What is Zen? 
                         A smile.

                                            The entire physical & metaphysical universe opens with it: who, when, what, why, how; relationships and situations.

History is a helix.

History does not repeat; events are in resonance with the past.

By going inward, we expand outward.

Living now as if monastery monk, the monastery being the entire world.

Everything is changing because nothing is ideally perfect.

The heart of a musician knows no boundaries in style, or territory.

Free will: flowing downstream, we only handle the rudder. I do not accept determinism or fate beyond potential, probable, and possible courses of action, which are situationally limited. One type of free will is to be ultra passive and allow things to happen without investing in it emotionally, not forcing change. A more practical approach is just act compassionately for the welfare of others.

Everything is in constant change. What seems solid and enduring is mainly space, and its constituents are eroding or growing at the micro level and changing structure and composition and energy at the molecular and atomic levels. Holism with creative energy is an organized system that allows, indeed requires chaos. Nature kicks in a little random nonsense and aberration to keep things interesting, to stimulate mind and Mind. In cosmic and social chaos, a pattern of a-thinking calm within existence can exist as flowing and acting with Tao.  The photo-biochemically aware flower complex turns and opens to the dawn sun. The oak tree oaks an acorn.

Noncomformity is the key to evolution: hail mavericks! Vive le différence!

Symphonic samadhi silence brings all cacophony into accord.

We can formulate this metaphysics: Action = Relationship × Situation².  This holds for matter, as in chemistry, as well as for people's lives. An action that changes relationships alters the situation; an action that changes a situation alters a relationship, but to a lesser degree, particularly for people.  Results are relative to each unique gestaltic action.

Experience vetoes inference. Experience is holistic knowledge when built upon scientific analysis.

Philosophy at its root is the study of consciousness-mind and its wise application. A mystic is a philosopher with yogic yearnings, i.e., a religious philosopher. Buddhism is one of the applied transcendental philosophies. Similarly, it is probably better to be both a philosophic scientist and a philosopher of science.

The life of most people is as if in dream yet some people know that they are dreaming. This lucidity of a greater order is a core mystic perception, a religio-philosophy and neuro-psychological science (and is the basis of the film Matrix). [Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream.....]

One religio-philosophy and practice [Abhidharma]: being mindful — of mind, it, self, this.

*     *     *

Dogen:

To study the Way is to study the self.

To study the self is to forget the self.

To forget the self is to be enlightened by the ten thousand things.

To be enlightened by all things is to remove the barriers between one's self and others.

 

The web of life does not just extend with each species of animal and plant, uniting them in a biosphere of interactions and co-dependency, it also defines ourselves and not because we are social animals. We are also dependent of the microorganisms that live on our skin, in the mouth and nose, in the stomach and intestines, and in the vagina; and in every single cell of our body live vestigial microbes, the mitochondria with their own DNA. Germfree animals suffer nutritional disorders and their immune system is weak. We are of various microbial ecosystems and we are a community. John Dunne's No man is an island, indeed. More than Walt Whitman realized in his "I am large, I contain multitudes," separating ourselves from other people and other organisms is delusion.

Ego is guru of which we seek to leave or deconstruct respectfully to become consciousness per se, a total awareness with neither a subject nor separate or independent object.

Mind (subcategories of matter-mind; awareness-mind; conscious- or self-awareness-mind] has, at its core, attractive opposites with potential energy creating behavioral attributes in kinetic action; that is, the engine of change is static imbalance, disharmony, and mind are universal processes toward balance or chaos.

In biology, upward emergent structure and downward function and regulation are mutual feedback loops. This applies to genetic-cellular environmental interactions to organisms and the biosphere. Form is patterned properties (functions). Morphology of things (the theme of my art) are metaphors and functional shapes. Art arrives with certain aesthetic [elegant or challenging] juxtapositions of forms and composition of the entire arrangement.

We can indeed experience the return to the state-of-being of unnamed universe, the nameless Tao; however, one cannot humanly, hence biologically, function this way, casting aside intelligence and self-awareness. We cannot survive. Returning neither to the state of zombie insects, nor to the instinctive, environmentally smart reptiles and rodents, but instead to live and to die this way, utterly aware but not in thought, being Tao, is a noble goal. Yet we should let go of even this, allowing the lessons of the experience and our changed being help us and others in the world. 

The direct, the simple answer to this koan has metaphysical overtones.  The philosopher will make a great, long, complex circle of thought and converge on the same point as that attained by the student of Zen. Both paths are equivalent.  Still, the scientist–philosopher will have come to accept the limitations of the approach and then, being the explorer,  take the adventurous leap into the wordless realm.  Great doubt, great attainment.

