Life and unfolding wholeness

We need to discover how to sense what is unfolding rather than simply trying to execute a plan…

—John Huss ¹

…all our experience…is…a complex flow, a constant unfolding, responsive dance of reciprocal gestures. It exists in process and in relationship…

—Iain McGilchrist ²

It is…a process of unfolding…, in which the whole precedes the parts, and actually gives birth to them…

—Christopher Alexander 3

Christopher Alexander and David Bohm talked about unfolding. For Alexander, it was an unfolding from wholeness, for Bohm from implicate order. Christopher Alexander’s key idea is that what grows and unfolds, literally grows and unfolds out of a structure of symmetries that exist in the way that a given portion of space is differentiated.⁴ In Bohm’s work, the larger wholeness takes the form of implicate order.

In Christopher Alexander’s conception of matter-space each spatial region, at every scale, has a relative value, and a relative degree of life.⁵ It is an entirely new kind of space where every region has its own (different) value, regardless of whether the value can be calculated, or whether it is observed empirically.⁶

Christopher Alexander believed that all physical laws will fall out as natural consequences of unfolding wholeness. He believed that all physical laws will turn out to be special cases of the principle that the next step after a given configuration will be the one which does most to preserve, or extend, the wholeness.⁷

A qualitative feature of Christopher Alexander’s view of matter-space is that each region not only is associated with value, but also with something more personal or self-like in its nature.⁸ There is a connection to life, feeling, and our experience of the self. This is a view which includes both contemporary physics and value. It is also a view that might contribute to insights to what life itself is when it arises in nature.⁹

What Christopher Alexander suggested was that space itself comes to life more and more. Space doesn’t have a fixed nature like a mechanism.¹⁰ It is something whose quality evolves. It actually changes in its nature. It is a process in which space locally changes qualitatively. Life is a direct result of a feature of space.¹¹

If I consciously see nature as part of the essence of my own being, then my perception and understanding changes. I perceive nature as part of my self. I begin to see its beauty as something to which I have a deep relationship. It becomes more precious. The character of nature, the character of the world and our relation to it, changes.¹² We enter into an entirely new relation to life itself.

Notes:
1. John Huss, in Michael Jones, Artful Leadership: Awakening the Commons of the Imagination.
2. Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things.
3. Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building.
4. Christopher Alexander, The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe, Book 4 – The Luminous Ground, p. 321.
5. Ibid., p. 325.
6. Ibid..
7. Ibid., pp. 325–26.
8. Ibid., p. 326.
9. Ibid., p. 327.
10. Ibid..
11. Ibid., p. 328.
12. Ibid., p. 330.