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The Vimalakirti Sutra

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How can a tiny room hold thirty two thousand chairs

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There is a room

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About ten square meters

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A little smaller than your bedroom

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But inside this room

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Thirty two thousand chairs were placed

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Each hundreds of thousands of kilometers tall

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The room did not grow

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The chairs did not shrink

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Thirty two thousand of them

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Not one missing

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They all fit inside

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And the city outside did not become crowded

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Everything stayed the same

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This is no fairy tale

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This scene is plainly written in the Vimalakirti Sutra

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And if you think about it

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What physicists say today

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And what this passage described two thousand years ago

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Are strikingly similar

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Hello

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Everyone

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I am Leo Wang

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Last time we discussed the most famous silence in the sutra

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Manjushri asked about the gateway to nonduality

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Vimalakirti said nothing

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Today we look at an even more astonishing scene

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A tiny room

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Holding things on the scale of the universe

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The sutra calls this inconceivable liberation

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First let me explain what happened in the text

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Vimalakirti was a lay practitioner

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He lived in the city of Vaishali

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And had a room one zhang square

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Fangzhang originally did not mean an abbot

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It meant one zhang on each side

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One zhang is roughly three point three meters

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So this was a room about three meters square

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Around ten square meters

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One day

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Manjushri brought many bodhisattvas and disciples to visit him

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Shariputra looked around the room

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And wondered to himself

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There is not even a stool here

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Where will everyone sit

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Vimalakirti read his thoughts

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He asked Manjushri

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You have visited so many Buddha lands

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Which world has the finest lion thrones

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Manjushri replied

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To the east is a world called Sumeru Appearance

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Its Buddha is called Sumeru Lamp King

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The lion thrones there are the most magnificent

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Each stands eighty four thousand yojanas tall

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What does eighty four thousand yojanas mean

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A yojana ranges from seven to over ten kilometers

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Even using a middle estimate

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Each chair is hundreds of thousands of kilometers tall

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The Moon is about three hundred eighty thousand kilometers away

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In other words

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Each chair is at least as tall as that distance

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After hearing this

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Vimalakirti used the powers of inconceivable liberation

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To borrow thirty two thousand lion thrones from that Buddha

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And placed them all in his room

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The sutra makes this clear

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The room did not expand

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The lion thrones did not shrink

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Thirty two thousand thrones

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Each hundreds of thousands of kilometers tall

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Neatly arranged in a room of ten square meters

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And more than that

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Vaishali did not become crowded

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Nor did the entire world of Jambudvipa

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Everything remained as before

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But there is a fascinating detail

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Once all the lion thrones were inside

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The great bodhisattvas sat on them effortlessly

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But Shariputra and the other hearer disciples could not

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The chairs were too tall

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They could not reach them

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Vimalakirti told them

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Pay homage to Sumeru Lamp King Buddha

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And you will be able to sit

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They did as he said

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As soon as they bowed

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Their bodies grew as tall as those of the bodhisattvas

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And they sat down easily

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Did you notice

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The chairs never became shorter

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The room never became larger

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So what changed

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The people

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The state of those trying to sit had changed

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This detail matters enormously

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It tells us

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The wonder of that room

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Was not a magic trick performed on space

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It was a change of mind

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When your mind opens

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The world you can embrace opens with it

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Space itself did not move

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Your way of seeing it changed

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At this point you are probably thinking

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Is this not just mythology

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But Vimalakirti immediately added something

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He said

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Someone who has attained inconceivable liberation

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Can put Mount Sumeru inside a mustard seed

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The seed does not grow

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The mountain does not shrink

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They can pour the ocean into a single pore

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Without losing a drop

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He was not showing off

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He was pointing to something fundamental

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He was saying

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Space is not what you think it is

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Large and small

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Are labels you attach

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Beneath those labels

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They are the same thing

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This is the real revelation in the passage

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Inconceivable liberation

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Is not liberation from suffering here

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It frees you from fixed ideas of space and dimension

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When I first read this

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Honestly it seemed wildly exaggerated

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Mount Sumeru inside a mustard seed

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How could that ever be possible

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Later I came across a theory

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Called the holographic principle

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In the nineteen nineties

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Dutch physicist Gerard t Hooft proposed an idea

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American physicist Leonard Susskind later developed it further

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They said

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All the information in a three dimensional region

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Can be fully encoded on its two dimensional boundary

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What does that mean

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Imagine a room

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With tables chairs books and people

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All those three dimensional things

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All their information

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Could be recorded entirely on the walls

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Not simplified

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Not condensed into a summary

