1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:01,640 Welcome to Wonder Cabinet. 2 00:00:03,140 --> 00:00:04,560 I'm Anne Strainchamps. 3 00:00:04,760 --> 00:00:05,740 And I'm Steve Paulson. 4 00:00:06,120 --> 00:00:08,160 How often do we, any of us, 5 00:00:08,520 --> 00:00:11,400 take the time to stop and look up at the cosmos? 6 00:00:12,100 --> 00:00:15,980 To just stand and stare at the moon or another planet, 7 00:00:16,260 --> 00:00:17,440 or even our own star, 8 00:00:18,040 --> 00:00:22,220 and think how lucky we are to exist on this tiny blue planet, 9 00:00:22,920 --> 00:00:24,640 floating in a sea of darkness. 10 00:00:25,400 --> 00:00:26,300 So here we are. 11 00:00:26,300 --> 00:00:30,880 And so the first thing we can do is we can close our eyes for a little bit. 12 00:00:32,000 --> 00:00:36,080 The air is phenomenal right now, so just bring it in. 13 00:00:37,020 --> 00:00:43,620 It's an early spring morning, and physicist Marcelo Gleiser has assembled a group of friends for a bit of sun worship. 14 00:00:44,380 --> 00:00:47,280 And we're going to all turn towards the sun. 15 00:00:47,700 --> 00:00:50,020 We're at the Island of Knowledge in Tuscany, 16 00:00:50,020 --> 00:00:55,480 a think tank where the purpose is to bring science and the sacred together, like this. 17 00:00:56,300 --> 00:00:58,700 Now, you know what's going on in the sun, right? 18 00:00:58,700 --> 00:01:02,700 The sun, for four and a half billion years, 19 00:01:02,700 --> 00:01:07,100 has been transforming the simplest chemical that exists, 20 00:01:07,100 --> 00:01:10,300 which is hydrogen, into the next simple one, 21 00:01:10,300 --> 00:01:13,500 which is helium, in this process called nuclear fusion. 22 00:01:13,500 --> 00:01:18,200 And as it does that, it releases all the energy 23 00:01:18,200 --> 00:01:22,700 that this planet uses in incredible ways 24 00:01:22,700 --> 00:01:25,200 to sustain all kinds of life here. 25 00:01:26,300 --> 00:01:29,600 And we don't thank the sun enough. 26 00:01:29,600 --> 00:01:35,500 So now what we're going to do is point our hands towards the sun 27 00:01:35,500 --> 00:01:45,200 and feel the energy of the sun going down your arms into your heart. 28 00:01:45,200 --> 00:01:53,700 Try to imagine this heart filled with the sunlight glowing gold 29 00:01:53,700 --> 00:01:56,540 with the power of the sun. 30 00:01:56,540 --> 00:01:58,980 Between your stretched arms up there 31 00:01:58,980 --> 00:02:01,200 and the feet on the ground, you are truly 32 00:02:01,200 --> 00:02:06,720 a bridge of light that connects the sky to the earth. 33 00:02:06,720 --> 00:02:13,800 Heart, arms, sun, ground, together 34 00:02:13,800 --> 00:02:19,080 with the whole of the cosmos for this brief moment. 35 00:02:19,080 --> 00:02:22,460 Let's all take a bow of gratitude 36 00:02:22,460 --> 00:02:25,580 to the sun that allow us to be alive, literally. 37 00:02:27,460 --> 00:02:29,740 And isn't that amazing? 38 00:02:32,000 --> 00:02:35,700 Marcelo Gleiser and his partners host three gatherings like this a year. 39 00:02:36,000 --> 00:02:39,100 And the topic this time around was rational mysticism. 40 00:02:39,760 --> 00:02:44,520 Now, mystical experiences are supposed to be beyond the rational and outside science, 41 00:02:45,040 --> 00:02:47,120 but the more we find out about the natural world, 42 00:02:47,640 --> 00:02:50,600 the more miraculous it seems that life exists at all. 43 00:02:50,600 --> 00:02:55,160 And in some ways, maybe spiritual awe is the most logical response. 44 00:02:55,700 --> 00:03:00,400 So there's an old philosophical idea that has been circling back around again these days 45 00:03:00,400 --> 00:03:02,660 that kind of expresses what we're getting at. 46 00:03:03,060 --> 00:03:03,580 Pantheism. 47 00:03:03,960 --> 00:03:06,380 The idea that nature itself is God. 48 00:03:06,740 --> 00:03:10,960 That concept is actually pretty close to how many people today would describe their beliefs. 49 00:03:11,520 --> 00:03:15,620 Even, or maybe especially, if they're not religious in any conventional sense. 50 00:03:16,140 --> 00:03:19,900 Pantheism was one of the subjects that came up at this meeting in Italy. 51 00:03:19,900 --> 00:03:23,700 And among the people there was Mary Jane Rubenstein 52 00:03:23,700 --> 00:03:28,720 Yeah, Mary Jane, MJ, teaches philosophy and religion at Wesleyan University 53 00:03:28,720 --> 00:03:33,400 And she wrote a great book called Pantheologies, God's World's Monsters 54 00:03:33,400 --> 00:03:34,320 Love that title 55 00:03:34,320 --> 00:03:37,640 And she also writes more broadly about the history of awe and wonder 56 00:03:37,640 --> 00:03:42,940 For instance, her recent book, Astrotopia, is about how people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos 57 00:03:42,940 --> 00:03:46,540 Have come to see space exploration as a new kind of religion 58 00:03:46,540 --> 00:03:48,040 Okay, I want to hear that 59 00:03:48,040 --> 00:03:49,560 Let's listen 60 00:03:49,900 --> 00:03:57,360 Mary Jane, you have written on an incredibly wide range of subjects that I was sort of looking at some of the things you've written about. 61 00:03:57,420 --> 00:04:03,060 I mean, you've written on everything from on wonder to the multiverse to space travel. 62 00:04:03,280 --> 00:04:08,460 You've also written about pantheism, which I think has a lot of cachet these days. 63 00:04:09,180 --> 00:04:11,820 Can you put this idea in some context? 64 00:04:11,820 --> 00:04:36,600 Sure. So pantheism is the idea that what we mean by God is the universe itself. So the material universe, the universe of ideas, the world around us, that that's what God is, that that is the source of all things and the life in all things and the source of regeneration in all things and the death or the end of all things. 65 00:04:37,240 --> 00:04:42,720 It's an idea that's had a sort of hilarious history in Western thought, at least, 66 00:04:43,140 --> 00:04:47,980 which basically invented the idea and then made fun of it for centuries and centuries. 67 00:04:48,500 --> 00:04:53,620 Well, and I mean, my very lay understanding of pantheism, it's sort of like God is nature. 68 00:04:54,040 --> 00:04:57,380 So people who are very like in touch with the natural world, you know, 69 00:04:57,380 --> 00:04:59,960 they don't have any sort of coherent religious view, 70 00:05:00,380 --> 00:05:02,780 but they just sort of feel like when they're out in the natural world, 71 00:05:02,780 --> 00:05:06,880 that is their experience of what you might call the divine. 72 00:05:07,100 --> 00:05:08,400 Am I getting that right? 73 00:05:08,560 --> 00:05:09,520 Yeah, I think that's fair. 74 00:05:09,640 --> 00:05:10,220 I think that's fair. 75 00:05:10,420 --> 00:05:16,200 And for some people, that nature is entirely material. 76 00:05:16,480 --> 00:05:22,200 It's the mountains and the trees and the skies and the microbes and the bacteria. 