Why is the Universe Lumpy?

[David Swedlow]

I have intuited that the lumpiness of the universe is a function of the
action of consciousness, which essentially is the tendancy to find balance.

I put pieces together myself, but I recognize that they are not mine, just
as relativity did not belong to Einstein. As such, I made a bet with
myself that I could google it and find this idea already out in the world.
Here is the link that I came up with. I have skimmed it sufficiently to
know that it corresponds to what I was thinking, but goes in more depth
than I had originally.

There are some very interesting implications with this realization. The
first is, you must start the game at the beginning. Balancing is first
learned by learning to manipulate your appendages and organs (mouth, eyes,
etc.) to achieve worthwhile goals. Eventually, you learn to manipulate
through space via physical balance. A few years later, you start learning
how to balance emotional states. Then mental/cognitive states. There isn't
too much new about what I've said so far. It get's interesting when we
notice that organism's do this together. We re-learn the balancing aspects
from another perspective as parents, and as teachers, etc. Learning to
teach other's to balance (notice, they would do it on their own, we're
just accelerating the process with skillful facilitation).

In this way, Open Space Technology is increadibly advanced balancing.
There are many lessons that I would expect to hear about learning to get
out of the way of the process to let it happen (as I mentioned in my
previous email). Without consciousness, we simply react to the situation.
This results in apparent stasis. When all members of a group are acting in
their own self interest, then the group gets to a certain level of
sophisticated group behavior, and then it stagnates (by outside
appearances). What is actually happening is the build-up to a state-
change, just as when water goes from water to steam. The energy of the
group increases but the water isn't boiling yet. You can even get
interesting and complex behavior (hexagonal cells) before the water starts
boiling under certain conditions. When the water is hot enough, when there
is enough energy in the system, it boils. This happens on it's own. (Just
let it happen). With the addition of consciousness, the energy can be
harnessed for self-useful purposes (metabolism). This is what life does.
It learns to balance. The earth is a complex ecosystem (GAIA), because
life continually finds balance. With this simple definition of
consciousness (consciousness = balance), we can see that balance happens
all the way up and down the great chain of being. That means that atoms
and molecules have a kind of consciousness, as do galaxies and
superclusters. With energy flowing through the system, matter creates an
equilibrium state in which certain things happen, like people and
societies.

Open Space is the way in which the human species organism (the group
organism of humans) is learning to metabolise the energy that is flowing
through the system. It's a natural process.

The analog case, and the one that is very instructive for me, is learning
to ride a bicycle. I didn't look at this case very closely when I was a
kid, I just got on and did it. But as an adult, when I was teaching my son
to ride, I noticed something interesting. His first inclination, when he
went out of balance, was to turn the "wrong" direction. I tried to imagine
why this was, and it seemed obvious. To him, it feels like the ground is
trying to suck him down, and he is resisting that pull by turning away
from the fall. But, in order to balance, you must turn into the fall!
Turning into, not away from, the disequilibrium is the way to return to
equilibrium. Another reason that this is so hard to grasp initially is
that to the child, watching someone else ride a bike looks like it is just
a matter of keeping the bicycle upright, and so, when the bicycle starts
to lean, the temptation is to lean the other direction to get back to
uprightness. We think balance means a static state of remaning upright, in
actuality, it is a dynamic situation in which we return to uprightness.
Once you start to fall, you aren't out of balance until you finish
falling. You can come to within inches of the ground, and if you can turn
sharply enough to return to equilibrium, you are in balance. And falling
is no big deal either (well, except the skinned knee). Just get back on
and try again.

Here is the thing though, as the situations get more complex, we put
safety mechanisms in place to allow people to learn the art of balance
safely; training wheels. The problem is, if we never take the training
wheels off, the lesson is never learned. And, here is the critical piece,
if the training wheels are left in place, the rider is essentially
crippled because they can't maneuver as nimbly as a rider without training
wheels.

This metaphor works at the society level as well. Civilization gets very
complex, and the risk of failure for some activities becomes fatal, so we
make sure to have safety mechanisms in place so that people learn (like
laws). But again, the organism (life) wishes to find ways to push the
system into equilibrium in order to learn to balance. It happens from moss
to ecosystems. But if the laws become absolute, then the training wheels
are never removed, and in some ways we are crippled. This happens in
organizations which become hide-bound by their policies (schools in the US
are very good examples). And the solutions that we come up with are
exactly like the one my son came up with, lean in the wrong direction.
Schools lean toward increasingly tight stricture (they move the training
wheels out further so that the bike can't fall over), but the school
system is really moving at a fast speed now, and training wheels are no
longer appropriate, but dangerous!! It is hard to learn this lesson, and
the school system may actually have to fall down and scrape it's knees (it
may even get a concussion if it's not wearing a helmet).

This is only a metaphor, but you can see the power of it. Let's take it
another step. The political system is in a current state of intense
disequilibrium. Conservatives believe, in general, that we should weld the
training wheels on for life, and make sure they are reinforced so they
can't break. Liberals, in general, think that we need to remove the
training wheels to allow the system to do it's own thing.

Both ways are right, and both are wrong. The issue is balance. We need the
training wheels up to the point that we've mastered balance in an
activity, and then we need to remove them slowly (or run alongside to
catch them if they fall). But we don't want to just remove the training
wheels altogether too early, or the reaction may be further shyness about
trying again. This isn't intended to be an endorsement or criticism of one
side or the other, we need both, and they need to work together to find
interesting solutions to our increasingly complex problems. Note: we need
BOTH parties to have balance.

Conservatives tend to operate with a "protect the innocent and free the
mature" mentality, while liberals tend toward a "liberate the youth, but
keep a watch on the powerful." These look like they are diametrically
opposed to one another from a certain perspective. And guess what, they
ARE! Just as right and left are diametrically opposed to one another when
one is sitting on a bicycle. You need both right and left to have balance.
Try to eliminate or handicap one, and you'll go sprawling to the concrete
as sure I'm standing here.

- David Swedlow

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