The atom and you

I just finished one of the most powerful books I have ever read in my life: The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. Now I am reading a second commentary on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, by an author who worked with Choygam Trungpa to translate the Tibetan Book of the Dead in 1975. Her name is Francesca Fremantle. Her commentary on the book is titled Luminous Emptiness. WOW. I don’t know want to talk too much about her fantastic book yet since I haven’t finished it yet, however I wanted to mention the concepts it is bringing up in me. These two books seem to be blurring the line for me between what is living and what is dying. There seems to be living in dying and dying in living. One concept is that if consciousness (FYI: Fremantle includes writing about 8 kinds of consciousness) is included in Einstein’s concept where matter and energy can not be destroyed only transformed (e=mc2), you could at least start to see how different things could happen than maybe nothing.

At the moment I want to describe a concept it keeps bringing to my mind: the emptiness. The atom is mostly empty space (think ~99%). And what is there is constantly spinning and moving with energy. Everything is changing and mostly empty. Yet when we look around it looks solid and unchanging. It is temporary and really kind of impersonal and yet I see my computer my favorite chair, it all looks pretty solid and unchanging to me!

One thing I adore about the Dalai Lama is his embracing of science. The idea is life is an experiment lets see what works. If you can measure an ancient technique for gaining compassion – Lets do it! Science and spirituality can be incredibly helpful to each other in developing ways that work. Brilliant. It is an exciting world we are living in. For now I will leave you with a vid I chanced across: Atom : The Illusion Of Reality – BBC Documentary