My conversation with... Jennifer Wiseman

Re-enchanting podcast guest Jennifer Wiseman shared an infectious wonder at the universe. Podcast co-host Belle Tindall reflects on their conversation.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

Four stars scintilate above a spiral galaxy viewed from the side.

Hubble Space Telescope captures a side-on view of NGC 3568, a barred spiral galaxy roughly 57 million light-years from the Milky Way.

European Space Agency, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

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The details of astronomy, the workings of astrophysics, the enormity of space, the fact that the universe is still expanding by the moment, the mystery of what lies beyond what we can see and even predict – those are things that do not sit comfortably in the confines of my brain.

It’s as if my brain is allergic to the sheer enormity of the subject. My mind does deep, it does not take lightly to vast.

And that is precisely why I so thoroughly enjoyed my conversation with astronomer, author and speaker, Dr Jennifer Wiseman for the Re-Enchanting podcast. Jennifer is Director Emeritus of the programme of Dialogue on Science, Ethics and Religion for the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She is also a senior astrophysicist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre. Science is a means by which Jennifer is able to live a wonderfully curious life, marvelling at the natural world and what lies beyond it.

When the narrative of science and religion being ultimately and inevitably at war with each other is the narrative that gets (by far) the most amplification, it was really interesting to hear how they coincide so powerfully for Jennifer. When talking with her, it becomes clear that they co-exist, they are the symbiotic forces that fuel her wonder at the universe. A wonder that is undeniably infectious. As she pointed out, the very fact that we have a curiosity about the universe we find ourselves in is, in itself, something to marvel at.

‘We are here, we’ve come through this 13.8 billion year development of the universe to the point where we can have this self-contemplating life that recognises a bit of where we’ve come from and how we connect to the universe.’

These are surely the thoughts that existential crises are made of.

Speaking with Jennifer made me feel small. Small in time, and small in place. I suppose dwelling on the enormity of an ever-expanding universe will do that to a person. Afterall, there are around one hundred billion stars in our galaxy (that we know of), the closest of which is four lightyears away. The vast majority of these stars have their own solar systems, hosting their own planets that orbit around them. And that’s still only within the confines of our own cosmic neighbourhood; there are hundreds of billions of galaxies in our (observable) universe, and infinite mystery that sits far beyond these numbers.

Since our conversation, I’ve been left with this simple, but salient thought – we’re incredibly small. But further to that, I’ve been pondering the notion that there’s a good kind of small, and perhaps we are it. We may be just one of the eight-billion inhabitants of a ‘pale blue dot’ in a universe that stretches far beyond the capacities of human understanding and measurement, but there’s a profound beauty in that. It does not equate to a feeling of non-consequentialism or oblivion, on the contrary, it is deeply empowering. It is, after all, the powerful reality upon which much of the twelve steps of recovery offered by AA/NA is built. There is a mysterious, and yet obviously tangible, power in coming face-to-face with our own small-ness, and surrendering to that which is deeper, higher, bigger than us.

Learning a little about Jennifer’s childhood living among the Ozark Mountains, with evenings spent gazing up at a canopy of stars that stretched from ‘horizon to horizon’, it was enchanting to hear about how her career has been an out-living of a childhood appreciation for the things that are so much bigger than us mere humans.

If you have a pull towards all things astronomy, this episode is undoubtedly for you. If you’ve ever pondered what science and faith look like when they’re not entering the ring from different corners, readying themselves for a show-down, this episode is also for you. If you’re craving enchantment of the most cosmic kind, this episode is for you too.

This conversation with Dr Jennifer Wiseman will be a refreshing antidote to the disillusion that comes with assuming we are the centre of our universe.

Listen to the Re-enchanting episode now.

Article

Culture

Film & TV

Psychology

4 September 2024

5 min read

Who’s missing from Inside Out’s internal family?

Where Riley’s writers could go next.

Henna Cundill

Henna is a researcher with the Centre for Autism and Theology at the University of Aberdeen.

Cartoon characters of emotions at a control desk.

Inside Riley's head.

Disney.

Once upon a time a man got angry. Then he got angry at himself for the fact that he got angry, which of course didn’t help. As the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh would say, “If we become angry at our anger, then we will have two angers at the same time.” Similarly, there was an occasion when he got really nervous that he might make a mess of giving a speech, and his nerves became so overwhelming that he delivered the speech badly. A self-fulfilling prophecy, one might say.

