Meditation is about quieting one’s mind. A mind without thought is not a thoughtless mind. It is an empty mind, a mind with nothing in it. It is a no mind, as Buddhists say. Sunyata[i] or emptiness in Mahayana Buddhism is enlightenment.

By this point in my journey, I was deeply immersed in two fields of inquiry–physics and the Vedas. These fields were converging for me. Wisdom of the Vedas was shining new light on many abstract concepts in modern physics, such as wave-particle duality. Conversely recent theories in physics, such as the nature of the void, were giving me, a scientist, permission to be open to the insights of the Vedas.

I was beginning to accept that the Vedic sages were scientists, of sorts, and they used, what Einstein called, “thought experiments” to arrive at their deep insights. They had other highly developed “tools” for probing into reality, such as meditation, yoga and mantras. I was no longer skeptical of these eastern practices and was ready to explore them for myself. I took up meditation.

Don’t let anyone tell you that meditation is easy. My father-in-law would tell me “all that you have to do is watch your thoughts”. As hard as I tried, I could not quieten my mind. I later learnt that trying hard is the problem. One has to just let go. I was ready to give up on meditation. In desperation, I took to extreme measures to quieten my mind.

I started by listening to music while wearing high fidelity headphones and cranking up the volume. I mostly listened to drums and Buddhist chants. Low frequency sounds would drown out the noise in my head. Lo and behold, my mind would quieten. I would drop into a state of “no mind”, lost in my music. The longer the music went the better I felt.

I was so drawn to this experience that it became my practice for almost a year. Every night I would put my headphones on and repeat the exercise. I became addicted to the experience. This was also the time that my teenage son started a punk band. I took to going to his performances and losing myself in his music. I would close my eyes and listen to his very loud band with my entire body, this experience too, as strange as it sounds, would quieten my mind. This was my introduction to meditation. Very unorthodox, I admit.

After years of listening to loud music through headphones and going to concerts with a view to “meditating” in this unorthodox way, I felt motivated to try traditional meditation. I was now able to let go of the chattering monkey in my head and sit quietly in meditation. I was able to watch my thoughts float by, like wisps of clouds in the sky. Often my mind would become still and completely quiet. In those moments I experienced nothingness of the void. It felt good.

I meditate often, and I can drop into meditation in the noisiest of places, such as in crowds or at a party. The switch for me from an outward focused life to a life lived inside-out started when I became skilled at watching my thoughts and meditating. I flipped from being a scientist of the world outside-a physicist, to a yogi of the mind. I could now switch easily and seamlessly between two realities-the external reality and the internal reality. I had the know-how to experience first-hand what the ancient sages spoke of. The wisdom of the ancient sages was now a realized experience for me, it was no longer an abstract idea. I could replicate the experience of the sages. Thus, I came to believe in the Vedas as much as I believed in physics. This was a breakthrough for me.

I could now integrate and synthesize two streams of knowledge-scientific and Vedic. I look at scientific knowledge as the “wisdom of the west” and the Vedas as the wisdom of the east. I have understood that they both point to true north or the absolute truth.

The absolute truth, soul, spirit, God or Reality by any name is within us. The journey in search of Reality is like traveling down the yellow brick road, in the Wizard of Oz, the further you go the more you come to know yourself,[ii] as Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Lion and the Tinman did.

This I believe: 10. Self-discovery is a slow unfolding. The further you go on this journey the more you come to know yourself.

[i] (http://www.buddhanet.net/cbp2_f6.htm, n.d.)

[ii] (https://www.shmoop.com/wonderful-wizard-of-oz-book/yellow-brick-road-symbol.html, n.d.)

It seems we cannot rely on our senses to reveal what is real and what is a figment of our imagination. Perhaps poetry, music, and dance are better guides to reality than our intellect. Reality does not speak to us as much as it touches us. We do not see Reality, but we feel it.

“To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.”

William Blake

William Blake’s beautiful poem speaks to me in ways that science never could. His words go straight to the core of my being, bypassing flesh, bones, and the intellect. Nothing in science, except, perhaps, pure mathematics, moves me so.  “To see a world in a grain of sand….” are just words strung together, and, in a literal sense, the sentence is meaningless and a physical impossibility. Yet, the sentence transcends my senses and intellect and touches me deeply. What it touches inside of me feels as real to me as anything outside of me. In this case, the words of William Blake evoke feelings that are deeper, richer, and more pleasant than the physical world brought to me by my senses. What is inside of me feels more real than the outside. I am convinced that there is a presence inside of me that I should get to know.

