Aikido

Another path to reach the state of wakefulness is the practice of a Martial Art. Along training your body you are training your mind how to conquer fear and how to act without intention.

Aikido is a Japanese martial art developed by Morihei Ueshiba (1883 - 1969) and it's title is often translated as "the way of unifying (with) the universal energy". The first goal in Aikido is the spiritual development of the aikidoka (aikido practitioner) however one seeks to control an aggressor without causing harm.

"The primary purpose of Aikido is spiritual development."
O Sensei

So basically the practice of Aikido is a path to spirituality through daily practice. O' Sensei was heavily influenced by Zen Buddhism and so its philosophy on Aikido is based mainly on compassion.

To control aggression without inflicting injury is the Art of Peace.
O Sensei

The philosophy of Aikido goes even further when O Sensei said:

"Attackers confront us continually, but in reality there is no attacker there".

This is an expression of the core idea in Zen Buddhism that one should not make any distinction between the subject and the object.

"The thinker of thoughts is just a thought, the feeler of feelings is just one of the feelings and the experiencer of an experience is part of the experience itself."
Alan Watts

I find the quote from "The Zen Mind" (an Empty Mind film) powerful:

"The search for self realization is powered by our anxiety and our fears which feed our ego causing frustration in our daily life, selfishness, jealousy, anger and hate which unconsciously serve to protect us, and in doing so, set us in opposition to everyone and everything."

So when one awakens to the realization of the illusion of the ego, the dissolution of the self happens spontaneously and thus one is able to reflect any attack as he will be one with the attacker. In fact there will be no attack at all because there will be no attacker and no one attacked.

Nothingness

This is the Yin&Yang of existence.

All that we know exist in contrast with it's respective opposite. So people are tented to split the world in black and white, wright and wrong, beautiful and ugly, etc. and then expect of life only the good part. But we see that if there was only white in this world you couldn't see nothing except white and the Universe will be very boring. There must be some black to see the white.

On the other hand, astrophysicists found that the Universe is filled more with Dark Matter than with Matter and it couldn't have been created without the existence of Dark Matter.

So all negative things-events coexist with the positive and you could not have one without the other. Now let Alan Watts explain more on this:

Nothing is more fertile than emptiness.
Alan Watts

The secret

We saw that through meditation we are making a conscious attempt to stop thinking, but most of the time we think. We have to control our daily thinking as much as we advance in our non-thinking training.

In eastern philosophy we have Karma Yoga and it basically means Action. In Karma Yoga everything that is happening to you it's your own doing and not just because "We are one", we are literally attract the future events with our thinking. Stopping thinking enables us to enter in a timeless space. Watch "The Secret" movie and see what laws exist at consciousness level.

Time

For Alan Watts making philosophy it is a way of living. He once joked in an open talk:

A philosopher nowadays is a practical fellow that comes with a briefcase at nine and leaves at five. He does philosophy during the day which is discussing whether sentences have meaning and if so what, and then he would come to work in a white coat if he could get away with it.

When he talks about eastern philosophy he does it from a neutral point of view and that's it's clearly stated in "The Way of Zen" where he writes:

On the one hand, it is necessary to be sympathetic and to experiment personally with the way of life to the limit of one's possibilities. On the other hand, one must resist every temptation to "join the organization", to become involved with its institutional commitments. In this friendly neutral position one is apt to be disowned by both sides.

In the previous video you saw that time is relative. We three-dimensional beings see the 4th dimension in a distorted way. Time/space is relative to the observer point of view and thus: if there is no observer is no time nor space. Let's see now the scientific explanation of the shape of the time.



Conclusions:

1. All events are really one event.
2. Time is pair-shaped and relative to the observer.
3. We cannot observe the present we are only seeing the past.

So it's very hard to define the PRESENT, because it's changing, the PAST, because our memory is selective, and the FUTURE which is an expectation.

Zen

"No thought, no reflection, no analysis,
no cultivation, no intention,
Let it settle itself"

from the "Six Percepts" of Tilopa



Another metaphor for the blue mountain and the white cloud is the phenomenon "moon-in-the-water". When there is no water, there is no moon. But when the moon rises the water does not wait to receive its image, and when even the tiniest drop of water is poured out the moon does not wait to cast its reflection. They exist dependent yet independent of each other.

"The search for self-realization is powered by our anxiety and our fear which feed our ego causing frustration in our daily life selfishness, jealousy, anger and hate which unconscious serve to protect us and in doing so set us into opposition to everyone and everything. To awaken to this realization is the practice of Zen."

This is a great excerpt from the EmptyMindFilms's "The Zen Mind" movie and it basically point out the cause of the violence we find it today and give the solutions to it.

Alan Watts gives a better explanation to the Way of Zen.

Meditation

The stream hides itself
   In the grasses
      Of departing autumn.

Leaves falling,
   Lie on one another,
      The rain beats on the rain.

A trout leaps
   Clouds are moving
      In the bed of the stream.

