What We Call Real Is Not Real
Quantum Physics: Universe As Mind
The British historian Arnold Toynbee said that Buddhism coming to the West may well prove to be the most important event of the twentieth century. Although Toynbee was a Christian, he recognized the radical transformative potential of the Buddha dharma for Westerners.
It’s been said that Buddhism is Hinduism stripped for export, stripped of Indian cultural accoutrement. When Buddhism came to China it met with the fertile soil of Taoism and produced the flower of Chan, the seed of which once again transformed when planted in Japan, becoming Zen. In Tibet, Buddhism encountered the Bon Tradition, which yielded that uniquely shamanic form of Buddhism known as Vajrayana.
In America the two most important traditions are Christianity and science, and a uniquely American form of Buddhism must integrate these streams, and if Christianity and science are to break out of their stagnation, they must integrate the insights of Buddhism. Indeed, Buddhism is the way that these two seemingly incompatible streams, Christianity and science, can realize a synthesis.
Quantum physics has already revealed the truth of the primary insight of Buddhism: emptiness.
“Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real. If quantum mechanics hasn't profoundly shocked you, you haven't understood it yet.”
―Niels Bohr
Nothing is solid, nothing exists in the way that we think. This is scientific fact. Things exist, relatively, interdependently, but not absolutely. All is void, emptiness dancing.
In the modern Kaluza-Klein theory all the forces of nature, not merely gravity, are treated as manifestations of spacetime structure. What we normally call gravity is a warp in the four spacetime dimensions of our perceptions, while the other forces are reduced to higher-dimensional spacewarps. All the forces of nature are revealed as nothing more than hidden geometry at work ... There is a deep compulsion to believe in the idea that the entire universe, including all the apparently concrete matter that assails our senses, is in reality only a frolic of convoluted nothingness, that in the end the world will turn out to be a sculpture of pure emptiness, a self-organized void.
Paul Davies -- Superforce
The insights of quantum physics are over one hundred years old, but they have not been fully incorporated into science, or our culture, because they don’t fit the materialist paradigm. What we call science is in fact materialist scientism, and although quantum physics has decisively destroyed the materialist worldview, dogma dies hard.
“The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you”
- Werner Heisenberg
The external investigations of quantum physics reveal the universe as Mind, which is exactly what the internal investigation of Buddhism reveals. Western science, as useful as it has been, has been hampered by its exclusively external focus. Western science seeks to understand the external world without understanding the instrument of all experience, awareness itself.
Buddha, on the other hand, completely penetrated the mystery of Mind. He was able to accurately calculate the size of an atom, among other things, without any scientific instrument aside from Mind.
When we have scientists who truly understand their primary instrument, we will have a true quantum revolution. We will have quantum psychology, quantum medicine, and much more.
Below is a video where Paul Levy on the radical implications of Quantum Physics.