Rapt in awe.
“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead - his eyes are closed.”
Albert Einstein
To apprehend the mystery is to be sharply discerning. You must be able to hold in frame a finely resolved picture of the world’s diversity - while understanding its fundamental integrity and wholeness. As you oscillate between marveling at plurality and acknowledging unity - you might wonder how it all carries on. What is the engine driving the ceaseless creation and annihilation of phenomena? Such a lofty question has enthralled scientists and mystics since the beginning, and both have come not upon final answers but upon reliable methods of inquiry.
Serious truth seekers don’t rest upon opinions or beliefs - but have devised self-correcting methods of inquiry. They understand the constant flux of reality and yearn not for ultimate truth - but for provisional understanding predicated upon the knowledge that reality cannot be put into words or explained. In essence: the Tao that can be named is not the real Tao.
Philosopher of Science Ian Hacking aptly summarizes such a method:
“If you can have a method which is internally self-stabilizing, which acknowledges permanent fallibility and yet at the same time tends to settle down, then you will have found a better way to fix belief”
If you approach reality in this way - humble and prepared to update your beliefs in the face of flux - then you may find some nuggets of truth. Careful observations lead to useful generalizations and these lead to foundational principles. One such principle, ascertained and corroborated from inner and outer exploration, is the prevalence of asymmetry.
The dance of the cosmos, both within and without, is driven by asymmetry. Your inner world is in a near-constant productive tension between indulging your passions and heeding your reason. Freud explored the relationship between these forces dubbing them the Id and the Superego respectively - with the Ego as the mediating factor between them. Plato also understood our disjointed experience and divided the soul into reason, spirit, and appetite. We act in the world because of the dance of opposites - and our experience is that of the radical center point. We are the integral whole out of which these energies spin. It is their asymmetrical influence on us that leads to action.
Sometimes we act through reason alone, closing off our hearts.
Sometimes we act with our bosom aflame, casting logic aside.
One modality privileges the vitality of the present moment, while the other privileges the future. This dichotomy is helpful and necessary, for if we spend our days tending to the whims of the moment - we will walk in a circle forever. Yet, if we march onwards forever seeking a better tomorrow - we miss the joy of living. This asymmetry presents itself on a societal level as well.
“Our forefathers had civilization inside themselves, the wild outside. We live in the civilization they created, but within us the wilderness still lingers. What they dreamed, we live, and what they lived, we dream.” T.K. Whipple
We must now contend with the balance between structure and freedom. Our modern world is highly ordered, efficient, and productive. Yet, within us all is a primate yearning to swing among trees and bask in the sunlight. Our development as a civilization must forever pay respects to our shapeless animal core - while ever leading us towards flourishing and collective prosperity. We turn away from the lingering wilderness within at our peril. The oldest parts of our brain have forever etched within their folds the wordless memories of starry nights, of hunts gone well, and of the untold brutality of the natural world. If we build a society not for humankind as it is - but for an infantile ideal of what we are - our internal dance of polarities - the dynamic balance between good and evil - will be thrown out of equilibrium.
Moving from the human realm to the natural world - asymmetry appears once again.
One of humanity’s most impressive feats was cataloging all known matter by constructing a Periodic Table of Elements. Curiously, among the 118 basic elements - we find no semblance of an even distribution as over 90% of all atoms in the universe are hydrogen. Yet, over 85% of all mass in the universe is Dark Matter - a substance not yet understood by science but known to exist. Stranger still is the fact that the Big Bang should have created equal amounts of matter and what physicists refer to as antimatter - yet here we are - entirely made of matter with antimatter almost nowhere to be found.
As this matter came together to create earthly life - it did so asymmetrically.
Plants are the overwhelming majority of Earth’s biomass, accounting for over 80% of it. At the species level, only 5% of all animals have a spine while the remaining 95% are invertebrates. Everything operates at the molecular and cellular level because of some asymmetrical distribution of matter or charge. Our cells pump protons and electrons across their membranes to create charge gradients - which in turn drive life-sustaining processes. Asymmetry is the engine of cell formation, human formation, galaxy formation, and everything in between.
May we all find moments to stand rapt in awe at the productive messiness of reality.
It is as it is.
Sasha