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• Self-Organization, the Ability to Receive Information from the Larger System, & the Spiritual Dimension

  
  

  Watch and listen to this 15-minute video, the fifth part of a 10-part dialogue with Ervin Laszlo and Marc Gafni in Tuscany on the topic of Evolutionary Love–envisioning a new Renaissance that will take us to the future. Watch previous posts from this series:

  • The New Renaissance, & Love as an Erotic Force
  • The Second Shock of Existence
  • Evolutionary Love, the True Nature of Reality, & Unique Self Enlightenment
  • Supercoherence

  Contents

  • 1 Enjoy the fifth part of the dialogue here:
  • 2 Transcript
    • 2.1 >>> You can watch the whole 10-part dialogue here <<<
  • 3 If you like the dialogue, you may be interested in our online course “ Becoming a Future Human”

  Enjoy the fifth part of the dialogue here:

  
  

  Transcript

  Marc Gafni: So, you remember that essay by Turing, morphogenesis, one of the classical essays of the last 50 years, where Turing, who was the code cracker in World War II, the Turing Test, that actually broke the Nazi codes, Turing introduces in this essay a lot of the notion of the self organizing universe, or what you called in your book the self actualizing cosmos, some of the building blocks of that system, of the entire world of self organization, were ready in Turing’s essay.

  What does self organization basically say? Again, stating in accessible terms, you have an anthill. How does every ant in the anthill know what to do? The answer is there’s a self organizing process in which ants receiver chemical signals, pheromones, from other ants, and then the ant knows precisely what to do locally, but that local self organization produces this global process of an anthill, which is elegant, organized, industrious, creative, everything in its right location, kind of gorgeous. Now, human beings aren’t ants. Human beings are awakened consciousness, and yet human beings, like ants, live in this larger system that Ervin’s described, which is super coherent, a term that I had borrowed from his book, “Self Actualizing Cosmos”. I love when Ervin quotes “Supercoherence”, which I borrowed from his book, so super coherence is the kind of, what my friend Daniel calls, and omni-considerate universe. You’re omni-considerate, you consider all the factors.

  You begin to produce solar, not coal. You realize that you’re part of the larger whole. Now, this system, what structures the self organizing universe of human beings, as opposed to aunts. Aunts operate in this interior system, which pheromone secretions guide the ant, and the ant, the way the literature says, the ant looks at 10 other ants at street level, and the ant receives the secretions and knows what to do. What happens with human beings? Fragrance is not what does it for us, we use deodorant to get rid of fragrance, so what actually happens to move human beings? What’s the organizing principle of the human self organization, and I would suggest, Ervin, that the organizing principle of human self organization, is this structure of consciousness, which we’re calling unique self.

  Actually unique self is the principle which guides the self organizing universe, and that it’s actually the structure of consciousness that allows us to integrate in a higher, what we might call a higher integral embrace, autonomy in communion, of these two great principles of autonomy and communion, the emergence of the individual, and communion being a part of a larger community, which have actually fought with each other for 2,000, 3,000, 4,000, 5,000, forever, for the first time we can integrate them, in the self actualizing cosmos, if we understand that the cosmos awakens through us, when we actually become the awake evolutionary impulse, but we’re the personal face of the impulse.

  We’re the irreducible unique face of the impulse, so we have irreducible dignity, and yet our irreducible unique creativity is guiding the self organizing universe, so that’s a piece of the puzzle I want to introduce to the table, and see how does that play in the natural world, is that an expression of the natural world, how does it play in your thought, how does it feel to you?

  Dr. László: I think that’s an extremely important concept. We can phrase it in different ways, extremely important as you put it. You talked about the anthill. What do the ants have? They have a set of signals, which are pheromones, pheromones, and that means that they perceive, they have a sense whereby they get signals from other ants, okay, and then they have an instinct, I’m just using quotation marks of these things, which tells them what to do with it, with those signals, how to process this. What happens in an information system in a computer? You get on the web, or when you connect, you get a set of information, and then your computer has a software and tells you what to do with it. And you have a further software here in your mind, where it tells you … you respond to the messages that you get, what to do with it.

