I often rub people the wrong way. This happens in person as well as online. Part of it is my being on the spectrum. I am very neuro-atypical. But part of it is I believe things that make people uncomfortable.
Let me give you a quick example. I am a scientist. I approach the world as a scientist. I have loved pretty much every minute of the 44 years I have spent doing research. It is a great life. I work very hard at encouraging young people to follow in my footsteps and all my daughters have followed me into the family business.
But I am also a devout Christian. Voilà, I just started rubbing people the wrong way. If I had a dollar for every person who has told me I can’t be a Christian and a scientist or that my religious beliefs made me less of a scientist I could buy the province of British Columbia. It is such a ubiquitous and ridiculous belief I have stopped even responding. And I certainly don’t move beyond my Christianity.
I don’t mention that I do my people’s traditional dances and try hard to keep their traditional culture alive. This includes trying to master the language which as a language isolate is utterly unique — totally unrelated to any other language on Earth. And that I accept my people’s animist beliefs. I even have a spirit animal, the Kermode Bear.
www.canadiangeographic.ca/…
One of the dances I do, and I have spent decades mastering the intricacies of it, is our traditional rain dance. It last for six days. I mean 144 hours, continuously. Sometimes it rains afterwards and sometimes it doesn’t. Hey, we live in a desert any rain is good. But in the course of the dance I have ecstatic experiences, hallucinate, and enter trances. And I usually come out of the experience with some wonderful new scientific theory to test.
People really seem to have a hard time believing that religious and spiritual practices can free your brain up to engage in subconscious scientific thought. I am, for my sins a geometer. When I am analyzing large data sets I am doing geometry. I am trying to see a shape in that data, floating in the mist of my ignorance. I am seeing that data in many dimensions at the same time. To do that I enter a trance.
I have been entering trance states to do Geometry since I was in junior high school and first encountered geometric proofs. But I have gotten better at maintaining them in the years since. That is from a regular practice of tantric yoga and kotodama. I believe words have spiritual and mystic power.
Masami Saionji has written and spoken about the creative power of words on numerous occasions. In a talk given in 2011, she explained:
In Japan, we have a traditional belief in the divine spirit of words, called ‘kotodama.’ We believe that when human beings first appeared in the universe, we were divine creators who used the sacred power of words to create all sorts of marvelous conditions around us. Sacred words are vibrations issuing directly from the universal divine source-the concentrated energy of absolute love and harmony. Sacred words are the means through which our light-filled hopes and ideals are manifested in this world through the power of divine consciousness.
That is from the web page of Byakko Shinko Kai which is an international organization dedicated to peace through prayer. byakko.org/...
Now I know rational people like yourselves don’t believe in the power of irrational things like prayer. But I don’t make any claim to being rational. In fact, I gave up all ties to a rational way of thinking about the world when I truly committed to aikido. For example, I accept there is no attacker, no attacked.
Buddhism allows us to experience the fact that bifurcation of subject and object is an illusion. This includes the differences between any subject and any object. The distinction is an illusion, created by our intellect and fostered by our ego. Only by dropping our egos and letting go of our desperate clinging to the idea of “self” can we recognize this. Once we do, we will move in unison with the entity formerly known as “uke” because the line between ourselves as nage and the illusion of a separate uke will have been blurred or eliminated entirely. Without this separation harmony is guaranteed and the outcome is certain.
That is from the website of Jikishinkan Aikido Dojo. www.directmind.com. Direct mind is what we are trying to accomplish in aikido.
But how then can I so clearly be irrational and be a scientist. I am fascinated by the world around me and curious to know more about it. Like any curious person I search out answers. I observe, I postulate, I experiment, and I analyze. Then I rethink the original question. Then I observe, I postulate, I experiment, and I analyze and so on and on.
My irrationality probably informs the kind of questions I am interested in and does so in ways I am aware of and ways I am utterly unaware of but science requires a huge diversity of questions to thrive. So what harm does my irrationality do to the world? I am just curious about things you probably aren’t. For example, I have spent years trying to understand why only a very few men can get and maintain an erection on the summit of Mt. Everest. This probably doesn’t interest you at all.
When I see a patient I don’t think my irrationality creates problems. In fact, I think it is a huge bonus. The vast majority of my patients are irrational. Being sick, stressed and scared will make anybody irrational and most of us have a few gears loose to begin with. I don’t hold their irrationality against them. I am patient, calm, warm, supportive, and I listen like a son of a bitch. Then I explain to them what I think is going on and what I am going to do about it and let them ask questions and repeat the previous step.
In tough cases, and as a specialist most of the patients I see are at the clutching at straws point, figuring out what is wrong is as much an intuitive process as it is a scientific process. Being in touch with my irrational self makes me much better at the intuitive part of the job. But then, once I know what is wrong, knowing what to do is all about the science of medicine. That is where the 17 years of training and 44 years of research and clinical practice come in. (I started bio-medical research in my second year of university).
It is my religious beliefs that make me a radical environmentalist and have allowed me to continue my fight for clean air, clean water, and a cool planet for 50 years. In the face of constant resistance and open hostility. Much of it from people who claimed to be rational scientific human beings. But it is my scientific and mathematical understanding of the interconnections that weave the web of life together that lead me to the believe that global warming is happening quicker and will be far worse than the consensus models show.
The rational and the irrational cross back and forth in my life. Each informs the other. This mixing has given me a rich, rewarding life. But as I said at the beginning it really rubs some people the wrong way.