Commitment to Research for Human Flourishing

In March 2011 Japan suffered a catastrophe with a massive earthquake off its East coast. A chain of events led to the Fukushima nuclear power plan disaster with the release of massive amounts of toxic radiation. I visited Tokyo a few months later, in July, when the city's population seemed subdued and fearful in a similar way to how many people have been with the Covid-19 pandemic.

I was hosted by Professor Yukari Shirota at Gakushuin University. In response to what happened, Professor Shirota made an emphatic statement, which I paraphrase: “Japan does not have much in the way of natural resources, only human resources. I therefore commit my life to research.”

Research is fundamental to human resourcefulness and is an activity that I would like to develop more effectively. Whilst research is a natural aptitude and I’ve long nurtured an interdisciplinary approach, I have only a very limited publication record despite having spent decades in academia; to earn a living I have served mainly in a technical support capacity.  I originate ideas quite easily, some expressed on this blog, but I have found it exceedingly difficult to gain traction for them.

Reasoning that I needed to devote more time to my endeavours, in July 2020 I decided not to accept an offer a 12-month contract extension to my post as Digital Projects Officer at the History of Science Museum (HSM).  Instead, I would work full-time on my research activities. However, I shall retain a connection following the award by Museum of the (unpaid) position of Honorary Research Fellow, which was approved by the Board of Visitors at their meeting last November.

There are several strands to my research that might benefit HSM. The most immediate concerns any digital aspects, particularly online communications, an area I have explored for a while and about which I will touch on below. There are other, broader aspects. In 2024 the Museum will be celebrating the centenary of its founding and I’ve already outlined some visionary ideas. I may take the opportunity to expand on them.

A number of my research strands have concerned aspect of science and religion, a broad theme whose historical development took a major turn in the 17th century, the century in which the original Ashmolean Museum was founded. The building now houses HSM, but it is still formally referred to as the ‘Old Ashmolean’. This was a period that saw the rapid rise of rationality; indeed, we denote this period as the Age of Reason. The consequences have been far-reaching, most especially in the increasing emphasis on materiality, which has pervaded notions of science and research in general.

I talk briefly about that development in Buddhism and Computing, the first tangible fruit of my research. A contribution to the ‘Mud Pie Slices’ series, it offers more than a slice of my thoughts from the past decade on critical issues around computer-based technology, particularly as manifest on the Internet. It has been a considerable challenge to squeeze in a wide range of topics without undermining the overall flow, but the issues are urgent and I wish to facilitate better access to them.

Buddhism and Computing summarises and ties together some of the main strands of my ideas in response to challenges facing humanity, concerning the freedom to think and act autonomously, the quality of awareness and so on. I conceived the Sigala project in sustainable online social networking as the primary deliverable in response to these challenges, but until recently I kept my research notes in local documents. I have now set up a website for the main body of research, research.siga.la.

Thus far the part-time efforts of one person, it has large gaps, is rough around the edges, out of date in details, lacks marketing (Why so few images? Where’s the explainer video? Etc.), yet it seeks to offer a coherent and humane vision. I’m hoping that once word gets around, the thesis will gain acceptance and the presentation strengthen, and so on.

For me the process started in November 2007 when I started to reflect on what friendship truly means and how best to support it online. Initially, I conceived this in educational terms, but very quickly saw that its scope was universal.

Having been introduced to the Internet in the early ‘90s in the context of research, I have been strongly averse to the way the Internet, particularly the Web, has been commercialised.  Browsing the Web today with its numerous interruptions, whether for legal consents or advertising, do not make for an aesthetic experience.  Furthermore, changes in search indices and results generation, favours organisations, particularly corporates, and has diminished the voice of individuals; all told, it has generally become harder to find high quality and truly diverse materials.  

Nevertheless, we need viable economic models and I see great potential in applying the work of Avner Offer, who recognised a spectrum from the gift to the market in his theory of the 'economy of regard'.  I’d like to incorporate this in Sigala.

I will elaborate on the substance of the project in future blog posts. For now, I just mention in passing that the website is a kind of knowledge base, whose process is ongoing. As explained, I author and manage the content on my laptop at home using a locally installed WordPress, a web content management system whose popularity is due in no small part to the fact that it is open source software.