77 00:05:22,680 --> 00:05:28,260 For other people, it's that stuff and also idea, mind, consciousness. 78 00:05:28,720 --> 00:05:30,480 There are lots of varieties of pantheism. 79 00:05:30,480 --> 00:05:33,860 To who might be some pantheists that we would recognize? 80 00:05:33,980 --> 00:05:50,420 So the first person who wrote a coherent philosophy of pantheism within the modern West was Baruch Spinoza, who's a 17th century philosopher who basically came from a Jewish refugee community in Amsterdam. 81 00:05:51,080 --> 00:05:57,000 And he had this idea that nature and God are the same thing, as you were just saying a moment ago. 82 00:05:57,000 --> 00:06:02,380 He used the term God or nature as though the two of them were interchangeable. 83 00:06:02,780 --> 00:06:09,460 He didn't publish the work in which he claimed that God and nature were the same thing until after he had died. 84 00:06:10,200 --> 00:06:12,360 Was that because it was considered heretical? 85 00:06:12,680 --> 00:06:13,940 It was entirely heretical. 86 00:06:14,120 --> 00:06:15,000 It was entirely heretical. 87 00:06:15,300 --> 00:06:21,400 And in fact, even though he hadn't said it while he was alive, his Jewish community in Amsterdam knew that that's what he was getting at. 88 00:06:21,400 --> 00:06:28,580 And they excommunicated him for it because of his having circulated the idea that God had a body. 89 00:06:29,080 --> 00:06:37,700 And if there is one teaching you cannot profess in the Jewish tradition, it's that God has a body, that God is somehow material. 90 00:06:38,080 --> 00:06:38,680 Okay. 91 00:06:38,860 --> 00:06:41,380 So who else have been notable pantheists? 92 00:06:42,100 --> 00:06:43,500 Well, this is the problem. 93 00:06:43,500 --> 00:06:52,260 You know, so Spinoza publishes what he publishes, and a few decades after his death, authors start just making fun of the position. 94 00:06:52,580 --> 00:06:53,860 They coined the term pantheism. 95 00:06:53,960 --> 00:06:54,960 Spinoza didn't use it. 96 00:06:55,380 --> 00:07:01,080 It's a term that comes out of a guy named Toland who fuses these Greek roots together. 97 00:07:01,280 --> 00:07:03,860 Pan means all, and theos means God. 98 00:07:03,980 --> 00:07:07,460 So the idea of pantheism is that the whole thing is God, all of it is God. 99 00:07:07,460 --> 00:07:15,360 And he just makes fun of it as being an infantile position, as being a kind of position that only a woman would have. 100 00:07:15,480 --> 00:07:24,040 Like, you'd have to be a complete idiot not to understand that God would have to be other than the material world, different from the material world. 101 00:07:24,280 --> 00:07:25,960 God is the source of the material world. 102 00:07:26,060 --> 00:07:27,180 God isn't that world. 103 00:07:27,300 --> 00:07:29,420 I mean, it's just the height of idiocy. 104 00:07:30,060 --> 00:07:36,500 For a couple centuries in German universities, you had to take an anti-pantheist test just to be able to teach there. 105 00:07:36,500 --> 00:07:38,680 Wait, an anti-pantheist test? That's crazy. 106 00:07:38,680 --> 00:07:40,360 Yeah, yeah, they had to just make sure that there were no pantheists. 107 00:07:40,460 --> 00:07:40,800 Oh, my God. 108 00:07:41,180 --> 00:07:46,220 But, right, wherever you find repression, there's a reason for that repression. 109 00:07:46,540 --> 00:07:56,320 So in German thought in particular, you have all of these philosophers who are, you know, tending toward something that you might want to call pantheism. 110 00:07:56,320 --> 00:08:11,940 Hegel in particular, Georg Hegel, who has this idea that what God is is the unfolding in space and time of a vast spirit that sort of projects the material world and then begins to reconcile it to itself. 111 00:08:12,480 --> 00:08:16,760 And the minute he starts teaching this, of course, his contemporaries are like, wait a minute, that sounds like pantheism. 112 00:08:16,920 --> 00:08:22,840 And rather than saying, yes, it's pantheism and it's a really interesting form of pantheism and this is what he says, no, it's absolutely not pantheism. 113 00:08:24,040 --> 00:08:25,360 Schlegel says the same thing. 114 00:08:25,360 --> 00:08:32,920 Even Schleiermacher says the same. These are all teachers who, to my mind, are pantheists, and yet who deny it strenuously. 115 00:08:33,300 --> 00:08:39,360 And what about today, or in recent decades? Are there notable thinkers who identify as pantheists? 116 00:08:39,460 --> 00:08:47,560 I mean, no, not really. When I went to go write this book about pantheism, all of my friends were like, why would you write a book on pantheism? 117 00:08:48,160 --> 00:08:51,940 Who would read it? Who would even want to be associated with such a thing? 118 00:08:51,940 --> 00:08:54,900 And I would say, you know, look, I'm not saying that we should be pantheists. 119 00:08:54,940 --> 00:08:56,160 I'm not saying I am a pantheist. 120 00:08:56,220 --> 00:08:58,980 I just find the intellectual history really interesting. 121 00:08:59,480 --> 00:09:04,240 And also, I think that there is an ethical lesson to be learned from pantheism. 122 00:09:04,380 --> 00:09:06,140 No, tell me, what is the ethical lesson? 123 00:09:06,140 --> 00:09:16,460 Well, the ethical lesson would be taking the creative integrity of the natural world seriously, period. 124 00:09:16,460 --> 00:09:22,260 The world shapes us, and we shape the world. 125 00:09:22,680 --> 00:09:34,520 We're all involved in this kind of interrelated dance of creativity and de-creativity, of making other beings, of sustaining them, of destroying them. 126 00:09:34,700 --> 00:09:36,420 Can I just say, this sounds wonderful. 127 00:09:36,880 --> 00:09:38,280 I don't know how coherent this is. 128 00:09:38,280 --> 00:09:53,500 I mean, I don't know if it's just sort of an overarching idea or if there's real intellectual meat to this idea, but it sounds, especially for our age today, when we've so degraded the natural world, this seems like a good philosophy to live by. 129 00:09:53,500 --> 00:10:05,440 Yeah, you know, honestly, when I've presented these ideas in any non-academic context, at bookstores, at festivals of arts and ideas, things like that, people are like, yep, sounds good. 130 00:10:05,440 --> 00:10:07,680 I mean, people don't seem to have a problem with it. 131 00:10:08,120 --> 00:10:21,080 The only people who have a problem with it really are trained philosophers and theologians who have been told that it's somehow anti-intellectual to identify the deity with the natural world itself. 132 00:10:21,440 --> 00:10:22,400 It is a heresy. 133 00:10:22,600 --> 00:10:24,900 You know, people, Giordano Bruno. 134 00:10:25,980 --> 00:10:26,860 Who was burned at the stake. 135 00:10:26,860 --> 00:10:30,420 Who was burned at the stake at the dawn of the 17th century for ideas. 136 00:10:30,420 --> 00:10:37,060 Again, we didn't have the term at that time, but these were pantheistic ideas about God being the universe itself. 