The Universe Cathedral
Imagine a modern Cathedral to the Universe: a “place”, both physical and virtual, where people can explore, learn and contemplate what we know about the universe, life and mind. Imagine a series of chapels, and a matching set of virtual spaces, devoted to 20 or so essential knowledge landscapes of our time: the tree of life, a map of human emotions, a journey through the size scales of the universe, a web of human archetypal story lines, diagrams of fundamental particles and chemical elements. Picture these chapels as sculptural idea-scapes, traversable environments that invite not just learning but also contemplation of significant territories of our physical, biological or mental/cultural knowledge and experience.
This is a proposal for a fundamentally new type of institution that gathers communities, tools, practices and ideas devoted to integration in an age of information overload. It is built on a proposition that we are far enough into the scientific and humanistic revolutions started in the renaissance that we can now knit together the disparate parts of knowledge, values and practices flung apart by the intellectual and political disruptions of the last 500 years. It is premised on the hope that that science and spirituality, in some forms at least, are fully reconcilable, that human sensibilities, analytic and encyclopedic on the one hand and physical, contemplative or relational on the other, can not only co-exist but support and strengthen each other. It anticipates that our scientific understanding of matter, life and mind will increasingly become more unified and that new ways of making sense of and celebrating how human thought and passions fit in the broader universe will be called for.
The image of a Cathedral, while limited, does capture essential elements of this vision. Despite the anachronistic and sectarian limitations of the word “Cathedral”, it points towards a type of institution that is part museum, part university and part place of worship: a home for personal, social, artistic and intellectual contemplation of ultimate reality that spans the natural and human worlds. The medieval cathedrals were aesthetically rich spaces, filled with evolving representations of the forces, stories and values that shaped the culture’s cosmology. Cathedrals and their schools were also communities of research, teaching and learning about these cosmologies. Finally, Cathedrals served as places of reflection, where individual lives could engage with larger visions and stories of ultimate reality through practices such as prayer and meditation, confession, sermons and rituals.
This mix of public and artistic cosmology, formal and informal education, and personal and existential exploration exists today only in fragmented parts. It is a mix that, could it be re-assembled in a contemporary context, would serve current needs for intellectual-spiritual integration, for education that builds not just information but also meaning-making and wisdom, and for bringing unification to the disorienting varieties of knowledge in this age of globalism and science. Concretely, I am proposing:
A collection of core interactive visualizations, realized in both physical and digital forms. These visualizations, each within its own chapel, would represent knowledge from physical and biological science, the humanities and personal experience, as well bridging between these. Many of these representations already exist in some form or other, but they would re-interpreted, re-imagined and inter-related to make them truly open to exploration, aesthetically and informationally rich, and ever expandable through community authorship.
A body of educational and contemplative practices that empower the learner/perceiver to internalize, contemplate and explore the meanings of these landscapes. In this age of expansive and growing knowledge, it is easy to get lost in a sea of information that never becomes personally meaningful. To counteract this, a premium will be placed on forms of engagement that build integrated perspective as well as personal relevance.
A variety of communities that will create, maintain and use the visualizations, as well as develop or use practices that bring them to life. These will include both audiences and creators, learners and experts, casual visitors and dedicated practitioners from diverse intellectual and socio-cultural backgrounds.
A physical space(s) where these visualizations can be built, housed, and experienced by the public. Part museum, part studio, part contemplative space, this site might start as a more provisional, even movable, installation and grow into a more permanent sculptural and architectural home. It is hoped that over time, new sites would spring up at various scales and degrees of formality or permanence.
A digital environment and toolkit to provide worldwide access, navigation and continual additions/variations to the multiple visualizations. Tools would allow for individualized learning, personalized versions, community curation and ongoing debate.
The ambitions of such a Cathedral are outrageously encyclopedic, integrative and progressive. The goal is to explore how the many dimensions of the universe and lived experience fit together and can be deployed towards shared values. Collective knowledge has advanced dramatically in terms of grand scientific laws and narratives as well as in understanding the situated, partially relativistic, nature of individual minds and cultures. Yet how all of this adds up and how to live a good life in the face of this new disorienting panorama remains unanswered. In the absence of a holistic story of who we are and how we fit in this brave new universe, other forces rule the day. On one side, unbalanced and impulsive consumer capitalism dominates our cultural airwaves and threatens the viability of the planet. On the other, religious or nationalist fundamentalisms seek a return to the comforts of a pre-modern, pre-global view of the universe. Instead, what we are proposing is a project of radical integration that embraces and celebrates the whole, looking for ways to fit the parts together. Mind and body, science and spirituality, facts and values, universal knowledge and personal experience are all parts of the same universe. It is time to put them back together.
