Scientific study. Meditative insight. Creative initiative – the greatest discoveries of humanity. Those are the three parts, or starting points, from which learning can begin, resulting in various forms of understanding. Performing them altogether creates our individual micro-evolution.
Knowledge and principles from scientific studies; reading throughout the history of a discovery or innovation, expanding concepts or formulas, or figuring out with an analytical logic (step-by-step) – along with other methods. This is the intellectual approach, by experiencing information already logically structured by others and formulating our knowledge structure. This part requires a conscious effort to acknowledge the collective effort of those humans who created a collective memory source and share it with the world (For this kind of understanding, acknowledging the meaning of unknown words is necessary)
Insightfulness and wisdom come from meditative practice: sitting alone in a contemplative state, undisturbed, to understand a phenomenon or make a decision, drawing on our prior experience. Knowledge comes from science. Wisdom comes from meditation. We understand the world through the mirror of our mind. If our mind is clear of unnecessary knowledge (presumptions, prejudices, illusions,…), we have the chance to witness the phenomena of the world as it is, shortening the path towards the truth. (For this kind of understanding, the lack of words is necessary)
Creations and initiatives cover the practicality of our learning process; science equals knowledge structure, meditation equals insightful wisdom. Through a creative initiative, we learn how to manifest based on the first two. This completes our understanding, as we must go through a set of actions that test our willingness. To learn how to create means developing a skill. Trial-and-error is a means for exploration, and conscious awareness represents the efficiency of our learning process (meaning fewer trials & as we acknowledge our errors).
- If we initiate a project that is beyond our knowledge & wisdom, we either make the effort to learn and understand along the way, or fail, as we constantly depend on others to provide us with valuable information.
- If we engage in a scientific theory or experiment without proper wisdom and creative potential, we will logically deduce knowledge based on false presumptions, leading to misinterpretations.
- If we practice meditation without a need to envision our potential action or contemplate on a subject we struggle to understand, we will just observe ourselves as we are, but do nothing with it.
Every human who created a relevant development, regardless of the field, went through all those three conscious processes. Albert Einstein covered every field of science in a meditative way to create the most relevant and popular theory known to humanity, living modestly with his family. Isaac Newton could only discover the laws of optics and motion alone at the farm, in solitude. Richard Feynman made the biggest breakthroughs in quantum mechanics because he listened to his intuition and disregarded his teacher’s recommendations on what to study. Countless more examples of individuals can be found, but to understand the importance of balance, we have to acknowledge those who had great insights, but were incapable of understanding the full causality of their discoveries: Georg Cantor, Alan Turing, Blaise Pascal….
The imbalance between their creativity, intelligence, and meditativeness is obvious, and this principle applies to all human activities (artistic endeavors, politics /leadership, business,… you name it – it all goes down to individual imbalance). The problem is not the individual, as they develop their minds in a rigid society – a society that never explained properly to them that the present laws and rules are here to maintain a balance, and if they want to change them, pace is just as important as speed. Great discoveries can create an imbalance if they are unsound for the development pace of the society. (A relevant analogy also represents the impact of society on the natural environment.
Balanced development
It is paramount that we understand the importance of those three qualities and make the effort to balance them continuously. We live in a moment with more accessible information than we can comprehend, as events, discoveries, or developments happen faster than we acknowledge them, and further on, to understand them and act consciously in response. Knowledge and principles are few, but difficult to understand, and if we take two or three hours each day to learn about them, the flood of information will become thinner – this is how our intellect improves. If we make another effort to become more aware of the mechanics of our being, we will become more conscious in our interactions, whether with people, tools, nature, or ourselves. If we make the effort to create, based on our desires to explore, understand, and develop, we will learn how to act more purposefully and acknowledge the tremendous effort our predecessors and ancestors manifested so that we can experience the present comfort.
Most jobs in the foreseeable future will incorporate those three aspects in their program. Learning continuously and improving one’s understanding creates the potential for development, which can happen through improvements to a product/service or work efficiency. The best places to work already have. People have their program split into learning, understanding, creating, and developing. Hard and smart work are qualities of how people use their capabilities over time in the work environment. This happens as an integration of what people love to do, and would do at home, with the necessity of working.