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Every bit encoded with nothing missing

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In black hole physics

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This has substantial theoretical support

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A black hole swallows enormous amounts of matter and energy

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But its information is not inside it

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It is on its surface

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That surface has a name

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The event horizon

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You might wonder

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What does this have to do with that tiny room

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Quite a lot

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What is the central idea of the holographic principle

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A small boundary

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Can hold all the information of a large space

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The boundary does not grow

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No information is lost

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Now look again at what Vimalakirti said

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The mustard seed does not grow

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Mount Sumeru does not shrink

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Something small contains everything in something large

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Structurally

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They are the same

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Of course

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I am not saying Vimalakirti knew the holographic principle

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I mean that in their own languages

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They point toward the same phenomenon

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Space is not simply a box of fixed size

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It is more like a way of encoding information

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Change the encoding

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And the relationship between large and small changes

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There is something else worth mentioning

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Quantum physics has a phenomenon called entanglement

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Once two particles become entangled

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No matter how far apart you separate them

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When one changes

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The other changes instantly with it

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No signal passes between them

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Distance seems irrelevant to this connection

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This has led some physicists to a conjecture

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Space itself

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May not be fundamental

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It may emerge from some deeper structure

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Just as temperature is not a property of individual particles

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But a large scale effect of their collective motion

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Space might work the same way

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If space really does emerge

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The story of that room no longer seems absurd

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It is simply saying

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At the level before space emerges

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Ten square meters and a million kilometers do not differ

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Because at that level

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The very concept of space does not yet exist

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Here is another way to understand it

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Draw a square on paper

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That is a two dimensional shape

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Now suppose I tell you

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It is actually the shadow of a cube projected onto paper

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If you were a two dimensional creature on that paper

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You would see only the square

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You would not know a much larger cube lay behind it

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To you

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The square would be all of reality

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But if someone lifted you off the paper

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And let you look again in three dimensions

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You would understand

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The square and the cube are the same thing

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One is the whole picture

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The other is a projection

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We have used an analogy before

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The moment of awakening

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Is like higher dimensional space collapsing into lower dimensional truth

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You suddenly see

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That things which appear contradictory

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Were never contradictory in a higher dimension

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That tiny room is the most extreme illustration of this

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The conflict between large and small

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Exists only in three dimensional space

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Look from another dimension

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And the conflict disappears

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Large has not become small

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Small has not become large

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The concepts of large and small have stopped applying

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This recalls a framework we often use in this series

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Yogacara teaches

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The world you see is not an objectively existing world

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It is a world manifested by consciousness

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What does that mean

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Your consciousness labels the raw stream of experience

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This is large

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That is small

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This is inside

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That is outside

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These labels are not reality itself

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They are a layer projected by your consciousness

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Yogacara calls this the imagined nature

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The story of that room

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Lets you see how the imagined nature works

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You say this room is only ten square meters

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That is your label

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You say this chair is hundreds of thousands of kilometers tall

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That is another label

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When Vimalakirti puts all those thrones inside the room

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He is not breaking the laws of physics

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He is breaking your system of labels

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When the labels shatter

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You see the reality beneath them

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That reality has no size

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And is not constrained by containers

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Yogacara calls this the perfected nature

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Seeing things exactly as they are

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Neither adding nor obscuring anything

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I want to take this one step further

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You may have used a large language model

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Hundreds of billions of characters of text

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Knowledge accumulated over thousands of years

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Are compressed into a set of parameters

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Those parameters may occupy just a few gigabytes

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Yet whatever question you ask

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It can reconstruct a reasonable answer from those few gigabytes

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Hundreds of billions of characters

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Packed into a few gigabytes

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The essential relationships in the information remain

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What disappears is redundancy

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Remove the repetitive and unnecessary parts

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And the remaining core structure is quite small

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Yet it carries all the meaning

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Does that not resemble Sumeru in a mustard seed

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It is not physically forcing the mountain inside

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It means the entire essence of Mount Sumeru

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Can already be carried by a smaller structure

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Because large and small are appearances

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The information structure is what matters

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In another chapter of the Vimalakirti Sutra

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The chapter on the Fragrant Buddha

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Another inconceivable event is recorded

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Vimalakirti sends an emanation to fetch food from a distant Buddha land

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Its Buddha is called the Fragrant Tathagata

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The food there has a special fragrance

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The emanation brings back one bowl of food

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Everyone present eats from it

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Everyone is satisfied

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Yet the food does not diminish

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One bowl of food

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Feeding unlimited people

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Without running out

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Again you may think this is exaggerated

