For years I have been fascinated by seemingly unrelated things: Stories, Rumi, genetics, mitochondria, biochemistry, neuroscience, healing, mythology, creativity, psychology, and meaning.
I always had the feeling that an invisible thread connected them all.
I just couldn't see it clearly.
This new series is my attempt to follow that thread wherever it leads.
It begins with an unlikely gathering: a geneticist studying corn, an ancient Greek polymath taking a bath, a chemist dreaming of a snake, a physicist riding a beam of light, and a mystic speaking of holy madness.
Welcome to Re-Enchanting the World
Part 1: Love, Embodiment, and Holy Madness
I always had the feeling that an invisible thread connected them all.
I just couldn't see it clearly.
This new series is my attempt to follow that thread wherever it leads.
It begins with an unlikely gathering: a geneticist studying corn, an ancient Greek polymath taking a bath, a chemist dreaming of a snake, a physicist riding a beam of light, and a mystic speaking of holy madness.
Welcome to Re-Enchanting the World
Part 1: Love, Embodiment, and Holy Madness
Why do some discoveries arrive in dreams?
Why do breakthroughs appear while walking, bathing, sewing, praying, or staring out a window?
Why do the greatest scientists, artists, and mystics often describe a process that sounds remarkably similar - yet very different from anything we learn at school?
What if reality reveals itself through a deeper mode of participation than rational analysis alone?
Barbara McClintock and “The Feeling for the Organism”
Barbara McClintock, an American geneticist, spent decades studying corn plants. At the time, most geneticists believed genes were fixed in place, like beads on a string. But as she patiently observed thousands of corn kernels, she began to see patterns nobody else noticed. She concluded that some genes could actually move around the genome. She called them “controlling elements.” Today we call them transposable elements or “jumping genes.”
The scientific community largely rejected her findings. Many thought her ideas were bizarre or impossible. Some even wondered whether she was brilliant or simply crazy. Yet she continued her work quietly, trusting what she was seeing. Thirty years later, molecular biology confirmed that she had been right all along, and she received the 1983 Nobel Prize.
But what makes her story especially interesting is how she worked.
McClintock spoke about developing what she called a “feeling for the organism.” She became so immersed in studying corn plants that she felt she could almost enter their world. She once described looking so deeply that the distinctions between observer and observed seemed to soften. Rather than forcing reality into a theory, she allowed the organism to reveal its own patterns.
The story of Barbara McClintock is one of the most fascinating examples in science of what happens when deep intuition and rigorous observation come together. It reminds me of a line said by one of the characters in Rumi’s stories, a court jester:
“All my life I used my brain,
now I seek the fruit of being insane.”
Many people interpret this verse as a sarcastic comment of an anti-intellectual character.
But Rumi, here, is not praising irrationality. In Sufi language, “insanity” often means going beyond the ordinary rational mind - the part that analyzes, reasons, categorizes, and controls.
The “brain” that says:
The “holy madness” of the mystics says:
McClintock did not abandon her rational scientific inquiry. She went through science so deeply that she reached a form of knowing that many scientists never reach. Her observations were extraordinarily precise, but they were guided by something more than detached analysis. She had what Michael Polanyi later called “tacit knowledge”, a knowledge we possess and use but cannot fully articulate in words… way of knowing that cannot be reduced to explicit rules… a knowledge that we cannot find in books or gain from attending lectures.
In that sense, McClintock’s “feeling for the organism” resembles what Rumi means by the fruit of “insanity”:
Not less reason, but reason transcended.
Not abandoning the intellect, but moving beyond intellect alone.
Not seeing the corn plant as an object, but entering into a relationship with it.
The irony is that, for decades, many scientists thought McClintock was the “crazy” one. Yet history revealed that her deeper way of seeing was actually closer to reality than the accepted view of her time.
