Observable Universe contains ten times more galaxies ...

[Diarmuid1]

I think my difficulty arises from the "We" or the "I". To me, it implies the existence of something that is bounded. The same may be true for the word "universe". I am not the universe because the universe points to galactic nurseries, red dwarves, black holes, suns, stars and comets. Me? I get sunburned if I don't apply Factor 50+!

The universe isn't me because there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than can be found in my skinbag. At the very most I may be part of the universe, but I am not the whole thing. This is why I have always assumed that the concept that I am the universe is me must be pointing to a different teaching. One that I just don't get.

[Jundo]

It is not so hard to understand really. More than an intellectual understanding, however, is to penetrate this to the marrow of the bones, to feel and be and breathe this.

Suppose the most distant galaxy and each star and every atom and you and are just ultimately X in reality. As much as your head and heart and skin and bones are just you, and you just each and all that.

Then you are X and I am X, every star and atom, all galaxies are just X ... likewise your head and heart, skin and bones all X. It is much as any hair on your head, should it awaken to consciousness somehow, might see itself as "I am a hair, yet I am this head ... I am Tom's head, I am Tom" ... all before falling to the oblivion of the barber of time.

As well, as you are X and so is every star and all the galaxies just X through and through ... I am you and every star and galaxy, and they each and all contain me. If I am X and every cloud is X, then I am every cloud in the most radical sense. Since the hair is Tom's head, and all the hairs of Tom's head are just Tom's head, all the hairs merge and interpenetrate in that True Nature of Tomness.

Thich Nhat Hanh expresses things this way:

If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow: and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are.

"Interbeing" is a word that is not in the dictionary yet, but if we combine the prefix "inter" with the verb "to be", we have a new verb, inter-be. Without a cloud, we cannot have paper, so we can say that the cloud and the sheet of paper inter-are.

If we look into this sheet of paper even more deeply, we can see the sunshine in it. If the sunshine is not there, the forest cannot grow. In fact nothing can grow. Even we cannot grow without sunshine. And so, we know that the sunshine is also in this sheet of paper. The paper and the sunshine inter-are. And if we continue to look we can see the logger who cut the tree and brought it to the mill to be transformed into paper. And we see the wheat. We know that the logger cannot exist without his daily bread, and therefore the wheat that became his bread is also in this sheet of paper. And the logger's father and mother are in it too. When we look in this way we see that without all of these things, this sheet of paper cannot exist.

Now expand this out to our whole world, the moon and planets, the sun which allows our world to be ... the stars which allow our sun and world ... the galaxies and whole universe which allows suns ... whatever allows all that. (I actually think that TNH does not go far enough in this example, because in the heart of the mystic the paper -is- the logger -is- the sun as much as every drop is the ocean, the entire ocean flowing into every drop. The great Indian mystic Kabir ...

“All know that the drop merges into the ocean, but few know that the ocean merges into the drop.”

Even the most hard-materialist physicists these days realize that there is some intimate connection here (regular guest on the talk shows, Neil Degrasse Tyson)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rr-jyg0MyI

Now what is "X"? Shall we call such "reality" or "the universe" or "cosmos" or "Buddha" or "God" or "Emptiness" or "Wholeness" or "The Totality" or "Stanley" or whatever? Zen Masters since of old sometimes affix a name ... Buddha or Dharmadhātu or the like. Better to answer in silence to truly understand ... Our Book of Serenity Koan for this week ...

“When I hear someone asking what Buddha is, I feel like my ears have been dirtied”

In such case "not knowing, not saying" actually meaning Knowing such beyond and right at the heart of all words! It is not "not knowing" in ignorance, but rather "Knowing" beyond all need to say. Saying just limits the grandeur.

Don't you wish to know who you are? You are all this, and every blade of grass and grain of dust ... and all just you. Saying that you are merely "part of the whole" misses the whole big picture. Yes, you are "part" but also precisely the "whole big picture" too. (I know it is hard to wrap one's head around, thus we are here sitting our days away).

