Dai-gidan
Science and Zen are ways of liberation that naturally complement eachother: Science questions everything outwardly, liberating us slowly and fitfully from the thrall of doxa (opinion); to consistently practice science as a way of life is to recognize that there is no belief that will hold come what may. Likewise, the Great Doubt cultivated by Zen arouses an inner awareness of the maya (illusion) one moves within, like a fish moves in water; in the process of moksha (liberation) not merely beliefs but mental categories, the very conceptual elements all beliefs are made out of, lift away-carrying with them illusions of self and separateness.
Speaking from personal experience, science has awakened me to weakness of intuition and the power of abstraction, while Zen has awakened me to the weakness of abstraction and the power of intuition. This seemingly paradoxical, bilateral doubt can perhaps be best understood by a pair sayings of William Ross Ashby's:
"Pattern-recognition is a throwing away of information. . . . Any device that can lose information can generalize." (Unpublished Aphorisms)
"Our first impulse is to point at the pendulum and to say 'the system is that thing there'. This method, however, has a fundamental disadvantage: every material object contains no less than an infinity of variables and therefore of possible systems. . . . Any suggestion that we should study 'all' the facts is unrealistic, and actually the attempt is never made. What is true is that we should pick out and study the facts that are relevant to some main interest that is already given." (An Introduction to Cybernetics)
The fact that there is far more information all around us than any mind could possibly incorporate demands that some of it be systematically disregarded. Abstraction means ignoring the details; this necessity of discarding information immediately dooms all abstractions, all classifications, to the realm of maya. But maya isn't something to be regarded as bad; indeed, to regard it thus would be itself a form of maya. Prajna (wisdom) consists in understanding maya for what it is, and using it when it is natural to do so. The ways of Zen and science are thus also united in being marvelously pragmatic.
When you allow everything to float free in this way, when you have "not a tile to cover the head" above you nor "an inch of ground upon which to stand" beneath you (Dogen), you develop as a side effect a heightened resistance to malicious memetic infection. Memes will still wander freely in and out of your mind-indeed, human consciousness is composed of little else-and in fact you should "be grateful for the weeds you have in your mind, because eventually they will enrich your practice" (S. Suzuki). But the mind of the "perfect man" of science and Zen "receives but does not keep" (Chuangtse)-memes can find little stable purchase for their hooks in a being that has given up tanha (grasping). This is Seng-ts'an's meaning when he writes in the Hsin-hsin Ming (Clarke trans.):
"If you wish to know the truth,
then hold to no opinions for or against anything.
To set up what you like against what you dislike
is the disease of the mind."
To the analytical Western eye this looks at a glance like a form of nihilism, but nihilism is merely a special case of the "disease". "Mental health" of the sort Seng-ts'an means consists in being able to entertain any idea without grasping it tightly or pushing it violently away, merely selecting what is useful and allowing the rest to drift away.
Speaking from personal experience, science has awakened me to weakness of intuition and the power of abstraction, while Zen has awakened me to the weakness of abstraction and the power of intuition. This seemingly paradoxical, bilateral doubt can perhaps be best understood by a pair sayings of William Ross Ashby's:
"Pattern-recognition is a throwing away of information. . . . Any device that can lose information can generalize." (Unpublished Aphorisms)
"Our first impulse is to point at the pendulum and to say 'the system is that thing there'. This method, however, has a fundamental disadvantage: every material object contains no less than an infinity of variables and therefore of possible systems. . . . Any suggestion that we should study 'all' the facts is unrealistic, and actually the attempt is never made. What is true is that we should pick out and study the facts that are relevant to some main interest that is already given." (An Introduction to Cybernetics)
The fact that there is far more information all around us than any mind could possibly incorporate demands that some of it be systematically disregarded. Abstraction means ignoring the details; this necessity of discarding information immediately dooms all abstractions, all classifications, to the realm of maya. But maya isn't something to be regarded as bad; indeed, to regard it thus would be itself a form of maya. Prajna (wisdom) consists in understanding maya for what it is, and using it when it is natural to do so. The ways of Zen and science are thus also united in being marvelously pragmatic.
When you allow everything to float free in this way, when you have "not a tile to cover the head" above you nor "an inch of ground upon which to stand" beneath you (Dogen), you develop as a side effect a heightened resistance to malicious memetic infection. Memes will still wander freely in and out of your mind-indeed, human consciousness is composed of little else-and in fact you should "be grateful for the weeds you have in your mind, because eventually they will enrich your practice" (S. Suzuki). But the mind of the "perfect man" of science and Zen "receives but does not keep" (Chuangtse)-memes can find little stable purchase for their hooks in a being that has given up tanha (grasping). This is Seng-ts'an's meaning when he writes in the Hsin-hsin Ming (Clarke trans.):
"If you wish to know the truth,
then hold to no opinions for or against anything.
To set up what you like against what you dislike
is the disease of the mind."
To the analytical Western eye this looks at a glance like a form of nihilism, but nihilism is merely a special case of the "disease". "Mental health" of the sort Seng-ts'an means consists in being able to entertain any idea without grasping it tightly or pushing it violently away, merely selecting what is useful and allowing the rest to drift away.