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Science of Meditation

You have probably heard about the Butterfly Effect, there are many movies and documentaries about it recently. It’s a principle about science and math that has some cross over with Buddhism, or the idea that we suffer because we are too attached to our self and ego.

The Butterfly Effect is a concept of Chaos theory that explains how seemingly small events can have large consequences. Mathematically this has to do with nonlinear dynamical systems that are sensitive to initial conditions - which is how natural systems tend to work. This is frequently explained by the weather and the Butterfly Effect. A small perturbation in the atmosphere like the fluttering of a butterflies wings can change the weather in another country. It’s because the weather uses all the information from around the world in one massively complex equation to compute the conditions at at any given moment. So any change in the atmosphere no matter how small when added to this complex weather equation can cause dramatic weather changes any where in the world.

So the Butterfly Effect is a scientifically proven and accepted principle that is followed by most systems in nature.

So that is pretty cool, but the next step is cool too. If almost anything can have a significant effect, and major effects can be caused by almost anything - it shows that all things are dependent on all other things. If a Butterfly flapping its wings could have a major effect then so can other butterflies, animals, and humans. And they are all effecting each other as well. If it rains then that affects everything which causes those things to change and create new causes.

So the theory of chaos and the Butterfly Effect supports the theory of interdependence which is also a theory held in Buddhism for thousands of years. In the West, chaos theory and interdependence are usually applied to physical systems, and in the East, interdependence is usually applied to mental systems such as the self, ego, and feelings. In Buddhism, interdependence of phenomena is used to show that feelings for instance, are dependent on many factors, causes, and conditions and they don’t have an absolute essence or identify. So basically if we are feeling good at feeling bad we shouldn’t take ownership because there were many other things that went into the cause of the feelings. In general we don’t have much control over our thoughts and feelings, they are dependent on many ( thousands or millions) of causes and years of conditioning most of which is beyond our control. As things are dependent on other things they are also subject to change. As everything in the universe is constantly changing and causing perturbations the interpendent web of reality is also in constant change.
So trying to hang on to a good thought or feeling because it tends to disappear as rapidly as it appeared. The important thing to realize is that even suffering is subject to change and it also will vanish as quickly as it came. Our suffering is compounded when we fight the natural change of things like trying to hang on to good feelings and make bad feelings go away,

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