Miss Buddha (85 page)

Perhaps, you say—playing the Devil’s
advocate—reality is conjured by two men, Thornton in Philadelphia
and a certain William in Bern, Switzerland. Perhaps. But if so,
then that is the one certain way that things are.

Perhaps, you say, this is just one of a
million, million parallel universes, and we only perceive one
trillionth of what really is. Again, if so, then that is the one
certain way that things are, simply because that, then, is the true
state of affairs.

Man has always been curious about the way
things are and how they came to be just that way, and has over the
years, and by various means and approaches, looked into this to
find out more about it.

One study of the way things are is called
Science.

One study of the way things are is called
Philosophy.

One study of the way things are is called
Religion.

And this is what they share, their common
space: they seek the Capital-T Truth about the way things are, and
how they came to be.

Ultimately, these three paths seek the same
thing: Truth.

Wisdom.

:: The Words ::

Man has long been in the habit of labeling
those things he has by one channel or another experienced, first by
sounds, later by spoken words, and finally by written words. He has
also a long-standing habit of collecting things in one place so, if
you want to assess the current state of mankind, the easiest and
most direct way to do so is to consult the dictionary.

In there you will find most, if not all,
things Man has experienced. In fact, it is not seldom that you
discover that the dictionary knew all about it all along. And that
being the case, let’s turn to it first.

Science, philosophy, religion? What was it
Man decided these labels was to represent?

Science

The path named
science
acquired its
meaning around the year 1340 CE when science meant knowledge, a
branch of learning, a skill.

Etymologically, the word
was borrowed from Old French
science
which, in turn, was borrowed
from Latin
scientia
, meaning knowledge, from
sciens
, the present participle
of
scire
, meaning
to know, which in turn, originally, meant to separate, divide; a
word related to
scindere
, meaning to cut,
split.

This, in my view, is as good a take on the
word as can be for isn’t that what we do when we study things? We
separate one thing from another in order to analyze. Cut things up
to examine the pieces. We discriminate, we differentiate. One piece
from another.

Science.

The modern, restricted,
sense of the word as a branch of learning based on observation and
tested truths, arranged in an orderly system, was first recorded in
Isaac Watt’s
Logic
(1725), and had by then developed from meaning a particular
branch of knowledge—such as logic, grammar, rhetoric, arithmetic,
geometry, astronomy—as distinguished from art (which, in many views
is yet another path to finding out how things are), into its
current meaning.

Science, then, today, is the path of
observing, closely—by dissecting and otherwise cutting apart into
constituent factors—the observable. It is the approach that takes
the road from the outside heading in.

The fact that once we
arrive
all the way
in (for a further discussion of this, please see my Particle
Physics Doctoral Thesis—which in turn was based on my and Julian
Lawson’s EPROM experiment) there is really nothing there (unless we
look and expect to see something), does not invalidate neither the
word nor the path.

Science, as a discipline, when practiced
honorably and with integrity, seeks the truth, seeks wisdom.

Philosophy

The path named philosophy
acquired its meaning about forty years before science, around the
year 1300, when as
philosofie
it meant knowledge, or a body of knowledge, or
learning; later it grew into
philosophye
, to finally, a few
hundred years later, settle on
philosophy
.

This word was borrowed from
Old French
filosofie
and later
philosophie
, which in its turn was
borrowed from Latin. Some claim that the word was also borrowed
directly from both the Latin
philosophia
, and the Greek
philosophia
. The Greek
word was the original, and meant love or pursuit of knowledge or
wisdom. It also meant speculation.
Philo
meant loving,
sophia
meant knowledge,
learning, wisdom, from
sophos
wise, learned.

Today, in my view, the
word
philosophy
means, above all, love of wisdom; and w
isdom, well, that is knowing the way things are, is it
not?

Philosophers down the ages have always been
a community united by this love of wisdom, this hunger for truth.
They have been united by the desire, the need—and the courage—to
look, and to report what they saw, regardless of whose toes (mainly
religious ones, if history serves) were treaded in the process.

Some died for their vision. Giordano Bruno
comes to mind. Others recanted what they had observed, and as a
result managed to live a little longer, in inward shame—Galileo
comes to mind, though his findings and views, recanted or not, were
soon enough recognized as true.

The Buddha, more than anything else, was a
philosopher, as was Jesus of Nazareth, Muhammad, Rumi, Saint
Augustine, Meister Eckhart, Spinoza, Bertrand Russell, and each and
every man or woman who earnestly looked (or still look) the human
condition in the eye and tried (or still try) to understand it.

Philosophy, as a discipline, when practiced
honorably and with integrity, seeks the Truth, aspires to
Wisdom.

Religion

Again consulting the dictionaries, we find
the path known as religion to be a little more constricted.

It acquired English meaning
as early as the year 1200 in the guise of
religium
which then referred to a
religious order, or a community of monks or nuns. This word had
made it across the channel from Old French
religion
, meaning, too, a religious
community, which in turn was borrowed from the Latin
religiare
to bind fast,
mostly by voicing a vow or obligation, and by that vow binding
yourself to a fate or a belief.

Today, a closely related
word (a first cousin) is
Theology
which, of course, means “The Study of God,” from
the Greek
Theos
,
meaning God, and
logos
, meaning study).

