Science has the capacity to metamorphose into a more evolved, more encompassing, more intelligent form. A more holisitic, more vision-driven science will give birth to benevolent, efficient, non polluting technologies. At the heart of our existential dilemma lies the incompleteness of our understanding of matter.

A new vision-driven scientific method fully harnessing creativity will bring the spectacular acceleration of our already growing knowledge of matter.

"Mind over matter" is the basis of all innovation. When you think about it, miniaturization - the art of getting equal or better performance from a smaller package - involves replacing matter with intelligence or "mind," in the sense that a 1950s room full of tons of electronic tubes, heavy equipment and miles of wiring (representing much matter indeed), is today reduced to a chip that will sit comfortably on the tip of your little finger. That silicon chip, seen exclusively from the perspective of matter, is basically a pinch of common sand. The rest is intelligence - mind.

The intelligence of the chip consists of very special dispositions of matter, including highly specific material compositions, circuitry and other complex, functional patterning, all of which could be included under the term "form." It is this form embedded in the silicon of the chip that constitutes the essence of its intelligence. While the composite substance of that chip is the best material that could be found for the job until now, it is inevitable that newer and more "intelligent" materials (e.g., gallium-arsenide) will soon replace it. With technical progress, the marriage between form and substance grows more and more intimate, and the resulting "matter" expresses more intelligence and becomes more lifelike.

"Functional complexity" is form imbedded in matter. We see that, as matter becomes more "intelligent," the form that it embodies becomes more intricately structured. As matter and the form contained within it become ever more compatible and more perfectly mated, they eventually become indistinguishable from one another, until we can no longer discern where one ends and where the other begins. As intelligence becomes manifest, the aspect of matter seems to recede into the background. The most perfect union between matter and form is to be found in the phenomenon of life, and more particularly, human life.

Undoubtedly we will someday learn to measure and quantify intelligence. It will then make possible the elucidation of a formula at least as elegant as Einstein's famous E=MC2, to show the spectacular inverse relationship between matter and mind. Observe the diversity, flexibility, richness, and subtlety of function in the human being - a truly miraculously compact package of capacities. Yet, in material terms, we are mostly water, and the rest merely biological precursors to an urn full of ashes. The essence of this "package" is the intelligence innate to our humanness - truly a triumph of mind over matter.

Technology - the increasing embodiment of intelligence in matter - has raised standards of living and greatly improved living conditions for everyone.

While our lives are inescapably molded and conditioned by the discoveries of science and the products of technology, it is not a simple matter to influence research priorities even when we believe we know what those priorities should be. Our frustration before this seeming impotence tends to mask the fact that the problem is not so much which scientific inquiries we pursue or even a question of being more careful in the research we do pursue. The problem is hiding behind the seldom asked, more fundamental question of how to approach science altogether. It has been a long time since anyone propsed improving upon the "methodology of science".

Our failure of planetary stewardship is increasingly attributed to a general failure of creativity, of vision.

Some are beginning to conjecture that the breakthrough we need will of necessity be revealed through the faculty of creativity. Harman and Rheingold, in their Higher Creativity[1], go into this at some length.

The new methodology mentioned here and outlined in PROJECT MIND plans to join science with creativity. It is called "Accelerated Thought." It is a vision-driven, contemplative method that obviates long, expensive, tedious cycles of hypothesis and experimentation. By using more of the mind than ever before, the scientist will be able to penetrate more deeply and more quickly into the knowledge of matter.

It will use special concentration techniques, environmental aids and sophisticated computerization.

Just as the "eureka" experience provides brief moments of brilliant insight - the sparks of genius and inspiration that have fueled the sudden advances in scientific progress until now - Accelerated Thought will provide sustained creative vision.

Although the "eureka" experience is not exactly Accelerated Thought, it is very closely related, and its habitual exercise is the trademark of creative genius. Just as, to a prepared mind, a salutary shock can at the right moment produce a eureka experience, a series of eureka experiences can under favorable conditions induce, in a properly prepared psyche, a chain reaction which can develop into Accelerated Thought. Accelerated Thought is a high-energy mental process whereby realizations (consisting of problems and solutions) arrive second by second in rapid-fire sequence rather than once a week, once a year or once in a lifetime as is typical with eureka experiences.

Creativity is seen to be a tool for "problem solving," comprised of discrete stages including self-application, incubation, eureka, elaboration, etc. - depending on the point of view. The use of separate phases rests on the idea that the run-up or ignition phase forms an integral and inseparable part of the creative process, and thus must be repeated anew for each creative thought or act. But the ignition of a process or engine is, or at least should be, nothing more than incidental to its running. In these terms, the process of creativity, is likened to an automobile that stalls every few inches and never actually gets going. "Elaboration" similarly presumes that the process is soon over and that the details are worked out in a prosaic frame of mind. Creativity is almost universally considered to be an inherently brief condition and not the continuing state that, potentially, it is.

What is it that constrains genius and the discovery of breakthroughs? There is plenty of rivalry, competition and incentive to egg scientists on. Yet no artificial constraints need to be imposed upon thought when that thought is already fettered by distraction. "Distraction," is the term used by T. Kun in Project Mind. Charles T. Tart's book Waking Up[2] explains the phenomenon at some length. Conventional living siphons off our energy. This is the key to understanding why things rarely go exactly the way we want them to and how we are so easily deflected from our purpose no matter how resolved we are.

Conditions of existence around us provide little opportunity for the development of the spark of creativity with which we are all born. Life soon infects us all with the infirmity of distraction.

Yet human intelligence, fundamentally, is one. That there seem to be distinct as well as higher and lower forms, including automatic skills of mind and body appearing to be autonomous and unrelated to creative vision, is distraction's way of throwing sand in our eyes.

The generation of Accelerated Thought, described in detail in PROJECT MIND [3], is accompanied by a spectacular increase in vitality and a feeling of elation. There is an accumulation of awareness for real possibilities that lifts the mind and the individual as a whole to a more integrated and conscious level of functioning.

But even more important than a new vision-driven scientific method fully harnessing creativity, are the results it will bring such as the spectacular acceleration of our already growing knowledge of matter.