Using this setup has yielded the first technical fruit. Running to a few dozen pages, the site is not large or complex, but there is a lot of text, so it may take some while to browse to find something specific. So, as with most websites, a search facility is provided. However, I’ve taken an existing search plugin, WP Static Search, and modified it to work offline, i.e. without an Internet connection or web server. I’m only an occasional coder, but have uploaded my changes to Github and submitted a pull request. This means you can download the entire site onto a memory stick and browse and search it there. (Just one tip: when downloading the zip file from Github, the plugin folder should be renamed back to ‘wp-static-search’ before deployment.)

However the research proceeds, I shall always be looking for opportunities to innovate!

WCBS Paper on Sustainable Social Networking

In addition to the invited plenary speeches, the 3rd World Conference on Buddhism and Science scheduled three tracks on the second afternoon (2 December), one for each theme (Buddhism + Natural Science / Cognitive Science / Social Science) with 4 presentations in each. The conference organisers very kindly gave me the opportunity to present a paper in the section on Buddhism and Social Science; it's only through the generous support they gave that I decided to make the journey to Thailand just a year after my last visit.

I was listed as the first speaker after lunch, something of a mixed blessing with feelings of gastronomic contentment and the body's tendency to want a siesta! Sectional presentations were given up on the 4th Floor in the College of Religious Studies, a building nicely designed around a quad, and for my talk I think there were 40-50 people who wandered in, including a substantial number of bhikkhus, sitting towards the front. Mahidol University has many members of the Sangha as students on its courses, a feature that makes me imagine scenes from Oxford's early days when it's academic spaces was full of monastics also.

The title of my paper was Supporting Kalyāṇamittatā Online: New Architectures for Sustainable Social Networking, a theme that I've had in mind for several years. In my blog post On 'Friends' and other associations, I had already proposed as core to new designs the implementation of multiple relationship types for making a connection - at present, the norm is just the one, 'friend', which places colleagues and closest family members in the same basket. The key inspiration is the Buddha's teachings in the Sigalovāda Sutta, guidance to the householder Sigala, on how to cultivate true friendship. How one behaves should depend on the kind of relationship that one has and the Buddha divides these into 6 separate categories, one category for each cardinal point (N,E,S and W) plus above and below. There's an excellent diagrammatic representation of this in Phrabhavanaviriyakhun's book, Man's Personal Transformation, enough to get my onto my feet to explain it!

[photo credit: Mananya Pattamasoontorn]

I tried to emphasize the contrast these 6 directions with the single direction operative in most social networking sites today. That's a rather parlous state of social affairs, is it not? (In fact I even received assistance from Matthew Kosuta, the chair of the session, who provided a further illustration of the blackboard.)

Furthermore, the Buddha gives advice on how to cultivate each type of relationship, which suggests in application that the services available for each relationship type should vary accordingly.

A copy of my slides below:

Supporting Kalyanamittata Online: New Architectures for Sustainable Social Networking

View more presentations from Paul Trafford.

In the Q&A and subsequent feedback, one question raised the underlying issue of control over online activities - there were several representatives of grassroots organisations who were concerned about being restricted in communications. My response was to suggest that it may depend upon how social networking sites are implemented - whether a single site [run by just one organisation] or distributed [in the manner of Diaspora]. Another key issue is the level of guidance - whilst most people that some is needed, there would be great resistance to any heavy-handedness whereby people are told what to do online, particularly in a way that takes away their freedom to choose.

I'm keen for the ideas to be shared, so I'm pleased that the paper itself is also available for download from the conference papers section (or a pre-formatted copy from my site). Please let me know if you have problems with access.

Interacting Processes at the 3rd World Conference on Buddhism and Science

The deep yearning for knowledge, particularly solutions to the problem of suffering, are stimulating many kinds of dialogue, particularly between and among Buddhism and Science. Thus the 3rd World Conference on Buddhism and Science that took place 1-2 December 2010 at the College of Religious Studies at Mahidol University (Salaya), provided a good opportunity to facilitate such activity. A prime mover behind this kind of meeting space is Dr. Alan Wallace, who is actively promoting the scientific analysis of meditation and its benefits.

