The Global Butterfly Effect

Source: The Global Butterfly Effect | Creative by Nature

With permission

creativesystemsthinking.wordpress.com

by Christopher Chase

Feb 24, 2016

 “We are Life, in human form. Descendants of the stars and galaxies, children of the oceans and forests, creative expressions of Nature. As much a part of this planet as the rivers, trees, mountains and butterflies.”

For thousands of years people in Western cultures have been wrestling with the illusions we’ve spun from our dualistic mindsets and beliefs. It’s like we’ve been dreaming a shared nightmare together, grounded in the mechanistic ways our society has been organized, rooted in how we live and think.

Across the centuries, the very foundation of our so-called “Civilization” has been based on ideas of separation and superiority- men above, women below, Kings above, peasants below, humans above, Nature below, etc. Walls of separation in our hearts and minds, a sense of sin and abandonment, believing that our entire species was “thrown out of Eden.”

With dualistic “ego” logical thinking came an emphasis on time, our consciousnesses locked into mental projections of a feared or desired future, an imagined and idealized history.

When lost in these projections we become less aware of the magical nature of each moment, blind to the beauty, value and mystery of the HERE and NOW. This is how schools teach our children to think and feel, how our ancestors were dazed and hypnotized.

From this mindset grew Civilized man’s mad circus of history, the hostile cultures of race and nationalism as identity, religion as truth, militarism as method, materialism and acquisition of wealth as the organizing goals of our institutions, the unquestioned values guiding our way of life.

It manifested with the rise of wealth obsessed empires seeking power and dominance. Dualistic thinking led to the Witch Hunts during the Renaissance, to Europeans coming to conquer the “New World” – thinking themselves superior to the Natives, stealing their land. Then going to Africa where they kidnaped and enslaved the people, dragging them across the oceans.

Over the centuries reductionistic thinking has given rise to all our most difficult problems- to racism, sexism, nationalism, slavery, human trafficking, organized crime, alcoholism, drug abuse, obesity, prostitution, genocide and all our wars.

For thousands of years now, individual artists, poets, prophets and sages have been trying to help us wake up from our delusions. From Jesus to Buddha to Lao Tsu, from Shakespeare’s “Romeo & Juliet” to Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience,” Whitman & Blake’s poems, Van Gogh’s paintings and forward thru time to the “Wizard of Oz,” ” Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” and James Cameron’s “Avatar”…

There was a great creative burst of realization in the 1960s, but still the spirit crushing institutions, selfish lifestyles and unquestioned mechanistic assumptions of the past continue to exert a powerful hypnotic force.

With the rise of new technologies and industrialization our consumer lifestyles have overpowered the rivers, mountains and forests that surround us. Over the last hundred years we have been destroying Nature’s ecosystems at an astounding rate.

Why has it been so difficult for humans to change?

In part, I think, it is because the “Civilized” Matrix will do whatever it can to avoid a shutdown. Our dominant institutions are designed to maintain control, to defend, expand and perpetuate their existence. Like the immune system of a body, attacking these systems directly only strengthens them, leads to hostility and violence.

Mostly however, I believe that we have not changed because too many of us are still hypnotized. Primarily identifying our sense of self with names, career, race, religion, gender, political perspective or nationality. Seeking pleasurable experiences, wealth, status and material possessions; mistakenly believing that these will bring us happiness and that the only way to solve complex problems is to “defeat the opposition.”

What most of us have failed to see is that we are not these social and cultural roles we imagine ourselves to be.

We are Life, in human form. Descendants of the stars and galaxies, children of the oceans and forests, creative expressions of Nature. As much a part of this planet as the rivers, trees, mountains and butterflies.

As more and more of us wake up to that deeper sense of identity we will be more easily able to transcend old thought patterns and beliefs. Observing Nature’s Systems closely, studying her ways, we can re-write and delete old programming.

To truly bring an end to the destructiveness of humanity- to really transform the world- a deeper wisdom has to first arise from within. We must “be the change” as Gandhi put it. We have to free ourselves first, transform our ways of thinking, feeling and behaving.

Then take the wisdom of our wholeness and apply it to everything we say and do, to all fields of human activity. Economics, entertainment, education, law, medicine, transportation, energy technologies- they all can (and must) be transformed.

We are not the solitary individuals we have believed ourselves to be. We are expressions of Universal life, Children of our Galaxy. We are the “leaves of grass” Walt Whitman spoke of – the Awakening voices of Eden, instruments of the great turning.

Nature’s Agents of Transformation- The Global Butterfly Effect.

~Christopher Chase~

“You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here… Keep peace in your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams; it is still a beautiful world.”  ~ Max Ehrmann (Desiderata, 1927)

“Be as simple as you can be; you will be astonished to see how uncomplicated and happy your life can become.” ~Paramahansa Yogananda

“People normally cut reality into compartments, and so are unable to see the interdependence of all phenomena. To see one in all and all in one is to break through the great barrier which narrows one’s perception of reality.” ~Thich Nhat Hanh

“The Earth is alive and contains the knowledge you seek. It is your consciousness that determines what it reveals. How to access this knowledge? And where are the keys to open it and make it yours? The Earth speaks. Love her, honor and respect her and she will reveal her secrets.” —Barbara Marciniak

“You are not IN the universe, you ARE the universe, an intrinsic part of it. Ultimately you are not a person, but a focal point where the universe is becoming conscious of itself. What an amazing miracle.” ~Eckhart Tolle

The Fractal Nature of Reality

“Life is about floating on the seas of turbulence, drifting on the eddies and currents, flowing, and along the way, learning: whatever that may look like for each of us currently experiencing a mortal life.” ~Joanna Hunter

Each of us (the animate and inanimate, the sentient and the purely material) is part of one inconceivably large, unfurling fractal entity that constitutes everything, and when taken as a whole is the equivalent of what some may call “God”.

