Essence of Buudha’s message in scientific language. | Philosia: The Existential Drama

Buddha was first Quantum Physicist!

To understand Essence of Buudha’s message, it is important to have a pictorial image of situation in which OSHO, first global master as declared by a Zen Monk, is answering this question of a disciple present at his commune in Pune, India.
Osho is experimenting his vision of a new-man of twenty first century and disciples from 75 countries and belonging to every possible religion are living there for about 20 years and following his messages, his suggested experiment to discover the change in their life. They cooked their own food, maintained the premises with housekeeping of every room. The administered whole commune so that thousands of outside visitors too could attend his discourses. Today I see it happening in real life.
Osho described people as enquirer, as those who are satisfied with just knowing something. Curious, as those who are good at collecting more and more information from every possible source and they enjoy looking at the heap and its growth. Mumukshu, those who are intelligent and ready to put their life at stake to know the truth behind what quenches their thirst.
This post is for the Mumukshu’s, the third catagory of persons.
Please note:- To clarify something I use small brackets to share from my experiences.

A very important question asked by a disciple and answer to the question by OSHO is reproduced here with link to audible single ‘Buddha the first Quantum Physicist’ from where you can listen it too.
When Quantum Physics has taken another leap by getting the particles entangled ie Quantum entanglement. According to my personal experience in spiritual journey Quantum entanglement is nothing but example of synchronicity between two particles. So in my opinion the science came closer to spirituality. Because it understood the phenomenon of synchronicity and the conditions under which it happened. It will help them know in future similar happenings between human beings.

The Discipline of Transcendence, Vol 1
Chapter #10
Chapter title: Thus come, thus gone
30 August 1976 am in Buddha Hall (Osho commune, Pune, India)

The first question is from Anand Nirgrantha. (From this wiki link you could discover everything about Osho and his sannyasins and their contact details)

Question 1
YOU SAY THAT BUDDHA WOULD NOT SPEAK OF GOD BECAUSE IT
CANNOT BE PROVEN. YET IN THE NEXT BREATH HE SPEAKS OF OTHER LIVES, AND REINCARNATION. HOW DOES THIS FIT INTO SCIENTIFIC FACT?
A BUDDHA SAYS THERE IS NO SOUL. WHAT IS IT THAT REMAINS AFTER DEATH?
WHAT IS REINCARNATION?
I VAGUELY UNDERSTAND THAT IT CAN BE THE FORMLESS THAT REMAINS, BUT CAN THAT HAVE AN INDIVIDUAL ENTITY? THE SAME WAVE IS NOT REBORN. THE QUESTION IS VERY SIGNIFICANT.

You also get out of your skin again and again many times. If you ask the
physiologists, they will say, ‘If a man is going to live seventy years, then nearly ten times he will change his skin completely.’ But the process is very slow, so you never become aware. Such a tiny part changes every moment that you cannot feel it; your feeling is not so subtle. The change is very subtle. The skin goes on changing and still you go on thinking to yourself that this is your body, the same body. It is not the same body, it is a continuum.

When you were in your mother’s womb, the first day you were just a small cell, invisible to the naked eye. That was your skin that time, that was your body.

Then you started growing. After nine months you were born — then you had a totally different body. If suddenly you come across yourself just one day old, just born, you will not be able to recognize that this is you. You have changed so much. But still you think you are the same. In a way you are the same because you are the same continuity. In a way you are not the same because you have been continuously changing.

In the same way, just like the skin, is the ego. The skin holds your body into a pattern, into a definition, into a limit. The ego holds the contents of your mind into a limit. The ego is the inner skin so that you know who you are; otherwise you will be lost — you will not know who is who; who is me and who is the other.

The idea of self, I, ego, gives you a definition, a utilitarian definition. It makes you clearly separate from others. But that too is a skin, a very subtle skin, that holds all the contents of your mind — your memory, your past, your desires, your plans, your future, your present, your love, your hate, anger, sadness, happiness — it holds all that in a bag. But you are not that ego either.

Because that too goes on changing and that changes more than the bodily skin. Each moment it is changing.

( To describe Essence of Buudha’s message )Buddha uses the analogy of a flame. A lamp is lighted: you see the flame, but it is continuously changing, it is never the same. By the morning when you put the light off, you don’t put the same flame off. It has been continuously changing the whole night.

