We are not separate from this arising world? So what are we individually in this big picture? And, more importantly, how do we participate?
We embody two important things:
- We are the expression of everything that has gone before, what you might call a result;
- And we are (really “are” and not “have”) the potential for choice and action to generate the potential for what will come next.
Everything is perfect (as in an accurate result) as the expression of every creative (potential generating) act that has every happened; and in the same moment there is a wealth of new things to try, new structures, forms, and capacities to create. Nothing is “wrong” and everything is up for improvement.
Most of us live in our worlds as a result; that is, instead of knowing our bodies, our minds, and our lives as an ever changing potential, we think of ourselves as something that happened, something that is stuck and has a problem. It is possible to learn to focus on ourselves as the choosing and acting dynamism in the universe. As we do that, we understand that we can live at the level of causality knowing that we are part of the causal component of our world.
You are Your Arising Potential
The model tells us that you are a portion of the arising potential of the universe embodying the creation of something new. You are that. It is not your “reason”; it is your being. Reason implies to us that you can choose what or why. But in reality you can engage with your potential arising or you can resist what is coming into being through you. You can try to choose something else, only to fight against the current.
Imagine a musician who is brilliant, dedicated, a magical performer, and a generous performing partner. This musician has dedicated his entire life to becoming a creative expression. As such, he is a clear embodiment of a creative force, totally and completely engaged in the realization of creative power. He is a generative being in a volatile state bringing something wild and surprising into being in the world.
In the most practical way, he IS this musical expression arising. He is the music itself. You can sense it in the performance and in his entire life, which is one of exemplary engagement; he is fully engaged the arising potential that is exploding into expression through him. His experience is that he just “has” to make music and the more he engages with it the more it arisies. We can view musicians as the embodiment required for music to arise into the univers and our experience. And the music is the embodiment of a greater expression of the experience of being human and one particular expression of our possibilities.
We each have some engagement with life that is arising with us, a role to play, a gift to give. Not all of them as dramatic as being famous musician, but all critical to the unfolding of the universe. We are the confluence of possibilities arising as a creation, which can perceive, choose, and act. This is the unique capacity of a human being, and a powerful role in the expressive nature of our world. Optimally, we don’t dedicate ourselves to something outside of us; we choose to powerfully engage with who or what we are, whatever it may be.
Our musician is a more overt creative expression in which his consciousness is totally engaged with the arising potential, enhancing and reinforcing it with his creative choices, enabling the whole thing to arise like a blaze into being. Some of us are more visibly a creative expression, but all of us, with whatever expression arises, are in support of the arising whole.
This is what an engaged purpose is—a human fully expressing the arising potential that is moving through them.
Note: One of my inspirations is the musician Mark O’Connor. When you watch him perform and read about his work and life, you come to realize that here is someone who is maximizing his potential and creating something wondrous in the world. Here is the link to his My Space page and some of his wonderful music.
The universe is really one continuity in the process of becoming, but we perceive things, people, organizations
The truth is that it is all continuous—that it is one universe arising into being as itself. But it appears in the Actuality as an infinite number of separate entities.
The understanding that we are separate is an illusion of the creative process. Individual expression and action function in the universe the same way multiple colors are used by an artist to create a single image. Each object that we identify as separate is just a focus of activity (locus of information), which is functioning as a seemingly separate as part of the dance. It has its own arising potential and persistence, and its own ability to act. But they are only seemingly separate from the whole.
So an entity, an object, a person or an organization is the expression of information about its current state of being, its potential (possible future states), and a localized ability to choose and to act. The potential of an entity is arising into being as the entity and its environment. It is a flow of becoming that has complex structures of change and persistence. That is what we mean by updraft. A group of entities (a family, a business, a bus full of travelers) comprise a confluence of their individual potentials creating more complexity and expanded abilities to choose and to act.
The Concept of Persistence
Some things have a great potential for persistence, that is, they stay around in fairly static states. Other entities (both objects and people) express wide variability in their patterns of persistence, sometimes chaotic. Water can be water for a very long time, but the form it takes on is a chaotic structure.
