A reminder… My first full-length course exploring spirituality/science begins tomorrow! Spirituality, Science, and the Creative Process will be presented by the Continuing Education program at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, CA, and enrollment is still open to the public.

Here’s a course description:

Great ideas inspire enduring art. This course explores the grand themes shared by spiritual philosophy and cutting-edge science, using them as source material for artistic creativity. Examining energy, duality, infinity, chaos, evolution, and actualization, students write reflective journals each week about how these and other spiritual and scientific themes can be applied to their creative process, inspiring resonant artwork in any medium. Special presentations by artist Marcie Kaufman highlight the work of visual artists inspired by both spirituality and science, and a hands-on workshop mid-course guides students in enacting and illustrating some of the grand themes discussed in class.

The course runs 10 weeks, Saturday mornings, starting tomorrow, and will include and expand upon all your favorite poetic interconnections between spirituality and science. And Marcie Kaufman, my co-conspirator for the term, is brilliant and engaging, and her mid-course workshop is sure to be deep, enlightening fun.

Here’s a link to enroll in the class:

http://www.otis.edu/ce,course.php?crs=539&sem=25

Looking forward to seeing you there!

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Last New Year’s Day I wrote a heartfelt blog post exploring a poetic interconnection among Taoism, physics, and the turning of the year. Today I feel inspired to reprise that essay, slightly revised, for those of you who’ve joined me in 2009… This one’s for you!

I love Chinese philosophy—its naturalness, its easy wisdom.

I’m in good company: Taoism may be the most popularized religious mysticism in the world. Books about any variety of topics have the phrase “The Tao of…” in their titles. A quick search at Amazon yields The Tao of Healing, The Tao of Eating, The Tao of Photography, and even The Tao of Network Security Monitoring! And in contemporary America, the Chinese words yin and yang have become cultural fall-back terms for the idea of interdependent opposites. They’re part of the pop lexicon.

A key Taoist concept that’s less widely known is wu wei. This Chinese term is perhaps best translated as “effortless doing”. The paradoxical phrase describes an orientation of self-surrender to the tao—the all-encompassing Way of the natural universe. Essentially, wu wei is pure acceptance of the process of life and the sacred rightness of every moment. It’s about moving in the world by flowing with it.

Religious scholar Huston Smith, in his seminal book The World’s Religions: Our Great Wisdom Traditions, summarizes the idea this way:

Action in the mode of wu wei is action in which friction—in interpersonal relationships, in intra-psychic conflict, and in relation to nature—is reduced to a minimum.

In physics, a superfluid is a phase of matter in which viscosity is zero. Viscosity is a term that describes a liquid’s resistance to flow, or disturbance by other substances. A thin liquid like water has low viscosity: it flows quick and easy and other substances move through it without much bother, their speed only slightly effected. A thick liquid like honey has high viscosity: it flows slow and sluggish and other substances struggle to move through it, becoming seriously held up as they try.

Viscosity, then, is a measure of a liquid’s friction.

In a superfluid, there’s basically no friction at all. This means a superfluid flows infinitely smooth, and things move within it resistance-free. So anything in motion inside a superfluid stays in motion, theoretically, forever. With no friction to slow or stop it, a process inside a superfluid unfolds unendingly!

A superfluid strikes me as an interesting analogy for the tao. And the quality of superfluidity is such a cool metaphor for wu wei.

So… Today commences a new calendar year: it’s 2010! This blog post is a benediction: May we all have a superfluid new year, characterized by the utmost wu wei—with friction within and among us reduced to a minimum, our lives flowing infinitely smooth, and our happinesses unending.

Thank you for your readership! Love and blessings to you.

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