  So you always have information and coding, or decoding, with information. Now, the big fallacy of the modern, western mentality is that it reduce the information that we are getting to a very small spectrum, the spectrum that you have consciously perceived through your sense organs. So the whole world became a set of sights and sounds and smells, even the smells and the tastes are less than that, and the touch is almost all what you see, sense data, as the analytical philosopher said, and sounds. And the whole world consists of those things. And many people try to reconstruct the world, what we have, just on the basis of what we understand of the terms of this sensory atomism or logical atomism, as Bertrand Russell called it.

  Turns out it doesn’t work, because first of all, the universe is far more rich, provides a far more wealth, great spectrum of information, than just what comes through a few of our sense organs. Now we’re discovering that the microtubules, the subordinate, but extremely important networks in our brain, that’s below the level of neurons, Penrose and Hameroff and others talk about this, and they are networks of networks of networks below it, down to the nanometer level, to the extremely small level. And these networks resonate with information, that is … that appears on higher levels, but is there. And it connects us with the rest, th is is quantal level information, so we resonate with the rest of the world.

  So we have, what I want to say, to make this point, we have an input of information, which comes to us from the world, much richer than what our sensory organs tell us, the great spiritual systems, as you well know, were much richer. They didn’t disregard these subtle intuitions, this sense of something higher, or something deeper, anywhere beyond the everyday world. And you get actually, real information of that, we can show how these networks of this subneural networks in our brain actually resonate with quantum waves that are propagated in space, because space is full of them, space is not a vacuum, space is planum, it’s a consistent wholeness of all of the information about all of the things that occur. It’s all there in space.

  And it all produces signals, okay, so that’s one thing. So we have input variables, and perhaps the traditional people use more of this input than so called modern people do. But we also have to know what to do with it. Now, traditional people used instinctive orientation, or perhaps their intuitive wisdom, the wisdom iterations of what to do. Now, we have reduced the world to some information, and also reduced our idea of the world, of there being only matter like things that interact with each other according to laws of nature that Newton described, and so on. And everything else is just imagination.

  So, if you recognize that this is about a ritual, it’s interacting on many levels, it’s producing information about all the things that are happening. We can be entangled with all the other things. We can perceive everything else in the world. In fact, deeply all of the meditative prayer for states of consciousness, as you well know, we can perceive a lot more of the world than we do, in ordinary states. So, we have information, and we have instinctive orientation of what to do, the code, how to handle it. We can decode the information, we can make sense of it. We have to open up our minds, open up our consciousness, so we can deal with this information that is coming to us, these signals.

  Then we become anthills, but that’s an awful thing to say, because we don’t … we are not becoming ants in an anthill. We have the information and the code, but we have something else, we have ourself, our individuality, so that we know what to do with this, not purely as a mechanical part of a larger system that orients us, that tells us what to do, we can rediscover it consciously, we can act in a way that we know that we are part of the system. We know that we can further the system, we can be in alignment, we can be … we can be coherent with the coherence in the world. And that is what can give meaning to our existence. We can consciously become part of this unfolding symphony in the world.

  Marc Gafni: Yeah, so consciously become part of the unfolding symphony, and so you describe, Ervin, two levels, and I want to be very precise here. So the first level is, we take in and … of course, I’m shutting my eyes on camera, because I’m thinking and forgetting about the camera, but that’s okay, so stay with us. So the first level is, Ervin’s describing that I actually recover my ability to receive information from the larger system.

  Dr. László: Right.

  Marc Gafni: and I do that through practice, and i want to be very clear friends listening, when Ervin talks about quanta, he’s not reducing the larger system to its physicality, he’s talking about quantum both literally, quantum are a literal, physical expression, but you also, if I follow you correctly in your writing as well, you use the word quanta in two ways. You use it as a kind of physical expression of reality, but quanta also refers for you to kind of, the underlying, deep dimension of reality, because quanta is both physical, it’s part of the world revealed by the eye of the senses, and the eyes of the senses doesn’t, of course, mean the naked eye. The eye of the senses means any way that we amplify senses.