Are you a participatory witness? I am a participatory witness: an outside student of the within, a within student of the outside. This occurs when a scientist, an analyst of nature and of mind, is also a religio-philosophic practitioner, in my case of Zen. The religious path of philosophical science is the unanchored, open interpretations of evidence leading to greater orders of complexities and ever larger categorical organizational levels. Yes, religion is the feeling that there is something greater than us, than the world of four-dimensional time-space phenomena. String-theory physicists through science and mathematics of 11 dimensions  provisionally presume so.

Humans have in tragic folly murdered, imprisoned, subjugated, and segregated each other over differing paths to God and over the very concept of God. In my extensive study of religions and practices, all writings and teachings concern a sense of a greater domain, a higher or more fundamental order beyond our common world, and seekers quest to experience egoless unity with this larger entity. Some say this is God, Allah, Brahma, Tao, Cosmic Consciousness, or Big Mind. Even atheists can regard an intrinsic dimensional domain of mentation and consciousness, ascribing an informational field. But suppose this greater realm or being is merely one of a multiple, like Russian matryosha nesting dolls.  The foolishness over religion thus becomes more acute. Over the centuries, science and technology have become ever more complex, from atomic matter to astrophysics, from life forms to ecosystems, from society to culture; our very common  here-now time-space-informational processes remain beyond our ken and this is the spur of science and invention.  Our sense of the divine has been similarly naive and simplistic. The Mystery is more than we can imagine.

*     *     *

We interpret the world in approximations. Phenomena are judged and analyzed statistically, whether they be physical, psychological, or sociological. Other than raw, subjective observations and descriptions (including photographic and instrumental documentation),  the conclusions of scientific experiments are reached with statistical analysis. Even elementary analytical geometry, such as the area of an ideal circle, gives an indefinite or approximate result, as it depends on pi. Mysticism seeks to experience that space between integers, the silence between musical notes, the potential before the action.

If, as in String Theory, the universe exists in 11 dimensions, cannot those dimensions beyond common volume and time comprise mind or constitute the information field? Must it be about shape? What about charge, the power of potential and of chemistry, and an attribute of matter? After all, there is no matter without process, or behavioral patterns of energy. Hence, we should not think of time-space alone but of time-space-mind (or time-space-information) and put aside antique concepts of materialism and duality.  All systems have feedback loops for regulation and adaptable change. Perhaps the 7 dimensions of the hidden informational field is the influential feedback generator of form, i.e., Sheldrake's "morphogenic field."

The metaphor of the brain: a radio transceiver. When you listen to music on the radio, is the music actually inside the radio? No. The apparatus is a processor of information from a separate and distant source. Likewise, Is memory stored inside the brain? Or does the brain process, coordinate, assemble, and synthesize information from a different format, as FM or AM musical waves from a broadcast studio antenna?  We know already that memories and knowledge are processed in multiple regions of the brain and assembled in a yet mysterious way for holistic recall and action, just as the single brain area, the hippocampus, is the necessary router and separator of holistic information, the switching yard, for creating new trains of associative memory.  And memory is fallible , as reconstructions can be faulty with blended imaginations and delusions regarded as truths.

Like with Stephen Batchelor, my Buddhist views draw a line at the concept of so-called reincarnation, which is emphasized in Vajrayana schools.  But I see a solution: Karl Pribram’s holographics concepts of cosmos-mind, each event entangled in the other; or perhaps informational fields, where exist informational ripples of experience (as information-unitary patterns in-corporated); or in Sheldrake’s proposed morphogenetic fields of contoured propensity.

Remote viewing, precognition, clairvoyance are related, historic, true, and testable information-based phenomena of but which presently lack scientific explanation because there is no well-developed theoretical model to encompass it. In short, The Standard Model is inadequate: hardly a radical view even among physicists. My father, my nephew, and I have such testable ability.  I attended a noetic science workshop where 70% of the participants demonstrated the ability. Scientism has shut out these useful arts known to indigenous peoples from Asia to Africa to the Americas. Horatio’s undreamt philosophy surely most regard mind and matter not as complementary nor correlated nor emergent but as a unity within process metaphysics.

*     *     *

Observations on Getting Old

As in Lao Tzu's sage and scholar comparison, during our first 50 years, we accrue and advance; then we discard and recede. Our senior years are more idiosyncratic [habitually individualistic or non-conformist]. More and more, I see the flow and patterns of all phenomena and the helices of history. More and more, I take things less seriously and find amusement in everything that happens, be it in conservative folly or progressive reform.  Life itself  and consciousness become priceless treasures that should never be taken away or abandoned heedlessly. 

Over the course of our lives, we probably forget things at the same rate [within ten years most of your college course details are long gone], but when younger there is no attention to it. Awareness of forgetting comes and increases with age.

At the age of 75, history is memory. [When you lived it, history books about some earlier era are inadequate and often wrong.]