Science is sacred

The mastery of mania

“…one can think deeply and be quite insane."
- Nikola Tesla

Life is all about the questions we choose to keep alive.

The closer you get to real science—by which I mean the stuff that begins to make fleeting, shimmering moments of contact with a hidden reality—the more you discover that it’s a spiritual endeavour and that a transcendental intuition is needed to ask the right questions. A kind of religious integrity is also needed.

In a weird way, being truly creative in science or art requires us to master mania. Because a worldview that steps beyond the zeitgeist always looks a bit crazy from the outside. And to be able to hold a worldview beyond the zeitgeist means taking your own mind above the zeitgeist that is mirrored within you. That requires energy. And when you combine energy with an unusual worldview, it looks a bit like mania.

As Lao Tzu said, “…the sage has no mind of his own. He takes as his own the mind of the people.” But the artist then leaps beyond it, into a realm of his own making. That’s the Übermensch. That’s the true scientist.

But mastering mania requires us to also master simultaneity and paradox: holding both the mind of the people and the new mind in a single embrace. Otherwise we lose ourselves in our lack of humility about our own discoveries. We risk becoming truly mad or an insufferable guru.

So science like art is controlled mania, which is the same as peaceful energy.

This is practically very important.

It’s no secret that scientific progress is in crisis. Our ability to apply science has never been better, but our ability to make discoveries has been showing diminishing returns. We see less and less of the type of insight that breaks paradigms and restructures assumptions. In other words, we are missing genuine revelation, which was at the heart of all the great discoveries of previous generations.

“Your life traces out a path on this delicately structured attracting set or manifold, where your highly convoluted orbits—or strange loops—keep bringing you back to where you once came from…” - Karl Friston

We seem to be stuck in a particular kind of strange loop, revisiting and rearranging the furniture inside an old house. We seem unable or unwilling to open the door and step out into the wilderness. Yet it is what we must do.

Nature has a way of making a house unliveable after a while. The cans of preserved beans begin to run low, the water gets musky from too little movement, and mould begins to creep the floors and walls that are desperate to breath fresh air.

We have no choice but to set out into the wild unknown for further sustenance.

Having studied insight and the process of revelation for over a decade now, I’ve seen over and over again how real discovery is a profoundly embodied, experiential, mind-expanding, and emotional thing.

The heart is somehow central to stepping beyond the walls of the mind, because the mind just mirrors what you remember, whereas the heart seems to have a flexibility that the mind finds troubling, vulnerable, and hard to control. The heart contains the mind of the people, ones own memories, and the courage to go beyond them.

Change likely begins with admitting that something was surely lost in the well worn grooves, in the industrialisation, in the bureaucratic hierarchy, in the inflexibility of all the synthetic systems that aimed to make science efficient and fair.

Nature dances awkwardly with too much order just before it unleashes fresh, wild, greenery through the cracks. And that’s really what we need: we need to get back to nature to rewonder and rewild our science. We need to (perhaps metaphorically) drop acid, climb trees, and go a little manic again. We need to take a sledgehammer to the concrete walls inside ourselves.

Or better yet: We just need to soften into the grand mystery of this moment.

And we desperately need more space. We need seclusion. We need to make real contact with nature to remember that it is her we wish to know. We need meditation and we need profound, vulnerable, conversations.

We need to face the pain of the current failing systems, grieve them, and move on. We need total commitment to the question that we’re inherently, by nature, totally bottom-up obsessed with.

We need liberation from supervision, especially from ourselves! We need to take our best scientists and put them in a dark room—or an endless expanse in the desert— with everything they need and set them free to think, think, think, until they become the solution they seek!

We need to free them from the excruciating idiocy of writing grant proposals about science they don’t believe in; and from publishing papers for metrics that are completely and utterly detached from any kind of insight.

Simply: We need to see science as sacred.

Not just to feel the wonder, but to do it well and to do it honestly. If we see science as sacred then we’re also willing to bring our sacred cows to the slaughter. Science is the same as meditation because both demand everything from us. Both are servants of the great unknown.

Much love,

Ruben