Contemplative Science, page 26
16 James, The Principles of Psychology, I:423.
17 William James, Talks to Teachers: On Psychology; and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals (1899; reprint, New York: Norton, 1958), 78.
18 James, The Principles of Psychology, I:425.
19 Hopkins, Meditation on Emptiness, 233.
20 A clear discussion of this technique is found in the section entitled “The Cultivation of Attention” in Karma Chagmé, A Spacious Path to Freedom: Practical Instructions on the Union of Mahāmudrā and Atiyoga, commentary by Gyatrul Rinpoche; trans. B. Alan Wallace (Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion, 1998).
21 Karma Chagmé, A Spacious Path to Freedom, 82.
22 H.H. the Dalai Lama and Alexander Berzin, The Gelug/Kagyü Tradition of Mahamudra (Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion, 1997), 37–142; Karma Chagmé, A Spacious Path to Freedom, 80.
23 This citation is from the “Sems gnas pa’i thabs” section of his Dge ldan bka’ brgyud rin po che’i bka’ srol phyag rgya chen po’i rtsa ba rgyas par bshad pa yang gsal sgron me (photocopy in author’s possession).
24 Ratnameghasūtra, cited in Śāntideva, Śikṣāsamuccaya, 68.
25 For a discussion of such techniques for realizing the primordial nature of awareness, see Karma Chagmé, A Spacious Path to Freedom, chs. 4–6, and Padmasambhava, Natural Liberation, 114–40.
26 For a fascinating account of this problem and its radical solution, see E. T. Whittaker, A History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity, Modern Theories 1900–1926 (New York: Philosophical Library, 1954), ch. 3.
8. BEYOND IDOLATRY: THE RENAISSANCE OF A SPIRIT OF EMPIRICISM
1 Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, trans. and ed. P. Urbach and J. Gibson (Peru, IL: Open Court, 1994).
2 David Ritz Finkelstein, “Emptiness and Relativity,” in Buddhism and Science: Breaking New Ground, ed. B. Alan Wallace (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 365–84.
3 Jeffrey Hopkins, Meditation on Emptiness (London: Wisdom, 1983), 296–304.
4 René Descartes, Discourse on the Method; and Meditations on First Philosophy, ed. David Weissman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), Meditations 1, 2, 6.
5 S. B. Klein, “The Cognitive Neuroscience of Knowing One’s Self,” in The Cognitive Neurosciences III, ed. M. S. Gazzaniga (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 1077–1090; Owen Flanagan, The Problem of the Soul: Two Visions of Mind and How to Reconcile Them (New York: Basic Books, 2002); Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).
6 Steven Collins, Selfless Persons: Imagery and Thought in Theravāda Buddhism (London: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
7 Aristotle, The Metaphysics, trans. John H. McMahon (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1991), 12.7; 1072b14.
8 Ibid., 12.7; 1073a4.
9 Albert Einstein, “Science and Religion,” in Out of My Later Years (New York: Philosophical Library, 1950), 27.
10 Albert Einstein, “On Scientific Truth,” In Ideas and Opinions (New York: Crown, 1954), 262.
11 John R. Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 90–91.
12 Daniel M. Wegner, The Illusion of Conscious Will (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 341–42.
13 B. Libet, C. A. Gleason, E. W. Wright, and D. K. Pearl, “Time of Conscious Intention to Act in Relation to Onset of Cerebral Activity (Readiness-Potential). The Unconscious Initiation of a Freely Voluntary Act.” Brain 106 (3) (1983): 623–42.
14 Jack, Anthony I. and Philip Robbins, “Review of Wegner’s Illusion of Conscious Will,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 27 (2004): 649–92.
15 Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind, 76–77.
16 John R. Searle, Consciousness and Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 50.
17 Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind, 3.
18 Paul C. W. Davies, “An Overview of the Contributions of John Archibald Wheeler,” in Science and Ultimate Reality: Quantum Theory, Cosmology and Complexity, Honoring John Wheeler’s 90th Birthday, ed. John D. Barrow, Paul C. W. Davies, and Charles L. Harper Jr. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 5–6.