Reading Rumi, listening to classical music, dancing like a Sufi, or seeing Escher sketches transports me to a different place. A reality that is beyond the reach of my five senses and intellect. In this verse, Rumi, it appears, is speaking to me: “…. like a scientist, you collect data and put facts together to come to some conclusion. Mystics arrive at what they know differently; they lie on a person’s chest and drift into the answer. Thinking gives off smoke to prove that there is a fire. Mystic sits inside the burning.” (The Soul of Rumi, 2002).

I feel like the scientist in Rumi’s poem, who, after collecting data from science and the scriptures, concluded that reality is more than our senses can perceive. I know what it is not, but I am ignorant of what it is. I want to be the mystic. I want to “sit inside the burning.” I am longing to know.

I was looking for reality in all the wrong places. Physicists are in search of reality “out there.” On the other hand, the Vedic sages believed that there is only one way to know Reality: to know oneself. Reality lies within, the sages say, and the mystics “sit inside the burning”- they live this truth. Many renunciates claim to be “with God” all the time. Can ordinary people like me “live in the world and not be of it”?

J.Krishnamurti, a noted Indian philosopher, writes, “… you can understand what you are, only by watching yourself, not trying to correct it, not trying to shape it, not trying to say this is right, this is wrong, but seeing what is actually taking place.” ³⁰ Krishnamurti called this practice of watching one’s thoughts, moment to moment, Choiceless Awareness. To know oneself is to know the contents of one’s mind’s desires, fears, beliefs, hurts, and everything else.

Choiceless Awareness is a process by which one withdraws from the world outside and turns the focus inward–on the self. Most people go through life unaware that their inner life is worth examining. They go through life not knowing who they really are. “Who are you?” asked the Caterpillar of Alice in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, “I can’t explain myself, sir,” said Alice, “because I am not myself, you see.”

I was fortunate to have been introduced to the practice of Choiceless Awareness by my father-in-law. I taught myself to watch my thoughts, emotions, and bodily sensations. I applied scientific tools of observation and data-gathering to myself. I recorded my thoughts as they surfaced and watched them without judging them and with complete detachment. I can watch a thought arise, and if I do not engage with it, it floats away; another thought appears, then another. After a while, the thoughts stop, and the mind becomes quiet. In these moments, I am lost to the world. These moments are like deep sleep, except that I am awake. J. Krishnamurti, in his book “The First and Last Freedom”[i] writes that the path to freedom from suffering is self-discovery. According to the Upanishads, self-knowledge is the ultimate goal of life.

My father-in-law advised me that the “only thing that you have to do is to watch your thoughts.” There is no need for a guru or a guide; one becomes one’s own guru just by watching one’s thoughts. By watching one’s thoughts, one gets to know the contents of one’s mind and realizes that we are not the contents of our minds; we get to know who we really are. “Know thyself” is an ancient Greek aphorism inscribed in the Temple of Apollo at Delphi.

“Who am I?” I am not my body. I am not my thoughts. I am not my fears. I am not my desires. So, who am I?

https://gamma.app/docs/Good-God-Its-Me-uurthyr7wwisnes?mode=doc

[i] (http://www.jkrishnamurti.org/krishnamurti-teachings/view-text.php?s=books&tid=30&chid=56858, n.d.)

Sacred Geometry and the Meaning of Life

Nature is proof that She is a mathematician. It is as if math is Her preferred language for revealing Her deepest secrets to us. F=ma, Newton’s Laws of motion gave us the mechanical age and , Einstein’s mass and energy equivalence gave us the atomic age. Through these equations She gave man the power to harness her energy for his purposes. Physicist and futurist Michio Kaku believes that one day physicists will find an equation about “six inches long” that will explain all of nature. A single super equation, that would explain all of nature, from the behavior of subatomic particles to black holes and galaxies. A hope and a dream to be sure, but as Einstein said we want to know “the mind of God”.

We are familiar with equations in physics and in the sciences, but what about describing a beautiful flower, a fern, a sea shell or a perfect wave in the ocean? Does She reveal her creative nature through math too?