137 00:10:37,540 --> 00:10:38,840 I mean, for Bruno, it was fascinating. 138 00:10:39,020 --> 00:10:45,640 What Bruno said was that God doesn't so much create the universe as God unfolds as the universe. 139 00:10:46,500 --> 00:10:52,120 And so what the universe is is the incarnation of God, God's self. 140 00:10:52,340 --> 00:10:57,600 So the church got really upset because they were saying that Bruno denied the divinity of Christ. 141 00:10:58,160 --> 00:11:00,660 And his response was, I don't deny the divinity of Christ. 142 00:11:00,740 --> 00:11:02,940 I'm just saying that everything else is also defined. 143 00:11:03,220 --> 00:11:06,180 Like, the whole thing is the incarnation of God. 144 00:11:06,380 --> 00:11:06,480 Yeah. 145 00:11:06,700 --> 00:11:08,260 So what about you, personally? 146 00:11:08,500 --> 00:11:12,860 I mean, if you're open about talking about your own spiritual life or religious life, 147 00:11:12,860 --> 00:11:17,220 are these markers at all or traits that you identify with? 148 00:11:17,800 --> 00:11:21,900 So, to my mind, there are two major strands of pantheism. 149 00:11:21,900 --> 00:11:31,540 There's one that says, look, the whole world is one thing. Everything is one and the whole thing is divine and we're all part of it. 150 00:11:32,000 --> 00:11:50,220 There are other kind of strands of pantheism that locate godness in the variety of the world and in the numerous interrelationships that parts of the world have with one another, but they don't try to tie it all up into one thing. 151 00:11:50,680 --> 00:12:01,120 I tend toward that second kind of view of the world as sort of bubbling over, you know, with sacredness, with something you could even call godness. 152 00:12:01,400 --> 00:12:09,280 When I talk about God, I tend to mean, you know, the source of life in all things, the source of creation in all things and the ultimate end of all things. 153 00:12:09,760 --> 00:12:14,080 That divinity tends to sort of hit for me in all kinds of ways. 154 00:12:15,060 --> 00:12:21,900 Can you give me, I don't know, one or two examples of that or sort of instances where you really feel that or think that? 155 00:12:21,900 --> 00:12:32,820 Well, there's a hedge. There's a shrubbery on the way to a classroom where I teach on campus. 156 00:12:33,580 --> 00:12:41,620 And sometime in late October, it's usually like October 27th, there's one day where this green hedge, 157 00:12:41,860 --> 00:12:48,880 having become something on the order of like mustard and then having edged into a deeper orange, 158 00:12:48,880 --> 00:12:57,620 suddenly just out of nowhere becomes this deep russet red that is dark and bright at the same 159 00:12:57,620 --> 00:13:07,220 time and that just seems like a total celebration not just of what that hedge is of what that shrub 160 00:13:07,220 --> 00:13:13,060 is but of the blue sky that you can see behind it and of the you know minerals that are giving it 161 00:13:13,060 --> 00:13:18,120 life from the soil and of the sun that's reflecting on it and of you know the spider web that you can 162 00:13:18,120 --> 00:13:26,380 see on it and of the do on it. And every time I see that damn hedge at the end of October, I think, 163 00:13:26,580 --> 00:13:36,040 my God, right? All of these elements are making one another what they are and are doing it with 164 00:13:36,040 --> 00:13:43,060 a kind of joy and just magnificence that I find totally overwhelming. So, you know, these things 165 00:13:43,060 --> 00:13:48,860 hit, I think, in totally different ways. I have to say, I can totally relate to what 166 00:13:48,860 --> 00:13:55,600 you're saying. So I spent a lot of time in Vermont, and I go with my dog, go for walks 167 00:13:55,600 --> 00:14:00,500 up in the woods, and there's a particular tree that I just stop at over and over again. 168 00:14:00,620 --> 00:14:05,820 It's this old, ancient maple tree that's been struck by lightning. Most of it is on the 169 00:14:05,820 --> 00:14:10,240 ground. I mean, I'm sort of astonished that it's still living, even though like two-thirds 170 00:14:10,240 --> 00:14:15,100 of it are on the ground. And it's like this elder. It stands out from the other trees there. 171 00:14:15,260 --> 00:14:21,560 So I kind of know what you mean. So this godness in the world, so that's something that you carry 172 00:14:21,560 --> 00:14:28,560 with you throughout your life? So I was raised a whole bunch of things. I was baptized Roman 173 00:14:28,560 --> 00:14:36,720 and Catholic. My mom then changed churches. We were Lutheran for a spell. We were Presbyterian 174 00:14:36,720 --> 00:14:42,640 for a spell, became Episcopalian. My dad is Jewish in a kind of New York Jewish sort of 175 00:14:42,640 --> 00:14:47,540 ethical sensitivity way that isn't particularly devotional, but observes major holidays. 176 00:14:48,140 --> 00:14:53,600 My stepfather growing up was not just a yoga teacher, but the kind of yogi who had been formed 177 00:14:53,600 --> 00:15:00,840 in ashrams, in a very serious study of Sanskrit traditions. People would always say, you know, 178 00:15:00,880 --> 00:15:04,860 like, how can you possibly be Christian and Jewish at the same time? Or how can you do this stuff and 179 00:15:04,860 --> 00:15:08,260 also take the yogic tradition seriously or something like that. And I don't know why, 180 00:15:08,320 --> 00:15:12,980 but it never felt, none of it ever felt contradictory to me or like something that you 181 00:15:12,980 --> 00:15:17,220 couldn't, not necessarily reconcile. I didn't even feel the need to reconcile it. It's just 182 00:15:17,220 --> 00:15:21,800 like you do, I don't know, it's just the way that you eat pasta some days and you eat oatmeal other 183 00:15:21,800 --> 00:15:29,080 days. You take and gain nourishment from these traditions without having to determine whether 184 00:15:29,080 --> 00:15:33,820 your pasta or your oatmeal is better or which one of them you would do if you had to only eat pasta 185 00:15:33,820 --> 00:15:58,360 Oh, that's a childish question, right? So this has never been a problem for me. I remember being in a car once with my then three-year-old, and he was in the backseat. I was driving him to my mom's house, and Madonna's Like a Prayer was on the radio, and she sings, Oh God, I think I'm falling out of the sky. 186 00:15:59,000 --> 00:16:02,880 And my three-year-old said, God, who's God? 187 00:16:04,100 --> 00:16:06,100 And I had a bunch of thoughts at the same time. 188 00:16:06,200 --> 00:16:10,240 My first thought was like, how the hell have I not mentioned the word God to this child? 189 00:16:11,280 --> 00:16:12,380 Well, he is three years old. 190 00:16:12,380 --> 00:16:15,240 He was, I know, but still, it was just, it was absolutely baffling. 191 00:16:15,320 --> 00:16:16,920 We had talked about all sorts of other things, you know. 192 00:16:17,440 --> 00:16:22,520 And the second thing was, do I tell him about, like, the character in the Bible? 