Yearning for transcendence

We can think of materialism in two distinct senses. The first, and more common, refers to a life driven by the pursuit of material wealth and comforts. The second is the belief that everything in existence is ultimately material. Both views, I would have thought, are incompatible with spirituality—the first because of its narrow, pleasure-driven perspective, and the second because in principle, it excludes the existence of anything that transcends the physical world. But my assumptions were challenged by my latest podcast guest.

Dr. Alan Lightman is an American physicist, writer, and social entrepreneur, who espouses the second but rejects the first sense of materialism. But he considers himself a "spiritual materialist": he believes we are made up of nothing more than material stuff; nevertheless he experiences and yearns for transcendence in a variety of forms. And he believes that spirituality as he understands it is an essential aspect of human experience that we should all prioritize.

Alan has served on the faculties of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and was the first person at MIT to receive dual faculty appointments in science and in the humanities. He is currently professor of the practice of the humanities at MIT. He is the author of numerous books, both nonfiction and fiction, including Einstein’s Dreams, an international bestseller, and The Diagnosis, a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction. He is also the host of the public television series “SEARCHING: Our Quest for Meaning in the Age of Science."  In 2005, Alan founded Harpswell, a nonprofit organization devoted to empowering young women leaders in Southeast Asia, and he has served as chair of its board. In August 2023, Alan was appointed a member of the United Nations’ Scientific Advisory Board. His latest book is The Transcendent Brain: Spirituality in the Age of Science. 

In our conversation, Alan shares profound insights into the relationships between beauty, science, and spirituality. We talk about his dual paths into physics and literature, the role of beauty in scientific discovery, his concept of spiritual materialism, the importance of cultivating gratitude, the limits of science in addressing questions of meaning, the importance of connection to nature, and his yearning to make the world a better place through his work.

While I’m not persuaded by materialism, I deeply admire many aspects of Alan’s approach. His humility, his profound attentiveness to experiences of transcendence, his call to step away from our distractions and busyness and to learn to attend to what matters, and his genuine respect for perspectives other than his own are all truly inspiring.

Here are some key takeaways:

• Art and science are both creative endeavors that can enrich each other
• Beauty often guides scientific discovery and understanding
• What spiritual materialism is and why it is not an oxymoron
• We should be open to experiences of "darshan" or transcendent encounters with the sublime
• Why we need to practice and cultivate gratitude
• How modern life distracts us from transcendent experiences
• Why spirituality matters for us all

You can listen to our conversation below (in two parts, which you can download wherever you get your podcasts) or watch the full video below. An unedited transcript of our conversation follows.

Transcript

Brandon: Alan, it's such a pleasure to have you on the podcast. Thanks for joining us.

Alan: Thank you for inviting me, Brandon.

Brandon: Alan, to get started, could you share a story of profound beauty from your childhood? I mean, you're such a master storyteller, and I know you probably have many examples that come to mind. But anything that stays with you till today, a memory of profound beauty from your childhood?

Alan: Well, of course, there are many moments of beauty that we all experience. Remembering something from childhood is a little bit of a challenge, but I will tell you one image that I had that I remember about my family. I grew up in Memphis, Tennessee. My family took vacations occasionally once every year to Kentucky Lake, which was in Kentucky and not a few hours drive from Memphis, Tennessee. We stayed in a hotel next to the lake. One morning, I got up early and there was a mist hanging over the lake. It was kind of bluish and purplish. It was just gorgeous. It was like I was in a fairyland or something. It was a very surreal image, and I will remember that always.

Brandon: Wow. I remember you sharing an experience of collecting — was it fireflies or some kind of bugs? Was that the same place?

Alan: No, that was a different place. The fireflies coming into synchrony and their flashing occurs many places around the country. But certainly, there were plenty of fireflies in the south part of the US where I grew up.

Brandon: Right. Were you particularly attentive to nature as a child and to beauty? Was that really something you paid attention to a lot in your childhood?

Alan: Well, I was certainly attentive to nature. I went to summer camp several years in a row, and we spent a lot of time outdoors learning how to identify different trees and different plants. So I had that experience with nature. I did write poetry as a child. I think some of the poems that I wrote had to do with with nature. I couldn't recite any of them now, and they're probably pretty awful.

