The Art of Life

Here's a nice distraction from our nutty lives: I watched this lovely film about Michael Behrens, a math prodigy who studied at MIT, then left it all at 29. Now he's 82, living in Hawaii where he can walk through the forests and swim with dolphins. He says, "I spent 13 years in the university learning how to think, and now I'm spending the rest of my life learning how not to think."

He explains that loving everything that's positive and beautiful is one strain of spirituality, but he practices perceiving everything as beautiful. It's only 38 minutes long, but I'll get to the bits I like below:

We're all separate beings, but we're also all just molecules shifting in space. Both things are true at once. While we need to work to feed and house ourselves, we don't need big goals beyond what we do today.

I've recently heard some proponents of newer books on stoicism promoting goals and progress, which feels antithetical to the stoic call to renounce desires in order to contemplate. We like to measure how well we're doing against a standard, and hope to constantly improve, but a lot of ancient philosophies encourage us to prepare ourselves mentally to be righteous in the face of adversity, not in order to dominate others and game the system. The idea that wasting time is a problem because we're not producing buys into that achievement society paradigm. The real concern about wasting time is those moments when we lack virtue. Seneca specifically calls it a waste of time to pursue profits, desire trading, soldier, or follow political ambitions. We could be practicing virtues with deep repose.

We might be better off to read those earlier books.   

Michael talks about the way dolphin pods investigated him, then welcomed him to join them, in a way that people are too fearful to do.

But I primarily love what he says about compassion and emptiness:

"In Buddhism, there are two things, emptiness and compassion. Compassion is a choice. You choose to be loving. You choose that. But emptiness is something different. 

Emptiness is basically seeing the world the way that it really is. It's not being subject to delusion, or at least knowing when you're subject to delusion. The Lama said that a fool that knows he is a fool is only half a fool. The fundamentals of quantum mechanics, the absolute basis of it, is when things are indistinguishable. A photon electron not having inherent existence radically changes the way it behaves. If something can happen in two different ways, if they're not distinguishable, you get interference, and all these bizarre things that happen in quantum mechanics are when things are indistinguishable. In Buddhism, it's the same thing. 

We're all enlightened. We're perfect the way we are. On the other hand, in reality, the way we act, we act like we're not. In essence it's the same thing. It's because they are totally entangled with their environment. The reason that our everyday world is classical is that basically everything just becomes distinguishable because of the light. Everything is being entangled with its environment constantly, so it appears to have inherent existence. It acts as if it has inherent existence. Everything that's a deep conception of reality is in terms of two things that are opposites, that are mutually contradictory: the wave and particle. Here, you're an enlightened person, and here you're this entangled trapped in some marble. They are two opposite views that contradict each other, but you need both of them to describe reality. The fact that you want to grab one or the other and say they contradict each other, that's not being alive because that's not the way the world really is. That's what the discovery of quantum mechanics says: deep reality can't be described that way.

About 600 BC, Buddha said, "Let's try to understand the world by seeing the simplest possible thing we can do, which is to do nothing." So that's meditation. We do nothing and we look. At the same time in Greece, they said, "What's the simplest thing we can think about if things are logically consistent?" As long as we stay within logic and consistency, we can actually come up with a conclusion. We won't just talk at each other for a lifetime. And so these traditions starting with Pythagoras and through Euclid have led to Western science, and Buddhism has continued in that way. The core concept in Buddhism is called sunyata or emptiness, which has different definitions, but two of them are that things don't exist in the way they seem to exist. They seem to be one thing, but actually they are something else. So that's this vast philosophical system. They also call that seeing reality as it actually is. So you go out in the evening and watch the sun set; you don't go out in the evening to watch the Earth rotate. Even though we've know this for 500 years, we still don't see it."

Things exist differently than they seem to. It's nice hearing about the dolphins, too!