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Dancing in Emptiness
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The Question is what is the Question?
Is it all a Magic Show?
Is Reality an Illusion?
What is the framework of the Machine?
Darwin`s Puzzle: Natural Selection?
Where does Space-Time come from?
Is there any answer except that it comes from consciousness?
What is Out There?
T`is Ourselves?
Or, is IT all just a Magic Show? -John Wheeler
Phenomena as they appear and resound
Are neither established nor real
Since they keep changing in all possible and various manners
Just like appearances in magical illusions. -Asvaghosa
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 Dancing in Emptiness
...is the first comprehensive and detailed exposition of
the remarkable meeting of Western Science and Buddhist thought. Many of the
dramatic parallels and interconnections outlined in spectacular detail have
not been described before.
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Modern science has overturned its own foundations and now
presents a picture of reality which is in accord with that proposed by Buddhist
sages of two thousand years ago. The Madhyamika philosophers developed
a rigorous and razor sharp method of philosophical analysis
which, together with meditation investigation, penetrated into the
ultimate nature of reality.
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Emptiness, the core view which is propounded by the Madhyamaka, is the
insight that there is nothing in the universe which exists as an
independent entity in its own right. It follows that
nothing exists as a fully independent feature of reality as was always thought
by Western science up until the advent of quantum physics.
Indeed, an understanding of Emptiness can throw new
perspectives onto problems of quantum interpretation.
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The search for the ultimate TOE (a theory of everything) has become a central
concern for modern physicists. But it is seldom appreciated
that without integrating the phenomenon of consciousness within the
'physical' worldview any such TOE will not have a leg to stand on.
This fact is unaviodable becuase consciousness is implicated
at the quantum level. As the physicists Bruce Rosenblum and
Fred Kuttner have recently indicated:
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Consciousness and the quantum enigma are not just two mysteries; they are the
two mysteries; first, our physical demonstration of the quantum
enigma, faces us with the fundamental mystery of the objective world
`out there` the second, conscious awareness, faces us with the
fundamental mystery of the subjective, mental world `in here`. Quantum mechanics seems to
connect the two.
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To contact the author - graham.smetham@gmail.com
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