Saturday, January 15, 2011

Einstein and Taoist meditation

Time is the hardest thing on earth, you can't bend it! According to Einstein, our only hope of bending time is when we travel close to the speed of light - apparently in similar scenario if we can travel faster than light we can go back to the past faster than they slip away! Of course, that will not be the physical world that we are living in today.

Some Buddhist and Taoist meditative practices (or chi-kung practice) oftentimes promise advanced practitioners that they can obtain extra-sensory power, like the six extra-sensory power (六神通:天眼通、天耳通、宿命通、他心通、神足通、漏盡通) on one's eyes, ears, past & future, others' thinking, instant travel and free from one's super-ego, in particular related to libido. These extra-sensory skills defy the constrain of time. It is the same for Shamanism and other spiritual practice that focus on a person's internal experience.

It would be logical to assume that these gurus from different disciplines and times have not been telling lies. In other words they do have real psyche experience leading them convincingly to believe so. And they also believe they psyche experience to be with genuine metaphysical contents (and as Carl Jung often insisted that his study was on psyche experience without refuting possible metaphysical realities) . And because of their strong beliefs and their other higher spiritual manifestations, such as leading a highly moral life that an ordinary person only hope he could accomplish to a small degree, they have been well-respected within their respective belief groups or systems.

It is also interesting to note that these strong psyche beliefs are similar to those experienced by psychotic patients suffering from schizophrenia. The gurus are not pathological in a sense that they trained themselves into these stages and are willing to stay there with one's volition and without losing one's cognitive skills; and of course, they usually stay within the law.

Trouble, however, may arise when, say, one of these gurus believes that what he experienced is not only metaphysical reality but as genuine physical events (like one truly can physically travel into past history). Take this past history example, if a person can genuinely defy the rigidity of time and go back to history and therefore can change historical event, then any guy can suddenly disappear because one of his parents might be killed by someone going back to history! Well, that certainly is not like the world we are living in.

It is therefore up to leaders of organized religions to structure their belief system in such a way that their metaphysical beliefs are being separated from what should be the domain of physical science. There are indeed gurus who claimed to know the world will end on such and such a day, and there are indeed gurus who claim to be able to go back into history, with the reason that why they don't meet other gurus there is because they go there at different historical time (!), and they don't change history because it is not the right thing to do for gurus (!)

Last but not least, a belief, by some practitioners or would-be practitioners, of these psyche experience being physical may actually be a form of escapism, a revolt to suffering in life, rather than a proper spiritual route of comprehending suffering itself under a proper light of enlightenment. Having said that, take an example, vivid-dreams can almost be considered real by anyone having that experience if we do not let our logical cognition does its proper job of critical analysis. And one possible objection to my contention often argue for an indeterminable physical reality quoting findings in quantum physics (e.g. the uncertainty principle) as example. I would simple argue that fortunately we are not living in a nano-world. But again further arguments would lead to yet another story, so stay tuned...

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