Every single moment the flame is disappearing in the smoke and the new flame is replacing it. But the replacement is so fast that you cannot see the absence — that one flame has gone, another has come. That is gone, another has come. The movement is so fast that you cannot see the gap between the two. Otherwise there is only a continuity; it is not the same flame. But still, in a way, it is the same flame because it is the continuity of the same flame. It is born out of the same flame.

Just as you were born out of.your parents — you are a continuity.
You are not the same. You are not your father, you are not your mother — but still you are your father and your mother, because you continue the same tradition, the same line, the same heritage.

Buddha says the ego is a continuity, it is not a substance — continuity like a
flame, continuity like a river, continuity like the body.

The problem arises… we can concede to it that okay, it may be so: if a person dies at death and everything disappears, then perfectly true — maybe it is just a flame.

But Buddha says a person is reborn — then the problem arises.
Then who is reborn?
Then again, a few analogies.

Or, right now you are listening to me. If you put a radio on, suddenly you will start listening to a certain broadcast from some station that is passing right now.
Just a receiver set is needed. Once a receiver set is there, something that is being broadcast from London or from Moscow or Peking, you can catch hold of it.
No substance is coming, just pure thought waves jumping from Peking to
Poona… just thought waves, nothing substantial. You cannot hold them in your hand, you cannot see them, but they are there because your radio set catches them, or your television catches them.

Buddha says when a person dies, his whole life’s accumulated desires, his whole life’s accumulated memories, his whole life’s sanskaras, karmas, jump like energy waves into a new womb. (This is another part of Essence of Buudha’s message here) It is a jump. The exact word is in physics: they call it ‘quantum leap’ — ‘a leap of pure energy without any substance in it’.

Buddha is the first quantum physicist. Einstein followed him after twenty-five centuries, but they both speak the same language. And I still say that Buddha is scientific. His language is of modern physics; he came twenty-five centuries.before his time.

When a person dies, the body disappears, the material part disappears, but the immaterial part, the mind part, is a vibration. That vibration is released, broadcast. Now, wherever a right womb is ready for this vibe, it will enter into the womb.

There is no self going, there is nobody going, there is no ego going. There is no need for anything substantial to go, it is just a push of energy. The emphasis is that it is again the same bag of the ego jumping. One house has become, one body is no more possible to live with. The old desire, the lust for life — the Buddha’s term is tanha, lust for life — is alive, burning. That very desire takes a jump.

Now, listen to modern physics. They say there is no matter. You see this very substantial wall behind me? You cannot pass through it; if you try you will be hurt. But modern physics says it is nothing, nothing substantial. It is simply pure energy moving with such tremendous spped that the very movement creates the falseness, the illusion, the appearance of substance.

You have sometimes watched a fan moving fast — then you cannot see the
spades. There are only three spades, but they are moving so fast it looks like a circle, like a plate; you cannot see the gaps between two spades. If a fan is moved with the same velocity as the electrons are moving — the velocity is tremendous — then you can sit on the fan and you will not fall from it.
You can sit as I am sitting on the chair and you will not feel any movement, because the movement is so fast. Exactly the same is happening in this chair and the same is happening underneath you in the floor.

It is not a marble floor, that is only an appearance, but the energy particles are moving so fast that their very movement, their fastness, creates the illusion of substance. Substance exists not, only pure energy exists. Modern science says matter exists not, only immaterial energy exists.

Hence I say Buddha is very scientific. (You need to combine both messages to get the Essence of Buudha’s message ) He does not talk about god, but he talks about immaterial no-self. Just as modern science has taken the idea of substance out of its metaphysics, Buddha took the idea of self out of his metaphysics. Self and substance are correlates. It is difficult to believe that the wall is non- substantial and in the same way it is difficult to believe that no self exists in you.

Now, a few things more which will make it more clear. I cannot say that you will understand it, but it will make it more clear.

You walk, you are walking, you have gone for a morning walk. The very
language — that we say ‘you are walking’ — creates a problem; in our very
language is the problem. The moment we say somebody is walking, we assume that somebody is there who is walking — the walker.

We ask, how is walking possible if there is no walker?

Buddha says there is no walker, only walking. Life does not consist of things.
Buddha says life consists of events. And that is exactly what modern science is saying: there are only processes, not things — events.

Even to say that life exists is not right. Only thousands and thousands of living processes exist. Life is just an idea. There is nothing like life.

In the sky one day you see black clouds have gathered and there is thunder and lightning.

When there is lightning do you ask,

‘Is there something behind lightning?
Who is lightning?
What is lightning?’

You will say, ‘Lightning is simply lightning — there is nobody behind it; it is just a process. It is not that there is something which is lightning. It is simply lightning.’

