Just before he passed away, at the age of sixty, Bassui sat up in the lotus posture and, to those gathered around him, said: "Don’t be misled! Look directly! What is this?" He repeated this loudly and then calmly died.
There are two big questions in Zen:
Who am I?
What is this?
Usually, people try to tackle the first one first. Today, though, we will start with the second one.
What is this? This phenomenal world?
What is this, over here? "Oh, that’s just a tree." There it is! The key phrase: just a.
That’s just a tree. That’s just a dog. That’s just a person.
Sometimes maybe the just a doesn’t kick in right away. Wait, what is that? Oh, I see, that’s just a moth.
Before just a, what is there?
Well, this talk isn’t about answering that question. Rather it is a about shaking up the just a a little bit.
This talk is about the origin of This. This beautiful moment right here. The sun, the sky, the trees, the grass, the flowers, the insects, the people. I have a science background, and this is a story that comes from science. Although it is just a science story, it really does make you wonder…
(By the way, most of this information comes from Wikipedia.)
What was the beginning of This? What was the beginning of all in the phenomenal world that we can see, that we can perceive with our senses and telescopes, of the entire visible universe?
Astronomers have discovered that the universe is expanding, and expanding in such a way that it is clear that this expansion began some 13.7 billion years ago from essentially a single point, what is called a singularity.
This singularity was something like a point of infinite density and infinite temperature, but physics can’t really say anything about it, because the laws of physics don’t apply in such a situation. Physics starts (just barely) with what is called the Planck Epoch of the universe, the time immediately after the universe began expanding, a period lasting around 10-43 seconds. The Planck epoch was characterized by such high energy that, apparently, all of the physical forces of the universe were unified. Gravity, the weak nuclear force, the electromagnetic force, and the strong nuclear force were all one in the same.
The Planck Epoch is also defined by a size, it is called the Planck length. The Planck Epoch ended when the universe reached the Planck length, 10-35 cm. At the end of the Planck Epoch, the entire universe, which is now at least 14 billion light years across, was only about 10-35 cm across. By contrast, the diameter of an atom is about 10-8 cm. The universe was 1000000000000000000000000000 times smaller than an atom!
Strangely, the big bang, described above, was not capable of producing the matter that we see around us today, and find in our bodies. The big bang only produced hydrogen (75%), helium (25%), deuterium (about 0.01%) and trace amounts of lithium and beryllium. Carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, iron, etc., were not, and could not, be produced.
How did the elements out of which we are formed get created?
I think I was a teenager when the answer was discovered, and I remember reading about this in the Science News magazine that I got at the time: the heavier elements up to the weight of iron are produced in large stars as they run out of fuel. Stars burn (fuse) hydrogen to form helium. But after the hydrogen is all used up, if the star is large enough, helium fuses to form carbon and oxygen, and these continue to fuse into heavier and heavier elements. Once iron is produced, fusion stops, and the star collapses.
The inner core of the star collapses to form neutrons, and then the remainder of the collapsing core rebounds of off these neutrons to cause an enormous explosion: a supernova. In the initial stages of this explosion, in extremely high temperatures, a different type of fusion occurs that creates the elements heavier than iron.
The elements that we see around us, and within our bodies, were created from the death of a generation of large stars.
And it turns out that the shockwaves from these deaths, from these explosions, were what caused the next generation of stars and planetary systems to begin their process of condensing out of interstellar gas.
But for the death of a generation of large stars, our sun wouldn’t be here, and the elements that make all of this up wouldn’t be here either.
We truly are stardust.
In spite of the big bang, the birth and death of a generation of large stars, and the later birth of our solar system out of interstellar gas and supernova remnants, we still aren’t even close to having the building blocks of life.
We have carbon, oxygen, water, but what about, for example, amino acids?
The early earth was a hot and violent place. The atmosphere was filled with poisonous gasses such as methane, ammonia, and hydrogen sulfide. The surface was bombarded by UV light, and by extremely violent electrical storms, much more powerful than anything seen today.
Although this environment would be hostle to most life as we know it now, it was an excellent place for the synthesis of the organic molecules needed as the basis for life. The atmosphere had the raw materials, and the UV light and the electrical storms provided the energy. Amino acids were created, and these linked up to form proteins.
