What we call ‘physicality’ is brought about by attraction and repulsion, and attraction/repulsion is brought about by polarisation (or symmetry-breaking). Symmetry is therefore where there is no polarisation – it is that state of affairs where everything hasn’t been divided into two opposing halves. The symmetrical situation is that situation where ‘it’s all the one’, in other words. It’s all the one and so nothing opposes anything else. There is no opposition whatsoever.
We could also say that the symmetrical state is the state in which there is no agreement and no disagreement’ this isn’t what we might expect because our normal way of seeing things is to say that where there is unity this is because all the parts, all the components, agree with each other. Society, for example, is a unity because everyone in it agrees to adhere to certain core rules – i.e., a social group is ‘’an agreement. A crystal of ice is an agreement in the same way since all the water molecules ‘agree’ to align themselves in the same way. Symmetry has nothing to do with agreement however; it has nothing to do with agreement because for there to be agreement there have to be different elements to agree. A part is essentially asymmetrical because there is a fundamental difference between that part and all the others. A part only gets to be a part because it exists in opposition to everything else in opposition – as we’ve just said – is a lack of symmetry.
In symmetry there no parts, no differentiation, no divides. This doesn’t mean that there’s no content however, it doesn’t mean that the symmetrical state is ‘a null set’ – it simply means that there are no ‘things’ making it up. The whole is not the sum of its parts; it’s not the sum of its part because – outside of our arbitrary way of looking at things – they aren’t any parts. We can add up all the parts, all the fragments, in the world and this still isn’t going to add up to anything real! We can add up parts forever and we still won’t even have started the journey (since the ‘fractions of the whole’ are only ever abstractions). In the symmetrical state there is no agreeing and no disagreeing, no pushing and no pulling, no ‘yes’ and no ‘no’ – there’s no mechanical stuff going on here at all. Something’s happening for sure, but we can’t say what it is (because in order for us to say ‘what it is’ we would have to have polarity, we would have ‘one thing against another’). Without opposition there is nothing tangible, nothing measurable or definable, as we keep saying.
The physical aspect of reality – known to us as ‘the material universe’ – exists because of opposition, therefore. There’s no physicality at all in the absence of opposing forces and ‘opposing forces’ aren’t an intrinsic part of reality, much as we might imagine that they are. We could argue that opposition is an extrinsic aspect of reality, or that it is a phenomenon which is somehow supported by non-polar reality – which is clearly true – but that still doesn’t make it real. It’s a special case, an artificial situation that needs to be somehow engineered. Even putting it like this doesn’t make the point strongly enough – what we should say is that oppositionality is a game that we’re playing, an artificial situation that doesn’t exist without our input, without our interference, without our causing it.
When we think about the physical universe it seems like a very complicated business, naturally enough – it seems that if we study assiduously for the whole of our lives we will still only learn the tiniest little bit of what’s going on. In one way this is of course true, but it is also true to say that the basic principle – the basic gimmick behind it all – isn’t that hard to understand at all, and that we can very easily get completely distracted by all the complications or ramifications. All we really need to know is that it comes down to push and pull, attraction and repulsion. What comes about as a result of attraction versus repulsion is endlessly intricate, but that’s beside the point when it comes to understanding what the basic principle behind ‘physicality’ is. If we don’t grasp this principle – which is very simple and doesn’t need complicated equations to show how it works – then we’re going to be thoroughly distracted by all the proliferating complications that arise as a result of polarity. We’re going to miss the point. We’re going to get ‘lost in the game’; we’re going to get lost in the game because the more knowledge we have about what’s going on in the game (or what’s happening within the terms of the game), the less we know that it is a game. The more we focus on the details, the less aware we become of the Whole.
This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t be interested in the physical sciences but rather that if we miss the essential point (which is [1] that it all works on polarity and [2] that polarity is only an appearance with nothing behind it) then we fall under the spell of illusion. There absolutely couldn’t be anything tangible, physical or measurable without polarity and there is no way around this. It would be absurd to presume that there is a way around this. Polarity as a phenomenon is only ‘skin deep’; it’s only skin deep because there isn’t actually any such thing as YES versus NO – that’s just a convention, which is to say, when we examine it closely we see that polarity is just ‘a way of looking at the world’ and not how the world is in itself. A slightly different way of putting this would be to say that the phenomenon of polarity comes into being as a result of entropy – which is to say ‘unavailable information’ – and that whatever we perceive to be the case when there is information which is unavailable to us isn’t really the case at all!
