LEVELS

“Reality… is pictured as a limitless series of levels which extend to deeper and deeper subtleties and out of which the particular, explicate order of nature and the order of consciousness and life emerge. Synchronicities can therefore be thought of as an expression of this underlying movement, for they unfold as patterns of thoughts and arrangements of material processes which have a meaningful conjunction when taken together.”

- F.D. Peat

Alive On Many Levels

The complexity of living systems is manifested on many different but functionally linked levels. For example, a person walking down the street is a conglomeration manifested on many levels operating simultaneously, for example the quantal,  molecular,  genetic, cellular, organ, body and psychological levels.

No Fundamental Level

As such, top-down vs. bottom-up;  higher vs. lower; macro vs. micro, etc. are not well formed, and are more usefully thought of as squiggles: (top-down~bottom-up, higher~lower, macro~micro). Linkage across levels of observation/description is by virtue of shared dynamics.

The figure, Reciprocal Causality of Coordination Dynamics ( TCN, p.), illustrates a basic arrangement of such linkages. Individual coordinating elements within a dissipative system self-organize into dynamic collective coordination patterns that affect the self-organizing coordinating elements that generate it.

A key point here  is that such individual coordinating elements can be  be mechanical, metabolic, environmental, neural…(psychological, social, societal). Even though phenomena observed at different levels may be radically different, the dynamics of the element~coordination, the part~whole, the one~many follows the same coordination law.

This insight in itself is worthy of much more research~development. Can individual coordinating elements be thoughts? Memories? Is the sudden flash of realization, awareness, kensho, enlightenment a self-organization of many individual thoughts, loosely coupled, into a collective coordination pattern we experience as that flash?

This is still unknown, but is becoming a more and more reasonable prospect; based upon the available evidence of a large and ever growing knowledge base resulting from the work of many scientists in the institutes and centers around the world. Of course, there remains much work to do.

Still, as a thought experiment, let’s suppose there is merit to this idea, that such “levels of awareness” do exist. Actually most of us would agree with this idea at least in spirit, that some people are  enlightened, that they have achieved a deeper level of awareness. Why? Because we have experienced it. We have met met those people. Perhaps we are those people, or at the very least have felt the flash of realization at some special moments of our lives.

But returning to our point, in the paradigm of the complementary nature of complementary pairs, of squiggles, the same laws of coordination define and operate at and different levels.

Following this idea, just as their is no fundamental physical level, their is no fundamental psychical level either. This may be one of the reason for the Mona Lisa smile of buddhas and sages!

Nevertheless, if psychical~physical levels are created~destroyed via coordination dynamics, then many specific predictions can be made, and an entire theory~experiment paradigm is available to guide further research~development into the mysterious levels of human awareness.