I almost posted this in "Off topic" link because it is not about exploring the afterlife, it is about exploring the present life. But I decided it fits in with "What the Bleep"-type inquiries.

Here is a link to a newspaper article about a Buddhist monk at MIT:

http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2005/05/28/from_vision_t...

I don't entirely understand why someone who started studying Buddhist meditation at age 10 would need to go to Harvard Divinity School. This person obviously has an active intellect. Maybe some greater force is at work here. I can understand with his fascination for physics that he would want to hang out at MIT.

So to me this is a continuation of sorts of the "What the Bleep..." story as it unfolds in our culture. Hope you find it interesting.

what a wonderful article, thank you!

take care,
shawn

Hi Lucy-
The Buddhist approach to reality is, to paraphrase the Buddha, "Believe nothing until you've made it work for you personally." In addition, Buddhism denies the existence of a fixed and immutable spiritual object called "the soul", and also denies the existence of a God, in the sense of a "big superman who created everything".  Given these basic tenets of faith, and a little insight into the actual meanings of these ideas, we come very close to quantum physics.

The "soul" that Buddhism wants to eliminate is the idea of some kind of unchanging spiritual construction. This idea is replaced by the idea of awareness that proceeds forward through experiences, and that has no innate substantial nature. In New Age terms, the soul is a dynamic that is perpetually altered and evolved through experiences.

The "God" idea that Buddhists reject is the idea that there is an eternal Creator, such that this Creator builds and destroys the universe capriciously. (The initial target of this statement was the crude notion of Brahman, the Hindu deity, who sits in nowhere-in-particular and spins forth the world.) In its place, Buddhism (at least the madhyamika prasangika school of Mahayana Buddhism, as found in Tibet) suggests that the emanation of the world from "beginningless time" is a natural process, such that it is the nature of emptiness to give forth a world, and that this world is not merely a dream image without reality, nor is it merely an idea, but that it actually exists in some way, much as we experience it. (In fairness, there are also nihlistic, "mind only" and other Buddhist sects that differ on the philosophical basis of reality.)

In quantum physics the world is composed of probabilities for interaction of abstract observable properties. For example, if you squirt a stream of probability waves through a pair of slits onto a screen, the probability waves interfere, giving a wavelike interference pattern. But, if you force the probability waves to go through a single slit, they arrive at the most probable point on the screen, just like a stream of BBs. Prince Louis de Broglie pointed out that this is true for all quantum objects. So reality is neither a wave, nor is it a particle, nor can it ever be pinned down to being one or the other, because there is always a built in uncertainty to probability waves. Werner von Heisenberg initially expressed this as the uncertainty of position and speed of a particle when a light is shined on it. The energy of the light gives the position, but it disturbs the direction of motion. If we track the direction, as in a cloud chamber, the particle is lost because it has given up its motion to the measurement gear. (Uncartainty  can also be derived more formally.)

In social science the same thing is true, that we can never completely understand anything because we cannot know the sequence of its causal conditions in beginningless time, so its direction of evolution can never be fully known. Because each observation contains information that we absorb, so that our position in information state space is changed by every new fact, we tend to alter ourselves as we observe it, so the meaning with respect to us can never be precisely known. There's always an error. In everyday experience, all you know about your neighbor arrives as a stream of experiences that you interpret, hence you can't ever be 100% sure about what you see, because it is filtered through experiences etc, not all of which are 100% known.

In other words, physics, and the logic of QM, says that there is no immutable "person" but a dynamic that moves through experiential space. If there is no 100% known valid, fixed an immutable person, there is even less probability that that uncertainty has a 100% fixed and definite spiritual embodiment. Meditation agrees, we sense ourselves as elements of the process of awareness of the spirit world, or the world in which we have an OBE, or whatever. Thus we agree with both Buddhism and QM physics.

One of the cosmological approaches that makes sense (at least with the numbers it generates) is that voidness has more than one nature, since it can be so empty that it can be pointed to, but contain no properties etc, or it might be so vast that nothing could ever fill it. These are abstract properties that can be related, and their relationships can be related as well, giving a collection of relationships that comes from nowhere. Just as a pile of sand can be formed into any figure desired (especially if you add a bit of glue), these relationships can be formed into any reality desired, and they give rise to more probable relationships that occur as sets of probabilities etc. (This can also be expressed more elegantly with mathematical formalisms.) That gets rid of the need for a big guy who sits on a cloud and squeezes realities out of a tube. Physics and Buddhism agree.

