Fritjof Capra: Science gets closer to Buddhism

Eds., Wisdom Quarterly; Maria Armoudian, Prof. Fritjof Capra (Scholars’ Circle, 8-31-14)

The Buddha under a vast sky, Battambang, Cambodia (Samantonio/flickr.com)

Amazing visionaries from the Buddha to the guardians and more (Pete Karnevil/flickr)

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The Systems View of Life: a Unifying Vision

(Scholars' Circle) Fritjof Capra, the world-famous author of The Tao of Physics, talks about his more recent work, The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision.

Capra, who is for all practical purposes now an Eastern mystic and one of Leonardo da Vinci's greatest proponents, also researched and wrote: The Turning Point, The Web of Life, The Hidden Connections, The Science of Leonardo: Inside the Mind of the Great Genius of the Renaissance, and Learning from Leonardo: Decoding the Notebooks of a Genius.

Dr. Capra is an eminent physicist, system theorist, science writer, and the founding director of Center of Ecoliteracy.

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Feeding students, sustainable living, thinking about ecosystems (ecoliteracy.org)

 

The Systems View of Life

Over the past three decades, a new conception of life has emerged at the forefront of science: New emphasis has been given to complexity, networks, and patterns of organization leading to a novel kind of "systemic" thinking. Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi integrate the ideas, models, and theories underlying the systems view of life. They put it all into a single coherent framework Taking a broad sweep through history and across scientific disciplines, the authors examine the appearance of key concepts such as autopoiesis, dissipative structures, social networks, and a systemic understanding of evolution. The implications of the systems view of life for health care, management, and our global ecological and economic crises are also discussed. It is for college students and essential reading for graduate students and researchers interested in the new systemic conception of life with implications for a broad range of professions -- from psychology and law, economics and politics, to medicine.

KPFK (90.7 FM) Host Maria Armoudian (armoudian.com, The Scholars' Circle)

Kill the Messenger: The Media's Role

• Pacifica Radio host and producer Maria Armoudian (The Insighters, The Scholars's Circle) is author of Kill the Messenger: The Media's Role in the Fate of the World and a fellow at USC’s Center for International Studies, a doctoral candidate at the Univ. of Southern California, and a board member for the L.A. League of Conservation Voters.
• fritjofcapra.net

Thinking Like an Ecosystem (Frances Moore Lappe/ecoliteracy.org)

The genius of Da Vinci and the Tao (audio)

Wisdom Quarterly; Dr. Fritjof Capra, Mitch Jeserich (Letters and Politics, Dec. 30, 2013)

Fritjof Capra's new book Learning from Leonardo: Decoding the Notebooks of a Genius presents an in-depth discussion of the main branches of Da Vinci's scientific work. What was it?

Da Vinci pioneered fluid dynamics [the Tao being the way, the flow, the path of least resistance], geology, botany, anatomy, mechanics, aerodynamics, [ecology, eco-designing, war and weapons engineering, vegetarianism, pacifism, art most famously painting the "Mona Lisa" but, notably, not the social sciences or any political or economic phenomena].

Most of his astonishing discoveries and achievements in these fields are virtually unknown to the general public. Dr. Capra's thesis is that, at the most fundamental level, Da Vinci always sought to understand the nature of life. This has often escaped earlier commentators, because until recently the nature of life was defined by biologists only in terms of cells and molecules, to which Da Vinci had no access.

 

Popes were more like Roman emperors

THE POPE of Da Vinci's day, in tune with the corrupt Holy Roman Catholic Church he led, was absorbed with mistresses, children, and imperial wars. He was not concerned with Da Vinci's heretical ideas, like his view of the "soul." Da Vinci thought it akin to cognitive psychology's view of cognition [or the Buddha's detailed analysis of citta, the process of consciousness, as an interdependent process]. Galileo, a century later, would face a much different pope and inquisitive Church that allowed no deviation from its dogma.

 

Mona Lisa and Leo (gregoryherpe.fr)

 

The enigmatic Leo Lisa (lewets)

But today, a new systemic understanding of life is emerging at the forefront of science -- an understanding in terms of metabolic processes and their patterns of organization. And those are precisely the phenomena which Da Vinci explored throughout his life. The book has been published in three editions in three languages.

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Fritjof Capra, Ph.D., physicist and systems theorist, is a founding director of the Center for Ecoliteracy in Berkeley, California. Dr. Capra is the author of several international bestsellers, including The Tao of Physics (1975), The Web of Life (1996), The Hidden Connections (2002), and The Science of Leonardo (2007). He coauthored Green Politics (1984), Belonging to the Universe (1991), and EcoManagement (1993), and coedited Steering Business Toward Sustainability (1995). His most recent book, Learning from Leonardo, was published in Italy and Brazil in 2012 and will be published in the United States in 2013. He is currently working on a multidisciplinary textbook, The Systems View of Life, coauthored by Pier Luigi Luisi and to be published by Cambridge University Press. See bibliography for book details.

Brahma's "Big Bang"

WQ edit of Religious interpretations of the Big Bang theory

Helix planetary nebula nicknamed "Eye of God" (NASA)

Buddhist View
The Buddhist view of the universe (cosmology) can be found in a Buddhist scripture called the Agganchcha (Pali, Aganna) Sutra. According to Buddhism, as with everything within it, the universe itself is subject to radical imperma-nence. It is in a perpetual state of becoming (rather than "being) and while no discernible beginning is declared, there is also no definitive end. There are instead many beginnings and ends, cyclical ages (aeons) and epochs, and countless other universes (world systems) in all directions.