193 00:16:22,720 --> 00:16:26,920 Do I tell him who God, but the third thing was, you're losing the light. 194 00:16:27,320 --> 00:16:27,940 This is a child. 195 00:16:27,940 --> 00:16:29,320 You have to say this very quickly. 196 00:16:29,480 --> 00:16:30,780 You have to come up with something immediately. 197 00:16:30,900 --> 00:16:35,660 And this is part of what I find so fascinating about living in relation to children is that you have no time to think. 198 00:16:35,780 --> 00:16:40,840 You just need to say something true and understandable and fast. 199 00:16:41,300 --> 00:16:48,660 And I said, oh, God is the force that creates everything, the whole world. 200 00:16:49,500 --> 00:16:53,660 And my son said, ah, I don't like God. 201 00:16:54,500 --> 00:16:55,800 And I laughed. 202 00:16:55,800 --> 00:16:57,280 You don't have much of a choice. 203 00:16:57,940 --> 00:17:15,960 So there's not, but I dropped him off and I was thinking and I thought like, that's really interesting that when he asked me who God was, I didn't say, you know, well, throughout the ages, people have taught that God is this paternal force in the sky who, you know, redeemed his people from Israel and who like, I didn't go for the historical stuff. 204 00:17:16,020 --> 00:17:20,400 I didn't go for the narrative stuff or the character stuff or the personal relationship stuff. 205 00:17:20,580 --> 00:17:24,340 I went for the sort of source of creation of all things. 206 00:17:24,920 --> 00:17:26,600 It sounds kind of pantheistic. 207 00:17:26,880 --> 00:17:27,800 Well, this is just it. 208 00:17:27,800 --> 00:17:29,840 And so then I thought like, huh, that's interesting. 209 00:17:29,980 --> 00:17:35,860 It seems like these ideas, as much as I kind of want to hold all of them at arm's length, do kind of form me. 210 00:17:36,340 --> 00:17:38,800 Not necessarily because I think it's true. 211 00:17:38,980 --> 00:17:43,440 I mean, I'm not really sure what it means to call some huge idea like that that's unverifiable true. 212 00:17:44,000 --> 00:17:45,840 But because I think it's instructive. 213 00:17:45,920 --> 00:17:49,760 I think that if we are going to talk about God, it's a useful way to talk about God. 214 00:17:49,760 --> 00:18:00,320 There are plenty of people who relate in a reverent and grateful way to the natural world without calling it God. 215 00:18:01,140 --> 00:18:02,500 Hold that thought for a moment. 216 00:18:02,760 --> 00:18:06,840 When we come back, we'll talk about awe, wonder, and space exploration. 217 00:18:07,440 --> 00:18:10,760 Hi, it's Anne. I am so glad you're joining us. 218 00:18:11,120 --> 00:18:15,640 We have some amazing guests lined up for the weeks ahead, and I'm really excited about them. 219 00:18:16,060 --> 00:18:21,600 And here's a tip. Maybe you know this already, but if you follow Wonder Cabinet on Apple Podcasts, 220 00:18:21,840 --> 00:18:27,240 those new episodes will show up automatically, like a little weekly gift in your podcast feed. 221 00:18:27,660 --> 00:18:28,540 I hope you like it. 222 00:18:28,540 --> 00:18:33,320 You're listening to Wonder Cabinet. 223 00:18:33,640 --> 00:18:34,440 I'm Steve Paulson. 224 00:18:34,920 --> 00:18:37,160 You know, the whole time I was working on this episode, 225 00:18:37,460 --> 00:18:41,100 I was taking breaks to watch the recent Artemis II mission around the moon. 226 00:18:41,100 --> 00:18:45,580 I kept thinking this entire mission felt like a giant blast of awe. 227 00:18:45,960 --> 00:18:47,600 You could hear it in the astronauts' voices. 228 00:18:48,360 --> 00:18:52,380 Here's Christina Koch at the astronauts' press conference the day after Splashdown. 229 00:18:52,900 --> 00:18:58,380 So when we saw Tiny Earth, people asked our crew, 230 00:18:58,540 --> 00:19:06,700 what impressions we had. And honestly, what struck me wasn't necessarily just Earth, 231 00:19:06,700 --> 00:19:15,720 it was all the blackness around it. Earth was just this lifeboat hanging 232 00:19:15,720 --> 00:19:19,120 undisturbingly in the universe. 233 00:19:21,640 --> 00:19:22,400 So 234 00:19:22,400 --> 00:19:27,680 I may have not learned 235 00:19:27,680 --> 00:19:29,160 I know I haven't learned 236 00:19:29,160 --> 00:19:31,760 everything that this journey 237 00:19:31,760 --> 00:19:33,320 has yet to teach me. 238 00:19:34,540 --> 00:19:36,780 But there's one new thing I know 239 00:19:36,780 --> 00:19:38,520 and that is 240 00:19:38,520 --> 00:19:40,060 planet earth 241 00:19:40,060 --> 00:19:43,380 you are a crew. 242 00:19:43,380 --> 00:19:48,440 There's actually a phrase that's been coined to describe this experience 243 00:19:48,440 --> 00:19:49,740 The overview effect 244 00:19:49,740 --> 00:19:52,820 And I'm mentioning this because it's going to come up in a few minutes 245 00:19:52,820 --> 00:19:56,240 So let's get back to my conversation with M.J. Rubenstein 246 00:19:56,240 --> 00:20:02,380 So let me throw in two other words that might help flesh out some of this discussion that we're having 247 00:20:02,380 --> 00:20:03,940 Awe and wonder 248 00:20:03,940 --> 00:20:06,700 I mean, if people talk about sort of closeness to the natural world 249 00:20:06,700 --> 00:20:10,340 All the time you hear people who have experiences of awe and wonder 250 00:20:10,340 --> 00:20:13,040 And I know you've written about this as well 251 00:20:13,740 --> 00:20:17,380 And first of all, do you use those words interchangeably, or do they mean different things? 252 00:20:17,800 --> 00:20:19,800 For the most part, I use them interchangeably. 253 00:20:19,800 --> 00:20:39,860 When I'm trying to get really fine-tuned, I tend to use wonder as the blanket term for a whole cluster of related feelings and kind of overlapping feelings that include, in particular, I guess you could think of them as like positive feelings and negative feelings. 254 00:20:40,420 --> 00:20:43,120 No, really, I think of wonder as almost uniformly positive. 255 00:20:43,360 --> 00:20:43,860 I know. 256 00:20:43,980 --> 00:20:45,980 People do tend to think of wonder as uniformly positive. 257 00:20:46,440 --> 00:20:51,780 Wonder, the English word wonder, comes from a German word that means wound. 258 00:20:52,140 --> 00:21:00,120 There's a kind of damage that wonder does to our sense of who we are or what we know. 259 00:21:00,660 --> 00:21:04,460 There's like a destabilizing, a sense of uncertainty of like, 260 00:21:04,460 --> 00:21:10,620 taking us out of a kind of comfort and bringing us into something else. 261 00:21:11,120 --> 00:21:16,380 So yeah, so for me, wonder is a cluster of emotions, of reactions, 262 00:21:17,040 --> 00:21:18,940 some of which, again, we would encode as positive. 263 00:21:18,940 --> 00:21:23,120 So like awe, amazement, astonishment, et cetera. 264 00:21:23,340 --> 00:21:25,140 And some of which we might think of as negative, 265 00:21:25,380 --> 00:21:29,440 like fear or horror or even terror. 266 00:21:29,860 --> 00:21:36,160 You know that the word awe can be used in a sense of sort of being awesome or being awful. 