Seeking Wholeness: Chapter 2
And a voice came to me, saying:
In every creature, in forest and ocean, in leaf and tree and bird and beast and man,
there moves a spirit other than its mortal own,
Pure, fluid, as air — intense as fire,…
–Edward Carpenter (from Among the Ferns)
Moving is natural, stagnation is sickness.
–Attributed to Lao Tzu
I am sitting at the open door of my hogan, an eight-sided wooden cabin built into the steep mountainside. It is a quiet place for writing and contemplation. The doorway looks out over the pine-clad foothills of the Rockies to a straight-line horizon fifty miles away on the plains. Sun shines from the deep blue sky. I hear birds and the wind restlessly moving the branches.
A gnarled ponderosa pine sweeps over the hogan. It holds onto life despite lightening strike, insect boring and old age. I notice the resin oozing from its flaky reddish bark, the twisted limbs connecting to twigs and bunches of pine needles. It is like a Chinese painting in its hoary perfection.
No disorder intrudes on this scene. Everything – trees, grasses, rocks, dirt, pine needles and broken twigs – is meant to be here. Everything has its place, its way of being, its part to play in an ever-changing wholeness. This ponderosa pine is unique, completely itself. I can sense its aliveness as it slowly grows and changes through the seasons. It is a living system, intimately connected to earth, sun, air and moisture — part of the surrounding forest, one among many trees in this whole mountain ecology.
My seeing and appreciation is also part of another whole. As I look and connect, I am linked to everything for these moments. Now tree, my experience of this tree and my awareness of that experience create something new that begins to extend into this description. You read these words; a further transformation occurs. Now you are part of this description — this is your experience of my seeing. Your experience joins with mine and so the ripple expands another circle out into the universe.
Experience is never still; it has to be in motion. As Lao Tzu says in the quote above, movement is alive, inertia is dead — this is most true of our being. We are fully alive only when we are immersed in the flow of living experience; we become more ‘un-alive’ as we cling to that which is predictable and unchanging.
Look around you. What do you notice? Probably you see the things and objects that make up your immediate environment: this book, the furniture, walls, floor and windows. Everything looks normal, solid and real. It feels tangible and substantial when you touch it. There is something unexceptional and predictable about this material world. It stays put. It has “object constancy”; you can rely on things to be there, essentially the same, if you leave them and come back later.[1]
You have read or heard in school that material things are mostly made up of minutely tiny bits of energy/matter whirling in vast amounts of space. You may even have been told that those infinitesimal bits do not really exist in a way that we can understand. But this knowledge has little impact on your concrete experience here and now. It is all interesting in theory, but it is not really ‘real’.
But take a step backward into yourself. Notice your body and changing sensations. How are your hands feeling? Is your breathing easy? Are you relaxed or restless – what small movements are happening without you willing them? Your body is also a material thing but it does not seem quite so constant as the objects around you. It keeps changing moment to moment – and you feel those changes as shifts in your experience.
Again, academic knowledge tells you that your body is an amazingly complex collection of limbs and organs – blood, bone and tissue – neurons, cells and biochemical reactions. It is always in motion – but you forget unless it signals that it is thirsty, tired, in pain or unsettled. Then for a while you remember that it is not really a thing. It is you, and it keeps demanding attention — getting older, growing hair, needing to go to the bathroom, fidgeting and breathing. It is never, for a single moment, completely static — even when you sleep. Your body is like those bits of energy whirling in space; while alive, it never stops moving and changing.
Look inwards a little deeper. Notice your feelings and fleeting associations. You may be able to hold a single image or idea in your mind for a few seconds with effort, but then it moves and transforms. If you relax a bit and stay aware, you can notice your “stream of consciousness” — a never ending train of thoughts, feelings and fantasies emerging from the back of your mind.[2] You grasp at a thought that is in motion. It slips away and becomes something else. There is no ‘thing’ to touch and hold.
