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reprinted from Peaceful Fire Journal, February 19, 2009
I was listening to His Holiness, the 14th Dalai Lama, in the Four Noble Truths presentation that I posted a couple of days ago. He made the point that the first principle of Buddhist thinking is the principle of dependent origination, and in particular the principle of causation. Within this framework, everything that "exists" does so as the result of something that existed before it. Our minute-to-minute "reality", with all of its' arising causes and conditions, is impelled into existence by something pushing from behind, and in turn, as it shoves its' way through time, causes the onrushing future. As a result of this says His Holiness, the world of apparent existence that occupies our daily lives, is in fact empty of inherent meaning.
Then His Holiness made the point that the principle of dependent origination gives rise to two negations. First, that nothing comes out of nothing, negating the concept of a first cause. And second, because there is no first cause, any concept of a creator God is negated. (Interestingly, Saint Thomas Aquinas follows a similar line of reasoning to arrive at the opposite conclusion; that each event of existence is caused by the one before it until one reaches the first cause, which is God...well, there's no accounting for tastes).
With regard to the second negation, I had a feeling that something was up when someone sneezed at a Jewel Heart meeting, and no one said "God Bless You."
Just kidding. Actually these were the principles that attracted me to Buddhism in the first place. When I was coming up, the expectations of the so-called Judeo-Christian tradition seemed to require belief in a series of magical tricks, which made it impossible for me to remain a Christian practitioner after the onset of the age of reason. Buddhism seemed to offer relief from this expectation, and His Holiness confirms that the very hallmark of Buddhism is a negation of non-rational theories of origination. It was while I was in a crisis of faith regarding the existence of God and the nature of Christ, that Buddhism became available to me and filled a need for achieving a deeper understanding of existence, without the irrational expectations that I found alienating. It also provided an ethical framework for living within society that promoted human unity, justice and non-violence.
As described in an earlier post, at a certain point in my life, my rigid rationalism gave way to the demonstrated power existing within the subtle realm, the gateway to which is to be found only within the perceptive ability of human consciousness...as far as we know. Within this realm, the drama of visionary experience contains much that is anthropomorphic in its' apparent nature, leaving it vulnerable to psychological interpretation. (An example might be the eternal dance of Yamma, the Tibetan Lord of Death.) But, it also contains much that seems successfully descriptive of the more complex and subtle forms of spiritual existence one would expect to find in a natural realm coexistent with the universe as described by a modern understanding of cosmology.
It will remain forever true for myself that the God of the Old Testament, the Creator God of Genesis, is an impossibility. The logic traps of fundamentalism just do not work for me.
However, I cannot imagine a universe without consciousness, and I cannot imagine that consciousness is bound by its relationship to physical existence; indeed, His Holiness asserts that it is not. The basis for the Buddhist belief in reincarnation, he says, lies in the realization that matter and consciousness are separate and distinct. Matter, he says, cannot create consciousness. And consciousness cannot create matter.
Currently, a furious debate is unfolding in the scientific community, on the question of whether or not the mind exists independent of the brain. The question is of interest to psychologists, neurosurgeons and others who have professional cause to wonder about it. The debate is the subset of a debate - or is it a war? - between the Darwinian strict constructionists, and the stealth creationists of the intelligent design camp. I don't want into that fight; when rigid tautological battle lines are drawn, I tend to run for cover.
It is true however, that the world of science is searching for an explanation of how the brain creates the mind, and has yet to find one.
Buddhism, as expressed by His Holiness and the other enlightened beings, by negating the concept of a creator God, expressing the principle of dependent origination, and observing that matter and consciousness exist independently, opens the door to the realm in which we exist when we don't exist as inhabitants of physical matter.
As advanced as Buddhist thinking is from my perspective, and especially as compared to the relatively primitive fundamentalist religion of my youth, its' accomplishments become even more remarkable when one realizes that the concepts of Buddhism, which seem to fit so comfortably within the scientific model of quantum physics and the expanding universe, is actually 2,600 years old and came into existence at a time when the prevalent vision of the cosmos was of a flat world of earth with a dome of sky, riding on the back of a tortoise. The stars were perceived as little leaks of light exposing the sun in its hiding place behind the night.