When the existing universe or world system dies, it goes into a state of undifferentiated chaos. It emerges again due in part to its own nature and partly as a result of karma. At that time, living beings are mostly reborn into a Brahma world (abhassara-brahma-loka). There they subsist on "joy" and fly about.

Billions of years later (immeasurable cycles of time, aeons), an empty space emerges as a result of karma. There a first being, who thus earns the title Maha Brahma (great divinity), is said to be reborn alone. Soon after, other beings (brahmas) are reborn. Often this leads the Great Brahma to imagine that It called them into existence. Later It may say, "I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first, the last, the always, the creator, the sustainer, the destroyer. As I will it, so it becomes" and other similarly faulty deductions and declarations.

However, the state of Brahmas are only for beings with a store of high caliber karma (merit). Their mental state is such that they are not attached to sensual pleasures. They are neither male nor female but neuter. Other beings, habitually desiring the enjoyment of less refined pleasures, take rebirth in denser worlds.

As a result of their "karma" (those actions previously willed, carried out, and accumulated coming to fruition) appropriate worlds emerge. These worlds are appropriate to the fruition of various actions. This coming into being can take place as the undifferentiated chaos organizes itself into order -- a Big Bang? The universe gradually evolves from entropy into a state where (carbon or physically based) life emerges -- again, largely as a result of karmic-force.

Beings' craving for sensual pleasure forms part of a process known as Dependent Origination (paticca-samuppada). Rebirth takes place based on this principle. Nothing emerges from one thing or cause, but by a confluence of factors. (These are summed up and explained in detail in the Abhidharma or Buddhism's Higher Teachings).

The cycle of Dependent Origination completes itself and repeats until one or more of its factors are weakened and eliminated (e.g., ignorance, craving, etc.). Otherwise, the process cycles and cycles -- marked by impermanently, unsatisfactorily, and (above all) impersonally. The time it takes between the rise and fall of worlds is called a maha kalpa (great age). It is difficult to reckon; therefore, the Buddha described it by way of a staggering analogy. If there were a solid mass of granite a mile high and a mile wide, unbroken, and a tiny bird were to come and whet its beak with a silk cloth only every century...that entire mass of granite would be worn down before a maha kalpa were finished.

Hindu view
Science writers Carl Sagan and Fritjof Capra have pointed out similarities between what they consider the latest scientific understanding of the age of the universe and Hinduism's (more technically Brahmanism's) concept of a "day and night of Brahma." This is much closer to the current known age of the universe than other creation myths (when taken literally).

The days and nights of Brahma posit a view of the universe that is divinely created. Like Buddhism and other "Eastern philosophical" view, it is not strictly evolutionary. Instead, it is an ongoing cycle of birth, death, rebirth, and redeath for the universe. According to Sagan:

"The Hindu religion is the only one of the world's great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths. It is the only religion in which time scales correspond, no doubt by accident, to those of modern scientific cosmology. Its cycles run from our ordinary day and night to a day and night of Brahma, 8.64 billion years long, longer than the age of the Earth or the Sun and about half the time since the Big Bang. And there are much longer time scales still.[Ref]

The Sound of Silence
Some Hindus believe that with the pranava mantra -- the AUM sound, or the "Word" in the "Beginning" -- the Universe was started. This is similar to the Big Bang theory. Omkara, the sound of ohm, is posited as the means of creation.

Capra, in his popular book The Tao of Physics, writes that:

"This idea of a periodically expanding and contracting universe, which involves a scale of time and space of vast proportions, has arisen not only in modern cosmology, but also in ancient Indian mythology. Experiencing the universe as an organic and rhythmically moving cosmos, the Hindus were able to develop evolutionary cosmologies which come very close to our modern scientific models. One of these cosmologies is based on the Hindu myth of lila — the divine play — in which Brahman transforms himself into the world.[Ref]

The Hindu cosmological view of a cyclic universe has received further support from recent activity in loop quantum gravity theories [Bojowald 2007; Corichi and Singh 2008] that postulate that the existing universe is identical in terms of its physical laws to a previously contracting universe across the Big Bang window.

Taoist view
There may also be a suggestion of a Big Bang to be found in Taoism, a branch of Chinese philosophy. The first verse of the Tao Te Ching ("Book of Changes") is:

"…It was from the Nameless that Heaven and Earth sprang; the named is but the mother that rears the ten thousand creatures, each after its kind."[Ref]

• PHOTOS: 1) Spitzer space telescope, artist conception (NASA); Hammurabi (Indian, Manu) receiving the Code of Laws from Surya, the sun deva (ranajitpal.com); image taken by the Kepler telescope, released by NASA on 4/16/09, shows an expansive, 100-square-degree patch of sky in the Milky Way galaxy where it hopes to find Earth-like planets. (AP/NASA/JPL CalTech); Shiva (the destructive face of Brahman, the godhead (astromandir.com); aum (om) symbol, a letter and sound in the sacred Sanskrit language of the Vedas;

Kepler: New Space Photos
PASADENA, Calif. – NASA's new planet-hunting telescope has beamed back the first images of a patch of faraway sky in the Milky Way galaxy where it hopes to find Earth-like planets. NASA on Thursday released several images snapped by Kepler earlier this month, including a view of a distant part of our galaxy containing some 14 million stars. Scientists say more than 100,000 of those stars are potential candidates for research. More>>