Some days my intuition for connecting with some obvious implications ain’t so good. On other days it works great. Just recently I came across this which awakened my intuition:
“Normal matter—the stuff of trees, animals, people, rocks, air, planets, gas, and stars—makes up only 4 percent of the universe. Strange as it may seem, 96 percent of the universe seems to be made of two ingredients that no one understands. What is dark matter? Nobody knows. What is dark energy? We know even less about that” (Ellen Jackson & Nic Bishop, The Mysterious Universe).
It never dawns on most of us that the 96 percent of the dark universe might be eternal insofar as it appears to be increate (according to the Buddha only created things are impermanent, and suffer, etc.). Moreover, it is beyond the mental and physical nets of science which have been constructed from the leftover 4 percent which have been specifically designed for capturing data about the 4 percent! Talk about being in a box.
We Buddhists would call life in this 4 percent box, life in the transitory and suffering Five Aggregates. From the perspective of the dark universe life in this box is empty, and as the Buddha has said, it is not myself. Indeed, what is myself—the real side of me—must refer to the dark universe of 96 percent of which modern science admittedly knows nothing.
On the subject of thinking, I suspect that our all-too-human cunning reason only deals with the 4 percent material universe, while our intuition has a direct channel to the universe of 96 percent—which at the moment is not being used by most humans. On the other hand, those who elect to use this intuition we refer to as shamans or mystics and may include some of our far out scientists.
A post script to this, some newer estimates are that 75 percent of the universe is dark energy while 23 percent is dark matter leaving only 2 percent which is our visible universe.
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