Healing the Split between the Artist and the Scientist
REFLECTIONS ON ATTENDING AN ALCHEMY CONFERENCE
Last weekend, I got to attend a conference offered by the London Arts-Based Research Centre on the topic of “Alchemy: Exploring Metaphorical Transformations and Arts-Based Research”.
Yes -an entire conference dedicated to Alchemy! You can imagine my joy and enthusiasm, when I found out about it, which only grew as I fully immersed myself in the alchemical field (quite palpable, even via the internet) for hours on end.
This experience had a real impact on me, and I am definitely still digesting both the information and the transformation. Before too much time goes by though, and while it is all still fresh and alive in me, I wanted to write down a few reflections on that journey, and share some of what it brought up in me.
Starting with this big realisation:
Research has changed
It is not in any way the same as twelve years ago, when I was writing my Master’s dissertation. My paper on Alchemy and Yoga would have been considered too far out for most graduate institutes at the time, but I was fortunate enough to study at a rare and rather fringe one that welcomed -what was then considered- unconventional subject choices. As a reference, I still don’t think it would be accepted as a valid research topic in any university in Greece, where I’m from.
Research has actually evolved, progressed and is continually moving beyond the great split between art and science, between subjective experience and hard facts, between Eros and Logos -ultimately, between body and mind. As I discovered through the many, incredibly interesting presentations at the conference, there is now ample space in research for creativity, for the spiritual and the mystical -there is space for the imagination, not just logic!
We have come a long way, I thought, since the time of Carl Jung’s own wrestling with this same tension, when he had tried so hard to renounce the label of the mystic that was often attributed to him, in favour of that of the scientist.