It is said that Einstein once stated: “Creativity is seeing what others see and thinking what no one else has ever thought”. McClintock’s genius was not merely that she discovered jumping genes. It was that she learned how to listen to the corn closely enough for the corn to reveal them. And that is very close to what the Sufis mean when they speak of knowledge arising from tasting (dhawq)... from seeing the Divine countenance in everything and everyone.
From Archimedes to Kekulé: Direct encounter with reality
Archimedes (d. 212 BC) was an Ancient Greek mathematician, physicist, engineer, and astronomer. According to a famous story, King Hiero II of Syracuse had commissioned a golden wreath for a temple and provided the goldsmith with pure gold for its construction. Later, however, the king began to suspect that the goldsmith had secretly mixed some of the gold with silver and kept part of the precious metal for himself. Unable to prove the deception, he turned to Archimedes for help.
Archimedes wrestled with the problem for some time. How could he determine whether the wreath was truly made of pure gold without damaging it?
The story goes that while stepping into a bath, he noticed the water level rising as his body sank into the tub. Suddenly, he realized that an object's volume could be measured by the amount of water it displaced. In that moment, the solution became clear.
So excited was he by the discovery that he reportedly ran through the streets naked, having forgotten to dress, shouting, "Eureka!" - "I have found it!"
Archimedes then compared the wreath with equal weights of pure gold and pure silver. By measuring the amount of water displaced by each, he demonstrated that the wreath occupied more volume than pure gold would have, but less than pure silver. The conclusion was unmistakable: the wreath was not made of pure gold but had been mixed with silver.
What makes the story fascinating is that the solution did not emerge while Archimedes was staring harder or reflecting deeper at the problem. It appeared during an ordinary embodied experience. Years of reasoning had prepared the ground, but the final insight arrived in a moment of direct encounter with reality.
August Kekulé, a German organic chemist, is the principal formulator of the theory of chemical structure. This theory provided a dramatic new clarity of understanding how the carbon atoms link to each other and other atoms in a molecule. Kekulé's most famous work, though, is the structure of benzene. The empirical formula for benzene had been long known (6 carbon atoms linked to 6 hydrogen atoms), but its structure was a challenge to determine. How do these 12 atoms link together and how the molecule remains so stable despite its highly unsaturated structure?
Kekulé struggled for years with the chemical structure of benzene. He later described a dream-like vision of a snake seizing its own tail (the ancient symbol of the Ouroboros), which led him to conceive of the benzene as a ring, closed loop rather than the regular linear chain that science at the time knew. In 1865, Kekulé published his theory. The new understanding of benzene as a ring, revolutionized how chemists saw all organic and aromatic compounds. His discovery opened the door to so many insights in organic and biochemistry.
What is fascinating is that neither Archimedes nor Kekulé’s discovery emerged from not thinking. They emerged after thinking intensely. The conscious mind prepares the ground. Yet, “Something else” assembles the pieces. To find this “something else” or rather encounter it, we need to be willing to move beyond what Ibn Arabi would call the limitations of discursive reason (fikr) into another mode of knowing – tasting (dhawq).
The Heart (qalb) suddenly sees the pattern that neither reasoning (‘aql) nor imagination (Khayal) could see alone.
That is why so many discoveries arrive through dreams, images, metaphors, stories, or seemingly unrelated experiences.
These stories are all circling the same question:
Is the brain merely a calculating, analyzing, reasoning machine, or is there a form of knowing that emerges at the liminal space between reason and imagination … a space where the heart steps beyond reasoning and beyond imagination?
For millennia, the mystics saw this liminal space and willingly stepped in it. And, it seems that our most creative modern scientists, although using different language, stepped in this space as well.
None of them abandoned reason.
They used reason so thoroughly that they reached the doorway where something larger could enter.
Or, in the language of the mystic:
The intellect carries you to the door. Love, imagination, or “holy madness” carries you through it.
The pattern often looks like this:
It is as if the Divine is teaching us full surrender and humility. Teaching us that it is not up to us… any insight, knowledge or wisdom come from Him alone - the All-knowing, all-Wise (al-Alim, al-Hakim).
