Relativity. Motion and Meditation

There is a lot of spinning in circles here, but like a fly trying to get out of the bottle that is to be expected.

So as a pre-teenager I established that the world was relative and an illusion. But did I make a mistake!

So my first dictum was "All things are relative."

The meaning here was a moment of insight from Einstein's Relativity theory. I had read a popular commentator say of motion that "you cannot hammer a nail into the space-time continuum to act as an absolute reference point." When we measure motion we always do so between two things.

Inadvertently I had stumbled across Buddha's "Dependent Arising" (Pratītyasamutpāda) but in the form of a New Scientist article on Physics.

What an extraordinary thing in fact that the most basic of things like motion turns out to be impossible to grasp in absolute terms. We think we are stationary sitting watching the TV. There is no exertion, we are relaxed and everything in the room "appears" not to be moving. That has got to be the experience of stationary. But 2000 years of investigation has shown us this is far from the "true" situation. That appearance of stationary is not "true" in any absolute way. We are in fact on the surface of the planet that is rotating once a "day"* (by definition) and the planet orbiting the Sun once a year (by definition) and so on. We have "red shift" to determine the motion of far away things relative to us but it is all relative. We have no way to know whether something is stationary, or more importantly this idea of "stationary" is only ever relative, it has no absolute solid meaning. We must get used to existing in the "emptiness" of realising that our state of motion exists "between" things but not "in" things!! I have no absolute state of motion, it is always relative. Now this is the very essence of Buddha's teaching!! Nothing exists "in" itself. All things exist relative to other things. There is no "in itself."

What does this mean outside the context of measurement? In the physical world it is that everything is created and does not last forever. It means everything comes from metaphorical "parents", nothing comes from itself. Everything is made and cannot exist by itself. It will decay, spoil and disintegrate eventually. So not only can nothing make itself, but it cannot sustain itself either! There goes the entire American Dream in a one catastrophic earthquake. To survive we must interact with our environment and it must interact with us. The very nature of "survival" exists in this interaction. There is no "me" surviving and there is no "you" helping/hindering me. "Surviving" is always a mutual process. If I support you and you support me then "we" survive. If you do not survive then ultimately neither do I.

And in the mind, relativity is finding that the idea of "self contained things" no longer has any relevance. The world turns out to be composed from inter-related things, that come and go.

Now I took "All Things are Relative" as a maxim. But it leads to some problems in thought. If everything is relative then everything is an illusion. It is an illusion in that it has no fixed "body" of its own, and is only a temporary appearance relevant in this situation only. Like with motion we can appear to be stationary in a moving train with the blinds pulled, but this is only an illusory "appearance" we know perfectly well we are moving relative to the world outside. The appearance is not absolute, and many contradictory appearances like stationary (with the blinds pulled) and moving (looking outside) at the same time, can apply to the same situation. And this encourages nihilism. We can start to think Matrix style that its all an hallucination and its worthless.

Uh Ho! Mistake.

How do we get from "illusion" to "worthless"?

What is going on here is "attachment." Compared to "solid permanent fixed eternal reality" then we find the temporary illusion worthless. But is there a solid reality? We just investigated that there is not. So "against" what is it worthless? It just is what it is now!

So we see the deep workings of our "attached" and "grasping" mind. When it grasps something it holds it as a measure against other things which it considers less worthwhile. Obviously when it find something more worthwhile it then grasps at that. So ironically the grasping mind is actually living in a  relative world itself! To make a statement that something is "worthless" is to be relative and not absolute.

The irony here is that accepting the relative world for what it is, no longer comparing it with other things and just accepting that it is fundamentally relative becomes an absolute! Looking out the window we just accept the movement, looking in the carriage we just accept the stationary. When we stop grasping we see the nature of absolute! Dangerous thing to say, cos with any mention of solid reality or absolute we immediately grasp for it.

And so it is in meditation too. We start meditation in the relative world. Buddha says "know that I am breathing in." Obviously breathing in comes next to breathing out. We split the world into relative pairs. He also does long and short. This is relative existence. Things not being themselves as themselves, but being in relation to other things. It is also called "conditional" world which means the same, that nothing is intrinsic but exists within conditions. In English "conditions" is a rich word that captures both the if/then of its existence but also has the meaning of environment too. If the fish has no water it decays, is the same as a dry environment will not support the fish. Nature is all about conditions and relativity as much as physics.

