Complexity is the Expression of Simplicity
As far as I’m concerned, complexity theory has completely changed the entire paradigm of knowledge itself. It has, for example, eliminated the need for a pseudoscience called “psychology”, completely. But because all phenomena really are complex systems, it is the one theory that understands everything. They’ve been looking for a theory of everything, but they’ve been looking in the wrong place. They’ve been looking toward quantum physics, and they can’t do that. That in itself is a subcategory of complexity theory. It is one form of a complex system that exists at micro levels. But complexity itself, the archetype of complexity, if you will, is the key conceptual cluster, let’s say, that spreads out, radiates out, to enable us to understand everything.
It’s an extremely important theoretical concept, and the nuances of complexity theory, which are evolving all the time, are affecting every aspect of modern life—whether it’s management theories, organizational design, dealing with scientific questions, dealing with all kinds of social, ecological, permaculture questions—all of it, everything you can think of as a system that operates according to the rules of complexity. And therefore one cannot overestimate its importance if you want to understand the universe.
Now, the reason that complexity theory is inadequate is, it must be—and has not yet been—accompanied by an adequate simplicity theory. And this is the problem. You see, complexity exists at the surface level of phenomena, but at the depth level, there has to be simplicity. Now, they know that in terms of relative simplicity, that you have to have code, and the code will produce the appearance on the screen of the computer, right? So you have to have a few laws that then will produce the effect—the genotype produces the phenotype—the DNA will produce the larger effects of the form of the organism, etc. But they haven’t gone deep enough into simplicity, and this is why complexity theory itself will turn out to be a subset of Atmanological theory—but I don’t know if I should get into that because you’ll think I’m giving you a commercial—but it is, without understanding simplicity, and that the emergence of complexity itself must come out of a prior existent intelligence, that without recognizing that intelligence that has produced complexity, and therefore is teleological in its nature, it operates from beyond time, but its appearance will be from the future to the present or to the past; it’s a reversal of the timeline. And this has always been present in yogic theory, which is why there can be precognitive dreams, and premonitions of all kinds. And it enables us then to, if we return teleology to its rightful place—because it has been disowned by modern science, and there’s no getting around the existence of teleology.
This was understood long ago, including by the ancient Greeks as part of Aristotle’s “four causes”, right? You had formal cause, material cause, efficient cause, and final cause. Well, final cause is teleology. In other words, what is the purpose that this thing has been made for? Right? Well, that means there must be a maker, a designer who made it for a certain purpose. But the modern science threw out final cause, and they threw out formal cause as well, because with Darwinism, they wanted it to be random. So there is no blueprint, there’s no formal cause, and all you’re left with is material cause and efficient cause, which leaves you with an inadequate way of describing reality.
Now, complexity theory is finally moving into that vacuum and allowing us to understand how complex events actually occur, which science could not explain. And that’s why they had to develop things like fractal mathematics, and vagueness theories, and various others. But these are all tangential to the core issue of teleology, and of the relationship of matter to life, OK? Because the other theory they threw out that was the dominant theory in the nineteenth century was called “Vitalism”, and it was the understanding that life operates on a different principle than does inanimate matter. And when you have an appearance of life within a form, then there is a quotient of freedom that is present that can overcome codes that were deterministic in nature. And so it overrides causality of the efficient and material kind that science was focusing on. So it’s extremely important that, now, I think Vitalism is also able to return with scientific credibility and not as some crackpot woo-woo new age idea. And again, this goes back to the very origins of Greek thought and of Indian yogic thought.
So in honor of that, I created a new acronym as our word for SATTVIC, since that seems to be a key word in this retreat. Let’s see, let’s call it Simple Attunement to the True Teleological Vitalon as Implicit Code.
I think this concept is an important one for us to understand. David Bohm, the great physicist, talked about the implicate order, right, that you cannot get wholeness without an implicate order. But the implicate order has to be made out of implicate codes, of the functioning of matter, or of life, and to understand the essence of life, which I’m referring to as a vitalon, because I consider it to be an actual particle that will be discovered by physicists. I think that’s what’s next in this vacuum as the overthrow of the standard model has occurred, there will be a whole rush of new alternative theories that will be able to finally have space in which to be heard, you see?