These are not my examples; they are examples given by psychologist Richard Schwartz in his introduction to Internal Family Systems (IFS). This therapy (sometimes also called “parts therapy”) is a form of self-analysis in which participants learn to resist supressing or controlling their difficult thoughts or emotions, the different “parts” of their inner world, and instead adopt a posture of curiosity towards each of them. This posture allows people to be in a beneficial relationship to their emotional lives, rather than being ruled by them.

Fundamentally, the relationship that emerges is one of compassion, understanding that our thoughts and emotions have a job to do, even the uncomfortable or shameful ones. So, anxiety, for example, guards us from committing social faux pas, whilst joy helps us to keep hold of a sense that life is ultimately worth the living, no matter how hard things get. Even sadness and grief, as much as we fear being overtaken by such emotions, have an important role to play, for example by helping us to define what things and people are most valuable and important to us.

For those who haven’t seen the Inside Out films, the writers cleverly take this idea of the “internal family” of emotions and create five relatable characters that embody them – Joy, Fear, Sadness, Anger and Disgust. In the first film, we see how these characters interact inside the head of a little girl called Riley. They are helping her to hang on to her sense of self despite the upheaval she experiences in her outside world, when her family relocate to a new city, and she must settle in to a new home and school. In the sequel, we rejoin Riley as she enters the turmoil of puberty, and the five initial characters are abruptly forced to work alongside some new arrivals – the “teenage” crew of emotions: Anxiety, Ennui, Envy, and… the biggie… Embarrassment.

This Self is transpersonal – it exceeds the boundaries of who we each are as an individual person and connects us to something large.

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When he first developed IFS in the 1980s, Richard Schwartz was, by his own confession, a committed atheist, with what he describes as “a distain for religion”. Schwartz writes of the frustration he felt at that time when several Christians got excited about IFS in its early stages of development. His peer, Robert Harris, even went so far as to publish a book that set out a Christian version of the therapy. Initially, Schwartz felt the biggie – embarrassment – that his therapy was being taken up by Christians. However, as time went on, and as much as Schwartz tried to push aside the spiritual dimension of IFS, he increasingly found that spirituality could not be eliminated from the picture:

“As I used the model with clients through the eighties and nineties, increasingly they began having what can only be described as spiritual experiences. These vicarious encounters with the mystical profoundly affected my own spirituality and I became interested in Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, shamanism, Kabala – everything but Christianity.”

Over time, Schwartz’s antipathy to the relationship between IFS and Christianity began to wane. He saw how much he had been working on the basis of prejudice, limiting his own exploration of Christian ideas in response to some unhelpful encounters he’d had with a few heavy-handed fundamentalists. He made deliberate moves to engage with Christian dialogue partners across the breadth of the tradition and began to see how congruent IFS was with the teaching of Jesus. The posture of curious compassion towards oppressive and uncomfortable emotions that Schwartz was encouraging his clients to adopt was mirrored perfectly in the attitude that Jesus advocated towards “enemies” in the outside world: do not judge, instead seek to engage them with kindness, and work towards their healing.

In recent decades, Schwartz has come to rethink IFS as an integration of psychology and spirituality, rather than as a form of psychotherapy. He speaks of “spirituality” as an innate essence at the core of each person, which he calls the “Self”, and acknowledges that many of his more religious students prefer to think of this essence as “the soul” or “Atman” (the eternal self within Hinduism). And, whilst he still describes himself as fundamentally agnostic and is wary of making his own definitive religious commitments, he has come to agree that this Self is transpersonal – it exceeds the boundaries of who we each are as an individual person and connects us to something larger.

Screenwriting for a popular audience of all-faiths-and-none, it is perhaps unsurprising that the makers of Inside Out have thus far eschewed the deep and fascinating spirituality of IFS. Riley’s “sense of self” is at the centre of both films, but the way it is depicted implies that it is something that only comes into being at birth and exists entirely to regulate Riley’s engagement with the outside world. So far, there has been no exploration of more existential questions such as faith and eternity. However, the concept of the film is so brilliant, and for a complex idea it is so well executed, that I am sure we can look forward to many more Inside Out films to come. If that is the case, then just as Schwartz found himself going on an unexpected journey of spiritual exploration, the writers of Riley’s may well find themselves doing the same. I, for one, look forward to finding out what Riley discovers.