[MD] spirituality

[MarshaV]

M:
     "Buddhism doesn't reject reductionism as a tool for understanding nature's mechanisms.  But its basic approach is quite different.  It's far more concerned about how an erroneous idea about the existence of phenomena can influence our lives in terms of happiness or suffering.  In this sense, it's more worried about a _reifying_ approach than about reductionism itself.  As we've already said, reification means giving an intrinsic existence to the qualities and characteristics that our common sense perceives.  This process generally also leads to making consciousness into a concrete object, and to the conception of the mind/body divide.  Almost all people engage in this kind of reification all the time in their ordinary perceptions of things, without realizing it.  It also dominates science, even though it's no longer compatible with sciences's own recent developments.  This disparity makes some scientists perform endless juggling acts while trying to reconcile the results of quantum mechanics, and their solid vision of the macrocosm.

     "Buddhism favors instead the integration of the understanding of the unreality of things into our daily lives.  The Middle Way, which Buddhism adopts by refuting both nihilism and realism, allows us to resolve many of the paradoxes that so puzzle scientists.  

     You mentioned earlier the notion of Platonic ideals.  The Plantonic conception of reality has been so compelling for so long that people steeped in this tradition of thought find the Buddhist conception of reality terribly difficult to accept.  Central to Plato's concept of reality is the notion that there is a realm of pure truth, of ideals that is separate from the human sphere.  This is the alleged realm of natural laws; they act on but exist apart from our world.  Buddhism has refuted in many ways this notion of separation and of ideals of any kind of existing as immutable entities.  

T:
    "Plato and other philosophers supported their contention that there was such a separate world of perfection largely by pointing to the remarkable powers of mathematics to describe the concrete world.  According to this view, mathematics is the language in which the natural laws are expressed.

     "Plato defined two levels of reality: first, the level of the physical world perceived by our sense, which can be measured and quantified, and which is impermanent, changing, ephemeral, and illusory; then the level of the true world of immutable and eternal Ideas.  The temporal world we perceive is just a pale reflection of the world of Ideas.  You know the famous allegory of the cave, which Plato used in his dialogue _The Republic_ to show the dichotomy between these two worlds.  Outside the cave, there is a vibrant world of colors, forms, and light, which men cannot see or reach.  All they can observe are shadows projected by the objects and beings of the outside world on the walls of the cave.  Instead of the brilliant colors and clear shapes of the glorious reality, all they have are the sullen darkness and the indistinct outlines of the shadows.  Plato thought that, as in the shadow world, the universe we perceive is merely an impoverished version of the world of Ideas.  Illuminated by the Sun of intelligence, this world of Ideas was also the domain of perfect mathematical relationships and geometric structures. 

     "The belief that the regularity of these underlying relationships can be described in mathematical terms constitutes the foundations of the scientific method.  Some scientists make the rather exaggerated claim that results that can't be expressed in mathematical language can't be considered truly scientific."

   




'Mathieu Ricard & Trinh Xuan Thuan, 'The Quantum and the Lotus: A Journey to the Frontiers Where Science and Buddhism Meet',pp.215-216)


 
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