19 Ibid., 7.
20 Prevention & Treatment, Volume 1, Article 0002a, posted June 26, 1998. The full article may be viewed at: http://www.journals.apa.org/prevention/volume1/pre0010002a.html. A more recent and more comprehensive version of the argument, published in 2002, called “The Emperor’s New Drugs: An Analysis of Antidepressant Medication Data Submitted to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration,” can be accessed at: www.journals.apa.org/prevention/volume5/toc-jul15–02.html. For a broad, cultural perspective on the placebo effect in general, see Daniel E. Moerman, Meaning, Medicine, and the “Placebo Effect” (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
21 Andrew F. Leuchter et al., “Changes in Brain Function of Depressed Subjects During Treatment with Placebo,” American Journal of Psychiatry 159 (2002): 122–29.
22 Searle, Consciousness and Language, 34.
23 Antoine Lutz et al., “Long-Term Meditators Self-Induce High-Amplitude Gamma Synchrony During Mental Practice,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 101, no. 46 (Nov. 16, 2004): 16369–16373. The full article can be found at: http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/101/46/16369.
24 Edward J. Larson and Larry Witham, “Leading Scientists Still Reject God,” Nature 394 (1998): 313.
25 René Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, Pt. 4, § 187, in Oeuvres Philosophiques de Descartes, trans. and ed. F. Alquié (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1973), 3:502n.
26 Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy (London: Penguin, 1989), 59; see also E. Schrödinger, The Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (Woodbridge, CT: Ox Bow Press, 1995); H. D. Zeh, “There Are No Quantum Jumps, Nor Are There Particles,” Physics Letters A172 (1993): 189–92; P. C. W. Davies, “Particles Do Not Exist,” in Quantum Theory of Gravity, ed. S. M. Christiansen (New York: Adam Hilger, 1984); Michel Bitbol, Schrödinger’s Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics (New York: Kluwer, 1995).
27 P. M. Haman, Energy, Force and Matter: The Conceptual Development of Nineteenth Century Physics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 43.
28 Richard P. Feynman, R. B. Leighton, and M. Sands, The Feynman Lectures on Physics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965), sec. 4–2.
29 Tim Folger, “Does the Universe Exist if We’re Not Looking?” Discover 23, no. 6 (June 2002). For the full article, see: http://www.discover.com/issues/jun-02/features/featuniverse/; Anton Zeilinger, “Why the Quantum? ‘It’ from ‘Bit’? A Participatory Universe? Three Far-Reaching Challenges from John Archibald Wheeler and Their Relation to Experiment,” in Science and Ultimate Reality: Quantum Theory, Cosmology and Complexity, Honoring John Wheeler’s 90th Birthday, ed. John D. Barrow, Paul C. W. Davies, and Charles L. Harper Jr. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) 201–20; Jacob D. Bekenstein, “Information in the Holographic Universe—Theoretical Results About Black Holes Suggest That the Universe Could Be Like a Gigantic Hologram,” Scientific American (August 2003); David Bohm, Thought as a System (London: Routledge, 1994); David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (London: Routledge, 1995).
30 John Archibald Wheeler, “Beyond the Black Hole,” in Some Strangeness in the Proportion: A Centennial Symposium to Celebrate the Achievements of Albert Einstein, ed. Harry Woolf (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1980), 356; John Archibald Wheeler, “The ‘Past’ and the ‘Delayed-Choice’ Double-Slit Experiment,” in Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Theory, ed. A. R. Marlow (New York: Academic Press, 1978).
31 Finkelstein, “Emptiness and Relativity,” 366.
32 Michel Bitbol, “Materialism, Stances, and Open-Mindedness,” in Images of Empiricism: Essays on Science and Stances, with a Reply from Bas van Fraassen, ed. Bradley Monton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, in press).
33 Michael Lockwood, Mind, Brain and the Quantum (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 20.
34 Hilary Putnam, The Many Faces of Realism (La Salle: Open Court, 1987); Realism with a Human Face, ed. James Conant (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990); “Replies and Comments,” Erkenntnis 34, no. 3 (1991).
35 E. R. Harrison, Cosmology: The Science of the Universe, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); George F. R. Ellis, “True Complexity and Its Associated Ontology,” in Science and Ultimate Reality: Quantum Theory, Cosmology and Complexity, Honoring John Wheeler’s 90th Birthday, ed. John D. Barrow, Paul C. W. Davies, and Charles L. Harper Jr. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 607–36.