Fleming’s Penicillin: A Shift in Perception
Penicillin is another fascinating example, but it highlights a slightly different aspect of the “knowing” process.
Alexander Fleming was studying bacteria in 1928 when he returned from vacation and noticed that one of his petri dishes had been contaminated by mold. Normally, a scientist might have discarded the spoiled culture without a second thought. Yet Fleming chose to take a deeper look. He noticed that around the mold, the bacteria were dying. The mold or fungus appeared to be producing something that inhibited bacterial growth.
The funny thing is, scientists for years have been complaining about this mold that ruin their bacterial cultures and force them to discard the dead culture and start all over. They did not notice that this “dead culture” is the whole point. They saw a contaminated plate. Fleming saw significance in it.
Fleming’s breakthrough was a shift in perspective… A shift in perception.
He saw what others might have overlooked.
The issue is whether we are actually seeing what is in front of us.
Fleming’s discovery depended on a mind that was prepared enough and present enough to recognize an anomaly.
Louis Pasteur, the famous French microbiologist renowned for his discovery of pasteurization, later expressed a similar idea that “chance favors the prepared mind.”
For Fleming, the mold was chance. Recognizing its importance was preparation and attentive presence.
There is a lovely connection here to Rumi’s famous teaching that the wise is seeking self-knowledge, while children just want candy.
I see a deep common thread among all these stories:
Reality is constantly presenting clues, patterns, anomalies, whispers… Whatever you want to call them… They are all around us… They come in various forms and shapes.
Most of us filter them out. Yet, some do not:
This actually echoes something very close to the notion of basīrah (inner seeing - insight). Two people can look at the same thing:
The world is the same.
The seeing is different.
Which brings us back to one of our recurring themes:
“We do not see the world as it is. We see the world as we are.”
But, perhaps all these stories are examples of another side of that statement as well:
When perception becomes refined - through discipline, deep attention, intention, and love- we begin to see realities that were always there, waiting to be noticed… The veils start to lift and we see the Divine countenance wherever we turn.
Einstein: A different way of knowing
Einstein may actually be one of the most important examples for the pattern we’re tracing here.
Most people think Einstein’s genius was physics and mathematics.
Ironically, Einstein himself repeatedly said that his discoveries began not with equations but with images, imagination, and thought experiments. He famously wrote: “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” And: “I very rarely think in words at all.”
Einstein often described his thinking as visual, kinesthetic, and intuitive before it became verbal or mathematical. As a teenager he asked himself: “What would it be like to ride alongside a beam of light?”
That is not a mathematical question.
It is almost a child’s imaginative game.
Yet he spent years living inside that question.
From that imaginative exercise eventually emerged the foundations of Theory of Relativity.
Notice how similar the pattern is:
They imaginatively participate in it.
Einstein demonstrated that imagination is not merely a source of inspiration or an after the fact metaphor.
It can be a genuine mode of investigation.
Instead of asking: “What equation describes reality?” He often asked: “What would reality feel like from the inside?” That is a very different way of knowing... of tasting (dhawq).
This is also where I think Einstein sits close to Rumi. Rumi often invites us to stop standing outside reality and judging it. Instead:
Become the reed flute and allow the Divine breath to flow through you.
Become the moth and feel the burning of that flame.
Become the lover and taste the pain of separation from your beloved.
If you place all these figures together, they seem to reveal different faces of knowing:
In a sense:
And, most importantly, all of them challenge the modern assumption that intelligence is simply data collection and analytical processing.
Data is useful. Analysis is essential.
But analysis alone rarely produces revolutionary insight.
Data, work, and discipline are the preparation. This is just a starting point. And when we let go and are humble enough to receive, insight comes.
And, afterwards, reason steps is again for refining and formulation.
McClintock sensed something different in the corn. Then she spent years refining and documenting it.
Kekulé saw the snake. Then he worked out the chemistry.
Intuition is not replacing reason.
It is giving reason something new to work on.
