The Spiritual Traditions permeating the Eastern World

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"Prajapati was alone. He didn’t even know whether he existed or not. ‘So to speak’, iva. (As soon as one touches on something crucial, it’s as well to qualify what one has said with the particle iva, which doesn’t tie us down.) There was only the mind, manas. And what is peculiar about the mind is that it doesn’t know whether it exists or not. But it comes before everything else. ‘There is nothing before the mind.’

Then, even prior to establishing whether it existed or not, the mind desired. It was constant, diffuse, undefined. Yet, as though drawn to something exotic, something belonging to another species of life, it desired what was definite and separate, what had shape. A self, atman – that was the name it used. And the mind imagined that self as having consistency. Thinking, the mind grew red hot. It saw thirty-six thousand fires flare up, made of mind, made with mind. Suspended above the fires were thirty-six thousand cups, and these too were made of mind."

-Roberto Calasso, Ka
 



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Topic: Neuroscience, Quantum Mechanics, & Vedic Wisdom

We describe the confluence in the understanding of wholeness, paradox, and transformation from the perspectives of neuroscience, quantum mechanics, and Vedic wisdom.

Our understanding of reality occurs in the mind and, therefore, it is a construction of the mind. According to quantum mechanics, we cannot know what reality is, we can only interact with it and speak of our observations. What the state function of a system or universe gives us upon probing depends on what the instruments can elicit. We are like individuals in Plato's cave who must infer the true forms from the shadows on the wall. Reality, at its deepest level, is a superposition of mutually exclusive attributes. At the experiential level this superposition is characterized by complementarity. In physics and biology this is summarized in the polarities of particles and waves, and the living and the dead; within the individual's heart, the polarities are that of freedom and subjection, grandeur and abjectness, Eros and Thanatos. Wholeness transcends complementary categories, and in our reductionist commonsensical conception, we see paradoxes. Self-transformation is the process in which we journey to greater wholeness from the fragmented views that we are conditioned into by materialistic culture, classroom education and the media. That mind constructs its reality is obvious considering people from other cultural areas and in extreme emotional states view events very differently, and autists perceive the world in their own unique ways. Sages and scientists provide us visions of the whole.

Speaker Bio:

Subhash Kak is Regents Professor of Computer Science at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater. Born in Srinagar, Kashmir, he was educated at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. His current research is in the theories of neural networks and quantum information. He has also worked on archaeoastronomy and written on history of science and on art. He has made the surprising discovery that the ancient Indians knew that the sun and the moon are approximately 108 times their respective diameters from the earth. This knowledge was coded into temple architecture, in the 108 poses of Indian classical dance, and the 108 prayer beads of the japa mala.
His work has been showcased in the popular media including Discovery and History channels, PBS, Dutch Public TV OHM, and in a documentary on music called Raga Unveiled. His writings on the philosophy of mind show how recursion plays a fundamental role in art, music and aesthetics. He is the author of twenty books which include six books of verse. The distinguished Indian scholar Govind Chandra Pande compared his poetry to that of William Wordsworth.

He coined the term quantum neural computing which is a theory of consciousness that is partly classical and partly quantum. In this theory, neural networks do conscious and pre-conscious processing whereas the virtual particles associated with the quantum dynamics of the brain are the ground for the unconscious.
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https://aeon.co/videos/western-logic-has-held-contradictions-as-false-for-centuries-is-that-wrong

Since Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Western philosophers and logicians have with few exceptions viewed contradictions as unacceptable, simply incapable of being true. But certain logical paradoxes demonstrate that some contradictions aren’t so easily dismissed as merely false, an idea that some Eastern philosophical traditions have grappled with more successfully. In this instalment of Aeon In Sight, the US-based British philosopher Graham Priest explains how the Liar Paradox – unresolved since antiquity – upends the traditional Western view that all contradictions must be false.
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禪林句集 Zenrin-kushū - Terebess

"There is no place to seek the mind, it is like footprints of the birds in the sky."

Zenrin Kushû
“A Collection of Phrases from the Zen Garden,” a compilation of 6,000 quotations drawn from various Buddhist scriptures, Zen texts, and non-Buddhist sources. At least since the time of the eighteenth-century Rinzai reformer,Hakuin Ekaku (1685–1768), Rinzai masters and students have relied upon the Zenrin Kushû as a resource for jakugo, or capping verses, which are used as a regular part of kôan practice. Portions of the text have been translated into English in Sasaki and Miura’s The Zen Kôan and Shigematsu’s A Zen Forest.

The Zenrin Kushû is based upon an earlier anthology of 5,000 Zen phrases known as the Ku Zôshi, compiled by Tôyô Eichô (1438–1504). Tôyô drew his material from sutras, recorded sayings of Chinese Zen masters, Taoist texts, Confucian texts, and Chinese poetry. He arranged the phrases according to length, beginning with single-character expressions, continuing with phrases of two characters through eight characters, and interspersing parallel verses of five through eight characters. Tôyô’s work circulated in manuscript form for several generations until the seventeenth century. At that time, a person using the pen name Ijûshi produced an expanded version of the text that was first published in 1688 under the title Zenrin Kushû.
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TALKING TAOIST SIGIL MAGIC WITH BENEBELL WEN

This week we speak to writer and metaphysician, Benebell Wen. Benebell is the author of Holistic Tarot and The Tao of Craft.

It's a great chat, covering the history of Taoism and Taoist magic, differences in western and eastern sigil construction, Chinese diaspora lifeways, families hauntings and -inevitably- a little tarot too. You can download the episode directly here or listen along on YouTube below.
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