36 Robert B. Laughlin, A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down (Basic Books, 2005), 31, 55.
37 Ibid., 14.
38 George F. R. Ellis, “Physics, Complexity and Causality” Nature 435 (2005): 743; “Physics and the Real World,” Physics Today 58 (2005): 49–55.
39 Finkelstein, “Emptiness and Relativity,” 367–68.
40 Andre Linde, “Inflation, Quantum Cosmology and the Anthropic Principle,” in Science and Ultimate Reality: Quantum Theory, Cosmology and Complexity, Honoring John Wheeler’s 90th Birthday, ed. John D. Barrow, Paul C. W. Davies, and Charles L. Harper Jr. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 426–58.
41 Finkelstein, “Emptiness and Relativity,” 380.
42 For this discussion, I am indebted to the wonderful insights expressed in Michel Bitbol’s essay “Materialism, Stances, and Open-Mindedness,” and to our correspondence concerning these issues.
43 Laughlin, A Different Universe, 55.
44 H. H. the Dalai Lama, The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality (New York: Morgan Road, 2005).
45 Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).
46 Laughlin, A Different Universe, 13.
47 Francisco Varela and Jeremy Hayward, eds., Gentle Bridges: Conversations with the Dalai Lama on the Sciences of Mind, 2nd ed. (Boston: Shambhala, 1992), 37.
48 M. Kline, Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 59.
49 K. C. Cole, The Hole in the Universe: How Scientists Peered Over the Edge of Emptiness and Found Everything (New York: Harcourt, 2001), 244.
50 Basil Hiley, “Vacuum or Holomovement,” in The Philosophy of Vacuum, ed. Simon Saunders and Harvey R. Brown (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); H. Atmanspacher, “Mind and Matter as Asymptotically Disjoint, Inequivalent Representations with Broken Time-Reversal Symmetry,” BioSystems 68 (2003): 19–30; Henry P. Stapp, Mind, Matter, and Quantum Mechanics (New York: Springer, 2004); M. B. Menski, “Concept of Consciousness in the Context of Quantum Mechanics,” Physics—Uspekhi 48 (4) (2005): 389–409; Mark Stuckey, Michael Silberstein, and Michael Cifone, “Reversing the Arrow of Explanation in the Relational Blockworld: Why Temporal Becoming, the Dynamical Brain and the External World Are All in ‘in the Mind,’” in Endophysics, Time, Quantum and the Subjective, ed. R. Buccheri et al. (London: World Scientific Publishing, 2005), 207–30.
51 Cole, The Hole in the Universe, 177–78.
52 Düdjom Lingpa, The Vajra Essence: From the Matrix of Pure Appearances and Primordial Consciousness, a Tantra on the Self-Originating Nature of Existence, trans. B. Alan Wallace (Alameda, CA: Mirror of Wisdom, 2004), 255.
53 Ibid., 251.
54 Ibid., 210–12.
55 Padmasambhava, Natural Liberation: Padmasambhava’s Teachings on the Six Bardos, commentary by Gyaltrul Rinpoche; trans. B. Alan Wallace (Boston: Wisdom, 1998), 62.
56 I. P. Sheldon-Williams, trans. and comm., Periphyseon (De divisione naturae), Book 2 (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1968–72), 143–45 (589B–C).
57 H. Lawrence Bond, trans., Nicholas of Cusa: Selected Spiritual Writings (New York: Paulist Press, 1997), On Seeking God (De quaerendo Deum 1445), 230.
58 Ibid., 251.
59 Robert K. C. Forman, ed., The Problem of Pure Consciousness: Mysticism and Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
60 William James, Pragmatism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975).
61 Henry P. Stapp, Mind, Matter, and Quantum Mechanics (Berlin: Springer, 1993); Basil J. Hiley, “Quantum Mechanics and the Relation Between Mind and Matter,” in Brain, Mind and Physics, ed. P. Pylkkänen et al. (Helsinki: IOS Press, 1997), 37–53; Laughlin, A Different Universe.
62 Laughlin, A Different Universe, 14.
63 Ibid.,116.
64 B. Van Fraassen, The Empirical Stance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 61.
65 Nick Herbert, Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1985), 248.
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