This entity does not exist within some surrounding vacuum but rather twists and folds back on itself so that it is boundless. The concept of “nothing” is therefore a logical fallacy, an impossibility.

We, as parts of this great unfurling fractal cosmic entity, are eternal, though the notion and form of “I” is temporary and in fact the “all” we are participating in exists outside of time.

“What you are basically, deep, deep down, far, far in, is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself.” ~ Alan Watts

 

Evolution is the fundamental process at work within this greater “all”, along with its opposite, entropy. Evolution utilizes energy to increase complexity and information over time, whereas entropy dissolves structural patterns, flattening everything out into evenness.

Evolution gives birth to difference, entropy soothes into sameness. Evolution is life, entropy is decay. They are two sides of the same coin and without them nothing would ever happen. Similarly, one cannot exist without the other.

“Nature is ever at work building and pulling down, creating and destroying, keeping everything whirling and flowing, allowing no rest but in rhythmical motion, chasing everything in endless song out of one beautiful form into another.” ~ John Muir

A System Governed by Flow Dynamics

The whole system of our universe is essentially governed by flow dynamics or the physics of turbulence. Turbulent systems are characterised by the eddies, currents and vortices of “flow”. Vortices are self-sustaining energy structures that occur everywhere naturally. They exist at the core of the Möbius torus shape.

If you think about almost any life form, you can see it is a variant of the Möbius torus and fractal dynamics. Equally, all life forms are holarchies of many lower level Möbius tori. E.g. apple seed, apple tree, apple. All are expressions of Möbius tori.

Atom, blood cell, human body, brain, womb, heart, lungs, eye: derivations of Möbius tori and fractal mathematics. Temporary, self-sustaining physical manifestations of vortices in the flow dynamics of the enormous unfurling cosmic fractal everything.

“I seem, like everything else, to be a center, a sort of vortex, at which the whole energy of the universe realizes itself. Each one of us, not only human beings but every leaf, every weed, exists in the way it does, only because everything else around it does. The individual and the universe are inseparable.” ~ Alan Watts

Finding One’s Life Purpose as a Part of the Flow

So if that is what reality looks like and how it works, what is our purpose within it? Our purpose is to participate consciously and continue the journey of evolution and entropy.

To be expressions of creativity that keep the whole thing unfurling rather than descending into a flat field of sameness.

Life is about floating on the seas of turbulence, drifting on the eddies and currents, flowing, and along the way, learning: whatever that may look like for each of us currently experiencing a mortal life.

Out of this universal process, meaning emerges. In this way, we are all meaning-making entities, part of a boundless unity, which is itself a system of creativity, evolution and meaning.

So the purpose of our mortal lives is to flow, to wonder and to learn – to “spin out” this meaning into ever more beautiful shapes and forms.

All contributing, all dancing as part of this one, unfurling, fractal whole. And so it will go on, and has always gone on, eternally.

by Joanna Hunter

“To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don’t grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float” ~ Alan Watts

“We are travellers on a cosmic journey, stardust, swirling and dancing in the eddies and whirlpools of infinity. Life is eternal. We have stopped for a moment to encounter each other, to meet, to love, to share. This is a precious moment. It is a little parenthesis in eternity.” ~ Paulo Coelho

 

“Wholeness does not mean perfection: it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life. Knowing this gives me hope that human wholeness — mine, yours, ours — need not be a utopian dream, if we can use devastation as a seedbed for new life.” ~ Parker Palmer

 

 

“…from out of the sexual organ of every woman there came another cord, with another woman or man at the end of each one, and all of that, millions and millions of times over, turned into an enormous tree, a tree formed from the infinity of bodies, a tree whose branches reached to the sky.” ~ Milan Kundera

 

 

 

 

 

Every system is a “holon”

Creative Systems Thinking

“Each system, from atom to galaxy, is a whole. That means that it is not reducible to its components. Its distinctive nature and capacities derive from the interactive relationships between its parts. This interplay is synergistic, generating “emergent properties” and new possibilities, which are not predictable from the character of the separate parts–just as the wetness of water could not be predicted from oxygen and hydrogen before they combined, or just as the tensile strength of steel far exceeds the combined strengths of iron and nickel.Every system is a “holon”– that is, it is both a whole in its own right, comprised of subsystems, and simultaneously an integral part of a larger system. Thus holons form “nested hierarchies,” systems within systems, circuits within circuits, fields within fields. Each new holonic level– say from atom to molecule, cell to organ, person to family– generates emergent properties that are nonreducible to the capacities of the separate components.~ Joanna Macy ~Creative Systems Thinking