The Illusory Knot

“…and the Dalai Lama tells me, ‘Oh, uh, there won’t be any money — but when you die, on your deathbed, you will receive total consciousness.’

“So I got that goin’ for me, which is nice.”

— Bill Murray, Caddyshack

In the beginning, says the story of Genesis, the world was formless and void until God started using words to carve things up: Light from darkness; earth from sky; land from sea; life from inert matter.

A Buddhist, on the other hand, will tell you that everything is still formless and void; that in fact it always has been and always will be; and that the things we think and talk about — ourselves included — are all products of an overactive imagination.

The philosopher Alan Watts explains this peculiar point of view with a little story about a knot in a rope — an interesting variation on the old “Ship of Theseus” thought experiment.

Say I’m holding a rope whose upper half is made of nylon and whose lower half is made of silk; the two halves woven together seamlessly.

I tie a knot at the top of the rope, and I start working the knot downward.

When the knot crosses over from nylon into silk, is it still the same knot?

Our intuition says “yes” — but why?

The knot is no longer in the same place it was when I tied it; it’s no longer made of the same material; it no longer looks or feels or weighs the same as it did when I started. What about it, exactly, makes it the same knot as before?

The answer, of course, is continuity; a certain pattern of change that persists for a while. A Buddhist will take this logic a few steps further and tell you that everything but continuity and change is an illusion. In other words, the rope is just as illusory as the knot.

How can this be? Well, ropes are made of atoms, which are made of protons and neutrons and electrons, which are made of quarks — and the further down in scale we go, the harder it gets to get anything to sit still. We can say that an electron has a certain probability of being in a certain place at a certain time, but the math says we’ll never be able to measure whether it’s actually in that place at that time (or not) if we simultaneously try to measure how it’s moving.

Things get even weirder down at the quark level, where physical properties like “direction” and “orientation” don’t even have exact counterparts. At this level, we’re quite literally working beneath physical reality. Quarks make no intuitive sense to us — not even to leading quantum physicists, by their own admission — because quarks don’t obey the laws of classical physics… because quarks are not physical objects in any sense we understand. They’re not made of matter or energy; matter and energy are made of them.

What’s a quark, then? It’s a set of probabilities about how certain types of quantum vibrations will interact. In plainer terms, a quark is simply the name we give to what happens when certain types of vibrations interact in a certain way — just as “C-sharp” is the name we give to what happens when air molecules interact with our ears and brains in a certain way. A chord and a quark — and a rope — are all events.

By way of analogy, sweetness isn’t an object that’s somehow “in” sugar, any more than it’s “in” your tongue — sweetness is an event that’s produced; evoked; by certain relationships among sugar molecules, taste buds and neurons; just as a quark is an event that’s evoked by certain relationships among vibrating quantum strings. Buddhists take this logic even further and say that what’s true of sweetness is true of everything we perceive, from quarks and symphonies to planets and cities — and, most strangely of all, it’s even true of that private inner core of selfhood you call “me.”

The core idea of Buddhism is that all human suffering is rooted in our cravings to hold onto these transient events — to try to impose permanence on processes that slip through our fingers every time.

This is why, whereas Jesus said, “No one comes to the Father except through me,” Buddhists believe that a human Buddha (there’ve been many) is the ultimate distraction from one’s own awakening — the ultimate red herring, you might say — precisely because he seems to have got it all figured out and “It” is something you can really only find out for yourself.

This is why Buddhist students recite the proverb, “If you meet the Buddha in the road, kill the Buddha.” In other words, every seemingly-permanent object of worship is a false god.

Even people who agree with this concept on an intellectual level have an extremely hard time grasping it on an intuitive gut level — knowing it rather than just understanding it — which is why meditation takes center stage in many schools of Buddhism. But in contrast to Christian meditation, which cultivates focused remembrance of specific ideas or images, many schools of Buddhist meditation are designed to help the practitioner forget illusory labels and distinctions.

One common critique against Buddhism is that forgetful nothingness — the so-called “Void” — doesn’t sound like an appealing destination, or a very practical one either. But in Buddhist thought, nothingness doesn’t mean unconsciousness — in fact, it means precisely the opposite.

The Sanskrit word (śūnyatā) that’s usually translated as “void” or “nothingness” in Buddhist texts actually means something more like “no-thing-ness” — a state of hyper-awareness in which no distinct “things” are separable from one another, because all their interrelationships are too obvious to ignore. An even better translation might be “everythingness.”

A similar word (mushin) is used in Japanese, in the Zen school of Buddhism. This word often gets translated as “no-mind” — but by the same token, it doesn’t mean “mindlessness” in the sense we usually understand. It’d be more accurate to describe mushin as a state of mind in which one lives entirely in the transient present moment; in which one’s mind — like a motionless pool of clear water — becomes a perfect reflection of ever-changing reality; clinging to nothing, rejecting nothing; just attending to everything exactly as it’s happening.

Thus, the word “Buddha” is a title meaning “one who is awakened” — similarly to how the title “Christ” means “one who is anointed.” The most famous of history’s Buddhas, a man named Siddhartha Gautama (who — contrary to popular belief — never claimed to be anything more than an ordinary human who’d come to an extraordinary realization) said that his newfound state of awoken-ness felt as different from everyday consciousness as everyday consciousness feels from dreaming — and that waking up into this state of awoken-ness brings just as much shocking clarity as when one wakes abruptly from a long and confusing dream.

One result of Gautama’s teaching is that his immediate followers — and those modern Buddhist schools which have stuck closest to his original program of mental experimentation — seek to perceive no distinction at all between the “physical,” “mental” and “spiritual” worlds; or, for that matter, between any one “thing” and any other. All these concepts, a Buddhist might say, are just different “slices” of the same eternal process. All nouns, in other words, are slices of verbs.

Buddhists, then, would disagree with Descartes’ famous declaration, “Cogito ergo sum” — “I think, therefore I am.” All we can really know, Buddhists say, is simply that thinking sometimes happens.

Of course, this begs the question, “Who (or what) is doing the thinking?” A Buddhist will tell you that the answer to this question can’t be put into words, any more than words can tell us if the color red looks the same to me as it does to you — or can tell a person who was born blind what the color red looks like to either of us. The only way to find out the answer, Buddhists say, is to meditate until you forget enough illusory concepts to recognize the truth for yourself.