Physics & Wonder with Dr. Alan Paige Lightman
Rainbows, Auroras and other Miracles of the Material
SHOW NOTES | TRANSCRIPT
We are thrilled to welcome Alan Paige Lightman as a guest on our podcast, where he will share his unique perspectives on the intersection of science, spirituality, and the human experience.
Alan Lightman is an American physicist, writer, and social entrepreneur. PhD in physics, Caltech. He is the recipient of six honorary degrees. He 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 the professor of the practice of the humanities at MIT. Lightman’s work in astrophysics concerns black holes and cosmic radiation processes. The episode weaves together scientific inquiry, spiritual wonder, and philosophical depth, encouraging listeners to embrace a worldview that integrates awe and material reality. Join us as we explore the profound insights he has to offer.
In this episode, we cover:
Einstein's Dreams and Its Impact
Background and Achievements
Understanding the Space In Between
Natural Phenomena and Their Scientific Explanations
Hummingbird Flight and the Beauty of Nature
The Role of Mystery in Science and Creativity
The Future of AI and Human Evolution
Balancing Multiple Interests and Depth in Knowledge
Preparing for the End and the Concept of Nothingness
Please explore Dr. Lightman’s works and reflect on how this episode may have sparked new understandings of time, wonder, or the miraculous.
Thank you to Rosewoman.com and Radiantfarms.us for your support.
Helpful links:
Alan Paige Lightman - Author of The Transcendent Brain: Spirituality in the Age of Science
Subscribe to the Museletter on Substack
Find Rosebud Woman on Instagram as @rosebudwoman, Christine on Instagram as @christinemariemason, and on Tiktok as @therosewoman108.
Find Radiant Farms on Instagram @weareradiantfarms and on Facebook @RadiantFarmsLLC
Order the new Blue Lotus Gift Set: Tea and Floral Tea Infuser (Gold or Silver) for this holiday season at Radiant Farms. It is made with 100% Blue Lotus Flowers.
Check out these Free E-books brought to you by Radiant Farms
Listen, Like, Share & Subscribe on Apple Podcast | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Youtube
TRANSCRIPT
Alan Paige Lightman 0:01
Well, it's interesting. If there are new things that appear, why are we frightened by some and appreciative of others? Can you imagine what people 2000 years ago thought of eclipses when they had knew nothing about astronomy? What it would be like, how scary that would be
Christine Mason 0:22
it's been almost 30 years since physicist Alan Lightman published his small novel Einstein's dreams. This book explores in short prose chapters the relationship of time to the creation of our world. He explores things like worlds that have love time and clock time, or worlds where it was thought that the farther away you were from the surface of the Earth, the slower time moved, which resulted in a world where people built their homes increasingly up the mountain and on stilts. This was a very important book for me personally, because it sort of shocked me into understanding that perhaps humans are wired to perceive time linearly and in a forward thinking way, but that that sits on top of the physical reality that all time space exists at once. How does that work? I'm going to read you a couple of passages from Einstein's dreams to give you a flavor of what Dr Lightman was writing about then, because it feeds into what we're talking about today. Here's an example. Here's one. In this world, most people have learned how to live in the moment. The argument goes that if the past has uncertain effect on the present, there is no need to dwell on the past. And if the present has little effect on the future, present actions need not be weighed in for their consequence. Rather, each act is an island in time to be judged on their own. In this acausal world, scientists are helpless. Their predictions become post dictions. Their equations become justifications, their logic illogic scientists turn reckless and mutter like gamblers who cannot stop betting scientists are buffoons, not because they're rational, but because the cosmos is irrational. Or perhaps it is not because the cosmos is irrational, because they are rational. Who can say which in an acausal world? Another chapter imagines a world without memory. Here's a segment from that chapter. Arriving home, each man finds a woman and children waiting at the door, introduces himself, helps with the evening meal, reads stories to the children. Likewise, each woman, returning from her job, meets a husband, children, sofas, lamps, wallpaper, China patterns. And late at night, the husband and wife do not linger at the table to discuss the day's activities, their children's school, the bank account. Instead, they smile at one another, feel the warming blood, the ache between the legs, as when they met the first time 15 years ago. They find their bedroom, stumble past family photographs they do not recognize, and pass the night in lust for it is only habit and memory that dulls the physical passion without memory, each night is the first night. Each morning is the first morning. Each kiss and touch are the first I mean, there are so many more. He has one where he imagines that time is not a quantity, but a quality, like the luminescence of the night above the trees, just when a rising moon has touched the tree line, time exists, but it cannot be measured. He imagines a world when body time and clock time are