You are also Jiken and Jundo and Bob and Mary, so just get on with it, chopping wood and fetching water and putting all the big questions aside. You are the whole shabang in most intimate sense and the whole enchilada in every hair on your head ... yet you are also just you standing in the sun on that beach with all the grains of sand, so best to put on sunscreen so as not to get burned.

Why is this important? Realizing that one is not merely one's limited 'little self' with all its suffering and complaints and feeling of smallness and mortality is what out Way is all about.

Gassho, J

SatToday

- The Dustin Hoffman Bodhisattva (in an otherwise mediocre movie) did a pretty good job with this ...

You are not merely a part of the blanket ... you are the blanket.

Now throw away the blanket! Or toss it over your shoulders, as it is cold outside.

[Diarmuid1]

I know it is hard to wrap one's head around, thus we are here sitting our days away).

These are words of wisdom!
Thank you, Jundo.
I hope (y)our cold is better.

[Jundo]

Time to repost this too.

Why you are standing at the center of a universe (but so is everybody and everything) ... a universe that is truly not "big" nor "small" when human measure and relative self-comparisons are taken out of the equation ...

=======================================

One Buddhist perspective to experience is that the whole of reality, all time and space ... is manifested in a grain of sand ... and all of the universe is held on the tip of each blade of grass.

So. do not be so quick to judge either a grain as "big" or "small" ... a blade as "tall" or "short" or finite ... or the universe as vast and distant ... for to do so is perhaps each a relative value judgment, and saying how "small and insignificant" we must be is not much different from ancient man's subjective judgment in asserting how "grand" we are and that we are at the heart of it all, the universe spinning around us, the "center of creation".

Mahayana Buddhists point out that "big and small" and "far and near" and "center and periphery" and the like are, more than we realize, measures of the human brain that are not the only way to experience reality. For example, the "center of the universe" and "place where the Big Bang is still happening" (even physicists will point out) is not some place far from here and long ago ... but here and here and here and everywhere in the Cosmos ... and now and now and now and all times ... and all is "the center". You want to know "where the Big Bang happened/is still happening?" Well, open your eyes, look around and in the mirror too! Space is expanding outward right from every particle in your body!

As well, who is to say that an ant is "less important" than an elephant because one is smaller, or an atom is less than a star, in the whole scheme of things because of relative size? These are value judgments we make.

In fact, we are at the heart of all, the center, for where in the universe is the heart, the center of all? Better said, where in the center of reality, all emerging, is not the center? Where in the heart is not found the heart? Every point in the universe spins around every point in the universe.

...

A frequently cited expression of this vision of reality is the simile of Indra’s Net from the Avatamsaka Sutra, which was further elaborated by the Huayan teachers. The whole universe is seen as a multidimensional net. At every point where the strands of the net meet, jewels are set. Each jewel reflects the light reflected in the jewels around it, and each of those jewels in turn reflects the light from all the jewels around them, and so on, forever. In this way, each jewel, or each particular entity or event, including each person, ultimately reflects and expresses the radiance of the entire universe. All of totality can be seen in each of its parts.

Another time, Fazang illustrated the Huayan teachings for Empress Wu by constructing a hall of mirrors, placing mirrors on the ceiling, floor, four walls, and four corners of a room. In the center he placed a Buddha image with a lamp next to it. Standing in this room, the empress could see that the reflection in any one mirror clearly reflected the reflections from all of the other mirrors, including the specific reflection of the Buddha image in each one. This fully demonstrated the unobstructed interpenetration of the particular and the totality, with each one contained in all, and with all contained in each one. Moreover, it showed the nonobstructed interpenetration of each particular mirror with each of the others.

...

