As Norm and I focus on how the Consciousness is shifting daily, we recognize the need for having conversations that matter that can help in understanding the changing worldview of what is life – a living vision of ourselves as living organisms, functioning with awareness of epi-organizing laws, connected to other living organisms, all made from the same bio-energy matrix of life-itself. It seems particularly relevant to the conversations about health and health care that are so loud with politicized rhetoric, and which leave out what really matters... health, aliveness.
The old worldview consciousness is moving aside more each day. The underpinnings of thought which have entrapped us are shifting as we can see here:
- Old Consciousness ? New Consciousness
- Discrete individuality ? autonomy and connectedness, interactive relatedness
- Separateness, thing/fact oriented ? wholeness, cooperation, functioning as unicept, processes of becoming
- Fixity of nature, consistent ? fluidity, creating new realities, coherence value-driven, allows oscillation
- Passivity (being acted upon) ? self-aware, self-knowing, self-law, self-initiating, producing
- Classificatory stability ? stretching for novelty, creative, dynamic, paradoxical, finding effective acts
- Subject-Predicate logics ? Logics of acts, theory of acts, how one becomes, evolves chooses acts
Notice how the following descriptions of old and new consciousness feel as you read them. What is the “felt sense” they create in your “organism energy field?“
Psychologist, Eleanor Rosch characterized the old consciousness as follows:
In the analytic picture offered by the cognitive sciences, the world consists of separate objects and states of affairs, the human mind is a determinate machine which, in order to know, isolates and identifies those objects and events, finds the simplest possible predictive contingencies between them, stores the results through time in memory, relates the items in memory to each other such that they form a coherent but indirect representation of the world and oneself, and retrieves those representations in order to fulfill the only originating value, which is to survive and reproduce in an evolutionarily successful manner.
As she describes Primary Knowing we can see the new consciousness:
“Primary knowing” arises by means of “interconnected wholes, rather than isolated contingent parts and by means of time-less, direct, presentation” rather than through stored “re-presentation.” “Such knowing is open rather than determinate, and a sense of unconditional value, rather than conditional usefulness, is an inherent part of the act of knowing itself..." Acting from such awareness is “spontaneous, rather than the result of decision making,” and it is “compassionate… since it is based on wholes larger than the self."
Alfred North Whitehead in what he called the Philosophy of Organism laid the foundations of today’s process philosophy. Here he speaks about the old paradigm entrapments that have controlled science, as we know it today.
There persists …the fixed scientific cosmology, which presupposes the ultimate fact of an irreducible brute matter, or material, spread throughout space in a flux of configurations. In itself such a material is senseless, valueless and purposeless. It just does what it does do, following a fixed routine imposed by external relations which do not spring from the nature of its being.
This is called scientific materialism. It is not a scientific requirement. It is a metaphysical assumption based on “substance metaphysics.” Logic has been developed to be compatible with substance metaphysics.
What is organism? Organisms may include the cells in our bodies, you and me, or you and me as cells in society, the ecosystem, the economy, or Planet Earth as a cell in the universe. It is being said today that the cosmos is an organism; what used to seem an outrageous claim that the cosmos is living. We know that the Gaia hypothesis claims the earth is a living organism; the cells in our bodies are organisms, now, by high-tech observation, we know that the molecules in the cells are living organisms. And they all seem to obey the same organizing epi-laws. They have been “out of awareness” laws till recently and they have not reached mainstream thinking by far.
What is life and life-itself as we mean it here? Life means structures of energy in the Sea of Dirac (pre-space), a primordial matrix that creates the physical universe as a living entity/organism. Within this living entity (infinite because there is no other) are many hierarchal societies of organisms, all connected and interacting. Life is primordial activity, which, physicist David Bohm called the implicate order.
Here are some of characteristics of these organizing epi-laws of organisms and the living domain. To see a more complete list visit our website: www.autognomics.org under theory/life-itself characteristics.