The common theme is that reality may be disclosed through more than one faculty. But when imagination and intellect work together, something remarkable becomes possible.
This is what Rumi meant by “seek the fruit of being insane.”
Not abandoning rationality.
But venturing beyond the part of reason that merely analyzes, into the part that can participate, imagine, and receive.
Then, after the insight arrives, the intellect returns to test, refine, and articulate what was seen.
The mystics call this inspiration.
Scientists call it discovery.
The process often looks surprisingly similar.
This pattern is totally different than how western education goes. Modern education has become extraordinarily effective at analysis and specialization. Yet the figures we have explored suggest that another dimension of learning is equally important: participation, wonder, patience, and the capacity to dwell with a question. It works in deep connections, embodiment, wonder and wander. Patiently sitting with the discomfort, not forcing an answer. The Divine is teaching us that it is not our efforts, it is His blessing that gets us there. He is teaching us humility and surrender.
Modern Western education, especially since the Enlightenment, tends to emphasize:
That model works remarkably well for many things. It gave us modern conventional medicine that saves lives, engineering that builds houses, and technology that facilitates life in many ways.
But when we look at the stories of McClintock, Einstein, Kekulé, and many great scientists, artists and mystics, we encounter another pattern:
Attend deeply → dwell with the question → tolerate not knowing → become intimate with the reality → wait → surrender → be receptive.
The answer is not guaranteed … it is a blessing, a gift, a grace.
McClintock’s “feeling for the organism” is so different from modern concept of conquering nature – genetically engineering for productivity and consumption. McClintock wasn’t extracting information from the plant, neither imposing her expertise on it. She was entering into a relationship with it. That language sounds strange to modern ears, but it would have sounded perfectly natural to many premodern traditions.
Even Einstein’s famous discoveries emerged from years of living with a question. He did not force relativity into existence. He carried the question long enough that a new way of seeing became possible.
This pattern, again, resembles what the philosopher Michael Polanyi called “indwelling.” Before we truly know something, we dwell within it.
The knowledge is gestating long before it becomes explicit.
The seed grows underground before the shoots break the surface of the dirt and emerge.
The healing herbs percolate in their menstruum before the hidden medicine is fully revealed.
And then there is the spiritual dimension. Traditional wisdom always knew that the deepest truths cannot be seized. That knowledge cannot be forced and nature cannot be conquered.
They can only be received… with grace and humility.
The lesson is that effort has limits. Beyond those limits lies a wisdom that cannot be commanded.
It can only be granted.
The same pattern appears repeatedly:
But because effort alone is insufficient.
The great discoverers often arrive with humility rather than pride.
McClintock did not conclude, “Look how clever I am.”
Einstein spoke repeatedly of awe and mystery.
Even Newton wrote that he felt like a child playing on the seashore while the great ocean of truth lay undiscovered before him.
The closer they came to reality, the more they seemed to encounter wonder.
I keep circling around words like:
These concepts are totally missing and dismissed from our modern scientific discourse.
Yet, they may be the most important conditions that allow a deeper intelligence to emerge.
The intellect prepares the soil.
The imagination opens possibilities.
The body feels and experiences it.
The heart receives with grace.
And, what arrives feels less like an achievement and more like a gift, a blessing that leave us in gratitude, awe, and wonder.
Perhaps the world has never been as disenchanted as we imagine. Perhaps we have simply forgotten how to participate in it. Re-enchantment begins not by changing the world, but by changing the way we attend to it.
See you next week with Part 2 of our exploration: Re-enchanting the world.
Why do breakthroughs appear while walking, bathing, sewing, praying, or staring out a window?
Why do the greatest scientists, artists, and mystics often describe a process that sounds remarkably similar - yet very different from anything we learn at school?
What if reality reveals itself through a deeper mode of participation than rational analysis alone?
