“All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree.” is a quote by Albert Einstein. Seems like a weird way to try to connect things, when you first read it. I think his way of thinking was going in the correct direction. The three are closely related somehow, some way. The tree would be a great symbol of wisdom, from the human mind. It helps us with our understandings, our way of living, and our evolution and freedom. It is the starting point of life; the foundation. Religions, arts, and sciences branch from this tree of wisdom because their origins trace back to the human mind. They are all representations of the truth, which is how they are related. In the World of Myth book, we have read about the creations of myths. There are five basic creation myth types: ex nihilo creation, creation from chaos, world parent creation, emergence creation, and earth diver creation. The different types help aid us into recognizing the universal patterns that humans have tried to use to understand the origins of their world (15-16).
Let’s start with religion, it is an imagination that depends on social evidence. In the Judo-Christian Genesis myth, the earth was created first. Then the angels, plants, trees, and Eden. The fourth day stars and planets was created. Lastly, but not least, creatures, beasts, and humans were made (20-22). They were all created by God. This creation myth gives the idea that human beings are created to be namers (15). It gives their followers a sense of being. It is their foundation for their religion, that comes from the tree. Religions are kind of an odd mixture of science and arts, in a sense. While the followers of the religions believe the creation stories, other people think it is just mere fiction. Some religions were created different, like Buddhism. Buddhism is believed to have originated from a human being, but is worshipped like a God. The sand painting ceremonies begin with the recitation of the creation myth. The painting is a mandala, a sacred circle representing creation in its original wholeness (16). Religions seem to originate from the tree of the human’s imagination because the originators of the religion implies it to be true since it came directly from a God.
Art is an imagination that relies on emotional evidence to back it up. Art does not require anything, it is relatively free. It is purely a work of human imagination and creativity. It is meant to affect your emotions and not your mind. I feel like one of the Indian myths would fall into this category. This myth is a world parent myth. The world parent is the thousand-headed, thousand-footed primal man Purusha, who enveloped Earth and was the universe itself (24). Purusha sounds like man that was created from someone’s imagination and was accepted by that culture because it was a nice fit. I also feel like the Buddhist sand painting would be a great example of the art in myths. When the patient sits in the sand painting and has the creation myth recited over him by shaman. It returns the patient to the womb of nature in the hope of being reborn into nature’s wholeness. It evokes the patients emotions which pulls on their creativeness and their imagination.
Science is an imagination that depends solely on material evidence. It is a hypothesis created by humans but can be verified by real facts and evidences. The origin of science is technically a hypothesis that a scientist tries to build on, with the use of observations. It comes from a scientist imagination in other words, like the tree. Charles Darwin’s theory is considered merely a theory by many religious fundamentalists, but it is still accepted by the scientific community (38). The Big Bang theory is also another scientific theory that some scientist believe. It says that the universe began as a hot, small, and dense superforce. Then a few billion years ago, it started to expand, which is started to form atoms that eventually led to stars and galaxies.
Creation stories are treated as truth by the culture from which they emerge from until they are exposed as myths. The source of all religions, arts, and science is the imagination from a human’s mind. The imaginations are just given different names like hypothesis, theory, fiction, revelation, etc. The tree is the start of it all, which is the human’s mind and from it stems arts, science, and religion. This does not mean that every imagination thought of by man is true, it just simply means that it must be proven somehow, before people are willing to accept it. Mythology is a great way to help explain Albert Einstein’s quote.
