In 1932 Max Planck, the father of Quantum theory, said that “Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature” insofar as we “are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.”
This mystery, to be sure, is quite profound and hyper-subtle. If science is arrogant enough to believe that it is getting closer to solving the mystery of nature, it is severely deluded. Science which depends on sensory consciousness and instruments designed to increase the power of the senses is only increasing the scope and depth of nature’s mystery—not solving it. As a result, only more questions will arise; certainly not answers which remove the mystery.
Solving the mystery of nature is not a job for science. Its job is to create useful and practical fictions which extends to technology and its development. Where science errs is in not realizing that the scaffolding it creates is not the same as what it is placed against. In other words we cannot, through the senses, know the transcendent thing-in-itself (Kant) as something determinate except to become (or awaken to) the transcendent thing-in-itself which always lies beyond the plane of our sensory experience including pure reason and thought. But in the main, science cannot except this. Instead, science chooses to cheat. It changes the transcendent thing-in-itself to an empirical thing-in-itself then sets about to create its fictions with fictional answers.
Buddhism, unlike modern science, takes the path of least resistance and presuppositionlessness. By doing so, the mystery can better awaken to itself. In other words, enlightenment consists in mystically seeing the mystery in all of its glory including the fact that the sensory world is composed of this mystery. This, I hasten to add is inscrutable nirvana, Suchness (tathata) or absolute Mind which are labels for this awakened-to-mystery.
“The dharma obtained by me is profound, of deep splendor, difficult to see, difficult to understand, incomprehensible, having the incomprehensible as its scope, fine, subtle, the sense of which can only be understood by the wise” (Catusparisat Sûtra).
"Finding God or the One, thing-in-itself Mind with a telescope or microscope is absurd in the extreme and total folly if science affirms that there is no God or One Mind because it has yet to discover anything relating to this matter."
AFAIK science sees itself up to the task to describe the world by using conventional symbols, words, numbers whatever. Nothing more, nothing less. It's most of the time the wacky religious people who think, science would set itself in the position of their puny religious belief. Science knows, what it knows (and what knowing means) and what it doesn't. Not knowing, you know, is an attribute that you won't find in the mystics circles.
Then, what tool do you take for "finding your one mind"?! What a ridiculous task at all!
Posted by: qbrick | April 25, 2011 at 05:42 AM
“Science which depends on sensory consciousness and instruments designed to increase the power of the senses is only increasing the scope and depth of nature’s mystery—not solving it. As a result, only more questions will arise; certainly not answers which remove the mystery.“
Really, like this.
Finding God or the One, thing-in-itself Mind with a telescope or microscope is absurd in the extreme and total folly if science affirms that there is no God or One Mind because it has yet to discover anything relating to this matter. We may see evidences or manifestations of same, but never That Which Is beyond the capacity of physical, material instruments and the basic 5 senses that are needed and used to assess the ‘crude’ data these instruments collect.
Posted by: Paul | April 25, 2011 at 01:14 AM