Adhyatma Vidya (skt.) is traditionally known as the knowledge of mind or true self or in a more modern sense the Science of Mind. The rich and fantastically elaborate culture of the ancient Indians were perhaps the first civilization to study, theorise, and test mind. And since the time of the historical Buddha, followers of the Buddha Dharma have been studying it ever since within the ever modern laboratory of meditation.
“You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.”
— Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis (1994)
“Is that so? The science of mind has a pretty straightforward answer to that — let’s smash a few together and see what’s actually in there.” QP
The Laboratory of Meditation
What is the laboratory of meditation? And what experiments are we doing when we meditate? Quite simply we are looking for the self or the observer. We are looking for that through which hears through our ears and sees through our eyes. We are looking for that part of us that has been with us since beginningless time that which has no colour, shape, or form, the part of us that never dies and was never born, but that part of us that we just seem to know or understand to always have been there.
This is not casual daydreaming. The Vajrayana Buddhist tradition refined this investigation into a precise technology of meditation — transmitted teacher to student, tested and confirmed across centuries of direct experience. The instructions exist. The lineage is intact. The experiment is reproducible.
— Niels Bohr, speech at Bologna (1937). Published in Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge (Dover, 1961)
The Observer and the Observed
🔬 Many great treatises have been written about Buddhist Epistemology (theory of perception), Nagarjuna’s Prajnaparamitas, and the processes that take place when we experience and interact with phenomena. It is understood that when we thoroughly examine all the relationships and dependencies (theory of dependent origination) we can find no thing that is truly independent or exists in and of itself. This could be a good way to explain the Buddhist idea of emptiness; empty of its own existence.
In Sanskrit the word used is Shunyata. It is extremely important to note here that Emptiness or Shunyata is not “Nothing or nothingness” the root “Su” denotes a great swelling of possibilities. Wow, that sounds very exciting to me how about you? We live in a world of limitless possibilities and endless joy that arises from it. Space is rich and beautiful beyond our wildest imaginations.
The Experiment Continues
The science of mind does not stop at definitions and philosophy. The tradition produced a technology for running this experiment directly, and some of the most remarkable instructions ever written came from the Mahasiddhas — the great realised masters of the Vajrayana. In Part Two we sit down with a couple of them and see what Niels Bohr has to say about it. Spoiler: he would not have been surprised at all.
QP
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