![]() ![]() While the Copernican Revolution was yet in mid-stride, a mild-mannered biologist named Charles Robert Darwin scandalized Victorian England in 1859 with the publication of The Origin of Species. Big Bang cosmology and the deep-space images of the Hubble Space Telescope are but aftershocks of the intellectual seismic waves that Copernicus unleashed 450 years ago. More broadly, Copernicanism launched the Age of Reason, in which the locus of truth shifted from ecclesiastical authority to direct experience in the form of scientific inquiry. First, Copernicus' heliocentric theory of the solar system dethroned the Earth and its inhabitants from the center of the cosmos. The Copernican revolution, a revolution in cosmology, ushered in a paradigm shift of monumental proportions. Both placed the human squarely at the center of the universe, literally and figuratively. Prior to the publication in 1543 of Copernicus' De Revolutionibis, truth was to be found in religious authority, and meaning in religious mythology. At the cultural level, it manifests as animosity between science and religion. In the individual psyche, this manifests as disharmony between mind and spirit. In short, Westerners are afflicted by a kind of collective "schizophrenia," torn between conflicting allegiances. ![]() There is no easy congruence between those two radically different worldviews-yet, to use Faust's term, they are somehow forced to 'cohabit within our breast.' That's the schizophrenia all of us grew up with in the 20th century. And science rules the outer cosmos and the objective world, while the Romantic aspirations of our poetry, our music, our spiritual yearnings rule the interior world of the modern soul. In a sense, the modern soul's allegiance is to Romanticism, while the modern mind's allegiance is to the Enlightenment. In it, cultural historian Richard Tarnas summarizes the Western dilemma: With uncanny synchronicity, just a few weeks before the second student-led discussion, a magazine arrived in the mail bearing an article titled "The Great Initiation." It remains to this day the single most enlightening article I have read, and it afforded clear-eyed context for what the course was trying to accomplish. It was, in fact, the best day in my teaching career. The four student leaders, of their own initiative, assumed the roles of the four grandfathers. When Rebecca, one of the discussion leaders, inquired before class "Which direction is east?" I knew it would be a good day, and it was. In Lakota mythology, the four cardinal directions-north, south, east and west-are personified by four benevolent "grandfather" spirits. We were preparing to discuss our first text, Black Elk Speaks, an American classic about the life and wisdom of a Lakota ("Sioux") holy man. There were no guarantees that a course so conceived could or would work, and in the first weeks I experienced considerable anxiety over it-until one fateful day. I had begun to suspect that the roots of the conflict were societal and universal. These two sides-the rational and the intuitive-often seemed in conflict. On the other hand, I have a "poet nature" and had learned over the years to listen carefully to the still, small voice of intuition. On the one hand, I had majored in engineering, loved mathematics and science, was a child of the space race, and had worked for NASA. The Black Elk to Black Holes course was born in the recognition that most humans, particularly in the West, struggle to effectively integrate these two modes of making sense of the world. ![]() Let's call them head knowledge and heart knowledge. The premise of the course was to view the universe from vastly different perspectives-from a mythological perspective of Native Americans on the one hand and a modern scientific perspective on the other-and then to look for resonances between these seemingly disparate and possibly irreconcilable worldviews. Although delighted to have the opportunity to teach a course that had been germinating for several years, I wondered whether, as a mathematics professor, I might be out of my depth. For the first time I was teaching an honors course, From Black Elk to Black Holes: Shaping a Myth for a New Millennium (HON200D). To my continuing amazement and gratitude, some courageous undergraduates followed-and sometimes led-into a new dimension of intellectual exploration. Ten years ago, with considerable trepidation, I left my academic comfort zone. Originally published in Fall 2009 "Madison" magazine ![]() A joint venture to integrate the intuitive and the rational By Dave Pruett ![]()
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