THE SHAPE OF THE UNIVERSE
PRESENTED BY:
the Wanderling
PRESENTED BY:
the Wanderling
If you are fortunate enough to share a neighborhood with a leafy elm, a gnarly oak, a soaring redwood, take another look at its silhouette against the sky. That self-similar 4-D explosion of branching branches is a clue to a cosmic riddle or two, and a key concept in fields as unrelated as vascular surgery and software design.
The Buddha knew this, and so do neurologists, database programmers, and mythologists.
Axis mundi, the axis of the world, is the tree at the center of everything sacred. Mythologist Joseph Campbell, referring to the Buddha's awakening, noted that: "This is the most important single moment in Oriental mythology, a counterpart of the Crucifixion of the West. The Buddha beneath the Tree of Enlightenment (the Bodhi Tree) and Christ on Holy Rood (the tree of redemption) are analogous figures, incorporating an archetypal World Savior, World Tree motif, which is immemorial antiquity."
To Hindu dream adepts, the question of how you know that you are awake is at once psychological and metaphysical. David Shulman, in Tamil Temple Myths, discusses a character in a myth who realizes that he is dreaming the tragedy of his life, and notes: "The nature of his delusion is clear from the moment he first catches sight of the upside-down tree-a classic Indian symbol for the reality that underlies and is hidden by life in the world, with its false goals and misleading perceptions."
To say nothing of the Garden of Eden and its two special trees. Why do trees always happen to be on the set when God talks? It doesn't matter whether your cosmology is Hebrew, Christian, Hinduism, Buddhism, Shamanism, paganism, or Animist: trees are always part of the scenery when a theophany happens.
Tradition throughout the Life and Teaching of the Buddha has it that the Buddha's tree was the type known as "pipal" (ficus religiosa), and that it was precisely as old as the fellow who sat down in its shade to catch a case of Satori. Sakyamuni, as the Buddha was known pre-enlightenment, had a lifelong habit of sitting under pipal trees that were exactly his age. It was also written that the Buddha's mother (a.k.a. Maya Devi) held onto the branches of a pipal while she gave birth to him.
Why a tree? Why not a seashell, a lightning bolt, an old man with a beard? The iconography is not strictly Asian: Yggdrasil, the world-Ash, is Norse. The Druids were far from India and China. The theme surfaces in folktales, holy books, cave paintings, tiled mosques, and frescoed chapels on every part of the globe. The Chinese saw it as a giant peach tree that bore the fruit of immortality. In the nineteenth century, German scholars discovered that the word temple derives from the Indo-European roots meaning "sacred grove."
The visual representation of a tree that branches at both ends is a model of the universe as a living organism, a metaphorical map that serves equally well for the cosmos external to the individual and the spectrum of consciousness deep within - with its highest branches in the heavens and its roots deep within the dark underrealm.
Are we also drawn to trees because our minds know that our brain structures are tree-shaped? Do these signatures of our internal informational systems keep emerging in symbols of our deepest religious impulses because they are what nineteenth-century anthropologist Adolf Bastian called Elementargedanken - "elementary ideas" that are hardwired into our brains? Our nervous systems are shaped like trees, and so are rivers, capillaries, data structures, probability worlds, solution spaces, chess games, and chain reactions. Our ancestors lived in trees, not too long ago. It's no wonder that Sakyamuni sat under one when he was ready to awaken.
Trees are talismans of sanity and wholeness to Western psycho-therapists as well as to Eastern mystics. According to Jungian psychoanalysts, the appearance of a tree in a dream can be fortuitous, in the sense that it often symbolizes, empowers, and heralds a movement toward wholeness of the personality. Marie-Louise von Franz notes that "Since...psychic growth cannot be brought about by a conscious effort or will power, but happens involuntarily and naturally, it is in dreams frequently symbolized by the tree, whose slow, powerful, involuntary growth fulfills a definite pattern."
One characteristic that doesn't vary much from one tree to another is the way components of the tree - the larger and smaller branches and twigs - reflect the shape of the entire tree; a computer programmer would recognize the tree as a "recursive structure" (because the same pattern "recurs" at both the top and bottom levels of organization. As the European alchemists of the Middle Ages would say: "As above, so below."
This shape that makes trees and other things look treelike brings new perspective to several important questions about the way things work: How can you keep track of a billion units of anything and make sure you can find each unit as quickly as possible? How do you move things from one point to many other points most efficiently? A recursive, branching tree shape is the visual analog of the answer to both questions.
A tree of the botanical variety is shaped that way because a branching plant efficiently collects moisture from the earth via ten thousand roots and distributes it rapidly to ten thousand leaves. (Kabbalism, the Jewish mystical tradition, depicts the path to God-consciousness as a tree-shape with the explanation that this is the way to distribute God-consciousness to innumerable sentient beings.)
Examine an aerial photograph of a river delta next to an X-ray arteriogram of a human lung and you'll see that branches aren't limited to forests. Rivers branch as they run into their own sedimentary deposits; when the main channel suddenly becomes shallow, and arboreal shape most efficiently distributes the river's flow. Pulmonary arteries branch because branching enables the lungs to distribute oxygen to the blood rapidly. The branching of nerves and blood vessels in the brain is known as "arborization."
