I am so interested in not only Physics ,but also Eastern Philosophy,especially so-called Mysticism. The following paragraphs are copied from The Tao of Physics;it explained the current Modern Physics in the view of Eastern Religions;Taoism,Zen Buddhism and India Mysticism. I wanna translate it to Burma Language, but don’t have enough time to do .Hence,Sorry for now on, merely describing one of its chapters for my friends with so keen mindedness in these subjects just like me.
Thank you,
Zayya
Knowing and Seeing;The Parallels between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism
From the unreal lead me to the real!
From darkness lead me to light!
From death lead me to immortality!
Brihad-aranyaka Upanishad
Before studying the parallels between modern physics and Eastern mysticism, we have to deal with the question of how we can make any comparison at all between an exact science, expressed in the highly sophisticated language of modern mathematics, and spiritual disciplines which are mainly based on meditation and insist on the fact that their insights cannot be communicated verbally. What we want to compare are the statements made by scientists and Eastern mystics about their knowledge of the world.
To establish the proper framework for this comparison, we must firstly ask ourselves what kind of ‘knowledge’ we are talking about; does the Buddhist monk from Angkor Wat or Kyoto mean the same thing by ‘knowledge’ as the physicist from Oxford or Berkeley? Secondly, what kind of statements are we going to compare? What are we going to select from the experimental data, equations and theories on the one side, and from the religious scriptures, ancient myths, or philosophical treatises on the other?
This chapter is intended to clarify these two points: the nature of the knowledge involved and the language in which this knowledge is expressed. Throughout history, it has been recognized that the human mind is capable of two kinds of knowledge, or two modes of consciousness, which have often been termed the rational and the intuitive, and have traditionally been associated with science and religion, respectively. In the West, the intuitive, religious type of knowledge is often devalued in favour of rational, scientific knowledge, whereas the traditional Eastern attitude is in general just the opposite. The following statements about knowledge by two great minds of the West and the East typify the two positions. Socrates in Greece made the famous statement ‘I know that I know nothing’, and Lao Tzu in China said, ‘Not knowing that one knows is best.’ In the East, the values attributed to the two kinds of knowledge are often already apparent from the names given to them. The Upanishads, for example, speak about a higher and a lower knowledge and associate the lower knowledge with various sciences, the higher with religious awareness. Buddhists talk about ‘relative’ and ‘absolute’ knowledge, or about conditional truth’ and ‘transcendental truth’. Chinese philosophy, on the other hand, has always emphasized the complementary nature of the intuitive and the rational and has represented them by the archetypal pair yin and yang which form the basis of Chinese thought. Read more of this post