So that’s also going to shift things, because the marginalized physicists who have avant-garde views of reality, like as a simulation and as a hologram, and all of that that were kept out of the standard model now will have an opportunity to be heard as they were not before. So what I want to express is that we must accept as a reality, certain phenomena that do not appear in third party objective terms. So when you meditate, there is a, if you want to call it a phenomena, or an imperience, but it is something that is replicable even though it’s not objectively viewable under a microscope, of an experience of a point of light within the third eye, and some would locate it within the pineal gland. But that point of light I would call the vitalon. That is the emergent phenomenon of the Atman that produces and sustains life in the human organism, and is the channel through which information is downloaded.
And that vitalon, when it leaves the body, that’s called death. And so it is this spark of life and light that needs to be integrated into physics theory if we’re going to understand how life proceeds and sustains itself. Anyway, enough of that.
Well, I won’t say enough of it—there’s a lot more we have to do, especially to understand that the vitalon is teleological in nature—in other words, it draws us from the future toward our destiny. Our destiny is not brought about by causes from the past that determine what we are like, OK? And so it’s very important to recognize that, and there is, I would say, the primary difference between psychology and Atmanology, OK? In terms of ethics.
An ethical psychotherapist has a particular job, and that is to get you to stop blaming yourself for what happened to you in childhood. That’s their function, because most people blame themselves as children; they assume if the parents broke up and divorced, “it’s my fault”. The child thinking that, because “if I was enough for them, they would have stayed together in order to take care of me. And so obviously I wasn’t lovable enough, I wasn’t worthy enough.” And so the child takes that on as their fault. And because of the child’s egocentric view, it takes the blame on for many, many things, and feels guilty for things that have nothing to do with its own behavior or thoughts or anything else. It was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. OK? That’s what karma is. Good karma is finding yourself in the right place at the right time, but nonetheless, at the level of the psychological “I”, which would be I 1-3, at least, the child is not to blame, and it must be released from that blame. But from the level of Atmanology, we must take responsibility for everything that happens to us. And we ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time because of things that happened earlier, and because of our destiny required us to go through certain events of suffering to learn certain things from. So again, not that we are to blame for it, it’s not a matter of now we can blame people again and say, “You see, you did bad karma.” No, because karma itself is a subset of a teleological frame of reference that comes from the future. It has nothing to do with what you did. What you did happened because of what you’re going to do, and who you’re going to be. And because of who you’re going to be, you had to go through certain kinds of suffering and turn that suffering into wisdom so that you could then transmit that wisdom and help the evolution of the complex system of the universe.
OK? So again, it’s a freedom from blame, but coming from another side entirely. Does that make sense? OK.
Question: Are you saying the teleological framework, is that my logical framework, or let’s say that on the logical framework includes that?
It includes all of it, because time itself is an illusion, but the future’s presence now is as much real as the past being present, as part of the composition of the scenario that you happen to be going through. Because it’s all one. OK. All of time is included in every moment, just as the holon of an individual consciousness contains everything, all of the information, but not necessarily translatable into human vocabulary, but it’s all there. In the same way that the oak tree is present in the acorn, but you won’t see it, but it’s there, and you couldn’t have an oak tree without the acorn, right? So the information is all there at every moment, and it’s just a matter of how much of it is appearing in the macro field, and how much remains in the micro of the vitalon. But it’s all here.
Question: What does teleology mean?
It means causality from the future rather than the past. There are teleologists who would disagree with that definition, who would say, rather, it comes from the whole to the part. And I believe that’s accurate too, especially if you recognize time as an illusion, then where does time itself come from? You would have to say it’s from a consciousness transcendent of the spacetime continuum, which is the Atman.
OK, so three preliminary observations; let’s see. The first two would be a vicious circle, if you will, or, a useless bit of information, perhaps, but the third one puts it into perspective. So accuracy yields potency. Does that make sense to people? That would seem to be common sense.
If you are accurately in alignment with the laws of the universe and the forces that are dominant in any field at any moment, you will have power to be able to achieve your aim. Whereas if you are not accurately in alignment, or to some extent you deviate from your correct understanding of the situation, then you will not achieve complete success. OK? It’s pretty simple, and that’s the reason why people study. They learn, they become as capable as they can be of being masters of the situation that they think they’re going to face. That’s why musicians practice beforehand, right? And why physicists study for many years, why doctors aren’t allowed to do brain surgery until they’ve had a long period of residence and supervision, etc., etc.
