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GREEN PARADISE LOST |
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Part 2. Whole and Home Again 7. Discovering the Connections within the Structure of Reality There was no moon tonight but starlight instead -- and would there be phosphorescence? The water was still as glass with never a ripple. When we walked into it we suddenly became no longer earthbound but found ourselves wading through the Milky Way -- yes, there was phosphorescence -- and I never saw so much. As long as we moved and created a stir, be it ever so slight, countless stars were there in the water around us. When we stood still they vanished. While we swam myriads of glistening bits tossed off our arms, spread in rolling silver sparks, underwater and on the surface, endless and everywhere. The separate definition between water, sky, stars, and our two figures swimming seemed to vanish. All merged into one. The whole universe was one, and I felt us lose separate identity and become one with it. In that instant I knew what the mystics mean when they say, "All is one." To be a part of such beauty for a brief moment was a rare and wonderful experience. [1] Our Bodies and the Body of Life The new understanding of life must be systemic and interconnected. It cannot be linear and hierarchical, for the reality of life on earth is a whole, a circle, an interconnected system in which everything has its part to play and can be respected and accorded dignity. It is difficult for us, trained as we have been in the male culture, to understand the order there is in a diversified system which is non-hierarchical. Our human bodies would provide us with a good example of a non-hierarchical system if we would but take off our hierarchical glasses: the nervous system, the circulatory system, the digestive system, the immune system -- all are diverse cooperating equalities. Each has its part to play, each needs the activity of all the others. Ronald J. Glasser, writing in The Body Is the Hero, describes the body at one point in this way: Our bodies are made up of over a trillion individual cells, all of which have learned through the long process of evolution to work together, to maintain one another, to do what they do and yet support the whole, so that each will in turn be maintained and protected. Our body is like a great movable city, made up of a trillion individuals all with different skills, yet working together. It has its own ventilation and sewage systems, its own telephone and communications network, a billion miles of interconnecting highways and side streets, a system of alleys, its own supermarkets and factories, disposal plants and heating units. All it really needs to keep going are a few basic raw materials to be brought in -- sugars, fats, proteins, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, magnesium, iron, zinc and calcium, and a way of discharging wastes. [2] What our bodies can do is remind us that we are of this earth, that this is our heritage and our destiny and our glory. If we take off our Ernest Becker glasses, then we can move into the wonder of life shared with each molecule of the earth, as Ronald Glasser suggests in this passage: The fluids in our bodies mimic the primeval seas in which we began. The concentrations of salts, of sodium, potassium and chloride in our bloodstream, the cobalt, magnesium and zinc in our tissues, are the same as those that existed in the earliest seas. We still carry those seas within us, and the same chemical battles that were fought in them a billion years ago are being waged today in fighting our infections and controlling our illnesses .... Not only does our blood go back to those ancient seas, we are also, literally, children of the earth. The carbon in our bones is the same carbon that forms the rocks of the oldest mountains. The molecules of sugar that flow through our bloodstream once flowed in the sap of now fossilized trees, while the nitrogen that binds together our bones is the same nitrogen that binds the nitrates to the soil. Life has endured as long as it has because it is formed from substances as basic as the earth itself. [3] Understanding ourselves as "above," "apart," or "beyond" the natural systems of which we are a part has been an aspect of our sickness in the past. "Difficult as it may be to believe," Ronald Glasser writes, "the differences in all living things have only to do with differences in the specific arrangement and sequence of the chemicals that make up their DNA. Its general helical structure, whether in plants or animals, remains the same throughout the living world, a common heritage coming from the same common beginnings."