“That’s happiness,” Willa Cather wrote, “to be dissolved into one thing full and nice.” We’ve many names for that dissolution, all revolving round some sense of spirituality they usually all involving what Iris Murdoch so splendidly termed “unselfing” — experiences, most frequently furnished by artwork, music, and nature, that enable us to “pierce the veil of egocentric consciousness and be a part of the world because it actually is.”
On the coronary heart of each our spirituality and our science lies this everlasting craving to know the world because it actually is lies — a craving with an infinite vector, pointing all the time simply previous the horizon of our data, anchored all the time in essentially the most elemental nature of the human animal: our curiosity, our restlessness, our starvation for fact and transcendence.
And but the reflex of selfing, which stands so typically between us and elemental fact, between us and transcendence, is hard-wired in our physiology — our whole expertise of actuality is lensed by way of our particular person consciousness, housed within the mind and tendrilled through the body. Coursing by way of our nervous system as electrical alerts beckoning to neurons are the tremors of falling in love and the anguish of grief, all of our emotions meted out by charged particles transferring at eighty ft per second. The stuff of poetry and the stuff of desires, all a particulate cloud of coruscating matter.
In The Transcendent Brain: Spirituality in the Age of Science (public library), the poetic physicist Alan Lightman units out to light up how these atomic constellations will be able to such exultant religious experiences, aglow with such shimmering emotions. From the prescient atomic materialism of Lucretius to Maxwell’s equations, from the poems of Emily Dickinson to the synchronized firing of neurons in recognizing a cherished one’s face, from the Hindu idea of darshan — the beholding of a deity or sacred object — to the cosmic wonders we have now beheld by way of the “oracle eye” of our majestic area telescopes, he argues that religious experiences “are as pure as starvation or love or need, given a mind of enough complexity.” Radiating from the millennia-wide inquiry is a revelation about how mere atoms and molecules can provide rise to the very persuasive expertise of a self, of a soul, of one thing that feels so huge and complicated and magnificently irreducible to matter.
He writes:
I’m a scientist and have all the time had a scientific view of the world — by which I imply that the universe is made of fabric stuff, and solely materials stuff, and that stuff is ruled by a small variety of basic legal guidelines. Each phenomenon has a trigger, which originates within the bodily universe. I’m a materialist. Not within the sense of searching for happiness in automobiles and good garments, however within the literal sense of the phrase: the assumption that every little thing is made out of atoms and molecules, and nothing extra. But, I’ve transcendent experiences. I communed with two ospreys that summer in Maine. I’ve emotions of being a part of issues bigger than myself. I’ve a way of connection to different individuals and to the world of residing issues, even to the stars. I’ve a way of magnificence. I’ve experiences of awe. And I’ve had transporting creative moments.
The mixture of those very various kinds of experiences, echoes of which reverberate by way of each human life, is what he phrases “spirituality” — a notion he nests contained in the paradox of materiality and irreducibility:
I imagine that the religious experiences we have now can come up from atoms and molecules. On the identical time, a few of these experiences, and definitely their very private and subjective nature, can’t be absolutely understood when it comes to atoms and molecules. I imagine within the legal guidelines of chemistry and biology and physics — in truth, as a scientist I a lot admire these legal guidelines — however I don’t suppose they seize, or can seize, the first-person expertise of creating eye contact with wild animals and related transcendent moments. Some human experiences are merely not reducible to zeros and ones.
Therein lies the paradox — provided that “all psychological sensations are rooted within the materials neurons of the nervous system and {the electrical} and chemical interactions between them,” how can this inescapable materiality wing us with such emotions of spirituality?
He provides a radiant reply in an orientation he calls “religious materialism” — the concept even with a lucid understanding of how nature works, and the way we work as materials miniatures of nature’s legal guidelines, we’re able to transcendent experiences arising from the dazzling tessellation of atoms we name consciousness. These experiences contour our highest humanity: our funding in residing an ethical life and stewarding the happiness of others, our capability for awe and surprise, our sensitivity to magnificence.
