We Can't Understand the World

Most of Western science is obsessed with understanding the world. Understanding every single detail of the world. And this is great. I have nothing against this idea of exploring and trying to map out reality. By doing this, science has made the modern world possible.

It is worth noting, however, that ultimately understanding everything might not be entirely possible. At least not for our human minds. Maybe AI can figure it all out.

There is an idea in Zen that we can not possibly understand the mind because the mind is our tool for understanding the world, and using a tool for understanding that same tool just doesn't work. It's impossible to understand something without the ability to step outside that thing and see it separately.

Science recognizes this and attempts to understand the mind by using facts and figures (and increasingly AI) to model the mind and therefore let us step outside of it, so to speak. Zen has a different approach.

All meditation seeks, among other things, to help us understand the truth that we are not the mind. Typically one of the main ways they do this is giving is some way to help us ignore the mind. You see, people not familiar with meditation usually think that meditation is stopping thinking, but when you actually get into the practice you are taught that this is impossible, you can no more stop the mind from thinking as you can stop the heart from beating. Thinking is what it does. The heart beats, the lungs breath, and the mind thinks.

What you can do, however, is learn to ignore the mind and all its thoughts. That is what meditation teaches, and by doing that practice consistently, we start to see through the illusion that we are the mind. We start to see that we actually have very little control over the mind and it does its own thing more often than not. Yes, like some micromanager we can wrest control of the mind at times and force it to do what we want, but we can't maintain this control for long, as I'm sure anyone who has tried to study for a test is well aware of. We also have this limited level of control over many of our other organs, showing that it is nothing unique.

The ways to ignore the mind vary, but typically they involve some kind of a distraction: watching a candle, listening to our breath, chanting a mantra, etc. Zen meditation is a little unique in that instead of ignoring the mind's thoughts, we watch them without interacting with them. This is a more difficult technique and is harder to do, but it also helps illustrate the truth that we are not the mind even more. When you watch as thoughts pop up out of nothing and when you see how our environment influences this and the things we consume influence this, well, it pulls back the curtain a little.

Why is this useful? I mean, one can analytically understand this all without experiencing it. I'd say there is a difference between understanding something is true and seeing it is true for yourself—actually experiencing it is true—but that aside there is a reason for practicing meditation. Do it often enough and you are more likely to have so-called enlightenment experiences. These can be thought of as catching a glimpse of Reality itself and not the filtered image of reality given to use by the mind.

Christian books often put forth the idea that if we saw Reality itself—God Himself—directly it would burn out our senses. It is so overwhelming that our brain just wouldn't be able to handle it. Zen would mostly agree with this. Not so much that it would burn out our senses, but it is quite beyond our senses so we have no capacity to understand the experience, which is why these little hints of it we get in enlightenment experiences may make little sense.

So the Zen approach to understanding the world, or Reality, is by stepping outside of the mind and trying to catch glimpses of Reality directly. While the scientific approach to understanding the world is by modeling it with computers and AI and using the model to make guesses about the real thing.

Which approach is the right one? Well... both, obviously. A coin has two sides, after all. Try to take one away and the entire structure falls apart. But maybe a better Zen exchange would be something like this.

A: Which approach to knowing the Buddha is the right one, meditation or science?
B: Yes.

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【Title graphic from a photo from Penny from Pixabay.】