Mind and Life: Discussions with the Dalai Lama on the Nature of Reality (Columbia Series in Science and Religion) by Luisi Pier Luigi

Author:Luisi, Pier Luigi [Luisi, Pier Luigi]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Religion/General
Publisher: Perseus Books Group
Published: 2010-12-13T02:00:00+00:00

Reflections

As we started moving toward the exit at the end of the session, most of us were absorbed in thought. My own mind was still on Matthieu’s presentation about beginninglessness. At a recent conference I had heard from John Barrow about his concept of the multiverse, a theory that, coming from as far away as string theory, foresees a series of universes originating one from the other,19 an idea put forward also by the astrophysicist Leonard Süsskind.20 These modern theories, which also leave behind the idea of a beginning of the universe, have developed without any link to the Buddhist view of beginninglessness. It is interesting how similar things come from different sources. I was also thinking about the relationship between Matthieu’s notion of beginninglessness and my own talk about the origin of life, the scientific view that foresees a neat beginning of this event. In principle, there was no contradiction between the two, as my scientific notion clearly concerns a “local story,” the story of our planet Earth, a small speck of dust in the universe. Is there no contradiction then between science and Buddhism in this respect? Not quite. My scientific theory of the origin of life implied that life, sentience, and consciousness would derive from the same material basis—that once the structure and self-organization of the cell has appeared, life would originate as an emergent property of this material basis. Moving from the simple first cells to multicellular and eventually to higher organisms, cognition and perception would arise as the sensorium of the organism became more and more sophisticated. At a certain point it would acquire sentience and consciousness. All this comes from within the structure, with no place for any transcendental element. This is not what Buddhism teaches us. We will see more of this contrast in chapter 6, expressly devoted to consciousness.

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