Brandon: But being able to come up with a poem as a child is remarkable. I think a lot of us, I mean, my experience growing up in the sort of Indian subculture was, as a child, you were either steered into art or science. It was almost discouraged. I remember growing up wanting to be a — I was good at sketching portraits, of people's faces. I was a bit of a musician, and that was discouraged by my family. Because I was supposed to go into engineering or medicine. "Work in your math homework. The art is a waste of time." Were art and science equally encouraged in your family or in your school? What allowed you to nurture both sides of your interests?

Alan: Well, let me say that, first, I think that many children have an interest and even an aptitude for both art and science. The experience that you relate that happened to you is what happens in many cases: that teachers, friends, parents, push you in one direction to the other because life is just easier if you're either the artist type or the scientist type. Of course, that stands for being more intuitive versus being more deliberate.

I had an interest in both art and science from a very young age. I don't know where I got it from. Neither of my parents had anything to do with science. When I got into school, of course, I took, like many people, I took both art classes and science classes. I know that I wrote stories and poetry from a very young age, but I also had my own little laboratory that I built and shot rockets into the neighbor's yards. I did notice, by the time I got into high school, let's say, at age 15 or 16, that I had two distinct different groups of friends. I had the artist, intuitive type friends, and I had the scientific, deliberate, rational type friends. I wasn't aware of of having two separate groups of friends until I got to be about 16 years old. It didn't seem to me to be very unusual. I easily went back and forth between one group of friends and the other. But in retrospect, I realized that I really did have two different groups of friends.

Brandon: Wow. It seems you've continued to be a bridge builder between those domains for the rest of your life. How did you end up then pursuing physics for your career, at least, to start?

Alan: I was interested in both the arts and the sciences. When I entered university, I knew of some scientists who later became writers like C.P. Snow, but I didn't know of any writers who later became scientists. So even though I didn't understand the reason for these different trajectories, I did accept that message. And so I decided that I should start my career in science, but I didn't abandon my interest in the arts and in literature. I continued to write, but I did the writing as a hobby on weekends and evenings. I put most of my time into science. The reason why I was attracted to physics, among other sciences, is because I have a philosophical bent. And physics is the science that's closest to philosophy.

Brandon: That's great. You pursue your questions that are certainly challenging philosophically to address around the origins of the universe. Those are long-standing philosophical questions. I want to ask a little bit about the role of beauty in science. As you know, from some of the work we've done with scientists around the world, we find that there seem to be at least three different types of beauty. There's the sensory aspect of the phenomena you're studying, whether it's the stars or the cells you're looking at. There's a heuristic value for beauty, relying on beautiful equations as a guide to truth perhaps. Then what we're calling the beauty of understanding, that grasping of the hidden order or inner logic of things, which seems to many scientists like a kind of harmony, a sense of profound fit. Some have even told us that's the driving force for what they do. That's why they are bench scientists. That's why they didn't go to work in industry or have given up lucrative careers elsewhere, et cetera. What do you think of these three modes of beauty, if you found them in your own experience? Are there other modes of beauty in science that you've come across?

Alan: Well, I think I did look at your short three-minute video where you described those three different modes of beauty or experience of beauty, and I think that those categories make a lot of sense to me. I do know that beauty has been a very useful guide in science, especially in theoretical physics, where it is always a criteria that seems to guide us to the right theories and the right equations. There are a few notable example, counter examples, where nature doesn't follow our conception of beauty. The most prominent counter example is something called parity violation. Parity or conservation is the idea that everything that we see in a mirror also exists in nature, that is a left-handed version of everything, that's right-handed version also exists in nature, that nature does not have a handedness. We found experiments in the 1960s that, actually, nature does have a handedness, that the right and left are not identical as far as natural phenomena. So that was kind of a shock to physicists and a wake-up call that our human sense of beauty does not always accord with what we find in nature.

But there are many, many other examples. Where if a physicist has a choice between choosing between two theories, and one of them is more beautiful than the other, the more beautiful one is usually the correct one. So I think that it has been a very useful guide in science. So it's not that surprising to me that our human concept of beauty is obeyed by non-human nature. Because we are a part of nature. We evolved over millions of years from nature. We are part of nature ourselves. We're not separate from nature. And so, for that reason, it's not surprising to me that our experience of beauty, our concept of beauty, is usually in accord with nature.

Brandon: There are some who've argued that the challenge is, once you start to have a track record for certain kind of aesthetic, then you can be more easily misled, right? So there's a lot of debates now around what's happening at CERN and whether that's just chasing beautiful mathematics, right? You had an example, I think, from your early childhood of being misled by beauty of building a rocket. Could you share that story?

