Easy As Pie

"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe."

This is one of Carl Sagan's most repeated quotations, and it has all the genius his fans came to prize in him: brief, direct, plain-spoken, trenchant. Less noted is the pure Zen that Carl – a convinced, though deeply respectful, atheist – also encoded here. It's a complete and concise summary of dependent co-arising. Easily recalled and memorised. The only part I might gently dispute is "from scratch".

Making a pie – any pie – requires all of Creation.

Carl was referring to the fact that every atom in the ingredients, and all the physics required to produce, process, and bake them, and all the energy all that takes, from generating the materials to heating the oven to your own mental and physical effort, has to proceed from somewhere. As do we, down the eons-deep path back to the Big Bang. Every day and each step of which has engineered, in excruciating detail, not just your dessert recipe, but indeed, the mind that ponders it.

Skip one spec? No pie for you.

Kind of makes you want to tip your baker, eh?

Contemplating this truth helps me to think like a grown-up. To understand that circumstances have a long tail of origination – and that's after you've determined what those circumstances really are – a step people tend to drop. And that until you've delved as profoundly and as honestly as possible into both questions, you've no right to an opinion.

And that's just for scientific matters. (AKA the kindergarten of the intellect.) Make it a human issue, and it's back to GO.

Zen has that peculiarity of all religions, that it hawks an esoteric, unknowable Dharma, then metes out a drumline of simplistic rituals that followers are told is "Zen". Despite the obvious irony, there's a certain logic to this, but the problem is, that as in all binary systems, we tend to judge the superficial wing "fundamental" and dismiss the other as pretty but impractical.

Because given the choice, humans will cleave to observable, assessable behaviours while suppressing the justification for them.

Which is why our rules never work.

So today I'm sitting with Carl Sagan-roshi's teaching:

If you wish to avoid half-baked practice, you must first create the universe.


(Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)