disparate. Dr Lightman himself is a bit of a national treasure. He grew up in Tennessee and got a PhD in theoretical physics. He was a postdoc in astrophysics at Cornell, and he started writing poetry then and then, in 1981 he started publishing essays about science, the human side of science, the mind of science. And has been in American scholar, the Atlantic Monthly, the Boston review, Daedalus, discover, I mean, Harvard magazine, The New Yorker, like pretty much every major publication that might cover something like this, he's been a professor at MIT since 1989 he co founded the graduate program in science writing at MIT. I mean, his awards, his academic awards, are really crazy rich. So he's one of the few people who have really crossed over the science and philosophy split in a really deep way. He's both a distinguished physicist and an accomplished novelist. I love this part of his bio where they say his essay in the name of love was the first article about love and language published in Nature, and his the first law of thermodynamics, was the first short story published in a physics journal, so his ability to cross over and blend is very unique. In addition to writing over 20 books, doing PBS shows, being interviewed on every major science program in the country, write. Multiple essays, he has founded a nonprofit organization whose mission is to empower a new generation of women leaders in Cambodia and the developing world, for which he received an award from the Cambodian government. So why now? Why do we get the privilege of having Dr Lightman on the show now. Well, his work continues, and he has just published a book called The miraculous from the material, and that is on top of another book on the transcendent brain that was published the year before. And if you've been participating in the show, then you know that these topics are very near and dear to me. The subtitle of the transcendent brain is spirituality in the Age of Science and the miraculous from the material explores how you might find more wonder, more enchantment in the visible world if you understand the science behind it that not only does it not take away from the mystery, the wonder and the awe, but looking at the science and the complexity actually enhances the wonder and awe. He is a major advocate for the healing of the split between what are consistently pushed in the West as disparate concepts for the healing of the split of the material and the spiritual into one dance. I begin by asking him about some of his formative experiences that made him into this synthesizer of the material and the wondrous.
Speaker 1 6:40
I can mention one when I was about nine years old or so, or maybe 10. It was the middle of the afternoon, and I was in my home in Memphis, Tennessee. There was a railroad track near our house, and I could hear a train passing. And suddenly I don't know how I felt, like I was drifting in outer space. I became aware of myself as a small part of the cosmos for the first time, and I imagined myself in outer space. I lost track of my body, and I lost track of time, and I was just floating in outer space, and I was aware of of the vastness of the universe, and the vastness of time before I would was born and and the vastness of time after I would be gone. And I realized that the universe really didn't care much about me, that I was just a tiny speck in the cosmos. That that thought didn't frighten me, but I suddenly became aware of where I was as a tiny speck and a very large universe. It was, it was an out of body experience, not that I was looking down and seeing my body, but I was totally disconnected from my body. I had lost track of my body. It happened when I was nine years old, and I still remember it. So it had a very big impression
Christine Mason 8:13
on me. It's a spontaneous Unity Consciousness experience. Yes, it was something like that. There's a researcher in England who surveyed people and said, How many of you have had this moment of unity consciousness in nature? And like half of the people said they had and they had it in nature, and they most never told anyone, because they thought they were strange. But there's actually sort of a sense that there's something in us that's wired to have those perceptions. Well,
Speaker 1 8:39
certainly feeling connection to nature is, I think, is in our DNA, because for most of our history, we live close to nature outside. And if you developed a sensitivity to nature, it helped you survive. You knew where to live and where would be a good source of water, and what were the animals that were dangerous to you, and what were the foods that you could eat? And so there was some survival benefit and being close to nature. So I think that that feeling of being connected to nature, which which is probably part of the Unity Consciousness you're referring to, developed a couple of million years ago in our evolutionary history. Well, you
Christine Mason 9:24
know, I was really surprised to hear you describe yourself as a materialist because of the sort of out of body or transcendent or mystical, what one might call mystical experiences. And then, you know, you're talking about wonder. You're talking about the brain perceiving things as transcendent. So I wonder if we could talk about, like, do you consider yourself truly a materialist or a spiritual materialist? Like, like, how would you qualify where you're currently landing in the cosmology of how all this stuff is working? What's going on here?