Alan: Well, among the many science projects I did as a kid, I built rockets. I mixed my own rocket fuel and had my own ignition system and everything. The rocket itself, in my view, was beautiful. I often painted my rockets or put decals on them because I thought that added to their beauty. One of the things that I did was when I put tail fins on my rocket, what I should have done was riveted them on, which had been a much stronger bond, but I just glued them on because I thought the rivets would spoil the beauty of the rocket. And of course, after flying for just a few 100 feet, the glued tail fins came off, and the rocket swung out of control and crashed. That was an example where my sense of aesthetics clashed with my more rational, practical side.

Brandon: How do you recommend scientists sort through this? Because, at times, it's hard to think about what other criterion you would use to move forward other than beauty, right? When you come up with a hypothesis you want to test, the more beautiful equation seems to be the thing to invest in.

Alan: What are the other criteria? Logical consistency is certainly very, very important. Your theory has to also be in accordance with the known body of knowledge. When you set out to invent a new theory or pursue a new theory in science, you're never inventing out of whole cloth. Because there's always a large body of knowledge that you have to be in accordance with. Now, sometimes, you'll have a theory, a new theory, that departs from the previous theory just very slightly in terms of its predictions, but it's conceptually very different. But in the end, science is an experimental endeavor. We have all kinds of wonderful ideas about the way nature should behave. But in the end, we have to test our theories against experiment. That distinguishes science from many other human activities. We have this external reality check that you don't have in the arts, you don't have in philosophy. There are many other endeavors, I mean, I would argue that you don't have in theology either. Although, I'm sure that there would be many theologians who would disagree with me on that.

Brandon: Well, the challenge, I suppose, now in areas of physics where it's hard to imagine what experimental testing would look like when it comes to some aspects of string theory or multiverses.

Alan: That's right. So that raises the interesting question of whether, if we are working on theories that are either extremely difficult or impossible to test, are we really doing science, or are we doing philosophy? As you correctly point out, modern physics has gotten backed itself into a corner these days with the multiverse, with string theory, where we don't really know how to test our theories. There may be no way to test whether other universes exist or maybe no way to — the origin of the universe, of course, is another example. We're never going to know for sure how our universe began. But if we have a theory that correctly predicts all the phenomena in our present-day universe, then it's not unreasonable to extrapolate backwards in time.

Brandon: I was talking with Sabina Hassan Felder on this podcast a few months ago. One thing she argued for was leaning more on something like mathematical consistency or theoretical consistency much more than aesthetic criteria. And so you can have some account that is mathematically consistent but looks really ugly. Maybe that's what you should invest in. But it's very hard to convince people with that.

Alan: Well, that's usually not the case. The aesthetic guide has a very, very good track record. I would say try the aesthetically-pleasing theory first, as we did with parity conservation. And only when you find that it's violated by nature do we turn to a more complex theory.

Brandon: I want to switch gears and talk a little bit about your work on spirituality. You call yourself a spiritual materialist. Could you say what you mean by that?

Alan: Well, I'm a materialist — and I think that most scientists are materialists — in that I believe that every thing in the world is made out of material atoms. Now, there might be some very complicated arrangement of those atoms, but I don't believe that there's any non-material essence. On the other hand, that's the material part of that name I give myself, I also appreciate spiritual experiences. I'm open to them. And by spiritual experiences, I mean feeling connected to things larger than ourselves. The appreciation of beauty, feeling connection to nature, those are some of the aspects of spirituality that are very important to me and that I feel that we must be open to. Now, that definition of spirituality may or may not include the existence of God. There are some people that feel that all of their spiritual experiences are mediated by God, whatever their conception of God is. We could talk about what God is. But I think that my conception of spirituality does not require a divine being who created the universe. So since I put great value in these kinds of spiritual experiences, and I'm also a materialist, that's why I call myself a spiritual materialist.

Brandon: You have a wonderful example which you've shared many times, many places. It'd be great to hear you to narrate that story about falling into infinity while you were on the boat, because I think that would give our listeners a good picture of the kind of experience you're talking about.