This is the ultimate demonstration. Your mind, your awareness – the means through which you experience the world as solid and stable – these are utterly shifting and flowing. The deeper we explore outer and inner reality, the more we find that everything is insubstantial, in process of movement and change. Our ordinary perceptions of a solid and stable universe are mostly illusion. In fact, all around us and within us is a vast flux, constantly evolving and shifting. It is a living motion picture, ever changing — moving inexorably from the past into the future. Yet we constantly freeze this movie into a series of still photographs.
Now we find the dilemma. Our mind, with its perceptions and ideas, is designed to highlight all that is most predictable and relevant for survival. It creates the experience of a solid and reliable world. But in doing so it masks the truth.[3] We are fully convinced that things are constant. Yet even as we finish this sentence, everything is different from when we started – atoms whirling, mind shifting, galaxies journeying through space; the universe has moved on. This is the predicament: do we assume the accuracy of our taken-for-granted perceptions, or do we dig deeper into a different, more fluid way of knowing?
Each perception is an edited and abstracted version of whatever is out there. Ordinary convictions and ‘common sense’ assumptions are part of what blinds us. When we look inward at the texture of experience – flowing, shifting, ever moving – we begin to get a clearer grasp of what is most essential — and that is change itself.
We cannot gaze at this shifting scenery too long. We look away from the dizzying movement towards something solid to soothe the disorientation it provokes. Like children spinning on a merry-go-round, we desperately fix our eyes on the ground so as not to lose balance. It is hard to accept that our humanness, and maybe all we can know, is made of movement and not of stuff that stands still.
To understand our experience, we have to capture this movement. If we can only ensnare that fleeting intuition of motion, then we conceive of ourselves in a profoundly different way. We look deeper into the mystery of experience and know that we are transient beings on a journey of becoming. We are always proceeding to some unknown and unpredictable future; we are not things — we are process.[4]
I remember being fascinated and disturbed as a child that saying the same word over and over drained it of all semblance of meaning and that staring fixedly at a point caused everything to flow in a weird, unrecognizable way. It made me wonder what was real or unreal. My adolescent experiments with hallucinogens helped me realize that the solidity and familiarity of the world is only paper thin. Beneath the surface everything we hold to be true is called into question.
Throughout history great thinkers have been intrigued with similar questions about the nature of reality. How can everything be changing and yet seem to remain the same? Is anything ever constant? Is our experience of the world and ourselves real, or is it an illusion? These are profound and difficult enigmas that science, philosophy and religion have tried to address in different ways. Out of this vast accumulation of ideas, I will touch on a small sample to provide us with some useful landmarks.
Ancient Wisdom
In Western tradition it was Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher of the fifth century BC, who first proposed that everything is flux and change. Heraclitus is credited with the saying that, “you can never step twice into the same river.”[5] His words come down to us in pithy epigrams that are somewhat obscure but embody a profound wisdom.
All things come into being through opposition, and all are in flux, like a river.[6]
This fragment suggests that the universe is in a constant state of change characterized by a ceaselessly shifting conflict of opposites.[7] Driving this change, according to Heraclitus, is a creative energetic essence that he likened to, “an everlasting fire, kindling by measure and going out by measure.”[8]
Later Greek philosophers called this energy for change, Physis or Life Force, a useful shorthand to describe the mysterious workings of the creative process that imbues everything with a dynamic energy.[9] In humans, the Life Force is the vital living essence of all our processes, the spark in our experience.
When we look to the East we find similar wisdom in ancient China. The I Ching or “Book of Change”, one of mankind’s oldest texts, is first and foremost a guide to the workings of process. It tells us that change itself, unfolding in time, is the most essential aspect of the universe, particularly in the development of the individual soul.[10] For over 3000 years the I Ching has been treated with the utmost reverence both as a philosophical text and as a practical means of divination:
“It (the I Ching) has the omniscience of a Buddha. It speaks to the transient world as though from the Womb of Change itself — Change, the one constant factor amidst all the countless permutations and transformations of mental and material objects which, when the eye of wisdom is closed, appears to us as a meaningless flux.”[11]
Like Heraclitus, the I Ching proposes that all things arise and change in patterns of opposites — those of receptive Yin and active Yang.[12] The universal indivisible principle encompassing both Yin and Yang in Chinese thought is named Tao. Tao is the Way of the universe, its indescribable primordial nature. Tao is unknowable in itself and can only be glimpsed enigmatically through our experience of changing creation.