Z_{n +1} = Z_n ² + C is the mathematical equation describing the Mandelbrot Set, named after the discoverer Benoit Mandelbrot, a Polish born, French, American polymath. The Mandelbrot Set are fractals which describe amazing shapes occurring in nature. “Fractals are special mathematical sets of numbers that display similarity through the full range of scale — i.e., they look the same no matter how big or how small they are. Another characteristic of fractals is that they exhibit great complexity driven by simplicity”.[i] Fractals are self-similar patterns of complexity driven by simplicity. The smallest unit of a fractal is similar to the whole. Fractals appear in nature in sea shells, galaxies, ferns and even human lungs.

 

“The mathematical beauty of fractals is that infinite complexity is formed from relatively simple equations. By iterating or repeating the fractal-generating equations many times, random outputs create patterns that are unique yet recognizable.” (Mcnally, n.d.).

What amazes me about fractals is that they are so prevalent in nature, are beautiful and yet complex patterns that can be represented by simple formulae.

Is math an expression of nature or vice versa?

X_n = X_n-1 + X_n-2 a sequence of numbers known as Fibonacci sequence was invented by Leonardo Pisano, an Italian mathematician, who was also known as Fibonacci (son of Bonacci). The sequence of numbers written out are 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55…these numbers appear mysteriously in nature over and over again. This is why it is often referred to as nature’s secret code. This hidden code can be found in the numbers of petals on a flower, the structure of fruits and vegetables, the proportions of the human body, and even in the unique shape of spirals in nature. “Sunflowers are particularly fascinating as they show Fibonacci numbers in so many ways.  Count the petals on a sunflower–there are many! –and you’ll most likely count exactly 21, 34 or 55 petals–nothing in between. If you look closely at the center of a sunflower, you will see a spiral pattern. In fact, there are spirals in two directions. If you have the patience to count the number of spirals, it will always be a Fibonacci number. Count the spirals in the other direction and it will be an adjacent Fibonacci number. So, if you count 34 spirals going to the right, you know that there will be either 21 or 55 spirals to the left.” Source: Fibonacci in Nature.[ii]

 

Long before Tegmark, Mandelbrot and Fibonacci there was Pythagoras, circa 400 BCE, who believed in divine geometry and started a religious movement based on this belief. Predating Pythagoras are mandalas–geometric patterns representing the universe– which first appeared in the Vedic text Rigveda. Mandalas are symbolic representations of the entire universe. The Vedic sages did not have knowledge of mathematics but they intuited (or divined) that the physical universe was a symbolic representation of the “mind of God”. Mandalas, like equations in physics, reveal the hidden order in the universe.

 

The Vedic sages believed that behind the forms in nature are deep patterns, and these patterns contain the inherent harmony in nature. Mandalas are representations of this harmony. The act of drawing mandalas and meditating on it, brings man and nature in harmony.

Physicists and the ancient Vedic sages have come to the same conclusion that behind forms and appearances are patterns, which can only be expressed in the abstractions of math and geometry.

Paraphrasing Maria Popova, who wrote in her essay[iii] on Susanne Langer that great art, requires a dual contemplation– “it asks the artist to contemplate her interior life and give shape to what she finds there in abstract form; it asks the audience to contemplate the abstraction and glean from it transcendent resonance with our own interior life.” Mandalas are sacred geometry that are “an act of translation–inner to outer to inner….in the act of that two-way translation, (they) transform us”

The point of abstractions to represent Reality is that the world we live in might be abstract, not material. Reality, therefore, is best represented by abstractions, like the mandalas or mathematical equations. Symbols are abstractions, it is we who give them meaning, as in Rorschach tests. Therefore, it is meaningless to ask what the meaning of life is because it is we who give life meaning.

The mind of God is revealed through math and the mind of man projects meaning onto it. God is a mathematician. And, Life is a Rorschach test[iv]!

[i] (https://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/wilderness-resources/blogs/14-amazing-fractals-found-in-nature, n.d.)

[ii] (https://plantsandbeyond.com/2018/01/08/fibonacci-sequence-in-nature-and-plants/, n.d.)

[iii] (https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/04/21/susanne-langer-philosophy-in-a-new-key-questions-answers/, n.d.)

[iv] (https://psychcentral.com/lib/rorschach-inkblot-test/, n.d.)

