June 15, 2003

Einstein, causation, and the future

This evening, I was reading some of Albert Einstein's essays from the book, Ideas and Opinions.

For some reason the following quote from the essay, The Religious Spirit of Science really struck me:

"...the scientist is possessed by the sense of universal causation. The future, to him, is every whit as necessary and determined as the past."

Though I have thought about this idea intuitively many times before, I don't believe that I have ever seen the future compared to the past as directly as in this case.

For me, this evokes an image of a steady stream of states of the universe - the past states being no different from the future states, except for they are separated by a single point on this line that we call this moment.

This is a very Zen idea when I think about it, though I never really made the connection until I thought about the past and present in this context.

In The Zen

Posted by Josh Staiger at 10:32 PM

Comments

it's always better to follow the original.
i think therawada is the roots which helps you to find the truth of everything, i feel that you might like these sites(may be u have already visited em.)
http://www.bswa.org/
http://www.vipassana.com/canon/sutta.php
http://www.vipassana.com/
http://www.gautamabuddha.org/
http://www.buddhistinformation.com/ida_b_wells_memorial_sutra_library/

Posted by: Anuradha March 9, 2006 02:53 AM | Permanent link

Please do not get confused with Zen Buddhism; it is not the very realistic Buddhism. If you want to find the real Buddhism, please understand Theravada Buddhism. Above sites may help you. You may also visit http://www.mahamevna.org/. Those type of questions about the universe will lead you nowhere, you must fist understand YOUR SELF.

Posted by: Kithruwan Saputhanthri November 23, 2006 12:29 AM | Permanent link