NEW BOOK

Working Title:

When Universes Collide: the Encounter Between Buddhism and Science

The next step seems to be a more general book that will try to explain the projects of both Buddhism and science, and see what they have in common, and see how they might help each other.

I think that science can help Buddhism because scientists have discovered so much about what human beings are like, and about what the world around us is like. And I think that any Buddhist will be keen to have a full awareness of what is really going on. Science can also help the Buddhist compassionate project of alleviating suffering, offering technologies that can help heal the sick, can improve communication and transport, grow more and better food and so on. (Though I am under no illusion -- technology can easily also make things much worse.)

Buddhism can help science principally, I think, because it has a bigger perspective. It takes consciousness seriously, which I feel that some scientists do not, when they imply that it's just some weird fizzing in the brain. It has an uncompromising vision of the great interconnected network of conditions that includes everything from galaxies to moment-by-moment mental events. It offers the tools of introspection and meditation, which see more deeply and more clearly into the human mind than any MRI scanner. It has a non-dogmatic ethical framework, a method for trying to be more ethical, which I think could help the work of scientists and their regulators enormously. They are often very confused in the area of ethics, and are just as prey as the rest of us to self-centred motivations. Indeed, I think that any scientist would be a better scientist not only by living by Buddhist ethics, but also by improving his or her mental states using Buddhist methods, especially awareness and metta meditations.

The Buddhist and the scientist can ask each other very searching questions, whether or not they are combined in the same person! What are your motivations for doing what you're doing? What are the possible outcomes, beneficial and harmful? Can you accept reality in all its unexpectedness, beauty, inconvenience, and so on? What can a Buddhist learn about karma and rebirth, meditation states, space and time, body and mind, by making use of the findings of science?

Any thoughts/suggestions? You can E-mail Robin Cooper directly on:
   
             
   
   
   
     
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