Both words, however, have the narrow scope
of either subscribing to (binding yourself to) a certain faith or
view (or later, dogma), or to a certain philosophical approach to
truth (as in via an all-powerful Creator, God).

Still, many of us relate the word to Truth,
to the way things are, even if these ways that things are today
come prepackaged for the most part.

Each current world religion
offers its own version of the Truth; something which held true for
the Caveman’s worship of Fire, and still holds true for the modern
Guru’s systematic approach to self-betterment (when this is cloaked
in that word
religion
).

Most religions assume a Creator, though not
the same one, and therefore tend to get into arguments, fights,
wars, bloodshed with other religions whose Creator, just like
yours, demands there be no other Creator beside Him (or Her).

A sad testament to this is the fact that
more humans lives have been shed and more human blood have been
spilled in the name of such Creators than for any other reason.

Some paths, such as Buddhism, are religions
in name only and not in the sense of binding its followers to a
fate. Such religions should more correctly be called philosophies,
where what is true for you—and only that—is true.

For all the Buddha ever told us to do is “Go
look for yourself.”

Each religion, at its fountainhead, saw an
honest looking, an honest seeing, which was then communicated as
well as the seer possibly could.

Jesus was a seer. Muhammad was a seer. Lao
Tzu was a seer. The Buddha was a seer. Zoroaster was a seer.
Baha’ullah was a seer.

But while seers see, their disciples and
follower may—in fact, most often do—have dust in their eyes.

Also, non-seers, or apprentice seers, or
wishful-seers, those with little or much dust in their eyes tend to
hold to a higher opinion of themselves than warranted by experience
or accomplishment (making up, it appears, for such lack of
experience or accomplishments), and wish to (in order to bolster
their self-worth) put their own personal stamp on the seen by
interpreting or commenting or expanding upon it (so that the rest
of us, not-so-bright souls may understand as well).

The true seer sees, the true understander
understands and feels no need to comment or interpret, while the
dusty eye must map and interpret and claim that his map of the
labyrinth—and only his map—is the correct one.

This is how religions derail.

But I believe that we can truly say that
religion, as a discipline, when practiced honorably and with
integrity, also seeks the Truth, seeks Wisdom.

:: The Paths ::

To better convey this brotherhood, this true
one-ness of the three paths, I wish to lay their historical
foundation; I now wish to map their respective journeys from their
origin-past into their (often far too) divergent present.

:: Science ::

Aristotle hails Thales as the inventor of
science. I think this is debatable. Bertrand Russell, for one,
believes that Thales learned most of what he knew from the
Babylonians, and I believe history bears this out.

No, Thales did not invent science. I think
that the first human being who inspected something from various
angles with a view to understand it better, I think he or she
invented science—if indeed such a thing as science can be
invented.

I think that curiosity is the mother of
science.

From its early, and by most yardsticks
humble beginnings, science has grown into one of the most lauded
(and these days over-lauded, in my view) and influential fields of
human endeavor. Today, an army of her branches scour for and
investigate virtually everything that can be observed or detected,
and science as a whole has no lesser aim than to shape the way we
understand the universe, our planet, ourselves, and other living
things.

She sometimes succeeds, sometimes not.

One of her vital trademarks—we could even
call it her Code—is that what she discovers must be found by
objective analysis rather than by personal experience or belief (a
principle that is not always followed). This approach, honestly
adhered to, will accumulate knowledge with time and will so allow
science to strive ever higher with earlier discoveries as its
foundation.

Vital parts of this foundation, such as, for
example, our understanding of numbers, were laid by ancient
civilizations. Other scientific insights, such as our isolation and
understanding of cancer-causing genes or of quarks, date back less
than 80 years.

On paper, all scientists, be they current or
ancient, take the same systematic approach: based on the now known,
look farther, deeper, higher, and add to it.

We refer to this approach
as the
scientific
method
.

Scientific Method

Whereas philosophy on
occasion also ponders the question
how?
, it primarily concerns itself
with the question
why
? Science, on the other hand, focuses nearly exclusively on
the question
how?

Most of today’s scientists
hold that modern science—and with it the concept of scientific
method—originated with the Renaissance; but if you look more
closely, you’ll detect the rudiments of scientific approach—what
I’d call
methodic
curiosity
—throughout human
history.

Cornerstones

The cornerstones of the
scientific method consist of an
objective
approach
to any investigation, and
of
accepted results
.

The precept of objectivity means that we
have to observe things as they are, without yielding to the
somewhat procrustean temptation to force such observations into
accord with preconceived views or other hobby horses.

The precept of acceptability stipulates that
observations or experiments made by one can uniformly be reproduced
by another. Scientific findings, in other words, must hold true for
all who investigate any given set of conditions and phenomena.

Reasoning

By use more than
definition,
scientific method
deploys both
inductive
reasoning (that reasoning
which proceeds from specific observations and experiments: a penny
dropped will fall to the ground; to form more general hypotheses
and theories: there is such a thing as gravity) and
deductive
reasoning (that
reasoning which travels the other way—from intuited theories or
hypotheses to predict and/or account for specific, observed
phenomena: we postulate a force called gravity; so, if let go: this
penny should fall to the ground).