The emergence of a coherent and transformative vision of health.

Here in the United States there is a kind of collective psychosis or delusion that is embodied in the two figureheads of Trump and Musk. There is a powerful single mindedness of purpose that is driving that destructive process forward. It has to do with power over and extractive wealth and ethnic cleansing.

Writing during the rise of Nazi Gernamy, Walter Benjamin captured this sense of shock in an aphorism called The Angel of History:

A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the Angel of History. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken what is dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Ed. and Intro. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1968.

This is a good metaphor for our situation today. We understand the paralysis this angel is experiencing as a function of trauma. We are all being swept forward into something that feels inevitable but out of control and we are watching the devastation of our world as this happens. We are in a situation where we can go neither forward nor backwards and so the only solution is to draw deep within. It is this deep inner pursuit of truth that is producing the alternative view of life and health which is emergent today, a new theory of life or physics of life.

This is a view of reality not built upon the five external senses but upon an awareness of the interior senses, called interoception and proprioception. We have a rich wealth of integrative, interior function that is largely untapped. This is the interoceptive resource from which we can recover from the trauma we are experiencing and at the same time gain a new vision of the deeply integritive and coherent nature of life and reality.

As a healer and theorist working at high level in recent developments in complexity theory, I can see an emergent focus arising in a new paradigm of understanding. We are coming to a significant degree of coherence in how we understand complex living organisms to be profoundly integrated and interwoven, and this stands in contrast to the traditional view of science and evolution that is mechanistic, divisive and which stresses competition over cooperation.

Some of this new emergent thinking is being driven by the need to clarify what is consciousness and intelligence and to understand how self-directed organisms including humans function so efficiently. The technological drive towards robotics, artificial intelligence, and computer science is providing the impetus and funding for breakthrough work in these fields. The challenge with robotics and artificial intelligence is how to replicate what is already happening within life. From this is emerging the new physics of life.

This is something like the culmination of a long process of development in the domain of integrative scientific and philosophical thinking. I call this the somatic tradition of natural philosophy but the point is that it has always been a sort of underdog in modern history since Copernicus and certainly since Newton. The mathematical, reductionist, and objectifying tradition of the physics of inanimate matter has always held the upper hand and defined our understanding of reality as mechanistic rather than organic and interwoven.

We are at a turning point however and one example of the emergence of this new coherent vision of integrative organismic thinking is something I have been investing myself in over the last couple weeks as I have been mostly bedridden after my surgery. It is called active inference theory or Free Energy Principle and was originally developed by Karl Friston and others. It is quite powerful but isn’t the only element or even the most potent element of the emergent scientific and philosophical consensus that I see.

https://doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2013.0475

Reductionist scientific thinking has the upper hand and because it objectifies life, in our minds this has the effect of the loss of connection and sensitivity we see in the political chaos happening today. There is a single mindedness of focus that this mechanistic worldview has and that is embodied in events here in the United States today but which is really just a destructive force, not a form of progress. In contrast, I feel strongly that there is emergent vision of the first principles of a new kind of biophysics or a theory of life occurring now and this is a big part of that focused vision of health that I think is an evolutionary imperative. It is not coherent on a popular level yet but those like myself working at a high level in fields like synergistic anatomy and complexity theory, where I believe most of this is happening, have a strong sense of a genuine paradigm shift occurring.

What is different about this vision of health is that it does not emerge from the prefrontal cortex and is not only a product of abstract thinking. It is something that we feel in our guts and is a product of the coherence not just of ideas but of our instinctive feelings and tissues that are real and alive within and between ourselves and each other and the environment we are all a part of.


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