A frequently cited expression of this vision of reality is the simile of Indra’s Net from the Avatamsaka Sutra, which was further elaborated by the Huayan teachers. The whole universe is seen as a multidimensional net. At every point where the strands of the net meet, jewels are set. Each jewel reflects the light reflected in the jewels around it, and each of those jewels in turn reflects the light from all the jewels around them, and so on, forever. In this way, each jewel, or each particular entity or event, including each person, ultimately reflects and expresses the radiance of the entire universe. All of totality can be seen in each of its parts.

http://archive.thebuddhadharma.com/issues/2006/fall/phenomenal.html

You see, it used to be thought that mankind was the center of the cosmos, thus very important. Then, Copernicus, Hubble and others showed that we are just fleas on a speck of dust in one galaxy among countless galaxies ... so apparently unimportant in our relative smallness. However we Mahayana Buddhists (and many modern physicists!) tend to see the cosmos as more like the surface of a sphere, like the surface of this ball or balloon ...



For the surface of a sphere, no matter the size of the sphere, EVERY point on the surface is as much the center of the surface as every other point. In a sense. every point is just as important or unimportant as any other ... and is as much the ball or balloon as any other. We are all the ball, and playing ball, in the most radical sense. In our universe, every point can also lay claim to being a center around which all spins as much as any other too. In fact, each point of the ball's surface supports all the rest of the surface ... ala Indra's Net.

Remove one atom from the surface, and one changes the whole ... maybe "pops" the whole balloon.

Since all was a singularity that held the makings of everything and all possibility, the Big Bang happened not just far away and long ago ... but right here where you stand, and as every atom that makes you too. A little more here, when we were talking about Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot ...

The universe only seems big or small to human beings who makes comparisons, often to their own self. Just stop it. What is "big" or "small" then?

Gassho, A Grain of Sand

PS - This was also recently posted ...

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/GR/centre.html

[Physics FAQ] - [Copyright]

Original by Philip Gibbs 1997.



Where is the centre of the universe?

There is no centre of the universe! According to the standard theories of cosmology, the universe started with a "Big Bang" about 14 thousand million years ago and has been expanding ever since. Yet there is no centre to the expansion; it is the same everywhere. The Big Bang should not be visualised as an ordinary explosion. The universe is not expanding out from a centre into space; rather, the whole universe is expanding and it is doing so equally at all places, as far as we can tell.

In 1929 Edwin Hubble announced that he had measured the speed of galaxies at different distances from us, and had discovered that the farther they were, the faster they were receding. This might suggest that we are at the centre of the expanding universe, but in fact if the universe is expanding uniformly according to Hubble's law, then it will appear to do so from any vantage point.

If we see a galaxy B receding from us at 10,000 km/s, an alien in galaxy B will see our galaxy A receding from it at 10,000 km/s in the opposite direction. Another galaxy C twice as far away in the same direction as B will be seen by us as receding at 20,000 km/s. The alien will see it receding at 10,000 km/s: ...

So from the point of view of the alien at B, everything is expanding away from it, whichever direction it looks in, just the same as it does for us.

The Famous Balloon Analogy

A good way to help visualise the expanding universe is to compare space with the surface of an expanding balloon. This analogy was used by Arthur Eddington as early as 1933 in his book The Expanding Universe. It was also used by Fred Hoyle in the 1960 edition of his popular book The Nature of the Universe. Hoyle wrote "My non-mathematical friends often tell me that they find it difficult to picture this expansion. Short of using a lot of mathematics I cannot do better than use the analogy of a balloon with a large number of dots marked on its surface. If the balloon is blown up the distances between the dots increase in the same way as the distances between the galaxies." ...

[Jundo]

These are words of wisdom!
Thank you, Jundo.
I hope (y)our cold is better.

Another famous Zen Koan that expresses all this ...

When Jundo catches cold, Diarmuid1 sneezes!

Isshu Miura and Ruth Fuller Sasaki wrote this on Zen Koans many decades ago, discussing the approach to Koans in a traditional Rinzai way ...

