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1 R T H E C A S E F O R W O N D E R A M E D I T A T I O N W Y N W A C H H O R S T Perhaps it had no beginning. Perhaps, being spacetime itself, it is neither where nor when. Like the scarlet ribbons of song, it came ‘‘I will never know from where.’’ Yet here I am, awake in this vast improbability for a nanosecond of cosmic time, a mote of life on a fleck of rock afloat in the cosmic ocean. What better way to pass that waking moment than to probe its mysteries? What better ends than love and wonder, the two great gifts of consciousness? A true sense of wonder ignites an open quest for knowledge, not the idolatry born of an egocentric metaphysics – of our Paleolithic brains, our parental programming, or the need to restore childhood innocence – but a curiosity rooted in true humility, one guided by the highest of human endeavors, the enterprise of science. Beyond all the practical benefits, science is a spiritual quest in the broadest and deepest sense. At its heart is the need to perfect a grand internal model of reality, to find the center by completing the edge. If science is a belief, it is simply a faith in the inherent potential of humanity. As the only reliable road to any accessible reality, scientific knowledge is the result of open inquiry and debate , accepted only when a range of compelling evidence is corroborated and replicated by a community of inquirers. Science is 2 W A C H H O R S T Y structured like a web, its facts bound tightly in place by many supportive threads. When they enable us to make accurate predictions and build powerful devices, we know we have tapped into some form of reality. ‘‘It is not the ‘true’ story,’’ said the philosopher Paul Kurtz, ‘‘but it is certainly the truest.’’ Yet there is a great wall dividing what we know from what we feel. We are a species still in childhood, only now becoming aware of the true immensity and complexity of the cosmos, a universe turbulent and mysterious beyond anything our forebears conceived . ‘‘Mystery surrounds us,’’ wrote the naturalist Chet Raymo; ‘‘it laps at our shores. It permeates the land. Scratch the surface of knowledge and mystery bubbles up like a spring.’’ And ‘‘the larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shore of wonder.’’ Wonder reflects the mysterium tremendum, the aura of unfathomable majesty, utterly humbling and wholly other, surrounding the sublime and terrifying unknowns that have bordered our models of reality – the dark forest, the sacred mountain, the boundless sea, the black silence of cosmic infinity. The proclivity of otherwise educated people to believe in Adam’s rib and Noah’s Ark suggests that some of us have an inability to confront the abyss. A mature sense of wonder occurs when we no longer perceive the world and the cosmos in a provincially personal context. Entering mental adulthood, we see the larger reality as neither parental nor primarily threatening, but as impersonal and indifferent . There is resignation, if not romance, in our isolation, and a higher tolerance for ambiguity, for our insignificance, and for the high probability that there is no personal meaning out there, no divine parent watching over each of us. The chasm between innocence and maturity is that the one sees the cosmos as familiarly personal, while the other sees the personal as inscrutably cosmic. Perhaps it is more than coincidence that Sigmund Freud and Edwin Hubble shared the same moment in history, Freud exposing the rational mind as a tiny clearing in the dark forest of the psyche, Hubble revealing that our galaxy is only one among billions , that the heavens are immense beyond imagination. To gaze into the night sky and feel the vastness and passion of creation is to glimpse an equally vast interior. We are aware of the stars only because we have evolved a corresponding inner space. And the T H E C A S E F O R W...

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