Living Evolution: Life Heals by Creativity Within the Laws of Coherence

Living Evolution: Life Heals by Creativity Within the Laws of Coherence

Norm Hirst

Human knowledge advances slowly day by day. There may be some practical advances but generally life goes on as it always has. But sometimes knowledge comes together in a way to change everything. I call it clumping. The first clumping to change everything occurred in the 1860’s when Maxwell united all that was known about electricity and magnetism into four differential equations. With that clumping, Maxwell made possible the practical application of electricity and magnetism changing our lives forever. What had been invisible became known and accessible.

I believe we are now going through the second clumping. Just as with the Maxwell clumping, the second clumping about to occur will make the invisible dynamics of values accessible and practical opening new possibilities for living meaningfully and well.

The First Clumping

Until the 1860’s there was no awareness of electromagnetic waves. That is radio waves, x-rays, light waves and cell phone waves. Come to think of it there wasn’t even awareness of telephones. There was some awareness of electricity. Ben Franklin is credited with the first practical application. His house was on the corner of a main street and a dark alley. Drunks walking home at night relieved themselves against the foundation of Ben’s house. Ben was experimenting with leyden jars, a primitive form of batteries. He hooked up some primitive form of wires to the jars and ran the wires along the foundation. The problem was solved!

Before magnetism was discovered, there was something called “philosopher’s stones,” stones that appeared to have magical properties. At the time scientists were called philosophers. Experiments were done with these stones in an attempt to understand why they worked as they did. In working with these stones, they discovered magnetism and later found that electricity and magnetism were functionally related. Varying magnetic fields produced electricity while electricity produced magnetism.

James Clerk Maxwell expressed these functional relations in four differential equations. At the time of his work, nothing was known about the possibility of electromagnetic waves. In my opinion Maxwell’s discovery was the most revolutionary and world changing discovery in human history. He was the first to realize these equations produced electromagnetic waves. Until his discovery, so much that we take for granted today, could not have occurred such as power distribution, the various waves and all electronics. Think about everything based on electronics and thank Maxwell. It would be wonderful to know how he felt when he realized for the first time this new world of possibility, a world that could not even have been imagined without this discovery.

Maxwell’s equations made us consciously aware of natural processes that occur but we had not known. Knowing them made possible all of the ways we use electricity and magnetism. We should make lists of what would be missing in our lives without such basic knowledge. As cell phones and ipods leap to mind don’t forget simpler things such as the thermostat controlling the temperature in your house. Also your automobile needs an ignition system.

The Second Clumping

I believe we are at a moment in history where very powerful processes are being discovered that will transform the world by making visible what has been invisible just as Maxwell did. These current discoveries will change consciousness enabling us to understand life as we've never been able to know it. Thanks to electronics we can make observations that have never before been possible. For example

• Transfer of brain wave patterns from one person to another even though the receiver is in an isolation chamber
• Remote viewing
• Watching the processes in bodies through ultra-sound as they live
• Discovering the liquid crystalline nature of living tissue
• Discovering that living organisms emit biophotons
• Discovering the zero point energy source that physicists refer to as the Dirac Sea.

There has been 30 years of testing in the first two categories showing that people are connected in ways that make no sense whatsoever, given our current foundations of thinking. Being able to watch processes in living organisms as they live has brought into question much of conventional biology. The remaining three are discoveries of the last decade that begin to reveal what has been hidden ways of life.

I believe we are seeing pointers to hidden processes that we now need to understand. I will call them processes of life itself. In view of current research I conclude that current views of reality are tragically limiting. Humans have been committing debilitating errors destructive of life.

A most serious error is the belief that inert matter is fundamental and that life is an incidental accident grown out of the nonliving world as is believed in the Big Bang Theory. We send technology into space looking for life in the universe believing that if we find certain properties of matter, life could follow.

Research is now revealing that life does the creating.

Life is fundamental. Our common notion that inert matter is fundamental is an error. Defining life in terms of material properties, such as carbon based, will not hold up in the light of recent discoveries. Life is transforming processes and must be defined as such. What are the characteristics of a life process?

Life processes are self-acting. Cause and effect does not apply. It is not required. In and of themselves they are not material processes. They are processes of energy and fields, fields in the sense of gravity, electricity and magnetism, nuclear forces, biophotons and probably much yet to be discovered.

These processes are creative acts. They create new realities. They are also habit forming. Sufficiently strong habits can create and manifest what we would consider inert material or less alive matter i.e., table and chairs. Thus living processes will be both conservative and creative. Living processes exhibit both poles of categorical contrasts. For example, Yin-Yang or light and dark. There would appear to be contradictions between the two poles, however that is resolved by on-going oscillation between the poles.

To find life look for self-creation. Trees become without anyone making them. Buildings have to be built. But what about planet Earth? Yes I believe Earth is produced by life. I believe the entire cosmos is created by life. We are living in a life just as do the cells in our bodies. Does the point that we live in another life have consequences? Yes, beyond our wildest imagining.

It is now known that our bodies consist of 75 trillion cells all living in a pure democracy. There are no bosses. The cells enjoy maximum freedom provided they conform to the body’s coherence conditions, the organizing unity to which all the cells relate. Coherence makes freedom possible. Without coherence conditions, our liver cells might make war on our kidney cells. That would not only prevent the cells from doing their jobs, it would kill their life support – us. Coherence basically means adhering to the organizing conditions without destructive interference. In contrast, cancer cells are non-communicating. Thus they lose touch with the coherence conditions and cause death.

We are living in the life of the living cosmos. I have no objection to calling this cosmic life God. I find many people have difficulty with the idea of God. I too have difficulty with the God taught in my Sunday School. I heard God called an angry and jealous God. To my mind man created this God as a cosmological superman with a sadistic personality, as a strict parent demanding obedience, standing ready to judge us and punish us in an eternity of Hell for the slightest transgression. I could not believe in such a creature, let alone worship him. I flunked Sunday School. But I have thought a lot about God, and every time I do, I feel a loving presence, not a punishing or cruel one.

Now I believe this loving cosmic life imposes coherence conditions on us just as our bodies do on our cells. I believe these cosmic coherence conditions are what we call values. Most work today on values tries to define what we will all agree is good. With values as coherence conditions, the fundamental focus is finding the conditions under which we can all, in our differences, have the greatest freedom. In freedom we can all become and express our unique nature, who we are meant to be and thus experience on-going fulfillment of the infinite creative possibilities within our life’s meaning. Nothing could be more healing.

Years ago I studied with a world famous value philosopher, Robert Hartman. He discovered three types of value that he called intrinsic, extrinsic and systemic. Due to their logical properties he said that intrinsic takes precedence over extrinsic and extrinsic takes precedence over systemic. It is my belief that these rules are perfect organizing unity coherence conditions. They maximize freedom while preventing destructive interference.

Consider human life to be of intrinsic value. Consider ideology to be of systemic value. When ideology results in taking human life, we violate the unifying coherence conditions. Violating these coherence conditions result in death and destruction. Choosing the higher values as much as possible we get closer to living in relationship to life's coherence and knowing this magical oneness in which we all dance. In that on-going creation process, healing occurs and life thrives.