New York Times, August 17, 2016
Tag Archives: universe
The Big Picture
The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself. By Sean Carroll
Life is a process, not a substance, and it is necessarily temporary.
For a long time, there has been a shared view that there is some meaning, out there somewhere, waiting to be discovered and acknowledged. There is a point to all this; things happen for a reason. […] Gradually, our confidence in this view has begun to erode.
“Life” and “consciousness” do not denote essences distinct from matter; they are ways of talking about phenomena that emerge from the interplay of extraordinarily complex systems.
At a fundamental level, there aren’t separate “living things” and “nonliving things,” “things here on Earth” and “things up in the sky,” “matter” and “spirit.” There is just the basic stuff of reality, appearing to us in many different forms. […] We will ultimately understand the world as a single, unified reality, not caused or sustained or influenced by anything outside itself. That’s a big deal.
The only reliable way of learning about the world is by observing it. Continue reading
Become What You Are by Alan Watts
Excerpts from Alan Watts’ Become What You Are:
Though your thoughts may run into the past or the future they cannot escape the present moment.
A man does not really begin to be alive until he has lost himself, until he has released the anxious grasp which he normally holds upon his life, his property, his reputation and position.
The one important result of any serious attempt at self-renunciation or self-acceptance is the humiliating discovery that it is impossible. […] The people who have quite genuinely died to themselves make no claims of any kind to their own part in the process.
Our attempts to stand above (our) emotions and control them are the emotions themselves at play.
Your everyday mind is the Tao. Continue reading
What Is Tao?
Taoism regards the entire natural world as the operation of the Tao, a process that defies intellectual comprehension.
Taoists understand the practice of wu wei, the attribute of not forcing or grasping.
Jen – a human being will always be greater than anything they can say about themselves, and anything they can think about themselves.
Tao is a sort of nonsense syllable, indicating the mystery that we can never understand — the unity that underlies the opposites. […] Tao is a reality that we apprehend deeply without being able to define it. […] Anything that is expressed about the Tao is not the Tao.
We have been trying to fit the order of the universe to the order of words. And it simply does not work. The real basis of Buddhism is not a set of ideas but an experience.
When we say that we are trying to make sense out of life, that means that we are trying to treat the real world as if it were a collection of words. (Words are just symbols)
We are taught to figure things out, and our first task is to learn the different names for everything. In this way we learn to treat all of the things of the world as separate objects.
Humans get in their own way because they are always observing and questioning themselves. They are always trying to fit the order of the world into the order of sense, the order of thought and words.
Every stream, every road, if followed persistently and meticulously to its end, leads nowhere at all. […] Any place where we are may be considered the center of the universe. Anywhere that we stand an be considered the destination of our journey.
“The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.”
Maya by Ray Alez
“The only thing that I have ever known was void. You could say that it surrounded me forever since there was no time before I created it. At first all I was was awareness, just the sense of consciousness with nothing else. Gradually, I started to think thoughts in the midst of this void. I’ve made up time and space. And once I was thinking in this emptiness I got horribly bored. So I’ve turned my thoughts into figures and images. I’ve imagined light, which turned into stars and galaxies and later – planets. And thus Maya was born.” Continue reading