Jesus, Jazz, and Buddhism

E = MC2:
A Love Poem
Reflections on Science, Art, and Religion

by Lauren Bowden and Jay McDaniel

Recently one of us (Lauren) was talking with a friend who is a mathematician.  He was explaining how, for him, mathematics is a kind of art.  He is drawn to it with the same enthusiasm that, for example, she is drawn to poetry.  He finds beauty in mathematics; she finds beauty in words.  Beauty is beauty. 

In this reflection we offer some "Whiteheadian" connections between art and science, insofar as they are attuned to beauty.  We will be gathering together strands of thinking that are not often associated: aesthetics, poetry, mathematics, physics, and religion.

By beauty we mean harmony and intensity.  These are the two sides of beauty.  Their yin and yang.  Harmony and intensity are discovered (1) in objects of experience, whether physical as in sunsets or intellectual as enjoyed in mathematical equations, (2) in relations within and between different human emotions, as occurs when we listen to the intense hamonies of music and feel both "happy" and "sad" at the same time, and (3) in relationships between people, as experienced in friendships and romance and eros.  

Indeed uncondintional love -- the love that gives without expecting anything in return -- is a kind of beauty.  And the act of loving the unlovable is a kind of beauty, too.  Jesus of Nazareth was especially adept at this kind of beauty, and so are many other people.  They "love" people apart from questions of attractiveness and reciprocity.  They find beauty in what others call "ugly."  The harmony and intensity of beauty, as we understand beauty, runs much deeper than questions of attractiveness and unattractiveness, as defined by social conventions and attached clinging.  Sometimes things are seen in their beauty when we are un-attached to them, when we can let them be without our forcing our projections onto them.  The so called "coolness" of science, where the scientist lets the evidence speak for itelf, is an attempt to "let things be."  Thus it is a way seeing beauty.

There is a particular kind of beauty that is especially important to many scientists and philosophers.  It is the beauty of understanding something.  To understand something is to feel a sense of harmony, of emotional rapport, with whatever is being understood.  This rapport is never absolute.  When you think you understand, say, the way a molecule works, you simultaneously realize that there is always more the molecule than your understanding of it.  But there satisfaction that is felt in the act of understanding is a kind of harmony in the moment: a feeling of being "at one" with the subject.  In religious terminology, it is a form of communion.  One way or another, all science and art is seeking rapport or communion.  It is trying to be with the world in some way.   Indeed, as we suggest, it is seeking to be with God, with "God" understood, not as a creator but rather as deep beauty.  In this sense science is a form of theology, and scientific equations are, in their way, love poems.

To the left you see a beautiful love poem written by Albert Einstein.  You will note his use of white space in and around the margins.  That's one important feature of poetry.  Unlike prose, poetry does not try to fill up the page.  It wants you to see empy spaces, too.  This particular poem moves forward toward a conclusion which is a lure for feeling in its own right.   It is underlined for emphasis. 

It proposes the idea that the mass of a given entity is a form of energy, and that the quantity of this energy is the mass itself, multiplied by the speed of light squared.  Don't worry about the numbers; it's the general idea that mass and energy are convertible that we want to focus on.

One thing we like about Einstein's poem, and also Whitehead's philosophy, is that both of them invite readers to perceive the world around us and the world's within us as expressions of something like energy.  People define energy in different ways, but its root meaning is something like power, force, vivacity, creativity.

There is clearly energy in the water falling down the rocks.  But there is energy in the rocks, too.  Everything we see around us is pulsating with some kind of energy, some kind of force or vivacity.  There is no such thing as "dead matter."  The idea that matter is alive, and that there is a continuum between rocks and trees is something Whitehead shares with Asian and African and Native American traditions.  This is why, in JJB, we feel resonance with the traditional Chinese idea that matter contains qi

Whitehead was interested in the subjective side of life, too.  The emotions and aims and feelings that living beings both suffer and enjoy. As the girl makes these faces, she is feeling certain things inside herself. 