  Human beings have become very, very good at amplifying our natural senses. A telescope sees more. Positive emission tomography sees more, but they’re still operating in the sensory world, so in a certain sense, even beneath quanta, even beneath the sensory world, is the deeper dimension of what we might call essence, that if your will, births, that informs, that animates the sensory world. So when we’re talking about quanta reality, we’re not merely talking about, if my understanding of the way you’re using the word, Ervin, correctly, you use it in two ways. You use it to describe that the network of interlocking its, but you also use it to point towards the underlying world of essence, that animates the world of its, and that’s inseparable from them. Is that fair?

  Dr. László: Well, absolutely, you put your finger on this. I’m obviously reluctant to come for with just my own particular concepts, but here’s you’re practically forcing me to do that.

  Marc Gafni: Hopefully politely, because I’m in your home.

  Dr. László: Yes, well I appreciate it, waiting for it actually. I’ve talked about a deeper dimension in the world, which I call the Akasha Dimension, because Akasha was the idea that 5,000 years ago the Rishis in India had talked about as the fundamental dimension of the world, and so I say that, yes indeed the world has not only … that manifest level, which are little particles of quanta joining in love together, and forming systems and living systems and ecologies and planets and galaxies and so on. There is, underneath, something which is a less dense, more ratified domain of the cosmos, where there are not actual things, but there is the software of the things. There is the information. There are the elements that Plato, that’s what I said I’m becoming more and more Platonic, that Plato called forms and ideas. That’s why they’re called eternal objects. There are … and today, increasingly in the quantum cosmology, we are discovering an area or domain of reality, which is beyond space time.

  It creates space time, it gives rise to space time, so it isn’t in space time. So this is like a cosmic mind. It’s a cosmic logos. It’s a cosmic kind of consciousness. You can talk the divine consciousness if you wish, but it’s something that orients this process, whereby the denser energies become particles, the particles join together, and so the quanta on one level, which is a densified energy, arises out of the rarefied energies on the lower level. When you have a particle, virtual particle, you know, every once it disappears. In fact, extremely fast, and it just pops in and our of existence. So where is it? It’s the same particle, and it comes back is the exact same properties. If you modify it, it comes back modified, so what happened to the universe before it was born, before the Big Bang?

  What happens when the last galaxy, galactic sized black holes, disappear? It falls back. The ancients called this fall … arises out of and falls into this Akasha Dimension. We talk about this unified field, which is there, so not everything is on the level where we can observe it, we can interact with it, but the other things is deeper, but it’s even more real, because it’s what guides, what orients, what happens in the world.

  Marc Gafni: Right, and it’s really a beautiful way to say it, that actually what we think is real, is actually often just the surface expression of reality, and the actually deeper dimension … let me say it this way, spirit is more real than the physical, and the realness or concreteness of physicality doesn’t even begin to exhaust, it doesn’t have sufficient realness, sufficient thickness, to actually touch the interior dimension of spirit, which animates.

  >>> You can watch the whole 10-part dialogue here <<<

  In their dialogue, Ervin Laszlo and Marc Gafni share about the Second Shock of Existence, the New Renaissance, Evolutionary Love, and Unique Self Enlightenment as well as cutting-edge topics like super-coherence, self-organization, and the Unique Self Symphony.

  ---

  If you like the dialogue, you may be interested in our online course “ Becoming a Future Human”

  Who do we need to become in order for humanity to make it though its current dangerous technological adolescence and to create a world that is truly commensurate with our full human, scientific, social, spiritual, and technological capabilities? If you are here to embody your unique gift fully for the benefit of all life and play your role as a steward of the cosmos and the birth of a new humanity, then welcome! This course is for everyone that knows humanity is at the brink of an epochal shift, that believes we can create the world the great sages knew was possible, and that wants to be a part of co-creating that world together.

