The most important step in gaining the experience of ageless body is to unfreeze the perceptions that have locked you into feelings of isolation, fragmentation, and separateness.

Look at your hand and examine it closely. This is the hand your senses report to you, a material object composed of flesh and blood. In this first exercise we will attempt to “thaw out” your hand and give you a different experience of it beyond the reach of your senses.

Holding the image of your hand in your mind’s eye, imagine that you are examining it through a high-powered microscope whose lens can penetrate the finest fabrics of matter and energy. At the lowest power, you no longer see smooth flesh but a collection of individual cells loosely bound by connective tissue. Moving closer, you can see separate atoms of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and so on, which have no solidity at all–they are vibrating, ghostly shadows revealed through the microscope as patches of light and dark.

You have arrived at the boundary between matter and energy, for the subatomic particles making up each atom–whirling electrons dancing around a nuclear core of protons and neutrons–are not spots and dots of matter. At this level you see that all things you once took to be sold are just energy trails.

Now you start sinking even deeper into quantum space. All light disappears, replaced by yawning chasms of black emptiness. The blackness closes in, and you are in a place where not just matter and energy are gone, but space and time as well.

You have left behind your hand as a space-time event. There is no such thing as “before” or “after” in this region. You are everywhere and nowhere.

Has your hand ceased to exist? No, for in crossing the boundary of the fourth dimension, you didn’t go anywhere; the whole notion of place and time simply doesn’t apply anymore.