267 00:21:36,620 --> 00:21:36,780 Yeah. 268 00:21:36,940 --> 00:21:38,380 I mean, awe can be overwhelming. 269 00:21:38,940 --> 00:21:40,600 And that can be terrifying, too. 270 00:21:40,800 --> 00:21:43,080 I mean, it can be astonishing, but it can be terrifying. 271 00:21:43,300 --> 00:21:43,960 Well, right, exactly. 272 00:21:43,960 --> 00:21:53,260 And so I think that when I get excited about awe or I get excited about wonder when it is at that sort of limit moment. 273 00:21:53,260 --> 00:22:03,920 I mean, part of the reason that being at the top of a mountain is so awe-inspiring is that it might be, you know, beautiful, magnificent, and also terrifying. 274 00:22:04,040 --> 00:22:04,920 You're at the top of a mountain. 275 00:22:05,000 --> 00:22:05,940 What happens if you fall? 276 00:22:06,220 --> 00:22:08,120 Also, who are you? 277 00:22:08,200 --> 00:22:09,980 Who are you to be at the top of that mountain? 278 00:22:10,640 --> 00:22:12,380 Does the universe care for you? 279 00:22:12,560 --> 00:22:14,800 Are you important at all? 280 00:22:14,880 --> 00:22:15,560 Are you this tiny? 281 00:22:16,000 --> 00:22:19,920 And there's a kind of concatenation of feeling. 282 00:22:20,440 --> 00:22:21,420 This is so beautiful. 283 00:22:21,580 --> 00:22:22,580 I am so small. 284 00:22:22,580 --> 00:22:31,020 This is so magnificent. This is so terrifying. I am so amazed. I am kind of scared that for me is 285 00:22:31,020 --> 00:22:36,020 when wonder gets interesting. Aren't there lots of stories of like, if you go back in religious 286 00:22:36,020 --> 00:22:40,240 history, the history of the saints, for instance, I mean, there are these stories of saints who 287 00:22:40,240 --> 00:22:47,400 had these awesome experiences. I mean, experiences of awe that reading today can seem kind of 288 00:22:47,400 --> 00:22:51,200 terrifying, even though it's like sort of this direct contact with the divine. 289 00:22:51,200 --> 00:23:06,000 Well, absolutely. I mean, who wants direct contact with the divine? It's terrifying, especially that divinity. The divinity of the Hebrew Bible and of the New Testament is an awesome God, a totally overwhelming God. 290 00:23:06,000 --> 00:23:13,640 When Moses climbs Mount Sinai to receive the Ten Commandments, he's not just like walking up a mountain to have wine and cheese at the top. 291 00:23:13,760 --> 00:23:15,140 I mean, it's scary. 292 00:23:15,440 --> 00:23:23,200 And any kind of depiction we have of Moses on Sinai is of, you know, the wind blowing his hair and the thunder coming from the clouds. 293 00:23:23,740 --> 00:23:34,620 The magnificence of this revelation calls forth this feeling that in Hebrew is called yirah, which is the fear of God. 294 00:23:34,620 --> 00:23:41,180 I mean, when people say, we're going to put the fear of God in you, right, it's reverence, it's amazement, it's gratitude, and it's also total terror. 295 00:23:41,320 --> 00:23:42,200 It's abject terror. 296 00:23:42,540 --> 00:23:44,720 It's not cool to see the face of God. 297 00:23:45,360 --> 00:23:46,080 It's scary. 298 00:23:46,740 --> 00:23:55,620 I mean, that's a really interesting and, I think, useful way to think about this because I think, I mean, most people would say, oh, you know, you connect directly with God. 299 00:23:55,700 --> 00:23:57,140 How wonderful that could be. 300 00:23:57,460 --> 00:24:00,980 But you're saying, oh, it's going to be way more complicated than that. 301 00:24:00,980 --> 00:24:01,200 Sure. 302 00:24:01,200 --> 00:24:14,020 Look, I am in support and admiration of folks whose contact with what they understand to be reality or the source of things gives them a warm, glowing feeling. 303 00:24:14,320 --> 00:24:17,520 That's delightful, and I wouldn't want to change that for the world. 304 00:24:17,520 --> 00:24:32,840 But there are whole traditions that encode the experiences of people whose contact with reality or with divinity are so overwhelming that you can only talk about them in contradictory terms, right? 305 00:24:32,840 --> 00:24:35,880 I was amazed and astonished, and I was also terrified. 306 00:24:36,140 --> 00:24:39,160 I felt loved, and I felt tortured at the same time. 307 00:24:39,400 --> 00:24:48,720 And certainly, the Jewish and Christian mystics attest to this kind of combination of being totally loved and kind of torn apart at the same time. 308 00:24:48,920 --> 00:24:54,440 And our great mystics have said that that tearing apart is what helps rebuild you as something else. 309 00:24:55,100 --> 00:24:57,460 Strips you down to something more essential. 310 00:24:57,460 --> 00:24:57,720 Yes, exactly. 311 00:24:57,720 --> 00:25:03,020 So Meister Eckhart talked about being kind of burned away like a log in the fire. 312 00:25:03,660 --> 00:25:05,520 You're the log, and God is the fire. 313 00:25:06,100 --> 00:25:10,840 And the fire burns you away until you yourself are nothing but fire. 314 00:25:11,320 --> 00:25:12,700 And on the one hand, that's magnificent. 315 00:25:12,820 --> 00:25:14,120 You become the fire of God. 316 00:25:14,160 --> 00:25:15,820 On the other hand, you're being burned, you know? 317 00:25:17,260 --> 00:25:18,180 It's really difficult. 318 00:25:18,840 --> 00:25:22,660 Teresa of Avila would talk about it as being crucified with Christ. 319 00:25:22,800 --> 00:25:24,640 On the one hand, you're united to your Savior. 320 00:25:24,820 --> 00:25:26,000 On the other hand, you're crucified. 321 00:25:26,000 --> 00:25:36,220 But I guess I try to hold on to this, the difficulty of spiritual experience in a kind of solidarity with people whose lives are not easy. 322 00:25:36,220 --> 00:25:48,700 And I don't just mean like internal lives or recreational lives when you're up on a mountain or you're meditating or contemplating, but whose just daily experience of being in the world is hard. 323 00:25:49,160 --> 00:25:51,440 It's not like they're missing something. 324 00:25:51,440 --> 00:25:57,800 You're not missing something if the whole of things or even little bits of things are too overwhelming for you. 325 00:25:57,840 --> 00:26:02,640 You might be in touch with things if the whole or shreds of things are too overwhelming for you. 326 00:26:02,780 --> 00:26:02,880 Yeah. 327 00:26:03,400 --> 00:26:14,860 There's a more specific experience of awe that you've, again, you've written about and you were just talking about yesterday at the meeting that we're at here at the Island of Knowledge. 328 00:26:15,320 --> 00:26:17,860 And that's what has been called the overview effect. 329 00:26:17,860 --> 00:26:20,400 I mean, this is the astronauts go out into space. 