Buddhism & science

Were one to lay the Kamma teaching of the Buddha before a physicist, in all likelihood he would dismiss it with this objection:—

“Immediate passing over that cannot be put to the proof in space and time is telekinesis. Telekinesis is a fact only for faith. Accordingly, Buddhism too, like every other religion, is a religion of faith.”

The scientifically-educated man would probably concur in this train of thought. Hence, if Buddhism is to have any prospect whatever of playing a part in our intellectual life, it must offer a reply to such a line of argument.

That reply would run somewhat as follows:—

Actuality, when, where, and howsoever it makes itself manifest, really means nothing more than this—action is present. For actuality is action, doing, the power to do itself. It tells us, however, nothing at all as to how this action is bound to take place. Whence comes it then that science has the presumption to dictate to actuality a definite kind of action—would have it, so to speak, run along fixed rails?

The one-sided requirement of science that all action must be mediate, demonstrable in space and time, follows perforce from the position she takes up towards nature.

Science is only possible where there is the perceptible to sense—where there is what can be compared.

Comparison is only possible where things are so arranged that the actual energies can be neglected. For every energy is something unique, strictly individual, not comparable, as my consciousness immediately proves to me.

This leaving out of account of the actual energies is only possible in the world of reactions. Here it is possible, and therefore also legitimate, to regard any kind of process as a something constant and complete, as a product, and correspondingly to treat it as such. Every physicist knows that the grocer’s pound weight, as well as the grain of his own scales, rigorously tested, to-morrow are no longer the same as they were to-day. Nevertheless we make a compromise with actuality and act as though they were the same. It suffices for all practical purposes, and so is permissible. Here one is not at all aiming at a world-theory; one only seeks to measure and weigh, and satisfy certain needs.

This compromise with actuality—the looking upon things as finished, completed—is forced upon us by the idea of identity, with which all mental life, without exception, operates. And the physicist accommodates himself to this idea with his concept of “body.”

Body, in the physical acceptation of the word, is nowhere to be found in actuality; none the less the physicist is justified in making use of this idea so long as, in the pursuit of his aims, he can do so with advantage—that is, so long as it is a question of measuring and determining in advance.

The re-actual point of view of science involves as logical correlate the merging in one, of “motion” as manifesting itself to sense, and “energy.” Aught else corresponding to energy besides motion itself is not to be found in the re-actual world of the physicist. Here motion is energy itself.

Under these two preliminary conditions—the regarding of things as “bodies,” and their motions as energies themselves—the play of world-events displays itself in its entirety to perception by the senses; and every effect is something mediate, possible of being followed up in space and time.

But the movements that are perceptible to sense are just as little the energies themselves as “bodies,” in the physical acceptation of the word, are actuality.

The sensible motion is not the energy; it is only the evidence that energies are present.

When two electro-magnets, placed in a certain position with reference to each other, go through circular movements, this does not mean that these circular movements are the energies themselves; it only means that energies are there present, and of themselves prove themselves such by producing effects.

When a geyser discharges water every hour, it does not mean that this kind of action is energy itself; it means nothing more than that energies are there present, and as such are at work.

The earth’s course round the sun does not represent energy itself; it means nothing more than that energies are there present, and as such are at work.

Motion is not energy itself, but the by-product yielded by two systems of energies acting on each other. This by-product will manifest itself, according to circumstances and antecedent conditions, at one time as circular, at another time as elliptical, at another as rhythmical motion, and so forth.

In its essential nature this by-product—the movement perceptible to sense—corresponds wholly and completely to a shadow. As a shadow means nothing save that light is present—it is nothing but the by-product of two systems of energies, one giving, the other receiving, light—so “movement” means nothing save that energy is there present. It is nothing but the by-product of two systems of energies.

It is absolutely essential that the genuine thinker should make this idea as to the intrinsic nature of all motion his own. As little as it is possible ever to draw from shadows any conclusion as to light itself—saving the one conclusion that it must be present—just as little is it possible ever to draw from movements any conclusion as to the energies themselves, saving only that they must be present. The energies themselves withal remain wholly inaccessible. As to whether these are transmitted mediately or immediately, the fact “movement” supplies no information whatever.

Here the physicist will say, “That the movements are transmitted mediately is proved to me by experiment, since I can intercept an energy on its way at as many intermediate stations as I choose; hence, as mediate, can track its path.”

