In the Eye of the Beholder

Leggo of My Ego?

Hello friends,

This week I've been struggling with some big concepts that seem to be at odds with each other: Buddhism, Quantum Mechanics, and Society.

Childlike Mind

I am re-reading one of my favorite books—Zen Mind, Beginners Mind (affiliate link)—where Zen Buddhism can be summed up in this section on breathing.

The author, Shunryu Suzuki says:

If you think, "I breathe," the "I" is extra. There is no you to say "I." What we call "I" is just a swinging door which moves when we inhale and when we exhale…. We say "inner world" or "outer world," but actually there is just one whole world.

In Suzuki's teaching of Zen Buddhism, there is no ego, just a "whole world," just the universe as it is. The spaces between us, I, and them are illusions we construct. A single person and all people are the same. We create these differences to serve our own ego.

As someone who has read and followed Buddhism most of my adult life, I get this—we're all the same. You heal yourself so you can heal others. By healing yourself, you are healing others.

Grab Some of Them Atoms

Moments after I read this passage on breathing, I picked up my New Scientist magazine and read an interview with physicist Daniele Oriti. He has been studying quantum gravity for much of his career.

His belief is that there is no absolute universe as science is trying to define it. He believes a myriad of subjective observers create their own universes.

He says:

We have to embrace the fact that we make reality.

Oriti's perspective comes from the understanding that the quantum world (all the stuff that makes up our everyday existence) is constructed of waves and probabilities—nothing you can hold in your hand.

Physicists largely agree matter only becomes a fixed, knowable thing when someone looks at it. The instant you grab it. And only to that person doing the grabbing.

To illustrate this, consider a wave on the ocean. What is it? You see water undulating under the power of some force moving towards the shore, but you don't know how strong it is until you see it land on the beach, splash on the sand, and dissipate into a splatter. You can observe an ocean wave's result—scattered rocks, tossed driftwood, reshuffled seaweed, foamy water—but the wave itself is gone.

If you were the only person on the beach, you could determine how different the beach was after the wave arrived. But if another person came later, they could only know the collective effects of the previous waves. They would observe their own repositioning of the beach.

Your and their perspectives are unique to each of your observations in time.

The quantum world works like this (sort of). Oriti's perspective comes from the fact that scientists have struggled to understand the universe and can only come away with varied imperfect models.

In the interview, he goes on to demonstrate that if you conceive of reality as he does; if you alter the equations that are currently being used to describe the universe from this perspective; the math works out.

Imagination

Jacques Lacan, a French psychoanalyst who followed in Freud's footsteps, wrote about the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real. This is an evolution of Freud's Ego, Superego, and Id.

There's a lot here, but I want to focus on Lacan. Of the Imaginary, he posited:

The Imaginary is, above all, composed of illusions that structure the world, composing unities, harmonies, or relationships of similarity and identity between persons and things.

In other words, each person has a view of the world they create. For Lacan, this was not a false view of reality, but a true view for that person—that observer.

Lacan's Real is the absolute unknowable state of the world that can only be accessed through the lens of the Imaginary.

In essence, we construct and live in our own reality.

Where am "I"

Does the "I" exist or not? Does the universe exist as an absolute thing that we are trying to understand, or is an amorphous, unknowable blob (that Oriti and Lacan suggest) that only reveals subjective rules when an observer decides them?

Is Suzuki's dissolution of the ego actually an acknowledgement that there is no true reality, since the ego will always get in the way?

And where does this leave us?

Relativism can be extremely powerful, giving individuals the power to heal all kinds of traumas.

It also can be very dangerous. Extreme relativism is, perhaps, in direct conflict with society, where a community can only operate with shared rules. Where lies can be expressed and believed as truths (and vise versa). Where responsibility to a society can easily be dismissed as a personal perspective.

Interesting times, indeed. I little less comical newletter today, unless you think about it - lol.

Happy reading, happy writing, and Buona Fortuna.

David