only a miracle will solve the problem. You keep looking, and eventually you find something that links together the parts of the puzzle.” [Calvin, 1986]
But in science, unlike in puzzle solving, the problem may be impossible to solve. That uncertainty is part of the challenge.
. . . to Mystical Experience
Many scientists will be bothered or even offended by my inclusion of mystical experiences on the continuum of insight intensity. Mystical experiences are automatically lumped with emotions and other non-rational and therefore non-scientific subjects. Perhaps psychologist Abraham Maslow’s term ‘peak experience’ or James Joyce’s term ‘epiphany’ is more palatable. I argue that major creative insight is a goal-oriented subset of mystical experience rather than a fundamentally different phenomenon. But I am content if the reader agrees that the two phenomena exhibit some surprisingly strong parallels, as illustrated by the following examples.
St. Augustine [354-430 A.D., b] described a mystical experience as “a moment of supreme exaltation, followed by gradual absorption back into the normal state, but with resulting invigoration and clearer perception.”
“Then followed months of intense thought, in order to find out what all the bewildering chaos of scattered observations meant, until one day, all of a sudden, the whole became clear and comprehensible, as if it were illuminated with a flash of light. . . There are not many joys in human life equal to the joy of the sudden birth of a generalization illuminating the mind after a long period of patient research.” [Kropotkin, 1899]
Naturalist Annie Dillard read accounts of people blind since birth who were suddenly given sight by cataract surgery, and of their remarkably variable and sometimes frightened reactions to this new vision. She was particularly captivated by the experience of one young girl who stared, astonished, at what she finally recognized as a tree. This was not a tree such as you or I have ever seen, but “the tree with the lights in it” [Dillard, 1974]:
“When her doctor took her bandages off and led her into the garden, the girl who was no longer blind saw ‘the tree with the lights in it.’ It was for this tree I searched through the peach orchards of summer, in the forests of fall and down winter and spring for years. Then one day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance. The flood of fire abated, but I’m still spending the power. Gradually the lights went out in the cedar, the colors died, the cells unflamed and disappeared. I was still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck. I have since only very rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam.”
“Thus my mind, wholly rapt, was gazing fixed, motionless, and intent, and ever with gazing grew enkindled, in that Light, . . . for my vision almost wholly departs,
