Re: A possibly valuable quotation

[Judith Rosen <***>]

Hi Jack,

It's interesting that you chose an analogy that comes from a meditation
oriented perspective. I'm investigating Vipassana mediatation which is based
on learning to "see things as they really are", also called "insight
meditation" and is not connected to the religious side of Buddha's teaching.
(It actually was lost to India for centuries, while Buddhism was springing
up. So it is not part of the "ism" at all. It was kept alive in Burma and
has finally been reintroduced to India in the last 50 years or so. In fact,
it's proving so useful that it's being used all over the planet now. But
even the Dalai Lama didn't know about it. Interesting stuff to me!)

Anyway, I first heard about this meditation from one of my father's cousins.
She was describing what the purpose of it is and how to learn the technique.
>From the sound of it, what Buddha was experiencing was his own complexity as
a system. That tends to sound a little new-agey, even though this is an
ancient technique. But there are relations between human beings and every
other aspect of this planet. We breathe air because we evolved here. We
drink water and need salt because we evolved in the ocean (and blood is
almost an exact salinity match for sea water). We need sleep because we
evolved on a planet that is rotating as it also orbits the sun, so we have
light and dark phases... But there are even more widespread analogies to be
seen in Rosennean Complexity in the meditation setting. The mind and the
body are both complex systems. Vipassana talks of the "mind/body" and says
they are both one.

I find it fascinating that both mental pursuits; meditation and science, can
arrive at some strikinly similar concepts.

Judith
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jack Park" <***>
To: <***>
Sent: Friday, March 26, 2004 1:05 PM
Subject: [ROSEN] A possibly valuable quotation


> The mention of Ken Wilber got me to looking around. Google really is my
> friend, sometimes.
>
> Here is a particularly interesting snippet that I found in an interview
> at http://www.shambhalasun.com/Archives/Features/1996/Sept96/KenWilber.htm
>
> " The traditional analogy is the ocean and its waves, which is a really
> boring analogy, but bear with me. The wetness of the water is suchness.
> All waves are equally wet. One wave isn't wetter than another. And thus,
> if I discover the wetness of any wave, I have discovered the wetness of
> all. When I directly recognize Suchness or Emptiness, or the wetness of
> my own being, right here, right now, then I have discovered the ultimate
> truth of all other waves as well. Emptiness is not a Really Big Wave set
> apart from little waves, but is the wetness equally present in all
> waves, high or low, big or small, sacred or profane-which is why
> Emptiness cannot be used to prefer one wave over another.
>
> Enlightenment is thus not catching a really big wave, but noticing the
> already present wetness of whatever wave I'm on. Moreover, I am then
> radically liberated from the narrow identification with this little wave
> called me, because I am fundamentally one with all other waves-no
> wetness is outside of me. I am /literally/ one taste with the entire
> ocean and all its waves. And that taste is wetness, suchness, Emptiness,
> the utter transparency of the Great Perfection.
>
> At the same time, I do not know all the details of all the other
> waves-their height, their weight, the number of them, and so on. These
> relative truths I will have to discover wave by wave, endlessly. No
> Sutra of Wetness will tell about that, nor could it. And no Tantra of
> the Soggy will clue me in on this.
>
> That's why I earlier said that Buddhist contemplation is sufficient for
> ultimate truth: it will directly show you the wetness of all waves, the
> radical suchness of all phenomena, the Emptiness in the heart of the
> Kosmos itself, the primordial purity that is your own intrinsic
> awareness in this moment, and this moment, and this. But meditation will
> not, and really cannot, tell you about all the details of all the
> various waves that nevertheless arise as the ceaseless play of Emptiness
> and spontaneous luminosity. As you say, it will not automatically give
> you calculus, or the human genome, or quantum physics. And historically,
> it definitely did not, which should tell us something right there."
>
> OK. It's cast in a vocabulary that's not all that familiar to me, one
> that I'm only of late starting to want to grok, given that one of my own
> physicians recently studied acupuncture because his western meds were
> not solving the problems presented by a few of his patients. But the
> snippet echos my own intuition that there really is a big picture
> (enlightenment) that we are all looking for. Maybe in the context of
> this list, that big picture is Robert Rosen's what life is. The snippet
> suggests that no single modeling means is to be favored by the big
picture.
>
> Just my 0.02 EURs for the day.
> Jack