Chapter Eight
Appreciate the Connections
In the past, science and technology were concerned with things in themselves - stars, atoms, elements, humors, levers and microprocessors. And philosophers, poets and mystics were more interested in connections between things - mercy, justice and love.
The most fascinating trend in modern physical science is how the focus has shifted to relations: the theory of relativity measures all things in relation to the speed of light.
Along with relations, the focus is on connections: harmonizing the four elemental forces (strong, weak, electromagnetic and gravity) that hold everything together in the universe. That connection, when it's found, will hopefully provide a "theory of everything," or TOE.
But beyond that, the greater challenge will be to find the harmony between those four natural forces and three heart forces: composure, compassion, connectedness. That is truly the Brilliant Ingenious Gorgeous Theory of Everything, or BIG TOE.
Before the dawn of new physics in the 20th Century, John Muir, the eminent 19th Century naturalist who helped create the National Park System, said: "I find if I touch anything in the world it's connected to everything else in the universe." Put another way, nothing's not connected.
So when you pause, appreciate the interconnectedness of all things. This is no longer an activity for mystics or poets alone, but also for hard-core physicists now. Involvement in the web of existence is not an optional activity or something we can turn away from. You got a belly button? You're in. Always were; always will be.
Because of the ancient notions that all things are separate unto themselves, our institutions over time became structured like a wedge, to separate the strong from the weak, the believer from the infidel, the neighbor from the stranger. For one to prevail, the other has to lose.
Increasingly the universe, from bottom to top and quantum to cosmic, is revealed as too tightly bound together in complementarity, interdependence and relationship (relativity) to keep up that fiction. The insights of modern physical science show us a universe arranged much more like a web than a wedge, with each part dependent on the whole and vice versa.
And because scientific principles undergird the tools we make and use, it's time to reconsider tool use in light of the new model nature is revealing to us.
If we transition from a wedge to a web model of the physical universe then there needs to be a place for composure (peace within oneself) and compassion (kindness to others) to guide our tool-use, in order to build communities that unite and guide us, not divide and frustrate us.
The universe works very well. Whatever holds all this together deserves our attention and respect, whether we call it God, Tao, supersymmetry, nada or Elmer's Glue. As far as we know, existence doesn't have to exist. In fact, the existence of existence is so mathematically improbable that it's beyond miraculous.
The integrity of the universe goes way beyond the Kevin Bacon game that connects every Hollywood celebrity within six degrees of separation from the actor. The universe may not even have one degree of separation; but may in fact be a hologram - each in all and all in each - such as this from the August 2003 issue of Scientific American: 'Information in the Holographic Universe' by Jacob D. Berkenstein.
This in turn builds on a famous laboratory experiment conducted by Alain Aspect at the University of Paris in 1982 which demonstrated that signals of information do not pass between particles at speed faster than light, but rather both particles may be manifestations of one underlying, universal, uninterrupted reality. Put another way, the universe may be a gigantic hologram, or one single waveform.
(A hologram is a laser-generated image that captures a subject in three dimensions. It is different from a photograph, which is a two-dimensional record. If you cut a photographic negative in half you are left with only half the original image. But if you shatter a holographic plate, you still have the entire image on each shard of the plate. If in fact the universe is a hologram, then poet William Blake was right when he said we can see eternity in a grain of sand.)
If all is found in each and each is found in all, then the awareness that we are the center of the universe should be matched by the awareness that our enemy is, too. We can be centered within ourselves, without being self-centered.
Einstein said the most important question anyone can ask is: Do I think the universe is a congenial place? Do I feel at home in the universe? Our sense of well-being (and therefore our sense of how we relate to all other things) hinges on that.
When ads tell us we can never be happy until we buy the new threads, new wheels, new look or new styles, we find ourselves running like gerbils in a wheel with no end.
When belief systems add to that by saying we have to put on 'the new man; be born again,' and that this universe is merely an impediment to getting to our true home somewhere outside the universe, we internalize it as a self-fulfilling prophecy. And then we struggle needlessly within ourselves between mind and body, soul and body, and set ourselves up for self-generated unhappiness which in turn we often inflict on others as well.
