Steve, You are smart enough to cover both 'chance' and 'necessity'. These two also include all four: God, Fate, Chance, and Chaos. Nobody can argue with you. The question remains whether 'chance' has some 'necessity' elements, like in the case of Heisenburg Uncertainty Prinicple. From the uncertain location and velocity, it leads to the certainty of probability and all the way to quantum mechanics. Anthony
--- On Sun, 3/4/11, SteveW <[email protected]> wrote: From: SteveW <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [Zen] Why bother with Zazen? Better a Roulette To: [email protected] Date: Sunday, 3 April, 2011, 12:21 PM --- In [email protected], Anthony Wu <wuasg@...> wrote: > > Steve, > Â > I ask you which one of the four you support. > Â > '1' was missing. I put it back. > Â > Anthony > Hi Anthony. In my opinion, reality is a mixture of chance and necessity. Any account of reality must take into account uncertainty and non-locality. These two facts have been scientifically established beyond a reasonable doubt, imo. This is why I don't endorse Advaita Vedanta. Advaita Vedanta asserts that the world is an unreal appearance superimposed upon the face of static Being. Advaita Vedanta believes in strict determinism. If you read Be As You Are by Ramana Maharshi's student David Godman you will see that Maharshi believed that all phenomena are strictly determined. Modern physics has proven him wrong. For a while, some hoped that David Bohm's deterministic hidden variables model might prove to be true, but few now accept it. As the physicist Paul Davies comments in his book The Mind of God, the new physics has driven the final nail in the coffin of strict determinism. Some shit just happens, for no reason that can be given. You know, Zen people don't actually give a philosophical explanation for existence, but the Non-Dual Hindu traditions do. IMO, in comparing Advaita Vedanta with Kashmir Shaivism, Kashmir Shaivism is actually more in accord with the facts. Steve > > > >
