Who or what have been the guiding lights on your quest? On your journey? Sometimes a guide will be important to both. The death last week of Murray Gell-Mann reminded me of a discovery that shifted my spiritual quest onto a new path.
Murray Gell-Mann visiting ICRANet site in Nice, France, 2012 ~ Melirius photo, Wikimedia Commons
This was the story of the Santa Fe Institute, founded by a group of scientists, including Dr. Gell-Mann. Though I know none of them personally, their story jolted my exploration of faith and understanding to a new and higher level.
Until I discovered this story, my quest was primarily to find a religion that rang true to me. This meant it had to reflect scientific reality as it was then understood. I had yet to learn that for centuries, ever since Galileo, religion and science had mostly withdrawn to their own separate spheres of influence. Another thing I didn’t know was that the reality science seeks to understand is a moving target.
Detail from untitled work with symbols from top: spirit line, lady’s slipper, blood line ~ jturner; embroidery on dyed silk
What I knew about science then was framed by Isaac Newton’s view of the world. Within this framework, the systems of nature were potentially predictable. Eventually, scientists would be able to understand everything. My high school textbooks and the science fiction I began to read after graduating reinforced this idea of predictability.
Has your life seemed predictable to you? Mine certainly hasn’t. The mystical events I had experienced since early childhood came out of the blue. They affected my life’s journey in all kinds of ways. I was barely aware of this, and had no way to speak about it. Just a few years prior to discovering the Santa Fe Institute and its story, I had created three autobiographical works for an art gallery. In them, lacking words, I expressed my life in symbols instead.
What energized me so much about the work happening at the Santa Fe Institute was the notion of spontaneous and complex systems emerging out of disorder and chaos. These were patterns of
motion,
growth,
behaviour, and
beauty, among other things.
They were not the predictable patterns of Newton’s world, but something nonlinear, dynamic and strange.
In a Newtonian world, the presence of God in human life made no sense to me, but in the world of the scientists at the Santa Fe Institute, I felt at home. The questions for me then became, “How does God make himself known in the world? Make his presence felt? Do miracles?” These questions knit quest and journey together for me more closely. They began the process of bringing my inner and outer lives into closer harmony and alignment.
It’s impossible to know which persons or events will deflect us into new paths of spiritual discovery and life-learned wisdom. This is why the quest demands a commitment to reading and study as well as prayer and action. The adventures that lead to the world’s great discoveries are full of guiding lights. We never know when they will open to us discoveries of our own.
For further reading:
Waldrop, M. Mitchell. Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos. New York: Simon & Schuster Touchstone, 1992.
Boorstin, Daniel J. The Discoverers: A History of Man’s Search to Know His World and Himself. New York: Random House, 1983.