But it's not enough to turn away from the old physics, or the inherited Creation Stories designed to meet the needs of antiquity. It's better we find something to turn to, to recognize that:
- According to Big Bang Theory, we are at the center of an expanding universe and we matter.
- According to relativity theory, we are scaled midway between quantum and cosmos, the better to see in both directions.
- According to quantum theory, the units of energy that make us up have been here since the beginning and will remain until the end, and each unit of energy extends to the limits of the expanding universe.
- And if our understanding of the laws of physics has changed in the last century, then the technology based on the new physics needs to keep up. We can't keep promoting infinite consumption of finite resources, and must stop making weapons that threaten the web of life.
According to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, not only are matter and energy recycled, but information is too. Does the universe learn from experience?
Information is in all things and flows from one iteration to the next. Sunlight in-formed plants during the Carboniferous time with energy, which we recover now in the form of coal, gas and oil. That energy powered my toaster this morning as it heated grain that was also in-formed by solar energy last summer in Kansas. And the toast energizes me today.
Since information is energy (and vice versa), this could mean that all our memories, and the memories of all beings in our solar system, will eventually be bound up in an infinitely small bundle when our solar system collapses and implodes in five billion years. Just as a collapsed earlier universe may have been the singularity from which this cosmos exploded in a Big Bloom.
And upon going supernova, the new cosmos that emerges from our collapsed solar system may be richer for having heard the Ode to Joy in this one. And our memories may be woven into the warp and woof of that new universe. This is speculation, but it's possible. And awareness of that possibility can put some present concerns in perspective.
Since the universe is so interconnected, balanced and harmonious (as we explored in Chapters Three to Five in Part Two), it is all the more futile and wasteful that we channel our organizational ingenuity, enterprise and technology into creating and sustaining struggle and contention.
The starting place for rekindling any noble understanding is empathy, the wellspring of soul; the ability to walk for a mile in another's shoes. It is the recognition that The Other is not evil simply for being Other.
Ronald Reagan, the Cold Warrior, said "Trust but Verify." It starts with the appreciation that the other side has something to say. Or at least we should be open to that reality. Everyone wants to be happy and to avoid suffering.
The Ten Commandments were meant to protect limited possessions - life, land, home and good name. Laws regarding possessing and protecting knowledge - Intellectual Property protection - are today's equivalent. But now information in digital form is infinitely replicable, with each copy as good as the original. Like a magic penny, you can give it away and still have it.
Appreciation is not only recognizing our participation in the web of being, it's appreciating that others have a legitimate place here too.
In the story of the Prodigal Son, we hear of a young man who made some mistakes, squandered his inheritance, saw his errors and returned for forgiveness. He's presented on the surface as a foolish young man but not evil. Yet the deeper reading of the story is very troubling when we understand the Prodigal Son could be a repentant Idi Amin or Josef Stalin or even bin Laden. If one sincerely repents, can we begrudge the redemption?
One of the greatest technical accomplishments of all time is taken so much for granted we never think about it. It's the dial tone. Millions of man-hours have gone into making it so ubiquitous and so dependable. It would have been a miracle to people 150 years ago to carry around a device that let them speak to anyone, anywhere, at a reasonable price.
With such tools we have fewer excuses to say we don't understand others, globally or locally. With new technologies like picture phones, 'blogs, email - wirelessly enabled and available anywhere - the walls are coming down. When technology offers such hope, it takes on spiritual ramifications.
Appreciating what we don't know is as important as appreciating what we do know. Those who think they have a lock on it all usually lose sight of their humility and their humanity. There's an age-old riddle for today's knowledge workers to ponder: how to simultaneously know, and know we know not: to remain ever the learner, and not one of the learned with answers to questions no longer worth asking.
Each node on the web of being double-clicks to worlds within worlds; endlessly interwoven. There's nowhere you can go that you're alone.