Alan: Well, in the summer, my wife and I — my wife is a painter — we spend our summers on a small island in Maine. There are no roads or bridges to the island. So every person on the island, their six families, we all have our own boats and our own docks. One night, I was coming back to my house on the island. I was out in the ocean in my boat. It was very late at night. I think it was after midnight. A very dark night sky, no moon but a clear sky. So the stars were fierce. I would describe them fiercely shining. I decided that I wanted to have a closer connection to the night sky. So I turned off the engine of the boat, and it got even quieter. There were no other boats out on the water except mine. Then I turned off the running lights of the boat, and it got even darker. I laid down in the boat and looked up at the sky. After a few moments, I felt like I was dissolving into the sky. I lost track of my body. I lost track of time. I lost track of myself, and I was just merging with the stars up there. I felt like I was really a part of the heavens. It also had a strange — this experience had a strange aspect of time that I felt like the infinite past and the infinite future had been compressed to adopt. It was just this moment of existence. I don't know exactly how long I was lying there because I didn't look at my watch. But after a while, I got up and started the engine again and then went home.

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You're listening to Beauty at Work. This podcast is made possible through support from the John Templeton Foundation and Templeton Religion Trust.

Brandon: There might be people who have similar experiences and perhaps don't value it in the way you do. I'm curious to know what you think about why it is that, for some of us, these moments are really significant and for others, they might be, you know?

Alan: Well, I don't really know. I think that all of us have experiences that have some similarity to this one. It may not be lying on a boat in Maine. There's a Hindu expression called darshan. And you probably are very familiar with it coming from India. I mean, I think there are several different translations of it. But I translate it as being open to the divine or being open to the sublime, I would say. I think that in Hinduism at least, that we are encouraged to be open to the sublime. I wish that everyone was open to the sublime. I think most people are, but we lead such busy lives these days with the pace of life as regulated by our communication devices, our smartphones and the internet. We're always checking off items on our to-do list. We live a very fast-paced life, much too fast for our own good. And I think that we don't take the time to just be present and just experience the world. We're just rushing from one thing to the next. I think that our communication technology has done many, many good things. It allows us to stay in touch with family members or on the other side of the planet. But it also has this downside of having sped up the pace of life and really robbed us of these quiet moments where we can just be, instead of doing just being and the ability — I think this is part of what darshan is all about — of just surrendering yourself to the moment. Not worrying about being anywhere, not worrying about accomplishing anything, not worrying about your to-do list, but just taking some time out of the day. And it would be great if everybody could do this for 10, or 15, or 20 minutes a day in just being in the moment, letting your mind go where it wants to go.

Brandon: I grew up a Hindu. When I was a child, we would go to the temple pretty regularly. And so darshan would be a kind of encounter when you go to the temple. But because we were in a consumeristic society, it was a very transactional mode of encounter. You go into, the moment of darshan is when you have the sacred flame and you sort of put your hands above it and then you bless yourself. So you're receiving a blessing from the divine. But usually, you're caring to that, you know, help me with my finances and help me with my studies. And so it's a very transactional mode. That is quite the opposite of what you were suggesting, which I think is closer to the truer meaning.

I had, as a kid, very rare moments of transcendence in the temple. The one vivid example that comes to mind is of, I grew up in the Middle East, in Oman, mostly. So it's the Arabian Desert. Very hot. I'd go to the Hindu temple there. You take off your shoes as you should. Then the stone-cold floors of the temple are quite a stark contrast to the dry heat outside. Then you go in. There's loud noises of bells. So it's not being quiet in nature. It's a very noisy environment, lots of smells of incense. The priest is chanting very loudly. And you receive a sweet. So a sweet offering is given to the gods, and you receive that. That's an explosion of flavors in your mouth, all right? So for me, it was that combination of sight, sound, smell, et cetera. It was happening during a particularly difficult time in my childhood. My mom, when I was about seven or eight, started to hallucinate and develop psychotic episodes. And so it was a traumatic experience at home. But it was contrasted by something that seemed to be, for me, a promise from another world: that this will be okay. There's something more, that there's something sweet and something delightful in this world that I don't create that is given to me, right? And so there's the possibility of gratitude in spite of these challenges. It's something that I learned to, as a kid, dismiss as I try to survive with my studies and move on. But I've returned to it since then a number of times as an example of the kind of difference experience, I think, that you were talking about, which, in my context, happened in more of a religious setting. But I don't think I really, I lost my belief in God very young. But it was still, at that time, a very profound experience.