Everyone can come up with an idea, while fewer choose to wait for an insight. To make the effort to formulate a scientific theory and engage in an experiment is the next level of effort, but the results will last beyond a lifetime – this is how society develops. In a generation tho, few are willing to use every moment of their life to perfect their theories until they become ubiquitously practical for the rest of the world – this is how society evolves. This phenomenon is valid for any artistic creation, engineering, policies, etc. Balance is the key, whether we refer to individuals or teams.
When a fellow human strives to create a balance between those qualities of our conscious awareness, success is guaranteed. With mind mechanics developed to understand an aspect of reality from those three angles, encountering information generates an intellectual process to acknowledge their meaning & purpose. If the idea has enough relevance to reality, thinking of an implementation strategy follows naturally. Further on, humans with a balanced mind know how to prioritize plans and adapt their strategies to optimize the development of their creative process.
Dangers of imbalance
People who just study scientifically move slowly through the world and often stumble on their knowledge, as the intellect is but a part of the cognitive mechanism. Intuition for them is just an emotion that is always overrationalized. The dangers are overconfidence in what has already been proved and skepticism in novelties. This manifests as a high resistance to new and more profound ideas that require a new way of thinking, as they have to renounce the knowledge structure they created throughout their life. It applies both to individuals and to collectives – see the story of Georg Cantor.
For the overmeditative people, knowledge becomes a nuisance; studying a scientific principle or law is beyond their interest. Meditativeness creates a certain wisdom with a high resistance to everything negative that can influence that person. The dangers of solely meditative practices are overconfidence in the insights that come from the depths of our being during a contemplative moment. But, without voluntary involvement, going through the hard-working process of everyday development, human interaction & collaboration, meditative practice becomes useless – see the story of Osho.
As for the over-creative people, with too many ideas manifesting without structure or insight into their causality, confusion engulfs their minds, like a never-ending storm. An idea is just a longer thought, and to create a relevant insight, we have to be aware of its development within our mind first. Only after is it worth presenting it, with a logical structure, to be understood by others, and with the authentic expressivity of the feeling we experienced during our insightful moment. The dangers of over-creativity can be witness at people who always draw attention, as if they are addicted. And often they are – see the story of Jean-Michel Basquiat.
The mentioned people represent the scenarios at the highest level of activity in their domain. We all have characters alike in our family, at work, or in our friend group. Most humans develop imbalanced, as we depend on the environment: our parents, relatives, neighbours, school, etc. All of us develop our mind mechanics based on what we enjoy and avoid doing, and only after we become aware of the long-term dangers, balancing them becomes a conscious option. The effort we have to go through to create and maintain the balance is a continuous journey we call life, and we must understand that after us other will come, and it will be benevolent for them to encounter less negative friction – see the Finnish and Estonian educational systems.
Collective balance
In a perfect team, there is always a balance between creative, intellectual, and meditative qualities of the people involved, and foremost, they understand their role and act accordingly. Personal imbalance in such a team is balanced with conscious interactions, where new ideas are acknowledged, their importance evaluated & integrated into the working structure, and the short & long-term causality is constantly surveilled.
Such a team will always implement its projects successfully. We can look at DeepMind’s team, led by Demis Hassabis. He developed his mental abilities with a good balance of creativity, logic, and meditativeness. Therefore, he recruited members of his team based on his way of thinking, not allowing overly unbalanced people within, while understanding the importance of allowing people to come up with innovative ideas, or more logical structures, or prioritizing the implementation based on their relevance.
As for imbalanced teams, in most cases, the individuality of one of the members disturbs the flow of creative ideas, or the need to structure them, or the long-term relevance – the mental imbalance of the leader becomes the imbalance of the whole team. The case of Mark Zuckerberg, who, instead of simplifying the engagement on his platforms, created terms and conditions of thousands of options, making picture posting almost incomprehensible. All this just to protect his business from the legislative regulations, covering the problem it caused. In the case of Meta, a company that became too big to fail, it will fail spectacularly, just as it grew – from stealing an idea, just because he (Mr. Zuckerberg) doens’t know how to come up with a meaningful insight. The results of his autocratic management can be observed in his team’s inability to create any new and relevant technology, optimize it, and develop it further.
Developing balance
A small conscious effort changes some synapses within the nervous system. A prolonged one creates new neurons, which represent new possibilities for action, improving our development potential even further. It takes about twenty-four hours for a stem cell to become a neuron in an adult body, days to improve a neural connection, and about a month to create permanent development. This way we change the way we understand & interact with the world – or in one word, our behaviour. This is conscious development, through conscious understanding, with conscious learning.
