Dainin Katagiri points out that Dogen claims that there are 6,400,099,180 moments in a day. Other Zen Masters measure a "moment" as being 1/72nd of a second, a "moment" being described as that fraction of time in which a human being flashes in and out of existence---A kind of eternal Now.
Katagiri points out that each moment is so brief that our rational minds cannot grasp them. Imagine, however, if we could sound a bell or gong at the end of each moment. Each "bong" or "ching" would be an individual sound, yet repeated so rapidly that they would create the illusion of being one continuous sound---Just as we live the illusion of having one continuous life.
A nice philosophical thought. But just for fun, I did some math. 72 moments per 60 seconds per 60 minutes per 23.5 hours in a day equals 6,220,800---I don't have the length of a day to a precise second (a number which varies depending on the “type” of year we’re measuring, Sidereal, Solar, Tropical, or otherwise, and I don’t know what type of year Dogen used)---but this is roughly a factor of 1000th of Dogen's 6 billion four hundred million. Interesting.
It gets a little weirder when we examine the electromagnetic frequency of the human body, the rate at which our energy cycles. The human body’s organs all vibrate at slightly different frequencies, between 62 and 78 Hz. Just for comparison, a rock vibrates at an average of 3 Hz. The normal human brain frequency is 72 Hz, seventy two cycles per second.
Since each cycle is a binary on/off yin/yang up/down experience, it can be said that we flash in and out of existence at our body frequencies---and that our awareness of “moments” would necessarily correspond to the frequency of our brains. Are these the 72 moments of the old Masters? Dogen divides each cycle into thousandths, or millihertz. In 1997, it was discovered that magneto-acoustic waves from the sun’s corona (the “solar wind”) measure 1 millhertz.
“We are stardust, we are golden…”
Correlations don’t prove causation. But it seems we’re on to something here. What, I don’t know.
--- Konrei
No comments:
Post a Comment