Emptiness

Not a great post, but just vague summary of current journey.

I made a bad mistake as a kid.

When we discover science and knowledge there is a hunger and also an ego that makes us think perhaps we can understand it all.

In particular the Platonic idea that there are fundamental laws that in some way replace the phenomena they explain.

Newtons simple laws of motion, with rudimentary calculus seemed to explain all the previously complex motions of planets and earth bound objects. Its as though armed with this book we can miss out reality and speak directly to God.

Perhaps there is a law of everything?

Well in a way there is, but not like this.

The problem with this type of thinking is we start to step back from what we experience and put it in a suspicious box where we can examine it as something alien, not satisfactory, something that is to be understood in terms of something better.

This alienation from reality, is essential in a way for the scientist so they keep looking, but it produces a fundamental misunderstanding of the world.

It has taken me all my life since a teenager to really understand this mistake.

There was a time when I asked "why" to everything. Especially interested not in the law of physics like the acceleration, momentum and gravity but interested in why even they were true. Why does a football move when kicked was the perennial question seeking to get into that deeper layer of understanding of how the world is.

I came to a normative, empirical kind of understanding. We expect it to move simply because that is what it does. But this still didn't satisfy that need to get to deeper laws.

Eventually that all ends up with SRH. The question of why? runs aground when you start asking things like "why are there questions?"

Anyway the normative understanding was actually very close to the exit, but I was facing the wrong way and went back in.

The thing about life is that first and fore most it is here. That IS the most important thing. No getting away from that.

We can sit there and puzzle over how weird it is that we have a hole in our faces that we put food in periodically. We can explain this through need for nutrients etc but it doesn't get away from how weird this is, and also the sense of "is this really all life is?" or "is this really what we got?" It starts getting religious "why did God make it like this?", "have I a purpose?". And if perhaps "why am I in such a world as this; why isn't it different?". To think that my whole life will be spent under this particular set of star constellations like this and not another. It seems to "need" more reality and significance to it than it has. Its all the same kind of thing.

But when sensing these questions we are actually very close to the truth, but probably facing the wrong way.

The thing is, it IS like this. Its good to have seen the way it is. That shows unattached and clear mind. But the problem becomes when the Self/Ego takes a grip on that. It is threatened by things "just being this way." How can I change it? Why do I have to put up with it? Why does a profound and magnificent being as "me" which is beyond description end up in a world that is actually like "this". In the world of fantasy we are used to changing things all the time. Don't like it, change it. The idea that the world is a particular way, is refreshing in a way but also has an uneasy feel. IS this really IT?

If we are a being able to fly around the universe and occupy many other being and lives we might think of our life, well when I die I get a new life, or go to a different universe where there is no longer breathing and eating and I can fly and be magical. But actually which ever existence we take it will still be a certain way. Unicorns are still stuck with horns. Somewhere along the line the very nature of existence is "things being a certain way" and the Ego must suck that up. I am not handsome, suck it up. I am short, suck it up. I am not rich, suck it up. Its raining today, suck it up etc etc etc

So there begins meditation. Suck it up.

Once we are no longer opposed to the world, then it no longer needs explanation. We are happy with it being which ever way it goes. Like a leaf dropping into a stream we just go with flow. Does the leaf ever stop to think how weird it is to be drifting down on water?

Well this is where we are close to the answer. There is a way of just being with things where they look odd, but its not an unfriendly suspicious "need to know". Its not like meeting a stranger and sitting them in an interrogation chair to find out all about them. We can just enjoy being with them and all their "strangeness" without needing to smash it open to see anything more. The leaf can indeed feel how weird to flowing down the river now after a summer in the branches, but without drifting off into mental inquisition of the events, it can just sit with the new situation and go for the ride.

Not needing to smash the world open to peak inside is a great step to recover from the mistake I made.

And it leads to a wonderful thing about life. It doesn't need to be this way or that. There are those moments, particularly when we see other people living lives we have a desire for , of thinking that our life is not good enough. Our life is like this, and we think it should be like that. Standard self-alienation. This can get really bad to the point of really hating our own life and not wanting to live it or even not wanting to be ourselves. This is no different from the leaf deciding its had enough of the ride and wants to get out of the river. Leaves never do this. The world never actually does this.

But then we are back to the meditation and having to "suck it up." Turns out the world is like this, so suck it up.

What is interesting is that no matter how great our desire to be someone else, actually we didn't always have this desire, and so we know we will not always have this desire. That car our mate got which is so much better than ours; well yesterday you were happy with our car. What we notice is not so much that our mate got a new car, but that we got a new envy ;-) Suck it up, this is the way it is. Its odd how much we do just to get rid of envy, we end up with all this junk that we think we want, when actually it was the envy that we wanted to get rid of.

So looking at reality, but not wishing to undo it, change it, understand it, replace it with equations, fix it etc is the key.

Its got to be some way, turns out today it's this way.

This is actually what in Buddhism is called emptiness.

Not that we need a rationalisation of that, we can just accept it as it is. But what we are doing when we accept reality, is we are not grasping onto reality this way or that, but we are indeed getting to the underlying truth. How ironic that the journey above that we though was get us to the underlying truth was actually taking us away. Its very hard to say what the truth is in fact because its more an attitude of being with the world rather than holding on to a knowledge. As said above you can get to the door, but we are looking the wrong way. Stand right next to truth and not see it because we are expecting to get given something to hold and take away. The point about reality is that it is a certain way, we can examine that as deep as we want, but the moment we grasp hold of it to bring it "closer" it becomes like a fish out of water and we end up eventually with a dead museum specimen. Reality cannot be separated, not for very long at least, into bits and pieces. We can't go around saying "his life is better than mine" for very long because quickly we lose reality. "his life" and "your life" belong in the same fish tank, you can't go pulling one or the other out. Grasping at "his life" to "want it" and try and "have it for oneself" will kill it and you. It all goes together, including the envy or whatever other things turn up in "your" life.

This everything-going-together is only possible because of emptiness. Things are what they are, but they also go seamlessly together. It seems like a contradiction, but only when we try to hold the "strangeness" and get closer to it. How can the water and the fire go together? Yet they do don't they. You can go swimming on a sunny day feeling the burning of that fire in the sky, while having the waves gently washing over your shoulders. If you took one and left the other it would make no sense. True you can go to a parasol to get shade from the sun, but its just for now you are not going to extinguish the sun. It all goes together and there is nothing in particular to grasp or get the truth of, the truth is that everything goes together.

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Reading that back its interesting that one path of Buddhism, the oldest in fact, is the Four Noble Truths. The first Noble Truth is almost like an alienation describe above. Buddha famously experienced this alienation. When he saw that life was not a single beautiful thing but fundamentally tainted by death and disease he was alienated from it. He didn't recognise it any more and he realised that there was a problem in life. So he set out to fix it. And that did not go very well. We can start with some basics: you are not and never will be immortal. Indeed nothing is. We can't fix it like this. Indeed like above there is no underlying truth or secret that if you could just discover like an alchemist could give you immortality and solve the problem of death. This is not the right way to go about it. Anyway just noting how science's Platonic removal from the world is also one of the starting approaches of Buddhism.