New year's Resolutions tips and ideas

New year's Resolutions tips and ideas

The Context of all Contexts: the universal principle of organization

Written By: admin - Jan• 17•10
The most significant revolutionary effect of the physics of relativity and quantum theory has been to generate a new view of the physical universe as a single, indivisible, generate whole, in which phenomena and events are necessarily inter-determining. 

          It is a single system governed by a unitary dynamic principle, augmented by the results of findings in biology and ecology. Any such whole is not an undifferentiated unity, a blank; its integrity depends on the interconnection of parts internally related one to another, in accordance with an organizing principle. In the dimension of time, this principle is dynamic, generating a graded scale of subordinate wholes in which it is specified. The dynamic dialectically related forms are specific exemplifications of the universal dynamic principle governing the whole. Thus a design in the sense of pattern or structure, is obviously such a whole. Its parts and elements are interrelated systematically according to some principle of order and arrangement. The whole which contemporary physics as revealed, therefore, necessarily involves the generation of its own observation by intelligent beings, in whose minds it brings itself to consciousness.

          The whole or design is not ultimately fragmentary; in principle it must be complete. Deployed in scale of forms, it must ultimately culminate in a completed totality. Nor can its self-manifestation be only partial. In principle, and in fact, there must be a culmination of the scale that is both final phases and all-encompassing — an absolute, actual whole, totally self-contained and self-sufficient, and completely realised. It must sublate in itself the entire process of its self-specification, so that end and process overlap. It would be a mistake to imagine that this culmination can, or needs to, appear in time, for it must encompass all time in itself while nevertheless enduring throughout time. It does so in the same way as human consciousness transcends the present and includes at once both the present and the past while it continues to endure and participate in the flux. The culminating phase of the scale does this likewise, for it is the fulfilment of the organizing principle universal to every phase and every existent. It is immanent throughout all process, for every process is a manifestation of its self-differentiation, contributing at its specific level and in its peculiar degree to the final consummation.

          Finally, there are three characteristics of the universal principle of organization that need to be emphasised:

– It is in principle absolutely complete;
– Its completeness involves total explication in absolute self-consciousness;
– The final phase, like all others, must transcend and at the same include and comprehend all its predecessors; that is, the final phase must be, and yet transcend, the sum-total of all the parts (Harris: op.cit.).

          It must be such as no conception or existence can exceed it. This is the perfect being, totally complete, totally self-sufficient and self-sustaining — than that which a greater is inconceivable. As totally explicit in transparent self-consciousness, this consummation of the cosmic scale is an omniscient mind — the Alpha and Omega of all being. Because the universal principle is immanent in every part, it is what generates and determines the nature of every entity, and its activity is nothing more nor less than its own self-differentiation in and as the spatio-temporal world. But its ultimate realization is a transcendent comprehension and self-conscious realization of the whole. It is thus all-creative and all-powerful, as well as all-knowing and absolutely self-complete. All this is necessarily entailed by the very concept of design. If God — Purusa -— is conceived as the absolute universal principle of order manifesting itself — Prakrti — in and as the universe, and transcending all finite phases, the argument from design, as a proof of his existence, can be justified in this, its modern rendering, without requiring any inference from a contrived plan to a Supreme Architect (unless these phrases are used metaphorically). His knowing and conceiving are immediately and simultaneously his self-manifestation in and as the whole world — his creative power, his self-revelation. This conclusion has the rare advantage that it is not a resort to God as a cloak to cover our ignorance, but it is the logical consequence of the very nature of our knowledge and of the structure of the universe as discovered by empirical science — the latter however is not the eternal truth, or at least not all of it. Whatever the alternate theories which replace one another, it is still a unitary system, this universe with its dialectical series of ascending forms. Moreover, science is but one facet of a wider and more complex noosphere. It is inseparable from society and all that entails, and social sciences with philosophical systems in conjunction with science need to pursue the deeper implications of the organizing principle, alluded to above.

Based on “Holistic Science and Consciousness”, written by S. C. Malik for the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts.

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