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This is a phrase that is used often in Buddhist liturgy and today a team of physicists has claimed that our view of the early Universe may contain the signature of a time before the Big Bang.

The discovery comes from studying the cosmic microwave background (CMB), light emitted when the Universe was just 400,000 years old. Their model may help explain why we experience time moving in a straight line from yesterday into tomorrow. Their model also suggests that new universes could be created spontaneously from apparently empty space. They even suggest that from inside the parent universe, the event would be surprisingly unspectacular [1].

Buddha taught that our perception of time is a merely a localized reference that depends entirely upon our own observation - time unfolds in dependence upon our mind - and Buddhist scholars and lineage holders have been expounding this truth for nearly 1500 years!

In the Prajna Paramita (Heart of Wisdom and Perfection of Wisdom Sutras), Bodhisattva Avalokitshvara explains to Sariputra that all things and phenomena, even time itself, arise out of emptiness, and that with the perfection of wisdom, we can come to fully realize this. Now we have modern evidence to suggest that this may indeed be the ultimate nature of reality - form is emptiness and emptiness is form [2]. Shantideva, in the ninth chapter of the Bodhicharyāvatāra, demonstrates the difference between conventional and ultimate truth, and how we may perfect our wisdom realizing emptiness [3].

Over the centuries, great Mahayana scholars have elucidated the meaning of the Perfection of Wisdom Sutras in their commentaries. In “Ocean of Nectar”, where Geshe Kelsang Gyatso continues this noble tradition by providing an explanation of Chandrakirti’s famous commentary Guide to the Middle Way, we can see this understanding brought full circle as Geshe Kelsang explains with breathtaking clarity, the logic upon which this can be proven, even without modern technology, by realizing the true nature of our own mind. [4]

It has been demonstrated by the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas (and now the scientists) that all things arise from, and dissolve into;

e m p t i n e s s . . .

This is why it is also said that NOW is the time to turn the wheel of Dharma to realize our true nature and full human potential!

OM AH HUM

[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7440217.stm
[2] http://www.thebigview.com/buddhism/emptiness.html
[3] http://www.shantideva.net/guide_ch9.htm
[4] http://kadampa.org/en/books/ocean-of-nectar

. . .W o W . . .

(reposted from a tribe discussion)

Forgive me if this is long…

First a bit of context. I have spent the past year recovering and living with the results of unfinished business regarding major surgery to remove life threatening tumors and nearly died in the process. It has been contrary to what many people might think, a very affirmational experience that I consider a great blessing. I have realized both renunciation and bodhichitta throughout the ordeal. Tomorrow, one year to the day, they open me back up for six hours or so to reverse an colonostomy, perform radio-thermal oblation on three metastasis in my liver, and repair an eight inch herniated scar from the last surgery. I have supreme faith in all three surgeons who will be performing ‘yet another days work’ on my behalf. During the past month I have been preparing myself for another potential brush with mortality by engaging in retreat at my local Dharma Center, preparing a proper will, and debating ideals of free will and determinism with y’all here on Tribe. Its been to quote my son; ‘All Good’. (except when my delusions get in the way ;) During this retreat I have been almost exclusively studying the topic of emptiness in order to develop a strong conceptual understanding of it and in particular how it relates to wisdom and the mind itself.

Tonight, I had a strange phenomenon occur that might fit in with our discussion here.

As I prepared for sleep, I re-read several passages from The Bodhicaryavatara Chapter IX: The Perfection of Wisdom for perhaps the hundredth time and then prayed to the Buddha Avalokiteshvara that I might have a direct experience of this wisdom realizing emptiness. I gathered my winds in the central channel as I have been instructed, witnessed clear light mind, and then into deep sleep. I awoke two hours later when my partner became very startled that a book had fallen off the shelf, landing on my forehead. I was not startled at all but picked it up, glanced at the cover, and placed it back on the shelf where it was before. It was The Bodhicaryavatara! It was a moment that I can only describe as precognition why I was not startled, reacted calmly, ‘knowing’ what had happened.

So I posit, what to ‘believe’ from this event:

a) Newton was right.
b) My wife is a light sleeper.
c) I read too much.
d) Everything becomes emptiness.
e) My wish was fulfilled.
f) Tribing is a meaningless activity.
g) All of the above.
h) Some of the above.
i) None of the above.
j) There is no ‘correct’ answer listed.

Anyhow, the passages…

96. It is impossible for consciousness, which has no form, to have contact; nor is it possible for a composite, because it is not a truly existent thing, as investigated earlier.

97. Thus, when there is no contact, how can feeling arise? What is the reason for this exertion? Who can be harmed by what?

98. If there is no one to experience feeling and if feeling does not exist, then after understanding this situation, why, oh craving, are you not shattered?

99. The mind that has a dream-like and illusion-like nature sees and touches. Since feeling arises together with the mind, it is not perceived by the mind.

100. What happens earlier is remembered but not experienced by what arises later. It does not experience itself, nor is it experienced by something else.

101. There is no one who experiences feeling. Hence, in reality, there is no feeling. Thus, in this identity-less bundle, who can be hurt by it?