  >>> Learn more about the course here <<<

  
  
  
  

• Ervin Laszlo & Marc Gafni on Supercoherence

  
  

  Watch and listen to this 7-minute video, the fourth part of a 10-part dialogue with Ervin Laszlo and Marc Gafni in Tuscany on the topic of Evolutionary Love–envisioning a new Renaissance that will take us to the future. Watch previous posts from this series:

  • The New Renaissance, & Love as an Erotic Force
  • The Second Shock of Existence
  • Evolutionary Love, the True Nature of Reality, & Unique Self Enlightenment

  Contents

  • 1 Enjoy the fourth part of the dialogue here:
  • 2 Transcript
    • 2.1 >>> You can watch the whole 10-part dialogue here <<<
  • 3 If you like the dialogue, you may be interested in our online course “Becoming a Future Human”

  Enjoy the fourth part of the dialogue here:

  
  

  Transcript

  Dr. László: The idea is in us, I think. This is what I want to emphasize. You know, it’s been only last few years that I’ve kind of rediscovered that I’m a Platonist, I didn’t know that. I always thought of myself as more Aristotelian, but I discovered that in Plato, this idea that our deepest level, what Plato called the soul, or the spirit, it knows it all. It’s there. When we discover something, we rediscover it. The knowledge is there, because everything that we need in this world, everything that brought us here to be a complex species, endowed with consciousness, had to be in us, had to be a part of our heritage, otherwise we wouldn’t be here, so there is this drive towards complexity, diversity in this unity.

  And this is part of the unfolding of this evolutionary trend in the world. It unfolds because systems become integrated with other systems. Each of them maintains its identity, each of them contributes to it. Now if you could contribute to it consciously, you can carry forward this evolutionary trend, this evolutionary drive, toward higher levels of integration. This individuality, diversity, this unity, we can carry it forward much more effectively, enhance this process. And to my mind, this is what I’m thinking now, and what am working on now. This is the ultimate meaning, if there is such a thing, I’m think there is, ultimate meaning of existence, of conscious existence. That we’re able to prehend, to comprehend, that we are part of this evolutionary unfolding symphony. Which is taking us, like you have pointed out, is taking us as unique irreducible selves, into a larger unity, into a larger whole.

  We don’t have to worry about surrendering ourselves, because as conscious being, we maintain the universe in us. The whole universe is encompassed in our consciousness, because we can grasp it, we can prehend it, as Whitehead would say. So we are there, as an irreducible whole, in the universe, which is unfolding around us, and unfolding in us. We can describe it objectively, as the coherence of elements in higher level systems. We can describe is subjectively, but just as meaningfully, and perhaps even more meaningfully, as the sense of becoming part, part of larger and larger communities, communing with others, and this is the world around us. And that’s the idea, that’s the element that we have neglected. That’s the element in our deep consciousness, that we have to recover, through meditation, through prayer. That’s where spirituality, I think, helps, to us, to rediscover that we are part of a cosmic symphony unfolding.

  We carry our individuality as a force, as an element, not by disregarding and subordinating the rest, but by cohering, embracing this. I talk, you know, about all embracing love. You mentioned loved could be subverted a little bit if it’s limited to two or more individuals.

  Marc Gafni: That would be ordinary love, egoic love.

  Dr. László: Egoic love, but we could have a deeper love, which is our sense of being a part of the cosmos. Now, this seems to be like a very big statement, but part of reality, if you have that sense, you start relating differently, then you start not using coal, but using solar, for example. Then you start acting in a way that you can co-evolve with others around you. I’m convinced that biologists have also pointed out, there is no evolution in the world, except co-evolution. There is nothing except in partnership with others around it. Coherence is ultimately supercoherence, as you mentioned. To my mind, supercoherence as a very simple definition, is the coherence among coherent systems.

  We are a coherent system, in so far as we’re healthy. When we have disease, then we’re breaking down as a coherence, but as healthy beings we are coherent. Now, we are also coherent with our group, with our fellows, with our communities, with our families, with our ethnic group, with our culture, with our nation, et cetera, and ultimately with human kind. Then we are supercoherent. And there is nothing on this planet, on the web of life, that would not be supercoherent, except modern people, because they have forgotten this larger part of their coherence, and that’s the task before us, to recover this, to be, again, feel ourselves a part of the unfolding symphony of life, on this Earth. That’s the only way I think we can overcome our problems. That’s the best way we can move into a future where we can participate, where we can flourish, and have the rest of the system flourish as well.

