As we seek to nourish our spirits with awe and wonder, we may fear that our amazement will fade with our naivety, but the universe is truly amazing, and its beauty is no magic trick. As we seek to understand the questions of science, we seek also to understand the Mind of God.

One of the most fundamental questions of life is what is “real”: what is objectively meaningful and what is just word games and subjective guessing; what is the stuff of which we are made? We experience a vibrant, inner universe of thought and senses and a separateness between ourselves and everything else. If all existence is a continuum and we are irreducibly part of the Oneness of the universe; as Buddhism says, where do all these complex machinations of the world come from, and are they “real”? Emergence is one powerful tool we can use to begin to unwrap these questions.