"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious"
Albert Einstein in The World As I See It 1931
When you are intelligent enough to see the world like an Einstein, with all its profound harmony and symmetry, you can’t help but be in awe of it as well as realize that there is still much more that you don’t actually know about it. And it is the occasional glimpses of the Mystery, as the veil lifts for a moment, and you see the bigger picture, that are the highlights of life. That’s what Einstein was alluding to.
Having a deep curiosity, especially about the inexplicable, is what takes one beyond the boundaries of our known world. We know there are laws that govern nature but why is it that sometimes those laws can cease to apply under certain conditions? How is it that a molecule can be a wave and a particle at the same time? The double split experiment has yet to explain itself.
The mysterious always engenders a sense of wonder and awe in us. When we see the harmony in the laws of nature, we can’t help but feel as if there is, as Einstein called it, some great watchmaker behind the workings of the cosmos. All this harmony and conscious life suggests an intelligence behind it all. Some might call this a type of pantheism.
Pantheism
By definition it means identifying the deity or god with the entire universe and all in existence. It could also mean a belief in all the gods, but primarily it implies equating god with the forces of the universe, as well as a tolerance for all religions. This philosophy is atheistic essentially and does not require the existence of a supreme personality of godhead, since the cosmos embodies everything.
Curiously this form of the deity, where the entire cosmos embodies it, is found in the Veda text called Bhagavad Gita. In chapter 11 Krishna the godhead in personal form, reveals his so-called “Universal form” which consists of thousands of hands, heads and in fact all the planets and galaxies. It is such a overwhelming revelation that Arjuna is blown away and asks Krishna to return to his original human form. So the one deity Krishna, is seen as the source of the pantheistic universal form as well as being the source of all power.
This impersonal understanding of god as merely the powers of the universe around us, and not some deity who concerns himself with human affairs, is much like that of European thinkers of the 17th century, like Spinoza, who taught a type of rationalism, from which the modern conceptions of the self originated. There is no need in this philosophy for a soul or anything metaphysical. It is basically atheism. Nature is god and god is nature. Still, one can’t help thinking, like Einstein, that there is more mystery still to be discovered and also that there seems to be an intelligence or watchmaker behind everything.
Pantheism, where everything is divine, means that nothing is divine. It differs from the Veda which explain that although everything comes from one original source, still there is differentiation, and there is that which is divine and that which is mundane. Pantheism can actually be seen in the ancient Greek thinkers like Heraclitus and Parmenides. Other philosophies like Taoism and Buddhism might allude to a pantheistic viewpoint in some branches of their doctrine.
It makes you think, doesn't it?
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