I have vented to some extent my outrage over Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction programs simply because I hold the strong opinion that such programs demote Buddhism to just another self-help philosophy. Something fit for a PBS fundraising show.
But outrage and holding opinions, whether strong or soft, can originate only from an independent, unchanging self. And Zen practice culminates in awakening to no independent, unchanging self. The self we think we are is written upon no-self, just as words are written on paper or pixels are displayed by liquid crystals.
A physicist once asked: Why is there something, rather then nothing, i.e., why does the universe exist? The answer is that something is written on nothing, like words and pixels on papers and screens, respectively. Something can exist only in relation to nothing. And it was this nothing that the Buddha called “emptiness.”
Physicists of the 21st century tell us that 70% of our universe is dark energy and they freely admit they have no idea what dark energy is. It makes the universe expand faster and faster, which is counterintuitive since it all began with an explosion. Yesterday’s bombs don’t explode anymore. But the bomb of the universe is exploding more and more, increasing in intensity each moment.
So they tell us that dark energy is making the universe expand faster and faster. And that at a distant future date, no stars will appear in any night sky of any inhabited planet.
Emptiness is like a vacuum that sucks everything into it. Since the “something” universe is written on emptiness, it is falling, faster and faster into that emptiness. The universe, however large, has boundaries but emptiness does not. No matter how large, the universe occupies no percentage of emptiness. Deducting finite space from infinite space has no effect on infinite space. And emptiness is not space, i.e., it is the expansion of the universe itself that creates space and that’s why the universe is expanding at a speed that exceeds that of light without violating general relativity.
So a better question is: Why is there nothing, rather than something? Something is the numerator in a fraction where the denominator is infinity so there is no something. Dark energy is emptiness, and although it may be only 70% of the universe, it is 100% of everything. There is nothing so what are we fretting about? There is no self to be fretting about anything because there is no something to fret about. Our “something” does not even rise to the level of the trivial when we awake to the nothing of emptiness.
To understand this, we have to arouse our mind without it resting upon anything, as The Diamond Sutra reveals. And it certainly cannot rest upon theories about something and nothing.
The Quantum and the Lotus: A Jouney to the Frontiers Where Science and Buddhism Meet