But an interesting thing happens in meditation which in previous posts was called (1) the Named/Thought World and (2) the Present. The Named/Thought world is the relative/conditional world, and we start meditation here. But the practice is to cut things off from the environment and conditions. We take our breath (or whatever object we are watching) and we focus on it so that we begin to ignore all the other things. We become less and less relative and more and more absolute. And this comes with a dropping of language and thoughts, and eventually even consciousness as we enter Jhana. The Absolute does exist but it in unlike anything we can imagine or think about. It can only be accessed outside the relative world.

Not "outside" the relative world is just another relative statement. Inside/Outside. We don't really mean "outside", what we mean is the letting go for grasping for relative meaning and existence. The discreteness and "somethingness" or "solidity" that comes we placing something "here" and something else "there." This is "this" and that is "that" we love, literally LOVE to say. Love so much we find it almost impossible not to do it.

So there is meditation where we train ourselves to forget about "that" "over there". Its not important. Right now only this matters. And its hard to do. We have worries, and memories, and tasks to do, and duties, and expectations, and desires and longings and ... but they are ALL OVER THERE. For now just this matters, and so we bring the mind back to the breath (or whatever we concentrate on) and we watch it as steadily, acutely and undistracted as we can. Like a laser beam we bring our focus to a point on that object. Seeing just it as it is, without reference to anything else. What was "my breath", or the "in" breath" or the "short" breath becomes just this breath. In previous posts it becomes the source, there is nothing else. Going into that source we begin to find the absolute. 

So I was wrong in a way to insist on "ALL THINGS ARE RELATIVE" in that in unskilful hands this might sound like nihilism. But in skilful hands it points out that the ABSOLUTE is not relative. You don't have: "this is the absolute truth and that is not." This is dialectics, it is relative and conditional. Truth is dialectical. It recognises that truth emerges in a time and place. But there is an absolute that lies behind it all, and we should remember that the world is as FULL as it is EMPTY. Once we experience the ABSOLUTE then the world become perfect and unconditional. We see how the imperfect relative world is just a paper thin wrapping of the "present" (both meanings) real world. But unless we have accessed the ABSOLUTE this statement of "paper thin" or  "illusion" looks nihilistic, flat and depressing. The problem is that compared to the infinite light of the ABSOLUTE the relative world is indeed dull and lifeless. But if you tell someone who only knows the relative, conditional world that their world is dull, empty and lifeless it is depressing and psychologically harming. Indeed the psychological damage that can be caused by trying to rip someone away from attachments to the relative is counter productive. Bitterness, hatred, anger, depression, self-destruction and all kinds of terrible mental states can be created embedding the person ever deeper into the relative!! There is a part of me that thinks if you push hard enough there will come a breaking point where the relative world is so awful we are forced to let go of it. But this can manifest as things like suicide or murder as we try to physically destroy the suffering. Attachment can be so strong that we would rather die than let go! And under the influence of suffering we are the least likely to see how attachment is causing all this suffering and confusion.

Its almost like attachment is a demonic puzzle that only unlocks when we stop trying to unlock it, but those battling to unlock it just get ever deeper caught, ever more frustrated and ever more blinded to what is happening to them. To unlock the puzzle we must walk away, which seems crazy when we are holding onto things we firmly think are going to save us. How quite logically we ask can I gain anything by letting go? And the more desperate we are the more we grasp out for things. I believe sinking sand is exactly like this. The more we struggle the more we get sucked under. The only way to survive is to lie on our back and stop struggling: how counter intuitive this must seem amongst all the fear, panic, anger and greed.

So we begin with meditation and simply trying to hold a single object firmly in our attention, letting go of everything else. Its a really really good start to be able to let go of everything else!  

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* "Day" this is another relative term. How long is a day? It is defined as the time taken for the Earth to rotate. Although it has been the time between sunrise and sunset which clearly changes throughout the year. In Japan I understand that this definition was held firmly so that time itself was stretched during the year with time travelling slower in the summer to passage of the day constant. This has the advantage of solving the "daylight saving" problem and everyone gets up at the same time each day of the year. But this all illustrates that time itself must be measured "against" something. There is no absolute indication of time. Indeed this is the very nature of Measurement itself. By definition a measurement is where we compare two things, and the idea of Standard Units comes from everyone socially agreeing to use the same units or at least have an exchange system between units. So the US uses the ancient Pound while the rest of the world uses the French Kilogram. But we all understand that 1Kg = 2.2lb. Once Kg was defined by a standard reference block but today Kg is now defined in terms of Planck's constant, which can be measured. But we can't use this measurement to get something's mass. This must still be done relatively.