On Being A Scientific Mystic

                                           On Being a Scientific Mystic

                          “Yes, you can call it that,” Einstein replied calmly. “Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible laws and connections, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in fact, religious.”

It is useful to keep in mind our working definition of mysticism as "a constellation of distinctive practices, discourses, texts, institutions, traditions and experiences aimed at human transformation, variously defined in different traditions and contexts."  If we juxtapose this with a working definition of science as; "a systematic enterprise that creates, builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe," we get quite a nice pair of bookends that, although they are not reducible to one another, are certainly compatible and complementary in a synergistic way.

 From the earliest beginnings of human exploration and observation of nature and our attendant recordings, abstractions, and numerical and scientific formulations of what we observe, feel, intuit, and imagine, human beings have had a mystical orientation to the world. That is to say, we have encountered, and engaged the mystery of the universe with awe and curiosity, just as a child in a state of wonder with their first encounter of a flower, a dog, rain, and snow.

From their beginnings in Sumer (now Iraq) around 3500 BC, the Mesopotamian peoples began to attempt to record some observations of the world with extremely thorough numerical data. The observations of the heavens, and cycles of seasons were important as we began to have the ability to store food and build city/states in which large numbers of people co-habitated.  Astronomy and astrology were considered to be the same thing, as evidenced by the practice of this science in Babylonia by priests. Healers were also priests, and healing was set in the context of sacred temples that required divine intervention.  People were looking for omens and ways to divine the future, or as a scientist would say, make predictions. As certain groups of proto-scientists moved away from superstitions and blind belief, they still carried with them the skills of imagination, dreaming, intuiting, and using senses above and beyond their 5 ordinary senses.

Ancient Egypt necessitated an understanding of surveying land to protect and optimize farmland which was flooded annually by the Nile river, this greatly advanced geometry, architecture and medicine, which was mandated partly due to their religious mythology that involved mummification. 

We can see a parallel process with religious ritual and scientific advancement, the two aspects of life were not separate or mutually exclusive as they have become. Egypt was also the center of alchemical research which was the proto science of modern chemistry, but as C.G. Jung wrote;

“The real mystery does not behave mysteriously or secretively; it speaks a secret language, it adumbrates itself by a variety of images which all indicate its true nature. I am not speaking of a secret personally guarded by someone, with a content known to its possessor, but of a mystery, a matter or circumstance which is “secret,” i.e., known only through vague hints but essentially unknown. The real nature of matter was unknown to the alchemist: he knew it only in hints. In seeking to explore it he projected the unconscious into the darkness of matter in order to illuminate it. In order to explain the mystery of matter he projected yet another mystery - his own psychic background -into what was to be explained: Obscurum per obscurius, ignotum per ignotius! This procedure was not, of course, intentional; it was an involuntary occurrence.” 
― C.G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy

The Egyptian hieroglyphs, which was a phonetic writing system, served as the basis for the Egyptian Phoenician alphabet from which the later Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Arabic, and Cyrillic alphabets were derived. The city of Alexandria retained preeminence with its library, which literally held all extant knowledge in the world, and which was damaged by fire when it fell under Roman rule, being completely destroyed before 642. With it a huge amount of antique literature and knowledge was lost, this is equivalent to our modern library of congress being wiped out overnight with no back up of stored knowledge.

The real burgeoning of what we understand as scientific thought came about in classical antiquity with the Greeks in around the 6^th century B.C. There we see what would become “natural philosophers” with the likes of people like Thales who postulated that there was an originating principle of nature and the nature of matter was that of water.

                                                  

This is not unlike Laozi, the Mystical Chinese Taoist philosopher who formulated the Tao as; "the primordial essence or fundamental nature of the Universe." In the foundational text of Taoism, the Tao Te Ching, Laozi explains that; "Tao is not a 'name' for a 'thing' but the underlying natural order of the Universe whose ultimate essence is difficult to circumscribe due to it being non conceptual yet evident in one's being of aliveness. The Tao is "eternally nameless”  and to be distinguished from the countless 'named' things which are considered to be its manifestations, the reality of life before its descriptions of it." (Dao De Jing-32. Laozi)

Plato (428-348 BC), was strongly influenced by the mystical group of mathematicians (the Pythagoreans, who believed the universe was made of numbers). Plato generalized the notion of eternal mathematical truths to a wider scope of Forms or Ideas, or archetypes that included not only mathematics but the Forms of every object or quality. To Plato, these Forms or Ideas exist in an immortal, transcendent realm, outside space and time.

                                                             

Plato used the Greek word nous to signify the rational, immortal part of the soul through which the Forms could be known. As ancient philosophy progressed, the terms logos and nous were used to signify mind, reason, intellect, organizing principle, word, speech, thought, wisdom and meaning. In the Hebrew bible, when it says; “In the beginning was the Word,” it’s referring to the principle of Logos/Nous.

                                                    

The Greeks also gave us the concepts of Ethos-guiding beliefs or ideals, from which we get our symbol of justice as a blind woman with balanced scales, Eros-Romantic Love and the vitality of life, and Thanatos-the idea of death and dissolution.

The Platonic ideas were incorporated in religious thought as well as science. The founding fathers of modern science, Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, Kepler and Newton, were all essentially Platonists or Pythagoreans, which means they were mystically oriented believing they could find the mathematical patterns underlying the natural world, the eternal mathematical Ideas that underlie all physical reality. Galileo expressed it as; “The universe is a book written in the mathematical language.”

Einstein’s general theory of relativity is firmly in this tradition, and Arthur Eddington, who provided the first evidence in favor of the theory, concluded that it pointed to the idea that “The stuff of the world is mind stuff. The mind stuff is not spread out in space and time: these are part of the cyclic scheme ultimately derived out of it.”

All this points to the mystical idea that consciousness itself is the substratum of reality. The physicist James Jeans also adopted a Platonic perspective; “The universe can be best pictured….as consisting of pure thought, the thought of what, for want of a wider word, we must describe as a mathematical thinker.”

For his entire life, as he delved into the mysteries of the cosmos, Albert Einstein harbored a belief in, and reverence for, the harmony and beauty of what he called the mind of God as it was expressed in the creation of the universe and its laws.