Does her "enjoyment" have energy?  Whitehead thought so. He believed that wherever there is a subject of experience, there is something like self-enjoyment: that is, the enjoyment of being one among many.  Not one over many -- not one under many -- but one among many. 

Imagine for a moment that we are scientists and that we peer into the girl's brain with a microscope.  We can see the neurons firing and the molecules interacting.  But we cannot really see her enjoyment.  This enjoyment is the girls as a concrescing subject from her own first-person point of view.  It has a kind of energy, too.  Thus we have two kinds of energy: the energy of her soul and the energy of the neurons in her brain.  Descartes thought that these two kinds of energy were of different ontological types.  One was "material" and the other was "mental."   Whitehead proposes that there is only one kind or type of actuality.  He calls them moments of experience.  The girls consciousness consist of such moments.  And so do the bursts of energy in the neurons in her brain.  All is qi.

Light is a form of energy.  Whitehead thought light was both particulate and wavelike and that it occurs in bursts of energy: quantum energy.  He was influenced by early quantum theory.  He said that even time unfolds in discrete packets: moment by moment.  Here, too, he was very Chinese.  He saw the universe in terms of events.  A moment of experience -- whether in the life of a neuron or the life of the girl in the photo -- is an event. 

The Chinese speak of the totality of events as wan wu.  For Whiteheadians this totality is a creative process that is new at every moment.  Light does not just keep being "light."  It changes into other things.  It is being creatively transformed.  Below we offer some art concerning the transformation of sunlight. 

This is a work of art combining text and image and color, spatially arranged on a cyber-canvas.  It is didactic in nature, which means that it is trying to teach us something.  Almost all art is didactic, even when it tries not to be; but this piece is very obvious.  It is trying to help people enter into rapport with something, even if only itself.

This art functions like all art.  It is what Whitehead calls a "lure for feeling."  Of course, when scientists look at a diagram, they believe it helps them understand the world around them.  But in Whitehead's philosophy undestanding is a form of feeling, too.  It is feeling the presence of ideas.  Even if the ideas in the painting were not true, they would be interesting.  This is one of the functions of good art, to offer interesting ideas.  And this is why science is such good art.  It doesn't have to be true to be interesting, but if it happens to be true as well as interesting, it is even more beautiful.

This is another postmodern poem.  Postmodernism likes to combine genres, and this one does this as well.  This poem combines images and words and numbers.  Of course, even with its images and words, tt has the appearance of being mathematical and formulaic in nature.  It illustrates the dynamics of photosynthesis at a chemical level.  In Whitehead's philosophy the divine reality -- God -- is present within our planet as a lure toward creative transformation.   Some religious people believe that God speaks in Arabic or Chinese or Sanskrit or English.  But certainly God speaks in numbers, too.

This is an example of some divine speech in mathematical form.  It is called the Shrodinger Equation, and it is used to understand some of the dynamics of energy-events within the depths of atoms.  Just as it takes years and years to understand Arabic, it takes years to undertand this equation.  But the result is worth it.  You begin to speak the language, too. 

In Whitehead's philosophy the most abstract forms of mathematical relations are understood as ideas or "pure potentialities" in the mind of God.  The word "mind" of God is a misnomer if it suggests something solid and entity-like.  The mind of God is a reservois of pure potentialities.  When you explore mathematical relations you are exploring the mind of God.  This was what the Pythagoreans believed in ancient Greece.   The Pythagorean tradition was mathematical and mystical.  The Whiteheadian tradition offers a way to reclaim the religious or spiritual side of mathematics.  Call it neo-Pythagorean spirituality.

Photosynthesis is a good example of how novel possibilities in the mind of God become incarnate in the unfolding of the world.  There was once a time when photosynthesis did not exist.  It was but a novel possibility.  But then, at one point, it came into existence.   It became a novel happening, ,and then a habit which endures over time, building up its own momentum.  This is what laws of nature are: they are enduring habits of what were once novel possibilities. 

Of course "life" was once a novel possibility, too.  Apparently something like "life" has been on our planet for about three billion years.  By this standard we are pretty young.  Even the dinosaurs are young by geological standards.  And the earth is young by galactic standards.