I was able to join this conference series for the first time and find out about some of the recent developments in this field and present ideas of my own. The 2 day event was compact, with about 20 speakers in all, allowing for closer discussions. In fact, quite a few of them can be seen on the following brightly-decorated open air shuttle bus (or 'rail car' as it's known locally)!

That was taken shortly before 7am on the first day.

The conference was formerly opened by HRH Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn of Thailand, who arrived right on schedule at 9am to give a supportive speech, highlighting the qualities of compassion and the importance of ethics for human well-being, an underlying goal for this conference. Her Royal Highness subsequently stayed on to listen to 4 keynote speakers (and meet them afterwards), taking notes at a desk placed close to the speakers. One of my cousins informed me that at the end of the year the Princess compiles a book from the notes taken, indicating considerable conscientiousness.

The presentations were very diverse, covering various aspects across the three themes of Buddhism and Natural Science, Buddhism and Cognitive Science, and Buddhism and Social Science. I'll only touch on a few here, but very conveniently a complete set of papers is available for download. Despite the diversity, there appeared to be some common patterns in much of the research articulated. The scene was very well set by a fluent presentation from Professor Denis Noble who gave a few notes, as it were, from his book, the Music of Life. I attempt to paraphrase what he said (I have studied very little biology!) As a systems biologist he emphasized interaction of processes as the characteristics of life, rather than any genetic code or other building blocks. For him, the human being needs to be treated as a whole, with no control centre; changes are effected in multiple directions, so you can't predict human behaviour by unravelling the human genome - such DNA provides only templates for proteins. This has led to reflections on the Buddhist concept of anatta, though I think it can only be properly understood through meditation at an advanced level.

Process-oriented views were repeatedly echoed by speakers in neurological reports, particularly neuroplasticity arising from meditation practice. Although it was observed that many presentations about science came from a particular Western epistemological perspective, at least the encounters with Buddhist teachings were generally encouraging more 'plasticity' in the research approaches. It is only early days. One speaker applauded the fact that in Thailand the integration of scientific methods with traditional Thai medicine is formally recognised at the national level, contrasting it with the rather constricted approaches in Britain and the United States - often treating symptoms, not causes. Some of what was presented I had heard before, particularly the work by Prof. Ian Stevenson at Virginia's Division of Perceptual Studies, relating to recollections by children of previous lives. Whilst the evidence continues to accumulate and I've long been persuaded myself, I wonder how much traction they are getting in general amongst the skeptical elements in the scientific community?

I don't have much formal training in the sciences (apart from computer science), but I have been practising meditation for quite a while and keen to see it adopted universally. So I was very keen to hear Rasmus Hougaard of the Potential Project, which provides mind training (meditation) for corporations. This looks like a recipe for success that has the right ingrediences: a programme that draws multiple meditation traditions (including the Thai Forest Tradition of Ven. Ajahn Chah), teachers experienced in meditation and the corporate world, training that applies throughout the day in whatever activities are engaged, a language that business people can relate to and the development of local facilitators to ensure continuity of practice. One limitation still to be addressed, and an important one in view of increasing movements between jobs, is that of supporting someone when they leave the company. At present it seems they're on their own...

It was fitting then that we could join in two meditation sessions - both courtesy of the jovial Malcolm Huxter, who had previously been a bhikkhu. Coupled with monks chanting the metta sutta (and excellent food), the conference had a very pleasant feel, though some of the organisation was a bit 'just in time', which is not unusual for Thailand!

There was another personally significant aspect. In 1993, Fuengsin Trafford, my mother, had helped organise a joint conference on 'Death and Dying' between Mahidol University and Selly Oak Colleges, Birmingham. With her language skills (Thai and English), she was responsible for many of the communications; she also presented on Thai death rituals. So I was very pleased to be able to visit the College of Religious Studies at Mahidol, particularly to meet Dr. Pinit Ratanakul, who had been a member of the group visiting the UK.

For a cosmologist's perspective, you can read the thoughts of keynote speaker, Adam Frank, who writes on Buddhism And Science: Promise And Perils.

Notes on 'Wholeness and the implicate order: Ch.1 Fragmentation and Wholeness '.

