Matter that moves faster than light found!

Wisdom Quarterly

Photons (light) are far from ultimate materiality. But how about neutrinos or quanta? There exist subatomic particles Buddhism refers to as kalapas. Name-and-form (nama-rupa) are intimately related, with the more subtle mind ("name") taking precedence.

In Buddhist physics -- gone into great detail in the Abhidharma ("Higher-Teaching"), one of the three divisions of the Buddha's teachings (Dharma), "ultimate particles" are referred to as kalapas.

Those able to see them (as a function of absorption- and insight-meditation called jhana- and vipassana-bhavana) consistently refrain from calling them "atoms."

It's not that Einstein was wrong; it's that we are not told about everything he found. Tesla and he fashioned a unified field theory just before he passed away. The government got those notes and equations. The true story is novelized by Sean David Morton in Sands of Time.

Our modern subatomic theory is wrong. And the next theory (string, quantum, torsion, etc.) is likely to be wrong as well. Why?

Public science does not yield ultimate truth. What happens behind the closed doors of the military-industrial complex is another story altogether. As far as what the public is told or college students taught, it is always a game of catch up with allegiance to Einstein at all costs.

How in the world could a meditator ever know and see subatomic particles? The answer is simple. Mind (cittas) arises faster than materiality (kalapas).

Both are incredibly fast, but by watching ultimate-matter (rupa-kalapas) with "higher mind" (adhicitta), which is purified by right-concentration (samma-samadhi, defined by the Buddha as mastery of the first four absorptions), it becomes possible to record these particles-of-perception and subsequently review them. How? Just as one might record an event with a high speed camera and then review it at normal speed.

Whether or not anyone considers this a satisfying explanation, it is not a meditation "theory." It happens. Wisdom Quarterly: American Buddhist Journal is well aware of people who can do it. Some even say it is necessary to do to systematically attain enlightenment in this very life. Why? The mind/heart stops clinging when it knows-and-sees that everything (mentally and materially) is radically impermanent, arising and passing away almost instantaneously.

• It is not wise to debate it when it is possible to practice it and see for oneself. Seeing is believing, whereas our thinking is deceiving. Einstein did not think, as we popularly imagine. Few mathematicians or artists do. (Eckhart Tolle, a joyful unitarian with Buddhist leanings) explains this as "presence," or thought-free awareness and inspiration, being in the now after one has struggled by rational means.

Einstein saw/intuited the big picture in an instant and developed the math to make sense of it: "The intuitive mind is a sacred gift, and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift" - Albert Einstein.

Subatomic neutrino tracks: detecting travel faster than light (Dan Mccoy/Corbis)

Neutrinos Travel Faster Than Light
Adrian Cho (News.sciencemag.org, Sept. 22, 2011)

Fat lady singing? The OPERA particle detector may have spotted neutrinos traveling faster than light, which would bring down the curtain on special relativity as an exact theory. If it's true, it will mark the biggest discovery in physics in the past half-century: Elusive, nearly massless, subatomic particles called neutrinos appear to travel just faster than light, a team of physicists in Europe reports. If so, the observation would wreck Einstein's theory of special relativity, which demands that nothing can travel faster than light. In fact, the result would be so revolutionary that it's sure to be met with skepticism all over the world. "I suspect that the bulk of the scientific community will not take this as a definitive result unless it can be reproduced by at least one and preferably several experiments," says V. Alan Kostelecky, a theorist at Indiana University, Bloomington. He adds, however, "I'd be delighted if it were true." More

• Faster-than-light particles found, scientists claim: Particle physicists detect neutrinos traveling faster than light, a feat forbidden by Einstein's theory of special relativity. It is a concept that forms a cornerstone of our understanding of the universe and the concept of time -- nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. But now it seems that researchers working in one of the world's largest physics laboratories, under a mountain in central Italy, have recorded particles traveling at a speed that is supposedly forbidden by Einstein's theory of special relativity.

Neutrinos are "faster than light": (WND) Recent tests have revealed that a neutrino beam from a CERN lab in Geneva, Switzerland, to the 454 miles remote INFN Gran Sasso lab in Italy seemed to travel 0.0025 percent faster through earth than the speed of light in a vacuum. Some undisputed pillars of classical physics will completely totter if this experiment turns out...

Rebirth: Wandering Without End

Bhikkhu Bodhi and Wisdom Quarterly (COMMENTARY)

The Buddha's teaching addresses something not immediately perceptible to us: our bondage to the Round of Rebirths.

