Andy's Mind

While sitting in meditation yesterday it again came to me that I’m just that – lost in thoughts. We all are.

This expression has a whole new meaning for me now that I’m experiencing my mind in meditation. I now understand why in old texts our mind is being compared to a wild horse. It is never resting, always shaken by incoming thoughts, twitched and pulled by attachment to them. In all this frantic activity we are getting lost. The present moment is getting lost, because the thoughts inevitably run away towards the future or dwell on the past.

It is so hard to just sit.

While sitting in meditation yesterday I saw how much mental junk litters my mind. But I also saw it is not it. There is lots of work ahead of me before I’ll be able to just sit.

I went to the local Karma Kagyu center last Friday to a lecture by one of traveling teachers, Karol Sleczek. It turned out that it was not a lecture strictly speaking but rather guided reading of the Heart Sutra in Michael Roache‘s translation. We were trying to understand what the original author of the sutra tried to tell us, his readers, without referring to any outside concepts, materials, historical backgrounds of any kind etc. We were just reading the text and analyzing the message it conveys just based on what was in it.

It sounds easy, but it’s not. It is really hard to concentrate just on this, rather short text, while forgetting for example all I know about historical context of these words or pitfalls of translations. It is not easy to resist the temptation of commenting the sutra in my mind instead of reading it. That is concentrating on what I think I think about it rather than on understanding what the author tries to say to me. Karol’s systematic approach and attitude helped a lot, since he constantly identified and rejected any ideas about the meaning we came up with that couldn’t be defended on the basis of what was written in the text.

It was a very important and interesting evening for me. Although I’m sure that the true meaning of this sutra can’t be understood thorough this kind of analysis, it certainly added a lot to my intuitive, deep trust towards this text which somehow I felt always since hearing it for the first time. And the method of “just reading” that I learned can be applied to other texts as well. And not only Buddhist ones.

This was also a very intense intellectual experience. I went in with a mild headache, but during the lecture it was gone as I had to concentrate so much that the body forgot of its little grumps.

Karol has a very sharp, precise mind and lots of training in this type of thing, as he is not only a Karma Kagyu traveling teacher with lots of practice but also holds a doctorate in philosophy. I’ve heard his lectures from tapes before, but the real experience is even better. A true intellectual feast.

He is also a very mean discussant, unsympathetic and with little patience for those with less intellectual ability who were not keeping the pace. If someone said something he thought was not correct he would blast at them as part of the reply, often with some personal remarks (like “So you think you are so educated, huh?” or “With this type of thinking you can just go and have a few beers”). But you can learn from that too, by observing why it hits you.

All in all – great stuff.

I’m reading “The Quantum and the Lotus“, a fascinating dialog between an astrophysicist and an ex-biologist who became a Buddhist monk and philosopher. I’ve been reading only for last three days so I’m now past chapter 6 or so, and yet I’ve already learned things I never heard of. The most mind boggling are the wider implications of the Foucault’s pendulum shifting in relation not only to Earth and twin photon experiment conducted by Nicolas Gisin in 1997 – an offspring of the almost century old EPR paradox.

It’s hard to boil all this down to few sentences but overall it seems that the famous phrase which pulled me towards Buddhism – “The form is empty, emptiness is form” – is more in agreement with current scientific understanding than I expected.

I also have some thoughts going around my head as I read. For example one thing that – so far – has not appeared in the author’s cosmological dialog is recognition of the fact that our perception as parts of this universe of interdependencies is inherently limited. We are unable to scientifically measure or probably even understand in terms of human reasoning anything that might be outside of it. Any speculation reaching outside is bound to be an extrapolation of our own way of thinking – just as saying that life – and especially intelligent one – has necessarily to be based on carbon biology as we know it from Earth.

Another raw, yet unrefined reflection regards consequences of the experiments mentioned. If something clearly can move faster than light (even if it is just some form of information) and stability of phenomena on macroscopic level is rather an illusion than fact then there is hope that somehow the great distances of space can be traversed. It is of course far fetched, but maybe way forward for us is not only to try to blend general relativity and quantum mechanics into one single theory but rather in unifying the understanding of cognizant, conscious part of the reality and what we perceive as inanimate matter. Because it seems that fundamentally they are intrinsically connected.