But this is a grossly erroneous conclusion.

To be sure, if I have a magnet here and a needle there, I can intercept the magnetic energy at as many intermediate stations as I choose, and so construct for myself a “path” for the energy. But such a “path” is nothing but a dead line artificially made up of momentary reactions whose continuity is nothing actual and vital, but founded solely upon the minuteness and multiplicity of the moments of section.

Again the physicist may object:—

“We can measure exactly the speed with which the energies propagate themselves, as, for example, the time required for light to reach us from the moons of Jupiter.”

But this also is an erroneous conclusion.

Of course, the fact itself is beyond dispute. But the time here mentioned does not represent the transmission-speed of the energies themselves; it only informs us as to how much delay these have encountered on their way; whether the halting-places have been very numerous and the stay at each a long one. This time which the physicist measures does not give the speed of transmission of the energies, but only the time of their non-transmission.

In accord with this is the incorrectness of ordinary physical terminology. The physicist calls light, heat, and so forth, energies themselves. But light is not energy itself, but only a designation for energies that lie for ever beyond our reach.

But once more I would call attention to the fact that this entire manner of conceiving of things as “bodies,” and of movements as energies themselves, is quite legitimate on the part of the physicist so long as he remains a physicist. It only becomes illegitimate when, reaching out beyond the field of reactions, it seeks to get itself recognized as a world-theory—that is, when it would have actual processes “read” in accordance with the like scheme. For now there follows the claim one makes upon nature that all her action shall manifest itself mediately, as possible of being followed up in time and space.

The illegitimate feature about this conception arises from the fact that it poses itself with an insoluble problem—the problem of telekinesis.

If one regards things as “bodies” in the physical sense, and if upon this conception one insists on erecting a world-theory, then one has to solve the question: How can it ever be possible for action to take place between separate bodies?—a question which involves the idea that every effect produced by contact, even the very slightest, always presents itself to thought as a form of telekinesis. In other words: Everywhere effects are being produced, and yet one is unable to explain how they can ever be brought about.

The insolubility of this problem is attributable not to things but to thinking; that is to say, it is a problem of a purely dialectical nature.

In starting out from the conception “body” as a thing complete in itself, identical with itself, one cuts oneself off from the possibility of ever being able to explain how one thing can act upon another. In thought one has torn things out of their natural connection, and holds them fast conceptually in this artificial isolation. Once I make a thing a “body,” no power in the world can move it so as to bring it into contact with some other thing; as little so as any power in the world can impart movement to a reflected image, taken by itself. Just as such movement can only be brought about through movement of the object reflected, only from this can proceed, so contact between things can only take place, proceeding forth from the beholder, when he lets drop his false notions and comprehends actuality unmodified as that which it is—namely, perpetual coming together into contact itself. Actuality is verily nothing but the passing over from thing to thing—that is to say, process. Actuality is not, as science would fain have us believe, mere possibility—if so, it would always be necessary first to have explained how these possibilities could ever arrive at realization—but actuality is a potency, and so, at every moment of existence, self-realization itself.

If only actuality is rightly conceived of, the question as to how action betwixt thing and thing can take place simply loses all meaning. Actuality is seen to be nothing but this action itself. Where one is, thither one cannot go; and what one is, that none can become.

When physics, and with it science as a whole, puts forward the claim that all action must be capable of being tracked mediately in space and time, it excludes itself from this requirement. For, without exception, every case of action in its own domain is to be read as a special instance of telekinesis. But be it well noted, the concepts, action by contact and telekinesis, are not something existent in themselves; they are merely intellectually-conceived functions of the purely artificial concept “body.” Where this concept is absent, there is neither action by contact nor yet telekinesis; there the whole universe, as a totality of combustion-processes, is action itself, but tells us nothing whatever as to how action can come about, or as to whether this action is mediate or immediate.

How action proceeds can never be comprehended from the observation of reactions, though one should track these with never so much perseverance and accuracy; that can only be ascertained where one is acquainted with the energies themselves.

In all the world there is but one single energy that is open to approach—my own in-force which becomes perceptible to me in consciousness. Thus the question as to how action itself proceeds can never be answered on the lines of induction: it can only be experienced.

When one asks the Theras of Ceylon for an illustration of how Kamma passes over from one existence to the new location, the example of teacher and pupil is that most frequently given. As instruction, stimulation, pass over from teacher to pupil, with effects that last throughout the latter’s entire lifetime, even so does Kamma pass over.

