Drawing on neuroscience, philosophy, theology, and spiritual traditions, the 2026 Boyle Lecture proposes that many modern errors stem from mistaking maps for realities and certainty for wisdom. It contends that the left hemisphere excels at analysis, categorization, and control but tends toward abstraction, fragmentation, and delusion when it dominates our understanding of truth, knowledge, and belief. By contrast, the right hemisphere is portrayed as better attuned to wholeness, relationship, ambiguity, metaphor, and the implicit dimensions of experience, making it more fitting for insight into truth, love, suffering, and the divine. The lecture extends this argument to science, religion, art, and artificial intelligence, suggesting that genuine understanding requires imagination, receptivity, and the acceptance of paradox rather than reductive certainty. Ultimately, it frames truth as participatory and evolving, rooted in attentive engagement with a reality that cannot be fully grasped from outside.
This article examines how scientists engage with and describe transcendent experiences, drawing on a diverse range of perspectives that includes the religious, the spiritual, and "nones." Through a quantitative-qualitative analysis of interviews, the article identifies both the contents and modalities of such experiences, ranging from moments of awe in nature or scientific discovery to sensations of unity or deep meaning. It also considers how frequently these experiences are reported across different identity groups and investigates the contexts in which they emerge, whether within scientific practice, personal reflection, or encounters with the unknown. The findings reveal how the language of transcendence is articulated within the scientific community and how it navigates the boundaries between empirical enquiry and existential reflection.
This article proposes a comparative theological reading of the Lurianic doctrine of tzimtzum (divine contraction) and shevirat ha-kelim (breaking of the vessels) alongside the Rigvedic Nasadia Sukta (RV 10.129), arguing that both traditions articulate structurally homologous accounts of cosmogenesis through observation. Drawing on Hayyim Vital's Etz Hayyim, Sha'ar HaKlalim, Stephanie W. Jamison and Joel P. Brereton's critical edition of the Rigveda, Elliot R. Wolfson's apophatic reading of tsimtsum, and Sandra Valabregue-Perry's analysis of Ein Sof as "integrative multiplicity," the article advances a framework termed "observer-instantiated cosmology," in which reality emerges through the recursive relation between witness and witnessed rather than through unilateral divine action. Both traditions resist metaphysical closure, position human consciousness as cosmogonically essential, and articulate a participatory ontology in which observer and observed mutually constitute each other in an ongoing process with no absolute origin or terminal endpoint. The article demonstrates how both traditions understand tikkun (repair) and yajna (sacrifice) not as commemorative but as constitutive, bringing into being a new configuration of reality through disciplined attention, intentional practice, and recognition of objective patterns. Wolfson's apophatic alternative is engaged directly as a productive complication that deepens rather than refutes the observational framework, and the ecological and ethical implications of the analysis for contemporary contexts of fragmentation and epistemic crisis are drawn out at each stage.