Speaker 1 9:56
Well, I'm materialist and and that I believe. Believe that every experience we have, all the objects of the universe and our own experiences, especially our mental experiences, are rooted in material, atoms and molecules, and in the case of our mental experiences, they're rooted in the neurons in our brain. But I also think that our brains are capable of some extraordinary sensations and experiences and feeling connected to things larger than ourselves, feeling connected to nature, feeling connected to other people, and even the most fundamental mental experience, which is consciousness, that I acknowledge. All of those extraordinary experiences, I embrace them, I welcome them, but at the same time, I believe that they're rooted in the material brain. And for me, the fact that I believe they're rooted in material doesn't diminish my respect and awe of those experiences. And in the book the miraculous from the material, I was trying to say that even understanding that the scientific underpinnings of phenomena like rainbows or volcanoes, it doesn't diminish the emotional experience. In fact, to me, it enhances the the experience of those things, having knowing the the science behind them, but it certainly doesn't diminish the wonder and awe that I feel for just being alive in the world. I mean, I, as I've gotten older, I'm more and more aware of how precious it is just to be alive. The vast the vast majority of material in the universe is not in living form. Well,
Christine Mason 11:43
there are so many like even even on that can I ask you just a fine, pointed question, what about the space in between?
Unknown Speaker 11:50
The space in between?
Christine Mason 11:52
What like the molecule or the atom and the cell wall in the middle of the nucleus, or like the between? What's the space in between, if it's not material. I mean, how do you understand that? Well,
Speaker 1 12:04
it's still material. Okay? Because to a physicist, there is not no such thing as a perfect vacuum, a perfect emptiness. Because even in the space between the center of an atom, in the outer edges of the atom, that vast space that appears to be empty there's actually there are energy fields which, which physicists consider to be material. I see because, you know, you can, you can quantify the amount of energy. You can put a box around it and say it's inside the box. It's not like the non material essence of the soul and other non material things that many people believe in, but it's a good question that you asked.
Christine Mason 12:46
This is so nuanced and subtle to say like there is energy that's material and is measurable, and some people would say that is what God is, or whatever the transcendent reality is, that energy force that permeates everything, and it doesn't have to be an individual soul body that's certain. Yes,
Speaker 1 13:04
well, physicists have learned how to measure energy according to Einstein's formula, equal MC squared. You can convert energy into matter, and you can say exactly how much matter you get from a certain amount of energy. So it's not the same non material essence or energy that many people associate with God or the soul or Yeah,
Christine Mason 13:27
it's also that tends to be more personalized and subjective. I was really loving, you know, this idea that knowing the mechanics of something don't diminish its wonder. In fact, it accelerates it. And in this most recent book, you mentioned rainbows. Maybe we could do rainbows first. So in the book, for people who haven't yet read it, I'm sure you all read it, that it takes these phenomenon that occur in nature, 36 phenomenon and outlines for you what these magical, quote, unquote, magical experiences are. I think you call it the realm of the magical, what they appear to be, and then what we know now about how they're caused scientifically, and so maybe we can do a few of those. You want to do that? Fine, let's do let's do rainbows. Let's do rainbow. What's a rainbow other than gorgeous and lucky and literally, can stop people in their tracks and have them leave their desk and go look rainbow.
Speaker 1 14:18
Yeah, they're pretty spectacular, and they are gorgeous. Rainbows are caused by the reflection of sunlight off water droplets in the air. White light, which is the light that comes from the sun, actually has a whole range of colors that are all mixed together, and each of those colors is associated with a different wavelength, like water ripples of different lengths, but when they're all mixed together, they appear white. But when sunlight reflects off water droplets in the air after a rain, different wavelengths get bent by different amounts, and so. Colors spread out. And we're familiar with a prism. You know, you hold a prism in front of the window and you see colors coming out of it. That's because the different wavelengths of incoming light are being spread out. And that's what happens in a rainbow. So it happens when the sun is behind you, and you get a bigger rainbow when the sun is low in the sky, and There's recently been a rain, so there's still a lot of water droplets in the air. It's striking
Christine Mason 15:28
in how all of the raindrops that are next to one another are catching the light at the same angle. So you can see a prism in a single drop of water, or you can see all of these architecting themselves into this giant bow, like, how do they know what part to play? How do I know whether I'm playing violet or yellow, if I'm in a rainbow, the
Speaker 1 15:47
different colors get bent at different angles when they enter the water droplet and then reflect off the back wall of the water droplet, they get changed their direction by different amounts depending on the wavelength. So is that that's how a violet knows that it's violet. It knows what wavelength it is. That is how many violet wavelengths it would take to stretch an inch, and there would be a different number of wavelengths just to stretch an inch for a red light and so on. So I don't, I don't think that violet light actually has a brain or a consciousness. But many, many things act according to the laws of science without knowing how they're acting. It's just mechanical, as you said. What
Christine Mason 16:32
about what about the Aurora Borealis? We went and saw a New Year's Eve, went up above the Arctic Circle with the Sami and watch the Aurora Borealis. Oh, so what about that? What's happening there?