The duality is brought by the language. You are walking — Buddha says there is only walking. You are thinking — Buddha says there is only thinking, no thinker.

Thinker is just created by the language. Because we use a language which is
based in duality, it divides everything into duality.

While you are thinking, there is a cluster of thoughts, all right — but there is no thinker. If you really want to understand it you will have to meditate deeply and come to a point where thinking disappears. The moment thinking disappears you will be surprised — the thinker is also gone. With thinking, the thinker also disappears. It was just an appearance of moving thoughts. ( This is exactly how I come to know the Reality or Truth, and due to this experience during awareness meditation I am suggesting people to practice awareness meditation. From my experience The Essence of Buudha’s message is that awareness meditation is like nectar drop in this poisonous world. Mystics says that we need to live in this poisonous world by sipping nectar drops like fish sucked air from water).

You see a river. Does a river really exist, or is it just a movement?

If you take the movement out, will there be a river?
Once the movement is taken out the river will disappear. It is not that the river is moving; the river is nothing but rivering.

For example, a simple sentence, ‘God is’; you cannot translate it into Burmese. If you translate it, it becomes ‘God becomes’. ‘God is’ cannot be translated because there is no equivalent term for ‘is’, because ‘is’ shows static-ness.
We can say ‘the tree is’, but in Burmese you have to say ‘the tree is becoming’, not ‘is’. There is no equivalent for ‘is’.

(In Burmese language) The tree ‘becomes’.
By the time you say ‘the tree ‘is’, it is no more the same, so why do you say ‘is’? ‘Is’ gives a staticness.
It is a river like phenomenon — ‘tree is becoming’. I have to say ‘tree is becoming’ but in Burmese it will be simply ‘tree becoming’, the ‘is’ will not be there.

But to say ‘God becoming’ is very difficult, because Christians cannot say that.
God is perfect, he cannot become. He is not a process, he has no growth
possibility — he has already arrived. He is the absolute — what do you mean by ‘becoming’?

Becoming is possible if somebody is imperfect. God is perfect, he
cannot become. So how to translate it? Very difficult.

You feel hungry, right — hunger is there, but there is nobody who is hungry. Then you eat — eating is there, but there is nobody who is an eater. Then hunger is satisfied, then you feel satiation — this
satisfaction is there but there is nobody who is satisfied.

Buddha says life consists of events. Life means living. Life is not a noun, it is a verb. And everything is a verb. Watch and you will be able to see: everything is becoming, nothing is static.

Eddington has said that in the english language there are a few words that are absolutely false: for example, rest. Nothing is ever in rest, the very word is wrong, because there is no equivalent in reality.
Have you ever.seen anything at rest?

Even when you are at rest, it is resting, it is not rest. It is a process:
something is happening, you are still breathing.

You may not have heard — sometimes it happens: Mohammedans, Christians, those people who bury their dead in the ground, sometimes come to know that the person is dead but his beard has grown, his hairs have become longer, his nails have grown. The person is dead!

Now this is very weird. If you shave a man and put him in the grave and after six months you open the grave and he has a beard… now what to say, whether he is alive or dead?

And you will be very much afraid; you will escape home, and that
face will haunt you in the night.

There is no ‘I’ left, you are pure space.

That’s what Buddha calls anatta, the pure space of no self. It is a tremendous experience.
… YET IN THE NEXT BREATH HE SPEAKS OF OTHER LIVES AND
REINCARNATION.
He speaks, and Buddhists have always been in trouble because of it. Buddha is so scientific that he cannot twist the fact. If he was not such a scientific man, if he was just a metaphysician, either he would have accepted self to make his whole philosophy look consistent, or he would have dropped the idea of reincarnation, because both things look contradictory.
But he is such a scientist that he will not enforce anything from his mind on reality. He simply stated the fact. If it is contradictory, he says, ‘Maybe it is contradictory, but it is so.’
This is what is happening in modern science.

But suddenly?
And not only suddenly, even more illogical is this: that two observers in a single moment of time, simultaneously can observe — one can observe it as a dot and another can observe it as a line.

Now what to do?

One observer seeing it as a seed and another seeing it as a tree?
In a single moment of time.

The whole of western science has grown out of greek logic. These electrons were rebelling against Aristotle, and there was no way to put them right. Scientists tried in many ways, because mind tends to cling to its own concepts, patterns. It is not so easy to relax and surrender to these stupid electrons.