So these kinds of preparation that yield more accuracy are important, but the problem is that in a complex system, we live in what’s called a “dancing landscape”, OK? Now, the complexity theorists say that there are three kinds of landscapes: You have your “simple landscapes”, your “rugged landscapes”, and your “dancing landscapes”. And the simple landscape is like Mount Fuji, as they often use, it’s a simple curve, a bell curve, and it’s like this, (Shunyamurti draws diagram), and so I am here, and I want to get here. OK, let’s say that’s Z. Here. I am, X. Somebody else is at Y. We both want to get to Z. And it’s clear that that’s the goal.
In a rugged landscape where you’re dealing with a situation that has many peaks to it—let’s say a mountain range, OK? Now, if you are at X, you’re not sure, do I want to get to Y, to Z, to A prime, to B? Which is the highest peak, you see? Now, you have to be more accurate in understanding, which mountain do I want to climb? There isn’t just one right now. That’s the situation most people face in life, and they find when they’re about 30, that they’ve climbed the wrong mountain. They went to school to study something, got their degree and everything, and then they start practicing whatever it is, law or physics or whatever, and they find, “this isn’t what I wanted to do at all.” So then they’ve got to go back and climb another mountain, right? So the rugged landscape requires a lot of wisdom before you begin the journey, or else you may have discovered it was futile, and they’ve got to start all over again. In most people’s lives, they have to climb seven or eight mountains before they find the right one. But because life is short, you don’t want to climb too many mountains that you’re not happy with before you get to the right one. But the more that you climb, the more wisdom you gain for the Mount Everest that you want to reach.
And then there’s the dancing landscape, which is the real situation that we now face at the end of Kali Yuga; the situation has completely changed. And what a dancing landscape is, that at one moment it’s a mountain peak, at the next moment it’s a valley, or even an abyss, and everything is changing at every moment. And so what you think of is going to bring you happiness, at moment A will bring you disgust and horror, at moment B, you see, and you think you want to spend your life studying the standard model of quantum physics, and then the next day it’s obsolete. And you spent four years now in graduate school, you’re writing your dissertation on it, and you read this and you say, “Oh my God, I got to start all over!”
So these kinds of things are happening all the time: people master certain kinds of software programs, and then they’re gone. The next day, everything is overturning at such a rapid rate that you cannot depend on anything to be there the next day, or to be worth knowing the next day. Right? Everyone’s familiar with this.
So we’re in a situation of instability that’s radicalized, that never existed before. If you went back in time, even just two or three hundred years ago, life was a simple landscape, and things didn’t change from year to year, and you knew in advance, in Costa Rica, you knew when the rains would start and when they would stop and how much they would be and all of that—everything was very clear and there was nothing chancy about it—but now, with climate change, how do you know what to plant or when, or what will survive in what climates, when the climates themselves are changing from day to day? It’s a dancing landscape in every aspect of reality. So we’re living in a time when you cannot plan in the way that you were able to do in the past, and the very ground of your career, which might be a certain theoretical premise, or a certain platform of computers—or whatever it might be that you’re basing your informational contribution to the information economy—may soon become disinformation, or completely obsolete and worthless.
So it creates great anxiety for most people to be in a dancing landscape. So if you’re going to do that, to have a teleological understanding of what’s going to happen would be a tremendous advantage, wouldn’t it? Because then you would know what’s going to be the peak tomorrow, or next week or next year, and you can plan for that, even though everybody will say you’re crazy. “That’s not even a peak, it’s a valley!” “Well, great, it’s a valley. I can get there more easily—right? And then it’ll become a peak and I’m already on it, I don’t even have to climb anything!” That’s what wisdom is, do it the easy way—pick the valley that’s going to become the tallest peak in a week from now.
Well, OK, that’s the basis of Sat Yoga anyway. So OK, purity—however, well, let’s go to the second one. Potency yields accuracy. Now, that’s also true, and has to be factored into this, because how do you attain accuracy to know the future, and to know how to move on a dancing landscape, and to be accurate?