I had a wildly hippy experience! At the “Science Over the Edge” presentation by Galeo Saintz, we were asked to go outside for 20 minutes, find a piece of nature and engage with it, without thought.

Wildly confused, somewhat sick-and-tired of esoterics, I half-heartedly smelt, felt, rubbed, scrutinised a piece of lichen. As I sat there staring down the tepid peppermint green, I was suddenly six-or-so again, sitting on the back of the bakkie, staring down the horizon with wind burning my eyes and floating over the fields. My fingers grew magnanimous as my being engulfed the lichen. I dropped it, shocked, looked up to the sky 16-or-so seeing the pixels that dance like infinitesimally small fireflies. Lying on the lawns at school, seeing shadows and shapes extrude and distend, the sky becoming invisible as it overwhelmed the physical world. And I jumped out of my body, with a gasp, walking down the quad stairs, 10-or-so, dissociated from all coherent consciousness. But still existing. Pre Kant. Before I even knew of Kant.

“By not thinking, I suddenly knew,” reported back one of the participants.

Galeo’s posit is that science as a reductory, linear form of understanding has failed to encapsulate the non-linear, ever-changing flow of reality. He called for science including other ways of knowing besides the analytical.

“Think with the heart,” he said, dead seriously, substantiating with a seemingly growing body of (hardcore) scientific research that posits the heart as an electromagnetic organ capable of controlling the brain. For instance, the heart’s behaviour changes when a person intentionally changes from analytical thought to the appreciation of stimuli such as imagination or the senses. The heart slows down.

He recommends:

1. Go into the world alone, abandon your preconceptions. Allow your sensory experience to be your thought.
2. Trust your senses.

In conclusion, Galeo took a quote from the December 2009 edition of Time magazine: “I don’t need scientific data, I am the scientific data.”

Personally, my inner deterministic atheist doesn’t really know what to make of it. But my phenomenologist is in orbit. To be frank, I think Galeo weakened his argument by dissing science TOO much, rather than presenting it as companionable. They can and should co-exist, and maybe this sensory knowledge is otherwise commonly known as “creativity” – what makes Revital Cohen’s work so potent, she draws knowledge from the same scientific data as the scientist, but uses a different organ (excuse the pun).

After all, consider that absolutely everything with think we know right now is based on a body of knowledge that is to blame for the state of the world right now. Besides every system, design, product, thing etc that needs to come up for questioning in a vision of World 2.0, our very basis and construct of knowledge should surely also come up for questioning. I recall Janine Benyus’s infinite feedback system and Borges’s encyclopaedia of other logic.

And then I meditated on my chakras at Ruth Mattison’s introduction to Sahaja Yoga. What’s happening to me?