The Breakdown of the World

Here’s the biggest unnecessarily kept secret in the history of the world, nature does not break down, it’s breaks up. There is no such thing as entropy as the term is mistakenly applied in popular culture. Nature is fundamentally an organizing force. An unstoppable one in fact.  

Nature works by organizing energy (information) into systems that self regulate within a particular range. When the energy contained by the system exceeds the system’s ability to organize it, a bifurcation point is reached and the system breaks up to reorganize on a new and higher level to accommodate the additional energy. The key here is that it breaks UP, not down.  

Nature always moves toward higher levels of organization. It’s physics. Just watch water flowing to get the picture. Weather patterns are also a great way of looking at complex self adaptive systems in action. As are human responses to weather patterns. Whats the difference between a drought and a normal precipitation pattern? Expectation and adaptation. 

 The reason humans think nature breaks things down is because they get attached to a limited snapshot of this highly dynamic system of ongoing evolution (hint, nature is here to grow too) and resists the growth of the system beyond it’s comfort zone. Humans tend to be short sighted critters and forget that the world is a dynamic experience. We get attached to a particular range of experiences and invest ourselves (and our money, perhaps even our identity or our lives) in that segment and then get upset when the system evolves past that narrow window. 

 The best part of the joke is that the energy humans bring is quite potent and when added to the system tends to accelerate the rate of growth (and therefore change). In short we contribute to the demise of the objects of our attachments. Be it weather patterns or fiscal patterns, patterns are patterns and if we only see chaos, it’s because we aren’t looking on a large enough scale to perceive the patterns at work and our place in them. 

Patterns stabilize for a time, then expand, break up and reorganize only to stabilize again. This is the breath of life, the Prana and Upana of the universe. What’s happening in the world today is that the old systems are breaking up and new systems are coming into being. Governments, financial systems, weather patterns, migration patterns, all systems on the planet are in massive flux and the one consistent theme is radical and rapid change. 

 While it might feel quite threatening and dramatic at times, this is actually the birth of a golden era. The death is of the old, unbalanced systems based on oppression and control. Do your work, be clear with your intentions, build your community, get to know your neighbors, remember your sense of humor and enjoy the ride of a thousand thousand lifetimes. 

 It’s not the end of the world, it’s the beginning.