Mind and Matter

      Back before westerners got involved in Buddhism there was no discussion about whether or not Buddhism was a religion. To the Buddhist in the east Buddhism was his religion and not a so called philosophy of natural law. All of these attempts to make Buddhism not a religion began when people simply couldn’t squeeze it  into the same mold as Christianity, Judaism and Islam.
       The very term “religion” in most Americans world view is simply another word for theism. As science and “enlightened” thinking progressed a new world view developed even among Christians that any idea of spiritual or mystical or magical beliefs was all to be labeled “superstition”. Physiologist in the west have even developed a clinical term for what these oh so rational scientists see as horribly irrational world views, they call it magical thinking.
       The Christians philosophers of the 17th century developed the idea they called Deism. A Deist typically rejects supernatural events such as prophecy and miracles, tending to assert that God (or "The Supreme Architect") has a plan for the universe that is not to be altered by intervention in the affairs of human life. That is to say they adopted Mechanistic thinking - the universe is a machinelike entity that God simply made wound up and sits back uninvolved and observes as it ticks away.
        As the new religion of Science took root in western thinking this idea of the Universe as a giant clock work mechanism was the underling view of the material world. In 1642, the year Galileo died, Isaac Newton was born. Newton was a mathematical genius whose laws of the physical universe became the handbook for Mechanistic thinking for centuries.
       The new religion science created a worldview that disconnects spirit and matter, in fact a world view that rejected the very idea of spirituality. Of course the problem was that we simply couldn’t escape our own awareness of spirituality. Philosophers and scientists and every kind of so called rational thinker have for the last two hundred years spent hours upon hours writing, arguing and “proving” that there is no such thing as spiritual matter or matters. The communist tried to stamp it out, burned murdered and savaged their own cultures relentlessly for a hundred years and still have been unable to convince the majority of humanity that they are nothing more than a temporary, meaningless assortment of organic sludge. Then of course the scientists delved deep enough into matter to discover the so called Quantum theory.
       A quantum system is represented mathematically by a wave function. What is so frustrating to the worldview that has developed over the last few centuries is that Quantum theory is generally regarded as one of the most successful scientific Theories ever formulated but its view of reality is much closer to the so called classical “mystical” worldview than modern scientists would allow. The standard interpretation of quantum theory implies that all the macroscopic objects we see around us exist in an objective, unambiguous state only when they are being measured or observed. This leads to the suggestion that  it is consciousness that collapses the wave function and thereby creates reality. In this view, a subatomic particle does not assume definite properties when it interacts with a measuring device, but only when the reading of the measuring device is registered in the mind of an observer.
          This was of course the bases of a major school of Buddhist philosophy, the mind only school, a thousand years before Newton was born. The similarity between these two theories of reality has caused great conflict in both science and Buddhism with each system of beliefs now frantically trying to integrate the other into itself.
            In considering all of the above, and yes Dorothy Zen is a Mind Only School, I have come across another issue that I would like to address in context with this sundering of spiritual and material in our world view: “Causality”. Causality then will be the subject of my next Blog.