[4] We are connected by our body to the seas, to the air, to the dirt, even to the germs. Penelope Washburn suggests that even our human sensory openness is connection: I begin with my body.... my body is me. I can think of my body as a porous membrane, not separated from the world, as an organic body pulsing ... opening and closing ... taking in and giving out. It is like a flower as it turns to the sun, responds to light, growing, absorbing, expelling.... I am breathing gently and with such ease ... until something happens to tense me, and my breath becomes shallow and labored. My skin is open, each of my cells in hair and skin is intimately connected to air, moisture, sun, dirt, hot and cold. [5] Even the great chasm we have put between life and non-life, living organisms and inert matter, is being bridged. Scientists have found a life form which seems sometimes to be dead and sometimes living. That bridge is the virus. Ronald Glasser writes: The question remained for decades whether viruses were alive or dead. Today we realize they hold a middle ground. Outside the body, a virus is nonliving -- just a tiny crystalline structure, appearing under the electron microscope as nothing more than a minute, sharply etched piece of silica or particle of quartz. It might as well be a piece of organic debris picked off the moon, to be examined here on earth. There is no vibration in it, nor any flowing. It does not consume oxygen, it does not divide, it does not grow, nor does it move. All of life, even the experiments that have come close to developing life in a test tube have one thing in common -- movement, if manifested only as energy being used up or transferred. To maintain life and the intricacies of its processes, energy must be utilized. The smallest, most primitive cell at rest or even dying, when placed in a scientific metabolic chamber, will continue to consume almost undetectable but still measurable amounts of oxygen. But a virus placed in the same chamber does nothing. There is no transfer of heat, no oxygen is used, no radiation given off or absorbed. For all practical purposes, outside the body it is dead, an inert polymer of DNA, lying within an inert protein sheath and so, since seemingly already dead, impossible to kill.... Something happens to that [hepatitis] virus when it is reinjected into the body and re-enters liver cells. Oxygen suddenly begins to be consumed by the infected cell, heat is given off, energy is transferred and utilized as the virus comes gradually to life. • • • And so the confusion. Containing the polymer DNA, a chemical found only in living things, they seemed anything but alive; indeed, taken from the body and looked at under the microscope, they not only appeared but were absolutely inert. And yet they were obviously infective, able to multiply and cause disease when injected back into the human body. [6] Getting off the Track: Descartes and Newton We have all these new insights into how the pulsing of life is sustained. Yet despite our vision of these vast and intricate webs of connections among cells and tissues and organs, our modern popular view of ourselves and our world is still largely blind to the continuous quality of the web which constitutes life. Why is this the case? The story is interesting and important. But at some points and to some readers it may seem complicated. To aid those who may wish for now to read only the highlights of this story and leave some of the actual detail for another day, the main body of the story will continue -- marked in the margin by a thin border. Those who do wish to skip ahead will find the highlights printed in italics. What we are involved with here is nothing less than a new vision of ourselves and our connections to one another and our world. Whether we are aware of it or not, our minds today are still drenched in assumptions from Newtonian science and its philosopher-progenitor, Rene Descartes. The physicist Fritjof Capra writes, "The birth of modern science was preceded and accompanied by a development of philosophical thought which led to an extreme formulation of the spirit/matter dualism. This formulation appeared in the seventeenth century in the philosophy of Rene Descartes who based his view of nature on a fundamental division into two separate and independent realms: that of mind (res cogitans), and that of matter (res extensa). The 'Cartesian' division allowed scientists to treat matter as dead and completely separate from themselves, and to see the material world as a multitude of different objects assembled into a huge machine." [7] In its basic metaphors and ways of thinking about life, the popular view today is still based upon scientific views associated with the name of Sir Isaac Newton. Newtonian science was mechanistic: our bodies, brains and nature were likened to machines. It was also deterministic. Men had noticed in the world what seemed to be natural laws guiding cause and effect, so it seemed possible to observe with precision and thus learn to use those "laws." Newtonian science was also materialistic, and reality was thought to consist of empty space in which separate things -- "matter" -- moved. Object A moving through empty space would affect object B, which in turn did something to object C. And A, B and C could be either people or billiard balls or inclined planes; it made no difference. Capra writes: As a consequence of the Cartesian division, most individuals are aware of themselves as isolated egos existing "inside" their bodies .... This inner fragmentation of man mirrors his view of the world "outside" which is seen as a multitude of separate objects and events. [8] When I now