For almost two, three decades, scientists were puzzled and they were trying to find out some way to explain it, or at least to explain it away, why it is
happening.
But finally they had to concede to the fact and they accepted it.
Hence the theory of quantum physics.
Quanta: the very word was invented; it had never existed before because never has man come across such an illogical phenomenon.
Quanta means a dot and line together, simultaneously.
Quanta means a particle and a wave together, simultaneously.

We had to find a name for something which was absolutely illogical and we had no symbol for it.

And when people ask scientists, ‘How do you explain it? — it is illogical,’ they say,’It is illogical but it is so and we cannot do anything. We have to listen to reality. If reality is illogical, then something must be wrong with our logic, that’s all.

We can change the logic, but we cannot change the reality.’

That’s what happened when Buddha came into the world. He entered into the innermost core of your so-called self and he was also puzzled — what to do?

The choice is simple: either you say there is no reincarnation because
there is no self….
That’s what people who don’t believe in the soul have always been saying.

The atheists, charvakas, they have always been saying that there is no self — when you die you simply die, nothing survives, and there is no rebirth. That’s simple, logical.

Or there are eternalists, theists, people who believe in the self. They say
that you die but only the body dies; your self, your center survives. Your soul, your atma survives; it is eternal. That too is logical.

Buddha is very illogical and he is illogical because his insistence not to go against reality is absolute. His emphasis is this: that whatsoever reality reveals we have to listen to it. We are not here to impose our own ideologies on it.

And what Buddha says is the same: anatta, no self.

HOW DOES THIS FIT INTO SCIENTIFIC FACT?
It

No, you will not be able to understand it intellectually, because your formless will again be of a certain form. How can you conceive the formless?
The word is okay, but the moment you try to conceive the formless, immediately it starts taking a form — because only form can be conceived; the formless cannot be conceived. It is an empty word.

You can go on calling god formless, but you cannot conceive it. And whenever even people like Shankara, who talk about a formless god, go to worship, they go to worship before a form.

Then they start singing Bhaj Govindam Muramatee. Then again there is a statue, a ritual, a god, a goddess, a form.
Even a man like Shankara goes on talking about the formless, the attributeless — the nirguna — but his worship, his prayer, is of the saguna — with attribute, with form — because it is impossible to conceive the formless.
Conception is only of the form; or whatsoever you can conceive, by the very possibility of its being conceived, it will take a form. So it is just a vague idea.
Nirgrantha says, I VAGUELY UNDERSTAND THAT IT CAN BE THE
FORMLESS THAT REMAINS.
No, it is not a question of vaguely comprehending. Intellectually there is no way. The way is only meditative, existential. You don’t figure it out through intellect, you simply move more into meditation, open a new dimension of vision.

Nobody has emphasized meditation as much as Buddha. His whole method is meditation.
And what is meditation?
Meditation is by and by becoming thoughtless; not falling into sleep — remaining alert and yet becoming thoughtless. Once thoughts disappear, everything is crystal clear — that the thinker was just a by-product of moving thoughts. It was a bundle of thoughts and nothing else. It had no
separate existence.

Then you walk, but the walker is no more there; then you eat, but the eater is no more there; then you sleep, but the sleeper is no more there; then you live, but there is nobody who is living; then you die, and there is nobody who is dying.

You are just a pure space in which millions of processes exist, in which life flows with all its processes and you remain uncorrupted by it. You are like an open sky… clouds come and go.

One of the most beautiful names given to Buddha is tathagata. It means ‘thus came, thus gone’. There was no one who came and there was no one who has gone — just coming and going.

That is the meaning of tathagata — just a process of coming and a process of going; there was no one who has come and no one who has gone.

Zen masters have always been saying that this man never existed, this man
called Gautam the Buddha never existed. Yes, he came certainly, and he went also, but he never existed. It is just like a dream process. A dream comes and goes and by the morning you know it never existed.

Once you understand yourself as pure space and many things happening, you become detached. Then you become fearless, because there is nothing to lose, there is nobody to lose anything. Then you are no more full of lust for life, because you don’t conceive of any self. Then you are not afraid of death and you are not in a lust for life. Then you don’t think of the past and then you don’t project the future. Then you simply are — as pure as the vast sky outside; you also become a pure sky inside. And the meeting of these two skies, the inner and the outer, is what Buddha calls nirvana.

Buddha says unless you drop the self, you will go on perpetuating the same
nonsense again and again. Your paradise will be nothing but a projected world — the same world modified, made more beautiful, more decorated. Here on the earth women age, become old. In paradise, in the hindu paradise, they never become old; they are stuck at the age of sixteen. They must be feeling very fed up — at the age of sixteen; they never grow beyond that.

