ABSTRACT
This is the story of an adventurous life of pushing limits to expand our understanding of ourselves in our universe—as an explorer, as a scientist, as a philosopher, as a political animal, as a mother and grandmother, even as an artist—concluding with the realization that all we have to go on is our stories. This is what most differentiates us from other species, even from our own cells: that we tell each other stories of What, How, and Why Things Are as They Are. We do not live as they do in the eternally Now moment, deeply interconnected within All That Is; rather we live in a mental trajectory from deep past to far future, making up stories about ourselves and everything else, coloring our perceptions with these stories and acting them out. We make them up differently in art, science, politics, economics, religion, and whatever, but however much we insist they are truths, they remain the more or less plausible human stories by which we necessarily live our lives individually and collectively.
mind and external reality, being differentiated conceptually, are both merely ideas. From the end of the last century scientists have recognized this idealistic impediment in their work. Werner Heisenberg wrote: The common division of the world into subject and object, inner world and outer world, body and soul is no longer adequate and leads us into difficulties. Thus, even in science, the object of research is no longer nature itself but mans investigation of nature.
… The universe has arisen through objectification and the ball is placed in our hands. We have to practise letting it go if we are to play games with it instead of being its dependent. If, as we have assumed, science is practising a way of finding out, the science of creative intelligence is the natural and only thorough way of continuing the process. It does not supersede the objective research but irradiates and enlivens it.
—Max Flisher, in Science and Objectivity (https://home.debitel.net/user/RMittelstaedt/Media/subj-obj.html)