However, if you want to look for God, we can find God in the innate creative nature of the universe itself.  Sounds a lot like Buddhism. It also provides us with a God that is emergent, so that we can be "created in His image", New Age experiences and meditation confirm that after we get over being isolated individuals, we go back and become part of the One. Your mind is part of the Mind of God. (Perhaps a nasty person may be part of God's rectum, just as popular speech tells us.)

The issues that are more important in this kind of thinking are whether or not we will become so compulsively attached to some frame of reference or some dogma that we refuse to see things as they are. That dogma might be physics, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Vedanta etc. These ideas will be commonplace in a century. Yet fifty years ago people denied the reality of karma, and the idea that "what goes around comes around" was some kind of spooky stuff.

Having said all that, to return to your question, whether quantum physics is compatible with Buddhism, my personal answer is, "Probably, but we can't be 100% certain."  (Just as you suspected, eh?)

dave

Hi again -
Actually, even after sleeping on this post I was somewhat agitated by the question. It is different in wording, but precisely the topic I've been studying for over 30 years. In fact I got a PhD out of development of part of the answer, and there's still forever to go. It's really a darn good question!

So, this morning I thought I'd add a couple additional lines of blather.

The first important concept I'd like to propose is that answers to these things don't come from academics, but from meditators, people who do soul retrievals, past life and spirit world workers, and even the hippies who eat plants and chemicals and attempt to explain what happens to their awareness. Understanding doesn't come from "think about it" but from "do it".

The second thing that is important is that these ideas lead into a new and as yet poorly explored topic area. This chat forum is at the cutting edge of discovery. Those who contribute are generating a new world that has never been seen before. In addition to my gratitude for Bruce's books, I am especially grateful that Bruce would take the trouble to set this chat forum up. This is Real, folks. Academia is kinda like a cloud nine version of reality, carefully insulated from uncertainties and paradoxes by careful preparation of lectures and theoretical constructs.  (I changed schools three times before I could get my doctoral work in this area accepted. New ideas are rarely desired, unless they come from a Tenured Professor.) These chats deal with where the rubber meets the road, and why we occasionally suffer skid marks.

Returning to the QM and Mind idea, where this kind of thinking goes is into a quantum psychology, that is, a way of looking at the world as composed of bits of information that our awareness processes. When you are doing a retrieval, other people may localize your body in the familiar world, but where you yourself are going is into a "place" we call the "Astral World" because it is a "place" in which the laws of reality are radically changed. That is, your "self", the part that exists when the body falls off, is actually experiencing a different reality. And it's a Real reality. The problem is to explain it, just as the Buddhist monks, ancient Hindu Rishis and so on had to do.

Without going into terrible details and math, there are two general ideas in quantum psych: discrete information, and force fields.

A discrete idea is any mental concept that can be discriminated, such as, "Hmmm, it's morning." We assemle thoughts by putting these ideas together. For example, putting together the idea of a couple wheels, some rods, a few sticks and a basket, plus a roll of duct tape, we can create the idea of a shopping cart. (Or a number of less useful things.) This gives an exact model of the growth of scientific knowledge, growth of our ability to learn to cope with the world, and so on.

Force fields include gravitation, an everyday experience, that arises from the fact that things are more stable when they can combine than when they must remain separate.

A digression into math - Archibald Wheeler and other relativistic cosmologists might object to this, but the cause of gravitation and related combinatorical tendencies is easily shown by comparing the probability of an intellectual object A, when initially presented in the set  A and B, as compared with the probability of A when in the set that includes the combination of A and B, AB.  The probability of A in (A, B) is 50%. The prob of A in (A, B, AB) is 67%.  The increased probability is 17%. In this case, A and B are information, entropy, the definitions that we relate to locations in experiential space as observable properties of stuff that we perceive, whether it's a brick or a thought about beauty. Thus, it can arise as a collection of potentialities, and does not require a material Guy-in-the-sky to create it.

Physical space is defined by the various combinations and probabilites, assembled so that a definite structure occurs. A probability is experienced as a force that urges something to occur.  The forces we experience, gravity, momentum etc, arise so as to define the way our world operates. In addition, there are other forces, such as the force of attraction at about noon between you and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The separation of things in physics deals with the curvature of physical space, and the separation in everyday life deals with the "curvature" of experiential space.

All this stuff can be expressed with wonderfully elegant and confusing mathematics. However, the bottom line is that it means that there is no difference between the "Self" and Thought, and the Sun and Planets, or the Universe and Alternate Realities etc. It's all one thing. That is the brief answer to physics, QM and thinking.

