Finding my way – Science and beyond
Aug 12
The Brain (by Andrei Dorokhin/deviantArt)
The past week has been really interesting for me from in many regards. My new found motivation for deeper understanding of myself has made me introduce a significant amount of change to my routines and daily activities. I would like in part to credit Steve Pavlina for this. I spent around 5 hours on his blog devouring a good few of his articles and they all rang so true with me. Brilliantly written, clear, he inspired me.
About a week ago I decided to start this blog with the overall purpose of acquiring a better understanding of myself and my surroundings. One of my goals was to find a guiding purpose. Nothing big, just the meaning with life, mine in particular. While I’ve not yet found it I think I’ve made some progress. If you perhaps have read my previous blog post about Is there room for Science? you might have figured out that I will begin to take a somewhat more scientific approach to personal development.
I hope to provide a somewhat unique approach to personal development. Obviously it will still be from my perspective and I can’t promise that it will make any sense or even be valid but my intention however is to provide scientifically supported evidence for a given idea, or at least some background material that might support it. I hope to achieve a couple of things with this approach.
- Provide a solid, scientifically verified (or somewhat supported) foundation for understanding our minds
- Contribute something useful instead of adding more noise
- Bridge science with philosophy and psychology
- Make science cool :-)
Okay, so number 4 is obviously never going to happened, but who knows? Anyhow, let me explain one, two and three.
The first goal is my intention to distil the science behind the functioning of our minds and translate the sciency language into something we can use and apply to our daily lives.
The second goal is probably the one I feel most strongly about. There are so many personal development blogs out there and most of them simply reiterate what others have already said, many times before. I’ll probably do the same, but hopefully to a much lesser extent. And if I do, it will be from a different perspective. (I’m not obviously not saying all blogs are nonsense, but most of them are just out there contributing to the noise, and we really need less of that!)
The third goal is about not going all scientific, but rather attempt to find the synergies between philosophy, psychology and neuroscience. I feel this is an area not well covered in the personal development area and might be something I could contribute.
I feel it’s important to point out the fact that I’m not going all sciency geeky here. I’m an experimenter and believer in what I can see and do myself. I’ve tried many things that would definitely not be qualified as scientific, such as Out-of-Body experiences, lucid dreamig, and so forth. But I’m still very much interested in finding ways to bridge these “explorations” with rational, repeatable and scientific underpinnings.
I sincerely hope that you will join me on this journey through science, time, mind and explore what lies beyond. (and perhaps learn something on the way!)
