Heroes Not Zombies

I’ve just embarked upon a study of the Abhidamma – it’s a Buddhist text which is referred to as THE main text on Buddhist psychology. Buddhist psychology is becoming more prominent in recent times because those who write about neuroscientific approaches to the Mind, researchers and philosophers interested in phenomena like consciousness and perception are discovering that many of the Buddhist insights help them with their more biomedical approaches.

This concept suddenly stopped me in my tracks – we tend to perceive reality as being like a series of events. We divide time into the past, the present and the future, and the present is the time period which is the hardest to pin down because as soon as you think about it, it’s slipped into the past! One way of modelling this concept of reality is the movie. We know that a movie is made up from a long series of still photos. When we run the film past our eyes quickly we don’t actually see any of the single frames. Instead, we see movement. So maybe the way to understand reality is to break down the flow of experience into events….like the individual frames of the movie. I’ve wondered about this a few times but the author of the text I’m reading suddenly turned it on its head and that’s what stopped me in my tracks.

He said, what if we think about it in quite the opposite way? What if reality is the flow, and the individual frames, or events are artificial? In other words, there are no events, there is only flow. Slicing the flow into pieces is artificial and gives us the impression that we can understand reality by considering disconnected small segments of it.

This is exactly the problem we have with materialistic, reductionist science. We are told that science can describe complete phenomena as entities, things, or “facts”. But that’s artificial. Reality is flow, is connection and process and cannot be reduced to fixed units. Fortunately, the new developments in science have taken this on board. The new ways include thinking about complexity, chaos, networks and systems. They have a dynamic focus, not a fixed one.

Oh, what’s that photo above? My camera has a function called “16 shot” – you press the shutter release and it takes 16 photos in rapid succession and shows you the results as a single image. This is a photo of a wave. Not only does the phenomenon of a wave act as an interesting example of how see “entitities”, of things, by slicing up the flow of reality, but it reminds us of the impermanence of everything and of the constancy of change.