Archimedes Thoughtful (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
There is not such a great gap between mysticism and rationalism as we tend to imagine . . . we have all urged friends to “sleep on” a problem in the hope of finding a solution that has eluded them in their waking hours. When our minds are receptive and relaxed, ideas come from the deeper region of the mind. This has also been the experience of such scientists as Archimedes, who discovered his famous Principle in the bath. A truly creative philosopher or scientist has, like the mystic, to confront the dark world of uncreated reality and the cloud of unknowing in the hope of piercing it. As long as they wrestle with logic and concepts, they are, necessarily, imprisoned in ideas or forms of thought that have already been established.
- Karen Armstrong, from “A History of God” (Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1993)
