Science is now discovering what artists have long understood: that nurturing our feelings is vital to the quality of our lives and that intellect and feeling are intimately connected. For the past 300 years the dominant view in Western culture has been that intelligence is mainly to do with certain sorts of logic and reason. This view evolved through the European Enlightenment and established science and a particular sort of rationalism as the main sources of intellectual authority. The achievements of this worldview have been spectacular, including the explosive growth of technologies and unprecedented advances in medicine, in communications and in our understanding of the physical universe.
Science has transformed human life in what is, in geological time, the beating of a wing. There have been many benefits. There's also been a high price. Among them is the exile of feeling; within science itself, in our culture in general and especially in education. For proponents of pure reason and objectivity, feelings are messy and misleading. Feelings have even had a bad press in psychology and psychiatry, the scientific disciplines that focus on human behavior and motivation. Significantly, the histories of both are mainly about negative feelings, emotional disorders and mental illness.
There's no doubt that there's a plentiful supply of all of these. One of the reasons is the chasm between thinking and feeling our culture has opened up. The social and economic costs are incalculable. At one end of the spectrum there are the huge numbers of people who are chronically disengaged at work or in school because they find it all pointless and unfulfilling. At the other are the jaw-dropping numbers who are critically addicted to alcohol, tobacco or drugs as a way of stimulating or suppressing their feelings.
There is a shift taking place in the status of feeling, within science itself and in the broader culture. The movement in Positive Psychology, spearheaded by Martin Seligman, Dan Gilbert, Sonja Lyubomirsky and others, is an important part of it. George E. Vaillant is a psychoanalyst and research psychiatrist at Harvard University. In Spiritual Evolution, he sets out a sustained defense of emotions and their role in human well being. There is an important difference between negative and positive feelings. Negative feelings include shame, hate, anger, guilt, fear and contempt. Positive feelings include joy, love, compassion, hope, happiness, forgiveness, awe, gratitude and delight. Vaillant notes that modern science is coming to accept the importance of emotions, even though the tendency in some quarters is still to accentuate the negative. He notes that in 2004, the leading American text The Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, half a million lines in length, "devotes 100 to 600 lines each to shame, guilt, terrorism, anger, hate, and sin; thousands of lines to depression and anxiety, but only five lines to hope, one line to joy and not a single line to faith, compassion and forgiveness."
Vaillant argues that the negative emotions originate in the older parts of the human brain and are dedicated to individual survival. The positive emotions evolved later and are what bind us to each other: "The positive emotions are more expansive and help us to broaden and build. They widen our tolerance, expand our moral compass and enhance our creativity... Experiments document that while negative emotions narrow attention ... positive emotions, especially joy, make thought patterns far more flexible, creative, integrative and efficient." For thirty-five years, Vaillant directed the Harvard Study of Adult Development. "In the first 30 years leading the study," he says, "I learned that positive emotions were intimately connected to mental health."
One of the aims of Positive Psychology is to promote a greater sense of 'mindfulness': to go beyond the daily chatter of your mind and the endless agenda of tasks and anxieties that often drive it to a deeper sense of your own being and purpose. In Fully Present: the Science, Art and Practice of Mindfulness, Susan Smalley and Diana Winston show that the benefits of practicing mindfulness include reducing stress, reducing chronic physical pain, boosting the body's immune system, coping with painful life events, dealing with negative emotions, enhancing positive emotions, improving concentration, improving relationships, reducing addictive behaviors, enhancing performance in work, sports and education, and stimulating creativity. This is a to do list that we could all do with.
Being mindful is not about improbable poses and relentless optimism. Learning to live mindfully, say Smalley and Winston, "does not mean living in a perfect world, but rather living a full and contented life in a world in which both joys and challenges are givens." Although mindfulness does not remove the ups and downs of life, they say, "it changes how experiences like losing a job, getting a divorce, struggling at home or at school, births, marriages, illnesses, death and dying influence you and how you influence the experience ... In other words, mindfulness changes your relationship to life."
Being mindful also revitalizes the relationship between thinking and feeling. One of corollaries on the rise of science has been a schism between the arts and sciences. The sciences are thought to be all about truth and objectivity: the arts about feelings and creativity. Neither stereotype holds up. There can be great objectivity in the arts and huge creativity in science: and deep truth and feelings in both. As science turns its attention to feeling, it may rediscover old common ground with the arts and with the humanities too. It's on that common ground that we could restore the balance in our lives and create new approaches to education and working life that will nourish and sustain it.
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And yet, my peers are painters, photographers, singers, musicians, brewers, & appreciators of the finer aspects of life just as much as they are scientists. Some live dual worlds & are professionals in both! I think to dismiss science & scientists as divorced from the world of feeling & spirituality is to make a judgement too soon. My yesterday? Studying in the morning, jazz in the afternoon. My Saturday? Studying in the morning, performing in a cabaret in the afternoon & evening. My today? prayer, meditation, & study in the morning... class in the afternoon.
It's hardest for others to understand an see where it is you're coming from within yourself... Within your own Heart, Soul, & Mind... Your own Feeling, Emotion, & Thoughts... There's only 2 that know it, yourself & God... Those around can try their best but can only guess where you maybe... A man made machine can be placed on a person's body but still not surely know what is inside that person...
P.S. But that's because you're not responding (feeling) correctly. (Couldn't resist.)
Where Gods fail at every step
In the end only stability matters
Layers of one's self and layers of others
To the next interest
While others cauldrons churn
The faintist ideal and the lowlies of man
For not all are just a stumble
But are they
But I have to disagree with you that the human experience will always be beyond science. Unless you can show that the human experience is "supernatural" in nature, then there is no reason whatsoever that empirical study will not produce an accurately-predictive model.
Meaning - the more fixed and rigid we are with our definitions of how people/things are the more likely it is that we'll come across people/things which we perceive as being OUTSIDE our dogmas - and the more likely it is that we'll perceive the "outsider" as a "problem". Relying on our rigid dogmas to define/understand ourselves - or anybody else - is akin to looking through a few windows on the ground floor of a 2 story house and believing you know the whole truth of the whole house - just by looking through a few windows from the outside. The conundrum faced by Science is that it wants/attempts to define the UNDEFINABLE. So too do rigid/fixed dogmas and doctrines. Truly, once we drop our dogmas and embrace the undefinable, we experience far fewer "problems".
That said, as far as human life is concerned; man is not a rational creature, but rather a creature that rationalizes. Feeling rules life; and mindfulness is all important.
In 1985 My Puerto Rican Wife's father died, he lived in the country in Puerto Rico.
Later in the evening after the funeral my wife tells me 'she took some dirt from her Father’s grave and was afraid he would haunt her to return it".
So there I was at midnight, climbing over a small stone wall to the cemetery, under a full moon, while my wife watched from the car with the headlights shining into the cemetery.
I couldn’t believe I was living out a scene from movies I had watched.
Found the grave, made it back to the car in record time!
Today’s horror movies are too gory, except Underworld….
BOTH are essential for our survival but, without doubt, the fear instinct is more powerful and must be harnessed, whether by "mindfulness" or otherwise. Otherwise, in a world where we can destroy the threatening "other" with nukes, nanobots, geno-weapons, stuxnet worms, etc, we will end up also destroying ourselves as well. And that's a sure recipe for unhappiness.