About 600 BCE, a profound text, the Tao Teh Ching, was written down, possibly by a sage called Lao Tzu. Its terse epigrammatic style (somewhat similar to Heraclitus) attempts to capture the essence of Tao. There are countless translations of the Tao Teh Ching, none of which agree exactly. I have chosen a translation of verse twenty-one that I feel expresses the mysterious fluid nature of Tao:
Tao, as the absolute Truth of the universe, is elusive and evasive.
Though it is elusive and evasive, it unveils itself as images and forms.
Evasive and elusive, it discloses itself as indefinable substance.
Shadowy and indistinct, it reveals itself as impalpable subtle essence.
This essence is so subtle and yet so real.
It is the primary origin of the whole of creation.[13]
Tao is the indefinable dynamic principle behind all creation. Everything we know reflects this principle, which fills all creation with life and vitality. Tao manifests in the things that we can touch see and feel with our senses; it moves through us in the ever-changing, flowing energetic pattern of our experience. Yet we can never grasp it fully with our minds.
Ancient Greek and Chinese thinking seem to agree: the universe comes into existence through a transcendent force that permeates all creation, flowing in accord with a fundamental principle of constant change. When we are in harmony with the way the universe itself moves, our being flows naturally towards a state of wholeness.
A Modern Viewpoint
This all might seem rather obscure and esoteric, and certainly unscientific. Yet as we shift perspective from the ancient East to the modern West, we find a surprising agreement. David Bohm, a profound theoretical physicist, conceptualizes the whole universe as manifestation of the universal flux, almost another name for Tao.
(The universal flux) can perhaps best be called Undivided Wholeness in Flowing Movement. This view implies that flow is, in some sense prior to that of the ‘things’ that can be seen to form and dissolve in this flow. One can perhaps illustrate what is meant here by considering the ‘stream of consciousness’. This flux of awareness is not precisely definable, and yet it is evidently prior to the definable forms of thoughts and ideas which can be seen to form and dissolve in the flux, like ripples, waves and vortices in a flowing stream.[14]
Bohm tells us that everything is process; everything is in process.[15] What this means is that nothing is constant, nothing can exist beyond the principle of change — there are no stable, enduring phenomena anywhere in the universe.
The idea of process is hard to grasp and harder to translate into a convincing experience. Why, if all is change, do we experience the world as relatively stable? Is it that a false idea of permanence is derived somehow from the passing impressions that touch our senses? Maybe it is like the TV or movies: our eyes ignore the flicker of thousands of different images to produce a constant picture that makes sense.
Occasionally, in different states of awareness when the conscious mind is bypassed, we can experience more closely, the way the universe really is. Aldous Huxley, reflecting on his experiences of taking the drug mescaline, suggests that the function of the brain and the nervous system is largely eliminative. We cannot usually experience reality in the raw:
To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us stay alive on the surface of this particular planet.[16]
Our nervous system is not only a “reducing valve” but it is also limited by the particular rate at which it processes information. We perceive objects as solid and stable because, in actuality, they are slower processes than that of the human system. We see them as static because we move faster. The chair you sit in, your physical body, your mind and awareness, each is a manifestation of the universal flux. Each has its own rhythmic vibratory rate, its own velocity. Faster processes are more ephemeral, slower ones apparently more substantial and permanent. Our perception of constancy is an illusion created by relative velocity.
I wonder how I appear to the ponderosa pine near my hogan. It probably includes me with those other phenomena such as wind or rain that are fleeting and intangible. I am a phantom to it. In relation to the life and pace of that ancient tree, I move far too fast to be noticeable.
