Ignorance!

Monday 7:55 p.m.
                           Donald Rumsfeld was widely mocked for this comment, but I love it. It's almost enough to get him made the first honorary blissheid in the Disbelieving Congregation.

[T]here are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don't know we don't know.	”
—United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld

This was in the New Scientist today.
"Quantum particles such as atoms and molecules have an uncanny ability to appear in two places at once, spin clockwise and anti-clockwise at the same time, or instantaneously influence each other when they are half a universe apart. The thing is, we are made of atoms and molecules, and we can't do any of that. Why? "At what point does quantum mechanics cease to apply" asks ... an answer is yet to emerge."


"There is the 'many worlds' interpretation , where quantum strangeness is explained by everything having multiple existences in myriad parallel universes. Or you might prefer the de Broglie-Bohn interpretation, where quantum theory  is considered incomplete: we are lacking some hidden properties that, if we knew them, would make sense of everything... There are plenty more ..."


Ignorance is the first of the twelve links of dependant origination which, if you want the wrong things, leads to ... grief, sorrow, lamentations ... delusions, disappointments and despair ... suffering in this life!


Because of the bliss and the heat, or warmth in my case so far, it is apparent that there is more to the human body than meets the eye. There is stuff in operation which you cannot see and which doesn't  seem to have a physical presence. The lama told me to watch out for unleashing forces I wouldn't be able to control. I know these forces are there because I can feel them to some extent, but how are they operating and in what medium are they operating?


Milarepa was supposed to be able to fly and change shape. Of course, we should be sceptical about such claims, and it is fair enough to say that seeing is believing. But quantum mechanics completely defies common sense as well. 


The Copenhagen Interpretation seems to say that if you observe or try to measure something you seem to change something in the fabric of reality. That's accepted by the smartest people in the world. Is there something in this which is telling us something about consciousness? Consciousness has to be conscious of something.


So Milarepa maybe changed his consciousness, or did something amazing to it through meditation that changed everything for him. Perhaps by so doing you would change everything because at the end of the day maybe everything is just consciousness.


Obviously, I'm really struggling with this stuff. What did the Buddha say again? Experience is proceeded by mind; led by mind; and produced by mind. We think we know what mind is, but I don't think we do really. I think I read that even the Buddha couldn't find it.