Speaker 1 16:45
It's pretty amazing. The sun is constantly throwing out subatomic particles. First, it's hot and has a magnetic field. It's accelerating particles, and these subatomic particles are streaming through space, and at certain times of the year, the sun is particularly active and particularly hot and and it's it's sending out a particularly large amount of these subatomic particles, which stream from the Sun to the Earth. Actually, they're streaming in all directions. When they get to the earth, get trapped in the Earth's magnetic field, and they bump into the molecules in the air, oxygen and nitrogen. And when they bump into those molecules, they give them energy, because they're streaming very, very fast, like one pool ball hitting another, and those atoms of oxygen and nitrogen the energy that they receive from the subatomic particles they re emit as blue light and violet light, and the other light that we see in Aurora Borealis and the sort of waving curtains of light that we see are due to the magnetic field of the Earth, the shape of the magnetic field. If you take a piece of paper and you rub some iron filings on top of it and put a magnet below it, you'll the iron filings, bits of iron take the shape of the magnetic field of the magnet. And the Earth's magnetic field is very much like that, and we know that the Earth's magnetic field is caused by molten iron at the center of the earth that's swirling around. If we didn't have a magnetic field of the Earth, there'd be a lot more harmful radiation from outer space that would come to earth and would cause diseases and other things much worse than sunburns. So, so we're thankful that we have a magnetic field,
Christine Mason 18:49
yeah? Like the magnet at the center of the Earth basically holds the atmosphere to it, like we wouldn't
Unknown Speaker 18:54
even live without No, we wouldn't live without an atmosphere either. So
Christine Mason 18:56
okay, let's do one more. Let's do a humming hummingbirds flight. Yeah, what's that? How does that little creature I love hummingbirds.
Speaker 1 19:03
We had a bird feeder on the porch of our house in Maine, and they're always hummingbirds coming up to it. I think Pablo Neruda, the poet, called them Air and Air or something like that. I mean, they're just so lovely. And they appear to just hover in midair. They need to hover in midair because to get food, they have to suck nectar and honey from certain flowers. And if they were moving around too much, they wouldn't be able to do that. But to hover, they need to expend a large amount of energy. I think they have probably the largest metabolism, or one of the largest metabolisms of any animal, certainly any animal their size. So they hover because they they need to mechanically to get the nectar out of the flower, and they need to be feeding constantly to supply the. Energy needed to hover. So it's hard to say which came first, the chicken or the egg. They need the energy to hover and they need to hover so they can get the energy.
Christine Mason 20:10
Yeah. And there's the this construction of the beak to the shape of the flower, yes. Just Just everything so perfectly tuned. It
Unknown Speaker 20:18
is perfectly tuned.
Christine Mason 20:19
And this kind of, this kind of, gets at this question. You use the word wonder a lot. Are beauty and wonder the same, you know, like, like, there's actually, like, we would call these visual phenomenon. Wow, that's beautiful, but that seems to be a human, like a human, yeah, like a human perceptual assessment. And I do think we're wired to see particular things as beautiful.
Speaker 1 20:44
I do think we are. Yes, you're right. It is a human perception. If you didn't have any human beings, it would be hard to say that something is beautiful, like a mountain or as fresh snow, because there wouldn't be any mind to observe and analyze it. Wender all, of course, is also a human trait. I think that our appreciation of beauty, and this is was said by Freud and Darwin, is a byproduct of our attraction to mates. Freud is not going to talk about anything except sexual attraction is going to reduce even going to the laundromat. And in terms of sexual attraction, why
Christine Mason 21:26
do you clean your clothes so you will be very sexy. You won't smell bad. Yeah,
Speaker 1 21:32
right. The the appreciation for beauty and potential mates and the coloration of potential mates is related to the need to reproduce. And so once you have the appreciation of beauty hardwired in your DNA, then a byproduct of that is to appreciation other things that are beautiful, other than potential mates. Oh,
Christine Mason 21:55
that's interesting. Like, Okay, so first we we're given the gift of perceiving beauty as a way to drive our reproductive choices, and then that gift just sort of leaks out into appreciating an aurora or the Grand Canyon or grandeur in any way. That's
Speaker 1 22:11
right. And actually, the great evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould gave a name to these byproducts of traits that had direct survival benefit. He called them spandrels. So the appreciation of beauty to procreate has direct survival benefit, but then the appreciation of the Aurora Borealis and rainbows is a byproduct of that other trait that had direct survival benefit.