In fact, that is the desire of every woman — to get stuck at sixteen. It never
happens here, but there…. After sixteen women grow very reluctantly: in three, four years, only once their birthday comes. Very reluctantly…. But that has been the desire — to make beauty permanent.

Here it is impossible. Even with all the scientific gadgets, instrumentation,
methods of beautification, plastic surgery, this and that, even then it is not
possible. One has to age.

In paradise — hindu, mohammedan, christian, jewish — that miracle has happened: god has prepared a beautiful walled garden paradise for you. He is waiting. If you are virtuous, if you obey him, you will be rewarded
tremendously; if you disobey, then the hell.

So the self exists here as the center of desire and god exists as the center of fulfilling that desire.

Buddha says both are not, get rid of both; neither god is, nor self is.
Look at reality, don’t move in desires.

Drop fantasies, stop dreaming and look at what is. And he says there is only this impermanent world of processes — this flux-like world, this vortex of reality… everything impermanent and changing, nothing is permanent.

That is the meaning of his insistence that there is no self, because you are trying to make something in you permanent. You say, the body changes, okay; the world changes, okay; relationships change, become rotten, okay — but the self, the self is eternal. Yes, this visible world changes — but the invisible god, he is eternal. You want something eternal so desperately that you start believing in it.
It is your desire that the eternal should be there.

Buddha says there is nothing eternal. Everything is impermanent, everything is in flow.
Understand this, and this very understanding will liberate you.

Remember, when others talk of liberation, they talk of liberation for the self.

When Buddha talks of liberation, he talks of liberation FROM the self. And that is a tremendously radical standpoint. Not that you will be liberated, but liberated from you.
The only freedom that Buddha says is real freedom is freedom from you.
Otherwise your mind will go on playing games.
It will go on painting new desires on new canvases. Nothing will change. Canvases you can change.

You can get out of the marketplace and sit in a temple — nothing will change, your mind will project the same desires in heaven and paradise.

Look at this mind.

Look at it’s desires.

Watch, become aware.

Again and again Iwill have to remind you, because I am talking in non-buddhist language.

If you drop the idea of the self, the continuum disappears; you evaporate.

That’s what nirvana is.

Just as if you put off a lamp and the light ceases,
disappears, you put off your desiring mind and all misery, and all transmigration, and all suffering, ceases.

Suddenly, you are not there.

But that does not mean that nothing is, otherwise there will be no difference between a charvak and a Buddhist, then there will be no difference between the atheist and Buddha.

There is tremendous difference.

He says you cease and for the first time reality takes over. But he never gives it any name, because naming is not possible — to name it is to falsify it.
To say it is, is to be untrue to it.

He keeps quiet, absolutely silent about it.
He indicates the way (Awareness meditation) how to experience it.
He does not spin and weave a philosophy around it.- Osho, The discipline of transcendence, Vol 1, #10 Q1

My suggestions:-

Awareness Meditation is the way worked for me in understanding Essence of Buudha’s message that I shared here and I tried it first during brushing my teeth in the morning after trying 8–10 meditations over period of 15 years! So there is no need to reinvent the circle for you. May be you too find it suitable otherwise with Dynamic meditation and/or Kundalini in the evening it is suitable for most of the people. There are 110 other meditation techniques discovered by Indian Mystic Gorakhnath about 500years before and further modified by Osho for contemporary people that one can experiment and the suitable one could be practiced in routine life.

Hi ….. I write my comments on this post on Essence of Buudha’s message from my personal experiences of my inner journey. This post may include teachings of Mystics around the world which from my personal experience I found worth following even today. For more have a look at my linktree website for getting regular updates through social media lor subscribe to YouTube channel or listen to the podcasts etc.

For references of content on Osho, Copyright © OSHO International Foundation, An MP3 audio file of this discourse can be downloaded from Osho(dot)com or you can listen or watch his discourses @ OSHO International channel of YouTube where you can get subtitles in language of your choice or you can read the entire book online at the Osho Library. Many of Osho’s books are available online at Amazon.

My suggestions:-

Osho International Online (OIO) provides facility to learn these from your home, through Osho Meditation Day @€20.00 per person. You can learn Dynamic meditations from disciples of Osho. OIO rotate times through three timezones NY,Berlin and Mumbai.

Originally published at https://philosia.in on January 16, 2024.