Further on, a counterintuitive process must be performed as a long-term mission – our individual conscious development. Counterintuitive – meaning that we have to choose to do precisely what we want to avoid, and go through physical, intellectual, or affective discomfort. The conscious approach is to be aware of our feelings, along with the cognitive and perceptive processes, until we experience a balance of those inner manifestations. Whatever we want to improve must begin with ourselves, and desire is just the starting point that has to be followed by conscious effort in three forms: intellectual, meditative, and creative.
What we want to see happening must come from us first. Learning about a new phenomenon without prior knowledge will always be counterintuitive and extremely difficult in the first month. People who have only studied the sciences will be extremely uncomfortable with a paintbrush in their hand or in a lotus position, meditating. People who have just meditated most of their lives express very cryptically, as they don’t consider the meaning, logic, and expressivity of their words. People who created only as they pleased will be too expressive in their descriptions and impatient with any question asked.
I will share some of my personal examples of balancing:
- Every morning, after I wake up, I stand for a moment, bend with my head between my legs, until I feel every part of my spine active -then my morning yoga stretching follows a pleasant process, otherwise I will oversleep or be extremely lazy in the morning. Further on, for my daily physical training, the first ten minutes of warmup feel like begging for rain to excuse myself from my hour-long full body workout. After warm up, I won’t stop until my muscles faint.
- Reading is still one of my terrors – I am a thinker mostly, which means I can figure out easily how something works, and find the principles of it. To balance my inability of relating to language, I look at 20-30 words per day, about 30 seconds each, and 30 more to visualize their shapes, and 30 more to contemplate their meaning. The first and last three or four words are almost painful, then the experience feels like that of my favorite video games. My reading ability improved exponentially in weeks.
- When I don’t understand a phenomenon, such as a technological device, political decision, scientific principle, work of art, etc….I know that I have to study beyond my superficial approach to comprehend its complexity, even if, at first, intuitively, I can feel their purpose and meaning. To go beyond, I have to become aware of my ignorance and accept it. A.I. – I don’t understand how it works. This means studying over two centuries of developments from the first practical use of electricity. To understand artificial intelligence means to understand the many (if not all) laws of physics, engineering principles & innovations, mathematics, and many more aspects of knowledge. Lastly, I have to engage in the process of creating algorithms in a programming language. All those processes are unfamiliar and require months of continuous & counterintuitive effort.
Balancing development
This is how counterintuition can be overcome. Become aware of the mind’s mechanics, accept the present limitations, and engage in prolonged conscious efforts to improve cognitive processes, the way we perceive the world, and feel ourselves.
For those who have too many ideas and are always exploring for more, you must find a way to express them, but in a structured way, in which the small parts are configured based on a grand vision that encapsulates everything. Counterintuitive it will be, because creativity always springs new ideas within the mind’s scope, and searching for logical connections is a job for a scientific mind, while choosing the most relevant idea is for a meditative one. To train logical and meditative thinking, the creative one must isolate from expressing ideas and work every day on the other two qualities. Studying the history of science will help to understand the effort of structuring ideas into theories. Contemplating one or a few ideas for prolonged moments will create a meditative insightfulness on their meaning and purpose. At their confluence, complex ideas will form as relevant insights and structured strategies for a project.
For those with too much knowledge, from scientific studies, reading articles or professional books, experiments with the mechanics of a phenomenon with only logical deductions, the beauty of life never fully stands in your sight. To learn how to use that vast knowledge, meditative practice, and creative initiatives will help find and explore the potential development of that logically structured knowledge. Creativity will feel counterintuitive because it requires making mistakes, which an overly logical way of thinking creates resistance. For this part, meditative practice will help to clear the mind of overrational thoughts, balance emotionality, and calibrate the development strategy for the creative act. Whether one chooses to engage in creativity through an art or engineering project, the process will be similar: choose an idea, conceptualize it, explore variations, design a strategy, and implement the project – in this order, as reversing it will mean that you approach the same way as before (a creative initiative begins with a blank canvas).
As for those overmeditative people, you can figure out for yourself the balancing way from the two paragraphs above…
Nevertheless, WE are alive now. The world around us only develops at the pace of human capabilities. We can choose now either to learn, understand, and create continuously, developing our capabilities, or stagnate within our mind, body, and soul, until death sends us back again.