Quantum physicists even dreamed up four-dimensional trees. Because certain aspects of the equations describing the transformations of electromagnetic energy, it is possible to hypothesize that the universe is an infinitely branching entity. This formally permissible (if unconfirmed) logical consequence of the quantum equations is known as "the many-worlds interpretation." Your lifeline (your life as expressed - time, motion, endeavor - as a sort of vector) and mine, called "worldlines" by quantum physicists, branch when we make decisions, take action, hesitate, move, or stand still. There are worlds in which you are the Buddha and worlds that are exactly the same as this one, except you part your hair on the opposite side. The abstract space of such a universe, filled with infinities of non-intersecting branch universes, is a four-dimensional tree that grows at a rate incomprehensible to 3-D mindsets. The following is from an article in Scientific American, November 1994, by Andrei Linde:
Furthermore, the total number of inflationary bubbles on our "cosmic tree" grows exponentially in time. Therefore, most bubbles (including our own part of the universe) grow indefinitely far away from the trunk of this tree. Although this scenario makes the existence of the initial big bang almost irrelevant, for all practical purposes, one can consider the moment of formation of each inflationary bubble as a new "big bang." From this perspective, inflation is not a part of the big bang theory, as we thought 15 years ago. On the contrary, the big bang is a part of the inflationary model.
In thinking about the process of self-reproduction of the universe, one cannot avoid drawing analogies, however superficial they may be. One may wonder, Is not this process similar to what happens with all of us? Some time ago we were born. Eventually we will die, and the entire world of our thoughts, feelings and memories will disappear. But there were those who lived before us, there will be those who will live after, and humanity as a whole, if it is clever enough, may live for a long time.
To estimate the number of advanced civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy and how long they are expected to exist, thus then, their thoughts, feelings and memories go to : The Drake Equation.
A tree can be a map of space or time or psyche, or it can be a map of information.
Tree-shaped data structures are essential parts of all computer software
systems because trees offer an effective and orderly way to store and retrieve
large amounts of binary information. A tree in which each branchpoint leads
to exactly two branches is the direct visual analog of binary code, because
you can get from the trunk to any one of the leaves by making one of two
decisions at each branchpoint.
To programmers who are trying to write software to emulate human problem-solving,
tree-shaped strategies are "a way to fan out quickly into a solution
space." The first computer chess programs tried the "brute force"
method of evaluating the consequences of every possible move at every step
of the game, but the most powerful computers, then and now, bog down in
the explosion of possibilities that happens if you try to look down too
many branches in a recursively branching structure. It was Claude Shannon,
the father of information theory, who demonstrated that the explosively
branching tree of possibilities is destined to destroy any brute-force approach
after only a few steps. Among Artificial-Intelligence programmers, the creation
of increasingly effective search-tree-pruning algorithms has become a grail and the results inturn beg the question for some, Does the Internet Have the Buddha Nature.
Early on the full moon day of Kason (April) in the year 103 of the Great Era, i.e. 2551 years ago, counting back from the year 1324 of the Burmese Era, the now emaciated prince sat down under the Bo Tree (the Bodhi Tree) near the big village of Senanigama awaiting the hour of going for alms food. At that time, Sujata, the daughter of a rich man from the village, was making preparations to give an offering to the tree-spirit of the Bo tree. She sent her maid ahead to tidy up the area under the spread of the holy tree. At the sight of the starving man seated under the tree, the maid thought the deity had made himself visible to receive their offering in person. She ran back in great excitement to inform her mistress.
Sujata put the milk rice which she had cooked early in the morning in a golden bowl worth a hundred thousand pieces of money. She covered the same with another golden bowl. She then proceeded with the bowls to the foot of the banyan tree where the prince remained seated and put the bowls in the hand of the soon to be Great Bodhisattva, saying, "May your wishes prosper like mine have." So saying, she departed.
Sujata, on becoming a maiden, had made a prayer at the banyan tree: "If I get a husband of equal rank and same caste with myself and my first born is a son, I will make an offering." Her prayer had been fulfilled and her offering of milk rice that day was intended for the tree deity in fulfillment of her pledge. However, later when she learnd that the Bodhisattva had overcome the powers of Mara and gained Enlightenment after taking the milk rice offered by her, she was overjoyed with the thought that she had made a noble deed to the greatest merit.
A tree and a leaf are one; that is, they depend on and define one another. A leaf exists because a tree exists and vice versa. To the non-dual mind and to themselves, the tree and the leaf transcend distinction. As autumn approaches, the leaf begins to quiver, darken and eventually falls to the ground, separating from the tree. This detachment resembles entering the dual world where the tree and leaf exist as two separate entities, no longer defining one another. According to Dogen Zenji, the eminent Soto Zen philosopher (1200-1253), precisely at this moment when the distinctions are realized, the tree and leaf understand the pervasive emptiness that encompasses them both. Only by falling into the realm of duality can they feel the sense of oneness they once manifested. The leaf does not fear the world of distinctions because it falls into the net of oneness that catches and sustains all things. The dichotomies of the tree, leaf and all entities, illuminate the underlying and consuming emptiness that engulfs all form.
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The above article, with some exceptions, written by:
Howard Reingold
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Whole Earth Review, 27 Gate Five Road,
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