At the opposite end are the glimmering hummingbirds at my feeder, their wings a blur of energy. They ignore me as I come close because I move so slowly in comparison to their pace. The hummingbird flits at lightning speed around me, at least ten times my velocity. To that tiny winged being I appear a sluggish thing, almost tree-like in my movements.
Are there other beings whose speed is so swift that I am a rock to them and they are less than a breeze to me? How would I know? Can I even guess at the being of Gaia, the spirit of this planet, whose single thought might be a thousand years long? I am captured within a tiny range of possible experiences, limited by my neurons.
We do not see the swirl of atoms or the hectic race of galaxies. Our velocity and sensory apparatus limit us. We imagine the world, and ourselves in it, to be semi-static, filled with enduring objects — things rather than living processes. Yet the truth is more fluid and far more complex, filled with unimaginable possibilities. We are ripples in a vast flowing ocean of universal movement.
Most people love to walk along a beach, watching and hearing the ocean waves rolling rhythmically onto the sand. Why is this sound and motion so potent, so absorbing? There is an archetypal aspect to the movement of waves that touches a deep knowing within us. Waves are a living reminder of the shape of our lives and experience: the movement of fluid energy rises up, rolls along and breaks apart into a calming wash — ever-changing, powerful yet ephemeral. This is the profile of each and every process.
Process has a consistent design, a wave-like pattern: arising, continuing, and transforming. Everything – except perhaps the universal flux, Tao, God – comes into being, is embodied or differentiated for a period of time, and then dissolves or transmutes into a different form.[17] This is the cycle of birth, life, and death — the beginning, middle and end that defines every phenomenon.
Process is mysterious, ungraspable, because it has only this one dimension — duration. It is not made of anything; it has no depth, height or breadth. It is a movement that exists only in time, not in space. Yet it does have impact; we know it through its effect. We don’t see the wind, but we see and hear the leaves rustling.
Like an ocean wave, process is a moving flow of energy that creates the deceptive perception of water in motion. Even though that roller does not actually propel the water towards you, it can knock you down, engulf you. Its power is not illusory. Particular processes are ripples, rollers, tsunamis in the ocean of the universal flux; each has its own quality and imprint. Can you imagine yourself and all around you as waves breaking against some mysterious shore?
Some of these waves are immeasurably long. The formation of stars, the spinning of our spiral galaxy, the expansion of the universe since the Big Bang — these take eons to unfold. In comparison, the total span of human existence is a brief instant. At the opposite end of the scale, subatomic particles oscillate at a rate almost beyond the ability of time to measure. They exist at the extreme edge of manifestation, almost, but not quite coming into being as we know it.
Within this vast range, everything has its own rhythmic frequency, its surging pattern. Living beings take the middle ground. Life, as we recognize it, exists in a narrow range of frequencies. Here we find those processes that define what it is to be human — the pattern of being born, living, experiencing and dying that circumscribe our nature.
Within a human being each life process has its own span. Our neurons are stimulated, fire off a series of signals and then rest. We are hungry, we eat and then stop eating; we are tired, we sleep and then wake; we feel aroused, become sexual, reach orgasm and relax. You can only read this book for so long before you need a break to do something else. Every experience, every feeling, has its beginning, its duration and then its end or transformation.
I learned this directly, working with grief and bereavement when I visited a young mother in her home. Her husband had died slowly of a horrible neurological disorder a month previously. She was totally distraught, weeping uncontrollably as we talked about him. She told me she would never get over his loss, never move his bed from the living room or his cigarettes and lighter from the ashtray. I began to wonder if she would cry forever.
Emphatic as she was, her sobbing began to ease after about forty minutes. I learned that no matter how painful a feeling, most people can only cry for just so long. Within three months, she had cleared out her husband’s things, except for a few precious momentos. She became engaged with life at around six months, and after just over a year, she was exploring new friendships. Her grieving process progressed naturally, each aspect having its own particular pace and duration.