The realm which is revealed to us once we see into our own true nature is none other than that known in Sanskrit as the Dharmakaya, and, in Japanese, the hosshin . ... In Rinzai roku, the Zen Master Rinzai speaks about the Dhannakaya this way: "The pure light in each instant of thought is the Dharmakaya Buddha within your own house."

With the aid of our first koan we attain our first glimpse into the undifferentiated realm of the Dharmakaya. To deepen our insight into this realm, to become acquainted intimately with this, our original home, and to make it our constant dwelling place, we study many koans known as Dharmakaya koans, or, in Japanese, hosshin koans. Let me give you a few examples:

A monk asked Kassan Osho: "What is the Dharmakaya?" "The Dharmakaya is without form," Kassan replied.

A monk once said to Dairyo Osho: "The physical body decomposes. What is the indestructible Dharmakaya?" Dairyn answered with this verse:
"Blooming mountain flowers
Are like golden brocade;
Brimming mountain waters
Are blue as indigo."

When Ummon was asked, "What is the pure Dharmakaya?" he replied: "The flowering hedge [surrounding the privy)."

To Jun Osho's verse on the Dharmakaya was this:

When the cows of Eshu are well fed with grain,
The horses of Ekisha have full stomachs.

This is like saying that, when an American sneezes, an Englishman catches cold.

...

If, on coming upon expressions such as these, you feel as if you were meeting a close relative face to face at a busy crossroad and recognizing him beyond a question of a doubt, then you can be said to understand the Dharmakaya. But, if you use common sense to conjecture about it, or run hither and thither trying to follow the words of others, you will never know the Dharmakaya. An old master has said: "There are many intelligent men, but few who have attained insight into their own real nature." Truly this one thing - seeing into one's own real nature - is the eternal eye of Zen.

http://www.huuu.org/learn/zen-koan.html

(Maybe it is the cold medicine that has me writing all this today).

Gassho, J

SatToday

[Kotei]

Hi Kotei,

The Ultra-Deep field is definitely a lovely shot! There's a certain video I like to go back to from time to time, which goes on to include a 3D view of it.
...

Thank you, Stacy.
Didn't know about this video... Wow!
Escaping light-pollution, I was at a dark place some 100km away from my home, last week.
Got very silent, thinking about photons that started their journey some billion years ago, hitting my retina right now.
Me, sitting on the surface of a spinning ball, circling around our star, that itself is circling around the center of our Milky way galaxy, circling around.....
Even in the dualistic recognized part of all this, we're all made of stardust ;-)

Gassho,
Kotei sattoday.

[Jundo]

By the way, it is such a comment on who we are that this amazing story ...

http://www.nature.com/news/universe-has-ten-times-more-galaxies-than-researchers-thought-1.20809

... got almost zero news coverage this week as we focus instead on the 'black hole' of Donald Trump's ugly beauty pageant and the latest pork prices the result of Brexit. Oh well. Somewhere in this vast cosmos there truly must be intelligent life ...



Gassho, J

SatToday

[Mp]

By the way, it is such a comment on who we are that this amazing story ...

http://www.nature.com/news/universe-has-ten-times-more-galaxies-than-researchers-thought-1.20809

... got almost zero news coverage this week as we focus instead on the 'black hole' of Donald Trump's ugly beauty pageant and the latest pork prices the result of Brexit. Oh well. Somewhere in this vast cosmos there truly must be intelligent life ...



Gassho, J

SatToday

Gassho
Shingen

s@today

[Jundo]

If 2 trillion galaxies seems like a big number, turn the light to shine ... look within yourself. This announcement this week:

Human Cell Atlas project aims to map the human body's 35 trillion cells

Labs around the world will create the most comprehensive map of the 35 trillion cells that make up the human body under plans put forward by researchers on Friday.

The international effort aims to decipher the types and properties of every cell a person contains, whether healthy or diseased, in a bid to speed up discoveries in medical science.

