Science and the Personal

The practice of science requires diligent removal of the first-person “subjective” observer. Scientists strive to see Nature without the imposition of their own hopes, judgments, or fears – to see the external world free of human projections, and simple in its freedom.

This clear seeing is in fact a form of deep Love. To be seen is to be loved. This is immediately clear with children, who must be seen as they are, without projections from their parents, in order to feel fully loved. And so it is with Nature. To see our world without human bias is to love it. People who constantly color the outside world with their own desires and aversions do not perceive the love that scientists experience directly.

The shadow side of this wonderful love can be ignorance of first-person experience. Trained to remove themselves, scientists are often out of touch with their own internal experiences. Subtly or not, personal considerations are belittled. Science sees the Universe as a vast, multidimensional space with one point missing – the origin.

This poses challenges when relating the scientists’ Love to ideas of Truth. The quest of science is to identify those truths that exist regardless of who observes them. This would be fine if acknowledged as such, but the common vocabulary goes much farther, naming these observer-independent truths as The Truth, and all other types of knowledge – those that do depend on the observer – as “not really true.”

There is a psychological price paid for believing that one’s personal experience is neither important nor fully true. Few scientists are aware of this psychological pain because it is obscured by the very habit of removing and censoring oneself from one’s experience.

I speak not as a scholar, but in the first person – as a practitioner of both science and meditation. I directly know something of the different types of knowledge these disciplines offer, and something of the psychological wound that scientists can carry.