At the start of virtually every meditation of Diamond Way Buddhism, after quieting the mind and letting thoughts and feelings pass without evaluation, the focus turns to the four basic thoughts that point mind to its highest possibilities. These four thoughts are:
- our precious opportunity in this life
- the impermanence of everything composite
- causality
- the reasons for working with mind.
Although we normally connect these thoughts with the start of our meditation, they have extreme relevance to our everyday experience, including the discoveries and activities of science. How might they benefit the view of both the Buddhist on the path to liberation and the scientist on the quest for knowledge? What if we looked at these four thoughts through the eyes of a scientist?
We Recognize Our Precious Opportunities In This Life
While life is indeed abundant on earth, astrophysics provides us with a fresh perspective on just how precious our opportunities really are. Modern astronomy shows us that the visible universe is dominated by conditions that are incredibly hostile to life.
Interstellar and intergalactic space are characterized by areas of extreme cold and extreme heat, ranging from minus 263 degrees Celsius in giant molecular clouds to a million degrees Celsius in many areas of intergalactic space. Furthermore, space is full of high-energy radiation and particles that would harm life as we know it if exposed for too long. Earthlings are protected from this hostile interstellar medium by the ultimate space suit—the earth’s atmosphere and magnetic field, called the magnetosphere. Earth’s special conditions allow for liquid water and a rich nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere, which are critical for carbon-based life and are truly precious considering the vastness of space. As far as we know, the other seven planets in our solar system cannot support life and the nearest star (other than the sun) is about 40 trillion kilometers away. Astronomically speaking, our planet is a very rare and precious gem—a single diamond on a beach full of pebbles. The rare opportunity to enjoy our nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere is good to remember the next time you focus on the air coming and going at the tip of your nose.
However, even if we see that life can only occur in very few places in the universe, this does not imply that we are totally alone. In both Buddhism and science, space is full of richness and possibility, and both consider the possibility of beings on other worlds. But not all life has the opportunity for high levels of intellectual and spiritual development. What is the cosmic probability of a precious life, human or otherwise, that is capable of advanced technology, critical thought and the chance to hear enlightened teachings? Both traditional Buddhist teachings and science tell us this is very rare. In Buddhism, the probability of getting a precious life is traditionally likened to the chance that a turtle swimming in the ocean and surfacing every hundred years would randomly come up for air in the middle of a small floating ring.
An astronomer might provide some guess at a probability of the precious human life using the famous Drake Equation. The Drake Equation is used to estimate the number of extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy that could be advanced enough to send out radio signals detectable to us on Earth. This equation can also be modified to answer such questions as, “What are the expected number of civilizations that could currently have dharma teachings?” This will depend on several factors, many of which can only be best guesses.
We will call this the Dharma Drake Equation, whose full expression can be seen in the graphic. I will take some of the numbers that astronomer Carl Sagan famously used, namely:
N* = the number of stars in the Milky Way = 400 billion
Fplanet = the fraction of stars that have planets = 1/4
Nearths = the number of those stars that have planets in the ‘habitable zone’ meaning they have the possibility to support life = 2
Flife = fraction of those planets where any life actually develops = ½
Fintelligent = fraction of those planets where intelligent life actually develops = 1/10
This works out to 100 billion worlds in our Milky Way that have some form of life, and 10 billion planets with intelligent life.
Now, the calculation gets a bit trickier. Even if we assume that buddhas will always appear when intelligent beings are present, we cannot assume that the teachings of a buddha will be available, or that beings will be interested in the teachings. What is the fraction of these planets with intelligent beings that have teachings? To get some estimate we can look at our own population on Earth. Assuming seven billion total intelligent beings and 360 million Buddhists, we see that the number is about five percent, or
Fdharma = 1/20
Flifetime represents the total time that the teachings have been around since life existed on our planet. The teachings of the Buddha Sakyamuni have been around for 2,500 years. As it is unclear for how long the previous Buddhas’ teachings may have been around, we will use the historical Buddha’s time as the total time dharma teachings have been around. Comparing 2,500 years to the time that life has existed on Earth (about 3 billion years), we get:
Flifetime = 1/1,200,000
Taking these factors all together, we have 10 billion planets in the Milky Way Galaxy with intelligent life, times the fraction of these that develop dharma teachings of 1 in 20, times the fraction of dharma teaching lifetime to total lifetime of life on the planet of 1 in 1,200,000… that comes out to about 417 planets in our galaxy that might have dharma teachings currently! Considering there are an estimated 100 billion planets in the galaxy, this means that any given planet has about a 1 in 240 million chance of hosting dharma teachings currently.
This calculation of course does not take into account the small chance of having the karma to obtain a life that allows one to understand and practice the teachings on one of these planets. Essentially, it only represents the probability of being at the right place at the right time. Here again, we are reminded of the example of the turtle and the ring in the ocean. Precious human life indeed!
We understand the impermanence of everything composite
The idea of impermanence is found everywhere in nature, even if we might strongly resist it in our personal lives. Even though we may realize that the world around us is constantly changing, we often ignore the inner changes that occur in mind. This is evident in that studies of consciousness and brain function are still on the frontiers of science. However, since its inception as a modern empirical science, physics has been making discoveries about change in the outer world.