330 00:26:20,400 --> 00:26:27,080 they look back at Earth and there can be this profound experience, transformative experience, 331 00:26:27,220 --> 00:26:30,920 and a number of astronauts have talked about that. Can you sort of describe what the overview effect 332 00:26:30,920 --> 00:26:35,980 is? Sure. So the overview effect is a term coined by a philosopher named Frank White, I believe in 333 00:26:35,980 --> 00:26:43,040 the 1980s, who had listened to the testimony of astronauts coming back to Earth, having been 334 00:26:43,040 --> 00:26:49,800 either in orbit or having momentarily left the atmosphere and come back down, of seeing Earth 335 00:26:49,800 --> 00:26:58,040 from space and feeling overwhelmed by that vision. And seeing the earth from outside the earth is 336 00:26:58,040 --> 00:27:05,360 said to produce a feeling of overwhelming connection between and among human beings. 337 00:27:05,540 --> 00:27:09,300 Because you're suddenly seeing the planet as a whole. You know, you're not just seeing, 338 00:27:09,360 --> 00:27:13,500 you know, one country or another or one sort of ethnic group or another. It's like we're all 339 00:27:13,500 --> 00:27:17,480 there together. Right. That's the idea, that we are all there together so that the differences 340 00:27:17,480 --> 00:27:22,640 among and between us are not important. What matters is our collective belonging to this 341 00:27:22,640 --> 00:27:28,240 same planet. Yeah, the first couple of people to get outside our atmosphere, so Yuri Gagarin, 342 00:27:28,420 --> 00:27:34,700 the Russian cosmonaut, said, you know, from my spaceship, I saw the Earth fragile and entire, 343 00:27:34,820 --> 00:27:39,820 like people of the Earth, let's save the Earth. And Michael Collins said, you know, I just wish 344 00:27:39,820 --> 00:27:43,780 we could get all the world leaders up into space so that they could realize that we're all in this 345 00:27:43,780 --> 00:27:49,380 together, and then maybe they'd be able to get along. So I know you are rather skeptical, 346 00:27:49,680 --> 00:27:53,000 not of the experience of the overview effect itself, but sort of the 347 00:27:53,000 --> 00:28:00,620 wider benefits that basically it's been oversold. Well, I appreciate the way that you're asking the 348 00:28:00,620 --> 00:28:06,520 question. I do not at all doubt the experience of people who have attested to what Frank White 349 00:28:06,520 --> 00:28:10,900 calls the overview effect. It does seem to have been very personally transformative for them. 350 00:28:11,320 --> 00:28:15,140 they do seem to think that this kind of vision 351 00:28:15,140 --> 00:28:19,120 connects them to other human beings and to the Earth itself, 352 00:28:19,200 --> 00:28:20,080 and I'm sure that's true. 353 00:28:20,500 --> 00:28:23,460 I don't know that that means that the answer is to blast 354 00:28:23,460 --> 00:28:25,680 as many people as possible into space 355 00:28:25,680 --> 00:28:29,580 so that they can see the Earth and then come back transformed. 356 00:28:29,800 --> 00:28:32,300 I'm not sure that that's the way to world peace 357 00:28:32,300 --> 00:28:33,320 or to global reconciliation. 358 00:28:33,660 --> 00:28:35,620 Although there are people who want to do that. 359 00:28:35,620 --> 00:28:40,180 Jeff Bezos, with his Blue Origin, his whole rocket program, 360 00:28:40,900 --> 00:28:44,920 He brought up his wife into space, this group of women recently. 361 00:28:45,100 --> 00:28:46,940 Katy Perry, the pop star, was there. 362 00:28:47,180 --> 00:28:49,900 She talked about it being a fantastic experience. 363 00:28:50,160 --> 00:28:50,840 What do you make of that? 364 00:28:52,180 --> 00:28:53,480 Oh, it's hard. 365 00:28:53,640 --> 00:28:56,260 You know, on the one hand, I'm really happy for Katy Perry. 366 00:28:56,480 --> 00:28:58,960 I'm really glad that she got to have this beautiful experience. 367 00:28:59,100 --> 00:29:06,360 You know, apparently when she got up there with Gayle King and a bunch of others on this all-woman space flight, she sang What a Wonderful World. 368 00:29:06,540 --> 00:29:07,820 I mean, that's lovely. 369 00:29:07,820 --> 00:29:10,520 I don't deny her that experience at all. 370 00:29:10,520 --> 00:29:27,460 But the escalating space industry, which has become now a multi-trillion dollar industry, is on the one hand exacerbating the inequalities between and among human beings that kind of savage capitalism tends to exacerbate. 371 00:29:27,460 --> 00:29:44,300 And on the other hand, it does a ton of environmental damage. Launches put kerosene, kerosene directly into the stratosphere. The pollutants remain in the stratosphere much longer than they do in the atmosphere. And we are launching more and more and more and more rocket ships every year. 372 00:29:44,300 --> 00:29:55,140 We are producing them, ramping up mining, taking over land that used to belong to indigenous people in order to create spaceports, poisoning wetlands, poisoning the skies. 373 00:29:55,520 --> 00:29:57,000 I don't know that it's worth it. 374 00:29:57,100 --> 00:29:57,980 I think maybe that's it. 375 00:29:58,040 --> 00:30:04,340 It sounds so silly to say it this way, but I don't know that the environmental calculus is worth it. 376 00:30:04,680 --> 00:30:12,240 To do all of this damage in order to get a couple of people into space to feel really good about the earth doesn't make a ton of sense to me. 377 00:30:12,240 --> 00:30:24,720 Well, you gave a talk yesterday where you also talked about another Jeff Bezos mission into space, and that was with William Shatner, Captain Kirk from Star Trek, and I guess Bezos is a big Star Trek fan. 378 00:30:24,860 --> 00:30:25,140 Yes. 379 00:30:25,680 --> 00:30:28,380 And Shatner, who was, what, 90 years old when he went on this mission? 380 00:30:28,520 --> 00:30:30,040 He had a very different experience. 381 00:30:30,340 --> 00:30:33,460 He did, or at least the way he talked about it was different. 382 00:30:33,460 --> 00:30:53,820 He got up into space. I think that these flights are about seven minutes. And he came back down and he was shaking and sort of struggling to explain what had happened to him. And he said, you know, you're here, you're sort of traveling, you're racing through, ripping was the word he used, ripping through the kind of blueness of Earth. 383 00:30:53,820 --> 00:31:11,300 And then you get outside the atmosphere, and he said, it's like you're ripping the blanket off while you're sleeping, and suddenly this layer of protection we have, our atmosphere, is gone, is gone, and it's just you suspended in the nothingness, the vacuum. 384 00:31:11,300 --> 00:31:16,400 I mean, the absolute void of space. 385 00:31:16,880 --> 00:31:23,800 And he says, you look back at the planet and you realize that's mother and that's earth and that's life. 386 00:31:23,980 --> 00:31:27,260 And the thing that I am suspended in right now is death. 387 00:31:27,840 --> 00:31:33,260 And the line between life and death is so thin and so fragile. 