In this chapter Bohm asserts very strongly the need for a whole view in which knowledge and experience are as one. Without this perspective, thought is fragmented and hence the world. It's not a common view among Western scientists, at least not one generally espoused. I had read that Bohm was influenced by Krishnamurti and this is evident if you look at the end of the Appendix, in which he pays glowing tribute to the approach of Krishnamurti and distinguishes approaches and attitudes to measurable and immeasurable that he has encountered between West and East (especially India). The appendix might have been put at the beginning because the perspective offered seems to flow from the observations there.

Overall, I think the views offer valuable coherence and I want to learn more, but there seems to be a denial of the transcendent potential of human beings; that the absolute reality can be attained:

Actually, there are no direct and positive things that man can do to get in touch with the immeasurable, for this must be immensely beyond anything that man can grasp with his mind or accomplish with his hands or instruments.

I find this ultimately pessimistic, unnecessarily so. I guess if someone comes from a Western background it can be difficult to not equate a human being with the biological organism, but the biological organism cannot of itself transcend. In insisting on wholeness of the thinking and content, to include the biological [conditioned] self, and nothing beyond would imply being stuck. Actually, isn't this argument in itself relativistic?

My conviction is that the first journey is to explore what it is to be human and that alone - if carried out properly - will refute the above statement. Indeed the Buddha taught a different way of viewing, a subtle way, which contrasts the conditioned sphere as subject to dukkha (suffering/unsatisfactoriness), anicca (impermanence/flux), anatta (not-self), with lokuttara dhamma - reality that transcends the conditioned, as recorded in Udana VIII.3: Nibbana Sutta

There is, bhikkhus, a not-born, a not-brought-to-being, a not-made, a not-conditioned. If, bhikkhus, there were no not-born, not-brought-to-being, not-made, not-conditioned, no escape would be discerned from what is born, brought-to-being, made, conditioned. But since there is a not-born, a not-brought-to-being, a not-made, a not-conditioned, therefore an escape is discerned from what is born, brought-to-being, made, conditioned.

In the appendix, there's similarly another bone of contention:

It is of course impossible to go back to a state of wholeness that may have been present before the split between East and West developed...

Personally, as someone who is half Caucasian and half Oriental, I would like to suggest this is possible, particularly if you are mixed race (East/West) and have appropriate karmic background and a supportive environment in which to develop ... as it happens, my research and professional work is in science and technology, whilst my personal interests are in religion and philosophy. :-)

And a bit further on he adds another 'of course':

Of course, we have to be cognisant of the teachings of the past, both Western and Eastern, but to imitate these teachings or to try to conform to them would have little value.

Is that so? The Buddha often used the exhortation of "Ehipassiko!" as an invitation to "Come and see!" which meant following Magga, the path leading ultimately to nibbana. I think if you were to ask a Bhikkhu (monk), they would say that the Buddha's teaching is as relevant today as it was 2500 years ago and the vinaya and suttas contain instructions that if followed can be found effective guidance for the Path.

There's a lot of attention to the divided nature of the world and critical issues, with implications for how one lives within society and not separate from it. That's evident even in monastic societies, e.g. the Buddhist Sangha and lay supporters are operating in a kind of ecosystem, supporting each other in complementary ways. However, at the same time, a bhikkhu formally renounces the world, society and all its endless comings and goings.

Something I found odd is that there's no discussion of ethics or values tied in with actions. Maybe I've missed something. But then, that aspect is not pronounced even in some Eastern traditions, with more emphasis on carrying out rituals and duty. However, it is fundamental to the Buddhist perspective - indeed, karma in the Buddhist sense is ethical, as the previous quote from the Dhammapada shows.

Nevertheless, I find it apt that he attributes great importance to how we cultivate views, how we think. I considered this issue as a prelude to some writing in the past and even took a quick look, as it happens, at the word 'rational,' but I had a narrower impression in my mind of its definition, viz as being fundamentally an activity of the brain, adding as a footnote the example of soldiers thinking/considering their battle plans. I was undoubtedly strongly influenced by lessons I received at school, which at the time of writing was not so long ago. However, Bohm conveys a deeper sense of 'measure' with a very nice discussion of how it underlies many words that have developed rather separate meanings. So I see my view was unnecessarily limited and perhaps a more accurate translation for the soldier's deliberations might be weighing up!

