Entanglement

The fundamentals of quantum mechanics, the absolute basis of it, is what they say when things are indistinguishable. You know, a photon electron not having inherent existence, radically changes the way it behaves. If something can happen in two different ways, if they're not distinguishable, you get interference. And all these bizarre things that happen in quantum mechanics are when things are indistinguishable.

You know, in Buddhism, it's the same thing. You know, we're all enlightened. We're perfect the way we are. The other hand in reality, the way we act, we act like we're not. In essence it's the same thing. It's because they are totally entangled with their environment. The reason that our everyday world is classical is that basically everything just becomes distinguishable because of the light. Everything is being entangled with its environment constantly, you know, so it appears to have inherent existence. It acts as if it has inherent existence. Everything that's a deep conception of reality is in terms of two things that are opposites, that are mutually contradictory. you know, the wave and particle. You know, here's you're an enlightened person and here you're this entangled [inaudible] You know, they are two opposite views that contradict each other, but you need both of them to describe reality. That's the Copenhagen interpretation. And the fact that you want to grab one or the other and say they contradict each other, that's, you know, that's not being alive because that's not the way the world really is. That's what the discovery of quantum mechanics says, is that a deep reality can't be described that way.

About 600 BC. Buddha said, "Let's try to understand the world by seeing the simplest possible thing we can do, which is to do nothing." So that's meditation. We do nothing and we look. At the same time in Greece, they said, "What's the simplest thing we can think about if things are logically consistent?" As long as we stay within logic and consistency, we can actually come with a conclusion. We won't just talk at each other for a lifetime. And so these traditions starting with Pythagoras and through Euclid have led to Western science and Buddhism has continued in that way. So what's the core belief system? The core concept in Buddhism is called sunyata or emptiness, which has different definitions, but two of them are that things don't exist in the way they seem to exist. They exist... They seem to be one thing, but actually they are something else. So that's this vast philosophical system. They also call that seeing reality as it actually is. So you go out in the evening and you watch the sunset. You don't go out in the evening and watch the earth rotate. Even though we've known this for 500 years, we still don't see it. So that's an example of something that's existing as something different than it seems to be. It seems to be the sun moving, but actually it's the earth rotating.

So an even deeper thing that science has, which was totally incomprehensible to people, but since the movie, The Matrix, now people understand, is that this world out here isn't the external world. It's not, it's a representation in our mind. There is nothing out there that corresponds to what you see. There are no colors outside of the human mind or outside some mind. What is this model? This model is there's this three-dimensional space. And there are objects in the space. And at any particular moment, an object is in a particular space. And in another moment, like three seconds later, maybe it's in another space and there's two others. That has two properties. One is that if this was here and it moves here, it has to move through a continuous path, a smooth path to get there. And the other one is that two objects can't be in the same place at the same time. So that's the model that we're immersed in. We see as external reality, even though it's part of our mind.

But the thing is, that was built up by evolution. It was built up so that our ancestors could survive and reproduce and for no other reason at all. It's inherently, what we're actually seeing out there is the wisdom of our ancestors much more than any kind of external world. Right. But the thing is, is all of our ancestors were basically about this size. I mean you know, 50 million years ago they might have been really tiny, but you know, none of them were ever the size of an atom or a subatomic particle. So this model that we've built up by evolution because it worked for the last few hundred million years, there's no reason whatsoever, no operatory reason why it should work at the size of an atom. And of course it wouldn't make any difference. If the smallest thing you could see was about a 10th of a millimeter, but now that we can actually manipulate things at the level of an atom, we find out that it simply doesn't work.