BOOK OF EQUANIMITY - Case 99

[Jundo]

I've been thinking about this concept a fair bit lately and how it relates to the scientific concept of singularities (points of infinite density, not the technological singularity). What are your thoughts on this?

Perhaps I'm going off topic AND missing the point of the koan, which is to be experienced, not intellectualized.

Gassho,
SatLah
Kelly

I am not sure if we experience this "each point and moment is a singularity which fully contains within the whole universe" more in a poetic sense in the heart (we just feel this somehow, like Blake's poem on the "world in a grain of sand"), or just by gerrymandering (redrawing the lines) in the model of space dimensionality that we create subjectively for ourselves in the brain (we experience the world through models of objects, distances, relationships which we fashion in the neocortex and elsewhere, so we just change the model, something like these scientists were able to do here: https://www.sciencealert.com/science...-11-dimensions ), or whether it represents some objective reality to the universe (as some physicists postulate, that the universe is like a hologram in which each bit does contain fully all bits, something like the mirrors in Indra's Net, in which each mirror fully reflects all mirrors: https://www.scientificamerican.com/a...h-anniversary/) ...

... or whether all of the above are true, if not different faces of the same reality. Many flavors of Buddhism posit that our thinking creates, not only our experience of reality, but objective reality too.

In any case, physicists note that the Big Bang began from a singularity, as single point that was everything. However, physicists might also note that the universe is STILL NOW a singularity, which is only now a singularity which seems to be expanding. ALL the universe is "the" center because, as there is only the universe and this one singularity, there is nothing else not to be the center. So, we are the singularity and "the" center. Furthermore, every point is "a" center (if the universe is like the surface of an expanding spherical balloon, every point of the surface of the sphere has as much claim to being the center of the surface of the sphere as any other point, as explained here: https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physi...e%20everywhere.) Finally, if the universe is like Indra's Net of Mirrors, then every point is "the/a" center because it fully holds within all the other points with room to spare.

Now, the Koan reminds us of this: All this thinking about it is fun, BUT ...

... now put all the philosophizing down, feel it, know it, in each grain of sand or rice, each drop of water.

Each drop is the whole bowl of water, each grain of rice is the whole bowl of rice.

Gassho, J

stlah

[Chikyou]

I am not sure if we experience this "each point and moment is a singularity which fully contains within the whole universe" more in a poetic sense in the heart (we just feel this somehow, like Blake's poem on the "world in a grain of sand"), or just by gerrymandering (redrawing the lines) in the model of space dimensionality that we create subjectively for ourselves in the brain (we experience the world through models of objects, distances, relationships which we fashion in the neocortex and elsewhere, so we just change the model, something like these scientists were able to do here: https://www.sciencealert.com/science...-11-dimensions ), or whether it represents some objective reality to the universe (as some physicists postulate, that the universe is like a hologram in which each bit does contain fully all bits, something like the mirrors in Indra's Net, in which each mirror fully reflects all mirrors: https://www.scientificamerican.com/a...h-anniversary/) ...

... or whether all of the above are true, if not different faces of the same reality. Many flavors of Buddhism posit that our thinking creates, not only our experience of reality, but objective reality too.

In any case, physicists note that the Big Bang began from a singularity, as single point that was everything. However, physicists might also note that the universe is STILL NOW a singularity, which is only now a singularity which seems to be expanding. ALL the universe is "the" center because, as there is only the universe and this one singularity, there is nothing else not to be the center. So, we are the singularity and "the" center. Furthermore, every point is "a" center (if the universe is like the surface of an expanding spherical balloon, every point of the surface of the sphere has as much claim to being the center of the surface of the sphere as any other point, as explained here: https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physi...e%20everywhere.) Finally, if the universe is like Indra's Net of Mirrors, then every point is "the/a" center because it fully holds within all the other points with room to spare.

Now, the Koan reminds us of this: All this thinking about it is fun, BUT ...

... now put all the philosophizing down, feel it, know it, in each grain of sand or rice, each drop of water.

Each drop is the whole bowl of water, each grain of rice is the whole bowl of rice.

Gassho, J

stlah

Gassho,
SatLah
Kelly