..续本文上一页r particle, is associated with activity, with dynamic change. Thus the core of the universe--whether we see it as the heart of the atom or our own consciousness--is not static but in a state of constant and dynamic change. This energy--now wave, now particle--infuses each and every form at the cellular level. No form exists without being infused by this universal energy; form and energy interpenetrate each other endlessly in an ever-changing dance of the molecules, creating our universe. This universal energy is itself a process, beyond the confines of time and space; a form, on the other hand, is an "event," existing momentarily in time and space. This "moment" may last for seventy or eighty years in the case of a human being, a thousand years in the case of a sequoia tree, a few million years in the case of a mountain, but internally, at the cellular level, each of these forms is in a process of change at any given moment. In the paradigms of quantum physics, there is ceaseless change at the core of the universe; in the paradigms of Mahayana wisdom, there too is ceaseless change at the core of our consciousness and of the universe.
But change implies change from something to something else. Without something to be changed, there would be no change. Without forms, there would be no change; without the energy of change, the forms would not be able to hold their balance and would collapse. In meditation practice, we see this dynamic, constant change in our own mind-body system.
It has been just as difficult for the human mind to accept the existence of sunyata at the core of the universe as it was for the early quantum physicists to accept the quantum randomness of the universe. Einstein had even hoped that the quantum theory he helped create was somehow flawed, hoping desperately, even in the face of the evidence of his own experiments, that there would be a hidden variable that would establish order in the quantum world. Later experiments, conducted at the University of California in Berkeley on Bell”s theorem, confirmed the absence of any hidden variable, and showed that when either of two correlated particles were observed, no matter how far separated in space, the other was instantly affected by the observation--as if the two particles were embedded in the observing consciousness itself. Even before Bell”s theorem, Werner Heisenberg, one of the founding fathers of quantum theory, formulated in his Uncertainty Principle that it is not possible to examine a situation or system without altering the system by the very act of examination; in the deepest experience of meditation, the object of consciousness is embedded in the observing consciousness; the two are fused together by the energy or sunyata out of which both emerge.
A strange place is this world of the new
physicists, a world of ultimate connectedness,
where consciousness--or observership, as John
Wheeler calls it--coexisted with the creation, and
where it might be said that the vastness of space,
the nuclear conflagration of starts, the
explosions of galaxies are simply mechanisms for
producing that first glimmer of awareness in your
baby”s eyes.[9]
Subatomic particles, then, are dynamic patterns, processes rather than objects. Sunyata too is a dynamic pattern rather than an entity. Henry Stapp, an atomic physicist, has remarked, "An elementary particle is not an independently existing unanalyzable entity. It is, in essence, a set of relationships that reach outward to other things."[10]
Compare this to Nagarjuna (100-200 CE, the great Buddhist thinker whose dialectic of Madhyamika--the Middle Way--sought to define the experience of Mahayana wisdom): "Things derive their being and nature by mutual dependence and are nothing in themselves."[11]
Some …
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