So – just to go into this a bit more – we can say that we start off with a symmetrical state (which is where all the information is available) and then perform some sort of action whereby we produce a ‘plus’ on the one side and a ‘minus’ on the other. In terms of particles, with we could for example have an electron in one corner and positron in the other. We might therefore say that cosmic symmetry has been broken but – on a deeper level – it hasn’t; it hasn’t been broken because the books remain balanced – when we consider both the electron and the positron together (on the same page, as it were) then there is ‘no net event’. Nothing happened, despite appearances to the contrary. If we take the positive and negative together – which they always had to be, since their produced as a pair and will always stay a pair – then there’s nothing there. The disturbance – when we look at it – is actually perfectly peaceful. There is no conflict, no opposition at all. ‘The nature of all phenomena is tranquil’, as the Buddhist sutras tell us. Everything is tranquil, really…
What we’re talking about here is ‘the creation of a wave’, therefore – when there is no wave (when there is a peaceful undisturbed surface) then this is the symmetrical state, and when the stillness of the undisturbed service is broken (by throwing a pebble in it for example) then we produce a wave or ripple, which equals ‘the separation of the opposites’. The opposites are the crest of the wave and the trough. The point is that ‘plus’ and ‘minus’, crest and trough, aren’t really separate; the opposites aren’t really separate, but there is a time lag that has been introduced which allows us to perceive the crest and the trough of the wave as separate things or ‘unconnected events’. If we pay attention to only a small segment of linear time (‘linear time’ being the only type of time there is) then crest and trough will be perceived as separate; were we to take the broader view however then we would see them together and when we see them together we see that this situation is symmetrical after all. When we take the broad view then we always see the underlining symmetry; we only perceive a lack of symmetry when we take the narrow view, when there is entropy in the system. Entropy creates the appearance of polarity where there is none.
We could equally well look at this in terms of causality, in terms of ‘cause and effect’. In one way, we could say that the crest of a wave is the cause of the trough that follows it, and that this trough then goes on – in turn – to give rise to the crest which follows it. We could make a statement like this, but what would we be saying here? Clearly, this is a completely meaningless thing to say since both crest and trough are the same thing (seeing as how they can’t ever be separated). This is easy to see in the case of a wave but it’s also true for all chains of cause and effect – if one state of affairs has been caused by the preceding one then it must have been inherent in it and so nothing new or unexpected has happened. We could see the continuum of logic (or the continuum of thought) as being made-up of lots and lots of positions that are linked by cause and effect but, when it comes down to it, if every position is logically implied by every other then this means that there is only the one position. When we look at things in terms of a chain of cause-and-effect therefore we can see that the so-called ‘linear progression’ is actually tautological and thus not a progression at all. Cause and effect are tautological developments of each other just as the negative displacement of a medium is a tautological development of the positive displacement that preceded it.
Cause and effect are simultaneous, Nichiren Daishonin tells us, and if cause and effect are simultaneous then the gap between the one and the other which we think we are living our lives within doesn’t really exist! This is a good argument against playing the waiting game therefore, which is something we all do. We might fondly imagine that there’s going to be some great development (or ‘effect’) that’s going to make all of the waiting worthwhile (our ‘reward in heaven’, so to speak) but there isn’t. As Immanuel Kant says, there is no freedom in cause and effect, only in the transcendence of it. Or as Wei Wu Wei puts it, freedom is to be found in the vertical dimension not the horizontal one. The only thing about this however is that we never look in the vertical dimension, we only look in the horizontal, which is the unfree direction – it’s unfree because it doesn’t go anywhere, it’s unfree because it’s all endless cause and effect and cause and effect is lack of change (or stasis) disguised as a progression. We’re ‘unfree’ therefore because everything we think and do is perfectly and immaculately redundant…
Image – pinterest.ie