Alan: You mentioned the word gratitude. I know that that's very important in Buddhism, and it may be important in Hinduism as well. I'm more familiar with Buddhism. I think that we don't show enough gratitude. And, somehow, I think darshan is connected to gratitude, that we're just thankful for being alive at all. I mean, we're very privileged to be alive at all in the universe. The fraction of matter in the universe as in living form is 1,000,000,000th of 1,000,000,000th. That's like a few grains of sand on the Gobi Desert. So we have a particular arrangement of atoms in our bodies that make us alive, and we're very privileged for that position. Conscious and intelligent life is even more rare. We, living beings, especially, we, intelligent living beings, are the only way that the universe can comment on itself. We are the observers, the spectators. And so there's both an obligation there and a sense of gratitude. Somehow, I think that that sense of gratitude is connected to being open to the world around us and being open to other people. I don't think we show enough gratitude to other people.

Brandon: Yeah, I think that's true. It's just another practice, I think. It's traditionally a spiritual practice to cultivate, right? It's gratitude. I want to share a story. I sent you this little quote from another biologist we interviewed. Her story reminded me a bit of your experience on the boat. She says — this is a UK biologist who we talked to — I was on a boat, and there was bioluminescence across the whole ocean. Then when you were swimming in the water, your whole body glowed. The fish around you would also glow the moment they moved. Then there were dolphins at one point, and they crossed. You could just see everything through light, that sense of understanding that all of these little glowing lights are individual organisms that are glowing for their own reasons. Actually, that connects us, all of us. That was a profound experience of real emotional connection. It was very touching. Then there's that sense of, I'm just this swirling part of this glowing tapestry. That's where I would say I felt spiritual. I wouldn't say it felt that way because I felt a stronger sense of connection to a higher power or God or gods. I think, for me, I suppose it felt spiritual just in that sense of being connected and being part of that whole tapestry of being, and being small in that moment and an insignificant part of that tapestry of being. So these experiences of awe, the sublime of vastness, of being pulled out of yourself but also being connected, of being united. The philosopher, Charles Taylor, argues that this is a universal human need. He says that this kind of cosmic connection is not simply any mode of awareness of the surrounding world but one shot through with joy and significance and inspiration. This is a human constant felt, at least, by some people in all ages across human history.

I'd like to believe the human constant and the human universal. But we talked to a number of scientists who said, "Look. I don't even know what you mean by connection. I don't think I've experienced anything like it." I'm curious to know what you think of that. Are some people incapable of it or just don't know how to attend to it, or does it need practice? Or, why would some people say, like, "None of this makes sense to me." We would share some vignettes and examples with them. We shared your example of being on the boat, and they're like, "I've never experienced anything like that. I don't even know it would feel like to have that experience." So I'm just curious to know what you think.

Alan: Well, I think that all of us have experiences of connection but we may not name it that. I think there are other transcendent experiences that come like of being present at the birth of a baby, especially if it's your baby. That is a profound feeling. You can call it connection, or you might call it something else. But it's certainly a very profound emotional feeling of being part of something larger than yourself. I think that people, that all of us, have gone out on a clear night and looked up at the sky, at the stars. I would guess that most people feel something when they do that. Whether they describe it as a connection or not, I think they're feeling something large there. These people that you talk to that said they didn't know it, they didn't experience anything like what I felt being on the boat or like the biologists felt with the bioluminescence, I think that if you had a longer conversation with them and probed more deeply, you might find that they did have experiences that were not unlike those. They may not have labeled them that but—

Brandon: Yeah, I suppose it's part of the limits of a one-hour or an hour-and-a-half-long interview. There's only so much. Some people are much more comfortable being open with a strange sociologist intervening in their lives, and others are not. Or have the language.

Alan: What about falling in love? I mean, almost all of us have fallen in love. We know that feeling of becoming part of someone else, where for a while, your ego dissolves and you just feel like that other person is your world or a part of your world. That also is not unrelated to what we're talking about. So I do think that if you would talk longer with these people and your guests and brought up other kinds of situations like falling in love, or watching the birth of a baby or something, or going outside and looking up at the sky, you might have found a resonance somewhere.

Brandon: Yeah, I think you're right. Yeah, it's hard to know what that would be. And even with falling in love, I know some people like to reduce it just to, "Well, that's just a chemical, feelings." You trivialize it, right? But there's got to be something that people find significant.

Alan: I like to talk to one of those people who says it's just a chemical.

