Let’s jump right to 40,000 feet.
As discussed in the blog (particularly here), the phenomenon of life can be thought of as some sort of macro-scale, structured-water, quantum-information-organizing symphony of light, sound, and electromagnetism. It utilizes the natural crystalline properties of water to extract energy from the ether (“quantum vacuum fluctuations”) in order to live and to adapt.
In fact, it even begs the question: Which comes first? What we call “life”, or these apparent properties built into the physical structure of water at the molecular level? And for that matter, why stop there? After all, the whole thing is working together. As Nassim Haramein often says, “the whole thing is talking.”
(More on this in future episodes, or for more – check the shownotes.)
Episode 1 hinted towards the possibility that at some point in our understanding, what we currently have only conceived of as “metaphor” ceases to be so. You might think of this as due to some universal “illusion” (what in Vedic philosophy is referred to as maya, and in Daoism is the ten-thousand things which arise from the Dao ). For our syncretic purposes, the apparent consistency of this “illusion” can be thought of as a product of the entanglement of all mass-energy in the perceivable universe with itself. I’d like for you to visualize the beautiful cosmological model known in Vedic philosophy as Indra’s Net – a vast web of interconnected, multifaceted jewels where any one face on any one jewel reflects every other jewel in the net.
This model of Indra’s Net is both ancient and useful. However, there are fractal-holographic properties to our world that aren’t made entirely explicit by this model, at least on the face of it. That is, until you realize that this “Net” is, itself, a hyperdimensional object. Hah! You were thinking about physical 3D jewels – weren’t you?! What it’s describing isn’t just the relationship between protons in the physical universe, but the way information itself is structured.
As you zoom in to reality, stuff starts to look a lot like it does at other levels of scale. For instance, the arrangement of neurons in the brain compared to the plasma birkeland currents in intergalactic space as captured by the Chandra Observatory – or – hey! How about the cymatics dancing on the surface of a glass of water compared to what we think of as representing an “atom”. Go figure.
(This is called scale invariance and was discussed in Episode 4. It’s something known in ancient Western philosophy as the Hermetic axiom; “as above, so below”.)
If you extend this scale invariance to apply not only to what we think of as matter but also to information itself (of which matter is composed in a digital physics), it implies that the very nature of information is at some level self-recursive. This would actually necessitate the eventual dissolution of the abstract nature of metaphor. All is a self-entangled fractal unfolding of the same.
Sound redundant? It is.
Now we’re at 50,000 feet.
The origin of life in the universe becomes, in the holofractal model, an inevitability rather than the statistical impossibility presented by evolutionary and molecular biology.
“Quintessential Spirit” [jingshen] provides the means by which to
The Essential Huainanzi, Chapter 7 (Major, Queen, Meyer, and Roth)
trace to the source the root from which human life arises
and understand what animates humans’ form, frame, and nine orifices.
Taking its images from Heaven,
it coordinates and organizes humans’ blood and qi
with thunder and lightning, wind and rain;
[It] correlates and categorizes humans’ happiness and anger
with dawn and dusk, cold and heat.
Judging the distinctions between life and death,
distinguishing the traces of identity and difference
regulating the workings of movement and stillness,
it thereby returns to the Ancestor of nature and destiny.
It is what enables you to
cherish and nourish the essence and spirit,
pacify and still the ethereal and earthly souls,
not change the self on account of things,
and fortify and preserve the abode of Emptiness and Nothingness
Here we have the Daoist notion of what to the Renaissance thinker was the Vitruvian man.
A pictorial representation of the human body “squaring the circle” – a fractal unfolding of the Divine Proportion (Golden Mean). I’d like to point out how late in Western thought these ideas held their ground.
A notable distinction to be made in the study of metaphysics is the degree to which the world is excreted from these cosmic forces as an ongoing process (panentheism?) or to which the universe is a clock set in motion at the beginning of time (deism). Both of these can in some sense hold simultaneously, however (as stated in other episodes) understanding the world, fundamentally, as a process is a feature of much of Eastern thought.
The Huainanzi describes this “organization” as a process. “Taking it’s images from Heaven” it actively “coordinates and organizes”, but according to the archetypal and metaphysical ways in which those relationships are rightfully ordered (e.g., as corresponding to lightning and thunder, etc.). It is said that jingshen, the essence of spirit, naturally “provides the means” by which to return to itself. The structure of life’s organization is itself evidence of cause of life’s origin.
Consilience is the term for a phenomenon in the history of science, where independent evidence from unrelated sources converge to support a common conclusion. The patterns of the honeycomb, the north pole of Saturn, and the hydrogen bonding that arranges water into a hexagonal lattice aren’t merely the world organizing itself according to the path of least resistance. What would it even mean for the world to “organize itself according to the path of least resistance”? What is the world resisting against? Itself? Ohhh – right – entropy, dark matter, thermodynamics, yadda yadda. That stuff is soooo 20th century. It is the consilience of all form pointing to it’s origin – some hyperdimensional net of cosmic jewels.
“We tried to find another solution to the riddle of the origin of life, namely when the Earth’s primordial chemistry did not allow complex and precise autocatalytic cycles the continuation of a relatively high organization of a pre-biotic system could have been ensured in a special coherent regime of polar oscillations, stemming from water and later spread on a more complex and dynamic chemical system within water. The beauty of this outlook is that the water coherent regime can be highly organized even when the pre-biotic chemistry is in its infant stage and, when [left] to it, would prove to be incapable of any growth of informational richness.”
Igor Jerman, 2016
In other words, the incredible chemical complexity that constitutes what we think of as “life” was already running in virtual reality, more or less as potential, embedded in the complexity of liquid water’s interaction with itself before the molecules necessary for life were even present within it.
Quantum biology shows us that the information about how to organize life must literally be derived from the ether. The ability of matter to organize itself coherently and in a way that negates entropy is a natural product of the holofractal redundancy we’ve discussed. Being the superfluid substrate through which all space and time is mobilized, the coherent fluctuations of the ether provide a means by which thermodynamic equilibrium is broken in favor of less entropy, more stability, and the flourishing and replication of life.
Indeed, even, to have boundaries (or a membrane) and to distinguish self from other – (as the Huainanzi states) “distinguishing the traces of identity and difference”.
If you ask me, as I said in Episode 3, the miracle of life is absolutely nothing short of a miracle, even when given some kind of physical explanation.