say that "We are interconnected," I do not use those terms within the thought world of Newtonian science. I do not mean just that there exist certain relationships between discrete entities, which bridge otherwise empty space. On the contrary, what I am meaning to convey when I am speaking of connections is the sense of a continuous reality so much of one piece as to make the whole notion of empty space and solid objects totally inappropriate. Beyond "Empty Space" and "Solid Objects" In his book The Tao of Physics Fritjof Capra tells the fascinating story of how scientists in the early decades of this century discovered the limits of Newtonian thought. What they uncovered through their exploration of atoms and subatomic particles was a different sort of reality than we had previously even imagined. [The laws of atomic physics] were not easy to recognize. They were discovered in the 1920s by an international group of physicists including Niels Bohr from Denmark, Louis De Broglie from France, Erwin Schroedinger and Wolfgang Pauli from Austria, Werner Heisenberg from Germany, and Paul Dirac from England. These men joined their forces across all national borders and shaped one of the most exciting periods in modern science, which brought man, for the first time, into contact with the strange and unexpected reality of the subatomic world. Every time the physicists asked nature a question in an atomic experiment, nature answered with a paradox, and the more they tried to clarify the situation, the sharper the paradoxes became. It took them a long time to accept the fact that these paradoxes belong to the intrinsic structure of atomic physics, and to realize that they arise whenever one attempts to describe atomic events in the traditional terms of physics. Once this was perceived, the physicists began to learn to ask the right questions and to avoid contradictions. In the words of Heisenberg, "they somehow got into the spirit of the quantum theory," and finally they found the precise and consistent mathematical formulation of this theory. The concepts of quantum theory were not easy to accept even after their mathematical formulation had been completed. Their effect on the physicists' imaginations was truly shattering. Rutherford's experiments had shown that atoms, instead of being hard and indestructible, consisted of vast regions of space in which extremely small particles moved, and now quantum theory made it clear that even these particles were nothing like the solid objects of classical physics. The subatomic units of matter are very abstract entities which have a dual aspect. Depending on how we look at them, they appear sometimes as particles, sometimes as waves; and this dual nature is also exhibited by light which can take the form of electromagnetic waves or of particles. This property of matter and of light is very strange. It seems impossible to accept that something can be, at the same time, a particle -- i.e., an entity confined to a very small volume -- and a wave, which is spread out over a very large region of space. [9] (Emphasis added.) • • • The apparent contradiction between the particle and the wave picture was solved in a completely unexpected way which called in question the very foundation of the mechanistic world view -- the concept of the reality of matter. At the subatomic level, matter does not exist with certainty at definite places, but rather shows "tendencies to exist," and atomic events do not occur with certainty at definite times and in definite ways, but rather show "tendencies to occur." In the formalism of quantum theory, these tendencies are expressed as probabilities and are associated with mathematical quantities which take the form of waves. This is why particles can be waves at the same time. They are not "real" three-dimensional waves like sound or water waves. They are "probability waves," abstract mathematical quantities with all the characteristic properties of waves which are related to the probabilities of finding the particles at particular points in space and at particular times. All the laws of atomic physics are expressed in terms of these probabilities. We can never predict an atomic event with certainty; we can only say how likely it is to happen. [10] This twentieth-century discovery of a continuous and probablistic reality is totally foreign to us whose imaginations have been nourished within the world view of Newtonian science and within a political, social and intellectual life characterized by hierarchical orderings. Reality no longer has basic "building blocks." All that is put aside. A new metaphysic and philosophy of reality is suggested in which there are only dynamic webs of interconnections. Capra sets out the implications for us of this transformation of our understanding: Quantum theory has thus demolished the classical concepts of solid objects and of strictly deterministic laws of nature. At the subatomic level, the solid material objects of classical physics dissolve into wave-like patterns of probabilities, and these patterns, ultimately, do not represent probabilities of things but rather probabilities of interconnections. [11] (Emphasis added.) A