I considered these issues in a long series of reflections that eventually led to a book. The process of authoring that book was perhaps unusual - I would occasionally jot down on scraps of paper reflections and realisations. I had no intention at the start to write a book - I had only the will to write and reflect. Then later on there was the wish to order the notes; still later on the observation that there was sufficient to compose a book. It might appear that here was a book made up of tiny disparate fragments and thus fundamentally fragmented. But perhaps these fragments came out from the same whole and reflect that whole - unable to represent that whole in even a number of reflective writings, this was a process of unfolding over time. I wonder if merely the intention to understand was what Bohm refers to as the formative cause in this process, where the book is implicit from the intentions, or we might say that in the book there was the flow of conditions that had cause in intentions.

Notes on reading 'Wholeness and the implicate order': Introduction (3).

Still more notes in response to the intro (with more baggage that I bring). Although these are presented as notes jotted as I read, in practice, I usually tap away and later on do some tidying up. Most entries are prepared offline, on a handheld computer (HP Jornada 720, as usual :-) It allows for me to sit on a comfy chair, edit to my heart's content, whilst using only modest amounts of electricity (or battery power).

[p. xi] Thought and reality: for the Buddha, the reality he was primarily concerned with was dukkha, typically translated as 'suffering' or 'unsatisfactoriness' concerning which he taught a lot about subtle processes (e.g. the dependent chain of contact, feeling, perception and so on, yet the essence is expressed in a simple connection, in the first two verses of the Dhammapada:

1. Mind precedes all mental states. Mind is their chief; they are all mind-wrought. If with an impure mind a person speaks or acts suffering follows him like the wheel that follows the foot of the ox.

2. Mind precedes all mental states. Mind is their chief; they are all mind-wrought. If with a pure mind a person speaks or acts happiness follows him like his never-departing shadow.

[p. xv - xviii] Bohm continues to summarise what lies in the chapters ahead, and comes to the later chapters. He is looking for a holistic theory that takes a wold view that includes consciousness and evidently is not content with the discontinuities at the sub-atomic level, in which results given are in terms of statistical aggregates. I find it interesting that research is oriented to concrete predictions, that are applicable: indeed even 25+ years later, even though physicists are well-versed in wave/particle duality, I tend to hear about funding for particle accelerators or measurements concerning sub-atomic particles, such as the MINOS project .

However, it may be that it's the level of aggregates where we need to work. Again, the Buddha gave many teachings on khandas, which translate as 'heaps' or 'aggregates', and the processes surrounding them. But, as expressed e.g. in the Parivatta Sutta, the key requirement is direct personal observation.

This is what I was trying to get at in my first foray in this area, when on the basis of little more than intuition and reading an article in Scientific American, I posted a perhaps overly bold (and, now it seems arrogant) message to Usenet, entitled 'Quantum Theory and Meditation,' especially as it was my first proper posting! I received a flame within 3 days and more vitriole followed, yet there also flowed some rich dialogue and friendship. The main point I was trying to make is that the most interesting results depend upon's one own observation and not that of any instruments set up to do the observations for you.

I touched on just special relativity at school, when I read and wrote an essay on some of Bertrand Russell's 'The ABC of Relativity,' but that's about 20 years ago and so I have very little detailed knowledge.

So that's my baggage, so I look forward to reading what Bohm presents concerning quantum theory and relativity, and his new approaches.

Already though the book conveys the sense that there's a lot of feeling one's way for research directions. There's a kind of sustained balance or tension between wholeness and division, to which I can relate to intuitively from the period I spent doing a bit of research in number theory, in that the object of my research was to elicit the integer values of the determinant of a certain kind of matrix, which is a problem worked mainly in the field of algebraic number theory, but actually the main result was in terms of densities, saying "most values of 'the right type' are integer values of the determinant," and thus a result of analytic number theory.

So what? Well, many mathematicians like simplicity, symmetry, wholeness and completeness, wherein they can find great beauty. For some, it evidently meant so much, among whom Kronecker is well known among mathematicians for his remark:

God created the integers, all else is the work of man.

But, on reading a summary of his life, it sounds that this strongly held belief led to immense friction.

