It is easy to ridicule not only those who seek the transcendent in the way of Buddha-nature or pure Mind, but also the assertion and faith that such exists. This kind of ridicule is easy because a state like pure Mind has no corresponding physical object that can be touched or publicly viewed. In other words, it isn’t a particular shape with a background like our kitchen table in the kitchen. Still, those who make fun of spiritual seekers are well advised, according to the Buddha, that if they are going to admonish others, they must be prepared to be, themselves, admonished.
So let’s turn the tables on those supporters of the physical sciences who might judge Buddhism too harshly, ridiculing it for its belief in the supernatural. Certainly they, too, boast of objects such as ‘black holes’ ‘quantum particles’ and ‘gravity waves’. So where, for example, is their gravity wave (a gravity particle will do, also)? No researcher to date has found a so-called ‘graviton’ or a ‘transverse gravity wave’.
Such things as gravity waves are what I characterize as mathematical fictional objects: a fiction meaning what might be or as if. Under the definition of fiction, big bangs, black holes, super strings are all fictional objects that we can imagine but have found no physical evidence for their existence. Thus far, no telescope or any instrument or combination of instruments has detected so much as a black hole or a gravity wave, or fundamental, subatomic particles Quantum Mechanics (QM) predicts.
A digression, the most terrifying thing any modern physicist who is on the moonshine of physics-by-math can imagine is something like Indra’s Net. In his book, Hua-yen Buddhism: The Jewel Net of Indra, Francis H. Cook describes the net has follows:
“Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net which has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out infinitely in all directions. In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel in each “eye” of the net, and since the net itself is infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number. There hang the jewels, glittering like stars in the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold. If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number. Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that there is an infinite reflecting process occurring” (page 2).
What needs to be underscored is that each jewel is connected to every other jewel by way of a rope-like filament which makes up this super reticulum. Indra’s net can be thought of as a kind of tensegrity structure in which there is no need for particles or transverse waves. And that is precisely the reason such a matrix cannot be allowed in the hallways of modern physics. Such a net does away with particle and wave the stuff of science fiction.
Returning to the matter at hand, the physcical sciences certainly have their share of what we Budhists call “flowers in the sky” or “a barren women’s child” and still they have the face to make fun of the spiritual voyager or the rishi sitting under his fig tree in spiritual communication with the absolute like Siddhartha did.
The more salient fact is that the physical sciences, like the Catholic Church of old, have cleverly foisted on the public a grand fiction about the starry heavens and the microscopic world—who even receive grant money for these fictions; the gullible taxpayer being all too willing to shell out the dough. This even extends to the neurosciences which are trying to turn absolute correlation into identity in which mind and brain are treated as being identical when there is only correlation between them. We might even imagine a character out of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver's Travels who is trying to prove that warm air is identical with mercury because the former affects the latter perfectly causing it to expand in a glass tube!
I shall force myself to stop here. My humor is starting to take over—and this blog is supposed to be serious!
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