On the very auspicious occasion of the th Buddha Jayanti it is good to show that his teaching – to see things as they are – still cuts through and illuminates the darkness of ignorance.
The praise of an intuitive knowledge, which is based on attentive observations with a quiet mind, to capture the common and recurring patterns, properly generalize them and abstract away the irrelevant details by capturing the “essence” as an abstraction and then to give such abstraction a name. This is not just how mathematics “works” (came to be), but it is a more general and universal process, which is behind not only a human language (which is prior to any math), but how the brain structures has been shaped (trained) to match some aspects and constraints of the shared environment in which it happen to evolve.
The primordial awareness, quietness of the mind, a focused attention, repeated observation, parttern recognition, generalization, abstraction and then application is the way to “know intuitively”. This intuitive knowledge is not “excactly right” – it is an approximation to What Is, just like some calculations can be approximate. The Buddha, according to the tradition, used to be a champion in capturing, “realizing” and teaching of such intuitive knowledge.
Lets show that the tradition is till alive and well.
Human minds (except of the Buddha) just cannot help but strive to associate themselves with something suprime, ultimate or even absolute and pure. The most amazing attainment of a human intelligence – having only the intuitive knowledge (millennias prior to formulation of the scientific method) – was the abstract equation Tat Tvam Asi (तत् त्वम् असि) (“That Thou Art”), which equates the “Self” (in myself) to “That”.
Actually there is sort of a distributive law – Ayam Ātmā Brahma (अयम् आत्मा ब्रह्म) - “This Self (Atman) is Brahman”, which says that the “Self” (Atman) is the same as the “Supreme Brahman”, just like drops of water are the same as the water.
But what is that “That”? According to the tradition the Supreme Brahman was the ultimate reality, the underlying abstract (beyond all qualities) principle which sustains everything What Is.
By using the negation method (neti-neti) – not this, not that – all the “biological machinery”, including the minds and senses, has been discarded and the resulting abstraction has been quated with the suprime abstraction or the absolute.
These deductions cannot be refuted by any logical arguments, because they are not based on any logic, it is an intuitive knowledge based on generalized notions from observations of What Is – an intuitive knowedge.
Lets show that some of these abstract equations still hold.
You are, indeed, “That”. What think of as yourself and call “I” can be trivially traced back, through your mom, her mom, through prokaryotes, eukaryotes, to the primordial soup (of stable intermediate forms), via the “elements” (atoms) produced inside the stars, via the energy which sustains the processes within a star to the “energy itself” and even to its unknown (and unknowable in principle) “source”.
What has been lost (discarded) is that supremity and absoluteness, all the garments, so to speak. What remains us just a conserved energy in its various forms. Thermodynamics, if you will.
By the way, the famous \[E=mc^2\] equation shows (captures the fact) that what we call a “mass” (an energy captured by other forces in particular locality) and “light” (a free-floating energy) are just different forms of the same. The ancient Indians figured out that, at least conceptually, you are just another form of that “same”.
Operationally, this is just true. It can be observed and even scientifically verified.
What was the very first life form? A stable-enough molecular arrangement (out of “stable intermediate building blocks”) which was capable of self-replication within a particular environmental constraints (water of a particular temperature range, acidity, etc).
How a life form is different from an inanimate molecular structures? Well, it is a structural closure which captures “vibration” (a form of energy) within itself and is capable of self-replication passing that “vibration” (or energy) along.
The very first eukaryote (a single living cell) and every single one since then is maintaining what we observed, captured, properly generalized abstracted and now called a homeostasis (which is the Central concept, if not am operational definition, of all Life).
This is as if a fire (or the light – a human mind loves poetic, that is dopamine releasing, associations) somehow found itself a closed lamp, which protects it from wind and water (and somehow have an endless supply of an oil) from the surrounding environment. Or as if a self-assembled lamp invited the fire to stay in (which is a closer to the truth approximate analogy, because there were lots of “imperfect, flawed lamp forms” whose fire has been lost).
Now please realize the ultimate fact, that in no moment in time this “energy” was ever once lost, it has been propagated along the chain of life forms, form the primordial soup to you. The energy captured by the very first life form is still there, in your body.
Of course, a eukaryotic cell, is a machine to sustain and maintain (not to lose) that energy. A multi-celluar organism is just a more advanced machine, and all the evolved biological tricks, including the DNA and its propagation, are just means to sustain the propagation of that vibration (captured energy) along the chain of life forms.
And yes, the whole universe is an expanding emergent directed acyclic graph of “discrete steps” between stable intermediate forms (of energy), partially captured, generalized and analyzed by mathematicians .
So, conceptually and operationally you are that energy. This is what some ancient Indians have derived (attained) intuitively by discarding everything. This is just what “remains”, what cannot be refuted.
This is the same method the Buddha used for his realizations and the method itself is the part of what He taught.
Yes, there is much more subtleties to it. A “seed” or even a human “egg” and “sperm” can be “frozen” to an (almost) “inanimate form” (or a state) of just a biological molecular arrangement and then “brough back to life” in an appropriate conditions (temperature, humidity, and so on) and the environment.
Notice that “some vibration” is still there (it wasn’t the Absolute Zero), so we could maintain that it is indeed “the essence” . The encoded “information of how to proceed” and the “container” which carries the information and the “machinery” can be “animated” (energyzed) again by just adding (the same) energy (from a different “stream”) back to the seed.
This apparently breaks the beautiful conceptual continuity to the “origin” and what remains is just the “conservation of energy” principle and the “state”, captured or encoded within a seed, which is a biological closure, different from a single living cell which just divides into its own living copy. An “egg” is a living cell. In fact, in the process of a biological reproduction the “energy” has never been lost, only “reduced” and “recharged”.
A seed is just a part or a product of the clever biological machinery to sustain and even “encourage” the propagation, not of the genes (they are just tools), but o that “cosmic vibration” itself. And You Are That.
This is a tribute the power of an intuitive knowledge and the Buddha.