Brandon: We were surprised at some of the people we talked to it. Then I don't know if they were just being ornery or defensive. So the other piece of pushback we got was like, why spirituality, in which perhaps I could ask you. Because there are both scientists and even some social scientists we talked to who think we're trying to be too expansive in extending the scope of spirituality to this sort of secular spirituality. Part of the problem is, okay, it's got some baggage. If you say spirituality, people think it's all woo-woo, mysticism.

Alan: Oh, yeah. Well, that's the problem. The word spirituality has a bad rep. But in terms of why spirituality, I mean, look at a lot of our art. That is inspired by something. It might not be by a divine being, but it's certainly inspired. Look at the Cro-Magnon paintings in the caves of France that are 30,000 years old, that have a very strong aesthetic to them. Look at some of the buildings that we built, our cathedrals. I think that whatever you call it, there's something there that is operating at an emotional level, that is part of being human. It's part of our achievements. It's part of us. We're not just all rational beings; we're emotional beings as well. I think it would be hard for you to find a guest to interview on your program who didn't have an emotional life of some kind or other.

Brandon: Some of the social scientists we would talk to would say, "Why not just call it emotions, or call it awe, or call it human desires for things of higher value? Why use the word spiritual or spirituality, which is associated with ontological kind of material?"

Alan: It doesn't mean material. I've used the word spirituality myself. You have, and many other people have. But it's not the word itself. I do understand that some people have a negative reaction to that word because they associate it with organized religion, and with required belief, and God and all of that. So I think that's why we have to define what we mean by that word in other words. I've given a lot of lectures, public lectures. During the Q&A, people ask me, "Do you believe in God?" The first thing I say is, "Tell me what you mean by God." We use these words, but some of them are very complicated and have many layers of meaning. You really have to define what you're talking about.

Brandon: I wanted to ask you whether it's spirituality in the sense in which you mean it is always positive. I was reading a largely positive valence. But can it ever be negative? Because certainly, in the context of religion, there's spiritual abuse or spirituality for the sake of dominating other spiritual cults, right? Can this kind of spiritual materialism have a dark side in any way?

Alan: Well, I suppose it could. I mean, all of the experiences that I personally have had that I associate with spirituality are positive. But I suppose that if a person had a concept of spirituality that included indoctrination or something equivalent to the Crusades — so we certainly have forced religion. I don't know exactly how you would say that. I do respect religious beliefs of all kinds. But religion has done a lot of good things and also a lot of bad things in the history of humans, and so has science. So it depends how you use it.

Brandon: I suppose there are spiritual cults that are maybe not theistic. But they certainly have, once you have a charismatic leader, and once you have people who follow that leader and a structure around it or even beliefs, that could be misleading, perhaps, right?

Alan: Yeah, I think that cults, in general, they probably have more potential for darkness than light. I'm wary of cults of all kinds, which I will find as just sort of a blind commitment to a person or an idea.

Brandon: I really enjoyed your PBS documentary. There was a section there where you go into the fMRI machine with your colleague there in his lab. Once you looked at the neural correlates of your experience on the boat, perhaps you're not satisfied. There's something that's dissatisfying around it. Then you asked your rabbi what are questions that science cannot answer for you. I'd like to ask you that question. Why were you dissatisfied with the explanation that neuroscience can offer? Then, are there questions that science can't answer for you?

Alan: Well, I was dissatisfied with the explanation of the neuroscientist. His name is Robert Desimone. Of course, he was speaking for neuroscience in general. I was dissatisfied because I didn't think that all of the factual information about how much electrical current was flowing through different parts of my brain, I didn't think that that captured the feeling that I had. And that gets to the question of consciousness, because consciousness is the fundamental mental sensation. We still don't understand exactly how consciousness arises from the material brain. Being a materialist, I don't think there's any supernatural element of consciousness. I think that it somehow arises from the chemical and electrical behavior of neurons in the brain. But how we get from that material basis to the sensation of consciousness, the feeling that we're separate entities in the world, that we have self-awareness, and that we can plan for the future and all the other attributes of consciousness, we don't yet know how to get from the material neurons to that experience that we call consciousness. So I don't know whether science will be able to explain the feeling, the feelings that we have, or the experience of consciousness. Even though, I think almost all scientists agree that the mind and the brain are the same thing, that everything that we think and feel and experience is rooted in the material neurons of the brain. But it may be that the tools of science are not appropriate for capturing or describing that sensation.

Brandon: I suppose they're also inappropriate for questions of meaning, right? A lot of the kinds of things that you described is spiritual. Even, say, your relationship with your spouse, I mean, it would be kind of absurd to describe that in scientific terms.