Christine Mason 22:43
And I mean, there's other I heard somewhere, like the neuro esthetics of landscape that across the planet, if you have an open field with a woods, a lake and a mountain, every single culture across the planet considers that a beautiful landscape because it's got all the signals of supply, yeah, no moving water, not a lake, a river, a river. So there's also that indication of evolutionary suitability of the landscape, right? But the other things feel like a little bit more, like neophilia, you know, like, oh, that's new. Let me pay attention. You know, like, or that's rare. Well, it's
Speaker 1 23:16
interesting. If there are new things that appear, why are we frightened by some and appreciative of others?
Christine Mason 23:25
Good question. Let's see. Well, maybe there's a proximity taxonomy, like, if it, if it's a very dark light and you're losing the sun, that's usually like an eclipse, right? Maybe that's usually associated with and then, oh, my god, the Eclipse. If you've been in a full solar eclipse anybody, and you're standing there and the sun is blackened, and the temperature drops 30 or 40 degrees, and you're suddenly very aware of how your entire existence is dependent on this sun continuing to shine. It's very humbling, like drop to your knees, humbling. And so I imagine something like that, that that seems to mimic that, like darkness, a dark storm, something like that would feel like evolutionary threatening, right?
Speaker 1 24:10
Can you imagine what people 2000 years ago thought of eclipses, when they had knew nothing about astronomy, what it would be like, how scary that would be, I
Christine Mason 24:21
would be totally turning to the shaman. I would be like, bless me, save us. You know, I would give all my power away to an external authority. No Kidding, kidding, yeah, I know that's a very real question. I think there is. I mean, what do you think, like the this marriage between wonders that don't yet have an explanation, and the willingness to give our power away to authorities who have a plausible answer.
Speaker 1 24:46
I believe that almost all scientists do not believe in the supernatural, or I should put another way, very few scientists believe in the supernatural. So the point of view of almost all scientists is that when we see. Phenomena that we don't understand. We think that at some time in the future we will be able to understand it. For example, in the 18th century, we thought that heat was a fluid, and now we know that heat is the motion, the rapid motion of atoms and molecules. It's not a fluid, but it's motion. And so that's an example of something where we didn't know what it was originally, and then eventually we learned what it was. So the same as with electricity, of course, I personally, I hope, I hope that there are things that we never will understand, because I think that mystery is a great stimulus to creativity and exploration. And I know that scientists are most excited when there's something that they don't understand, when they're on the edge between the known and the unknown, and that's when things are most interesting. Yeah, there's
Christine Mason 25:55
also the word that keeps coming up as humility and having mystery. And I know some scientists that I consider to be living in the mystery and the wonder and the this is what we know so far, and there's much more to be discovered. And others who have sort of a an academic ego or a pride, and they're like, this is what it is. This is how it is. And I'm like, haven't you learned anything from like, when we didn't think blood circulated? And they, like, wanted to, you know, they killed that guy. You know that striking this balance between knowing and not knowing seems to be a real dance, yes,
Speaker 1 26:29
and being comfortable with that. One of my favorites, favorite quotes from Albert Einstein, and this is what he wrote. I guess it was originally in German. The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the emotion that lies at the cradle of true art and true science. And I love that quote. We're
Christine Mason 26:51
at an age of great mystery now, so many doors opening. What do you what do you think with all of these advances, the acceleration in AI and space travel, and how are you tying that into your work? The intersection of wonder, awe, beauty and science.