The fallen flower
   Returning to the branch ?
      It was a butterfly.

The wind brings
   Fallen leaves enough
      To make a fire.

Haiku poems collected by Alan Watts and extracted from "The Way of Zen".

Intellectual approach to Yoga

Yoga consists of methods of meditation to get our minds clear of thoughts, to enter in the frame of mind when we are complete aware of WHAT IS. Let's now hear Alan Watts which has a throughout introduction to Yoga.

"The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It should transcend a personal God and avoid dogmas and theology. Covering both the natural and spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things, natural and spiritual and a meaningful unity. Buddhism answers this description. If there is any religion that would cope with modern scientific needs, it would be Buddhism." - 1945, from "Albert Einstein: The Human Side", edited by Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffmanm Princeton University Press

Fractal Consciousness

We live in a world of illusion. We think about matter as something very solid but in fact matter is not solid at all. It consists of atoms surrounded by a cloud of electrons. The solidity results from the repulsing electrical interaction between the atoms. Quantum physics had shown that if we go deeper and deeper in structure of atoms we enter in a world of pure abstraction and pure potential. This is thought to be the information field governed by consciousness and thus our minds can alter the Universe.



Max Planck was talking about God, the consciousness being that expresses itself through all living beings, through all matter and all the Universe. He is not separated from us. It's like the Universe is a very complex fractal. Because in a fractal the part resembles the whole, if we have consciousness then matter has it too and this might bee the only substance there is.

"I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness." Max Planck - The Observer (January 25th, 1931)

"The circle has an inside and an outside which are different (separate) and cannot exist without the other. To a donut the inside and the outside is the same." So we see that when we think in a higher dimensions things seem to be one. We think to ourselves separate from everything else because we perceive world through our senses and project these holograms outside ourselves. But the reality is that we are all one and thus this feeling of separateness is the matrix of life.

That's why LOVE is the most powerfull force of the Universe. Because it disolves the feeling of being alone and binds people. Jesus knew this from the Beginning and we all knew this, we only have to remember.

Multidimensional Beings

Because it's rather confusing to us to imagine higher dimensions, we must let Carl Sagan explains how a multidimensional being interacts with a lower dimensional being like ourselves to figure this out.

This also can explain angels sightings or extraterrestrial entities which can morph their appearance or other "out of this world" phenomenons. In the Book of Revelations GOD is "Alpha and Omega" and it means that He knows the Beginning and the End of Time and thus He is at least in the 4th dimension. I presume that GOD is the ultimate multidimensional being and exist in the 10th dimension. Now, let Rob Bryanton explain why 10 is the last possible dimension.

A beautiful new TOE

An beautiful super-symmetric 8 dimensional subatomic particle model could predict the new particles that LHC could produce. There is no doubt that our universe (or just our mathematical thinking) is symmetric or have a recurrence pattern just like a fractal object. Garret Lisi's "Theory of Everything" states that this 8D object constitutes the elementary super-particle from the time-space grid and with the different rotations applied to it we can generate all the elementary particles like electrons, protons or neutrinos.

We are one !

The Theory of Strings or Super-symmetric strings of energy states that we can have a theory of everything and finds that we are all connected at the quantum level (Plank scale). We are all one giant super-dimensional being and we don't even know it.

John Hagelin Ph.D, explains the Unified Field of Consciousness which makes Quantum Physics self-consistent.

Now we can witness the merge of eastern philosophy with the new true philosophy of western world which is science. In Hinduism or Buddhism one must seek inward for the true self letting go of it's ego and realizing that he is one with the entire Universe.

Unlearning

We begin our journey with Alan Watts as our guide through the Maya as Hindus call "The Matrix". The western philosopher, explains with freshness and lucidity the way of Tao "which is not the eternal Tao". Using a more digestible language he is a venerable pioneer in bringing the Eastern philosophy and understanding into the westerner's point of view.

On the other hand, our science got to a point where we can completely eliminate the need of God and basically science has it's own religion. Watts also promotes "The religion of NO religion" and that doesn't mean that he promotes atheism. He says only that one must seek inward for self enlightenment not outward for a particular God. Inward you'll find the only God there is and that is You and Everybody and Everything else.

In the last century, science with the help of computers discovered fractals. They are beautiful mathematical objects and simply you have to gaze at them because it's useless to try to comprehend them. They are infinitely complex as everything in this world; from the smallest particle (still undiscovered) to the edge of space-time (still not determined). Finding fractals everywhere creates a new ground for the Philosophy of Science, which is the Fractal Tao.

To enter in this new frame of mind we have to unlearn things we've learned. Lao Tzu said: "The scholar learns something every day, a man of a Tao unlearns something everyday, until he gets back to non-doing." Unlearning things makes you boundless, but it's hard to stop thinking as it's hard to calm a disturbed water with our hands. So we have to let go and be carried out by the flow and eventually reach that state with no effort.