Estimated read: 8 minutes
I was twelve years old in science class when it happened.
We were learning about atoms. How everything is made of them. How the speed they vibrate at determines whether something becomes a hand, a desk, a cloud, a lake.
I held up my hand and stared at it. Then I looked at the desk.
Wow.
I could imagine the microscopic movement happening inside both of them. My hand and that desk were made of the same stuff. Just vibrating at different speeds. The only thing that made us appear separate was how fast we were moving.
I slammed my hand on the desk and asked out loud: “But why don’t they both fall apart?”
My teacher moved on. I did not.
A question that lived in me for thirty years
That question lived in me for thirty years. And somewhere in all that living, the nursing and the losing and the rebuilding, the answer started coming through.
Where there appears to be disintegration and disorganization, there is actually a harmonious unity.
The space between your body and mine is not empty. It is a living, fertile energy. It is what some call God, some call the Tao, some call the Great Spirit. I understand it as the thing that keeps it all together. Infinite and immense. Indescribable and unseen. Flowing through every aspect of everything.
We are not separate beings bumping into each other occasionally. We are one continuous organism having the experience of being individuals.
What science says, and what it cannot say
Here is the part twelve year old me would have loved. Physics does have an answer to why my hand did not sink into the desk. Atoms are mostly empty space, but their outer electrons push back against each other, and a rule called the Pauli exclusion principle keeps them from crowding into the same state. That is part of why matter feels solid. Inside every atom, another force, the strong nuclear force, holds the nucleus together.
So science can name the forces. What it cannot tell us is why there is something holding it all together in the first place. Why the universe is ordered enough for hands and desks and lakes and love to exist at all. That is where science and the sacred start to dance.
I am not alone in this. Some of the greatest minds in history sat right here with me.
Albert Einstein and the mysterious
Einstein was not religious in a traditional sense, and he said so. But he wrote that the most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious, and called it the source of all true art and science (Einstein, 1931). A decade later he wrote one of his most quoted lines: “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind” (Einstein, 1941).
He was not asking us to choose. He was asking us to hold both.
Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung
Remember the Pauli exclusion principle, the rule that helps keep my hand out of the desk? Wolfgang Pauli, the Nobel prize winning physicist behind it, spent years in conversation with the psychiatrist Carl Jung. Together they published a book exploring the meeting place of physics and the psyche (Jung & Pauli, 1955).
Jung’s contribution was his essay on synchronicity, which he described as meaningful coincidence, events connected by meaning rather than by cause. When I asked for a sign in that empty chapel and the bells rang, I did not need Jung to tell me what it meant. But it comforts me that a physicist and a psychiatrist took that kind of experience seriously enough to write a book about it.
Max Planck and consciousness
Max Planck, the father of quantum theory, told an interviewer in 1931 that he regarded consciousness as fundamental and matter as derived from consciousness (Sullivan, 1931). The man who opened the door to quantum physics thought mind might come first.
Erwin Schrödinger and the one mind
Schrödinger, another founder of quantum physics, was deeply moved by the Upanishads. In his lectures on mind and matter, he wrestled with the idea that the many minds we experience might, at the deepest level, be one (Schrödinger, 1958). I learned about this idea, and I believe in it. We are one continuous organism having the experience of being individuals.
Teilhard, Sagan, and Lao Tzu
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit priest and paleontologist, spent his life trying to show that evolution and spirit are one story moving toward greater consciousness and love (Teilhard de Chardin, 1959). Carl Sagan, who was never shy about his skepticism, still wrote that we are made of star stuff and that we are a way for the cosmos to know itself (Sagan, 1980).
And long before any of them, the Taoists had a word for this. The Tao. The Way. The current beneath everything. The Tao Te Ching describes a nameless source that gives rise to all things and cannot be fully spoken (Lao Tzu, trans. 1988). I did not know at twelve years old that I was already asking a question Lao Tzu had answered thousands of years before.
The lab and the chapel
God. Spirit. The Tao. The Great Spirit. I honor all the names the Divine goes by.
I choose to embrace both science and spirituality. The lab and the chapel. I have stood in both, and in both, I feel the vibration, the movement, of our sacred dance.
Your turn to wonder
Tonight, hold up your hand and look at it the way I did at twelve. Much of what it is made of was forged inside stars. Every atom in it is moving right now. And somehow, it all holds together as you. Sit with that for one full minute. Then write down the question it brings up. That question is your doorway.
If the Tao calls to you, find it in the Ten Doorways on the Believe path.
This essay is part of the Believe Series on the Believe path at The Gracewell Studio. Start at the Believe path here, or keep reading: Peace Pilgrim and the Courage to Begin Again.
A Blessing for the Curious
May you never stop asking why. May your questions lead you deeper, not away. May you feel, even for one moment, how held you are by everything. Go gracefully. 🤍
About the Author
Rev. Kristina Soto, RN, BSN Registered Nurse · Quality Management · Interfaith Minister · Usui Ryoho Reiki Master · Founder, The Gracewell Studio
Kristina is a Registered Nurse with nearly two decades of clinical experience, including more than ten years in quality management and performance improvement, and now in case management. She is an ordained Interfaith Minister through One Spirit Learning Alliance, a Usui Ryoho Reiki Master, a Shamanic Reiki Practitioner, a NYC Marriage Officiant, and the founder of The Gracewell Studio, where artful living meets well-being. Read more about Kristina.
References
Einstein, A. (1931). The world as I see it. In Living philosophies. Simon & Schuster.
Einstein, A. (1941). Science and religion. In Science, philosophy and religion: A symposium. Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion in Their Relation to the Democratic Way of Life.
Jung, C. G., & Pauli, W. (1955). The interpretation of nature and the psyche. Pantheon Books.
Lao Tzu. (1988). Tao te ching (S. Mitchell, Trans.). Harper & Row.
Sagan, C. (1980). Cosmos. Random House.
Schrödinger, E. (1958). Mind and matter. Cambridge University Press.
Sullivan, J. W. N. (1931, January 25). Interview with Max Planck. The Observer.
Teilhard de Chardin, P. (1959). The phenomenon of man. Harper & Brothers.