Barbara McClintock and “The Feeling for the Organism”
Barbara McClintock, an American geneticist, spent decades studying corn plants. At the time, most geneticists believed genes were fixed in place, like beads on a string. But as she patiently observed thousands of corn kernels, she began to see patterns nobody else noticed. She concluded that some genes could actually move around the genome. She called them “controlling elements.” Today we call them transposable elements or “jumping genes.”
The scientific community largely rejected her findings. Many thought her ideas were bizarre or impossible. Some even wondered whether she was brilliant or simply crazy. Yet she continued her work quietly, trusting what she was seeing. Thirty years later, molecular biology confirmed that she had been right all along, and she received the 1983 Nobel Prize.
But what makes her story especially interesting is how she worked.
McClintock spoke about developing what she called a “feeling for the organism.” She became so immersed in studying corn plants that she felt she could almost enter their world. She once described looking so deeply that the distinctions between observer and observed seemed to soften. Rather than forcing reality into a theory, she allowed the organism to reveal its own patterns.
The story of Barbara McClintock is one of the most fascinating examples in science of what happens when deep intuition and rigorous observation come together. It reminds me of a line said by one of the characters in Rumi’s stories, a court jester:
“All my life I used my brain,
now I seek the fruit of being insane.”
Many people interpret this verse as a sarcastic comment of an anti-intellectual character.
But Rumi, here, is not praising irrationality. In Sufi language, “insanity” often means going beyond the ordinary rational mind - the part that analyzes, reasons, categorizes, and controls.
The “brain” that says:
- Observe from a distance.
- Stay objective.
- Keep everything separated.
- Think of either/or
The “holy madness” of the mystics says:
- Enter into relationship.
- Become intimate with what you seek.
- Let reality teach you.
McClintock did not abandon her rational scientific inquiry. She went through science so deeply that she reached a form of knowing that many scientists never reach. Her observations were extraordinarily precise, but they were guided by something more than detached analysis. She had what Michael Polanyi later called “tacit knowledge”, a knowledge we possess and use but cannot fully articulate in words… way of knowing that cannot be reduced to explicit rules… a knowledge that we cannot find in books or gain from attending lectures.
In that sense, McClintock’s “feeling for the organism” resembles what Rumi means by the fruit of “insanity”:
Not less reason, but reason transcended.
Not abandoning the intellect, but moving beyond intellect alone.
Not seeing the corn plant as an object, but entering into a relationship with it.
The irony is that, for decades, many scientists thought McClintock was the “crazy” one. Yet history revealed that her deeper way of seeing was actually closer to reality than the accepted view of her time.
It is said that Einstein once stated: “Creativity is seeing what others see and thinking what no one else has ever thought”. McClintock’s genius was not merely that she discovered jumping genes. It was that she learned how to listen to the corn closely enough for the corn to reveal them. And that is very close to what the Sufis mean when they speak of knowledge arising from tasting (dhawq)... from seeing the Divine countenance in everything and everyone.
From Archimedes to Kekulé: Direct encounter with reality
Archimedes (d. 212 BC) was an Ancient Greek mathematician, physicist, engineer, and astronomer. According to a famous story, King Hiero II of Syracuse had commissioned a golden wreath for a temple and provided the goldsmith with pure gold for its construction. Later, however, the king began to suspect that the goldsmith had secretly mixed some of the gold with silver and kept part of the precious metal for himself. Unable to prove the deception, he turned to Archimedes for help.
Archimedes wrestled with the problem for some time. How could he determine whether the wreath was truly made of pure gold without damaging it?
The story goes that while stepping into a bath, he noticed the water level rising as his body sank into the tub. Suddenly, he realized that an object's volume could be measured by the amount of water it displaced. In that moment, the solution became clear.
So excited was he by the discovery that he reportedly ran through the streets naked, having forgotten to dress, shouting, "Eureka!" - "I have found it!"
Archimedes then compared the wreath with equal weights of pure gold and pure silver. By measuring the amount of water displaced by each, he demonstrated that the wreath occupied more volume than pure gold would have, but less than pure silver. The conclusion was unmistakable: the wreath was not made of pure gold but had been mixed with silver.