Unless a process is stuck, it will progress toward its natural conclusion. Each period of waking is just so long before we sleep. Each night dream lasts an average of twenty minutes. Each thought (unless we are obsessing) naturally proceeds into another. That all experience is finite is one of the blessings and also disappointments of living. Pain ends, but so does joy. If we simply allow each process to have its term, get out of the way of the flow, the movement toward wholeness will take us on a new path. That path is the journey of life.
Process and Life
It is astonishing how many different meanings there are to the word life. ‘Life’ is all living beings and it is also my experience of being alive. It is the active principle that sustains vitality and it is the whole span of my being in this body. Can I really separate these meanings? My personal life is part of the greater life. To be alive is to know life.
As much as we are alive, life remains one of those sacred mysteries. Within a material universe that seems to move inexorably towards entropy – disorder, disintegration, sameness – living beings struggle against the torrent. The Life Force is negentropic — differentiating, organizing, integrating and creating more of itself.[18]
Look at the incredible variety of living organisms on this earth and the impossibly precise way in which these organisms connect together to create evolving ecologies. Interconnection and symbiosis are the rule rather than the exception. In our guts are bacteria and enzymes essential for digestion — in our beds are dust mites consuming our discarded skin cells. Life fills every available niche from the volcanic vents on the ocean floor to the coldest wastes of Antarctica. As an organism evolves, it binds to other life forms, creating new complex partnerships and increasing its probability of survival. The more connected to the whole, the more likely it is to endure and develop.
Life acts as if it has a purpose, as if it knows which direction to take. It seems to seek out, or is attracted towards, some ultimate end point that is more whole and complete.[19] In the introduction we recognized this as the “actualizing and formative tendency” that sets the direction for our growth. Traditional biologists call it evolution and assume that it is driven by random mutation and ‘survival of the fittest’. However, when we examine our own experience, we find that deterministic ideas of simple cause and effect cannot capture its complexity.[20] Living organisms are not ultimately predictable.[21]
To be alive is to be involved in a process of growth and increasing connection. Look at your own life. Think about all the things you have learned — all the essential abilities that you take for granted, like talking, reading or driving a car. Remember how you were as a child, or even as an adult a few years ago and notice how you keep changing and developing. Life does not stand still; it evolves constantly, connecting and reconnecting. The universe is involved in a process of becoming increasingly alive, and we are part of that enlivening.[22]
We each have our own unique life process that gives us the experiences, the raw materials out of which we create ourselves. Once, a client asked me if I had a good life. Somewhat taken aback, and slightly wary that this might be a subtle ‘trap’, I took some time to think it over. Eventually, I decided to share the truth of my experience: I said I had a wonderful life, very full and satisfying.
I asked why she wanted to know. Her reply was interesting. Almost all her life had been horrible, full of fear and distress. She wanted to know that there were other possibilities to experience. I inquired if she wished for my life instead of her own. Very emphatically, she said, “No. I may hate my life but it is mine; it belongs to me alone. I wouldn’t be me if I had a different life.” Each life defines who we are. It is woven into the fabric of our being, given to us as a task and a unique winding path towards realization of ourselves.
The River of Life
Let’s create a dream-like image of the life process. Picture a river you know. As you sit on its banks the river is always changing, flowing onward. Within the river’s flow, you see the droplets of water, the waves and swirls, the depths and surface, the motion and stillness. Every part goes to make up that particular river: the water channeled between the changing riverbanks, the contoured rocky bottom, the silent pools and turbulent rapids. The river has direction — gravity pulling constantly toward a final merging with the ocean.
This river is a metaphor for your whole life. The flowing water is both your life essence and the movement of your experience. You begin as a tiny spring bubbling up at your conception. Your life ends, joining with the ocean, at your death. In the upper reaches it runs vigorously, a small stream cutting a channel into the mountainside; this is your childhood.
As the stream gathers substance on its journey, it becomes the turbulent creek of adolescence, tumbling and churning, furrowing deeply into bedrock. It reaches the flatter lands of adulthood, increasing in power and begins to spread into a more sedate well-worn form. Sometimes the flow is muddied, foaming and tempestuous as it moves through narrow rapids; other times it meanders leisurely and sluggish, twisting and turning around obstructions. Finally, replete with life, the river merges with the seawater at its estuary. Now the essence has transformed; the watery elements have become ocean.
