Spacetime Doesn't Exist. But Do You?
Published: November 4, 2025
A recent article on ScienceDaily presents a compelling case: spacetime is a powerful descriptive tool, not a real, physical entity. The author argues that we confuse the map for the territory, treating the “fabric of spacetime” as a real thing when it is merely a catalog of where and when events happen. The core insight is a crucial one: events occur; they do not exist as static locations in some four-dimensional block. This dissolves time-travel paradoxes and reframes endless philosophical debates about the “flow” of time.
This is a brilliant and necessary clarification. Distinguishing between the occurrence of events and the existence of objects cuts through a profound layer of confusion. It rightly challenges the notion of a universe where the past, present, and future are equally “real” and laid out like a cosmic film strip. The article successfully brings us from a naive realism about spacetime to a more sophisticated, process-oriented view.
However, this powerful argument stops at a new, more subtle duality. It creates a clean separation: events happen, while objects exist. Cars, people, and planets are presented as the solid, enduring “things” that exist, within which or between which events occur.
What if we take the next logical step? What if the “objects” we take as fundamentally existing are themselves best understood as slow, stable patterns of happening?
This is the perspective that emerges from both modern physics and contemplative traditions: the apparent dichotomy between “happening” and “existing” itself begins to collapse. A planet is not a static “thing” that exists; it is a persistent, rhythmic pattern of gravitational, nuclear, and quantum events. A thought is not a static “thing” in your brain; it is a fleeting, emergent event in a complex neural network. What we call an “object” is simply a process stable enough for us to interact with and label.
The Deeper Foundation: The Ground of Being
This line of inquiry inevitably leads to a more fundamental question, one I’ve explored in depth elsewhere: If even “objects” are just stable events, what is the nature of the stage upon which this universal happening is playing out? What does it mean for anything—events, objects, or the spacetime that relates them—to be at all?
The materialist framework hits a logical wall here. It can describe how things within the universe interact, but it cannot answer why there is a universe at all with its specific, contingent laws. To declare the universe a “brute fact” is to abandon the very principle of sufficient reason that powers scientific inquiry.
The only coherent alternative is to recognize that existence itself must be grounded in something necessary—a reality whose very nature is to be. This isn’t “a being” among others, but Being itself; not a thing that exists, but the ground of existence that allows any “thing” to appear. In philosophical and contemplative traditions, this is what is meant by the “Ground of Being.”
The Unified View: From Spacetime to Suchness
From this vantage point, we can extend the original article’s great insight into a complete picture:
Spacetime is a map, not the territory. (The article’s core insight)
The “objects” within spacetime are also patterns in the map. They are slow events, not fundamentally separate from the happening they participate in.
The ultimate “territory” is the Ground of Being. It is the necessary, self-existent, and unconditioned reality in which both the map of spacetime and the patterns we call objects arise.
The original article performs an essential service by dismantling one illusion: the static, existing spacetime. The next step is to see that the world of separate, independently existing objects is also part of the map. The final step is to recognize that the map and the territory are not two separate things. The territory is one of continuous, interconnected process—a unified happening whose nature is pure, aware presence.
Realizing this might be the key to resolving not just scientific confusion, but the deeper sense of separation that underlies so much of our human experience. The mystery of existence isn’t a problem to be solved, but a reality to be recognized—the silent foundation of all that is, was, or ever could be.
For a deeper exploration of the logical argument for this “Ground of Being,” you can read my longer piece: The Materialist’s Hidden Paradox