Speaker 1 27:10
It's hard to predict where AI is going, and even the experts don't really know how rapidly it's developing or when we'll reach certain benchmarks. I think that it's a combination of AI and other technologies. For example, we we now have the ability to put a computer chip into a paralyzed person's brain that allows them to move a robot arm by pure thought. So I think that that human beings, or I should say Homo sapiens, are evolving a new species, as you might call homo techno. We've long ago bypassed Darwinian evolution, and we are now evolving according to our own devices. We really don't know what homo techno is going to be like several 100 years from now, when we're part human and part machine. I certainly hope that they're some of our human qualities that are preserved, like the ability to wonder and have awe or feeling like we're part of things larger than ourselves falling in love. I hope that we still will have those qualities several 100 years from now. And
Christine Mason 28:24
it may it may be techno, half machine. It could also be just extremely edited, pruned, topiary version of human through CRISPR and other technologies like that. Maybe there's not even any machine embed, but that you've speciated in an accelerated way, grown poets and grown warriors and grown lovers, because they've like trimmed you for the specific genes that are optimized for that, which is a little I mean, eugenics, but yes, you're,
Speaker 1 28:52
you're right about that, that, and that raises all kind of ethical questions, is it okay for us to do that to ourselves? Well, right now we have, we have drugs like Prozac that alter our personalities, so we're already doing a version of that, and I do hope that there's some regulations about CRISPR for remaking human beings. Well, you mentioned the field of eugenics. I do. I don't know whether we can regulate that or not.
Christine Mason 29:23
I see, I just had this like vision of a future where somebody who's fully organic, you know, or somebody who doesn't go along with it, there's like a subculture of the fully organics, the foes, and they're out there. They don't do any they don't do any plastic surgery, they don't take any medications, they don't do any anti aging, and they become like the object of deep study, you know, and on fascination, they're like, they're the new celebrities. Well,
Speaker 1 29:48
Christina, I think you ought to write a sci fi novel.
Christine Mason 29:53
Okay, well, this actually gets me to my next question for you. You write poetry, you write novels, you write scientific papers. How is that? For you in terms of the creative fluidity of those things. Do you feel that these modes of thinking conflict, or what are your practices to integrate them? Well,
Speaker 1 30:07
I feel like the creative experience is the same when I'm writing a novel or thinking about a scientific problem, and I'm sure that everybody, all of your listeners, have had creative experiences where you lose track of your body and your ego, and it's just a wonderful feeling. There are certain do's and don'ts and different areas of creativity. For example, if you're writing non non fiction piece, you generally start a paragraph with a topic sentence, which we learn in high school, which tells the reader the idea of the paragraph. But in fiction writing, a topic sentence is fatal, because you want your reader to be blindsided and to enter that magical world that you're trying to create. And telling them how to think about the trip ahead of time cancels the trip. But I think that the feeling of creating the creative moment when you when you get into the zone, is very similar. I think that all kinds of creativity, whether you're writing music or writing a book or painting a painting, or contributing to the birth of a child, which is a very creative experience, I think that all of them take us away from our egos, in a sense which I find to be a very pleasant activity, because most of us are too stuck in our egos. Yeah,
Christine Mason 31:36
I think is it the flow state? When you lose touch, we become unself aware and so absorbed in the what you're doing. Yeah, I really, I really like what you what the way you were articulating that difference of leading with leading with the conclusion and then fleshing it out, versus, like inviting someone into the mystery. Yes,
Speaker 1 31:54
well, I like what you said about slow state, because I think that that part of the creative experience is allowing yourself and everything around you to slow down and modern technology, and especially, especially communication technology, has sped up the pace of life. You know, you see people walking through the woods looking at their smartphones or checking off items on their to do list that the high speed communication devices have, they've shaved time down to five minute units of efficiency. That's the fast state, and you were mentioning a slow state where we take time to just be present and to be self aware and to look the things around us and just take everything in and let our mind go where it wants to go. That's the slow state.
Christine Mason 32:50
There is so much more going on at any given moment, and I find the only way to get there is to do just what you're saying. You know, do you have, personally, any formal practices like meditation or a prayer or anything like that. Are you doing any of that
Speaker 1 33:03
stuff? Well, I do, I do meditate, not every day, but several times a week. And I think that that's you don't have to be religious in any way to meditate. You just need to take 20 minutes out of your day and go into a quiet place. And of course, there's plenty of materials available in books and online about meditation, and
Christine Mason 33:26
this is like training the system to slow down enough to perceive all the magic Exactly.
Speaker 1 33:31
It's mindfulness. Yeah, I think that's what the Buddhists call it.
Christine Mason 33:36
So if you're if you're out there, like you've had a very multidisciplinary life, what advice would you give people who are interested in pursuing multiple professions without sacrificing depth in any one field? Do you have advice for aspiring polymaths? You know?
