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Vincent Keisen Vuillemin
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Photo by Peter Ginter
Interdependence: Interactions and non-local variables.
Let us start this time from the Zen approach concerning inter-dependence. This inter-dependence is conceived as immediate and global. For example, that can be translated in the following sentence: A person who practices Zazen modifies the entire universe. Understand this sentence by contemplating an interaction which propagates itself first within our close environment, and then farther and farther is certainly justified. However it contains also a notion of immediate and universal action calling for no interaction propagating itself gradually, like if our whole universe were one, entirely linked and in complete inter-dependence. A priori, that seems to be in contradiction with the fact that in our world no interaction can propagate itself at a faster speed than the speed of light. According to this condition, billions of years would be needed until the influence of a person in Zazen propagates itself to the frontiers of our universe. However, in the last months, a new phenomenon was fully verified and established in physics, proving that a bound system in it's initial conditions stays bound, and that changing one of it's elements immediately modify the other ones. No signal would have the time to propagate itself from one part to the other one.
Two particles of light coming from the decay of an atom are emitted. These two particles of light are sent in opposite directions in kilometers of optical fibers. Although separated by kilometers their state stays bound, that is to say that a modification of the state of one of the particles is immediately observable on the other one, without any time for a signal to propagate itself, at the speed of light, from one to the other. The phenomenon is immediate, no spatial separation exists, space is discontinuous. That is a new level of reality. For the moment no mathematical formalism allows us to pass from one level of reality to another one. To pass from the laws of the world of quantum physics to the ones of the macroscopic world. This This experiment displays what the Zen Masters had sensed in talking about inter-dependence among all beings, in the large sense of pour universe, immediate inter-dependence, without any spatial separation. There are then in our universe phenomena which staid for a long time unknown from the scientific world, and which come closer to what was expressed from the beginning of Buddhism.
Both approaches are complementary in the sense that intuition is certainly correct but can profit from the scientific observation to be verified and be projected as a real phenomenon in our visible world. One could compare this process to the projection of the world of Buddha, source of integrated intuition, in our everyday world, the world of the observation of the physical phenomena. Knowing that, the scientific approach, to the extent that it stays modest, can help the human being to understand the profound nature of things. Like Buddha was saying: "If I tell you that I have a diamond in my closed fist, you would have to believe me. If I open my hand, you can see it." In that sense, the scientific approach forwards the understanding of our universe and helps to open the hand, so everyone can see the diamond.
Vincent Keisen Vuillemin
2005