Prospero's Books

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.

"Farewell lecture"

This spring, my colleague, Richard Turner, and I were asked to give "farewell lectures" on the occasion of our retirement from fulltime university teaching. Mine was about the transparency and opacity of language and the "cosmic" importance of stories. If you'd like to read my lecture, I've posted it on this site.

Prospero's Books Book of the Year

In my library, Ervin Laszlo is tied for fourth most represented author, after Jung, Campbell, and Shakespeare. Since the early 1970s I've been reading almost everything he has published.

Laszlo's 2008 book Quantum Shift in the Global Brain: How the New Scientific Reality Can Change Us and Our World is (1) a next step in Laszlo's lifetime work on systems theory and evolution, (2) a survey of several recent, albeit controversial, discoveries in physics, (3) an application of these discoveries to the solution of the world's problems, and (4) a description of Laszlo's Club of Budapest and several of its programs. For its thoughtfulness, sweep, and passion, Quantum Shift is the 2008 Prospero's Books Book of the Year.

Laszlo's book joins 2006's Museum of Lost Wonder by Jeff Hoke and 2007's Cosmic Jackpot by Paul Davies.

As common as grass

"Systems thinking looks at a variety of natural systems--from organisms and ecosystems to social systems--and sees them as open systems in a steady state. They are 'open' in that they require constant throughput of energies, substances, and information. They maintain a steady state by self-repair of their internal structures. These internal structures are not fixed, like a clockwork mechanism, but are self-organizing. Thus when conditions outside a system change substantially, the system survives through self-transformation. It makes a sudden, creative advance into novelty.

"Fundamental transformation is not only possible, it is the routine way natural systems evolve. Radical change is as common as grass in world history, because it is as common as grass in the life of all living systems."

--Marjorie Kelly, "On the Very Real Possibility of Transformational Change," Tikkun, July/August 2008, p. 36.

The balance of order and chaos

"Within every living system there exists order and chaos simultaneously. For example, the way lipids line up tail to tail in a perfect bilayer to create cell membranes, the way amino acids turn an angle of exactly 100 degrees in a protein alpha helix, the perfect four-fold symmetry of an ion channel protein--this order is aesthetic, and necessary for life. But without chaos life would be without diversity. The chance mutations that occur during DNA replication, the ability of some genes to literally transpose themselves in the genome, the unpredictability of gene expression during development--this chaos creates new physical characteristics, making every individual unique and more able to drive the species forward. I find great beauty in this balance of order and chaos, perhaps because this concept echoes my own aboriginal teachings and upbringing. The delicate balance of life must always be respected."

--Rheanna Sand, a Ph.D. student in biological sciences at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, in "Why I Do Science," Seed, September/October 2008, p. 42.

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.

A vast freedom we have not known since Newton

From Stuart A. Kauffman's Reinventing the Sacred, which I've just finished and recommend highly:

If we reinvent the sacred to mean the wonder of the creativity in the universe, biosphere, human history, and culture, are we not inevitably invited to honor all of life and the planet that sustains it? As we unleash the vast extinction [that] accompanies our global ecological footprint, we are destroying the creativity in the biosphere that we should rightly honor . . . .

Can I logically "force" you to see the sacred in the creativity in nature and join in basing a global ethic on that sacredness? . . . No, I cannot logically force you. But I can invite you. The very creativity in the universe, the wholly liberating creativity in the universe we share and partially cocreate, can invite you, for that creativity is a vast freedom we have not known, since Newton, that we shared with the cosmos, the biosphere, and human life. Accepting that invitation, while recognizing the evil we do and that happens, may be wise for us all (275-76).

It's called literature

From John Horgan's response to a letter in the May-June 2008 issue of Science and Spirit:

Many so-called emergent phenomena can be understood, at least partially, through conventional reductionist methods. Particle physics has yielded extraordinary insights into the origin, composition, and evolution of the entire cosmos. Molecular biology has illuminated once opaque mysteries such as conception, heredity, and speciation. But some emergent phenomena, notably that of the human mind, stubbornly resist reductionist analysis. Fortunately we do have a "different methodology" for understanding ourselves. It's called literature (6).

Book of the Year

The second annual Prospero's Books Book of the Year is Cosmic Jackpot: Why Our Universe Is Just Right for Life, by physicist and cosmologist Paul Davies.

A few sentences from the first pages of the book (especially when read alongside this blog's description, at the top left of each page) may suggest why it was chosen:

About 350 years ago, the greatest magician who ever lived finally stumbled on the key to the universe--a cosmic code that would open the floodgates of knowledge. This was Isaac Newton--mystic, theologian, and alchemist--and in spite of his mystical leanings, he did more than anyone to change the age of magic into the age of science . . . .

The word science is derived from the Latin scientia, simply meaning "knowledge." Originally it was just one of many arcane methods used to probe beyond the limitations of our senses in the hope of accessing an unseen reality. The particular brand of "magic" employed by the early scientists involved hitherto unfamiliar and specialized procedures, such as manipulating mathematical symbols on pieces of paper and coaxing matter to behave in strange ways. . . .

The ancients were right: beneath the surface complexity of nature lies a hidden subtext, written a subtle mathematical code. This cosmic code contains contains the secret rules on which the universe runs (4).

(The 2006 Book of the Year was The Museum of Lost Wonder.)

A myth before the myth

I'm reading Wallace Stevens's long poem "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction" with one of my grad students. Here's a passage that has stood out for me:

The clouds preceded us.

There was a muddy centre before we breathed.
There was a myth before the myth began,
Venerable and articulate and complete.

From this the poem springs: that we live in a place
That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves
And hard it is in spite of blazoned days.

We are the mimics. Clouds are pedagogues.

(Among the categories into which I've put this blog posting are Signs, Systems, and Spirit, but also Emergence. Those tags may help you see some of the things Stevens is saying to me.)