... The first pilot studies to feed into the atlas have already begun. The work draws on recent technological advances that can perform detailed genetic analyses on thousands of cells a day. While most cells in the body carry the same genetic code, their fate is ruled by is the pattern of genes that is activated inside them. Switch on one group of genes and a cell becomes a neuron; activate another and it forms a beating heart cell.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/...trillion-cells

I guess that includes the 100 billion neurons with their 100 trillion connections!

Each cell of your body is you. You are each cell of your body. In turn, without the cells there is no you. Take away each cell one by one, and what of you is there? You are your each cell's true self. If a cell dies, but you keep on living, we might say that there has been no death for the cell's true self.

You are the cosmos. Each star in the sky is you. Without you and all things and beings, there is no cosmos. Take away each thing and being one by one, and what of the cosmos is there? The whole is your own true self. If you die, but the stars keep burning, we might say that there has been no death of your true self.

Gassho, J

SatToday on a rump of cells

[Jundo]

The model of "self" in the human brain is transcended in Buddhism. It is really not so hard to explain in modern terms.

The human brain receives data through the senses, next processes, organizes and interprets the same, and creates within its lobes a model of reality. As part of that simulation, the human mind creates a conscious awareness of self identity (the feeling of "I am me"), and a pretty good division between your "myself" and all the rest of the world which it judges to be "not my self". For example, the brain tends to draw a border at the surface of the skin, inside which is "you" and beyond which is "the world out there". Much of the border drawing of "you" vs. "not you" occurs in the pre-frontal cortex, but it is actually a wide range of complex processes involving many portions of the brain:

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2012/08/self-awareness-new-insights-into-how-human-brain-constructs-of-sense-of-self.html

In fact, this sense of individuality and separateness is a perfectly good way to define your "self", and you are not the the "stuff outside you". You are not the chair you sit in, the house you sit in, the mountains or stars, and everything else beyond the skin. In fact, without this view of things we could not live and function!

However, that is not the only way to look at, or define, who "you" are and your relationship to the rest of the world. It is possible to muck around with that "holo-deck" model to create an alternative experience of reality in which the walls between the "self" and "the world out there" drop away. The result is an alternative, but equally valid and useful, way to experience identity.

For example, in our normal way of experiencing life, light (which is not you) comes from the sun (also not you) bounces off of outside objects and other people (not you) into your eye to be reprocessed in the brain into that model I mentioned that divides "me myself" from "everything and everyone not me". Likewise trees (not you) produce oxygen (not you) which is inhaled into the lungs (you) and incorporated into you cells (thus becoming part of you). You are made of elements (now you) that were "once not you" when they were created in distant suns (not you)

When the "alternative model" kicks in by dropping the hard division between "self" and "not self", one might then find that one's self identity can come to include everything ... the light, the sun, the objects, the eye, the brain, the trees, the oxygen, the lungs, the cells ... as one single whole. It is not strictly necessary to only define yourself at the skin line. You can, for example, perceive the sun and trees and other people as being as much "aspects of you" as your nails or nose or kidneys or eyes are aspects of you. The "new model" simply redraws the border to include all that.

Both the "self/not self" model and the "new wide border" model are alternative ways of defining and experiencing self identity. (The Zen experience known as "Satori" is largely tricking the mind into experiencing the "wide border" model. This "wide border" version of "self" becomes an experience as real and tangible as your experience right now that you are "you". For example, "you" would experience that "you" are as much "the planet mars" as that "you" is your own left foot! The new model just changes its own mental self-definition and border drawing, and the sense of connection and interflowing.

In this way, the border of self-hood could be expanded to included the world and all its features and creatures and other people, the most distant galaxies and all grains of sand on the shore. All that needs to be done is to tinker with the model which defines "selfhood" in our own brains. Many drugs, electro-magnetic impulses to the brain, brain injuries and meditation techniques can muck around with the borders of "self/not self" in the manner I describe.



