Relativity, Motion and Stillness (important post)

Argued the first part before...

The earth goes round the sun? Not last time I looked. This morning it was on the horizon, its high in the sky at the moment and later it will be on the other horizon. I'd have said it definitely just went around me and the earth. Not disputable!! the evidence is there every day for us all to see.

This is the power of illusions again. We are "told" to think that the earth goes around the sun, and therefore we don;t even see what is before our very eyes.

It is true however this if you went up in a space craft and took up an position in "space" stationary with respect to the sun then you would see the earth orbiting the sun. We tend to think of the sun as stationary in space in the Copernican model.

But can we really take up such a "stationary" place in space anyway given that the Sun itself is orbiting a galactic centre...

Its all about where you stand. And, the implication here is that without knowing where to stand you can't say whether something is true or not. And, if you are told something that is true but seems false then you know you are not standing in the right place.

Now this seems to be the import of a lot of religious teaching. It is not so much that the teaching is right absolutely, as saying to us that to enlighten we need to find a place to stand where such teaching appears to be true. Such a "place to stand" is very sophisticated in religious thought.

A friend once said very wisely that his understanding of the buddhist teaching that the "only certainty is change" (from the Japanese Monkey-King stories we were watching) is that for everything to be change, we ourselves must be stationary! If we are moving with something else then it seems to be stationary like two cars side by side on the motor-way. When you stop suddenly you notice how fast it is going (ok, not so in relativity theory, but metaphorically it works here). Likewise when we take up a position of true stillness then everything seems to be in motion. Ironically those who do not understand this seek peace by trying to move with the moving things to create an illusion of being stationary and there is the cause of suffering and rebirth!

Listening to Prabhupada on you-tube (a gem amongst the shit that goes down the U-tube - get it hehe) he provides an insight into reincarnation. That if you move from one place to another, yes your body has moved but have "you"? Adding the above insight: if you had moved as well, then would you notice the change? It is because we don't move that our bodies can move. Likewise in reverse the teaching of Hui-Neng that it is not the flag which moves but our minds (if you are familiar with the story). And, also Hui-Neng that because our minds (true selves) are "empty" that we can let the world in to be-there (Da-sein in German and Heideggar).

This is also like an insight I gained on a mountain. The more work i put into climbing this mountain the less I could see of the mountain and ironically the more I could see of the mountains around. Being somewhere affords us knowledge of everywhere else! Every statement is made from somewhere about somewhere else.

Thus there is an irony at the core of human existence. Whatever phenomena arise, they can do so because we are not part of that phenomenon, and so relatively there appears to be change. Not understanding this irony we are constantly in motion seeking to be with the phenomena, and so always changing our place of standing - which causes an endless motion and a corresponding endless change of phenomena.