Your life process is the complete river from beginning to end. You are the flowing totality, not any single element. Who you think you are, your consciousness, travels as a wave on the surface of the water, from near the beginning all the way to the end. That is the small self, the ego caught in time, acting as witness to the journey. That small wave cannot recognize the whole, does not know the depths and profound complexity of it all.
From one single viewpoint we cannot see the spread of the river from its trickling source to its sea delta. We cannot capture the river, cannot hold the fluidly changing form of our life. Only slices of reality are available to our limited awareness.
The river metaphor, lifted from Heraclitus, portrays the process of living experience. We are immersed in dynamic “watery” elements – flowing, swirling in strange, chaotic motions. Always we are moving in some direction we cannot wholly know. Yet somehow we are able to influence our journey, decide to some extent where and how we travel. The final path, its speed and motion, is a covenant between our intentions and the way life moves us.
Tuning to the Life Force
Life has been transmitted from one living being to another in an unbroken line stretching back to the dawn of time. We are the recipients of a priceless gift that demands an innovative response. Looking deeply into the universe and our beings, we discover a luminous insight: life, and our experience of it, is a profound flowing, mutable process.
Processes are waves on the surface of the universal flux. Your being is a particular waveform. It comes into existence, continues for a period and then subsides; this is your birth, your life and your dying. Change cannot be avoided — risk and difficulties are inevitable. You are being swept along on the river of your life.
How should we respond to this realization? Even with millennia of religious practices, even with shelves of psychology self-help books, we are still at a loss. The fact is each process and each path is unique. There are no schedules, no precise recipes for living and growing. I cannot tell you exactly what you should do — neither can any authority, whether therapist or guru. We each must find our own way, a way that resonates with the nature of our individuality.
To know ourselves we begin to sense the flow of our own process, feel it in our bones, our hearts and our minds. Moving through life, we recognize and appreciate our own small wave, part of the whole. There is a quality of ease, of rightness, as we move with the flow of the Life Force — with Tao, the Way of life; we are in tune with the transcendent. [23]
Sensing the undercurrents, it becomes easier to recognize the eddies and obstructions that create turbulence. Maybe we can elude them; maybe we can move through them more fluidly — but more importantly, can we recognize the true direction and purpose of our life journey?
Bapak Muhammad Subuh, a wise spiritual guide, tells us that one night while praying he received a large book filled with living, moving pictures. Each page showed him illustrations of his life task. He saw people of different colors and races being together, each moving to their own rhythm. As he hugged the book to him it vanished into his chest.[24] This was his ‘book of life’.
We too must find the flowing words and pictures that are written on our soul. The Life Force demands that we experience fully, that we neglect nothing, that we resonate with the movement of the universe. Then we are truly living in process.
[1] Jean Piaget, the foremost developmental psychologist, used the term “object constancy” to describe the progressive development of knowledge in the baby that things and people remain relatively the same over time.
[2] The “stream of consciousness” was so named by the great American psychologist, William James.
[3] Alfred North Whitehead, the great philosopher, tells us, “the human intellect ‘spatializes the universe’; that is to say that it tends to ignore the fluency, and to analyse the world in terms of static categories.” – Whitehead, 1929, p. 242.
[4] “Without doubt, if we are to go back to that ultimate, integral experience, unwarped by the sophistication of theory, that experience whose elucidation is the final aim of philosophy, the flux of things is one ultimate generalization around which we must weave our philosophical system.” – Whitehead, 1929, p. 240.
[5] What Heraclitus said actually translates as, “Upon those who step into the same rivers flow other and yet other waters.” – Melchert, 1995 Vol. I, p16. Alfred North Whitehead includes all experience in a similar assertion: ”The ancient doctrine that ‘no one crosses the same river twice’ is extended. No thinker thinks twice; and, to put the matter more generally, no subject experiences twice.” Whitehead, 1929, p. 34.
