What is Zen? 
                         A smile.

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

History is a helix.

By going inward, we expand outward.

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 trumps 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.

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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.

 

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, mind is the engine of change and universal processes.

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.  [This is the tenth, and last, ox-herding image of Zen Buddhism.]

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 neurological correlates of idea-thought compete as impulses; dominance being the decision to action. Scientific studies have determined that our decision to act occurs before we become conscious of the choice. Repetitive neurochemical enforcement, through conscious reflection, can change dominance, or karma.  In the mutual feedback of body and mind, momentum, be it material or spiritual, affects decisions and actions. It can break habits and psychological addictions, or it can create them.

Cannabis meditation includes "sequential collages" of rapidly changing mental images in associative strings or trains. Here is a tool for examining karma.

Cannabis returns us to a more joyful joie de vivre, a youthful, open neuro-mentation that refreshes neuro-noetic processes and neurophysiology. It removes the cobwebs of mind and lifts us out of the rut of numbing daily routines. However, to attain the proper life-supporting effect of the drug, it must be an occasional booster shot, not a daily crutch. Indeed, the herb is wasted on the youth and should never be used by minors, whose minds are yet in biological development and susceptible to dependency. Adulthood can be defined as the ontogenetic achievement of semi-homeostatic neurophysiological balance, or relative stability, where one’s cells are less sensitive to chemical and other addictions as well as to public or social peer pressures, i.e., the hallmarks of the teenage years.

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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 a 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.

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 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.

Like 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, or perhaps informational fields, where informational ripples of individual deeds and preferences are embedded, as in Sheldrake’s proposed morphogenetic fields. Whatever the underlying multidimensional physics, it takes the innate neurologically attuned mind of a person to detect and process the wave of mental momentum.  A very young child, yet unconditioned by society and with the correct mind configuration, is more open to receive the information from someone else’s, now deceased, life. I do not accept reincarnation of past ego. I do not accept the concept of soul or atman. I do accept as plausible, but not necessarily true, that a person can channel the deeds and proclivities of a historical person. This is not communicating with such an entity, nor embodying one, but merely demonstrating information about the dead individual without actually having met or having previous knowledge of the deceased. A dying lama may have the precognitive information that such a unique child may be located in such a region or with some other meaningful characteristic; these are never precise, as information in remote viewing experiments is not typically "seen" in the mind’s eye in exact or complete detail.

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.

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Observations on Getting Old

During our first 50 years, we accrue and advance; then we discard and recede. 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 folly or progressive reform.  Life itself  and consciousness become priceless treasures that should never be taken away or abandoned heedlessly.