Movement of Life: Living Organisms Evolve

Movement of Life: Living Organisms Evolve

By Norm Hirst, For Inner Tapestry

We think of movement as meaning change. There are many kinds of change: physical, spiritual, intellectual and social. There are movements in the sense of organizations trying to cause change. Today it seems change is pervasive. Everything is changing. Even common sense beliefs are being abandoned. For example, can a living entity (you and me, cells, molecules etc.) burn water? Well, of course it has been thought not to be possible. But it is now known that they can and do; so routinely that they don’t even know it. Just about every day I see another long held belief come into question. Confusion reigns!

Towards the end of the 60’s some experience taught me that that there was going to be the most profound paradigm change and development of a new consciousness. I was working in a computer lab on artificial intelligence. The most exciting ideas were programmed for testing. They became known as solving “toy problems”. When the programs were applied to real problems they crashed. That convinced me that we needed a new paradigm.

Now at Autognomics Institute our research approach is to look for the most fundamental ideas that can validate the change occurring towards a consciousness changing new paradigm. Unfortunately such fundamental ideas are not part of normal discourse. What is being discovered cannot be read as a self-help book, but interpreted and applied to the right context it can offer relief in answering questions about what one can believe and trust in a changing world.

For example, in 1965 a popular song had the memorable words…

“What the world needs now is love, sweet love

It's the only thing that there's just too little of.."

I remember thinking it is a nice idea but it will never happen in my lifetime. Reviewing now the fundamental ideas of materialism, it can be shown that the worldview based on materialism has kept us from seeing and knowing love and its non-local energy and connecting, creative, character.

But now new kinds of fundamental principles are being discovered showing us life as creative organism and that it forms and connects through non-local loving energy to bring about these changes and evolution occurring.

In 2007 environmentalist Paul Hawken came out with a new book, “Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming”. The book is the result of his thousands of lectures on environmental and social issues over a period of fifteen years. He began to sense organizations of volunteers working on important issues. He wondered how many such organizations there are. Thus he began searching. He now sees the total of between one and two million such organizations worldwide working for change. This is the largest movement in the world. Why did it escape notice?

Hawken wrote Movements Require …

“This is the largest movement the world has ever seen. Rather than control, it seeks connection. Rather than dominance, it strives to disperse concentrations of power. Like Mercy Corps, it works behind the scenes and gets the job done. Large as it is, no one knows the true size of this movement. It provides hope, support, and meaning to billions of people in the world. Its clout resides in idea, not in force. It is made up of teachers, children, peasants, businesspeople, rappers, organic farmers, nuns, artists, government workers, fisherfolk, engineers, students, incorrigible writers, weeping Muslims, concerned mothers, poets, doctors without borders, grieving Christians, street musicians, the President of the United States of America, and as the writer David James Duncan would say, the Creator, the One who loves us all in such a huge way.”  

He points out that by conventional definition this cannot be a movement:

• Movements have leaders and ideologies
• People join movements, study their tracts, and identify themselves with a group
• They read or listen to the biographies of founder(s) or listen to them

Left with the old paradigm, these characteristics would be sufficient to obfuscate the existence of such a movement.

However, he points out that this movement…

“is dispersed, inchoate, and fiercely independent. It has no manifesto or doctrine, no overriding authority to check with. It is taking shape in schoolroom, farms, jungles, villages, companies, deserts, fisheries, slums and yes, even fancy New York hotels.  One of its distinctive features is that it is tentatively emerging as a global humanitarian movement arising from the bottom up.  Historically social movements have arisen primarily in response to injustice, inequities, and corruption.”

He points out that the causes are more subtle than blatant.

“Could it be an instinctive, collective response to threat?  Is it atomized for reasons that are innate to its purpose? How does it function?  How fast is it growing?  How is it connected? Why is it largely ignored?  Does it have a history? Can it successfully address the issues that governments are failing to: energy, jobs, conversation, poverty, and global warming?  Will it become centralized, or will it continue to be dispersed and cede its power to ideologies and fundamentalism?”

He sought to..

“name it, but none exists. I met people who wanted to structure …this is the largest social movement in all of human history. No one knows its scope, and how it functions is more mysterious than meets the eye.  What does meet the eye is compelling: coherent, organic, self-organized congregation involving tens of millions of people dedicated to change. …What I see are ordinary and some not-so-ordinary individuals willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in an attempt to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world.”

And he summarizes with a poem from Adrienne Rich

“My heart is moved by all I cannot save:/So much has been destroyed/ I have cast my lot with those/ who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, /reconstitute the world.”

A NEW VIEW Today looking at life as creative organism, we find a very different view of reality than that of materialism. The variables we refer to here are pointing to universal organizing principles found throughout life and in living entities. One such principle is that life creates societies of creative organisms, and organisms follow their own unique laws and operating principles. Now this kind of reality does, in and of itself, supply what Hawken says is missing to define this new kind of movement.

How this works, we will continue next time. Stay tuned and in the meantime check out organisms characteristics and follow our conversations on Twitter @autognomics