388 00:31:34,180 --> 00:31:38,060 He was just sort of struggling to find words to explain it. 389 00:31:38,060 --> 00:31:42,440 but he kept pointing down to the earth and saying, this is life, and then pointing up at space and 390 00:31:42,440 --> 00:31:48,520 saying, and that's death. You know, he would go on in other interviews to say, we have to find a way 391 00:31:48,520 --> 00:31:53,880 to repair and heal this planet now because it's death out there. Like, there aren't other places 392 00:31:53,880 --> 00:31:59,620 for us to live. There aren't other places for us to be. He was horrified. He was horrified not by 393 00:31:59,620 --> 00:32:03,800 the vision of earth. He was, you know, of course, astonished and grateful for the vision of earth, 394 00:32:03,800 --> 00:32:10,000 But horrified that this is all Earth is, that this is the only place that we can live and that it's in so much danger. 395 00:32:10,400 --> 00:32:20,840 I mean, it's so interesting to hear that perspective because that is not the perspective of Jeff Bezos or of Elon Musk, I mean, who both have these space exploration companies. 396 00:32:20,840 --> 00:32:22,060 Oh, yeah, no, they've got lots of ideas. 397 00:32:22,060 --> 00:32:27,380 I mean, because, no, because, I mean, they think that the future of humanity is going to happen out in space, right? 398 00:32:27,380 --> 00:32:34,180 I mean, Earth is doomed, and, you know, our future is to colonize Mars or, I don't know, asteroids or whatever. 399 00:32:34,480 --> 00:32:38,020 Yeah, no, so Earth is doomed is the Elon Musk perspective. 400 00:32:38,160 --> 00:32:43,940 Earth is doomed, therefore we should go live on Mars so that we can create a kind of backup colony for humanity. 401 00:32:44,500 --> 00:32:52,980 Because whatever it is that will eventually wipe out the Earth, that might be an asteroid, it might be AI, it could be nuclear war. 402 00:32:53,500 --> 00:32:58,680 Whatever it is that's going to wipe out the Earth will wipe out all of humanity unless we have a backup planet for humanity. 403 00:32:59,140 --> 00:32:59,880 That's Mars. 404 00:33:00,320 --> 00:33:08,200 So let's get to Mars as quickly as possible so we can start to settle it and create, again, a kind of like a backup hard drive for humanity. 405 00:33:09,160 --> 00:33:10,360 Jeff Bezos is a little different. 406 00:33:10,660 --> 00:33:12,680 He's not so sure that Earth is doomed. 407 00:33:12,680 --> 00:33:16,920 He thinks that Earth is in a lot of trouble and Earth needs help and Earth needs restoration. 408 00:33:16,920 --> 00:33:29,700 And the way to do it is to relocate most of the human species, which, you know, does this polluting, destructive work, onto orbital space colonies that will be positioned between the Earth and the moon. 409 00:33:29,980 --> 00:33:32,520 So not even sort of a celestial body. 410 00:33:32,680 --> 00:33:33,320 No, no, no. 411 00:33:33,420 --> 00:33:37,200 No, it's like malls, like shopping malls established. 412 00:33:37,480 --> 00:33:39,780 And he thinks it's a much better – Mars, you know, fair enough. 413 00:33:39,840 --> 00:33:42,080 Mars, he says, is just a terrible place. 414 00:33:42,840 --> 00:33:46,080 And it's way too far from Earth, totally inhospitable. 415 00:33:46,080 --> 00:33:49,680 Well, yeah, so he wants to kind of create shopping malls between here and the moon. 416 00:33:50,200 --> 00:33:51,260 We'll live there instead. 417 00:33:51,260 --> 00:34:05,700 And when humanity is living on these space colonies, these sort of fabricated space colonies between Earth and the moon, the Earth will have time to regenerate itself, to take a breath and to recover from having hosted humanity. 418 00:34:06,480 --> 00:34:10,580 So I'm all for sort of thinking about future visions and all that. 419 00:34:10,660 --> 00:34:14,220 But this frankly sounds, I want to say ridiculous. 420 00:34:14,320 --> 00:34:15,260 That's not even the right word. 421 00:34:15,260 --> 00:34:17,860 but so misguided, wrongheaded. 422 00:34:18,400 --> 00:34:18,680 Yeah. 423 00:34:19,260 --> 00:34:23,480 You know, some people confronted with these ideas say like, fantastic, I want to go. 424 00:34:23,640 --> 00:34:25,340 I'm happy to go live on Mars. 425 00:34:25,560 --> 00:34:27,980 I will do the hard work of colonizing Mars. 426 00:34:28,760 --> 00:34:31,260 I mean, hard work is a massive understatement. 427 00:34:31,320 --> 00:34:32,580 It's going to suck on Mars. 428 00:34:32,760 --> 00:34:34,000 It's just, Mars is not nice. 429 00:34:34,660 --> 00:34:40,700 Or, yeah, it sounds like a climate-controlled rotating space colony is a great idea. 430 00:34:40,700 --> 00:34:42,820 So some people get excited about it. 431 00:34:42,820 --> 00:34:48,660 other people will say, you know, this is ridiculous. This is just a kind of cover for 432 00:34:48,660 --> 00:34:54,620 making a lot of money while the planet burns. This is bad faith, right? I think it's filled 433 00:34:54,620 --> 00:35:02,580 with a kind of hope and a kind of faith that things will work out if we work hard enough, 434 00:35:02,800 --> 00:35:09,260 that it is possible to have an infinite human future. It is possible to keep expanding, 435 00:35:09,260 --> 00:35:14,220 keep growing, keep using more resources, keep building more things, keep taking more from the 436 00:35:14,220 --> 00:35:17,720 universe. And it's going to happen through technology, advanced technology. And that 437 00:35:17,720 --> 00:35:22,720 advanced technology will allow us to do it, exactly. I do think that that's a kind of faith. 438 00:35:23,440 --> 00:35:26,460 It's a different kind of religion. Yeah, it is a different kind of, 439 00:35:26,540 --> 00:35:31,100 it's a sort of, I do think of it as a new, a kind of new religious movement. And I think it's 440 00:35:31,100 --> 00:35:38,340 misguided, but I don't necessarily think that even these, you know, billionaires are trying 441 00:35:38,340 --> 00:35:43,420 to deceive us, I think that they really think that this is possible. And this is the way. This 442 00:35:43,420 --> 00:35:49,180 is the way of the future. Okay. One final question. Because Anne and I have this podcast called 443 00:35:49,180 --> 00:35:54,220 Wonder Cabinet. We're sort of playing with this idea of the cabinet of wonders. And one of the 444 00:35:54,220 --> 00:35:59,880 ideas we're playing with is that if you were to come up with an imaginary wonder cabinet, 445 00:35:59,980 --> 00:36:05,780 you could put anything in there. It could be an idea. It could be an experience, a concept, 446 00:36:05,780 --> 00:36:15,820 a thought experiment what would you put in your wonder cabinet wow that's a really hard question 447 00:36:15,820 --> 00:36:25,080 so the thing about a wonder cabinet is that i mean that the old wonder cabinets contain these 448 00:36:25,080 --> 00:36:31,700 you know magnificent objects but of course the thing about wonder is the uncontainment that it 449 00:36:31,700 --> 00:36:39,200 prompts, right? The sense of unboundedness or, you know, vast interrelation and complications. 