The birth of Christianity led to belief in a world of faith, with human sinners struggling on earth, below a chorus of cloud-dwelling angels, archangels and saints in a universe consisting of an flat earth orbited by the sun the stars and the abode of God in Heaven. It has been a slow and difficult journey since then, for priests asserting their authority and theologians their understanding of God, within the unfolding knowledge of science regarding the nature and origins of the universe.
The understanding of the universe common in the years of my childhood, was influenced by the science of Einstein.* In those days, we were in the midst of a debate about whether the universe had existed for eternity in a "steady-state," or had exploded and was expanding. We did not know in 1950 that Einstein had already discovered that the universe was expanding when he wrote the General Theory of Relativity, in 1905. But it seemed counter-intuitive to him, so he assumed that his math was wrong and fudged his figures. Strange, but true.
In 1926, Edwin Hubble was looking at the stars through his telescope (Mount Palomar), and noticed that the light from certain stars had shifted into the red portion of the spectrum, indicating that the wavelength was increasing. His observation, which became known as "Hubble's Law," was that the shift in the light wavelength from a distant object, to the red portion of the light spectrum, increased proportionate to the distance of the object from Earth. This led Hubble to the realization that the object was moving away from the earth, and that the universe was therefore expanding. It was a monumental discovery; embarrassing for Einstein, and a big surprise for the rest of us, although it took about 30 years for the news to reach the west side of Cleveland.
The realization of an expanding universe leads to the further insight that the universe has not existed in its' present form since eternity as previously believed, but was created by a single catastrophic event occurring a short 15 billion years ago - a factoid from which we can derive not only the age of our universe, but its' approximate size as well. Imagine a space roughly the shape of a flattened globe with a radius of 15 billion light years, and you've got it.
In modern time, the scientific journey of discovery was also taken in the other direction; to the universe existing within the structure of matter. The understanding of matter that I had as a child was probably not much different from that of a child living in ancient Greece. We shared a belief in atoms as the smallest of things. And atoms, we believed are little solar systems of unimaginably tiny elemental planets. As it appeared, the same understanding that we applied to how the sun and the planets functioned in the solar system, could equally be applied to an understanding of the sub-atomic world.
Not so we found out; apparently things at the level of particle physics are chaotic, and the same sets of rules do not apply. Strangely...and quite poetically, when we get to the center of sub-atomic particles, with their positive and negative energies exquisitely balanced in a dance of strong and weak forces, we find, not the tiny elemental worlds we expected, but vibrating strings of energy spelling out the illusion of matter.
The very illusions perhaps that His Holiness refers to when he speaks of the negation of intrinsic existence.
Our growing scientific knowledge carries us ever forward, into the heart of the mystery of existence. And what God do we carry forward with us on this journey of discovery? The God of Abraham, Issac and Jacob. The god that spoke to us when civilization was young, and the world was a disc, riding on the back of a tortoise. We have good reason to do so, we believe. The bonifides of the God that led Moses through the wilderness, were confirmed more recently - a mere 20 centuries ago - by someone whose trustworthiness is impeccable; the son of the living God.
But will our limited ability to understand the vast realms to which we have been introduced in the last 100 years, allow us to meld our understanding of the God of the Old Testament, with our understanding of a universe expanding toward infinity in two directions? Toward the external infinity of the universe of stars, planets and galaxies in one direction, and the infinitely small universe of matter in the other? If so, can we call it God, with any sort of insight or understanding of what we mean when we use this term? It is apparent to me that my poor powers of imagination fail to give rise to a vision of a consciousness so vast that it can rule so great a realm. Depends on the definition of "rule" no doubt.
Remarkably, in pointing the way back in time to the "Big Bang" science has given us a place mark of fundamental value, a tool to be used in our struggle to reconcile ancient myth and modern knowledge in our search for understanding. It has revealed the manner and the moment of our creation. Has it also revealed at least the shadow of the Lord of Creation?
