The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision

by Fritjof Capra

This new conception of life involves a new kind of thinking – thinking in terms of relationships, patterns, and context.

The frame of a photograph is two dimensional. It has height and width. What we see through the viewfinder of a camera has three dimensions. It includes depth. Two dimensional thinking and perceiving is much simpler that three dimensional thought, which includes consideration of context, the nature of relationships, and recognition of patterns. Two dimensional thinking and perceiving involves broad use of the categories of right and wrong, helpful and unhelpful, good and bad, with us or against us. Two dimensional thinking arises out of fear. Survival is either/or. It is a faster way of thinking because it is reactive. Putting situations and people into broad categories of safe or unsafe allows us to react quickly without losing time considering the consequence. This is a helpful response if you are being stalked by a predictor that sees you as dinner. Context, relationships, and patterns don't matter when the only question is how to survive. Two dimensional perceiving is short term and self-centered.

The dark side of this fusion of science and theology was that any contradiction by future scientists would necessarily have to be seen as heresy.

Dead-end thinking occurs when we believe we know the final answer and no more questions are tolerated. It is the root of conflict between science, religion, philosophy, and spirituality. It is the basis of political divisiveness and forms the foundation of oppression, inequality, and even war. Dead-end thinking is formed by a sense of certainty maintained by dead-end categories that funnels all new information and ways of looking at things into broad categories that allow it to be easily dismissed. Dead-end thinking is both the death and the end of creative thought and alternative perspectives. It creates impermeable walls that compress curiosity and interest into variations of what is already known. The root of dead-end thinking is fear.

Galileo's strategy of directing the scientist's attention to the quantifiable properties of matter proved extremely successful in physics, but it also exacted a heavy toll. During the centuries after Galileo, the focus on quantities was extended from the study of matter to all natural and social phenomena within the framework of the mechanistic worldview of Cartesian-Newtonian science.

This laid the groundwork for an economic system that isolated the accumulation of capital as the driving force while reducing considerations of health, values, equal opportunity and sustainability

rational intuitive

Integrative thinking is also rational and self-assertive thinking can be intuitive. I believe that integrative thinking transcends self-assertive thinking. It is not either /or. Integrative thinking includes all aspects of self-assertive thinking while self-assertive thinking includes few of the aspects of integrative thinking.

The nature of medieval science was very different from that of our contemporary science. It was based on both reason and faith, and its main goal was to understand the meaning and significance of things, rather than prediction and control.

The need for prediction and control diminishes in the absence of fear. An open-ended journey to explore the meaning and significance of things leads to a broader and deeper understanding of evolution and development over time. Without fear we can learn to co-evolve and co-develop with the rest of nature instead of working against it and each other. Fear creates a shortened narrow time frame that severely limits awareness of the rhythms of natural life and blocks the ability to see our connection with the natural world. Prolonged Fear throws us out of physical, mental, and emotional balance and the lack of balance builds tension and generates more fear. Man has created a world view that keeps trying to run ahead of nature even as it is running out of energy. The man-made world seeks increasing control from a narrowing perspective. It's like driving faster in freezing rain when the windshield is icing faster than the defroster can clear it. One's entire focus is consumed by potential dangers on a road that's becoming slippier as the car behind pushes us to move faster. We are trapped on a road that takes us away from a sense of our true nature. They is no time to think about where we are going and why; no time to reflect on who we are or who we want to be; no time to consider the meaning and purpose of our lives or the value and potential of the life around us. The only reasonable thing to do is to pull off to the side of the road and take a rest until the storm passes. Then we can clear the windshield. We can even get out of the car and look around, maybe reflect on where we're going and why and think about where we really want to go and how to get there from here.

2.3 The century of the gene

The evolution of scientific thought was less an expansion of a frame and more a narrowing of perspective. It was assumed that the underlying causal mechanism was to be found by looking at smaller and smaller images of the components of life and matter. There was an assumption of one correct understanding of how the world operates and the focus was on ever more minute and elusive details. The perspective of interaction and relationship was lost in this narrowing view. Identifying the components of electrons and chromosomes is much easier than trying to figure out what affects a relationship. We can remove ourselves from the study of molecules and chromosomes. The observations will be the same no matter what mood we are in or whether we're hungry or not, or how well we slept the night before. New discoveries replace older theories.