Alan: Right, yeah. I mean, there are plenty of interesting questions that lie outside the domain of science, as you say. Meaning, there are ethical questions like, is it ethical to kill an enemy soldier in time of war? Is it ethical to kill someone who is entering your house with a gun who's threatening your family? There are lots of ethical questions of that nature. Also, I'm not sure that science is the appropriate tool for questions of aesthetics. Why is this Rembrandt painting so beautiful, or why does this symphony haunt me? So again, I think that the aesthetic experience that we have is rooted in the brain, but I don't think that science is the right tool for trying to understand it or describe it.

Brandon: One of the other ways in which it seems that science is maybe inappropriately used is in trying to render accounts of the non-existence of God or to dismiss the god question. Some might argue that if a certain kind of God exists, that is a presence, that has a personality, then the appropriate mode of encounter or of knowledge would be to attempt an encounter, to attempt something like a conversation. I'm curious to know what you think of that.

Alan: Well, I think what you said is absolutely right, that science cannot disprove the existence of God. Of course, there are some prominent scientists who have attempted to do that. But on the other hand, I believe that religion or theology cannot prove the existence of God, that we have to take the existence of God as a matter of faith.

Brandon: I'm curious to know what you think about experience, particularly, the idea that if there is some kind of entity that one could have a relation with, then the right way of engaging or gaining knowledge about that entity is to attempt some kind of conversation. I wonder if that's something you've ever tried or if you've ever tried in your childhood.

Alan: Well, there are many people who believe they have had those conversations.

Brandon: Yeah, I have myself, I think. Because I came back to some kind of faith in God in my teenage years. And it was partly through a surprising response to an experiment of this sort, which I didn't expect.

Alan: I respect that. But of course, having a conversation with a being that you believe exists, I think, is perfectly fine. I mean, it makes sense. It's reasonable. I do know that it's not only the prophets that have had these conversations with God. There are many people living today, maybe including yourself, who have had such conversations and feel that there was some being on the other end that was holding up their end of the conversation.

Brandon: Right, yeah. I suppose it's always a challenge to know. Are you fooling yourself? How do you know this is a legitimate interpretation of what's going on, right? I wanted to ask you to share your encounter with the ospreys, because I have a question around interpretation that comes out of that. Would you mind sharing that encounter?

Alan: Yes, well, this also takes place in Maine. For many years, there has been an osprey nest a couple 100 feet from our house on the island. My wife and I watched the life cycles of the ospreys, from the laying of the eggs, to the hatching, to the growing up of the babies. One summer, I'd been very carefully watching the two baby ospreys as they were growing up over the summer. I was watching from a second-story circular deck on my house, and I was about eye level with the nest. The adolescent ospreys were looking at me as I was looking at them all summer long before they took their first flight. An osprey has to be a couple of months old before it's strong enough to take its first flight. I imagined that, to those ospreys, it looked like I was standing in my nest because it was a circular deck. So we had been looking at each other all summer long. Then finally, the moment came in early to mid-August when these two baby ospreys took their first maiden flight. So this is the first time that they had left the nest since they were born. They did this very large loop out over the ocean, and then turned around and swooped around and came right at me. I was standing on this deck looking at them, and they were coming at me.

Now, an adolescent osprey is a fearsome beast. They are large birds, and they have very powerful claws. These birds could have ripped my face off if they had wanted to. So my first instinct was to run back into the house and protect myself. Instead, I just stood there. The birds came at me at great speed. And when they were about 20 feet away, very close, they suddenly did a high g-acceleration upward and went up and over the roof of the house. But for about one second before they did that high-acceleration maneuver, we looked each other in the eye. They looked at me in the eye, and I looked at them in the eye. There was a mountain of information that was exchanged between us, a mountain of feeling. In that second, I felt like they were talking to me, and they were saying something like, "We're brothers. We've shared this land together. We've had the same experience. We know each other." It was a friendly look. After they flew over the house, I realized that I was in tears and I was shaking. Because it was such a profound experience. I've had dogs and cats as pets, and I've never had that kind of communion with an animal, let alone a wild animal.

Brandon: Yeah, that's extraordinary. I mean, I'm convinced that's the right way to interpret it. But if someone were to come along and say, you know, "Maybe those birds just had poor eyesight. They realized you're not just a bald squirrel. They're like, oh, we can't eat him," why would that not be a satisfying explanation of what happened there?

