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I recently read an article in the Chicago Tribune called “All in Your Head” by science writer Ronald Kotulak. In it, he says, “The starting point for consciousness may be the universe, which many physicists believe is made of information. The things we see as matter and energy are really information being transformed from one state to another.” The human brain can’t deal with all the information available, the article continues, so it transforms sensory input into what scientists call neural correlates of consciousness (or in the lingo, NCCs), symbolic forms that it can work with more easily.

He goes on to quote Piero Scaruffi, a lecturer at Caltech, who says, “Consciousness is no more magic than electricity. We can study consciousness if we can study the particles that give rise to it.” In effect what Scaruffi is saying is simply, “emptiness is form.” But the understanding that form is emptiness seems to elude him—as it does most scientists.

In the same article Kotulak mentions that in order for scientists to investigate consciousness, “They must first work their way through the thicket of the unconscious mind. It sees things before we are aware of them. We duck a surprise blow, jump out of the way of a speeding car…. Some experts estimate that 90 percent of the brain’s workings are at the unconscious level.” In fact, as neuroscience is beginning to realize, we can never really separate the conscious and unconscious.

Science is at the verge of understanding the problem, yet, by and large scientists are unable to make the intuitive leap that Gautama Buddha made millennia ago to see how to resolve the contradiction. As a culture we’re beginning to see that we cannot comprehend the universe through the symbols of the conscious mind alone.

Yet the idea that the practice of zazen can directly allow a true understanding of the universe to emerge is somehow too strange for Western science and philosophy to come to grips with. It seems too mystical, too weird. The insights to be had through the long, boring practice of zazen, though, are available to anyone at all who commits to the practice— including you. These insights have been empirically confirmed by the process of Dharma Transmission from teacher to student for thousands of years.

“Dharma Transmission” sounds like fanatical religious conversion, doesn’t it? Maybe even brainwashing: Your teacher believes it, you listen to him long enough and you begin to believe it too. But seeing reality is not a matter of absorbing a set of beliefs that have been handed down to you.

Here’s an analogy (it’s a little far-fetched but the point is there, so bear with me): Imagine a person who’s been blind since birth suddenly gaining the ability to see. Now the formerly blind person and any sighted person can immediately and directly agree that, for instance, oak leaves in summer are basically the same color as grass. But another blind person listening might assume that they’d just arbitrarily agreed upon a shared, groundless belief. A real Buddhist teacher is like someone who is no longer blind. Practicing zazen is like gradually (or maybe not so gradually) getting your sight back. Dharma Transmission is what happens when your sight clears enough that you can see what your teacher and the Buddha have already seen: things as they are.

The major difference between the ideas proposed by scientists and those proposed by Buddhists stems from the fact that scientists want to understand things through analytical thought alone. Buddhists realize that any true understanding of the relationship between mind and matter must include intuitive understanding that involves the whole mind—conscious and subconscious—as well as the body and ultimately every piece of the universe itself.

This kind of understanding cannot be expressed symbolically in words used in the usual way. To the extent that it can be expressed symbolically, the phrase “Form is emptiness, emptiness is form” really is as clear as it gets.

Suffering, Origination, Stopping, Path