Cosmos

We have begun watching Carl Sagan's video series (c. 1980) about the origins of everything in the cosmos. I had forgotten what an amazing writer and engaging human being he was. 

I have been sitting in the zendo with the koan "Mu." Last winter I know roshi was losing patience with me as I struggled to get past logic with "mu." Sagan shows how all the physical matter on earth shares a common physical basis. In the physical universe we are all one thing! We are all one physical thing, and the differentiation we perceive is just an artifact of our binary brain's requirement to perceive things in time and with edges. So 'tis true what the buddha saw.

I remember this epoch in scientific thought including Fritjof Capra's THE TAO OF PHYSICS, and its discussion of Eastern mysticism and its parallel's with physics. I muse- is it the influence of these thinkers in a formative time in my life that have attracted me to zen? These were very important thinkers, Sagan and Capra. 

After sixty years of living, I see that strides in realization will come in fits and starts. Now we are immersed in a ludicrous financial quagmire, so the truth of the universe will be obscure for a time, while greed and avarice arise, and its effects are endured. It is time to drop out again, I think.