Organisms are self-creating, i.e., antipoietic – autopoiesis requires self-creation, self-correction & self-reference. Autopoiesis requires autonomy. It rejects allonomy leading to informational closure.
Living entities exhibit invariant organization and structural plasticity. Self-making requires self-knowing and self-reference. These requirements destroy the applicability of logic, as we have known it. Also life is di-polar requiring the assertion of both poles of categorical contrasts, a paradox resolved by time and oscillation. That which appears as illogical about a living organism may well have a rationale to be discovered. Meanwhile, give up the notion of need for consistency as it is normal to ebb and flow with oscillation in the learning and self-making processes.
Living organisms are holistic. There are no parts and no states. Organisms are created as a single whole. It seems as if there are parts. We have hearts, brains, kidneys, livers, etc. But they are not truly parts as in machines.
Life works by creating new realities, novelties, and variety. It is life itself that produces evolution, not random processes or survival of the fittest. Living processes are vibratory, oscillating between both poles of categorical contrasts to find effective acts in its creation process. This is why, for thinking about life, we reject consistency and truth preservation inference.
Organisms are autonomous. Autonomous means self-law. Everything they know and can do is developed within by processes only now being discovered. They are not like any processes a machine view would imagine. There are no computations. There are societies of living entities, cells in humans, societies of molecules in the cells and so on down to particles. At each level the societies permit maximum freedom subject only to coherence conditions, some of which are values and value processes. And we, as human beings are cells in a higher order society. The role of values and the valuation process that philosopher, Robert Hartman (see www.HartmanInstitute.org) put forth now becomes incredibly important. Strictly speaking I believe it is valuation processes that are important to living entities. The necessary autonomy of living entities prevents their having any informational inputs. Yet they do need to discover what works in their living context. They do that by acting, to find effective acts. Acts that produce the organism’s intentions are effective acts.
Applications and Implications: Health and Health Care
In health and health care we see that organisms don’t form themselves by machine structures that are fixed, and unchanging, but they are ever oscillating to find effective action. Health requires self-recognition of the organizing identity and dynamic creativity of creating realities, novelty. And it does so by the vast enormous variety of ways it stores bio-energy to access as needed for different contextual experiences. It functions as a unity, a unicept. Each cell is making decisions for itself while working collaboratively with the other 75 trillion or so cells (human organism) to keep the identity coherent and sustaining. Each organism must function by its own self-law (identity plus history of acts and inherent value intelligence) it cannot be or act out of “coherence” with itself. If it tries to, unhealthy qualities of unsustainable nature result. This process of choosing acts is “felt/sensed” by the organism with vibratory flows only accessible from an inner “awareness” of values. The capacities for healing are amazing, but let’s get out of the way and learn the “ways” of organisms to support them.
What questions would help shift the conversation on Health and Health Care at this time? With a fully engaged community of organisms (people, ad hoc groups, organizations) where leaders on all sides of the issues are letting go of control, persuasion, and force and where they are really conversing, listening and observing, the community, however defined, will find its own effective acts. To help move these essential collaborations forward, pay attention to generosity and an exchange of everyone’s self-defined laws.
Let’s hear from you. Join our forums on this and other Conversations that Matter, Changing the worldview and conversation of what is life? www.autognomics.org.
Skye Hirst, PhD is researcher, executive/personal coach, presentation facilitator and co-founder with Norm Hirst of Transcendental Autognomics (TA); New Field of Life-Energy and Transcendental Science/Philosophy going beyond scientific materialism to discover the emergent epi-principles within life-itself. The mystery/the miraculous/the wisdom of life-itself is revealing herself and Skye is doing presentation/discussions on latest revelations impacting us all during this time of transition. Her 30 years of experience as communication consultant, her love of the arts and nature inform her work as does her 30 years as energy medicine practitioner of Jin Shin Jyutsu. To receive Transcendental Autognomics email newsletter on how latest revelations are impacting us all, visit us www.autognomics.org or join us on Twitter @autognomics for frequent tips and insights, plus see who we are following.