  Marc Gafni: Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. So there’s this dislocation, right, which is this unique dislocation modernity, and this dislocation, of course, has served initially the evolutionary process, because it has allowed for the emergence of self, and the self’s dignity, and the self’s right, so human rights and democracy and feminism, have been what’s emerged from the beginning of this dislocation, the beginning of the dislocation was, I’m not only defined in terms of my larger context, I actually have irreducibly, irreducible dignity independently. You’re following, everyone who’s listening, so this dislocation that Ervin’s describing begins as a health evolutionary movement forward, but then it pathologizes, because the beginning of it stated, I’m not only part of a larger context, I also have my own irreducible dignity, but then it lost, it forgot, of course, I’m part of a larger context, of course I’m located right in the larger context, it dislocated from any location other than the desiccated self. And then the desiccated self was unable to experience its own meaning, and its own sense of wholeness. It then absorbed, parasitically, everything into itself, whether as a nation, or as an individual, which began the massive consumption of energy regimes, which produced the second shock of existence. And as Ervin said, we’re telling the exact same story. You know, slightly different ways of telling the narrative, which makes it exciting, but it’s the same story.

  
  

  >>> You can watch the whole 10-part dialogue here <<<

  In their dialogue, Ervin Laszlo and Marc Gafni share about the Second Shock of Existence, the New Renaissance, Evolutionary Love, and Unique Self Enlightenment as well as cutting-edge topics like supercoherence, self-organization, and the Unique Self Symphony.

  
  

  ---

  
  

  If you like the dialogue, you may be interested in our online course “Becoming a Future Human”

  Who do we need to become in order for humanity to make it though its current dangerous technological adolescence and to create a world that is truly commensurate with our full human, scientific, social, spiritual, and technological capabilities? If you are here to embody your unique gift fully for the benefit of all life and play your role as a steward of the cosmos and the birth of a new humanity, then welcome! This course is for everyone that knows humanity is at the brink of an epochal shift, that believes we can create the world the great sages knew was possible, and that wants to be a part of co-creating that world together.

  >>> Learn more about the course here <<<

  
  
  

• Dr. Zachary Stein’s New Paper: Love in a Time Between Worlds

  
  

  On the Metamodern “Return” to a Metaphysics of Eros

  What is the world?
  What is my mind?
  Can I really know love?
  Can I really know what is out there, what reality actually is?
  How do we move humanity forward at this time of great existential crisis?

  These are questions Zachary Stein asks in his paper Love in a Time Between Worlds: On the Metamodern “Return” to a Metaphysics of Eros as he turns the reader’s attention towards a metamodern metaphysics, or a new way at looking at reality.

  Metamodern being the era of time we are now in where we are aware of the scope of the crises we face together and we are aware of the lack of a powerful cultural narrative.

  “The term metamodern is used simply to describe the structure of what is emerging “after postmodernism;” it points out the new personalities, cultures, and theories that are able to critique and integrate the insights of both the modern and the postmodern.”

  Metaphysics being the stories we tell about ourselves and about the universe.

  “Believe it or not, there are metaphysical systems that survived postmodernism and popped out of the far end of the 1990’s with “truth” and “reality” still intact. These include object-oriented ontology and dialectical critical realism, among others. Metaphysics can be practiced after Kant and Darwin only by theorizing beyond what is thought of as acceptable in postmodernism and late-stage capitalism, as I discuss in the first section below.”

  Cosmo-Erotic Humanism, as is expertly detailed in A Return to Eros, by Kristina Kincaid and Marc Gafni, is a species of metamodern metaphysics, or, simply put, we need to embrace telling the most ultimate stories about ourselves, and about the universe. If we don’t do that, we will stay stuck in hyperobject problems, problems that are huge objects, extended over mass space and time, and effecting us all the time, like global climate change, racism and ineffectual politics.

  From respecting science as an indispensable form of knowing, to seeing that science is always contextual and truth always tentative; that reality always holds deeper truths, to a systems view of life, to panpsychism, that consciousness is everywhere in the universe and “as real” as matter and space, Stein opens the door for us to personally more deeply enter into these big questions in our own lives and communities.

  Kristina Amelong

  >>> Download the Paper Here <<<