Workshop 23

Eureka!

Creative breakthroughs in thought which transform or change the histories of science, philosophy, art, and religion are often given the descriptor The Eureka Experience. Eureka! is attributed to Archimedes after having suddenly discovering a method of finding out how much the gold of King Hiero's crown had been alloyed. Today, it describes that “bolt from the blue” that seems to confer the answer to a problem often after attempts to find it had been abandoned. In Margharita Laski’s book, Ecstacy: A Study of Some Secular and Religious Experiences, she outlined the six step process behind the Eureka Experience, recounted in The Biology of Transcendence, by Joseph Chilton Pierce:

1. Asking the question. A suggestion, idea, or intuitive hunch, something we long to find out about and want to experience ourselves, an enigma we want to solve – whatever it might be, a quest must become not just the focus of our life, but such a passionate intensity that we are seized by it and feel we live only to serve it. Often we get an idea that we think will win us a place in the sun and serve our interests in the world. Until we are seized in the pursuit of our notion by that which we have seized, the level of passion will not be sufficient to ignite our movement towards Eureka!

2. Searching for the answer. We must explore all avenues that might be useful in our search; find all the pieces of the puzzle; pursue every discipline; read every text; follow every directive whether the search is scientific, spiritual, philosophical, or artistic. Laski points out that we must leave no stone unturned in gathering the materials for our answer. The early stages of this pursuit are generally exciting, colored as they are by the conviction that the answer is always just around the corner.

3. Hitting the plateau period. A time of stagnation inevitably arrives when no more materials can be found, no more related paths can be explored, no more disciplines can be harnessed, no more sacrifices can be made. We have done as much as we can with no avail, which brings us frustration, despair, even bitterness and disillusionment – dark night indeed. Yet this is a time of gestation, that part of creation that lies beyond our doing and can’t be engineered. We might go through several such plateaus before the answer forms and breaks through to us. And, of course, the breakthrough may never come at all.

4. Giving up all hope. No dawn follows the dark; all possibilities are exhausted; we have tried everything but no answer is found. We feel we have wasted our life to no avail – and we quit. Really. Period!

5. Breaking through. Real quitting clears the circuitry of mind, brain, and body and makes room for the answer to appear. It has access to us – at which point the answer arrives, full blown and complete, when least expected, out of the blue, and in a single instant’s insight.

6. Translating the answer into the common domain. This is the critical step, the one in which far more revelations perish than survive to see the light of day. Our instant, breakthrough insight can’t be communicated as given – it must be translated into language that allows it to be shared with others of a like mind. Until this is done, it hangs in limbo, halfway between creation and created until it is properly birthed into the world.

Examples of this process in history include Irish mathematician, William Hamilton who produced quaternion function, a cornerstone in modern mathematics; August Kekule, a Belgian chemist who discovered the theory of the benzene ring, a cornerstone of modern chemistry; and Gordon Gould, a physicist who won the Nobel Prize for his theory of laser light.

Up Next: What Is Ego?