation in the visual cortex. However, this explanation suffers from a profound internal inconsistency. Extensive clinical evidence demonstrates that CSD consistently produces functional deficits wherever it travels: hemiparesis in the motor cortex, paresthesia in the somatosensory cortex, and aphasia in language areas. It is illogical to posit that CSD produces functional loss everywhere except in the visual cortex, where it supposedly produces a gain of function — brilliant light. The logically consistent interpretation is that CSD causes functional failure in the visual cortex as well, and that this sparkling, brilliant inner light appears as a result of cortical silence. Three independent and converging lines of neurophysiological evidence confirm this interpretation. First, MEG data show that alpha- and gamma-band rhythms collapse for the duration of the scintillations and return abruptly the moment they cease (Hall et al., 2004). Second, VEP studies show that the cortex no longer responds to external light during the aura (MacLean et al., 1975; Nyrke et al., 1989). Third, novel SEEG evidence (McLeod et al., 2025) offers the most direct confirmation to date: intracranial recording reveals a low-voltage suppression — a near-silent cortical signal — that correlates precisely with the scintillating scotoma. The paper extends this reasoning along the CSD–TSD continuum, where Terminal Spreading Depolarization represents the permanent, irreversible form of CSD that occurs at death. A clarifying double dissociation is presented: retinal ischaemia (failure of the eye) leads to darkness, whereas cortical ischaemia (failure of the brain) leads to brilliant light. This pattern is consistent with the filter theory of consciousness (Bergson, 1896; Huxley, 1954; Kastrup, 2019), which holds that when the brain's filtering function fails, a broader, intrinsic dimension of experience is revealed — not produced, but uncovered.

The special theory of relativity strongly suggests that the default ontological structure of the universe is eternalist: a four-dimensional block spacetime in which past, present, and future coexist. Yet our lived experience is overwhelmingly presentist. We experience time as a sequential flow with a privileged "now." This paper argues that this discrepancy is not a problem for eternalism but rather its strongest indirect confirmation. The central proposal is that presentism is not a feature of the universe but a product of conscious observation of this eternalist block universe. A conscious observer, through the neural machinery of the Default Mode Network (DMN), imposes a reference frame upon the eternalist block, partitioning it into "here" and "there," "before" and "after," "past" and "future." It is this reference frame that generates the experience of sequential time. Without it, these categories have no intrinsic meaning in spacetime. This proposal yields a direct and testable corollary: if the reference frame is what introduces presentism, then dissolving that reference frame should dissolve presentism with it. This is precisely what occurs during ego dissolution, a well-documented phenomenological state arising under psychedelics, deep meditation, and near-death experiences, in which the DMN disintegrates. Subjects consistently report timelessness, non-locality, and the coexistence of all events: an experience structurally isomorphic to the eternalist block universe. The paper therefore makes a twofold identity claim: (1) ego dissolution, as reported across contemplative and pharmacological traditions, is the phenomenological correlate of presentism-dissolution, the collapse of the observer's locally constructed experience of sequential time; and (2) the ordinary experience of presentism, the flow of time, is not a fundamental feature of reality but a local construction introduced by consciousness operating within a reference frame. What physics can only deduce mathematically, consciousness can apprehend experientially, but only when the reference frame that normally filters that apprehension is dissolved.

This paper argues that death has no first-person reality. I develop a two-mode account of subjective experience: Mode 1, dissociated experience through time, actively constructed by the default mode network (DMN); and Mode 2, timeless undifferentiated oneness, consistently reported when DMN activity is markedly reduced. I then show that non-being is not a third mode available to any subject, because a subject cannot undergo its own absence. Since temporal experience requires biological machinery that ceases at death, and since non-being is logically unavailable, only Mode 2 remains. An exhaustive disjunction over post-mortem scenarios demonstrates that this conclusion holds whether or not new dissociation occurs: if it does, no subjective gap is experienced; if it does not, only the timeless state persists. The argument draws on empirical findings from psychedelic neuroscience, meditation research, and near-death studies, and is situated within the broader framework of the filter theory of consciousness and Kastrup's analytical idealism, while remaining logically independent of any single ontological commitment beyond the irreducibility of first-person experience.

This brief article explores a phenomenological parallel between ego dissolution in deep meditation or psychedelic states and the dissolution of the reference frame in relativity. This is also the immediate difference between a measuring device as an observer and a conscious observer. A conscious observer can undergo ego dissolution or reference frame dissolution when the default mode network in the brain desintegrates. When a conscious observer ceases to define themselves as a fixed point in space-time, the zero-point of their reference frame, perception no longer occurs from a localized standpoint. Instead, the observer directly experiences space-time as it is: all times and all places existing simultaneously in a non-local, eternal now. This experiential state, often described by mystics as “unity with the universe,” reveals a consciousness that no longer observes reality as the unfolding from moment to moment of events through time, but as space-time itself: all at once in an eternal now.

This brief article explores a phenomenological parallel between ego dissolution in deep meditation or psychedelic states and the dissolution of the reference frame in relativity. This is also the immediate difference between a measuring device as an observer and a conscious observer. A conscious observer can undergo ego dissolution or reference frame dissolution when the default mode network in the brain desintegrates. When a conscious observer ceases to define themselves as a fixed point in space-time, the zero-point of their reference frame, perception no longer occurs from a localized standpoint. Instead, the observer directly experiences space-time as it is: all times and all places existing simultaneously in a non-local, eternal now. This experiential state, often described by mystics as “unity with the universe,” reveals a consciousness that no longer observes reality as the unfolding from moment to moment of events through time, but as space-time itself: all at once in an eternal now. Publicly available at Zenodo (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17340466). This is a revised and expanded version of the earlier upload (October 2025)

In phenomenology, we study what something is for an observer. In this work, I asked the question: what is “time” for an observer? I was confronted with Einstein’s insight that time observations and space observations are interconnected. I was not studying time and space in themselves (as in physics), but rather what time and space are for observers (phenomenology). This phenomenological perspective generated its own answers, which differ from the current scientific consensus. The distortions of space we observe are relativistic — they depend on observers. Observers are the zero-points of reference frames, a “zero” in mathematics. Yet they appear to be the backbone of reference frames in relativity, and the cause of the collapse of the wave function in quantum mechanics. What are observers? They exist; they are real in nature, and they have a lawful connection with nature, as I discovered. The redshift of the emitted light from receding galaxies, discovered by Edwin Hubble, is not evidence of an expanding universe, but rather evidence of the relativity of space within gravitational fields, observed by an real existing observer with his particular clock and his particular ruler. It can be a measuring device, an animal, a human being. Real existing observers with a real lawful connection with the observations of space and time. Not only theoretised reference frames in a model, but real existing entities with a lawful connection with their observations.