This reminds me of the conflict in views dismissed by the Buddha in the Tittha Sutta in the Udana. All in all it's best that I have no expectation about any absolute answers concerning the cosmos; rather, my goal should remain to learn something that may improve my understanding of the composition of the Buddha's teachings.

Notes on reading 'Wholeness and the implicate order': Introduction.

A copy of Bohm's book (Routledge Classics 2002) arrived last week, conveniently just before I set off for a few days' holiday, staying at my father's house. It looks fascinating, so I'll jot down some responses, though at this stage I don't know how far I'll take this. In any case, I should say I can be a very slow reader!

The introduction develops some rationale for Bohm's new perspective, which appears to have emerged from deep personal observation, a state of absorption, as well as his considerable experience as a physicist.

When I thought of 'wholeness' and 'reality,' what came first to mind were the elements, especially depicted in the dhammakaya meditation tradition as a sphere - the four elements of earth, fire, air and water at cardinal points surrounding the space element at the centre and within that the element of consciousness.

Things can be observed at different levels, on different scales. My impression is that at any given scale, science is familiar with progress/movement through stages and has developed laws of motion that model this accurately. However, what laws or models are there for movements between scales? What about the flow between levels of abstraction? I raise this because in the bit of literature I encounter, there seem to be different models for macro and micro, so what is happening on the journey from macro to micro?

The tensions between/balance of structure and flow can be found in many disciplines. I came across it whilst doing research in the field of [concurrent] formal methods in computer science, in which mathematical techniques are used to specify and analyse software systems. You can make a crude division in terms of orientation: one is 'structure' based, viz the so-called 'axiomatic' techniques of VDM, Z etc.that are oriented around sets; the other is 'flow'-based, which is the emphasis in process algebras - how systems are defined in terms of the actions that can be carried out from state to state rather than descriptions of the states per se and hence action-based or operational semantics. This was brought home to me by a very valuable survey of formal methods by Jonathan Ostroff [Formal Methods for the Specification and Design of Real-Time Safety Critical Systems", The Journal of Systems and Software, Vol. 18, No. 1, pp 33-60, Elsevier Scienc Publishing Co. Inc., New-York, April 1992.]

[p. xii] The content of consciousness to be 'reality as a whole'? It's quite an assumption that there can be consciousness of whole reality - is that possible? I'm glad Bohm emphasises the importance of view - it affects everything!

In the introductory class on Buddhist texts that I attended in Spring, Richard Gombrich explained how the Buddha always taught about consciousness of... [and the teachings state that viññana (translated as consciousness) is one of the 5 heaps that are not part of deathless nibbana].

[p. xiii] I can see that this work is very much contraflow vs prevailing views that have become entrenched since the so-called 'Age of Reason.' A process-oriented view was something the Buddha expounded 2500 years ago, expressed succinctly in Pali as sabbe sankhara anicca... - "all conditioned formations are impermanent." The growing interest in the Buddha's teachings presents a veritable challenge to those who separate subject from object and take a materialistic view, which seems the predominant characteristic of European thought during the past few hundred years.

[p. xiv] A language with verbal emphasis. Again, the Buddha focused teachings a great deal on processes of mind: indeed the path to Enlightenment, the Eightfold Noble Path is expressed in terms of verbs, starting with 'Right View' and detailed modes of practice themselves as expressed in e.g. the Satipatthana Sutta describe exercises through the four modes of mindfuless (body, feelings, mind, mental qualities) - that are always working with change; magga is a flow/process of going through stages and something that may be worth noting is that what also occurs is a subtle progression in the nature of observation.

We can go further with emphasising verbs and one of the most striking example can be found in the Buddha's instruction to Bahiya (see previous entry), "in the seeing, just the seen; in the hearing, just the heard, ..." But this is for a very very advanced practitioner, on the brink of full final attainment. So conventionally the subject-object paradigm is often more practical ... I wonder what Bohm's 'rheomodes' is all about and how far this language can be taken...?

Tuning in to Dhamma with the 3D Crystal Radio

The Dhamma has been made clear in many ways by Master Gotama, as though he were righting the overthrown, revealing the hidden, showing the way to one who is lost, or holding up a lamp in the dark for those with eyesight to see forms...

