The acceptance and realization of mystery

Westerners are daily fed fictions which they take to be reality.  In this respect, it is a most difficult task for them to understand the Buddha’s enlightenment which goes against the stream of human created fictions.  

Science, for example, is a most prominent and powerful fiction machine, having replaced the ubiquitous Catholic Church which was, incidentally, successful at fusing imagination with religion creating all kinds of religious fictions.  

Metaphysics has taught both the Church and science to construct elaborate fictions as if they represented and explained reality.  However, reality is something quite different than fictions which try to explain reality.  Take for example, electricity.  Electricity is a reality but one that is quite mysterious and, to this day, we have no idea what electricity really is.  It is not strictly matter or energy.  These are fictional terms, although useful.  While electricity may, to a certain extent, resemble matter and energy, in the sense that it cannot be destroyed, it is still a mystery.    

When it comes to the the “radiometer” (the picture in the upper lefthand corner) nobody actually knows how it works.  But it does work.  Our models of explanation have thus far failed to explain it.  Radiation pressure doesn’t explain it; nor does gas pressure; nor does outgassing of black material; nor does the photoelectric effect; nor convection currents.  

Turning to the Buddha’s enlightenment, our rational explanations of the Buddha’s enlightenment are almost entirely inadequate.  Even when the Buddha saw the mysterious Dharma (i.e., pure Mind), he only became one with it.  By that I mean he entered into its mystery and became that mystery, completely.  Even when the Buddha looked into his own body of birth, the mystery he realized could not be seen—still, it was present and real.  This means that the teaching of the Buddha is transcendent and mysterious, pointing to a transcendent realm beyond the pale of the psychophysical body. 

Truth be known, our world is fundamentally a complete mystery.  It is inexplicable.  Our models of explanation are useful as are our inventions but they fail to capture the mystery of the world.  It is only by following the teachings of the Buddha that we can become one with this mystery when, looking upon this world, we discover that it is the mystery’s mysterious expression.  How profound!

Comments

[dooyen]

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/General/LightMill/light-mill.html

Explaining the radiometer.

[The Zennist]

“For me gravity doesn’t exist,” said Dr. Verlinde, who was recently in the United States to explain himself. Not that he can’t fall down, but Dr. Verlinde is among a number of physicists who say that science has been looking at gravity the wrong way and that there is something more basic, from which gravity “emerges,” the way stock markets emerge from the collective behavior of individual investors or that elasticity emerges from the mechanics of atoms.

Source: http://goo.gl/zobF5

[The Zennist]

For those interested, Nancy Cartwright has a lot to say about the radiometer problem in physics in her book, _How the Laws of Physics Lie_ (the word lie is a pun). More to the point, philosophy is careful to distinguish phenomenological laws from theoretical laws, physics is not. Physics conflates the two. This is where Cartwright brings in the radiometer. It is a good example of what is wrong with physics.

"Really powerful explanatory laws of the sort found in theoretical physics do not state the truth." ~ Nancy Cartwright, p. 3

[Instance]

Java, what I said is that magnets are no more mysterious than a cup falling on the floor. Nobody finds that mysterious. And then you tell me: "but action at a distance is a mystery!" - Well what the hell is gravity if not action at a distance? Ah, why do I spend my precious time debating philosophical dilettantes like you.

[Vacchagotta]

Yea the radiometer is not the best example as the thermodynamics are well understood.