As someone pointed out, there's Astronomers, and there's Astronaughts. The academic circles are full of "Astronomers", but this chat line is made up of "Astronaughts". I salute you all.

dave

nice thread here you started Lucy, and I finally got around to reading about the monk/teacher who roller blades across campus, robes flying in the breeze..just the image itself would tend to enlighten me or lighten me up, one or the other. I titled the topic a little differently for my own purposes and to blather away here, although I will never blather so well as Dave, who has 30 years on me studying physics. I have been making efforts to bridge the gap between Q.P. and religious terminology, spirit and body, heaven and earth, etc. for just a few years...so far I'm like Dave, to say, you can talk all you want and put words on it, yet words are twice removed from whatever reality is, but putting your feet where your mouth is to test theory is what speaks the loudest...I have not seen "what the bleep." it's on my list "must do." but the tv show quantum leap, of this guy jumping into many different bodies and time frames is more than a great fantasy to me.  funny, he keeps saying "is my last leap going to take me home? poor guy. must be paying off karma or something. a lot of people seem to be expressing that they'd like to go home; then when they get home, they want to come back here. geez. make up your mind already! lol.

when I try to understand science I look at people who reconstruct the torn off corner of a photo; somehow they can reconstruct the entire photo from making a negative first of the torn piece. the pattern for the entire photo is there, although invisible to the naked eye. its not floating in the air..hmm. the piece contains the whole. so one thought can contain the whole. a moment could contain eternity in poetic terms, so in religious terms then, the totality of humankind and animal life equals up to be the sum total of God. ha ha! it's all sheer trickery I tell u! just joking around but everything is funny to me these days. I can be a real pain you know where to my more serious friends. Einstein said (I'm not into equations much) "imagination is more important than knowledge." I do believe, as concerns the mind of man, that he is right! because imagination is the forerunner of reality or manifestation of something concrete that can be experienced with the 5 senses we start out with. then when Dave said this forum is at the cutting edge of discovery, I know he is correct.

one thing I wonder about also, about force fields..it's not part of my vocabulary Dave..maybe you can drop a hint. perhaps a force field is like the gravity of the earth which keeps us from floating away? or what about people who walk on coals? perhaps they have created a mental force field of suspension of doubt around the soles of the feet? hee. I notice they run awful fast across them.   I do believe in it though. thanks for your input Dave. I really am trying to learn something!

Maybe I'm sort of a corollary to the buddhist philosophy. I don't seem to understand anything unless I experience it first. That includes physics. I thought the definition of force fields was bonkers, and those magnets kept me sane.

So Dave I'm very murky on what all this means awareness is. Do probabilites exist before awareness or the other way? But that is always the question...which is the meta state, or can we even find it.

So many questions in my head...better to try to focus on one or two. So some part of me is looking at my own awareness and trying to understand it better. There are different ways to focus and I guess I haven't meditated enough because I have only a passing understanding of that or how to use it or how to choose which way to focus at will. So there are many flavors of focus. Focusing on intense pleasure or pain, or focusing on something very close to the face, or the way one un-focuses while doing something repititious while either daydreaming or agitating about something else, or the way one might try to focus on senfing thoughts or energy or PUL and the way it feels when it "works" and the way it feels when it doesn't. My mind can focus/unfocus in so many ways. I'm not sure what I want to be working on or how to know I'm accomplishing it.

So in relationship to QM what does it mean to focus attention?

Quote:



you're cool Lucy. hee. u were really busy this morn I see! suppose Pul is a force field. then suppose it's opposite is also a force field. then suppose like attracts like...as in fear generates more fear, love generates more love. how can we tie this concept into the force field of a magnet? because here we see the north and south pole (opposites attracting?) and like repelling like.
hmm, hmm, and hmmm.
I don't think Pul is a force field exactly. because according to ACIM love has no opposite, because, maybe, just maybe PUL encompasses All That Is. and is a nuetral creative type stuff. it judges not. just accepts everything as a part of itself.

does it generate itself? it seems everything generates itself; darn cockroaches!

didn't u ask above the same question about which came first; the egg or the chicken, when u asked do probabilities exist before awareness or the other way around? I'd say the possibility existed first, then the probability, then the chicken came along. but that answers nothing. ACIM has a type of answer to this question in that it says we are a "thought" of God. before you pull your hair out, God is just like a basket. into this basket we toss all our unanswered questions and say it's all up to God. except people like you and me are never satisfied to be using God as a catch-all phrase. we're too curious. actually, I wasn't sure whether to be insulted to consider myself as a mere thought of some being, yet I had to admit maybe I was made out of thought-stuff. what is thought stuff? it hurts to even think about it! ha ha! so it's back to that pure awareness idea. or the probe idea. that works too. I think what we are in the midst of is redefining God by redefining ourselves. A friend has a catchy term, she calls PUL the All Pervading Intelligence. kinda reminds me of pure balanced awareness. I like the term creative stuff although that is highly unscientific I suppose. along with the probe idea, is the thought that there is limited perspective and unlimited perspective, but it is all one, huge glob of humanity, all connected by PUL.