From Whitehead's perspective all of this novelty is an expression of energy of one kind or another.   The oceans, the living cells, the animals with their hard shells, the dinosaurs, and us.  We are expressions of energy.  So are the stars and planets, the galaxies and other kinds of stellar systems. 

We are so small, but still included, in this much larger whole.  It is said that the whole is evolving, too.  Is this whole God?  Is God the recectacle for everthing that happens?  Whitehead thinks this is the case.  God is not a locatable entity connected with other locatable entities: God is the divine milieu in which entities unfold.  We might compare God to a womb in which the stars and planets live and move and have their being.  This is called pan-en-theism (everything inside God).  For Whitehead this divine receptable is also influential in the world in a continous but non-coerceive way through the provision of fresh possibilities which can, over time, beecome habits and then laws.  This influence is creative transformation.

A prominent Christian theologian who uses Whitehead's thought -- John B. Cobb. Jr. -- wrote a book called Christ in a Pluralist Age in which he proposes that the spirit of creative transformation at work in the evolutionary process, including human life, is the very spirit that was also at work in the life and ministry of Jesus, as he was creatively transformed by God to become a savior for his people.  

In trying to understand this, some early Christians began to speak of this spirit as the Logos or the Sophia: that is, the creative energy of God at work in the world.  They said that the Logos was revealed but not exhausted in the thirty-three years of Jesus' life.   John Cobb agrees and adds that this spirit is also found in other ways in religious sages of other traditions, and also in ordinary people who live with a spirit of wisdom and compassion, creativity and courage.  Wherever we see creative transformation in the world, says John Cobb, we see the living spirit of the Logos at work in the world.  We see God incarnate -- or perhaps better, Sophia incarnating. 

Everything is pulsating in the world of process or Whiteheadian thought.  This is why it is so close to Asian, African, and Latin American points of view.  And also to the I Jing of classical China.  We translate the phrase I Jing as the Book of Changes.  Whitehead's philosophy is a Book of Changes, of Transformations: a philosophy of -inging.

Please forgive us for inventing words like -ing and -inging.  We are trying to suggest that the things of our world, and we ourselves, are like gerunds.  We are verbs that look like nouns.  We think science points us in this direction, too.  It points toward a creative universe tht is filled with -inging.  Nothing is completely static.  Wherever there is harmony there is also intensity and movement.

Sometime people think that science and poetry are opposites.  Science books can sometimes be very boring to people.  They are tedious and flat.  But Whitehead offers a way of thinking about even scientific language as creative, because he says that all language functions as a lure for feeling.  The language can be written, spoken, verbal, musical, visual, gestural, or mathematical.  Some people might think that the purpose of language is to convey "information."  But we at JJB resist this idea, at least if the word "information" is meant to suggest a bit of data which is isolated from emotion, action, or the spiritual side of a person's life.  The cat is on the mat: maybe that sentence is intended simply to inform.  But E = mc2  is much more than a casual statement about cats on mats.  It is an invitation to look at the world in a certain way.  It is a lure for feeling.

The very idea that we humans can be "lured" by goals presupposes that we have the freedom to respond, or not respond, to them.  For example, when scientists publish papers in scientific journals, they presume that their readers are free to be persuaded by the evidence and ideas they present.  The very idea that we can be persuaded presupposes the possibility that we might not be persuaded.  The future is undecided unto we decide.

Whitehead believed in this kind of freedom, and he thought that it illustrates a kind of freedom tht is in the universe itself, even inside allegedly "dead" matter.  Whitehead believed that energy contains within itself a creativity, which means that there is an indeterminacy within matter itself.  On the other hand Einstein thought things were more determined, maybe even strictly determined. 

Let's try a thought experiment.  Imagine that the history of the universe is a drama being shown on a television screen and that you have a remote control device.  You are God.  And let's say that you pause the drama midway in the development and re-wind the tape and press play again.  As your press pause, you happen to be watching the boy in the photo above chasing a ball on a beath. 

