I went on my first meditation retreat in September (at the beautiful Wonderwell Mountain Refuge). It was a Buddhist retreat and I took it as a chance to dive into some further reading on Buddhism while I was there.

I was shocked to find very similar themes to those that I explored as a complexity scientist. Emergence and causality. How reality gets constructed. It seemed to match my understanding of the world perfectly.

The difference that struck me though, and which I’m trying to explore further, is the emphasis on embodiment. Sure, intellectually understanding how the world works is cool, but can you engage with the world with your whole being? What does it mean to have this understanding in the body?

I think this points to one of the frustrations I had as a scientist. Sure we understand this thing better, so now what? Does this piece of information change how we should live our lives?

Most of my time dealing with the science of complex systems felt like I’d hit a point where the most you could do is gesture towards the element of complexity at play in why the problem was hard. For example, we’ve tried to understand all these things about the brain but at some point there’s just emergence that happens that we don’t understand. Cool bro.

It’s fascinating to find a place where the point is not on just the understanding but the implementation. Perfect for complexity engineers like me. Curious to see what lessons can be gained from this approach, and having the embodiment of concepts be a more tangible goal.