In times when there are more questions than answers, two questions come to mind: Who or what is causing so many doubts? What do you do with them? This question was addressed by Nazareth Castellanos, a theoretical physicist, neuroscientist, and author of… The bridge where butterflies live (Seruela, 2025), and Priest Pablo Durres, founder of the Friends of the Desert network of meditators and author of Biography of silence (Galaxia Guatemberg, 2012), in a lecture moderated by Javier Moreno, former director of El PAÍS, at the Tendencias 2025 event.
“For me, the question is who am I? What am I? It is the spiritual question par excellence. That is why we talk about whether we are minds, whether we are brains, and the word Sufi appears.” The priest noted that it was an “age of paradigm change” and that until now it had been thought that the problems were on the outside: “We are beginning to understand that they come from within, and that is why the new paradigm of reality is what is on the inside, it is consciousness.” He added: “We are always thinking and acting, and we believe that there is something more important than thinking and acting, which is listening, looking and contemplating.”
Castellanos recalls the moment he introduced physical concepts into meditation and how that generated an initial mistrust in the meditators themselves. “When I discovered that introspection was described as increasing blood flow in the anterior precuneus (part of the parietal lobe of the brain), I was coming up with new ideas. The fact that it physically describes what happens in the body, which accompanies that experience, does not mean that it kills it, as long as there is mystery associated with the science.” The physicist spoke about separating information from knowledge: “Information describes how things are. The other piece tells you something else. It’s learning that you can’t describe analytically. It’s a step higher.”
he Trends 2025 event It is a meeting organized by EL PAÍS and sponsored by Abertis, Enagás, EY, Novartis, OEI (Organization of Ibero-American States), Redeia and Santander.