Pervasive Dance of Energy Relativity theory forced scientists to modify their concept of what a particle was if it wasn't a solid object, as we (and they) had grown up thinking: In classical physics, the mass of an object had always been associated with an indestructible material substance, with some "stuff" of which all things were thought to be made. Relativity theory showed that mass has nothing to do with any substance, but is a form of energy. Energy, however, is a dynamic quantity associated with activity, or with processes. The fact that the mass of a particle is equivalent to a certain amount of energy means that the particle can no longer be seen as a static object, but has to be conceived as a dynamic pattern, a process involving the energy which manifests itself as the particle's mass.... When two particles collide with high energies, they generally break into pieces, but these pieces are not smaller than the original particles. They are again particles of the same kind and are created out of the energy of motion ("kinetic energy") involved in the collision process.... This way, we can divide matter again and again, but we never obtain smaller pieces because we just create particles out of the energy involved in the process. The subatomic particles are thus destructible and indestructible at the same time. [12] (Emphasis added.) So objects are not solid masses, as we have always thought. Objects are actually patterns of energy. This means that reality is not only more interconnected than we have imagined but also far more dynamic and creative: Quantum theory has shown that particles are not isolated grains of matter, but are probability patterns, interconnections in an inseparable cosmic web. Relativity theory, so to speak, has made these patterns come alive by revealing their intrinsically dynamic character. It has shown that the activity of matter is the very essence of its being. The particles of the subatomic world are not only active in the sense of moving around very fast; they themselves are processes! The existence of matter and its activity cannot be separated. They are but different aspects of the same space-time reality. [13] (Emphasis added.) • • • Subatomic particles are dynamic patterns which have a space aspect and a time aspect. Their space aspect makes them appear as objects with a certain mass, their time aspect as processes involving the equivalent energy. These dynamic patterns, or "energy bundles," form the stable nuclear, atomic and molecular structures which build up matter and give it its macroscopic solid aspect, thus making us believe that it is made of some material substance. At the macroscopic level, this notion of substance is a useful approximation, but at the atomic level it no longer makes sense. Atoms consist of particles and these particles are not made of any material stuff. When we observe them, we never see any substance; what we observe are dynamic patterns continually changing into one another -- a continuous dance of energy. [14] (Emphasis added.) Western theology and philosophy have not come close to dealing with such a dynamic reality. Only process philosophy in the tradition of Alfred North Whitehead and the still-young process theology begin to think about reality in such dynamic and wholistic terms. Such dynamism and wholism break up the concepts of both classical science and traditional philosophy and religion. The Shattering of Old Concepts Our popular ways of thinking about space and time and matter have been undercut by modern physicists, as Capra explains: Einstein's theory ... says that three-dimensional space is actually curved, and that the curvature is caused by the gravitational field of massive bodies. Wherever there is a massive object, e.g., a star or a planet, the space around it is curved and the degree of curvature depends on the mass of the object. And as space can never be separated from time in relativity theory, time as well is affected by the presence of matter, flowing at different rates in different parts of the universe. Einstein's general theory of relativity thus completely abolishes the concepts of absolute space and time. Not only are all measurements involving space and time relative, the whole structure of space-time depends on the distribution of matter in the universe, and the concept of "empty space" loses its meaning. [15] (Emphasis added.) All of this raises the serious question of whether our accustomed thinking is adequate to the task of comprehending such a dynamic, interconnected, but relative reality. Capra as a physicist puts the problem this way: Rational knowledge is thus a system of abstract concepts and symbols, characterized by the linear, sequential structure which is typical of our thinking and speaking. In most languages this linear structure is made explicit by the use of alphabets which serve to communicate experience and thought in long lines of letters. The natural world, on the other hand. is one of infinite varieties and complexities, a multidimensional world which contains no straight lines or completely regular shapes, where things do not happen in sequences, but all together; a world where -- as modern