The Cosmologicals!

10:20 a.m.
Just finished the first meditation session of the day. An hour and a half. Prospects look very good today.

Before meditating, I had a look at the sensei and reverend's blog. Very good post about rebirth, non-self really. Non-self and emptiness, which is what I am supposed to be trying to realise, is quite logical and rational. Understanding it is easy; realising it is not. Well, not for moi anyway!

I was reminded of a tape I used to listen to by the Dalai Lama. The buddha didn't tell the same thing to everyone. Some things aren't a help to some people. The Dalai Lama said he told someone they hadn't a soul once - i.e. that there is no unchanging substance to folk anywhere - and the joe or josephine started shivering with fear. Telling this person they hadn't a soul wasn't really much of a help to them. As far as I can see, there is no truth, so you can believe what you like as long as it makes you happier and doesn't fung up anyone else.

Great Horizon programme on last week about the Standard Model for Cosmology. Regressing from the present, they'd got great equations for the big bang and whatnot. Excellent equations, but looking around they didn't fit the actuality. The evenness of temperature in the universe was wrong. So they invented Inflation to explain that. Then the galaxies weren't behaving properly. They needed more gravity, so they invented Dark Matter. This means there has to be something else there, but they haven't a clue really what it is. Then there's something funny about what's happening in the space between galaxies and they invent Dark Energy. This means if you take away all the matter particles and all the light particles, there's still something there. No nothing. You can't get nothing. Then this boy checked out the data in the background radiation and says the anomalies mean there has to be Dark Flow. Dark Flow means that Inflation probably occurred at different places and there is more than one universe to contend with. This is still controversial, but will probably be in the Standard Model as soon as some other joe gets round to crunching the numbers.

I love stuff like this!

So there's no soul. Fair enough. There's maybe just one thing. It certainly looks like that if you have a wee realisation of emptiness. But we still have to deal with misapprehension i.e. ignorance. The gross body is not the end of the matter. If what is reborn is habitual tendencies, it is very hard to see how even that could operate. But if the Dalai Lama keeps dying and then popping up again, there's something weird going on here. The vajrayana juju makes it evident that there's more to us than meets the eye. We're not just flesh and blood. Whatever it is doesn't seem to be unchanging, but there is something else there.

That's my half hour break up. I was anticipating staying in all day and awaiting a recorded delivery, but it's just been delivered. If it doesn't rain, I'll dig this afternoon.