And just here we come upon something that lies too close at hand for the ordinary person to give much heed to it. Nothing is more strange to us than actuality—that is, than we ourselves!

As a matter of fact, life in its entirety, as it runs its course among human beings, is such an instance of immediate effectuation. All actuality is immediate: it is only re-actuality that is mediate. Wherever I actually am alive, I stand in the midst of such immediate effectuations as mock at all scientific calculations.

When two pairs of eyes encounter one another and that springs up which we call love or hate, as the case may be, this is an instance of immediate passing over between two systems of energies. All forms of mental excitement, all our numberless sympathies and antipathies; the mutual understanding between man and man, between man and animal; the unspoken self-revelation, self-discovery between man and wife; the communion between mother and child;—all these are immediate effectuations. Each possibility of one giving an order to another, of one obeying another; all possibility of life in communities, animal or human; every possibility of education, has its roots in such immediate effectuations. But the very attempt to enumerate them tends to beget the fallacious idea that they are the exceptions. It is not so! All beings communicate with one another immediately. In immediate effectuations we live, move, and have our being. But through the re-actual apprehension of things inculcated by science our sense of actuality has become so dwarfed and stunted that we no longer dare to take actuality as itself; nay, we do not even know how to do so, but are disposed to recognize it as such only when we can have it handed us by some system of grains, feet, and seconds.

All unspoiled, natural thinking and feeling proceeds by way of immediate effectuation. The never wholly-eradicable idea of magic, as it still survives to-day—one last little remnant of it—in the form of “Sympathiekuren,” is nothing else but the instinctive idea of the necessity for such effectuation. How the nobleman of Capernaum would have laughed if Professor X. had said to him, “When you say to your servant, ‘Do this!’ and he does it, that seems to you quite a natural thing. But in strict truth this fact simply bristles with insuperable difficulties from the point of view of exact scientific explanation.” It is the high privilege of our age to listen with becoming awe to such-like profound absurdities just because the sense of actuality is lost to us, because through the insistence and authority wherewith science has been able to make her re-actual views prevail, we have finally come to the point of believing in all seriousness that in the actual, in things like eating and drinking, a proceeding indispensable to their proper performance is carefully to count one, two, three!

Science dubs all immediate effectuations “mystical,” and refuses to rest until she has extirpated all such-like ideas. But the mystical is not that which science understands by the term; for to her the mystical is nothing but the non-scientific. It is actuality itself that is mystical. Apart from actuality there is nothing mystical whatever; for it is only the actual, no matter where one lays hold of it, that rolls back into the twilight of beginninglessness. Beginninglessness is what is mystical, and my consciousness the mystical itself. A miracle is nothing mystical. For, if it happens, then it is law; and if it does not happen—why, then it simply is not!

This immediate action of man upon man—this it is that reveals to me how energies operate. When a glance from my eye produces a “stir” in another human being, this energical impulse is not obliged to pass through all the media lying between, but operates immediately. To be sure, an attempt is made to read mechanically this fact also—to interpret it in the form of psychic vibrations, subtlest etheric waves; and science and theosophic, spiritistic, and all sorts of mysticism here go hand in hand. But there is not the least necessity that it should be a glance, a sound, or anything else of a positive nature which moves another. A silence, a failure to look may ofttimes be that which produces the most striking psychic convulsions. To interpret this, however, as a case of transmigrating vibrations, were scarcely possible even for the boldest of hypothesis-makers.

It is even so! That which is most natural is most strange to us. Here too, as with “consciousness,” it is a case of sapere aude! We simply must learn again to dare to take actuality for that which it is—for that which acts there where it can and must act.

When love springs up between two beings, this means that unique attunement prevails. This, however, signifies that energy passes over immediately. It has no need first to wrestle with air and ether molecules: it exists there only where it acts, and it acts there only where it is uniquely attuned.

This is the way in which actual energies operate. This way cannot be proven inductively: it can only be experienced intuitively. And it is this experience which supplies us with our parallel, our point of support, in comprehending how Kamma works. And only because we have lapsed out of this actual life into the re-actual life of science, has the Kamma-teaching become strange and unnatural to us.

The value of an intuition to him who has not himself experienced it, is only measurable by the extent to which it is of service as a working hypothesis.

Of what service is the Buddha-thought here?

