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Testimony of an autodidact
Esteemed reader, have you ever been told that you have infused science? Maybe not; I understand that many have not heard that term before or do not know what it means, but believe me, it is not exactly a compliment, at least not in the sense my father meant when he told me this when I was a child.
I’ll start by describing the concept in the way I understood it back then: I didn’t understand it in any manner; I understood nothing. My dad would repeat it, usually smiling benevolently but sometimes ironically. I only knew that the phrase, according to him, meant I never did homework or studied for my exams, and yet I always got good grades. The truth is that neither he nor I could decide whether this was praise or criticism. Of course, I liked that I could see this in myself, comparing me with my siblings, who had to study to get good grades (according to my dad, too). For me, the youngest in a long line of outstanding children, distinguishing myself was a source of pride, but at the same time, it was clear to me – without knowing why, I insist – that with that phrase, I was taking away a good part of the credit for having good grades.
I was finally old enough to understand infused science: God infused science into some people’s minds, sparing them the long learning process. One example they explained to me at home was the biblical case of Christ’s apostles who, being uneducated people, had been able to preach the new religion in various countries and face the problematic theological challenges imposed on them by non-believers, many of them very learned.
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The truth is that I had several distinguishing characteristics along with my so-called infused science. Years later, I began to feel annoyed when people told me I was special. At some point, I used the term “shy extrovert” to describe myself. I attributed this paradoxical condition to a proud marginalization that had haunted me since childhood. It made me a perceptive, outstanding person and a lonely and tormented one.
Regarding my sociable side, I can say that I was boisterous, mischievous, talkative, and a joker. This description also needs a characteristic that took me decades to discover and accept: I was a bit of a bully. Not a physical bully, the kind who hits or threatens to hit, no, not at all! I was an intellectual bully, a humorous one, so to speak. Ten years ago, an old high school classmate put in words my way of being: “Oh yes,” he said, “you were the one who hurt others in good spirits.” Yes, I was the one who hurt kindly: the kid and later the young man capable of making all sorts of jokes at the expense of others (I imagine some very witty), without considering that I was hurting them. For this reflection to help students who are bullied, I can say that I always thought (until a decade ago) that I was just a witty and kind person. For me, laughing and making others laugh at their flaws (and, of course, mine) was a way of sharing how absurd life generally seemed to me, and I thought it should seem ridiculous to everyone. Many, as I recall, agreed with me, but others thought I was hateful.
I have said that I was also lonely and tormented. Once, when browsing for fun in a text about my astrological sign, Libra, I read that the main characteristic is not balance but precisely the unceasing, indecisive swaying of the scales that never achieve equilibrium. That described me perfectly.
Moreover, my duality, now that I think about it, had a particular characteristic, especially during my childhood: not only was it as extreme as the bipolarity of day and night, but it was literally like day versus night. By day, I was boisterous, disruptive, and aggressive in a funny and melodramatic way. At night, in my bed, I lived in a taciturn and sad state to the point of melancholy that became a prolonged and severe crisis of terror when adolescence arrived.
It all started when I was thirteen years old when, unbeknownst to my father, I went to see the legendary movie The Exorcist, accompanied by the woman who helped us with the housework. I always count that adventure among my worst tragedies. The image of the beautiful girl possessed by the devil left me spending my nights terrified and on the verge of delirium, from which I only managed to emerge almost a year later. During those months, the night’s darkness was hellish for me, and yet, at dawn, I managed to get up and resume my noisy, joking life. A joker to the extreme: somehow, I managed to make fun of that torment and pretend when I got on the school bus (my brothers still remember it), stretching out my hand to the passengers (as if asking for alms) and pretending to be a voice from beyond the grave that repeated, “Please, some help for the demon-possessed!”
Derision and fear to the extreme! When I write about it, I still evoke (invoke?) the joy of amusement and the pulverizing panic.