btw, you are precisely correct one needs to experience it or it cannot be believed with any certainty; only experience appears as a trustworthy barometer.

usually proof of whatever comes through one of the five senses of the body. if it comes through the poorly developed and little known 6th sense, nobody will believe you but you will believe yourself.

this is a cool exercise; try imagining what your life force feels like as you mentally move this energy up through your feet and out your head and circle it back. see if you can feel it moving. I tried to sense it and it tingled, stopped at the knees, had to work it a little harder then. it's a good exercise to become aware of the body, though. kinda trippy!

love and light

Marsha- if I've said anything worth saving or quoting, you're welcome to it.

OK, a force field is a general tendency that involves some kind of focal point, that place it comes from, and also is sensed by some other object that responds to it. For example, in the evening my wife comes into the bedroom in something mildly shocking and I feel a strong urge to go very near to her. Or, my coffe cup occasionally has an urge to visit the floor. Or, a cookie jar tends to act in a magnetic manner for a two year old (or for me, for that matter). 

The field extends as far as it can be sensed, so if I don't see the cookie jar it doesn't affect me, but I still might break my cup if I drop it, even though I can't see the ground.

Pretend for a moment that you were very tiny and lived inside a ping-pong ball, and you were dropped into a bag along with another ping-pong ball in which there lived another tiny being, and in addition there's a giant who comes by and periodically reaches into the bag and grabs. Now let's see what kind of space you'd like to inhabit. If you two lived in a space in which there was never a way to take two balls out of the bag at a time, you and your friend would only get to see the outside world 50% of the time, because only one of you could be pulled out of the bag at a time. That kind of space is called "non-additive" because you can't add things together.

Now let's allow the giant to grab one, the other, or both of the ping-pog balls. Assuming that he can't tell one from two, there  would be about one third of the time when he grabbed you, on third of the time when he grabbed your friend, and one third of the time when he grabbed both of you. That means that both of you would have a 2/3 thirds chance of looking around. That kind of space is additive, things can be grouped into bunches.

Now let's go back to the Instant of Creation. As Edgar Cayce put it, first was Light, then there was chaos. Without the gory logical details, everything that could potentially have been created, and in every conceivable way all the stuff might ever be put together is all expressed as the total potentiality inthe first instant.  It's an expanding wave of potentiality. In a sense it's an expanding bunch of energies to become everything in every possible way. These potentialities include patterns that relate to one another in the ame way as atoms and molecules and the stuff that could be interpreted as a world, universe etc. That's the chaos.

In this expanding stuff, all of the possible patterns occur at once in a space that has not as yet been given any dmensional definition. All possible worlds at once. Some of those possible worlds contain all the parts required to have a personal viewpoint inside a ping-pong ball. The "viewpoint" is the creative tendency that caused the Creation, except that it now finds points within this expanding stuff at which it might locate itself to some degree. So the viewpoint retains the same potentiality, and it manifests its potentiality by making choices by attaching itself to the universes that it likes the best. Since the viewpoint doesn't want to be forever cooped up in a ping-pong ball with no friends, it chooses the additive space in which things can come together to make new things.  This tendency to put prior things together to make new ones is called gravity. It is a force field powered by our choice of a world in which things go from a less probable to a more probable condition. And it occurs because by having it, the viewpoint of God, the Creator, or the Primal Vacuum Energy if you prefer, is able to select this as the place to hang out.

It's all a matter of choice. When we view gravity as the choice of God-Mind to exist in this space through its billions of fragmented individual selves, it is no different than saying that there is a force field emenating from my mouth that draws me to the cookie jar.

I personally like this approach because it gives two sides to the same image of creation. One side says that everything is a cosmic accident in which we are simply the most likely result, as compared to all the other ways to exist (all of which are available as images in the astral and dream spaces) and all we are is convoluted wrinkles of probability in potential space. The other perspective is that it all happens because given an infiinte range of potentiality, the Infinitely Potential One has chosen this as the best place in which to do Its thing, so that all we ae is the Will of God, manifested in a tangible form.

And, since you're God, you can have it either way or both ways, or even think up another way if you prefer.

d