This means that neither the electron nor any other atomic “object” has any intrinsic properties independent of its environment.

I understand spirituality as essentially a process of relationships -how we relate to our world and each other. Many religions primarily emphasize a relationship with God, where God is a separate entity from the world and us. Separating God from creation opens our thinking to a wide range of self-serving misconceptions. Religious ideas presented with the greatest certainty tend to be those that serve the self interests of their leaders. The leader is seen as an intermediary between humans and God who delineates a path to God that must be rigidly followed. Relationships do not grow or deepen by following a fixed path defined by someone else. Establishing a meaning relationship with another requires that one must be seen by the other, or at least that one desires to see and be seen by the other. Placing an intermediary between one and the other creates a screen or filter that darkens and distorts one's ability to see and be seen. A true and effective spiritual leader describes what can be seen from her perspective in a way that fits within the frame of the seeker. The risk of false teaching increases to the extent that she fails to acknowledge the limitations of her perspective or claims that her way of understanding and experiencing God is somehow the correct way. If we imagine God as creator, we can best get to know God through our relationship with creation. Creation is an all-encompassing whole. We diminish our relationship with God to the extent that we disregard our relationship with any part of creation we come in contact with. Brain pathways form the process, content, and limitations of our thinking and understanding. They are formed and reinforced through experience. Pathways that are most often reinforced determine and limit our view of reality. Fear draws our focus to survival, which makes us more self-centered. Pathways that reinforce self-serving behavior restrict our ability to see others clearly and therefore limit our capacity for healthy relationships. (That is why "do not fear" is an oft repeated statement in scripture). Fear and self-centeredness undermine relationships. They lead to a desire for control and limit our ability to see others clearly. It's like focusing on our own reflection in a window rather than seeing the other through the window. One of the first steps of true spirituality is to transcend fear. Religion based on fear turns us toward isolation and exclusion, which blocks our capacity to establish healthy relationships to our world and each other.

by linking the notion of structural coupling with the notion of structural drift, we arrived at the basic mechanisms of evolution.

Patterns of adaptation in the organism respond to patterns of change in the environment

According to Maturana, the behavior of a living organism is determined. However, rather than being determined by outside forces, it is determined by the organism's own structure – a structure formed by a succession of autonomous structural changes. Hence, the behavior of the living organism is both determined and free.

this describes how the brain influences behavior. Our behavior is determined and predictable to the extent that we allow our perceptions to be formed by habit and outside influences.

Mind is always present in a bodily structure; and, vice versa, a truly living organism must be capable of cognition (the process of knowing). The same holds for human consciousness. Consciousness is not a transcendent entity, but it is always manifest within an organic living structure,

Conscious cannot be separated from the environmental network of living interactions. Separation from the network is death. Consciousness has a permeable boundary. We are conscious of something while we are in something. Each of those somethings has a consciousness of its own that influences our consciousness. Humans who attempt to create boundaries on consciousness become self-centered, and to the extent they succeed, narcissistic. We have a clear "sense of self" which is a sense of identity - essentially a name we give to ourselves that sums up how we see ourselves. This is an artificial identity to the extent that we see it as fixed. Our true identity is an evolving pattern of interaction in concert with the evolution of the natural world. We gain a clearer sense of our true identity to the extent that we are open to the natural world while maintaining awareness of the essential structure of patterns of interaction that maintain health and support the fulfillment of our innate potential.

The view that the emergent properties of molecules are not explicable as a matter of principle on the basis of the components is opposed by several scientists, who argue that this is tantamount to assuming a mysterious force of some undefined nature – a kind of vitalistic principle.

How an Atheist Can Get to Heaven It is possible to get to know God without believing in "God" as defined by religious leaders. An atheist, but otherwise open-minded scientist who studies the emergent properties of biological and social self-organizing systems in nature will see clear, consistent evidence of the interconnected unity of life. She will recognize the importance of relationship and strive to identify to obstacles to healthy, sustainable interaction with every part of nature. She will see the value and potential inherent in every aspect of nature and all life. She will see the connection between the value and interconnectedness of all life and her own health and well-being and make a commitment to support the health and well-being of all living beings. In short, she will learn how to love. Since God is love, she will to know God.