Tantric Buddhism

In Tantric Buddhism, the male/female polarity is often illustrated with the help of sexual symbols.

Intuitive wisdom is seen as the passive, female quality of human nature, love and compassion as the active, male quality, and the union of both in the process of enlightenment is represented by ecstatic sexual embraces of male and female deities.

The Eastern mystics affirm that such a union of one’s male and female modes can only be experienced on a higher plane of consciousness where the realm of thought and language is transcended and all opposites appear as a dynamic unity.

A similar plane has been reached in modern physics. The exploration of the subatomic world has revealed a reality which repeatedly transcends language and reasoning, and the unification of concepts which had hitherto seemed opposite and irreconcilable turns out to be one of the most startling features of this new reality.

These seemingly irreconcilable concepts are generally not the ones the Eastern mystics are concerned with-although sometimes they are-but their unification at a non-ordinary level of reality provides a parallel to Eastern mysticism.

Modern physicists should therefore be able to gain insights into some of the central teachings of the Far East by relating them to experiences in their own field. A small but growing number of young physicists have indeed found thisa most valuableand stimulating approach to Eastern mysticism.

Examples of the unification of opposite concepts in modern physics can be found at the subatomic level, where particles are both destructible and indestructible; where matter is both continuous and discontinuous, and force and matter are but different aspects of the same phenomenon. In all these examples, which will be discussed extensively in subsequent chapters, it turns out that the framework of opposite concepts, derived from our everyday experience, is too narrow for the world of subatomic particles.

Relativity theory is crucial for the description of this world, and in the ‘relativistic’ framework the classical concepts are transcended by going to a higher dimension, the four-dimensional space-time.

Space and time themselves are two concepts which had seemed entirely different, but have been unified in relativistic physics. This fundamental unity is the basis of the unification of the opposite concepts mentioned above. Like the unity of opposites experienced by the mystics, it takes place on a ‘higher plane’, i.e. in a higher dimension, and like that experienced by the mystics it is a dynamic unity, because the relativistic space-time reality is an intrinsically dynamic reality where objects are also processes and all forms are dynamic patterns.

To experience the unification of seemingly separate entities in a higher dimension we do not need relativity theory.

It can also be experienced by going from one to two dimensions, or from two to three. In the example of a circular motion and its projection given opposite the opposite poles of the oscillation in one dimension (along a line) are unified in the circular movement in 2 dimensions (in one plane). The drawing overleaf represents another example, involving a transition from two to three dimensions.

It shows a ‘doughnut’ ring cut horizontally by a plane. In the two dimensions of that plane, the surfaces of the cut appear as two completely separate discs, but in three dimensions they are recognized as being parts of one and the same object.

A similar unification of entities which seem separate and irreconcilable is achieved in relativity theory by going from three to four dimensions. The four-dimensional world of relativistic physics is the world where force and matter are unified; where matter can appear as discontinuous particles or as a continuous field. In these cases, however, we can no longer visualize the unity very well. Physicists can ‘experience’ the four-dimensional space-time world through the abstract mathematical formalism of their theories, but their visual imagination-like everybody else’s-is limited to the three-dimensional world of the senses. Our language and thought patterns have evolved in this three-dimensional world and therefore we find it extremely hard to deal with the four- dimensional reality of relativistic physics.

Eastern mystics, on the other hand, seem to be able to experience a higher-dimensional reality directly and concretely. In the state of deep meditation, they can transcend the three-dimensional world of everyday life, and experience a totally different reality where all opposites are unified into an organic whole. When the mystics try to express this experience in words, they are faced with the same problems as the physicists trying to interpret the multidimensional reality of relativistic physics.

In the words of Lama Covinda, An experience of higher dimensionality is achieved by integration of experiences of different centres and levels of consciousness. Hence the indescribability of certain experiencesof meditation on the planeof three-dimensional consciousness and within a system of logic which reduces the possibilities of expression by imposing further limits upon the process of thinking.5

The four-dimensional world of relativity theory is not the only example in modern physics where seemingly contradictory and irreconcilable concepts are seen to be nothing more than different aspects of the same reality. Perhaps the most famous case of such a unification of contradictory concepts is that of the concepts of particles and waves in atomic physics. At the atomic level, matter has a dual aspect: it appears as particles and as waves. Which aspect it shows depends on the

situation. In some situations the particle aspect is dominant, in others the particles behave more like waves; and this dual nature is also exhibited by light and all other electromagnetic radiation. Light, for example, is emitted and absorbed in the form of ‘quanta’, or photons, but when these particles of light travel through space they appear as vibrating electric and magnetic fields which show all the characteristic behaviour of waves. Electrons are normally considered to be particles, and yet when a beam of these particles is sent through a small slit it is diffracted just like a beam of light-in other words electrons, too, behave like waves.

a particle a wave

This dual aspect of matter and radiation is indeed most startling and gave rise to many of the ‘quantum koans’ which led to the formulation of quantum theory. The picture of a wave which is always spread out in space is fundamentally different from the particle picture which implies a sharp location. It has taken physicists a long time to accept the fact that matter manifests itself in ways which seem to be mutually exclusive; that particles are also waves, waves also particles.

Looking at the two pictures, a lay person might be tempted to think that the contradiction can be resolved by saying that the picture on the right-hand side simply represents a particle moving in a wave pattern.

This argument, however, rests on a misunderstanding of the nature of waves. Particles moving in wave patterns do not exist in nature. In a water wave, for example, the water particles do not move along with the wave but move in circles as the wave passes by. Similarly, the air particles in a sound wave merely oscillate back and forth, but do not pro- pagate along with the wave. What is transported along the wave is the disturbance causing the wave phenomenon, but not any material particle. In quantum theory, therefore, we do not speak about a particle’s trajectory when we say that the particle is also a wave. What we mean is that the wave pattern as a whole is a manifestation of the particle. The picture of

travelling waves is thus totally different from that of travelling particles; as different-in the words of Victor Weisskopf-‘as the notion of waves on a lake from that of a school of fish swimming in the same direction’.6 direction of wave a water wave