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Infused science—the gift of bringing out of thin air concepts, judgments, and ideas, but also ridicule, blame, stigmata, and threats from the afterlife—remained for me, for a long time, a kind of curse and blessing. At this moment, it reminds me of that movie about two lovers who had been forever separated by a spell, by day because she transformed into a falcon, and by night because he transformed into a gray wolf. At dawn, during the metamorphosis, they could see each other for a moment, both looking human, but they never succeeded when they tried to touch their fingers. Thus, they lived sadly together and distantly. The same story is told about the sun and the moon, which can only come together during eclipses.
As I say, I feel in myself that separation, which over time has been transformed into a delicate duality. I say “fine” because I have learned to slim it down, to make it subtle, to enjoy its beauty, and to build communicating vessels that allow more frequent conjunctions between the two terms.
What is it that has allowed me to bring these two faces together? Was it infused science?
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In its original, etymological meaning, science means to divide. In terms of learning, we could translate it as discerning, i.e., separating and analyzing something into its components. And then put them back together? No, this is no longer the job of science. The cultural device that should achieve this is religion, whose etymology means just that: to reunite (to return to link, to re-connect). The procedure of science is to separate what it has divided and to associate some of these fragments with those of another part of reality previously analyzed. An example is scientific discoveries about light and vision: Once science discerns that white light is the union of light waves of many colors, it can associate these colors one by one with other things, for example, the different pigments in the cells of our eyes, which distinguish those differences. Repeatedly, science associates and divides, like a weaver separating the fibers of the cotton ball and putting them back together, not in the ball, but in a new network, a cloth. That knowledge (the fabric) is helpful to us for many things, a quality that the cotton ball does not have.
Indeed, science hopes to one day become a true religion, reuniting the whole of reality in an immense network of knowledge. (It is a true religion not only because it is wise but also because it is healthy since its conclusions would finally be universally verifiable.) However, as reassuring as this would be for our confused world, some of us suspect that it will not succeed, that science will always spend its time spinning and unraveling, weaving and unweaving eternally, like an ever-hopeful Penelope: humble and patient science, platonic and infinitely in love with the “beloved knowledge” that one day is gone.
The word “infused,” on the other hand, carries the idea that we have been infused, i.e., that someone or something put it into us from the outside. If this is true, the infused science that my father attributed to me, that discernment, would not have been my quality but a tool that came from outside.
A quality that someone puts into us (a gift, let’s say) does not have to be a problem. The problem begins by considering whether it is oneself who operates this gift (i.e., if one is free) or whether it works alone, i.e., whether the gift discerns instead of oneself.
I knew I was the one who operated the tool, but my father tormented himself over whether he should admit it to me, so he ended up saying this to me, but not enough to give me confidence. As we all know, there is nothing unusual or unscientific about a child discerning things from what he hears in the classroom and learning “without studying,” getting good grades without having to spend an entire afternoon “cramming” for the test. But it seemed that my father had a hard time recognizing the virtue in this, perhaps because he had been brought up to doubt his gifts (he had many, by the way, believe me) and could only trust the learning achieved systematically through study and obedience. For him (or his parents or parents’ parents, I don’t know), the best thing was to subject himself to visible causes and effects and to leave aside (for artists?) all infusion, all inspiration.
The child I was had minimal self-confidence. That little boy needed to be told that not only was study essential but also that his instilled qualities (innate, spontaneous, or whatever we want to call them) were worthy and commendable and that he could use them for many things (and above all, enjoy them!). That child (and all the girls and boys in the world) needed to know that studying is impossible or useless if one does not respect the gift (present in every one) of processing it freely!
There are things not given to us in childhood that we come to learn when we grow up. Perhaps the advantage of this is that, at a certain age, one can value learning in its proper measure and share it with more people. I hope I have achieved this here, at least a little. In any case, I thank those who have come this far in my text (as Karina Fuerte says every week in the Observatory’s newsletter) and have accompanied me on another of my adventures through the world of self-taught knowledge.
Translation by Daniel Wetta
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This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 
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