What makes the story fascinating is that the solution did not emerge while Archimedes was staring harder or reflecting deeper at the problem. It appeared during an ordinary embodied experience. Years of reasoning had prepared the ground, but the final insight arrived in a moment of direct encounter with reality.
August Kekulé, a German organic chemist, is the principal formulator of the theory of chemical structure. This theory provided a dramatic new clarity of understanding how the carbon atoms link to each other and other atoms in a molecule. Kekulé's most famous work, though, is the structure of benzene. The empirical formula for benzene had been long known (6 carbon atoms linked to 6 hydrogen atoms), but its structure was a challenge to determine. How do these 12 atoms link together and how the molecule remains so stable despite its highly unsaturated structure?
Kekulé struggled for years with the chemical structure of benzene. He later described a dream-like vision of a snake seizing its own tail (the ancient symbol of the Ouroboros), which led him to conceive of the benzene as a ring, closed loop rather than the regular linear chain that science at the time knew. In 1865, Kekulé published his theory. The new understanding of benzene as a ring, revolutionized how chemists saw all organic and aromatic compounds. His discovery opened the door to so many insights in organic and biochemistry.
What is fascinating is that neither Archimedes nor Kekulé’s discovery emerged from not thinking. They emerged after thinking intensely. The conscious mind prepares the ground. Yet, “Something else” assembles the pieces. To find this “something else” or rather encounter it, we need to be willing to move beyond what Ibn Arabi would call the limitations of discursive reason (fikr) into another mode of knowing – tasting (dhawq).
The Heart (qalb) suddenly sees the pattern that neither reasoning (‘aql) nor imagination (Khayal) could see alone.
That is why so many discoveries arrive through dreams, images, metaphors, stories, or seemingly unrelated experiences.
- McClintock’s insight appeared through intimate relationship with corn - “a feeling for the organism” - companionship with Reality.
- Archimedes’ solution to the crown appeared through his plunging in the bathtub – embodied experience.
- Kekulé’s benzene ring structure appeared as a snake - Symbolic imagination.
These stories are all circling the same question:
Is the brain merely a calculating, analyzing, reasoning machine, or is there a form of knowing that emerges at the liminal space between reason and imagination … a space where the heart steps beyond reasoning and beyond imagination?
For millennia, the mystics saw this liminal space and willingly stepped in it. And, it seems that our most creative modern scientists, although using different language, stepped in this space as well.
None of them abandoned reason.
They used reason so thoroughly that they reached the doorway where something larger could enter.
Or, in the language of the mystic:
The intellect carries you to the door. Love, imagination, or “holy madness” carries you through it.
The pattern often looks like this:
- Long period of disciplined work.
- Immersion in a problem.
- Reaching the limits of conscious analysis.
- Letting go.
- Sudden insight appearing seemingly from nowhere.
It is as if the Divine is teaching us full surrender and humility. Teaching us that it is not up to us… any insight, knowledge or wisdom come from Him alone - the All-knowing, all-Wise (al-Alim, al-Hakim).
Fleming’s Penicillin: A Shift in Perception
Penicillin is another fascinating example, but it highlights a slightly different aspect of the “knowing” process.
Alexander Fleming was studying bacteria in 1928 when he returned from vacation and noticed that one of his petri dishes had been contaminated by mold. Normally, a scientist might have discarded the spoiled culture without a second thought. Yet Fleming chose to take a deeper look. He noticed that around the mold, the bacteria were dying. The mold or fungus appeared to be producing something that inhibited bacterial growth.
The funny thing is, scientists for years have been complaining about this mold that ruin their bacterial cultures and force them to discard the dead culture and start all over. They did not notice that this “dead culture” is the whole point. They saw a contaminated plate. Fleming saw significance in it.
Fleming’s breakthrough was a shift in perspective… A shift in perception.
He saw what others might have overlooked.
The issue is whether we are actually seeing what is in front of us.