Would the play unfold exactly the same way the same time around?  If you think the play is entirely determined by the initial conditions, you would say "yes."  You really wouldn't need to have to watch the play, because you already know the end.  You would already know that the boy was chasing the ball.  You would know precisely where he would step in the sand and precisely where the ball would be.  Why watch at all.  You've already seen it.

However, if you think the characters in the play -- the stars and planets, the forms of life, the boy -- contain spontaneous creativity of their own, you would say "no."  You would need to watch the play to see what happens.  The end is not pre-determined, not by you or by the initial conditions.  

Whitehead subscribes to the second view.  He believes in God, but he thinks the future is open, even for God.  God is present in the universe continuously, not as a puppeteer, but as a lure toward creative tansformation.  God is inside the boy as a lure to chase the ball in free and creative ways, the outcomes of which cannot be known in advance. 

Our aim here, though, is not to disparage Einstein.  He may have been right that the universe is completely determined by its initial conditions, and Whitehead wrong.  A person can practice science with one or the other of these two paradigms.   For a good scientist, though, science is always beautiful.  

It is a beautiful  practice because it involves a surrender of personal preferences to the facts of the world as they present themselves   There is a kind of humility in this.  A willingness to assent to the way the world  is instead of the way one wishes it would be.  "Not my will but the world's will, O Lord."   There is also a kind of joy in science.  It is inspired by curiosity, a sense of wonder, and a delight in patterns. 

For the good scientist the practice of science is not unlike listening to music.  You hear something beautiful in the music you take delight in it.  You want to hear more.  You want to be in rapport with the music.  This rapport is what scientists call understanding.  It may be verbal or mathematical; in any case it is satisfying.  The satisfaction of good science is not a will-to-mastery.  It is not the satisfaction of a dictator feeling in control of his subjects.  It is more like the satisfaction of a lover.  It is  an act of being with the subject at hand, not unlike the way in which you are with music when you listen to it.   Science is grounded in a desire to be at one with the world.  It is rooted in an umpulse toward harmony.  It is a kind of surrender.  The idea of surrender takes us to our final subject: Islam.

Lauren is especially appreciative of the poetry of  the thirteenth century Muslim poet and mystic, Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Balkhī (Persian: جلال‌الدین محمد بلخى).  He is also known as also known as Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī (Persian: جلال‌الدین محمد رومی). In many parts of the world he is simply called Rumi.  Rumi emphasized love as a gateway to the deeper Beauty.  He has a person whom he loved very much -- a spiritual teacher named Shams -- and he found his relationship to the Beauty through his relationship with Shams.  His name for this deeper Beauty was Allah.

Rumi finds beauty in the divine reality, in Allah.  "The Beautiful" is one of the ninety-nine names of Allah.  Rumi believes that when you find beauty in this world -- in another person, in a poem, in mathematics -- something is touched inside of you which resonates with the deeper Beauty.  Imagine the divine Reality as an uncreated Light which shines through all things, but which is more than all things.  You see Allah, or at least a sign of Allah, in the beauty.

But Rumi's point is not simply that the Beauty is found in the things we see around us or entertain with our intellects, it is also that it is found in our longing for beauty and, sometimes, in our sense that beauty is absent, when we wish it were present.  Think of a love affair.  When two people are in love, there is beauty when they are together, but also beauty when they are apart.   If you really love someone,  you can sometimes know this person better, and be closer to him or her in a certain way, when you long for that person.  He or she is seen through the longing, which may last forever.  Rumi is a poet of ecstatic extremes.  He finds wisdom in such emotions.

Which takes us back the mathematics.  Some people conceive mathematics as cool and detached, as lacking in longing.  And maybe it is, at least as compared to Rumi.  But still it has its splendors, its delights, its beauty.  Can mathematics, too, be a context through which the Beauty is found?  And, related to that, can science as a whole be a context for finding Beauty?   We think the answer is yes, and that the philosophy of Whitehead can help.   We think the womb of the universe can be named Beauty and that the spirit of creative transformation is found wherever people seek this Beauty: in science, in mathematics, in art, in religion.  In their seeking, there is Beauty, too.