Jan 8, 2021
Anti-Matter, Through the Looking Glass, and Nirvana
Something that has always piqued my curiosity is anti-matter. Anti-matter is made up of particles that have the opposite charge of the regular particles that make up matter. Scientists believe that each particle of matter has an identical and oppositely charged particle, anti-matter. This suggests that there were equal amounts of regular and anti-matter particles in the universe in the beginning, but there is currently more matter in the universe than anti-matter, which is one of the greatest mysteries of science and is a spring board that complements creationist theories; another startling fact about anti-matter is that when anti-matter particles meet with regular particles, the two particles annihilate each other.[1] Scientists claim that based on this scientific fact about anti-matter, none of us should exist, yet we miraculously do.[2] I first learned about anti-matter in an annotated edition of Through the Looking Glass.[3] One of the footnotes in the text argued that although Carroll enjoyed making fanciful tales for pure entertainment value, he indeed shaped the looking glass realm in such a way that it corresponds to what an anti-matter realm could be like if one were to exist in some way. If you think back to the regular world that Alice resided in, she was playing chess. In the mirror world, the characters she meets are from a chess game, but they move in strange ways, not to mention that there is an extra queen, Alice, who is from the realm of regular matter (In the real world there is more matter than anti-matter; in Through the Looking Glass, there is more anti-matter than matter. Alice is the extra queen, but she is not extra because there are two other queens. One is less than two.). For example, in the mirror realm, one walks away from the Red Queen to interact with her, and the White Queen travels backwards in time. If you want to get anywhere quickly, you can’t run. The faster you move, the more you stay in the same place. Carroll also depicts null cases, cases that focus on negation as presence, as a matter of course, such as when the White King praises Alice for seeing nobody from such a far distance on the road. As Carroll was a professor of mathematics and logic with a penchant for cryptograms, it makes sense that even his creative works are influenced by his day job. The story itself is so mind bending that the idea of a scientific basis for it hooked me, causing me to read it year after year and to ponder it as I followed news stories on anti-matter and anti-matter experiments thereafter.
Years into the future, I was sitting at my desk at the Fo Guang Shan International Translation Center (FGSITC), a publication division of the Hsi Lai Buddhist Temple, reviewing a booklet on “Nirvana” [4] by Venerable Master Hsing Yun, the founder of the humanitarian Fo Guang Shan Buddhist sect, and something clicked.
The text “Nirvana” begins with explaining some common ideas about reaching the state of nirvana and then dispels them. Yun writes that “Some ascetics [of the Theravāda school] consider nirvana as simply annihilation or dissolution…but these views are one-sided and perhaps even misleading; in actuality, nirvana and annihilation are as different as night and day” (1). I found this comment to be intriguing because in popular culture there is a widespread understanding of the Buddhist aim as complete detachment from material reality or any reality for that matter since any manifested reality is an illusion. People who are more familiar with Buddhism, at least the humanitarian Buddhism of the Mahayana School, might recognize that such complete detachment is something that the monastics pursue while the laity follow a more realistic path, focusing on virtue. This divided approach to Buddhism indicates that the common understanding of Buddhism by the underinformed might place more ascetism on all of the Buddhist devotees than is actually expected or practiced. The common perception and the reality are, thus, in opposition. Yun then reminds readers of Prince Siddhartha’s transformation into the Buddha. In deep meditation under the Bodhi tree, he comes to a true understanding of the nature of things. What he came to perceive was nirvana. It is something any human being can access if we can free ourselves from the illusion of separateness. While any human can access it, it takes more than the five precepts to do so in the fullest sense. Beyond just reaching that realm, it is necessary to understand what nirvana is. Yun explains that nirvana is something to be understood through both affirmation and negation. We can understand what this ineffable state is by knowing what it is not and by perceiving the qualities it has. It is without any quality by virtue of being everything at once. It is the eradication of all impulses and ways of being. It is the fulfillment of all completeness. To be in nirvana, we must have this awareness with out any notion of the awareness. There is no concept of the self within nirvana as the self is separate from the all, and nirvana is the complete harmony of non-separation. To someone unfamiliar with Buddhism, it might very well sound like phenomena from the Looking Glass Realm.
If all of that weren’t paradoxical and complex enough, what I discovered working at the Buddhist Temple, is that it never ends there. I entered in thinking I knew about Buddhism only to discover I knew as much as a five-year-old Buddhist. The entirety of their theology is intricately subdivided as a general rule. When a person first learns about the five precepts (vows) one must take to be an official Buddhist, for example, it is only to be followed with over two hundred more precepts as the lay person works toward monasticism. A monastic would have committed to all of the required precepts, and those precepts are not so easy. So too with Nirvana: Nirvana is subdivided, and attaining it isn’t easy. Nirvana can be just recognizing the true inherent nature of reality. We can be in Nirvana with remainder (karma) or without remainder (without karma) and finally the practitioner ends up in the nirvana of non-abiding. You abide in nirvana, at that point, by not abiding, by not having any type of identity or existence. It is an exercise in opposites in a way, but the opposite states dissolve by virtue of no state being able to operate within nirvana. In fact, if one enters the nirvana of non-abiding, “Out of kindness and compassion, one is no longer attached to nirvana[!]” To be in the ultimate state of nirvana, one must not be attached to it. To not be attached to it, one is not in it, and the self does not exist. This suggests annihilation, but again, nirvana is the opposite of annihilation in its limitless fullness. Yun goes on to say that “You need not be afraid for emptiness here does not mean annihilation. Emptiness pervades all space and is ever present in all things.” The emptiness of nirvana, the complete disattachment from all reality whether material or ethereal, is a state of infinite fullness.
Now, to me, the connection is this. Our reality is made of two types of particles: matter particles and anti-matter particles. Anti-matter particles have the opposite charge of regular matter particles. To put them together is annihilation, yet somehow the universe exists. The annihilation never happened. Particles, whether those of matter or anti-matter, pervade all reality. That anti-matter is part of it yet has proven resistant to scrutiny is the stuff of nirvana.
To enter nirvana is to enter anti-matter. It is to enter a state of non-matter, for to enter nirvana, in its most total sense, a person must not be an entity on any level. There is no separation, even on the molecular basis, from the totality. Instead, nirvana is complete harmony with totality, not annihilation. The complete absence of being that composes nirvana is reminiscent of anti-matter somehow as anti-matter is the opposite of matter. The annihilation that scientists theorized should have happened never happened. Nirvana is not annihilation.
[1] CERN staff. “Anti-Matter.” CERN: Accelerating Science. 2021. Web. 07 January 21.
[2] Kwon, Diana. “Ten Things You Might Not Know About Anti-Matter.” Symmetry Magazine. 28 April 2015. Web.
[3] Carroll, Lewis. The Annotated Alice. Ed. Martin Gardner. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000.
[4] Yun, Hsing, Venerable Master. “Nirvana.” Buddhism in Every Step. Hacienda Heights: Fo Guang Shan International Translation Center, 2018.
