From the Buddhist "Flower Adornment" or "Flower Wreath" Sutra:
Quote:
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There is nothing to say about life. It has no meaning. You make meaning. If you want a meaning in your life, find a meaning and bring it into your life, but life won't give you a meaning. Meaning is a concept. It is a notion of an end toward which you are going. The point of buddhism is this is it |
It's from a teaching where a buddha simply held up a flower. I want to add that I only mildly consider myself a buddhist. Only in the sense that the name means enlightened to the illusion of the world.
The self MUST be a delusion.
A doctor opens up a patient's skull on an operating table to take out a tumor or repair a blood vessel. He stimulates parts of the brain in order to map out his location. The person behaves outside of their own control from their perspective. Memories are brought to the surface, motor function is activated, higher functions (like speech) are modified.
In the same way that the doctor applies a probing current with a wire, every sensory neuron in your body offers identical connections into your brain. Your eye, for examples, branches 10 million little wires into your brain that connect in a complex manner to stimulate very specific areas of your cortex on the back surface of your brain.
Vision is identical to stimulating the visual cortex with picture information. I can give you references to papers on medical procedures where electrode arrays are implanted on the visual cortex and the visual field is stimulated in blind patients. One study I saw on CNN and this guy could drive a car around cones in a parking lot and was totally blind.
All experience is based on the fact that your perception is not on the level of complexity of your inputs. Try zooming in on a painting. All you'd see is the bits and details of the paint particles. Zoom out, and you can interpret an image. It's the same idea. We are the higher functions of our neocortex. We are the zoomed out results of higher analysis and integrations of hundreds of millions of tiny electrochemical signals that arrive at the brain in the same way that the brain surgeon maps out his location and produces behaviors out of your control.
The difference is, that instead of 1 electrode zapping around, you have hundreds of millions of wires leading into your brain sending in information about the world around you.
It's amazingly complex and wonderful to realize.
We are no more in ULTIMATE control of our daily activities than we are in control of our bodies when the doctor is stimulating our muscles directly through pathways from the brain.
But
we or
I does not make any sense without the sense of control that is our central delusion. Ideas exist as much as you want them to. I'm not trying to suggest that you can believe food into existence. I'm saying that nothing exists in the sense that we think it does. There is no
me in ultimate reality. I am a delusion. It can't be any other way just by the sheer volume of observations that neuroscientists and neurosurgeons provide.
I don't know about existence in an ultimate sense. But I know that what we must be experiencing as self is ultimately a delusion. The difference between you and me is a delusion. Just because my skin doesn't enfold your nervous system doesn't mean that we're somehow different processes.
Birth, death, fear, desire, love, hate, god, money, language, self are all delusions.
The point is to pick which delusions to live by. To pick your meaning. Make it part of your own and turn this free fall through life into a swan dive instead of flailing about screaming.
But you need a means by which to select your delusions. Self is first for obvious reasons. There is no you to "pick" delusions without that first one. It is the foundation.
Beyond that, you can be indoctrinated into another delusion (as many are at birth and throughout life). You can stumble upon some other doctrine or have it shown to you by an individual. You can interpret coincidences in terms of a doctrine and swallow that. These are all dogma delusions that fit with god.
Or, you can break it down to simply the self. And then a utilitarian and empirical selection of other delusions. Love, for example because it seems so harmonious with the delusion of self. You connect with the delusion of another self. Money and language, for example, can be good to accept for a similar reason as accepting love.
Just realize that all along, humans haven't had this realization so readily apparent. Adam and eve were cast into the human condition by the illusion of good and evil (i.e. eating of the tree). This realization of choice and opposites was the original story of the delusion of duality and how consciousness arose. The story is expressed differently in many other cultures, but this is the western expression in the bible.
But now, science has simply realized what was there all along. That it truly is a delusion. It's put words on this realization that ultimately we are truly free of original sin (the entering of delusions into our lives). So then what is left is what the buddhists do. Joyful participation in the suffering of the world. It's what jesus embodied.
That same sutra that I quoted above describes an image called "the jeweled net of Indra." It is an image of an infinate array of jewels in all directions in space. Each jewel is polished such that it reflects every other jewel in the net perfectly. So every jewel is a reflection of every other jewel.
It's a beautiful expression of an idea that has been around for millenia and is finally getting true teeth in our detailed observations that science makes possible.
What exists is the universe. If you think your something other than a flower that has budded up out of that root then this is a delusion.
If you think that a creator god monitors your deeds as an independent self in this world and punishes or rewards you for all eternity in the afterlife, then this is an illusion too. It's a powerful illusion just as the self is VERY powerful. It is a motivation for behavior as the self. This god is very real in the behaviors that he motivates. VERY real.
And given that there's no ultimate choice anyway, you can't ultimately blame people for any of their delusions. What is is what is. This is the ultimate realization. That, and "thou art that." What you see is part of what you are.
Western religions are clearly illusions in the mind of man. What this realization of modern neuroscience allows us to do is empirically approach the delusion and pick those parts that feed our most essential delusion (self). This is the goal of all life then. Self preservation.
This is not the goal of life for any specific meaning. It is only the goal of life because objects without this goal don't exist (for the obvious reason that they don't preserve themselves). There is nothing saying that you have to have this goal.
Live life and enjoy it. But have the realization that it is not ultimately meaningful. I think this realization will bring harmony to people in the future. I think that it is coming no matter what we do and that there is already a large paradigm shift approaching relating to this realization. Why kill in the name of your delusion? Why hate and embrace strife for "rewards" in an afterlife that is delusion?
It's the ultimate expression of carpe diem. Living here and now.
Modern engineering is becoming more and more integrated with yesterday's biology forming new fields. We realize that the sciences that we've applied to develop technology that is changing the face of the world is in no way different from what we are as individuals. The underlying principles are the same.
My PhD will be in the field of Biophysics at Cornell (I'm finishing this semester) and I was the first funded student at the first Congressional National Nanotechnology initiative institution relating to hybridization of nanotech with biology (Cornell's Nanobiotechnology center). It's what I'm dipped deep in and it oozes from my pores. I got undergraduate degrees in electrical engineering and physics and my focus in my biophysics PhD has been on instrumentation to integrate engineering analysis methods into neuroscience. Just to give a little taste of my background and how it relates to the realization of the above statements.
Communicating it in this manner makes me so excited because it's so real and such a beautiful realization in the face of so much sectarian and cultural conflict in an ever more interconneted world.
Just realize that ultimately I am just a silly little flapping sack of meat in the wind and that all that schooling that I've been through is another extension of the process that causes the rise of every other individual from the oppressed minds of middle eastern radical islam to the middle american farmer to Hitler and back to Ghandi. It's divinity in all things and all people. That's what Namaste is about in my signature.
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