From the selection of texts on similes regarding the boundless series of rebirths that has been cycling without any discernible beginning in time comes a frightening possibility.

This cycle is called samsara, a Pali/Sanskrit word that suggests the idea of directionless wandering or faring on. No matter how far back in time we may seek a beginning to the universe, there was never a moment of initial creation.

There are, however, periodic "creations" or, more correctly speaking, "impersonal formations" at the beginning of each world-system.

There was no creator; they simply follow a natural cyclical process of evolution and devolution. At times these world-systems are referred to as universes within a multiverse.

But if we reserve the term "universe" to everything in the entire cosmos inclusive of all the countless world-systems, there is no beginning to be found. World-systems last a great aeon (maha-kalpa) passing through four incalculable or uncertain phases: formation, duration, contraction, and an empty time.

This period of calm is followed by yet another formation, another revolution, which may be thought of as a Big Bang. But a Big Bang in no way explains the actual first cause or creation of the universe ("all that is") only another round of development, operation, chaotic dissolution, and quiescence.



Similarly, just as world-systems evolve and dissolve over billions of years, each different but each arising from the former, the same goes for individual rebirths. Each past and future life is a point along an ever-changing line of identity and attachment, the sense that a single entity is carrying on. Aggregates of clinging recur through countless deaths and rebirths.

As in the former case so in the latter, there is no beginning point to be found. Moreover, there would be no benefit to finding one if it became possible to find. For knowing it would not bring about the end of suffering (nirvana).

No matter how far back we may trace any given individual sequence of lives, we can never arrive at a first point.

How long will the Round of Rebirth last?
According to these texts (given in full In the Buddha’s Words: An Anthology of Discourses from the Pali Canon (Teachings of the Buddha), even if we were to trace the sequence of our mothers and fathers across world-systems, we would only come upon still more mothers and fathers stretching back into the far horizons.

Moreover, the frightening prospect is that the process is not only beginningless, it is also potentially endless! This may not seem frightful to anyone who does not see suffering -- or grasp the Four Noble Truths even intellectually -- and the potential for far greater suffering due to karma produced in ignorance driven by craving.

As long as ignorance and craving remain intact, the process will continue indefinitely into the future.

For the Buddha and Early Buddhism, this is above all the defining crisis at the heart of the our condition: We are bound to a chain of rebirths, and bound to it by nothing other than our own ignorance and craving.

The pointless wandering on in samsara -- suffering as we chase pleasure, enduring happiness, and security where it cannot be found -- occurs against a cosmic background of inconceivably vast dimensions.

The period of time that it takes for a world system to evolve, reach its phase of maximum expansion, then contract, and disintegrate is called a kappa (Sanskrit, kalpa) or aeon.

The texts offer vivid similes to suggest the duration of the various types of aeons; others offer vivid similes to illustrate the incalculable number of aeons through which we have already wandered interacting in all kinds of relationships with one another.

As beings fare along, wandering and roaming from life to life, shrouded in the darkness of ignorance over what is going on or what is causing the unsatifactoriness and rebirths, they fall again and again into the chasm of birth, aging, sickness, and death.

They fall again and again into the chasm of incomprehensibly woeful realms in the unfortunate destinations -- the worlds of animals, ghosts, monsters, and hellions.

Because their craving propels them forward in a relentless quest for gratification of sensual desires, ambitions, and running from pain, they seldom pause long enough to step back and carefully consider their existential plight.

As Text 1,4(5) states, they just just keep revolving around the Five Aggregates in the way a dog on a leash might run around a post or pillar. Since their ignorance prevents them from recognizing the vicious nature of their condition, they cannot discern even the tracks of a path to deliverance.

Most beings live immersed in the enjoyment of or the search for sensual pleasures. Others -- driven by the need for power, status, and esteem -- pass their lives in vain attempts to fill an unquenchable thirst.

Many, fearful of annihilation at death, construct belief systems that ascribe to their individual selves, their "souls," the prospect of eternal life. They do not perceive that this constructed "self" is perishing at every moment, changing, altering, and hurtling towards destruction.

A few yearn for a path to liberation. But they do not know where to find one. It was precisely to offer such a path that the Buddha has appeared in our midst. Buddhism originally was precisely a path-of-practice to the end of suffering.

• AUDIO: Nirvana explained (D.I.Y. Dharma)