Science creates a framework for understanding the material world, and Engineering creates tools for facilitating our lives based on this understanding. Two industrial revolutions have freed people from laborious work and travel to the extent that was hard to imagine for people before these revolutions. Understanding and manipulating the material world are great advances for human beings. How about applying this idea to life itself?
Lack of a user manual of one's body and life
Science and Engineering are based on the basic expectation that the understanding and the tools they create can make the world a better place. However, just in the same way that a knife can be used to cook delicious cuisine and can be also used to commit murder, there is no reason to prefer to believe the produce of Science and Engineering to have good impact. If we don’t think about this carefully, it is possible to hold a sharp knife but to cut oneself constantly, without even noticing. That’s like the One Ring in The Lord of the Rings.
Nevertheless, I feel people have spent way too much time learning the Science and Engineering about the material world, following the western way of education. People spend way less time learning how to shape oneself properly. A good knife should be held in a steady hand. Carl Jung was very clear on this in his 1959 interview.
We know how to use sophistic tools like a car, a computer, or an iPhone; but we still know almost nothing when it comes to one’s own life experience.
Be something: dance with one's life
My personal experience seems to suggest that one should first 1) quietly observe one’s memory, experience and feeling, as if from a third-person’s point of view, in a point of view as neutral as possible; then based on these observations, 2) try making a plan to shape oneself and act the plan out. The process is very much like applying the Science and Engineering process to one’s life itself. It is a very active way to engage one’s own experience, instead of passively accepting what happens to oneself and fade oneself into the background of the story.
I would say it is a very uneasy and fleeting experience. I never find a way to understand and stabilize this process. Hope I can find more hints in great thinkers like Jung or ancient saints in the future.
