Science and Buddhism

This is going to be a strange post.  When I started this blog, I didn't expect it to lead me here.  But here I am.  The last few weeks I have been re-reading my manual on meditation.  When I first began my meditation practice, I basically cut out all of the Buddhism philosophy, and just worked with the essentials of how to meditate.  I have never really been a religious person, although in my later years I began to acknowledge the existence of spirituality, basically being led there by what I knew about quantum physics and other events of my life.  So I considered myself to be spiritual, but not religious.  So like I said the last few weeks I have begun exploring the philosophy and wisdom of Buddhism and have been astounded at how much science agrees with what it is saying.  I started this blog because my intuition told me that there is a unifying, guiding principle underlying nature and the very fabric of the universe, and I wanted to explore what science had to say about it, so that I could align myself with "The Heart of the River".  So it initially was all about the relationships between the mind, brain and quantum realities.  So the last couple of months has seen me pouring over literature dealing with these ideas.  So when I started to see all these connections between Buddhism and science, and self improvement in general for that matter, needless to say I have become very interested in what else Buddhism has to say.  For one thing, Buddhism says that our experience of reality is an illusion. Here is a post that describes how the brain creates a representation of reality. Here is a post that describes a theory that the universe is in fact a great big hologram composed of waves of energy. Here is a post describing how the brain does calculations to translate wave forms into images. So that should cover the whole illusion principle.  Buddhism says that in order to have an accurate awareness, you need to train the mind with meditation. You can read this post to see how training the mind will alter the structure of the brain. Also Buddhism believes in Karma or a law of cause and effect.  Physics definitely believes in cause and effect. It is also seen as wisdom elsewhere like "You reap what you sow".  The self improvement industry believes in this such as in Stephen Covey's "The seven habits of highly effective people" with how virtues and / or morals lead to a strong character. Here is a post that describes the effects of Karma seen by carrying bad habits. Just today I received three books in the mail about meditation and Buddhism, so I will probably write more about this topic this week.