<Physically stand certainly, but mentally you can "imagine" you are standing beyond- Hawkings seems to do this all the time:)

Two disparate points of view, converging on the same point:

A meditation technique used by mystics in all religions, in which one looks beyond ego and deity, has just such an objective. I don't meditate or seek religious trances by other means, but sometimes an awareness of this comes to sit on my shoulder. In these moments, when my bones seem to fill with air, I could almost float (not really), understanding that seemingly solid things are full of space and could almost dissolve into each other except that they vibrate too fiercely and at too many different frequencies to allow it. My conscious mind is both a product of and apart from the "real world" in which it dwells most of the time. Time itself doesn't stand still, but melts away. Of course, it comes back. ("She turned me into a newt! ... I got better.") It's a strange, detached feeling, but the perception is as real as anything else I have ever experienced.

I sometimes think that physics is a rational, logical expression of the pursuit of this experience, a way to codify, and possibly even reproduce and manipulate, an intuitive knowledge that can only be purchased otherwise through practice, concentration, isolation and asceticism. I have no time to practice, my attention flits, I'm surrounded by people, and I enjoy my senses too much to achieve more than a brief flirtation with the Step Outdoors. Could it be that Hawking, very much a man of this world and a brilliant one, but forced into an ascetic cell by his illness, has the unique situation and tools to puzzle out the big questions? Does he understand the answers intuitively through his experiences, and do his struggles with communication make it easier to grope toward logical expression of them, because he must struggle to express everything?

Am I even making sense? 8o)

And:

Watch the artists, if you would make science real for the rest of the world.

Artists, the great ones, have an intuitive sense of where thought is headed. They prepare the way for people like me to understand what people like you are trying to say to me. They will slash their way, often alone, through the untrodded forests of new thought, even as scientists are gathering their tools to pave the path. They surf the waves while scientists build the lighthouses and set out the buoys to make the way safe for the ordinary folks like me.

I'm not talking about subject material (which is often used for shock value, to get attention) -- look at their methods. The great breakthroughs in the physical sciences that came in the Renaissance was prefigured by the development of depth perception in painting. The discovery of radioactivity and its subsequent application to our understanding of light was matched step for step by Impressionist play with light as a substance rather than a condition. The surrealist movement brought the breakdown of physical reality to its component parts into the public imagination while the structure of the atom was beginning to be examined in laboratories. What are our artists doing now? Don't look at subjects that shock you -- look at compostion and method that move you but that you don't understand. You will be looking at the future of the way we think about the world.

And one last thing, as I head out the door to pull the past and the future into the present for a tour of third-graders: Dr. Seuss beat Dr. Hawking into the realm of little bubbles of reality. We are ready for this in part because we have read that "A person's a person, no matter how small." ;)

Regards--
Mary Anne

PS-- Hey Dan! Have I stretched the pseudoscience boundary too far? I'm feeling a little exposed out here on The Edge Of The Rational... ;D