Mostly reality seems to be made of math. Sure, there's atoms, photons, neutrinos, space and time, but it's math that rules all that. Math is the One Ring to Rule Them All. In fact, if you drill down into the things of the universe, you get mathematical relationships underlying their thingness. At higher levels, the relationship between math and reality is more obscure, but even evolution, genetics, molecular biology, and the other biological fields all admit of an, at least, logical description of the relationships between the important components. Sometimes, as in island biogeography and ecological modelling (a topic I studied at some depth during my graduate student years), you can even formulate the logical relationships in mathematical terms. Psychology and the social sciences seemed for many years to be exempt from this rule, but lately even that is changing. With the advent of detailed brain imaging, psychology is becoming more systematized and logical, if not yet completely quantitative, while the social sciences (especially economics) are experiencing a quantitative revolution through the advent of large scale data collection and analysis.
On the other hand, during a meditation retreat or after a deep and transformative meditative experience, reality seems to be made of magick. Dan Ingram in his book Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha calls this the Arising and Passing Away experience, and I talk about having had this experience several times in Silicon Valley Monk. By "magick" here I mean that reality seems to be controlled by human intention and that strong intention connected with high concentration seems as if it could have an effect on reality independent of any actions taken on the part of the intender (i.e. the person generating the intention). Indeed, there has grown up a whole collection of meditators who practice magick, in some cases from the classical Western magical traditions, on the side. One could also, I suppose, view certain Tibetan tantric practices as bordering on magick, though these typically have as their stated goal eliminating defilements in the mind rather than having any impact on physical reality.
So I'm trying to figure out: what's the connection? Many of the people who have this view are people whose meditation practice I respect quite highly so I am not about to dismiss their opinion as nonsense (as some in the secular Buddhist community would tend to do). They say that the link is causality and that what they are doing is simple karma, but really, where is there an equation that describes how a strong intention connected with high concentration can cause something independent of an action? When I get to high concentration why, for example, can't I understand why the zeros of Riemann zeta function accurately model the vibrational quantum levels of the nucleus, a mystery that deeply illustrates the underlying connection between math and reality? Rather than the wild and crazy things that I and others tend to experience?
A variation of the Madhyamika argument as to why any object in the universe can't have permanent, eternal existence might be relevant here. This argument is used by the Tibetans during "Dharma combat" debates at the colleges in India to refute, for example, the existence of any eternal, unchanging entity. Basically, the original argument goes like this. If anything else in the changing, impermanent universe were to interact causally with such an entity, the universe would rapidly freeze up because the interacting thing would become permanent and unchanging, and the other things it interacted with would also, and so forth until change becomes impossible. Since that isn't the way the universe works, such an unchanging, permanent entity is impossible.
The variation would be something like: if intention can influence reality independently of action, admittedly in a causal fashion, then the traces of this influence should be visible and it should be possible to infer the causal patterns of such an influence, yet no such trace is found. I suppose the counter argument is, well, nobody's looked. But actually, for many years, psychologists have been conducting experiments involving parapsychological phenomenon, and the data mostly show a result that is no different than chance. A few experiments have shown slightly (but very slightly) better results than chance, but during followup experiments, the effect has disappeared. Apologists say that such experiments are influenced by the skepticism of the experimenters, but in my view that's a cop out. If intention can have a causal influence on reality independent of action then it should be visible in data.
The data need not even be of an experimental nature. Judah Pearl in his ground-breaking work on causality describes how one can use data which is uncontrolled to determine the causes of a collection of effects. You construct a probabilistic graphical network describing correlations between events where you are looking to find a cause and use the rules of his "causality calculus" together with data to determine what is actually a cause and what is just a correlation. This method can even take unmeasured, background factors into consideration. Fundamentally, Pearl's method determines a cause-effect relationship by looking at it in relation to something that isn't a cause. The method can handle all kinds of confounding factors. So, in principle, it should be possible to determine whether intention has a causal influence on reality independent of action, but I doubt anybody would be interested in actually performing such a study.
Maybe it's kind of like cold fusion. For many years, cold fusion was completely speculative. Researchers kept reporting anecdotal results that "anomolous heat" was being generated, but the results weren't reproducible. Recently, some researchers at SPARWAR in San Diego elucidated the causal mechanism behind cold fusion, and are able to reproducably generate large amounts of heat. My bet though is that the Tibetans have it right, that magick, if it exists, only works within the body/mind. So you can use intention to influence the action of neurotransmitters in you brain, and thereby purify the mind of the defilements. I suppose one could posit some deeper level of integration between human consciousness and the physical universe that would allow a broader application of magick. Perhaps some day, we'll discover that link, but for now, I just don't see it. Maybe I'm missing something. In the meantime, I would sure like to understand why my mind generates these crazy stories when I come out of a deep meditative experience in retreat.
(Image courtesy of leaksource.info)