physics tells us -- even empty space is curved. It is clear that our abstract system of conceptual thinking can never describe or understand this reality completely. In thinking about the world we are faced with the same kind of problem as the cartographer who tries to cover the curved face of the Earth with a sequence of plane [flat] maps. We can only expect an approximate representation of reality from such a procedure, and all rational knowledge is therefore necessarily limited. [16] (Emphasis added.) The key which will open the door to the understanding of this vision of the universe cannot be our old key taken from Newtonian science. Those linear categories fit neither wholeness nor the dynamism of curved space and relative time. The key to such understanding of the universe will come from something other than our inadequate mental models and mental categories from the past. • • • I went out walking, intending to feel the world, not to think it. I tried to feel with that totally nonphysical sense -- that unspeakable sense of unity which communes without absorbing, allies without possessing, perceives without categorizing. It was snowing, but I didn't call it snow; I called it quiet. Wind swayed the grass fields, but I didn't call it grass; I called it rhythm. I sat on a stump and it became strength and companionship, rather than a hunk of wood. And suddenly I was no separate matter-body thinking about these things; I was an integral part of their music, their heart-beat. I was helping to make the balance .... Slowly I'm burning the boxes and pigeon holes I've built up within infinity. The music of a bird just touched my ears. Feel no need to identify the species. Someday I may not even need to name the singer "bird." [17] No Place Apart Quantum theory and Relativity theory make it clear that when we are talking about nature, we are not talking about something which is apart from us. Fritjof Capra writes: As we penetrate into matter, nature does not show us any isolated "basic building blocks," but rather appears as a complicated web of relations between the various parts of the whole. These relations always include the observer in an essential way. The human observer constitutes the final link in the chain of observational processes, and the properties of any atomic object can only be understood in terms of the object's interaction with the observer. [18] (Emphasis added.) "This means," writes Capra, "that the classical ideal of an objective description of nature is no longer valid. The Cartesian partition between [the] I and the world, between the observer and the observed, cannot be made when dealing with atomic matter. In atomic physics, we can never speak about nature without, at the same time, speaking about ourselves." [19] (Emphasis added.) What a challenge to traditional thinking and experiencing! What has disappeared -- it was an illusion -- is the partition of objectivity, the partition which in classical science was thought to separate the observer from what was being observed or done to. What must also disappear -- for it too is an illusion -- is the partition which in the male attitude has been thought to separate males from that which in patriarchal society has been mythed as Other -- woman, nature, things. Man has wanted to see himself as the creator and experiencer of history and culture -- set apart from objects (lesser men, women, slaves, nature, things) which he could act upon, observe, and manipulate with detachment as though "above" and "apart." What I am saying is that reality is not Cartesian. It is not partitioned. It is not hierarchical. It does not consist of builders and building-blocks, observers and observed, doers and done-to. Reality is a complex and dynamic web of energy and relationships which simply includes the human, both female and male. The implications of this for the Western mind are staggering, for we are the inheritors of a patriarchal tradition which goes back at least to Judaism. We are inheritors of a body/spirit dualism from the Greeks. And in our technology and our everyday understanding of science we are inheritors of the Cartesian categories. Furthermore, we have been nurtured in the problem-solving ways of scientific reductionism, which divides problems into component parts, splitting one thing from another ("The better to eat them, my dear!" as the Big Bad Wolf said to Little Red Riding Hood). A Single Connected Wholeness Whether we look into the science of the infinitely small (subatomic physics) or into the science of the human body and living cells (medicine and cell biology) -- or, as we will do in the next chapter, into the science of ecology and the global life-supporting web of the biosphere and its ecosystems -- what you will find is a single connected wholeness. Everything is immediately or remotely affecting and being affected by everything else. The religious mystic in a seventh heaven of revelation, or nighttime swimmers sharing the ecstasy of water, sky, stars -- all have intensely personal intimations of a truth we are now coming to know: our world at the core of its being is everywhere connected.
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