If describing changes in the natural world is the heart of physics, then the mathematics of calculus is its lifeblood, for the two are essential complements. Just as one might consider geometry to be the mathematics of shape, one can also consider calculus to be the mathematics of change. Many consider the birth of modern physics to coincide with the invention of calculus by Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz in the late 1600s. Calculus is used to describe change in all branches of science, from the motion of a motorcycle speeding down a highway to biological population growth.
Everyday experience tells us that time flows in one direction, creating changes we observe in both mind and the outer world. The flow of time is critical for human perception of phenomena, including the perception of past, present and future. Physics has attempted to address the fact that our consciousness perceives an arrow of time, even though it makes no statement on the nature of that consciousness. The most notable example of this is found in the second law of thermodynamics, which expresses the irreversible flow of time as the fact that differences in pressure and temperature tend to equilibrate over time. One consequence of the second law of thermodynamics is the impossibility of a perpetual motion machine, meaning a machine that generates free usable energy from the abundant internal energy of nature. Many other arrows of time are noted in physical theory, such as the causal arrow of time which is a statement of cause and effect, the cosmological arrow of time which is related to the ever-increasing expansion of the universe, and the quantum arrow of time which describes the irreversibility of the quantum mechanical wave function collapse. However, all of these can be thought of as a consequence of the thermodynamic arrow of time, or related back to this. In any case, the second law of thermodynamics and the ever-expanding observable universe show us that the impermanence of everything composite is a fundamental fact of nature.
We Understand Causality
The idea of causality is not unique to Western science. As far back as the 1600s, the mathematician Gottfried Leibniz realized the importance of causality, saying: “We ought to establish a law of nature which I hold as being most universal and most inviolable. There is always a perfect equivalence between the full cause and the total effect…each entire effect is equivalent to the cause.”
On the most basic level, the interplay between cause and effect is obvious to any Western scientist, mathematician, philosopher and nearly everyone else in between. Seeing things as a linear chain of events is especially easy for the Western mind, with one action leading to some outcome which then leads to another outcome and so on. Cause and effect is mathematically developed in classical mechanical physics via Newton’s second law: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
However, modern science and Buddhism know that cause and effect are far more complicated than a simple linear domino effect. The full interdependence of the observer, the act of observing, and the object being observed has only recently been realized in the theories of quantum mechanics and special relativity. In both Buddhism and quantum mechanics, there is no way to separate the scientist, the experiment, and the object being observed in the laboratory. All are interdependent, and any outcome or result will be a product of all three. There is no way to make an objective measurement free of any influence or observer bias. Through the phenomena of quantum entanglement, any observation on one particle will affect others in the entangled system instantaneously even though they are separated in space. In the theory of special relativity, causality also takes on an observer-dependent role, as there is no longer a universal clock with which to measure time. Every observer will have a unique view on a measurement, and there is no single privileged reference frame on which to base measurements.
Certainly in modern science it is naive to think of a straightforward or deterministic cause-effect. Specifically, the theory of quantum mechanics provides a framework that promotes the view of ‘conditions-outcome’ rather than ’cause-effect.’ In this case, conditions are the construct of all possible outcomes which have given probabilities of occurring (this is known as the state function or wavefunction). When the measurement is made, the outcome is provided in the collapse of the wavefunction into a given state.
The theories of quantum mechanics and special relativity are among the most frequently cited examples of a philosophical connection between Buddhist philosophy and modern science. They represent a strong departure from classical Western deterministic thinking, that is, the idea that the universe and everything that happens can be known precisely and calculated, given a situation where we have enough information about the initial conditions. The fact that deterministic differential equations found in quantum mechanics and chaos theory provide non-deterministic outcomes is a topic of exciting current research.
Finally, We See The Reasons for Working with Mind
Perhaps science could benefit by taking a step back from the whiteboard filled with equations and evaluating its own basic thoughts, or its basic philosophical assumptions. The world, to the scientist, exists apart from human perception and is independent of our concepts. Furthermore, any result accepted by science must be repeatable and hence reality according to science is based on what we all agree upon. These basic assumptions of science are what give science its power; without rigorous logical self-consistency, repeatability and a fundamental thirst for an intellectual understanding of nature, the world might look very similar to how it was perceived in the Middle Ages. However, the conclusion one comes to is that science doesn’t in fact tell us how things are, but only how they appear to be to our senses and machines. Furthermore, science is not currently designed to answer any question regarding the human condition or issues of human happiness.
The experiment is, of course, only as good as the instrument that is performing it and scientists take great care in quantifying their experimental errors and uncertainties. However, science so far has very little to say about the most important and basic instrument of all: the human mind. No other logical systematic inquiry of mind can match that of Buddhism, which has specialized in this study for thousands of years. Furthermore, Buddhism can be compatible with science in that it is also based on empirical inquiry and repeatability. Buddhism provides methods that have been tested over the centuries to address the issues of human happiness and develop the mind into a more aware and stable environment. These empirical methods and results of Buddhism are claimed to be repeatable: enlightened and liberated states of mind can be experienced by all, and all should test the methods and results on their own, taking nothing on blind faith. Ultimately, the methods of Buddhism can complement the scientific search in ways that can enable us to delve into the most fundamental nature of consciousness, matter, and space.