[6] Melchert, 1995, Vol. I, p.16.
[7] Clarkson, 1993.
[8] Melchert, 1995, Vol. I, p. 17.
[9] I will be using the term Life Force in a similar manner to Physis and the way of Tao. It parallels but is more encompassing than the élan vital of Henri Bergson. The Life Force may be thought of as the “formative tendency”, Aristotelian entelechy, the Holy Spirit of Christianity, the Kabbalistic Shekinah, the Roh Illofi of mystical Islam or any other purposive transcendent impetus that breathes life into the lifeless and draws evolution towards more complexity and integration. I prefer the more animistic and teleological Life Force to the more scientific term “attractor”, which seems to serve a similar function. For an exposition of these concepts, see Allan Combs, 1996.
[10] See Lama Anagarika Govinda’s preface to Blofeld, 1965.
[11] Quoted in Blofeld, 1965, p. 31.
[12] See Waysun Liao, 1977, for a concise explanation of Yin, Yang and their relationship with Ch’i, life energy. He says, “The human being, also a part of the universe, is powered by the same force of energy — ch’i. The process of human life is based on the interaction of Yin and Yang forces. Our life increases and changes, and for reasons that are still mysterious to us, it follows a natural cycle and eventually dies. Ancient Chinese explain this cycle as the growth and fading of ch’i. It is ch’i that determines human mental and physical conditions. The way in which ch’i is expressed is commonly known as the nature of things.” p. 33.
[13] Hua-Ching, 1979, p16.
[14] Bohm, 1980, p. 11. Bohm’s thinking is complex and somewhat impenetrable for a non-physicist. However, the concepts of the “implicate and explicate” order of the universe essentially mirrors Tao and Teh (the manifest universe) in the Chinese system.
[15] “Not only is everything changing, but all is flux. That is to say, what is is the process of becoming itself, while all objects, events, entities, conditions, structures, etc., are forms that can be abstracted from this process.” Bohm, 1980, p. 48.
[16] Huxley, 1954, p. 23.
[17] “There is nothing that stands fast, nothing fixed, nothing free from change, among the things which come into being, neither among those in heaven nor among those on earth. God alone stands unmoved.” – Hermes Trismegistus, from Hermetica, quoted in Perry, 1971, p. 773.
[18] For an accessible and interesting discussion about the nature of life, see Capra, 1996.
[19] See Sheldrake, 1991, p. 99: “life involves both an energy flow, which can be understood as an aspect of the universal flux, and a formative principle, which gives an organism the ends to which its life processes are attracted.”
[20] Erich Jantsch explains that recent models of life all have similar themes.
“(These) may be summarized by notions such as self-determination, self-organization and self-renewal; by a recognition of a systemic interconnectedness over space and time of all natural dynamics; by the logical supremacy of processes over spatial structures; …by the openness and creativity of an evolution which is neither in its emerging or decaying structures, nor in the end result, predetermined.” Jantsch, 1980, p. 8.
[21] The unpredictable yet directional nature of life can be explained in terms of “strange attractors”. This “strange attraction” is not simple, linear or determined; it tends to, “exist on the edge of chaos“. Combs, 1996, p. 31.
[22] See Jantsch, 1980.
[23] Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has explored the concept of flow, “the total involvement with life” in great depth, (1990 and 1997). He describes flow as an optimal experience that is directed toward some specific goal: “If a person sets out to achieve a difficult enough goal, from which all other goals logically follow, and if he or she invests all energy in developing skills to reach that goal, then actions and feelings will be in harmony, and the separate parts of life will fit together…” (1990, p. 214). While I agree with most of Csikszentmihalyi’s rationalist exposition, I experience flow somewhat differently. Flow, in its greater manifestation, is goal-less and does not require willful effort. It manifests through alignment with the way everything, the whole universe flows.
[24] Sumohadiwidjojo, 1990, chapter 6.