I'm Back

Guilty as charged. I haven't been blogging as regularly as I am supposed to, but just about everything I do somehow manages to find its way back to this mentorship. Since I last posted, I was able to practice sitting once more. However, this second experience was peculiarly different than the first. Perhaps I have to be in a specific mindset to be able to bring myself to the level of awareness I desire. Unfortunately, I have yet to figure out what that mindset is. Furthermore, I hope to reach a point in which I can achieve mindfulness regardless of how I'm feeling. This time, I just struggled to ignore the urges to think, and give into my thoughts as opposed to simply letting them go. Enough about my sitting practice for now. 

During my last mentorship meeting, I believe that I have arrived at the beginnings of the core of this project. The initial inception of this project stemmed from my desire to explore how two fields, science and religion, which have typically not seen eye to eye, can have such a cohesive relationship. A paradox if you will. It turns out, just about every detail of both Physics and Buddhism is a paradox in and of itself. For instance, the goal of the practice of Buddhism is to achieve enlightenment, but no one truly knows what enlightenment feels like unless they've been enlightened. The same goes for physics on both the minuscule and massive scale. Humans can only speculate what they believe to be happening of the atomic level and on the larger universal scale, but it is practically impossible to ever know what is actually going on. 

I have also started the unit on Cosmology in my Physics class and hopefully that will lead to some great observations. Thus far, I have concluded that the Big Bang Theory is very similar to the practice of sitting in that you have to be in the present moment. The mind has to be in a state where time does not exist before and after that moment, much like some insist is what happened when the Universe began. There was no such thing as time before the universe was created. Further, an article that I recently read for class very briefly mentions the relationship between science and religion where both science and religion strive to answer the same sorts of questions. However, I find it interesting that Buddhism is not truly concerned with some of the questions that other religions seem to want to answer. There is very little said in Buddhism about how the world came to be or what will happen to the Universe in the future. Perhaps, the key to understanding this relationship is understanding that Buddhism and Physics are NOT out to answer the same questions. In actuality, are the facts of one discipline, the answer to the other discipline's questions. This is definitely an idea that I think is worth pursuing.