really, truly

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Our bodies are not solid objects at a “higher level” and cells at a “lower level” and molecules still “further down", though we have used that shorthand to construct our complexity view of the universe. Instead we should say that a body as a holarchy appears as a solid object from one perspective, as a community of cells from a different perspective, and as a cloud of molecules from a still different perspective.

If the universe is a unity, one vast holarchy of self-organizing complex systems, then we have to consider that what is true for any part is true for the whole. From this standpoint, every action we take, every decision we make, every thought we have, is not only our own—it is also an integrated, integral part of the whole holarchical universe. In this sense, when I raise a glass of water to drink, it is the universe that raises a glass of water. If I am alive, then the universe is alive. We are not merely separate, lonely, disconnected beings searching for meaning; moment by moment we are unique emergent expressions of the universe itself.

You might argue with me, instead saying that the universe contains distinct and separate living and nonliving systems. You would be correct; however, that description is in complementarity with the view that the universe is, in its totality, a single living system. This is much the same as the way we deem each of our bodies, in its entirety, to be a living organism even though we have nonliving parts like hair and cartilage. At the boundless, nonlocal scale of the quantum realm, the living nature of the whole transcends the particularities of each part. There are no purely alive domains and none that are exclusively non-alive. There is simply the living universe.

Casual generalizatons about how we are all “one with the universe” are so common these days as to be trite. However easy it might be to thoughtlessly repeat that banal truism, though, it is in fact exceedingly difficult to intuit it directly, as a physical experience, not merely a belief. Our usual habitual experiences of the material world and our Western cultural bias toward materialism—that the world is only its physical substance—continually push us in the other direction. But complexity theory, woven together with relativity and quantum mechanics, tells a different story. 

Oneness is real and true. And while separation is also true, it is not any more true than oneness. They are a complemtarity—each, though different, is equally indispensable for a full comprehension of reality. This conviction comes not only from a subset of philosophies, or from ancient religions, or from new age mysticsm but from our modern, contemporary, empirical sciences.


—Neil Theise
Notes On Complexity: A Scientific Theory of Connection, Consciousness, and Being
(treasure)

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The word holarchy, coined by author and polymath Arthur Keostler, ha been used to capture what we intend here. A holarchy is a system of elements that do not relate to each other in terms of higher or lower, top or bottom, left to right, or right to left. The members of a holarchy (holons) are always equivalent to all other members. When we say that light is both a wave and a particle, we are not privileging one aspect of light over the other. Moreover, at our every day scale we experience light as neither of these—we experience it merely as light!


—Neil Theise
Notes On Complexity: A Scientific Theory of Connection, Consciousness, and Being

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