Speaker 1 33:50
Well, my first bit of advice is, go deeply into one field. If you don't go deeply into at least one field, then you're superficial and everything you're you're a dilettante. I find that once you go deeply into one area, you sort of understand depth in a lot of other areas. When I say understand, I don't mean that you know all of the facts and the methodologies, but you have the experience. You know the experience. So I would advise people that are that have multiple interests. First of all, don't discard any of your interests. Try to hang on to all of them. Go deeply into one of your interests. And then, after you have dived down deep into the ocean of one experience, you can then come up to the surface and begin experiencing other things that you're interested and I think that a lot of children have multiple interests, and their teachers and their friends and even their parents sort of push them in one direction or the other to focus on one thing or the other. And I think that we we. Encourage our young people that have multiple interests to preserve all of those interests well, while then going deeply into one of them, but preserve all of them. Don't cut off a part of yourself.
Christine Mason 35:12
Yeah, this sort of you're a whole being. You. You're an integrated whole being. What I wish someone had told me when I was young along these lines, was that life can be serial, that you have many lifetimes within this lifetime. And I did all the right things, building a business or raising a family, and then Only later did I get to be a writer or an artist, that when I was a child, those were things that deeply interested me, and I never thought I could have them all. That's really great advice. Well,
Speaker 1 35:38
I congratulate you, Christine, on being able to live several lives and come back to all of your interests. Don't
Christine Mason 35:46
you feel that way in your own life?
Speaker 1 35:48
I feel very, very lucky, yes, that I've had the opportunities to do all of the things that I want to do. I feel lucky.
Christine Mason 35:55
Is lucky scientific? Or is it wonder? What is lucky? What does that mean? Well, I
Speaker 1 36:01
think Lucky for me, it means that there's a lot of randomness in the world. A lot of things happen by chance. For me, lucky is that some random things have come together in the right way to give me a satisfying life. I do think that you can partly make your own luck by being serious about what you're doing and not giving up some of your interests. You know, if you're dating, for example, and you can say, Well, you were lucky to meet the right person, but if you were experimenting with lots and lots of different people, then it wasn't total luck, because you were presenting yourself with a lot of different opportunities, so you can nudge luck a little bit by your own actions. But I do think that the world is filled with with random events, and they often play a bigger role than we give credit to them. They have
Christine Mason 36:55
people who there's a funny bit that Bill Nye does with Amy Schumer, and it opens up with him saying, We've for 1000s of years, we've wondered what the purpose of the universe is, and now we know it's to give middle class women an answer to their personal questions. And then it cuts to Amy Schumer with a moral dilemma, and she sees a t shirt, and she goes, yes, the universe was telling me to keep sleeping with my married boss, you know, something like that anyway. Really bad, really bad. But you know, because there is no luck, there's nothing random, it's all for you, ladies and gentlemen. So you have these two recent books, the transcendent brain and the miraculous from the material. And I wonder, you know, that's pretty rapid, back to back book production. Congratulations. Not a slow state. It doesn't seem like how are those two pieces of work related? In your body of work,
Speaker 1 37:47
the transcendent brain introduces the concept of spiritual materialism, which we talked about earlier. You can believe that the world is made out of atoms and molecules and nothing more, but you can also be open and receptive and even embracing of spiritual experiences that book, the transcendent brain, after introducing that concept, tries to explain a lot of the spiritual experiences we have in terms of their evolutionary history and their survival benefit. The connection between that and the new book, The miraculous from the material, which is also embraces spiritual materialism, but by looking at the beautiful and extraordinary natural phenomena like rainbows or hummingbirds, and then giving a material scientific explanation of them, but without diminishing the awe and emotional attraction of them. So I think they're related. Both books are about this idea of spiritual materialism, which I think is probably not a new idea, but I think in today's world, many people think that science, science and the scientific worldview, is antagonistic to authentic human experience. And I want to challenge that view.