Fleming’s discovery depended on a mind that was prepared enough and present enough to recognize an anomaly.
Louis Pasteur, the famous French microbiologist renowned for his discovery of pasteurization, later expressed a similar idea that “chance favors the prepared mind.”
For Fleming, the mold was chance. Recognizing its importance was preparation and attentive presence.
There is a lovely connection here to Rumi’s famous teaching that the wise is seeking self-knowledge, while children just want candy.
I see a deep common thread among all these stories:
Reality is constantly presenting clues, patterns, anomalies, whispers… Whatever you want to call them… They are all around us… They come in various forms and shapes.
Most of us filter them out. Yet, some do not:
- McClintock noticed patterns in corn that others dismissed.
- Archimedes noticed water displacement during a regular every day bath.
- Kekulé noticed the deeper symbolic meaning of a dream image.
- Fleming noticed the the potential cure in a mold-contaminated plate.
This actually echoes something very close to the notion of basīrah (inner seeing - insight). Two people can look at the same thing:
- One sees random corn kernels. Another sees genes moving through the genome.
- One sees an enjoyable bath. Another sees a mathematical calculation.
- One sees a dream. Another sees the structure of benzene.
- One sees a contaminated experiment. Another sees penicillin cure.
The world is the same.
The seeing is different.
Which brings us back to one of our recurring themes:
“We do not see the world as it is. We see the world as we are.”
But, perhaps all these stories are examples of another side of that statement as well:
When perception becomes refined - through discipline, deep attention, intention, and love- we begin to see realities that were always there, waiting to be noticed… The veils start to lift and we see the Divine countenance wherever we turn.
Einstein: A different way of knowing
Einstein may actually be one of the most important examples for the pattern we’re tracing here.
Most people think Einstein’s genius was physics and mathematics.
Ironically, Einstein himself repeatedly said that his discoveries began not with equations but with images, imagination, and thought experiments. He famously wrote: “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” And: “I very rarely think in words at all.”
Einstein often described his thinking as visual, kinesthetic, and intuitive before it became verbal or mathematical. As a teenager he asked himself: “What would it be like to ride alongside a beam of light?”
That is not a mathematical question.
It is almost a child’s imaginative game.
Yet he spent years living inside that question.
From that imaginative exercise eventually emerged the foundations of Theory of Relativity.
Notice how similar the pattern is:
- McClintock enters the world of corn.
- Archimedes immersed his body in water.
- Kekulé steps in the imaginative world of the snake-image.
- Fleming lives the world of molds and bacteria.
- Einstein rides alongside the beam of light.
They imaginatively participate in it.
Einstein demonstrated that imagination is not merely a source of inspiration or an after the fact metaphor.
It can be a genuine mode of investigation.
Instead of asking: “What equation describes reality?” He often asked: “What would reality feel like from the inside?” That is a very different way of knowing... of tasting (dhawq).
This is also where I think Einstein sits close to Rumi. Rumi often invites us to stop standing outside reality and judging it. Instead:
Become the reed flute and allow the Divine breath to flow through you.
Become the moth and feel the burning of that flame.
Become the lover and taste the pain of separation from your beloved.
If you place all these figures together, they seem to reveal different faces of knowing:
In a sense:
- McClintock’s story teaches us about intimacy with the world around us.
- Archimedes’ story teaches us about embodied awareness.
- Kekulé’s story teaches us about imagination and symbolic seeing.
- Fleming’s story teaches us about presence and attentive observation.
- Einstein’s story brings it all together – participation, imagination, embodiment, and attentive presence.
And, most importantly, all of them challenge the modern assumption that intelligence is simply data collection and analytical processing.
Data is useful. Analysis is essential.
But analysis alone rarely produces revolutionary insight.
Data, work, and discipline are the preparation. This is just a starting point. And when we let go and are humble enough to receive, insight comes.
And, afterwards, reason steps is again for refining and formulation.
McClintock sensed something different in the corn. Then she spent years refining and documenting it.
