Invisible things and how to find them
What do Eckhart Tolle, bees, kōans and Carl Jung's patients have in common?
They are all pointing towards something you can't see.
I lived in Japan. At the ecology department they had a problem.
There was a beehive, but no way to find it.
So what did the tech-savvy researchers do?
They build an app to spot the hive.
How?
Every time you see a bumblebee, align your phone with it's flying direction and tap the button.
Do this many times and you collect a massive set of seemingly random arrows.
Seemingly..
When you let the algorithm do it's magic it will erase all random arrows. And you'll be left with arrows that point into a general direction. Go there.
There's the hive.
Jung applied the same principle to his patients.
It was called the word-association-experiment.
He asked his patients to respond to a word with the first word that comes to their mind.
When the patient was hesitant in it's response to the trigger word it would indicate a complex.
A complex is a theme in the psyche that has many associations build around it.
We thank words such as god complex or inferiority complex to Jung.
Jung discovered that there were groups of words, all related to the complex. many of these words made the patients hesitant in their reply.
Again, build a data set, this time with words, not arrows.
See where all the hesitant words are pointing towards.
Go there.
There's the complex.
How to find invisible things
In short:
Find directional patterns in noise.
Finding these underlying principles requires abstract thought.
That's education.
In the video below I explain how your education enables you to think abstract.
I personally really love this topic :)