Notes from Tao of Physics, Fritjof Capra (1975) "Every word or notion, however precise it seems, can only

be applied within a limited domain" -Heisenberg. Since our representation of the world is so much easier to grip than reality itself we mix the two things. In deep meditation the mind is completely awake but it doesn't allow sensations to stay to analyze or interpret. On sub-atomic level matter doesn't exist with certainty at some places, it show rather a "tendency to exist". To be free from maya's spell, to break the bonds of karma, means to realize that all phenomenon are part of the same reality. It means to experience, concretely and personally, that everything, inclusive our selves, are Brahman. This experience is called moksha, or liberation, within hindu religion and is its inner core. The most intellectual school within hinduism is vedanta. Another is yoga. The three most important Gods are Shiva, Vishnu, and the God mother. While hinduism's character is mythological and ritualistic, buddhism is psychological. Buddha's teaching isn't metaphysical but psychotherapeutical. Nirvana in buddhism can be compared with moksha in hinduism. Ashvaghosha formulated mahayanabuddhismen. Later Nagarjuna in metaphysical terms, that reality can't be understood with terms and ideas, so he called reality emtpiness, sunyata, a term like Ashvaghosha's tathata ('like that'). D. T. Suzuki see the two pillars of buddhism as wisdom, prajna, and love, karuna. Dharmakaya describes reality as it appears for the religious conscious, and is similar to Brahman in hinduism. In the human mind it's reflected as bodhi (like atman in hinduism). The core of mahayanabuddhism is considered the Avatamsaka-sutra. It inspired other asian cultures - chinese (to hua-yen) and japanese (kegon). The chinese: confucianism and taoism. The road, tao. Works, Tao Te Ching, Chuang-tzu. They called this complete reality tao, it is the road and process of the universe. It can be compared to the hindu Brahman and the buddhist dharmakaya. According to chinese wisdom it's better to have to little than too much, better to leave something undone than to do too much. Wu-wei means no-action, and refers to follow the natural flow in tao. Zen comes from chinese ch'an (sanskrit dhyana, pali jhana) around 0 A.D. It was absorbed in japanese culture around year 1200. It reflects the indian mystic, the taoistic love to the natural and spontaneous and the confucian psyke's thorough pragmatism. Enlightenment is called satori. This experience transcends all categories of thought and zen isn't interested in the creation of abstractions and imagination. Zen has no special teaching or philosophy, no formal dogmas or credos. It must have inherited this attitude from taoism, as Chuang-tzu wrote, "If one asks about tao and the other answers, then none of them knows tao." Zen points directly to the human mind. Zen's emphasize on naturalness and spontaneity is partly taoistic, but buddhistic at root as the faith in our inner nature's fullness, that we're becoming what we already are. Oriental mystics seems to experience a higher dimensional reality directly and concrete. In atomic physics we have to go beyond the terms existence and non-existence. How incredible it sounds that clocks go slower when they move, it has been tested thoroughly in particle physics. All these relativistical effects seem strange because we can't experience the four-dimensional space-time with our minds but have to observe their three-dimensional images which look different from different frames of reference.