[MN. 7, Vatthupama Sutta]

I'm going to try to develop further the ideas expressed in the previous entry and have a feeling that there could emerge a few strands of research.

There's no known contemporary written account of the Buddha's teachings - it was very much an oral traditon. So when we say the Buddha "taught," what gets recorded in written form as his "teachings" certainly loses a great deal. So this term probably needs lots of qualification along the lines of, say, the Buddha "transmitted" and it is worth paying special attention to the commonly used term applied to his disciples of "Savakas," the "listeners" or "receivers".

So, I'm taking 'Savakas' as my cue or prompt. My previous entry introduced briefly an analogy with holography. Just to use a bit more of the terminology, I was comparing the teachings with the interference patterns (hologram) produced on a special film when a light (called a reference beam) is shone at and interferes with light from the object to be 'recorded' (called the object beam). Shining the right light (the reference beam) at the hologram generates the light from the original object (i.e. the object beam) thereby providing a faithful 3D semblance. At least, that's my beginner's understanding of the process, just paraphrasing a Wikipedia article.

The main points I wish to highlight are that there are two components necessary to reproduce a faithful reproduction of the original whole - the appropriate recording (on film) and the right light shone onto the film.

Now to take the comparison further, it is as thought the Buddha possessed the reference beam and for someone to understand they too need the reference beam to reconstruct the original 3D object, the Dhamma object, as it were.

How do they generate the reference beam? In considering how the 'right light' (or reference beam) is produced by the mind, it's easier for me to try working with another analogy in which we may liken the mind somewhat to a crystal radio set. The crystal lies at the heart of the set because it acts as the detector, converting radio waves into sound that is meaningful to us.

The ability to interpret a signal depends upon the kind of crystal and also its size and quality. So it seems to me that it can be likened to the inner treasure of paramis, perfections accrued through meritorious actions over many lives, specially as a crystal itself takes a very long time to form. In practice, for radios, it's relatively easy to find the right kind of crystal that can do a good enough job, so the analogy is partial. However, we may also say that a radio's ability to tune in to different stations is similar to the way people can tune in to different kinds of teachings.

So what's the significance of the holography analogy? At the moment, what I'm presenting are probably just a few pieces of a jigsaw. Even so, I think some research could analyse the Buddha's teachings using the latest findings in physics and psychology to explore new kinds of mental maps. It would mean putting to one side many of the assumptions currently used in linguistic and textual analysis so there is space to allow for aspects hitherto considered irrelevant or dull, such as repetition. I think it would be instructive to provide different ways of looking at the Tipitaka through a variety of visual representations and mappings - linear and nonlinear.

One particular interest is abstraction or, looking the other way, expansion or reification: which teachings expand on others? Are these teachings characteristics of interference patterns? Is there something analogous to concentric rings to be drawn, where the inner core is the teaching at its most abstract, as in the Bahiya Sutta, and where the outer circles containing the inner core are supporting details, as in the Malunkyaputta sutta?

I think holography could be useful in casting light on how the mind perceives and processes. Also pertinent are studies in physics - particularly quantum theory - and the implication that these studies have on the study of mind.

I know little about holography or physics, let alone how they may relate to mind, so have just ordered Wholeness and the implicate order by David Bohm, and The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot, which was a bundle offered by Amazon.

[Quote at beginning of article added on 4 December 2008]

Holographic teachings from the Buddha?

When you read the texts that relate the teachings of the Buddha, you find some very short passages. They can seem fragmentary and it can be tempting to doubt their authenticity. However, I've long felt that the Buddha taught very precisely to his audience knowing that they could tune in so effectively that a few choice words sufficed to prompt progress to Enlightenment, whereas if read conventionally out of context they would appear odd and make little impact. So I wrote a short essay [with a long title of]: Observations on how kamma affects listeners and its implication for interpreting the Buddha's teachings.

In that essay I thought intuitively of holography as a good analogy for how one can recover the whole from fragments: just as a certain beam of light shone against the fringe pattern on a photographic film can reconstruct a faithful 3D representation of the original object, so the Buddha knew that the listener could penetrate the specially recorded words of the Dhamma teachings and reconstruct the essence of Enlightenment by tuning in (or 'shining the right beam').

Sorry if this is expressed clumsily.