The world of objects embodies a vast range in the qualities of persistence, though we can see with careful observation that nothing is perfectly persistent. The Himalaya mountain range, while seemingly a fixture for time immemorial, is changing every day as tectonic plates shift and surfaces crumble. The planets shifts, the sun burns, the waters flow. Everything is changing and the variety of changeability is core to the fabric of the world. Humans also embody this variability in persistence and changeability.
So what is persistence? It is the preponderance of likelihood that something will stay the same. A rock is more persistently a rock than a flower is a flower. And the opposite truth is that something that is ephemeral, fleeting, amorphous has the likelihood and ability to change. It is easier to change your thought than to change the color of your eyes; the thought has a smaller preponderance of persisting. Something that is very persistent has a lot of potential to remain the same, and therefore it requires a lot of accurately generated potential to change it. Something with little potential to remain the same does not require the same effort.
What is most persistent about a person? Which parts of a human being express stability? Is it:
- Bones? Muscles? Teeth? Brain?
- Personality? Emotions? Knowledge?
- Ideas? Beliefs? Intents? Thoughts?
These attributes represent a great deal of variability in persistence, but none of these are the most persistent attribute of a person. The most persistent element of a person is the process that causes the person to come into being—the ongoing becoming that creates a focus of activity, which we call a person. Each of us is the arising result of a process of becoming. And everything about us has more or less persistence. Our bones are more persistence than our hair. Our beliefs are more persistent than our thoughts. My location on the planet is more persistent than my emotions. We are a complex mixture of elements that express a wide variety of stability. This particular complexity is what defines us a human. And freedom in the elements that are highly ephemeral—the ease of potentiating change—are where the possibility of evolution is most available.
Moderate persistence is required for creative expression and the ability to evolve. A tree needs to maintain its existence as a tree in the midst of growing. A person has to maintain his existence as a person to evolve his capacities. There must be enough stability to perceive, choose and act; but enough dynamism to evolve. If we are too rigid, we cannot learn. If humans were so chaotic that we had no persistent pattern, we could not express what we might have learned. Evolution is the process of changing our relationship to the world in a way as to express a moderately persistent way of being in the world that, over time, continually shifts into a greater capacity for engagement and understanding.
We live on an edge between chaos and static order—this is where creative choices have meaning and evolution can proceed.
(see my apologies for the post at mary.panttaja.com)
Let’s assume this orange cylinder represents the moment—that “now” when
everything is actually happening, when it is not the future nor the past, but actually going on. It’s impossible to “represent” the moment actually—it would take the universe! But let’s pretend that this silly orange cylinder represents the time/place/moment when the potential becomes the actual. It would have to go on infinitely in all directions, of course. (Notice that it is not really a “time”, a “place”, or a “moment” precisely.)
The yellow cloud represents the potential—the sum of possibilities and preponderances. The blue cloud the actual—that which came into being. Notice the ambiguous edge between what is actual and what is potential.
.
.
.
The potentials arrive in/at/with the moment as they transform into the actual world.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
The actualities, the world as we know it, arise in the moment—the
same moment.
.
.
.
..
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Actions, which also always happen in the moment, generate new potentials.
.
.
.
.
.
Everything is happening in the moment where we at once experience what is
happening and act to create potential for the future. It is called the Arising World for it is ever arising from the potential. This movement of arising is what we call the updraft; it represents the potential that is arising into actual. That’s the movement and power we capture when we are updrafting.
The Model Itself
This model describes a functional structure with a set of simple principles (axioms) and relationships between those principles. Some of the axioms represent things (the existential axioms: state, moment, entities); some of them represent movement (the operational axioms: becoming, action, choice). To make the basic axioms easier to apply to real life, we have developed derivative axioms from the synthesis of the existential and operational axioms, which helps us understand the ordinary world.
Things that Are: Actualities and Potentials
At the deepest level, the model shows us that there are two main elements of the creative universe.
- There is the stuff of the world that is—that which we normally perceive. We call it the Actuality or Actualities. It includes what most of us would perceive as the actual stuff of the world. (Ambiguities about what is real stuff and what is potential stuff are interesting, but not really pertinent to the application of the model. Thank goodness, for the line is hard to draw.)
