Let’s imagine that we are walking into an Experimental Zone meeting:
As soon as you enter the room you feel something inside of you change – you are stimulated and at the same time you feel a sense of calm. Your eyes are met with light from lamps and candles as they reflect from a table covered in an ornamental textile and fresh flowers. On the walls are posters of the cosmos, optical illusions, or mandala art. You can smell the faint aroma of essential oils.
About a dozen chairs are arranged in a circle. You notice that the participants are a racially, ethnically, and gender diverse group ranging in age from mid-twenties, to seniors. The facilitator, Jenny introduces herself, welcomes everyone and explains that the Experimental Zone meets weekly and carries out several types of experimental activities — one involving meditation, another focused on interpersonal communication, an experiment in group creativity, a science experiment, and finally, an experimental activity just for fun.
Jenny explains that the first experiment is a five-minute silent meditation visualizing our breath as colored gas, imagining how it might appear as it passes from outside of us into our bodies, and then out again. Jenny suggests that we can expect that street noise as well as our own thoughts will distract us, but we should experience these dispassionately, as if they were passing buses, then return to picturing our breath. She then lifts a Tibetan singing bowl and circles the rim with a wooden mallet until it begins to ring. Everyone closes their eyes.
Five minutes later you hear the singing bowl again signaling that the meditation is over. You open your eyes and your breathe feels different – slower and more relaxed.
Jenny says that the group will now do a quick “check in” where each person will take two minutes to introduce themselves and share something about how they are feeling at the moment, or what kind of day they are having, or what bought them here today.
Rena spoke about how the meditation really calmed her down because it was a challenging day at her job. Hector said that he came today because he was curious and in the year since he moved locally he hadn’t found a community that he felt he could join. Daniel said that he’s been coming to these meetings for the last few weeks and because he enjoyed it so much he brought a friend.
When you introduce yourself you say that you learned about the meeting on line and you liked the idea of doing a bunch of experiments and wanted to see what it was all about.
After everyone had a turn Jenny says that this week Alex was going to facilitate the interpersonal experiment. Alex brakes the group into two and designates one group as A’s and the other as B’s. He then asks the B’s to pick an A partner. Alex then said A’s will interview the B’s for two minutes about their best moment of the week. Then the B’s interviewed the A’s similarly. Two minutes later Alex asked everyone to return to their original seats.
After the interviews the A’s were invited to tell the group what their B partner’s shared. Jamal said his partner was Charles and his best moment of the week was when he learned that his daughter and granddaughter were coming to visit him. Jamal asked Charles if he got it right or if he left anything out. Charles said Jamal was accurate.
After several reports Alex asks that we repeat the exercise, now discussing our most difficult moment of the week.
After the interpersonal exercise came Julian’s science experiment. Julian said that she was going to demonstrate a scientific principal and that the group will then try to figure out what they have observed. She asked if those who were more science savvy could provide clues to help others figure it out.
Julian placed a peeled hardboiled egg so that it sat inside the rim of an old fashioned glass milk bottle. Because it was too large to fall through, the egg remained at the bottle’s opening.
She then removed the egg and dropped some paper into the bottle and threw in a match. When the paper began to burn she replaced the egg. A few moments later the paper was completely burned. Julian then said that burning the paper resulted in the condition that would cause the next event which will happen shortly. While the group is speculating about what will happen next -suddenly – with a pop – the egg seemed magically sucked into the bottle. Whoa!
The group was excited. Julian asked for an explanation.
Eventually, the group figures out that it had to do with air pressure and the way heating the air inside the bottle resulted in the air expanding and seeping out past the egg. Once the heating from the burning paper had stopped and the air that remained cooled, it occupied less volume resulting in a difference between the air pressure outside the bottle and the air pressure inside. The higher pressure air rushing into the lower pressure area in the bottle pushed the egg in with it.
Julian explained that humans have only known about air pressure for about the past 400 years. Understanding air pressure paved the way to figuring out how the weather works, and it set the stage for human flight, and countless other technological breakthroughs.
The next experiment is creative — this week’s involves making an art piece with a theme using paper markers, crayons, and pencils. 2 or 3 people work together on large separate sheets and at the end the sheets are all taped together. It comes out looking surprisingly nice — somewhat funky and eclectic.
The final experiment is a fun game. The game requires that the group inflate about 25 balloons. About half the group volunteers to do this while the rest talk. The inflated balloons are emptied into the center of the room and the group’s goal is to place all of the balloons in three corners of the room, sorted by color. The wrinkle is that this is to be accomplished without anyone using their hands. Jenny turns on some music and the game begins- she says the group has until the end of the song to complete the task – about 4 minutes. After the music stops Jenny says there’s one more round but this time the goal is to switch the location of the colors.
You are surprised at how much fun this actually was, although there were one or two balloon casualties. The group concludes with everyone giving hugs, cheering, and applauding each other. They linger for several minutes before people start to leave.
We might think of these meeting as being analogous to a weekly Sabbath experience – except completely secular and naturalistic. They will provide a respite from the rest of the week, which is for most of us is much less experimental. The groups will demonstrate how the experimental dynamic that lies at the heart of the scientific method can be applied to our lives. The meetings will be joyful, and inspiring, and will set an experimental tone for the week to follow.
Experimental Zone meetings should be open to the public. They require no ongoing commitment and can have a random group of participants. For this reason Experimental Zone meetings will be an excellent entry point to become acquainted with the Naturalistic Humanist community. Meetings should last about two hours.
There are numerous techniques for brief meditations available in books, videos and audio recordings. Some mediations can be guided while others are conducted in silence. There are also a multitude of mindfulness exercises available in which you try to become more deeply aware of how your body feels and the thoughts that distract us.
The interpersonal experiment which follows the meditation and check in can range from ice breakers to communication exercises to trust exercises – and they can include dyads (grouping into twos), triads (grouping into threes), and full group cycles. Sensitivity exercises of every variety can easily be found in books and on-line. The principals demonstrated in the science experiment may already be known to some participants but will be fascinating to others. Numerous short simple science experiments are available in books and on-line, including those involving static electricity, air pressure, light diffusion, bio-feedback, and exothermic and endothermic reactions.