102. The mind is not located in the sense facilities, or in form and other sense-objects, or in between them. The mind is also not found inside, or outside, or anywhere else.

103. That which is not in the body nor anywhere else, neither intermingled nor somewhere separate, is nothing. Therefore, sentient beings are by nature liberated.

104. If cognition is prior to the object of cognition, in dependence on what does it arise? If cognition is simultaneous with the object of cognition, in dependence on what does it arise?

105. If it arises after the object of cognition, from what would cognition arise? In this way it is ascertained that no phenomenon comes into existence.

106. Objection: If conventional truth does not exist, how can there be the two truths? If it does exist due to another conventional truth, how can there be a liberated sentient being?

107. Madhyamika: One is an ideation of someone else’s mind, and one does not exist by one’s own conventional truth. After something has been ascertained, it exists; if not, it does not exist as a conventional reality either.

108. The two, conception and the conceived, are mutually dependent; just as every analysis is expressed by referring to what is commonly known.

Venus (my ruling planet) has been in retrograde in Virgo (my ascendant) and Mars is about to go retro in Cancer (my moon)…

H O L Y S H I T ! !

This explains a lot though I make no excuses for my behavior. Only I can control the afflictions of my mind. Samsara sucks…

I found the end of the internet today!

In one of history’s more absurd acts of totalitarianism, China has banned Buddhist monks in Tibet from reincarnating without government permission…the law effectively gives Chinese authorities the power to choose the next Dalai Lama, whose soul, by tradition, is reborn as a new human to continue the work of relieving suffering.

A wood fire deserves “direct perception”? [from J.Krishnamurti] ~ Zentences

A friend forwarded this along today; an essay on cognitive bias and why what you think is right is wrong. We Buddhists don’t need twenty-six reasons, only one; our minds are filled with delusions that keep us from perceiving reality as it really is. Still, it’s an interesting read and nice to see that the scientists are finding the same truths as the gurus. All is one after all…

My first exposure to Colin Wilson was reading The Outsider (not to be confused with The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton) as an assigned book in high school. It resonated with me as I was pretty much the ‘lone wolf’ then, and now. Then twenty years later I stumbled upon him again reading the The Space Vampires, which was also filmed in 1985 as the movie Lifeforce, under which name it has also been reprinted. I somehow didn’t make the connection then that it was the same Colin Wilson as I am terrible at remembering names of authors. Recently I have been reading a lot of work around the psychology, cognitive science, and existentialism, mostly because I don’t agree with much of existentialist philosophy, and I see it embraced time and time again as a rationalized excuse to under perform as beings. This kind of ‘back burner’ research led me to Wilson again via his Essay on the ‘New’ Existentialism. Wilson, by his own admission, makes the same point over and over again in all his books.

The human mind tricks itself into under performance.  Humans too easily fall prey to unnecessary defeatism.  Certain kinds of experience trigger our full capabilities, e.g., on receiving surprise good news we get a sudden surge of enthusiasm, optimism and meaning.  When we are threatened, we suddenly spark into action.

Now, once again, Wilson’s words have resonated with my own experience as I was able to relate this idea to my own life course over the past few years and how it took a ‘threatening event’ to spark me into the action of turning my life around.

I feel that this has been a very natural, almost intuitive, attraction to his work and ideas that are echoed in an essay/interview between Wilson and Jeffrey Mishlove Ph.D. That I came across on google yesterday. Particularly the following dialog regarding the possibility of ’something greater’ working in our lives.

MISHLOVE: It’s as if, if we are willing to acknowledge the possibility of something greater, we open ourselves up to it, and we can experience that.

WILSON: I think it’s more than simply acknowledging the possibility of something greater. I think that we recognize that in our own depths we possess enormous reserves of strength of which we are normally totally unaware. This is what fascinates me. This is obviously what happened to the romantics. They just had these bubbling experiences of power coming up from their own depths, and were startled by this. And what’s more interesting, I’ve noticed again and again when you experience a sense of power coming from your own depths, you are likely to feel that in some way it’s coming from the external universe, because it so transforms the universe — like Van Gogh’s vision of the starry night, with all the stars turning into great whirlpools of force and the trees looking as if they’re flames rising toward the sky — it so transforms it that it appears to be an external vision.

This is how my life feels these days. it is tapping into that energy that exists within each and every one of us, unlimited human potential, that often manifests as though it were an outside force or coincidence. Jung calls it synchronicity. In Sanskrit it is Atman; the ’soul’ or underlying metaphysical self. In Buddhism, the concept of Atman is the prime consequence of ignorance, – itself the cause of all misery - the foundation of Samsara itself.

Now, twenty-two years after reading The Outsider, I am finding new meaning and inspiration from the work of Colin Wilson and seeing that there it is possible for existentialism and Dharma to coincide. I am also finding Wilson’s “Spider World” trilogy great fuel for the D&D campaign I run for my children!

Sometimes, sudden as an afternoon thunderstorm, one realizes that they are in fact possessing a great deal of Karma to be worked though, burned off, left behind. Clearing the way for accumulating, new growth, rebirth…life is strange.