Letters to the Editor
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Buddhism is OK if you have a lifetime to practice
Guatama Buddha sat (meditated) under a tree (called the Boddhi tree) for 14 years until he achieved enlightenment. Most of us don't have time to sit around and just meditate. Mr. Wallace didn't have to worry about earning a living. Buddhism teaches an eight-fold path to overcome suffering, and reach "enlightenment". But advanced souls tell us we are already enlightened, we just don't know it. Why? Because our ego stands in the way. No matter how much we work on ourselves, meditate, eat rice, wash dishes, rake leaves, this is ego driven. So we are really wasting time.
If we can sit quietly, and watch our thoughts, then we come to understand that the ego itself is not watching our thoughts. It's our real Self. If we quiet the chattering of the brain we arrive at a quiet place. That is the real Self. We experience BEING. That is God. (If the ego dies, the mind dies too, so the mind is ego driven.)
God is not an old guy with a beard. God is consciousness that pervades the universe. Some Christians have defined hell as being away from God. Since God is everywhere, hell is a fabrication made up by the church to scare people.
Buddhism belabors the obvious. Yogis have learned to kill the ego, and they experience God. This is called samadhi. If one sits and forgets his name, asking himself "Who am I?" it becomes obvious that God is present.
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Thoughts...
Re: Jundo Cohen
Zen Buddhism is an offshoot of the original teachings of the Buddha, so while both have rich traditions that have certain eschatological differences, I would say that it is appropriate to consider their original foundations carried on through the Tibetan tradition. Your response- being a Buddhist of a different stripe than Wallace- is justifiably focused on differentiating the name from the beliefs, but the topic here is the relationship between Buddhist technique and the scientific method. That Wallace focuses on reincarnation is merely a product of the subject at hand. And, he does in fact say in the interview that the overarching purposes of Buddhism is to improve the quality of life, not to answer the Great Questions of existance.
Re: dwg
You are correct that we live in the early morning of man's understanding of the universe. I don't know that I would go so far as to say that there are 'wavelengths and other strata' that we do not know about. Instead it might be said that our understanding of these wavelengths and our perception of their form and function is infantile at best. Certainly mystic aberrations could be explained scientifically by methods completely outside of the mentality of the day. For instance, a genetic mutation involved in the development of the retina could, in theory, enable a person to 'see' the lower wavelengths that we describe as heat. In effect their field of perception would include the infra-red end of the energy spectrum. How would that person describe their vision? You would think that they could perceive the 'halo' of body heat surrounding a person- their 'aura'. Like those who 'see' sounds as colors or shapes they would have difficulty in relating to everyone else's perspective, but that would make it no less real to them.
Re: narrative0
I would like to just leave it at "you're an idiot", but I suppose that wouldn't do anyone any good.
First of all,
"the fact that drugs (physical objects with well-defined mechanisms of action) produce reliable changes in consciousness is strong evidence that consciousness has a physical component. I have yet to see any evidence that consciousness has a non-physical component."
Pharmaceuticals are hardly 'well-defined' mechanisms- ask your neighborhood pharmacology student. That they have relatively reliable effect is like saying my roomate in college was a smooth-talker because he got alot of girls. He wasn't. In frat-boy circles it's known as the 'shotgun' effect: you shoot a wide pattern of pellets at a large number of prey, you're bound to hit something. Pharm research is the same way. For every drug you beleive to be 'well defined' there are thousands of other compounds which could probably help some patients better than the ones that go to market- they just don't help the most people.
Second, "I have no idea what that is supposed to mean, and I doubt he does, either."
You simultaneously disregard any notion of Wallace being a credible voice on the topics of science and Buddhism, while clearly admitting that you yourself have a passing understanding at best. For one thing, "The purpose of science" is NOT "to develop testable, naturalistic explanations of things" Scientific theory is the only part of science that deals with 'explanations', as in the 'theory' of evolution. That evolution still carries the moniker 'theory' portrays the nature of scientific inquiry in a nutshell: Science is the method of proving or disproving theory using tangible, quantifiable data and logical, reasoned analysis. Thus the 'theory of evolution' remains, in the face of overwhelming scientific data supporting its hypothesis, a theory. Wallace wants to further integrate the techniques of Buddhist meditation into the scientific studies that you cite and may or may not have read. He wants to give them a time tested and tuned method of studying these phenomenons- a microscope when they are using a spyglass.
Picture this: your body begins as two cells. Your brain has two hemispheres. Your body develops in pairs, by two's. The psyche comes into play the moment an electrical field is established between the two halves. Think of the brain as two information centers- each with opposite physical characteristics that provide opposite net analysis. From the moment your brain is developed there is an electromagnetic field between the two hemispheres- this is your consciousness. As your neurons develop, directed and reinforced like the roots of an urban tree, they take on the charge characteristics that are reinforced every time that part of the brain is accessed, and modified every time the experience is different. Our brains are aggregate programs, like computer programs. If you imagine a single neuron that adds a 1 to the sequence 0100, and another in line that adds an 001, and so on, you can see how the code builds on itself to become 01001001. The net charge that exists between the two hemispheres is the net effect of all these modifications of every neuron in the brain, proportional to its usage. They all act on what could be thought of as the 'mind signal', a loop of 1's and 0's zooming back and forth accross the brain according to stimulus and previous development. When you talk about things being in the front or back of your mind, you are quantifying them by how often you are thinking of them. To 'get into a mindset' is simply to re-engage a part of the brain, to bring it to the front of your 'mind'. This is, as far as science can explain, how the machine works. This does NOT prove however, that there aren't other interactions, interactions at the gluon and furhter subatomic levels. We just haven't gotten that far yet, and to do so will certainly take intense materialistic studies of the mechanisms of the brain. For now we use the crude techniques we have, techniques less than 5 years old in some cases. Wallace is offering a techinique for understanding that is 2,500 years old. Can you understand that?