In the first place, it makes it possible to “read” both kinds of motion, the inorganic as well as the organic, the falling as well as the proceeding, from one common point of view.

Where the whole actual play of world-events is a summation of self-sustaining processes, existence is action itself; and the simple existence of an energical, of a Kammic system, purports that it makes itself felt with regard to other systems of energies—sustains itself in opposition to them. Actuality is devouring: man in his very nature an eater.

Where there are a number of energical systems, they act against one another. Where there is action, the corresponding reactions are present in the shape of motions perceptible to sense.

These latter, here also, signify nothing save that energies are present, and as such are at work according to circumstances and antecedent conditions.

When two men, in wrestling with each other, fall into a whirling movement, this by no means implies that there resides in these men an energy of this particular variety; it means nothing more than that energies are present, even as the circular movement of two electro-magnets intimates nothing more than that energies are present. Here also motion is only a by-product, the equivalent of the shadow in the case of light—nothing in and of itself. When the flower unfolds itself to the sun, when the creeper draws itself up towards the light, when the caterpillar crawls along the leaf, when the wild geese cleave the air like a wedge, when the dog snaps at the tit-bit, when I lift my arm, lie down, get up, do this or the other thing—in each case it is the same. All this only intimates that energies are present, and in the course of their action against other systems of energies yield by-products. In this mode of apprehending the fact “motion” as the shadow of energy the entire play of world-events, organic as well as inorganic nature, the dead as the living, the re-actual as the actual, admits of one uniform reading.

Secondly:—

In her fight against “telekinesis,” it is with science as with one who in public discourses eloquently on enlightenment, but whose own house is haunted by a ghost.

This hobgoblin of exact science is gravitation; and it bids fair to scatter all exactitude to the winds, since the physicist, too, is unable to represent it to himself otherwise than as acting independent of time.

In the Buddha-thought this independence of time permits of being “read” without the least difficulty, since here it is nothing but the by-product which two systems of energies acting upon one another yield with every alteration of energy-value on one side or the other. When I shift the light with reference to the object illumined, the movement of the shadow takes place as a by-product independent of time. In the selfsame way, what we call gravitation is nothing but the by-product independent of time which informs us that a change is taking place in the energical relation of two world-systems.

Thirdly:—

The Buddha-thought furnishes a reading of the concept of time and space.

Time and space as something existent in themselves are only possible where one is working with “bodies” in the physical sense, where one is operating with identities. Such bodies have need of a space existent in itself in order to perform movements; and, as a matter of fact, physics so completely objectifies the conception of space that it does not hesitate to make the attempt to determine the curvature-measurement of space. Such bodies, further, require time as something objective in order to traverse this space. An objective time and an objective space represent, so to speak, the ordinate and abscissa of the artificial system “body” as conceived of by the physicist. If one does not work with such “bodies,” but, as a philosopher, with things regarded as mere “appearances”—like Kant, for instance—then time and space, from being things purely objective, must become just as much things purely subjective—forms of perception given a priori; the one view as erring as the other!

“Avoiding both extremes, the Buddha points to the truth in the mean.” This continually-recurrent phrase applies, as everywhere, so also here in the strife of opposites. Actuality has no opposites. It is the union of opposites itself. And wherever contention reigns of or about opposites, it only shows that both parties alike have become entangled in pseudo-problems of a purely dialectical nature. This the seeker for truth may depend on, as a rule that has no exceptions: Where there are opposites, there is nescience! Whence it follows that there is no solution from the side of things, but only from the side of thinking, in the rectification of our mental assumptions.

So also is it here.

Where the actual play of world-events is comprehended as a summation of individual combustion-processes, time and space are things neither purely objective nor purely subjective, but belonging equally to both—a Becoming, like everything else. They arise, spring up, in the effectuation of the I-process with respect to the external world wheresoever the preliminary conditions are such that they can and must unfold themselves; in just the same way that consciousness arises in the effectuation of the I-process with respect to the external world wheresoever the preliminary conditions are so regulated that it can and must unfold itself.

So much for the Kamma-teaching, and its bearing upon the claims of modern physics.

Immediate passing over does not contradict actuality, but only the artificial premises of science. All that is actual is immediate. For this reason a passing over of the actual in time and space is an absurdity, since time and space are, first and foremost, functions of the actual, forms of experience, hence never can be made to serve as measure of this experience.