Alan: Well, because I didn't feel that. I mean, of course, I don't know what was in the ospreys' brains. Actually, birds have much more advanced brains than we think. We call people bird brains to diminish them. But actually, the neurons in the brains of birds are packed very closely together, and so they have a lot of neurons there. So I don't know what's in the birds' brains, but I know what I felt. And no matter what anyone says to me or whatever alternative explanations they offer, they cannot deny the feeling that I had. I had the feeling, and it was the feeling. It was an authentic feeling.

Brandon: It seems that it's more than just a feeling because there's also an interpretation there, and it seems like there's an adequacy to that interpretation. There's some kind of correspondence between what happened and what you felt, as well as a narrative, an account that actually can render that meaningful and true. It seems like there's some kind of a truth claim underlying that.

Alan: Well, that's an interesting way that you speak of it. I wouldn't make a truth claim. What I would say is that I definitely felt a connection to these birds. I felt that they were talking to me. I felt that I was connected, not only to them but to nature. That we were, together, part of nature. I don't know whether one could extend that to a truth claim, but it is a feeling that I have that was hyper-emphasized by that encounter with the ospreys, a feeling that we're all connected. And we are connected not only to other human beings but connected to nature.

Brandon: Yeah, I think that that's a crucial thing for us to recover in an alienated, disenchanted world that we're living in, right, is how to build that. Could you talk a little bit about creative transcendent, the concept of the creative transcendent, and how that experience plays itself out in your science, as well as in your writing?

Alan: Well, what I mean by the creative transcendent is that when we are creating something — it could be writing a poem. It could be making up a recipe for a new meal that you're cooking in the kitchen, a wide variety of things — we do get into a certain mental state where we lose track of our ego, we lose track of our self, and we rise above ourself in some way. That's what I mean by the creative transcendent very briefly.

Brandon: I made a really compelling argument for why we should take spirituality seriously. Do you think that the kind of spiritual materialism that you're offering can be helpful in any way to religious believers to perhaps enrich their spiritual quests or journeys? Is there something that it could help enhance in their own practices or pursuits?

Alan: Well, I don't know. I think just the awareness of these transcendent moments or these spiritual experiences, that they're important. They're important to being human. They're important to our creative life. I would say they're important to our intellectual life as well, the realization that we need to make time for them. We need to make space in our life for these experiences. I would offer that suggestion to both religious people and non-religious people. Religious people already have a strong foundation for their spirituality. That is their belief in God. But I think you could believe in God and still not be open to these experiences. I mean, part of it is an understanding that the world is moving too fast these days and that we really need to make time, make space for these experiences. We have to honor them and recognize their importance.

Brandon: Yeah, that's great. Alan, this season of our podcast is on yearning or longing. And so, as we close, I just wanted to ask if there's something that you would say has been a profound longing or yearning that has driven your work and continues to drive the work you're doing these days.

Alan: Well, that's an easy one for me to answer. And that is the desire to, in my small way, make the world a better place. I've led a very privileged, advantaged life. I grew up in an upper-middle class family. We had enough money. I had opportunities. I look around the world and I've traveled a lot, especially to Southeast Asia, and I see many people who have not had those advantages. I think that all of us who have some kind of privilege have some responsibility to help those who did not have those privileges and those advantages. For me, that's part of doing my bit to make the world a better place.

Brandon: Yeah, and you've done a tremendous amount. We'll direct our listeners and viewers to your books, as well as your PBS series. Is there anything on the humanitarian work you're doing in Cambodia that you'd like to share and we could direct our audience to?

Alan: Well, we have a website, which is www.harpswell.org. Our organization works to help empower young women in Southeast Asia. So we have a center in Cambodia and one in Malaysia where we have participants, young women, from all the countries of Southeast Asia. That's been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life.

Brandon: Amazing. It's been great to learn about your work. Alan, that's it for my questions. Is there anything else you'd like to add on the themes that we're discussing that we haven't touched on?

Alan: Well, you've had a great conversation with me, Brandon. And part of that is due to your own smarts and also a lot of preparation you did for this, which I thank you for.

Brandon: Well, your work is such a delight. It has been so refreshing for me.

Alan: Okay. Well, let me know when this is broadcast, when it's live.

Brandon: Absolutely. Will do. Thanks again, Alan. It's been such a pleasure.

Alan: Okay. Thanks, Brandon.

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