The Bystander

While everyone else



Is so busy striving,


The lone traveler


Is at ease by himself.


He's been living outside of convention


For a long time now;


In his pouch there is nothing at all.


When he walks,


He takes a cane for a companion;


When he talks,


He has the rocks for an audience.


If you ask him what his religion is,


When hungry it's a bowl of rice.










- Wen-siang (1210-1280)

Labels & Slogans

Because you grasp labels and slogans, 
You are hindered by those labels and slogans, 
Both those used in ordinary life and those
Considered sacred. 
Thus they obstruct your perception of objective truth, 
And you cannot understand clearly. 

 - Linji (d. 867)

Big Bank & dark matter

Even as a modern creation myth, Big Bang is awe-inspiring: imagine a moment before the birth of Time, when Space was nothing, when the Universe was not even a seed inside a Singularity. Then, with a mighty surge, all heaven broke loose. 

That was nearly 13.7 billion years ago. Since then, the universe has been expanding and cooling, and within the expanding universe, massive clouds of gas have been pulled together by Mother Gravity to form stars and galaxies. The material for this - from giant planets to tiniest diatoms - is embedded in a sea of dark matter which can only be detected by the gravity that helped in the creation by pulling things together. 

If all this sounds like a most unlikely coincidence on a truly cosmic scale, it is! As the visionary theorist Fred Hoyle pointed out, if gravity had been slightly weaker, it might never have been able to crush the Sun's core sufficiently to ignite the nuclear furnace that creates sunlight. 

Had it been wee bit stronger, the Sun might have burnt off all its fuel billions of years ago. Plants and people could never have risen on the planet. 

Such a chain of reasoning led to Hoyle's carbon coincidence or cosmic connection: all the heavy elements in our body, ranging from carbon to iron, were forged inside distant stars in an exquisitely orchestrated process; we were literally the children of stars! 

Sceptics like Victor Stenger, however, like to pick holes in the fine-tuning argument. Different conditions might have spawned completely different forms of Goldilocks and her bears. But we still don't know why.