Daydreaming I walk the Moebius band.
The road lies ahead. I look back on the road behind. Underneath others walk on the same road probably unaware of me or indifferent. I pass houses shops people I know and people I don’t know. There are trees, sign-posts, the church steeple, clouds. I have my take on all this but it is there also for anyone else, for everybody. It is for seeing, hearing, touching smelling,– and for knowing. I have my possibilities and my limitations like everyone else but we are all invited to the same entertainment. Or are we? Seeing, hearing etc. and knowing are not so simple, it seems. To understand what is going on scientists have uncovered causes and processes that are the hidden part of this entertainment. Atoms, molecules, neurones, genes and other secretive entities are the real producers of the show. In the vastness of the night I believe I see the stars as I see the trees but the light of each star left its source ages ago, perhaps a hundred, perhaps a thousand, perhaps a million years ago. Do I see them or do I just seem to see them? Walking the moebius band I think about this, trying to picture the world I live in. But after a short time my thoughts drift.
I am aware as I walk through the village many things are there I don’t see, hear or touch. Thoughts, intentions, memories, purposes, dreams, feelings of sympathy, antipathy, of contentment, of envy, of suspicion of gratitude etc. are all there but I directly know little about them although body gestures, faces and speech invite me to their presence. These invisible elements are nevertheless as much part of the village as the visible. In fact the visible things like buildings, content of shops, gardens, homes, trees and hedges are there because of past or present invisibles. All the more this acquaintance who walks towards me is, if I may express it, saturated with invisibilities. If I explore further I will find that his or her concoction of invisible elements are interwoven, shaped and structured around a sense of difference, of identity, of belonging. Of attachment and detachment. Of beliefs and disbeliefs. My acquaintance is an atheist or a Muslim or a Christian, a Socialist or a Tory. All invisible in spite of some outward signs. The invisible, that is consciousness in all its individual experiences is a large part of my village.
A geometric plane has no thickness. The feet on one side of the moebius band touch feet on the other. Likewise the visible touches the invisible. Unaware , the science of matter walks with the science of consciousness. But not always, for there is a new awareness in our time. For some years physicists and neuroscientists have been debating with Buddhist monks in search of common ground. ‘Mind and Life’ conferences have brought together experts in scientific disciplines and the Dalai Lama and other Buddhist experts in mind disciplines. The conference on the New Physics and Cosmology now in a printed form edited by Professor Arthur Zajonc clarifies the challenges and the legitimacy of such encounters. What brings these two groups together is an astonishing story. On the one hand are the startling discoveries in physics which began more than a century ago and on the other hand is the emigration of the Dalai Lama and followers to India resulting from the Chinese occupation of Tibet. The physics is a mathematical mystery for most of us. The inner world of a Buddhist monk may also be remote for us. However a brief description of the discoveries which have shaken our understanding of the world is given in this report and to these the Dalai Lama and his colleagues bring their thinking disciplined by long practice of meditation.
What is known as the double-slit experiment in quantum physics gives one an idea of the strange questions that scientists deal with. Here is the link to a description of the experiment you can find on YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h53PCmEMAGo
Whether light can be thought of as a particle or as a wave has been argued over almost since the beginning of modern science. The experiment throws a paradox. Light seems to travel through space as a wave but when we detect it it appears as a particle. Experiments with a single particle are possible and reveal an increasingly baffling situation:
Results are determined by the way instruments are set up and used.
The observer is involved to some extent in the results.
Particles move unpredictably without cause and yet they are the foundation on which a patterned world rests where all events have a cause.
Basic assumptions of how the world we perceive behaves have to be discarded in the sub-atomic world. It is like facing the void.
In the consciousness of the Buddhist monk there is the concept ‘emptiness’. The dialogue in the conference is the bridge between the experimental investigation of the sense world in which mathematics is applied to the mechanisms of nature and the study of the life of consciousness based on a long tradition and intense practice of contemplation. How productive can this dialogue be? That it happens is a positive event in in a schizoid world. Dialogue if it takes place in openness is not measured by its productivity. The search must engage the nature of the human being who is both observer and contemplator.