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But consider this

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A good piece of code is used by a million people

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Each uses it fully

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Yet the code does not wear out

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A good formula is used by students for centuries

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Yet the formula itself stays unchanged

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Information is not depleted by sharing

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The scarcity of the material world does not apply to information

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Over two thousand years ago Vimalakirti

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Demonstrated this in his tiny room

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With one bowl of food he tells you

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When you view the world at the level of information

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Scarcity is an illusion

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Matter looks finite

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Because you measure it with a material ruler

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Use a different ruler

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And the distinction between finite and infinite disappears

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Have you noticed

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Vimalakirti never presents a theory of emptiness

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He does not say all phenomena are empty

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Or explain how causes and conditions combine

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He gives no explanation

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He simply does something

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And lets you see for yourself

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This is the most powerful teaching method in the sutra

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He does not debate with you

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Or give you definitions

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He shows you directly

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If you see what it means

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The principle becomes clear on its own

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If you do not

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No amount of theory can help

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All explanations are fingers

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Pointing at the moon

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You must look up for yourself

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Sometimes I think

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We do something similar in everyday life

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We are constantly measuring

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How large this room is

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How far that road goes

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How long something takes

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We live inside measurement systems we have built

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Then use their results to define

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What is possible and what is impossible

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What Vimalakirti does

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Is switch off the measurement system

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Once it is switched off

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The boundary between possible and impossible disappears too

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The world has not changed

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You have put down the ruler used to measure it

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The story of the goddess scattering flowers

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I covered in the Stories of Practice series

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Also takes place in that room

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Today we explored another side of it

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Not a parable of practice in worldly life

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But the secret of space itself

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You may have experienced something like this

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In a deeply quiet state

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Or for a moment during meditation

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The space around you suddenly stops feeling like a fixed box

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You cannot say whether it grew or shrank

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The distinction between large and small simply seems unimportant

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The moment is brief

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It may pass in seconds

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But it leaves a feeling

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Things you normally take for granted

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Size distance and the boundaries between inside and outside

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May not be the foundation of reality

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They may just be tools your consciousness uses to organize experience

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The inconceivable liberation described in the sutra

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Ultimately

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Is telling you

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00:13:52,348 --> 00:13:54,157
When you put down these tools

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What you will see

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You do not see a larger world

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Or a smaller one

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What you see is

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That the distinction between large and small was always your addition

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Reality without that added layer

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Is reality as it truly is

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This is a distinctive method of the sutra among Mahayana texts

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It does not explain emptiness through abstract reasoning

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Other sutras have already done that

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It demonstrates directly

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00:14:20,992 --> 00:14:21,702
One tiny room

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00:14:22,152 --> 00:14:23,641
Thirty two thousand chairs

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00:14:23,953 --> 00:14:24,742
One mustard seed

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One Mount Sumeru

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It does not explain why this is possible

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It says that in true reality

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No explanation is needed

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Your discriminating mind creates large and small

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00:14:35,313 --> 00:14:37,761
Your discriminating mind says this is impossible

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00:14:38,152 --> 00:14:39,061
Let that mind go

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00:14:39,392 --> 00:14:41,242
And the inconceivable becomes ordinary

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00:14:42,297 --> 00:14:46,466
Holography encodes three dimensional information on a two dimensional boundary

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00:14:46,697 --> 00:14:49,387
Entanglement says distance does not affect correlation

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00:14:49,618 --> 00:14:53,907
Higher dimensional geometry dissolves three dimensional contradictions in higher dimensions

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00:14:54,297 --> 00:14:58,787
Language models compress vast text into gigabytes while preserving its essence

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00:14:59,098 --> 00:15:00,537
These modern disciplines

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00:15:00,537 --> 00:15:03,267
Enter the same room through different doors

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00:15:03,697 --> 00:15:06,186
But Vimalakirti was already inside

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00:15:06,457 --> 00:15:08,736
Sitting in that ten square meter room

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00:15:08,738 --> 00:15:10,518
Waiting for more than two thousand years

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00:15:11,030 --> 00:15:13,581
What do you think space really is

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00:15:14,087 --> 00:15:15,564
A physical container

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00:15:16,153 --> 00:15:18,249
Or a way for consciousness to encode experience

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00:15:18,964 --> 00:15:23,085
Have you ever felt your sense of size suddenly disappear

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I would love to hear your thoughts

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00:15:25,203 --> 00:15:27,071
Let me know in the comments

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00:15:27,310 --> 00:15:28,002
I am Leo Wang

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See you next time