450 00:36:39,200 --> 00:36:44,200 So the trick of having a real wonder cabinet, like a real wonder cabinet, would not just be to 451 00:36:44,200 --> 00:36:50,320 have like some really beautiful minerals or something in it, but somehow to like break the 452 00:36:50,320 --> 00:36:58,060 bonds of the cabinet itself, right? How do you have a kind of collection that by virtue of your 453 00:36:58,060 --> 00:37:03,020 contemplation of that collection leads you beyond the collection, right? So that it's not just in a 454 00:37:03,020 --> 00:37:09,320 bookcase. It's not in a, it takes you through it. This is it. There's a distinction in the world of 455 00:37:09,320 --> 00:37:16,460 religion scholars between idol and icon, that the old theologians talk about an idol as making you 456 00:37:16,460 --> 00:37:23,500 wonder at that thing itself, right? Like as though that's the thing. Whereas an icon is something 457 00:37:23,500 --> 00:37:27,440 that amazes you by taking you beyond that thing 458 00:37:27,440 --> 00:37:29,860 into lifting you into something else. 459 00:37:29,980 --> 00:37:32,960 So I'd be looking for like an icon, right? 460 00:37:33,180 --> 00:37:36,440 Something that takes you beyond it. 461 00:37:36,780 --> 00:37:38,640 And I know that this sounds schmaltzy, 462 00:37:38,640 --> 00:37:43,340 but honestly, any single experience I have 463 00:37:43,340 --> 00:37:47,580 with little kids is kind of iconic for me this way. 464 00:37:48,180 --> 00:37:50,360 And it's worth noting that you have a couple 465 00:37:50,360 --> 00:37:51,880 of relatively small kids. 466 00:37:52,000 --> 00:37:53,060 I do, they're relatively small. 467 00:37:53,060 --> 00:38:12,680 They're eight and six. So they're becoming themselves. They're becoming the people they are in the world. And if I stop too long to think about anything that we're talking about, it throws me completely off course and suddenly I can't get their shoes on because I'm just so astonished by the way that their mind works. 468 00:38:12,680 --> 00:38:23,280 So I guess for me, okay, I would put in it this 3D ultrasound image that I saw with my first child. 469 00:38:23,920 --> 00:38:27,840 It was, you know, late in pregnancy, they do for old people. 470 00:38:27,980 --> 00:38:30,400 I was old when this guy was incubating. 471 00:38:31,040 --> 00:38:36,600 And so for old people, they want to have these very late stage ultrasounds that are 3D to make sure that they turn the kid around. 472 00:38:36,600 --> 00:38:43,840 They make sure that there's nothing that you need to know that's going on with the little one that you might need to intervene with. 473 00:38:44,220 --> 00:38:45,320 So it's late stage. 474 00:38:45,380 --> 00:38:53,620 So you can really see, like, shapes, and you can see features, and I could see a nose, and just, like, all of it was totally astonishing. 475 00:38:53,760 --> 00:38:58,800 And at one point, the tech said to me, the ultrasound tech said, oh, and there's his spine. 476 00:38:59,620 --> 00:39:02,000 And I said, he has a spine? 477 00:39:02,000 --> 00:39:07,780 and she looked at me and laughed and said yeah you wouldn't want him without a spine 478 00:39:07,780 --> 00:39:18,080 but it it it floored me because i thought holy god like i i forgot he needed a spine like i knew 479 00:39:18,080 --> 00:39:21,880 that he needed eyes and i knew that he needed hands and i knew that there would be feet but 480 00:39:21,880 --> 00:39:30,700 like oh yeah a spine and i realized like thank goodness that it's not the conscious part of me 481 00:39:30,700 --> 00:39:36,080 that is forming this child because the conscious part of me would have brushed his teeth without 482 00:39:36,080 --> 00:39:41,940 giving him a spine. Like I have no, let me say as an aside, when people get really excited about 483 00:39:41,940 --> 00:39:45,940 the mystery of consciousness, I can't join them because it seems to me that consciousness is one 484 00:39:45,940 --> 00:39:53,140 of our least powerful, one of the least powerful things we do. Left to their own devices, the bodies 485 00:39:53,140 --> 00:39:59,340 of many of us form spines, right? Even though I had totally forgotten this kid would need a spine. 486 00:39:59,960 --> 00:40:22,420 And suddenly, all of these different forces of the, not the whole universe, but all these different forces of the universe and, you know, the kind of stardust that we are that could organize itself into such a way, despite my best efforts to mess it up, made a spine for this child, threw me into just total ravishment, astonishment, and terror. 487 00:40:22,420 --> 00:40:36,240 Because, again, it's this wonder at these processes, but also the horror that if I had been in charge of this process, which was presumably happening in my own body, I would have utterly screwed the whole thing up, right? 488 00:40:36,280 --> 00:40:42,040 How is it possible that this whole thing relies on this series of processes that's so contingent and so fragile? 489 00:40:42,620 --> 00:40:43,900 So I think that's what it would be. 490 00:40:43,940 --> 00:40:45,340 It would be a 3D ultrasound photo. 491 00:40:46,000 --> 00:40:46,320 Perfect. 492 00:40:46,580 --> 00:40:47,860 What a wonderful place to end. 493 00:40:47,960 --> 00:40:48,340 Thank you. 494 00:40:48,460 --> 00:40:49,240 Thank you so much. 495 00:40:49,240 --> 00:40:52,380 That's Mary Jane Rubenstein 496 00:40:52,380 --> 00:40:54,360 She teaches philosophy and religion 497 00:40:54,360 --> 00:40:55,660 at Wesleyan University 498 00:40:55,660 --> 00:40:57,380 and she's the author of many books 499 00:40:57,380 --> 00:40:58,740 including Astrotopia 500 00:40:58,740 --> 00:41:01,600 The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race 501 00:41:01,600 --> 00:41:03,820 We also talked about her earlier books 502 00:41:03,820 --> 00:41:06,720 Pantheologies, Gods, Worlds, Monsters 503 00:41:06,720 --> 00:41:08,260 and Strange Wonder 504 00:41:08,260 --> 00:41:09,880 The Closure of Metaphysics 505 00:41:09,880 --> 00:41:11,180 and The Opening of Awe 506 00:41:11,180 --> 00:41:14,620 MJ was part of the gathering on rational mysticism 507 00:41:14,620 --> 00:41:17,200 at the Island of Knowledge Think Tank in Tuscany 508 00:41:17,200 --> 00:41:21,840 We'll be sharing more of those conversations and discussions with you in the coming months. 509 00:41:22,480 --> 00:41:28,520 Support for Wonder Cabinet's Island of Knowledge episodes comes from Dartmouth College and the John Templeton Foundation. 510 00:41:28,920 --> 00:41:34,320 Thanks, as always, to our audio engineer, Steve Gotcher, and our digital producer, Mark Rickers. 511 00:41:34,880 --> 00:41:38,160 Wonder Cabinet is based in Madison, Wisconsin, and Bersher, Vermont. 512 00:41:38,840 --> 00:41:39,820 I'm Anne Strain-Champs. 513 00:41:40,120 --> 00:41:41,040 And I'm Steve Paulson. 514 00:41:41,300 --> 00:41:42,600 We'd love to hear from you. 515 00:41:42,600 --> 00:41:47,180 Send us your questions or comments at wondercabinetproductions.com 516 00:41:47,180 --> 00:41:49,440 and sign up for the newsletter while you're there. 517 00:41:49,740 --> 00:41:51,540 Be well, and see you next time.