Theory of Everything, Living Systems Trilogy Part 2

This article is a follow-up to the previous one, A Theory of Life and Death. The more I think about this concept the more sense it makes to me. It also started some good conversations on Facebook. The reason I write is to present thoughts for us all to delve into. Our education systems are set in concrete, designed to produce people to work in the economic system, forgetting all about the development of free thought and the needs of people themselves. Or maybe to ensure that the workforce doesn’t think too much about it all. We might just decide that we have outgrown the Culture that we were all compulsorily brought up to believe was the way things had to be. After all, the majority of its tenets are centuries old, when resources were plentiful, the people fewer and more innocent.

The thoughts I had pertained to the inbuilt imbalance in the foundational structure of the Universe. It intrigued me. My thought was thatat the time of the Big Bang, there were equal amounts of particles of matter as there were what is called antimatter. In life everything has an opposite: night and day, hot and cold, summer and winter, negative and positive charges The thing is that when matter meets antimatter (its material mate) they annihilate each other. This is no reflection on the tendency for humans who get together with people that are their opposite number, battling their way through life. Or does it? Is it possible that they are still wondering about the absence of the existence of antiparticles when they know they currently exist in decayed substances, like bananas? But their job is to delve into the small, or the very large. Maybe what I am talking about belongs with metaphysics, but it seems quite possible to me that antimatter equates to death as matter equates to life. We don’t see them because they are kamikaze, destroying themselves, as they destroy the dying matter, leaving question marks for our scientists to ponder.

Maybe matter is not indestructible at all but keeps renewing itself as the antimatter continues to destroy all that is no longer necessary? It would look like it was the same matter, but in fact it was new, continually being refreshed, but getting no bigger. It was an easy illusion for us to miss, but it actually is what happens to every part of our body. Our skin cells replace themselves at the rate of about 100,000 a minute, our blood cells 10 days, and the pancreas over 24 hours. That being so, I can’t see how the matter of the Universe isn’t also doing the same thing. As above, so below. The outcome of the disparity between matter and antimatter, then, would have created an ongoing imbalance, a juggling act of the process of keeping the Universe stable and in existence. Just like the juggling act of needs being created and met, constantly, in our own lives. A fractal pattern, it would stand to reason, would occur in every aspect of the Universal creation.

You and I have been brought up with the concept that we must be perfect, acceptable to the Culture at all times. The expectation is that we must achieve success in a linear fashion, staying in that place for the rest of our lives. There must be no down times, no changes, in fact, no crises, nothing resembling anything other than happiness. In a being whose needs are constantly changing, with the supply and availability of what is required constantly shifting, what is asked is impossible. There’s a name for what we are. It’s called a dissipating structure, applying to all of life and its components. Our culture hates change, but it is built into the system from the Big Bang onwards. It’s fighting a losing battle, insisting that we follow suit.

Growing up with these types of expectation placed on us is a nightmare. There is no time to discover who we are or our strengths and weaknesses. We are already being sculpted into a statue ready for our placement on the production line before our brains have cooled. Definitely no space for learning from our mistakes, which incidentally is the only way learning can occur. From conception onwards, our life is a continued patting, or slapping, us back into line every time a unique piece of us pokes out. We are terrified. We are sad and angry. We are told if we get it wrong catastrophe will hit. But something catastrophic is already happening to us. We are being encouraged to live in a way that is not sustainable. We are in a trap and are given no means of getting out. Even expressing our grief and frustration is denied to us, knowing it would create a crack through which we could escape. Is it any wonder we find creative ways of numbing ourselves to this continual editing of who we are? But there is no help real offered because we are being asked to be something we cannot: perfect static beings that are units of production.

Fortunately, science keeps finding things that previous generations knew nothing about. Newton was quite convinced that if you dropped an apple from a tree, it would hit the ground. He didn’t take into consideration the changing nature of a world far away from equilibrium. So the apple falls, but part way down it hits a bird, who wasn’t fast enough to get out of its way. It then goes sideways and lands on a tree branch and is smattered into pieces. The bird’s flightpath changes, and in its dazed state it meets its mate. It seemed easier for them not to take into consideration anything that was complex. (It’s still happening in laboratories that conduct trails on male mice, because to deal with the problem of the estrogen cycle in female mice would mess up the data. Any wonder female mans have difficulty taking may of the drugs offered?) Because life is not a simple, linear process. It’s not tidy, and antimatter does exist. You and I are not tidy either.

After Newton, the physicists came along, explaining to us that though we thought the apple was solid it was actually a bunch of tiny particles that weren’t solid at all. Solidness was an illusion brought about by agreed reality. All good, but they were linear too, chasing smaller and smaller pieces to see what life was made of, not how it actually operates. They did find the Higgs Boson, but it hasn’t made life any easier. It’s only now that the next generation of science is starting to look at what really happens in a messy world that refuses to be tidied, because it relies on imbalance not equilibrium, on creative change not constant order. The Living Systems adherents to Systems Theory are showing us that we are in a range of ‘balancing’ between opposites that keep shifting. This creates random change, causing us to keep adjusting, the functionality of which is more like being a cosmic surfer than a perfectionist.

People, while being programmed to believe they have to ‘do it right,’ grow up without the skills to find and maintain that range. As a result, their self-esteem is destroyed, leading to extreme survival behaviour. In my practice, the first thing I have to convince them of is that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with them. It’s what they have been taught that is in error. Instead of having to get it right for everyone else, they need to be self-focused, listen to their own feelings. Feelings are the inbuilt feedback mechanism we are born with. They are designed to show us what needs to be done to stay in the range of balancing ourselves. Note I say ‘balancing’ not being ‘balanced’ because in a living system there is only a small moment when we cross over the balance point, before the needs to rebalance are felt again. (If you’re hungry, you eat and that need is satisfied, but before you have time to rest back on that, your bladder needs emptying so off you go to the toilet). In a system which is constantly intaking nutrients and expelling waste there is no time to sit around trying to be a certain way, to figure out what will keep others happy. Life doesn’t wait for us to do that. It moves on. And we are Life, in constant motion and change, with no insurance policies to mitigate against what it will produce next. Populations in the world’s current disaster zones can attest to that.

What to do? Learn to be stable in the midst of chaos. Learn skills that our feelings will tell us to use when necessary. We don’t have to look far. All animals are born with these innate skills. We have just been trained out of ours by a system that is destroying us, pretending it is making things better. The training we have received is contained in programmes in our mind. It’s become what I call The Enculturalised Mind. Implanted, by our parents and society, in brains that are still pliable and extremely plastic, they are augmented by the education system. Now they talk away in our heads, touting out prescribed scripts for us to follow when triggered by life events. They are always using the words ‘should’ and ‘must’ which carry an imperative, threatening us with catastrophe if we do it our way. It’s not easy to ignore, drummed into us as it has been. But it’s simple to begin to listen to our senses and deep feelings instead. We just have to keep at it until we have retrained our brain to listen to us, not the Cultural programmes with allegiance to others. When that happens, we will find that living is not as hard as we thought it was. We were, indeed, born for it.