Before Einstein and Hubble, we didn't have a point from which time is reckoned. We lived in a world that had always been, in a universe that would remain forever the same...ticking it's way through eternity like the elegant timepiece of Jefferson's understanding. Even Einstein believed it; so much so that he fudged his numbers rather than change his mind.
Creation myths abound in man's ancient memory, but none of them compare to the story of the Great Explosion, before which is only the shadow of mystery, and after which is the birth of everything, awakening in a newly-crafted cradle of time. Though it sounds like an aboriginal myth created in dream-time, it is in fact, rock-hard science.
But all of this only serves to describe the physical universe, and offers nothing to account for the existence of consciousness. It must be asked, was the Big Bang of physical creation concomitant with the creation of consciousness, and if so, how? Did it happen in the same big flash? Did consciousness coalesce as matter did? As an incomprehensibly dense plasma of newly forming electrons, protons and neutrons coalescing into the periodic table of the elements? Or did the birth of consciousness come later, after the fire had died down, and the earth had cooled. Did it wait for the birth of the biosphere, before consciousness came to Earth and other places?
Science no doubt would surmise that consciousness grew incrementally in the same manner as the atmosphere; the collective expiration of the planets' living things over eons, giving rise to the breathable and navigable ocean of air that encircles the planet. Is there a comparable mechanism for accumulation of consciousness arising perhaps from the signal response of a collective infinity of flagella-waving amoebic nerve endings?
Seems a bit unlikely, and it certainly lacks elegance as an explanation for human consciousness, but the fact is we don't know. We know there was a big bang, and we know there is a world of matter. We live in it. We're made of it. We know there is consciousness. We think it. We become aware of it; an inner presence when we meditate. But of its origins we know nothing.
It has none, His Holiness would no doubt say, and no doubt he is right. But imagining that an event of consciousness might occur concomitant with an event of matter, at a moment when the universe flashes into sudden existence, leads one to wonder what sort of influence one aspect of such an event might have had on the other, and what aspect may have led to what outcome? The answer to such questions lie beyond the horizon defined by the explosion that led us to our present time and space; the mysterious event preceding, and undoubtedly causing, the only big bang of which we know.
(His Holiness goes the extra mile, by suggesting that the "Big Bang" is unlikely to have been a unique event. From the Buddhist perspective, he has said, the big bang is more likely to have been one of many. Not unique, but rather a common occurrence - the drop of water that suggests a greater ocean. Leading us to imagine a mysterious multi-verse of dark matter, and distant dimensions...but then that's why he's the Dalai Lama.)
Many suffer alienation from spirituality due to anger and bitterness toward the God that permits human suffering. Where was the God of mercy during the Holocaust? During Hurricane Katrina? Our way of understanding, and our need to feel control over the environment, gives rise to the God to whom we pray for deliverance.
When prayer fails, is not our anger directed at the straw man set up by a limited human vision? If so, it is a misplaced anger, and should be directed not at the Lord of Creation, but at the cargo plane made of sticks and vines, set out in the jungle in hope of attracting the source of the mystery by which it was inspired.
We must always remember that the world of human misery, the whole ugly history of wars inspired by greed served by violence, the ancient tradition of indifference by the elite for the fate of the poor, is a world of our own creation. It is the human choices we make that create the suffering of the world, not the demons of hell, abetted by an indifferent god.
Our prayers are largely misplaced. Instead of begging for deliverance from misery and misfortune, our need is for insight, to open us to the realization of the perfection within which we are living day to day, and to an awareness of the human suffering we create by greed and violence. To be awakened to the need for change in the world, so that the human vision of earth as a ball of resources ripe for development may be transformed into a respectful awareness of the sacred garden of life into which we were born and in which our treasured consciousness resides. So that our thirst for violence as a tool for intimidation and command may be transformed into an awakening awareness of human suffering and a response inspired by love and compassion.
DHL
* To my amazement, I found the following quote recently, over a year after writing this essay...
"The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It should transcend a personal God and avoid dogmas and theology. Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things, natural and spiritual and a meaningful unity. Buddhism answers this description. If there is any religion that would cope with modern scientific needs, it would be Buddhism."
Albert Einstein
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