Gassho, J

SatToday inside every atom and star

PS - By the way, when one transcends the self/other divide in Buddhism, the result is not what philosophers call "solipsism", the view for example that 'I' am the only thing that exists in reality and everybody and everything else is my dream. Rather, it is something which transcends all "I/Not I" to something much more encompassing and wonderful. It would be terrible if the universe were just fat old me or my personal strange dream!

[Jundo]

I probably should mention that I have a fever today and I have had a little cold medicine. But please know that I mean every word here.

[Jundo]

Many drugs, electro-magnetic impulses to the brain, brain injuries and meditation techniques can muck around with the borders of "self/not self" in the manner I describe.

I also want to point folks again to these two radio interviews with Jill Bolte Taylor, the noted neurologist who suffered a massive stroke which resulted in the parts of her brain connected to thoughts, judgments, time and such shutting down.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor is a Harvard-trained and published neuroanatomist who experienced a severe hemorrhage in the left hemisphere of her brain in 1996. On the afternoon of this rare form of stroke (AVM), she could not walk, talk, read, write, or recall any of her life. It took eight years for Dr. Jill to completely recover all of her physical function and thinking ability. She is the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey (published in 2008 by Viking Penguin).

JILL BOLTE TAYLOR: ... You know, I think that what I bring to this story that hasn’t been brought before is, through the eyes of a scientist, who specializes in the brain, we do have two very separate hemispheres and I think it’s a matter of recognizing we are biologically designed to have this experience of feeling at one with all that is and to be able to say, oh, all I’m doing is quieting a certain group of cells inside of my brain ...

http://ttbook.org/book/transcript/transcript-jill-bolte-taylor-insight

...

ROBERT KRULWICH: And, and the other thing that she told us is that lying in that bed without words, she says she felt connected to things, to everything, in a way that she never had before.



JILL BOLTE TAYLOR: Oh yeah I lost all definition of myself in relationship to everything in the external world.



JAD ABUMRAD: You mean like he couldn't figure out where you ended.



ROBERT KRULWICH: How much of that was about language. A little part? A lot? I mean.



JILL BOLTE TAYLOR: Oh I would say it was huge. Language is an ongoing information processing it's that constant reminder. I am, this is my name, this is all the data related to me, these are my likes and my dislikes, these are my beliefs, I am an individual, I'm a single, I am a solid, I'm separate from you. This is my name…

http://www.radiolab.org/story/91725-words/

Gassho, Nameless

SatToday

[Kotei]

Thank you Jundo.

Thinking about all this makes me feel important and totally small and unimportant at the same time.
It makes all this 'striving for being recognized and successful and important' look so totally absurd.

The human body: 30 trillion cells and 39 trillion bacteria. (As I read in an (unfortunately german) article).
This 'I' is already a 'we', a place with more aliens than residents.
Of course, the majority can change after going to the toilet. ;-)

Gassho,
Kotei sattoday.

[Jundo]

And thus the old joke ...

[Jundo]

Thank you Jundo.

Thinking about all this makes me feel important and totally small and unimportant at the same time.
It makes all this 'striving for being recognized and successful and important' look so totally absurd.

Well, another way to look at yourself is also to see that, as stuff made from the stars which formed your hands and legs and eyes and heart and mind, you are in that sense the universe come into a form to walk and see and hug and punch and build and destroy and all the rest. As another great modern neurologist, V.S. Ramachandran puts it ...

... Especially awe inspiring is the fact that any single brain, including yours, is made up of atoms that were forged in the hearts of countless, far-flung stars billions of years ago. These particles drifted for eons and light-years until gravity and change brought them together here, now. These atoms now form a conglomerate- your brain- that can not only ponder the very stars that gave it birth but can also think about its own ability to think and wonder about its own ability to wonder. With the arrival of humans, it has been said, the universe has suddenly become conscious of itself. This, truly, it the greatest mystery of all.”


― V.S. Ramachandran, The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtKvl-CaBy8

Alan Watts said it 70 years ago ... the universe is whirlpooling each one of us ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZPaMc5HkHU

Gassho, the whirlpool

SatToday