You have to work a little bit to see the beauty in the human brain, this wonderful and strange product of over 13 billion years of Cosmic evolution. That’s where the depth of its beauty lies: Our brains — we ourselves — are completely embedded in both Cosmic space and Cosmic time, inseparable from the scale of these dimensions.

We could not have appeared much sooner in time, because it required those billions of years of galactic, stellar and planetary evolution to prepare the nest for life on Earth, as well as for our birth as a species.

And our appearance in space? It’s beginning to look as though we might have appeared in any of a million places in the universe. And if by “we,” we mean “intelligent life,” then most likely … we have!

After you watch this video, it’s worth asking, “What use is the brain?

Does our use of it match the consummate beauty and honed perfection of it as an instrument of intelligence?

Since the Renaissance, but especially since the Industrial Revolution, we in the West live in a world in which the scientific and spiritual realms are increasingly separate and apparently incompatible with one another.

Over the centuries, some people in each realm have tried at various times to resolve this split by vanquishing the other realm in its entirety.

For instance …

Fundamentalisms of all kinds usually retreat into some text as the “word of God,” and engage in complete denial of well-established scientific facts about such matters as the age of the Earth and the processes of evolution.

On the other hand, some atheists (in the other realm) “preach” a radical absence of meaning in the mindless mechanisms of our cosmos.

John Boswell’s work, though, points to a middle way, in which the facts of science itself are an expression of the spiritual. They are both spiritual and material.

One of the great beauties of this “middle way” (and it’s no accident that you find this expression in Buddhism) is that it heals the split in our culture as well as the split within our own psyches: Boswell’s work engages both our intellectual and our emotional faculties at once. For some of us, science always does this.

How would you change your life if you believed that the entire universe is holy?

I love this stuff. Click here to see all the Symphony of Science videos.

"The Individual and the Universe are Inseparable"

Remembering Alan Watts no doubt dates me.

That’s OK.

I still miss the extravagant and rebellious Sixties.

Here’s a sample of what Alan Watts was like, but remixed by John Boswell in the style of Boswell’s Symphony of Science videos.

Boswell’s remix presents Watts more like Watts than … Watts was himself!

Which he would probably have appreciated …

He explains it this way:

“The Poetry of Reality (An Anthem for Science)” is the fifth video in the Symphony of Science series. This new video differs slightly from previous ones, in that it features many more scientific thinkers than usual. It includes (in order) Michael Shermer, Jacob Bronowski, Carl Sagan, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Richard Dawkins, Jill Tarter, Lawrence Krauss, Richard Feynman, Brian Greene, Stephen Hawking, Carolyn Porco, and PZ Meyers, all contributing their personal views on what science means to them and how important it is in our daily lives.

The reason I love these videos so much — and I suppose it’s possible for some people to not love them — is that, using science, they deliver the same emotional “hit” or impact as religion at its best.

They operate on the left and right brains in the same way that religion does, carrying this perennial spiritual message that is also a scientific fact: “We are all bound together in time and space, having evolved in an ‘unbroken thread’ from a common source.’”

From the perspective expressed in these videos, science and religion are one thing.

See earlier videos in this series here and here.