emptiness
On July 13th, UC Berkeley physicists, including Professors Beate Heinemann and Marjorie Shapiro - collaborators in the ATLAS experiment, explained the discovery of what could be the Higgs Boson. Their explanation of the decades long search for the Higgs Boson serves as an interesting comparison to Buddhist practice - not as a comparison of ultimate claims about the nature of reality, but a comparison of deep and prolonged investigations in subtle, invisible fields. This deep and prolonged investigation is at the heart of Buddhism as a personal practice, in contrast to Buddhism as a set of philosophical or religious assertions. [...]
If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? With the upcoming Guanyin session, many of us at CTTB will be spending the week contemplating the nature of sound. Just as the Buddha was pragmatically agnostic when questioned about a world beyond perception, the [...]
Everyone is familiar with the holograms embedded in our credit cards, those cool 3D images that appear lifelike when rotated at various angles. A hologram has the property of containing the whole in each of its discrete parts.... The twelve links and the interdependant origination of our entire reality have this same structure. [...]
For me, authentic creativity comes from nothingness, from the space we open to possibility. Other forms of creation are reactionary, responses to immediate stimuli propelled by past habituations. They are imitations of an object or how we imagine others might respond to this object and its so-called creator. Jason brings up an important point, namely [...]
In a recent article (which alternated between funny and cheekily serious, definitely worth a read), Scott Adams (the creator of the comic strip, Dilbert), asserts that boredom is good for us. The moments in our lives when we are not stimulated are ever dwindling–this has a huge detrimental effect on our creativity, and by extension, [...]
We tend to think of good things as being positive, of positive things being good. When things are perfect, for example, that’s something positive, right? Everything is just how you want it; everything is just so. [...]