Christine Mason 39:16
I think this movement you're making of the integration of the material and the spiritual is the most important movement that's happening in the world right now. As my friend Patrick would say, healing the split, healing the
Speaker 1 39:27
split. I know we're not going to get into political discussion, but I think that that that split plays a role, although maybe not a big role, in the polarization that we see in our society? No, I'm 100%
Christine Mason 39:43
that. It's in politics, it's in it's in business, it's everywhere you look. Until they become one field, it'll be difficult to get an integrated answer. It also leads itself to blaming other people, seeing other people as separate, doubting that their experiences. Are authentic and true, like assuming that your worldview is the only one you know, all those things are from a separatist ideation. What questions are arising for you now? Are you going to continue working on this theme? Are there new ideas or themes or perspectives that are evolving in your work? As I mean, after you put a book to bed. Usually there's a gap right between the time the book is finished and the time you start promoting it. What's coming up in the gap, what's what's emerging? Well,
Speaker 1 40:30
one project that I'm working on is an attempt to humanize scientists, which is related to the previous thing we're talking about, I turned 76 years old yesterday, and I'm beginning to wrestle with my mortality, so that is definitely on my mind. And I'm thinking about what makes a good life, and how do we prepare for the end? So I'm writing a book now that actually a novel that deals with that. It's a fictional symposium at a university in Sweden, and the title of the symposium is preparing for nothingness. The speakers of the symposium are a scientist, a psychologist, a philosopher, a hospice worker, a Buddhist monk and a Christian theologian, and each of them talks about, from their discipline and their perspective, what makes a good life, and how do we prepare for the end? Of course, many people believe that there's an afterlife, and so the end is not nothingness, it's something else. The motivation for this novel, of course, is working through my own concerns about my mortality and trying to come to terms with it and accept it.
Christine Mason 41:47
Yeah, I was going to ask you that question when I looked at your body of work over to over the years, like, you know, you look at questions around family and like, love, oh, your college reunion, you know, like I was wondering if the topics that you were doing in your novels were mirroring what you were wrestling with in your life. This seems to indicate possibly. Yes.
Speaker 1 42:12
I think so. I mean, I think that all novels, even though they appear to be fiction, are really autobiographies. Writers write about what they're interested in. I would imagine that that your podcasts are about things that you're interested in. Yeah.
Christine Mason 42:28
I mean, I I both write about and I interview people on topics that I think can provide, like, a little bit more spaciousness in people's ideas, like the way they think about the world, and more liberation and more choice, and that runs a broad range. What I've been finding with my customers and my readers and listeners is that there are certain places where people get really hung up, get really hung up on religion, bound and hemmed in by that early in life and around sexuality. That's another place they get very stuck and locked, or the problem of embodiment in general, like that. There's something wrong with their body, or they're wrong with their embodiment. So I tend to like go in a lot of questions like that, and then also things that can help with altered state of consciousness, like breath work or medicine, psychedelic stuff like that. But it's all aiming in the very direction that you speak to like we are living in this transcendently beautiful and amazing place, and yet we can always sort of find unnecessary conflict and cause problems where there really aren't a lot. So how do you live in that reverence and curiosity as a way of being and be more in joy than in suffering. Now we're gonna hear about the beauty, the wonder and the mystery at the intersection of science and aging, but told in a novel form, and also theology and also philosophy. So I'll be on the lookout for that in the meantime, happy birthday.
Speaker 1 43:57
It's also my anniversary in my birthday or the same day. What I insisted to my wife that we get married in my birthday, so it would be there would be one fewer dates that I had to remember.
Christine Mason 44:08
Wait, that's one fewer day that you get to celebrate, though. Wait, what?
Unknown Speaker 44:12
It's a trade off. That's right, it's a trade off.
Christine Mason 44:14
Well, happy anniversary, happy birthday. If you haven't had the chance to explore the work of Dr Lightman. Please do so from the fabulous I think actually, I got, I did an interview with Vogue, and they said, What's one of your favorite books of all time? And it was Einstein's dream. It's in that quote. And so his early work, and the more recent work, it's a life devoted to the intersection of science and beauty and wonder and art and spirituality, and we're so lucky to have you.
Speaker 1 44:47
Well, I'm lucky to be on your program. Thank you, Christine.
Christine Mason 44:53
Well, I'm really grateful to you for joining us in this conversation today. Please check out this lovely book of. Miraculous in the material. Maybe it's even a gift item for you, and if this conversation impacted you or caused you to think differently, let me know. I'd love to hear, was there something new about how to understand time, or how to understand the miraculous world around us that sparked something? And if you did like the episode, please pass it on. Just take the link and text it to someone or share it on social. That's the best way we can reward these amazing guests who come and give us their time. Please check out rosewoman.com for all of your holiday gifting needs. And radiantfarms.us, for wonderful botanical sacraments that can help you feel better. Both sites are running holiday specials that make it easy and quick to shop alright. All love all the time you.