Somehow, and nobody seems to understand this well, these molecules, these long carbon chains, began coming together to form some sort of a bubble or sack…
At some point, sacks of carbon-chain molecules became self-replicating. No one knows how this happened, and this has never been reproduced in the laboratory.
Somehow, carbon chains, with a few oxygen, nitrogen, and other elements in key places, have a capability to come together, to organize themselves into a sack that can reproduce itself.
The transformation from inanimate to animate occurred, all by itself. Much, if not most, of the life on earth today, consists of these cells. They form two of the three main branches of the tree of life: the Archaea and the Bacteria:
The Archaea have no nucleus or other organelles within their cells. They feed on everything from sugars to ammonia, metal ions, hydrogen gas, and some can even use sunlight as a source of energy. They live everywhere: in the oceans, the soils, hot springs and salt lakes. Although one of the most important and numerous forms of life on the planet, this has only recently been recognized. They were previously dismissed as extremophiles.
The Bacteria also have no nucleus, and they rarely have organelles. Bacteria are ubiquitous, growing in soil, acidic hot springs, radioactive waste, water, deep in the Earth’s crust, as well as in organic matter and the live bodies of plants and animals. Bacteria include blue-green algae (cyanobacteria). From Wikipedia:
Stromatolites of fossilized oxygen-producing cyanobacteria have been found from 2.8 billion years ago. The ability of cyanobacteria to perform oxygenic photosynthesis is thought to have converted the early reducing atmosphere into an oxidizing one, which dramatically changed the composition of life forms on Earth by provoking an explosion of biodiversity.
Apparently, it was this early single-celled life, especially the cyanobacteria, that re-engineered our planet to make it suitable for the life forms we have today.
Something I found amazing, on par with the creation of elements by supernovas, was a little appreciated but enormous step in the evolution of life: our human cells are not like those of the Archaea and Bacteria.
The Archaea and Bacteria are the first two kingdoms of life. The third is the Eucaria. We are of the third kingdom; we humans are Eukariots.
What is so special about Eukariot cells? Eukariot cells contain both a nucleus and organelles. But the incredible thing is where the nucleus and organelles came from. Some time around 2, or even 2.7 billion years ago, it appears that an Archaeon went inside of a Bacteria to become a nucleus. And a bacterium went inside to become a mitochondrion. Other organelles were formed in a similar way.
All complex multi-cellular life is made up of these Eukariot cells.
So now, we are almost there, right? We have gone through a big bang, the life and death of a generation of stars, the formation of a planetary system, the evolution of the building block molecules of life, the organization of molecules into simple cells, and finally the organization of simple cells into complex structured cells.
Well, actually, at this point we are at the stage of amoebas — single-celled Eukariots. How do you get from an amoeba to a human being?
From Wikipedia:
How organisms then became multicellular is a huge evolutionary step and is consequently under great debate.
Multi-cellular organisms not only have more than one cell, but they have differentiated cells. They have a specialization of cells.
It appears that single-celled Eukariots divided, but remained stuck together. Individuals within these colonies then went on to take on more and more specialized roles. Somehow, these specialized cells formed into organs working together. Somehow, cells came together to form a central command center, the brain.
Somehow, the human brain evolved into an organ capable of capturing and conceptulizing to some extremely limited extent, the story of its own creation.
The universe evolved to know itself.
How can you explain this?
That spec, that unity, smaller than an atom, it is still here… and it has become this… this inconceivable complexity.
Did this just happen by accident? Every little piece of life around us is an engineering marvel that cannot be duplicated by man. And it all works together, and evolves itself as a whole over time.
The universe has organized itself with astonishing intelligence. From the birth and death of stars to a human being. Without a misstep.
The universe has organized itself to become you. The astonishing intelligence has created you, is in you.
Do you want to know the spirit of this intellegent stuff of the universe, what it feels like, what it is?
Well, you are it, so you tell me!
Sam Gabriel, San Diego, CA
http://home.roadrunner.com/~clothespin
sam_gabriel@yahoo.com