The consciousness about how time and space interpenetrate is emphasized in Avatamsaka-sutra, in D. T. Suzuki's words, "The sutra's meaning is incomprehensible if we haven't experienced... a complete disintegration where there is no difference between mind and body, subject and object... Every object is related to every other object... not only in space but also in time... By experience there's no space without time, and no time without space. They interpenetrate." Chuang-tzu, "Let us forget the passing of time. Let us forget the conflicts of opinions. Let us turn to the endless, and abide there." Hui-neng, "The absolute calm is this now. Even if it's in this now there's no limit to this now, and herein lies eternal joy." Dogen, "People think time passes. In reality it stays where it is." Many oriental thinkers emphasize that thinking must happen in time, but that seeing can transcend it. "Seeing", says Govinda, "is closely connected to the higher dimensional space and is therefore timeless". The relativistic space-time is in a similar way a higher dimensional timless space. Swami Vivekananda, "Time, space and causality is like the window through which we see the absolute... In the absolute there's no time or space, neither cause nor effect." "What is tao?". Yn-men answered, "Continue!". Buddha is called tathagata, the one who as gone like that. The particles tendency to react to enclosure with movement reveals a fundamental "restlessness" of matter. "The silence in silence isn't the real silence. Only when there's silence in movement can the spiritual rythm appear which permeats heaven and earth", taoist quote. Whichever form energy has it can be made to perform work. The conservation of energy is one of physics most fundamental laws. Nothing has been observed refuting this law. In classical physics mass was related to a indestructible material substance, of the stuff one believed everything was made of. Like modern physicists the buddhists regard all objects as processes in an all-embracing flow, and denie that there are any material substance. Ernst Mach said the inert material object - its resistance to acceleration - wasn't anything embedded in matter, but a measure of its interaction with the rest of the universe - saying that matter is inert only because there's other matter in the universe. Quantum fields, Einstein, "We can regard matter as consisting of regions of space where the quantum field is extremely intense... In this new kind of physics there's no place for both the field and matter, becuase the field is the only reality." The upanishads, "Brahman is live, Brahman is joy. Brahman is emptiness... Joy is in truth the same as emptiness." The oriental mystics' emptiness can be compared to the sub-atomic quantum field. The new-confucianists developed a notion of ch'i (life-energy) which reminds very strongly of the quantum field. Chang Tsai, "When ch'i thickens it becomes visible. Then there are forms. When ch'i spreads it's no longer visible, and there are no forms. ... The big emptiness can only consist of ch'i. This ch'i can only thicken to form all things." Jospeh Needham, "The modern theoretical physics... has made us move our gaze from the visible - particles - to the unity beyond - the field. The presence of matter is just a disturbance in the fields's perfect state right there, something random, one could almost say only a pollution. Therefore, there are no simple laws governing the forces between the elementary particles... Order and symmetry have to be sought in the field beyond." None of the electrons "feels" a force when they get close to each other.

The only thing they do is to exchange photons. The force is nothing else than the collective macroscopical effect of all the exchange. The notion of force is therefore no longer valid in sub-atomic physics. Therefore physicists prefer to talk about interchanges instead of forces. Like the oriental emptiness is the physical vacuum - as it's called in field-theory - isn't a state of nothing, but contains potentially the world of particles in all forms. This forms are not independent physical units, but only temporary manifestations of the vacuum beyond. Chang Tsai, "When one knows that the big emptiness is full of ch'i one realizes that nothingness doesn't exist." Strong interaction keeps the nuclear core together, the electromagnetic interaction the atoms and the molecules, the gravitational interaction the planets and galaxies. Weak interaction only manifests in certain particle collisions and in particle decay. In Avatamsaka-sutra Buddha describes in detail how the world is perceived in the enlightened state of consciousness when "The individuality's solid contours melt away and the feeling of our finiteness doesn't press on us." The melting together is called in mahayanabuddhism a reciprocal penetration, which happens both in space and time. The metaphor of Indra's net, where every pearl is mirrored in every pearl, can be considered the first bootstrap-model. The idea that every particle contains all the others can't be comprehended in ordinary time and space. It describes a reality, as Buddha's, with its own rules. The core idea is that the forces that keep particles together are themselves particles that are interchanged. Lama Govinda, "For the enlightened... whose consciousness embraces the universe, for him the universe becomes his "body", while his physical body becomes a manifestation of the all-embracing mind, his inner vision an expression of the highest reality and his speech an expression of eternal truth." The mystic and the physicist reaches the same conclusion. One from the inner world, the other from the outer. The harmony between their views confirms the old indian wisdom that Brahman, the outermost reality, is identical to atman, det inner reality. Does the modern natural science discover an old wisdom that the oriental wise have known for millenniums? Should the physicists then leave the scientific method and start meditating? Or can there be a reciprocal influence between natural science and mystic, maybe even a synthesis? I believe all these questions must be answered no. They are though complementing each other - the rational and the intuitive mind.