- There is the Potential, the information about the future world into which the Actuality will transform. This information includes patterns of persistence, arrays of possibilities, likelihoods—all of the pending possibilities that have been previously generated. We understand a lot of the information that resides in the Potential, but not all of it. (We can predict the movement of a golf ball, but not the shifting of an earthquake, or the thought process of an Einstein.) Some of it is too vast or complex for us to be able to predict what is actually going to happen, though our capacity to understand is expanding all the time.
We call the combination of the Actuality and the Potential the State of the universe. State is an infinite informational state space—that is, everything in the world has, in each moment, some state or condition which is changing to some degree all the time. Its momentary actual state, its potential states, and the process of change itself determine how it changes—what it will become—what happens next.
In each moment, the potential becomes the actual—the world arising into being.
How the World Operates – Becoming
Becoming is the core of the universe’s existence. Everything is changing in every moment. The universe is a process of change and evolution even more than it is a set of things.
The rules for the process of becoming are in large part what we try to learn in life. These rules determine the creation of the actual world from the potential of what could be. We understand a lot of the rules of becoming. We can explain why a plane flies, or why balls fall, or how the surfboard catches the wave. We know why the baby is hungry. But there are many other underlying patterns and rules that we do not yet understand, though our evolution, exploration, and investigations are driven in large part by our desire to uncover them and to understand more accurately how the world works. Each individual has a different level of understanding and, in large part, that is what individual growth and development is—the expansion of our ability to understand all the ways of the world and to work creatively with them.
Why a new model of how the universe works?
Well, if we want to be more successful we may need a new way of looking at things, a way that corrects our misunderstandings and give us a stronger basis from which to choose—and choosing every moment is everything. The Arising World Model (AWM) also gives us a firm foundation for understanding our creative practices—what will work for us and what will never work.
The reality is that the world is just what it is regardless of whether we understand it or whether we have a good working model for our engagement. But if we can improve our understanding, we also change what we are doing which is the key step in evolving our own creative potential.
So, What Don’t We Know That We Need To Know?
There are several key reasons why a new way of thinking may be useful to correct misunderstandings that are pervasive in our current worldview.
More Than Action Matters
First, most of us barely have a clear model of how the physical world works. So we do not have a complete or practical model that includes how our thoughts, intentions, and beliefs affect the world and each other. And it turns out, whether you believe you thoughts do or do not affect the world, you will be more effective if you work within a model that guides your choices of what you do and what you think and believe. We will be more successful if we believe that our thoughts are effectively actions and that we can and need to choose them explicitly. It is not logical to separate the body and its ability to act from the mind and its ability to think, for they are both simply facets of you and your potential coming into being in every moment.
In fact, the universe is one whole and we are all, bodies and minds, arising together (no matter how convincingly it seems as if we are a lot of separate bodies and minds). So a model that helps us work within these seeming dichotomies in a practical way allows us to engage more effectively.
It turns out that when we consider the results, what happens next, we need to think of the world as a vast continuous whole. But when we consider our choices and our actions, we need to remember that we hold some individual responsibility for what happens next in that whole.
We Are Not In Control, But Are Critical to What Happens Next
Second, most of us need a new model because we think that the world is just happening to us, that we are victims of everything and everyone else. In thinking this, we also believe that what we do or think doesn’t matter much in the big scheme of things. What this model helps us to visualize is that nothing just happens to us and that we are responsible for everything we do, everything we think, and everything we believe. And that our actions make a difference in what we experience in our lives and what everyone else experiences in their life.
We need to get over the belief that we can be ambiguous, half-hearted, or incongruous about our actions, thoughts, and beliefs. We need to become whole-hearted about everything we do if we want to leverage the true power of our creative ability. And this power will come from two aspects of the human experience: the state of our awareness and the nature of our actions.
Skillful Means – With Awareness of the Implications, Do the Right Thing
This explanation of the world is focused on the nature of actions and, by expanding the definition of right action, the state of awareness of the actor. To develop skillful means is to evolve our ability to know what the right choice is and to execute the optimal action. AWM is ultimately practical in that it shows us how to make the best choices and to execute effective maneuvers. But optimally, it requires that we have a comprehensive worldview from which to make the choices, so that we understand the true implications.