Recounting his personal earliest reminiscence of a religious expertise as a baby enchanted with the scientific methodology, he writes:
Though as a baby I developed a scientific view of the world, I additionally understood that not all issues had been topic to quantitative evaluation… I used to be about 9 years previous. It was a Sunday afternoon. I used to be alone in a bed room of my dwelling in Memphis, Tennessee, gazing out the window on the empty road, listening to the faint sound of a prepare passing an important distance away. Out of the blue I felt that I used to be myself from exterior my physique. For a short few moments, I had the feeling of seeing my whole life, and certainly the lifetime of the complete planet, as a short flicker in an important chasm of time, with an infinite span of time earlier than my existence and an infinite span of time afterward. My fleeting sensation included infinite area. With out physique or thoughts, I used to be one way or the other floating within the gargantuan stretch of area, far past the photo voltaic system and even the galaxy, area that stretched on and on and on. I felt myself to be a tiny speck, insignificant. A speck in an enormous universe that cared nothing about me or any residing beings and their little dots of existence — a universe that merely was. And I felt that every little thing I had skilled in my younger life, the enjoyment and the unhappiness, and every little thing that I might later expertise meant completely nothing within the grand scheme of issues. It was a realization each liberating and terrifying directly… Regardless of the dismal feeling that the universe didn’t care a whit about me, I did really feel linked to one thing far bigger than myself.
Time and again, he returns to this sense of connection to one thing past the self because the crucible of our transcendent experiences and the beating coronary heart of every little thing we name spirituality:
A standard function of all facets of spirituality is a lack of self, a letting go, a willingness to embrace one thing exterior of ourselves, a willingness to pay attention slightly than speak, a recognition that we’re small and the cosmos is giant.
And but this too is a psychological paradox rooted in our physiology:
Most transcendent experiences are fully ego-free. Within the second, we lose monitor of time and area, we lose monitor of our our bodies, we lose monitor of our selves. We dissolve. And but… spirituality emerges from consciousness and the fabric mind. And the paramount signature of consciousness is a way of self, an “I-ness” distinct from the remainder of the cosmos. Thus, curiously, a factor centered on self creates a factor absent of self.
[…]
Extra self, much less connection to the bigger world.
For the reason that daybreak of our species, myths and religions have tried to resolve this paradox with the idea of the soul — a vessel of I-ness that exists past the fabric realm, typically conceived of as a type of supra-energy. And but regardless of the lengthy cultural and theological historical past of perception in an immaterial soul, in actuality all vitality is accounted for by the forces of nature and their descriptive equations. He considers how our mortality — the entropic destiny of all matter, the antipode of the parable of the immortal soul — is the true crucible of our connection to one another and the immensity past us, the wellspring of all of our creativity:
For me, the notion that our atoms had been as soon as a part of different individuals and can once more develop into a part of different individuals after we die supplies a significant connectedness between us and the remainder of humanity, future and previous.
[…]
Our inescapable loss of life will be the single strongest truth of our transient existence on this unusual cosmos the place we discover ourselves. Certainly, one may argue that a lot of our pondering, our view of the world, our creative expression, and our spiritual beliefs contain coming to phrases with this basic truth.
The actual fact of our loss of life can be what binds us to all life, stretching all the way in which again to the Huge Bang, reminding us of the borrowed stardust that we’re:
For those who may tag every of the atoms in your physique and observe them backward in time, by way of the air that you simply breathed throughout your life, by way of the meals that you simply ate, again by way of the geological historical past of the Earth, by way of the traditional seas and soil, again to the formation of the Earth out of the photo voltaic nebular cloud, after which out into interstellar area, you could possibly hint every of your atoms, these precise atoms, to specific large stars prior to now of our galaxy. On the finish of their lifetimes, these stars exploded and spewed out their newly solid atoms into area, later to condense into planets and oceans and crops and your physique at this second.
Drawing on his splendid earlier writings about what actually happens when we die, he initiatives this atomic tagging ahead right into a future during which his I-ness is not any extra:
The atoms in my physique will stay, solely they are going to be scattered about. These atoms won’t know the place they got here from, however they are going to have been mine. A few of them will as soon as have been a part of the reminiscence of my mom dancing the bossa nova. Some will as soon as have been a part of the reminiscence of the vinegary odor of my first residence. Some will as soon as have been a part of my hand. If I may label every of my atoms at this second, imprint every with my Social Safety quantity, somebody may observe them for the subsequent thousand years as they floated in air, combined with the soil, turned components of specific crops and timber, dissolved within the ocean, after which floated once more to the air. And a few will undoubtedly develop into components of different individuals, specific individuals. So, we are actually linked to the celebrities, and we are actually linked to future generations of individuals. On this approach, even in a cloth universe, we’re linked to all issues future and previous.
Radiating from the rest of The Transcendent Brain, because it traces the historical past of science and the historical past of tradition, is a largehearted invitation to “stand on the precipice between the recognized and the unknown, with out concern, with out nervousness, however as an alternative with awe and surprise at this unusual and delightful cosmos we discover ourselves in.” Complement it with Rachel Carson on science and our spiritual bond with nature, then revisit the good naturalist John Burroughs’s century-old manifesto for spirituality in the age of science.