 

Mathematics is abstract, symbolic, structured and precise. It is true everywhere and always and mathematical laws cannot be violated, ever. Math sounds a lot like the attributes of God-eternal, omnipresent and omnipotent. According to theoretical physicist Michio Kaku “”The mind of God we believe is cosmic music, the music of strings resonating through 11-dimensional hyperspace. That is the mind of God.”[i]  Vern Poythress, who teaches New Testament in Cambridge University and has two doctorates, a PhD in mathematics from Harvard and a doctorate in Divinity, argues in his book Redeeming Mathematics: A God Centered Approach[ii], that “the harmony of abstract mathematics, the physical world of things and our thinking depends on the existence of Christian God.” Srinivas Ramanujan, on whose life the book and the movie “The Man who knew Infinity”[iii] are based is known to have said that “an equation to me has no meaning unless it represents a thought of God”.

The structures of the universe, from the tiniest (subatomic size) to the largest (cosmic scale), can be visualized as networks or webs of connections. And, these networks are interlocking, pulsating particles, exchanging, sharing and transforming energy from one form to another. Physics today is understood through mathematics. Scientists have long used mathematics to describe the physical properties of the universe. But physicist Max Tegmark[iv] goes even further and believes that the universe itself is math. In Tegmark’s view, everything in the universe — humans included — is part of a mathematical structure. All matter is made up of particles, which have properties such as charge and spin, but these properties are purely mathematical, he says. And space itself has properties such as dimensions but is still ultimately a mathematical structure.

Mathematics, numbers, symbols, information and energy are different ways by which physicists have attempted to describe the universe. Modern theories in physics are abstract and mystifying to most. For many, faith in the divine origin of the universe provides more certitude than modern physics does. Faith gives one certainty which physics is unable to do, this is the appeal of faith for many. Certainty in an uncertain world is comforting.

Scientific knowledge has an asymptotic relationship to truth or Truth. Scientists are getting closer to the Truth but, I suspect, will never reach it. Scientists are like Adam reaching out to touch the hand of God but not making it, as depicted in the fresco[v] on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

Physicists are peering into the outer reaches of the cosmos and probing deep into the inner sanctum of atoms, discovering realms that are beyond the reach of our senses. For most of us, these realms are difficult to comprehend, because we cannot see, touch or feel them. No one has seen a quark or been able to visualize Einstein’s four-dimensional space and time. Hence, to some, modern physics is incomprehensible, abstract, hard to relate to, and indistinguishable from a myth.

Thankfully, we do not rely just on our senses to understand the universe, if we did, we would still be in the dark ages.

Physicists are looking for a single theory, or as Michio Koku states “an equation about six inches long”, which can explain all phenomenon, from the largest (cosmos) to the tiniest (subatomic particles). The holy grail in physics is to find a theory that reconciles general relativity and quantum physics. Science is in search of ultimate unity, the God Particle[vi], as Nobel Laureate Leon Lederman wrote in his book of the same name. Particle physicists keep building bigger and bigger particle accelerators, like the one at CERN[vii], in search of the God particle. At CERN, in the Large Hadron Collider, energy at the point of collision of the protons approaches the energy moments after the Big Bang, in the hope of finding the God particle.

The truth is that the Truth might not be a particle. Truth might not be a thing, it might be an abstraction, like an “idea in the mind of God”, as some have suggested or perhaps as Max Tegmark posits “There’s something very mathematical about our Universe, and that the more carefully we look, the more math we seem to find. ….. So, the bottom line is that if you believe in an external reality independent of humans, then you must also believe that our physical reality is a mathematical structure. Everything in our world is purely mathematical – including you.”

Theologists, scientists and philosophers seem to agree that Reality, absolute truth or God, if you will, is an abstract reality. Not a reality that can be detected by our senses or known through our intellect. In this view mathematics are an expression of the mind of God. She is a mathematician!

Further proof is in sacred geometries found in nature.

[i] (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jremlZvNDuk, n.d.)

[ii] (https://frame-poythress.org/redeeming-mathematics-interview/, n.d.)

[iii] (http://www.robertkanigel.com/_i__b_the_man_who_knew_infinity__b___a_life_of_the_genius_ramanujan__i__58016.htm, n.d.)

[iv] (http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/, n.d.)

[v] (http://www.museivaticani.va/content/museivaticani/en/collezioni/musei/cappella-sistina/volta/storie-centrali/creazione-di-adamo.html, n.d.)

[vi] (https://books.google.com/books/about/The_God_Particle.html?id=-v84Bp-LNNIC, n.d.)

[vii] (https://home.cern/topics/large-hadron-collider, n.d.)