Kekulé saw the snake. Then he worked out the chemistry.
Intuition is not replacing reason.
It is giving reason something new to work on.
The common theme is that reality may be disclosed through more than one faculty. But when imagination and intellect work together, something remarkable becomes possible.
This is what Rumi meant by “seek the fruit of being insane.”
Not abandoning rationality.
But venturing beyond the part of reason that merely analyzes, into the part that can participate, imagine, and receive.
Then, after the insight arrives, the intellect returns to test, refine, and articulate what was seen.
The mystics call this inspiration.
Scientists call it discovery.
The process often looks surprisingly similar.
This pattern is totally different than how western education goes. Modern education has become extraordinarily effective at analysis and specialization. Yet the figures we have explored suggest that another dimension of learning is equally important: participation, wonder, patience, and the capacity to dwell with a question. It works in deep connections, embodiment, wonder and wander. Patiently sitting with the discomfort, not forcing an answer. The Divine is teaching us that it is not our efforts, it is His blessing that gets us there. He is teaching us humility and surrender.
Modern Western education, especially since the Enlightenment, tends to emphasize:
- analysis over participation
- certainty over ambiguity
- answers over questions
- speed over patience
- control over receptivity
- disconnection over relationship
That model works remarkably well for many things. It gave us modern conventional medicine that saves lives, engineering that builds houses, and technology that facilitates life in many ways.
But when we look at the stories of McClintock, Einstein, Kekulé, and many great scientists, artists and mystics, we encounter another pattern:
Attend deeply → dwell with the question → tolerate not knowing → become intimate with the reality → wait → surrender → be receptive.
The answer is not guaranteed … it is a blessing, a gift, a grace.
McClintock’s “feeling for the organism” is so different from modern concept of conquering nature – genetically engineering for productivity and consumption. McClintock wasn’t extracting information from the plant, neither imposing her expertise on it. She was entering into a relationship with it. That language sounds strange to modern ears, but it would have sounded perfectly natural to many premodern traditions.
Even Einstein’s famous discoveries emerged from years of living with a question. He did not force relativity into existence. He carried the question long enough that a new way of seeing became possible.
This pattern, again, resembles what the philosopher Michael Polanyi called “indwelling.” Before we truly know something, we dwell within it.
The knowledge is gestating long before it becomes explicit.
The seed grows underground before the shoots break the surface of the dirt and emerge.
The healing herbs percolate in their menstruum before the hidden medicine is fully revealed.
And then there is the spiritual dimension. Traditional wisdom always knew that the deepest truths cannot be seized. That knowledge cannot be forced and nature cannot be conquered.
They can only be received… with grace and humility.
The lesson is that effort has limits. Beyond those limits lies a wisdom that cannot be commanded.
It can only be granted.
The same pattern appears repeatedly:
- You prepare.
- You seek.
- You struggle.
- You wait.
- Something is unveiled.
But because effort alone is insufficient.
The great discoverers often arrive with humility rather than pride.
McClintock did not conclude, “Look how clever I am.”
Einstein spoke repeatedly of awe and mystery.
Even Newton wrote that he felt like a child playing on the seashore while the great ocean of truth lay undiscovered before him.
The closer they came to reality, the more they seemed to encounter wonder.
I keep circling around words like:
- Intuition
- mystery
- imagination
- humility
- surrender
- patience
- embodiment
- intimacy
- connection
These concepts are totally missing and dismissed from our modern scientific discourse.
Yet, they may be the most important conditions that allow a deeper intelligence to emerge.
The intellect prepares the soil.
The imagination opens possibilities.
The body feels and experiences it.
The heart receives with grace.
And, what arrives feels less like an achievement and more like a gift, a blessing that leave us in gratitude, awe, and wonder.
Perhaps the world has never been as disenchanted as we imagine. Perhaps we have simply forgotten how to participate in it. Re-enchantment begins not by changing the world, but by changing the way we attend to it.
See you next week with Part 2 of our exploration: Re-enchanting the world.
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