Cr34t0rJuly 4, 2012 11:52 AM wrote:
Dear Shinzen, humanity calls for your explanation about Higgs boson. can’t wait to read it.
It’s a Papist conspiracy! They realized you can’t have Mass without it!
So much for humor; let me try metaphor.
Higgs is a sort of viscosity field that confers materiality to particles that would otherwise just be pure radiation. In some way, that seems analogous to how sensory viscosity causes the flow of experience to coagulate into the impression of somethingness. Neuroscientists are beginning to look into that. Richie Davidson and others refer to it as “stickiness”. Stickiness might be the reciprocal (opposite) of what I call equanimity.
But comparing this with the Higgs field is just a fun simile. Probably no more relevant to human spirituality than my corny attempt at humor.
Parallels like this can be fun, but we should resist the temptation to read too much into them. Here are some of my favorite parallels and my caveat.
For more on this, check out Buddhism and Science.