I remember eons ago when I was studying materials science, I saw a video about samurai swords.
Specifically, the traditional way of making them.
It’s an elaborate process, one that evolved over hundreds of years.
The point of this was to look at it from a modern scientific perspective. Which of the steps were necessary and which were simply tradition?
You might think that singing (and there is a lot of singing) is purely ceremonial. Not so, at least not always. Many of the steps require precise timing. A simple example: if the metal is too cold, it cannot be worked. Too hot and it melts. Then you need to heat it for a specific time.
(Also at a specific temperature, there were also rituals for that.)
So singing served a function: it helped them keep up.
I heard that Galileo did something similar: singing his experiments as a way to time them. That’s something to consider if you need to microwave something for a couple of minutes but somehow don’t have instruments to measure time …
Anyway, let’s get back to spades.
It could be argued that each stage is “necessary” because forging a samurai sword is an act of love. The rituals will help you appreciate it.
But assuming you’re a scientist, business executive, engineer, or some other professional looking to streamline the process …
Well, you could find some areas to optimize.
That’s because we know what each step of the forging process does.
This adds carbon, turning it from iron to steel.
This melts the grains, allowing you to re-melt the metal into a stronger shape.
Etcetera etcetera.
This mindset, the need to analyze and optimize, is valuable. It can be the difference between a million dollar idea and bankruptcy.
However …
We cannot approach everything in this way.
Worse still, it’s easy to fool ourselves into thinking we can.
Here’s another example from science that takes a closer look at a pre-science practice:
Let’s say a tradition that people use a particular herb as medicine. Maybe, I don’t know, it boosts your immune system or whatever.
Science reasonably asks two questions:
Does this really work (as in, beat a placebo)?
And if so, how?
So someone tries it with a placebo and it seems to work. That answers that.
They then take the herb and separate it, finding a unique compound. They decide that this is the “active” ingredient, isolate it, concentrate it and test it, calling it a new miracle drug.
Does this approach work?
Sometimes. We take a lot of drugs that way.
But sometimes this is not the case.
Who says concentrating the compound makes it more effective? There are many toxins in which increasing the dose makes it less potent, since it activates certain antitoxin responses in the body. That’s a simple answer … and the body is filled with thousands of complex answers.
And who can say that isolating the compound maintains its effectiveness? You may need to work in conjunction with the other compounds in the herb.
Does it even work in pill form? You may need to drink it as a hot tea to reap the benefits.
This is not the same as the sword forging example because swords are simple while biology is complicated. We can understand everything about steel, but we don’t know everything about how its trillions of cells interact.
You can put your faith in the scientific process here. They will surely try the pill and find that it does not work as well as raw herb.
Science will find the answer, for sure.
But it could work slowly, especially when money is involved. Even the scientific method can be distracted by short-term rewards and fad thoughts.
There is a moral to this story:
Pay attention to the cutting edge of science, because new things happen all the time.
But don’t be seduced by that.
After all, the scientific method is not responsible for the technique of making samurai swords. That came from a little instinct, a lot of trial and error …
And a long time.
Time has its own wisdom. Eliminate the practices that don’t work, leaving only the ones that do.
If you want to run a business, maybe that won’t help you unless you can create thousands of random businesses and see which ones survive the ages.
But if you are looking for a way to improve your body or your mind …
What old practices have outlived your rivals for decades, centuries, and even millennia?
Bonus points if they arose in different parts of the world at different times. Sometimes a bad idea can spread from the back of an empire, sure. But if it emerges in various places, and if it survives the civilization that spawned it, it must have something going for it.
Even more bonus points if science gives them the go. So you get the best of both words: the endurance of time, plus the ruthless rigor of science.
Taking all that into account, two mental disciplines stand out:
Meditation and hypnosis.
Meditation is thousands of years old. It is not just an Asian thing. The Australian Aborigines, a culture that dates back at least 60,000 years, have a practice called dadirri. It is a unique version of mindfulness meditation that everyone should experience.
As for hypnosis?
Well, modern hypnosis could be a few decades old.
And the terminology we use (hypnosis, mesmerism, etc.) goes back centuries.
But hypnotic principles appear in ancient Egyptian religious ceremonies, shamanism, and traditional cultures around the world.
Hypnosis is not just swinging pocket watches and clucking like chickens. It is an ancient discipline with roots in spirituality, which has survived for eons, long enough for science to discover it and turn it back into a powerful, focused, and evidence-based tool.
I know your problems seem huge to you … but compared to the weight of all that history and power, they don’t stand a chance.