Prospero's Books

Stardust

At an Ash Wednesday service yesterday, the priest commented on the fact that the atoms in our bodies are created within stars.

"Remember that you are stardust," she said, "and to stardust you shall return."

For those of you observing Lent, may it be holy for you.

[Illustration from Wikimedia Commons]

Without top-down leadership . . .

On self-organizing systems:

"From Cairo to Wall Street, all over the world people are coming together to create change, organizing without top-down leadership or hierarchies."

—Cami Arrow, "The Magic of Co-creation," at Reality Sandwich

The circle of those whom we do not kill

From Chet Raymo's Science Musings blog, in an essay originally published shortly after the events of September 11, 2001:

It is as Loren Eiseley wrote: "Instability lies at the heart of the world." The criminals who wreaked havoc on New York and Washington were acting out an ancient biological script.

Yet there is ground for hope. Our brains are of sufficient complexity to give rise to that mysterious thing known as self-awareness. Our genes may predispose us to act in certain ways, good or bad, but they do not constrain us. We are effectively free to choose good over evil. Humans alone, of all the things we know about in the universe, can escape the bipolar logic of evolution.

To a cheering extent we have done so. As Margaret Mead pointed out, the circle of those whom we do not kill has steadily expanded throughout human history. The optimists among us imagine that the circle will ultimately embrace the entire planet.

From nature's point of view, there is no such thing as the Problem of Evil: order and disorder, life and death, cooperation and competition are the twin principles of nature's creative force. What humans uniquely face is the Problem of Good: How to create on this tiny planet an oasis of unalloyed peace.

Turning in the widening gyre

This computer simulation of the formation of a spiral galaxy—such as our own Milky Way—is remarkably like the radar images we've seen in the past two weeks of the growth of Atlantic hurricanes.

As above, so below.

(Title from "The Second Coming" by William Butler Yeats)

Our natural tendency to connect and care

Apropos the forest fires here in New Mexico:

It is well-known from studies of the aftermath of the World Trade Center bombings on September 11, 2001, Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, and several other well-studied disasters that people develop ad-hoc communication networks to help each other cope with the aftermath of a disaster. Our disaster response strategy should reflect this knowledge, but it doesn't. We continue to react to disasters as if people were members of a military unit and can be ordered around, instead of working with their natural tendency to connect and care for one another.

—Raima Larter, Complexity Simplified blog

"The universe is not a place; it's a story . . .

. . . a story of an irreversible sequence of emergent events. . . . We now understand that the universe is an ongoing creative event. Stars came forth, galaxies came forth, planets have emerged, life burst into existence. This power of emergence could also be called ongoing creativity. In some ways, it's the greatest discovery in the history of the human sciences—that the universe as a whole, and each being within it, is permeated with the power of emergence" (34)

—Brian Swimme, "The Powers of the Universe," EnglightenNext, 47 (2011)

Co-creative participants in an adventure-driven mystery

From Darryl Reanney's Music of the Mind: An Adventure into Consciousness:

"I believe society is sick, at least in part, because we have lost the 'story' that bound us together. It is part of our human necessity that we need to be animated by some deep sense of common purpose, of shared meaning, if our lives are not to become pointless irrelevancies. Without an underpinning foundation of explanatory story we find it hard to experience enthusiasm in the true sense of its original meaning--being en (in) theos (God).

"Paradoxically, however, the agent that destroyed the old sense of shared myth may itself be the midwife that gives birth to the new. A revelatory story is emerging from modern science, a story which no longer sees human beings as accidental side issues in a mechanical universe but as co-creative participants in an adventure-driven mystery. At the centre of this evolving story is the ethic of interconnectedness; science is now validating the central insight of the sacred tradition, 'all is one', showing that the part has no meaning outside the whole, that to explain anything you have to explain everything" (v-vi).

Cosmos, Nature, and Culture

This weekend I'm presenting a paper in Phoenix at "Cosmos, Nature, and Culture: A Transdisciplinary Conference," sponsored by the Metanexus Institute. I've just posted the paper, "A 'Mirror up to Nature': Cosmos, Nature, and Culture in Shakespeare," on this site. It's my first long essay that grew directly from writing I've done for this blog.

If you're a reader of this blog and would be interested in getting together with me in Phoenix this weekend, please let me know.

Trying to force the great laws

The great Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis (”Zorba the Greek”) tells us that once when he was a boy he noticed a cocoon stuck to a tree, with a butterfly was about to be born. He waited a while, but it was taking so long, so he decided to warm the cocoon with his breath. The butterfly finally emerged but its wings were still stuck together and it died soon afterwards.

“I just couldn’t wait for the sun to complete the necessary process of patient maturation,” says Kazantzakis. “That small corpse is until this very day one of the heaviest burdens on my conscience. But that’s what made me understand what a true mortal sin is: trying to force the great laws of the universe. We have to have patience, wait for the right time and then follow confidently the rhythm that God has chosen for our lives.”

--Paolo Coelho (courtesy of my friend Jay at Bailey's Buddy)

The Emerald Tablet 2.0

The Emerald Tablet is an ancient document, attributed to the Egyptian god or sage Hermes Tremegistus, that serves as a foundation for alchemy and Hermetic philosophy. Here, the traditional text--in the translation by Titus Burckhardt in his Alchemy: Science of the Cosmos, Science of the Soul--alternates with my paraphrase, in systems terms.

1. In truth certainly and without doubt, whatever is below is like that which is above, and whatever is above is like that which is below, to accomplish the miracles of one thing. 

1. Systems large and small behave in like ways. The shared patterns of their behavior accomplish the miracles of the one thing that is the cosmos.

2. Just as all things proceed from one alone by meditation on one alone, so also they are born from this one thing by adaptation. 

2. All systems proceed from the mystery of consciousness that creates and sustains the cosmos. They evolve from this consciousness by adaptation and self-organization.

3. Its father is the sun and its mother is the moon. The wind has borne it in its body. Its nurse is the earth.

3. Our human understanding of the cosmos is born, in part, from our experience of the four traditional elements, or states of matter—earth (solid), water (liquid), air (gas), and fire (plasma)—and their transformations. Cosmic consciousness creates and sustains these elements and their transformations.

4. It is the father of every miraculous work in the whole world.

4. The cosmic consciousness is the origin of everything.

5. Its power is perfect if it is converted into earth.

5. Its power acts through us.

6. Separate the earth from the fire and the subtle from the gross, softly and with great prudence.

6. We must use this power—acting in and on natural systems—with reverence and great care.

7. It rises from earth to heaven and comes down again from heaven to earth, and thus acquires the power of the realities below. In this way you will acquire the glory of the whole world, and all darkness will leave you. 

7. Our human consciousness participates in the cosmic consciousness, and the cosmic consciousness penetrates our human consciousness. By understanding this, we can experience, and contribute to, the glory of the cosmos.

8. This is the power of all powers, for it conquers everything subtle and penetrates everything solid.

8. This is the ultimate power, for it allows us to consciously participate in the continuing evolution of the cosmos.

9. Thus the little world is created according to the prototype of the great world.

9. Thus we can help create human systems according to the pattern of natural systems.

10. From this and in this way, marvelous applications are made.

10. In this way, life can be experienced as a marvel, and marvelous things can be done.

11. For this reason I am called Hermes Trismegistos, for I possess the three parts of wisdom of the whole world.

11. For this reason systems thinkers can be called Hermeticists, for we search, in our several ways, for the hidden wisdom of the cosmos.

12. Perfect is what I have said of the work of the sun.

12. We strive to perfect our understanding.