Understanding Emergence and How to Perceive if it’s Good or Bad

Mar 10, 2022 | Syntony Story

I was asked to “explain how matter stays in form… how does it know what to be? How does my pen stay a pen? How am I sitting on a chair?”  Excellent questions, right?! 

Natural process clump together – and that’s good!

Well, it’s vibration and coherence and the law of affinity that creates the clumping.  As Niels Bohr was purported to have said, nature plays with a sticky deck of cards…  Things don’t happen according to a random distribution of probability.  They clump.  Your pen is such a clump, but it is made of so so so so so many smaller clumps (forming leptons forming hadrons forming atoms forming molecules forming cells and so on up to forming galaxies, galactic clusters, superclusters, and branes).  It’s all entangled and intertwingled.  The thing is, stuff tends more to fall together than it does to fall apart.  Or rather, when it falls, it clumps. 

As my friend David Schulhoff says, “it is the shuffling of the deck between hands that creates the play of emergent order each round the cards are dealt.”

So, what causes the clumping?  Vibration.  If things vibrate in ways that match in harmonic resonance (I just wrote in hormonic resonance, and that may be true at other levels!), they cohere.  This coherence forms a local attractor that brings those resonating vibrations into connection.  If they are vibrating at high frequency and high amplitude, they form what appear to be solid stuff.  If they vibrate at low frequency and low amplitude, they form what appear to be thoughts, spirit, emotion and immaterial stuff.  If they are right in between, they appear as both – as wavicles that sometimes behave like particles and sometimes like waves.

Does this make sense?  In contradistinction to what we were taught in school, there is no “thing” there – only packets of coherently resonating vibration.  These find each other out of the simple dynamics of affinity.  They create space for each other, call to each other, and fall into each other to form larger packets of coherent vibration, be they material or immaterial.  This is the tendency toward wholes that defines our universe, a tendency called holotropism.  We see it all around us as love. 

I was thinking about how to sense into these attractors – how to know that we’re not entering into coherent relationship with some aberrant expression of local deviation from the general holotropic trend.  I mean, it’s perfectly possible to align with the wrong side of things, to innocently support the villain or to unwittingly sign up for a false and deleterious crusade.  Sometimes people even manipulate us and take advantage of a trusting disposition – this is what is referred to as falling victim to a con, or in more contemporary jargon, to a ponzie scheme.  In any event, one doesn’t have to be particularly gullible to be hoodwinked like this; the fact is that it even happens in nature.  So how do we avoid being lured into less-than-syntonious situations?

Using your Syntony Sense to discern flourishing dynamics

It occurred to me that one way of sensing into the “rightness” of the flow is by converting our impression of what is going on into a sensory perception.  For example, asking “what color would this situation/dynamic/condition be?  Would it be sharp or smooth?  Soft or rough?  If it had an odor, what would it smell like?”  Thinks like that help me sense into whether or not this is an attractive or a repulsive experience.  I could also try to imagine if what I was perceiving and experiencing was a cloud, then what kind of cloud would it be?  Or if it were water, would it be warm or refreshing or turbulent or deep?  The key here is to perform a creative translation function from the conceptual/rational/analytical consideration of what’s going on to some other analogous expression that captures the essence of the experience.  In effect, this is an act of alchemy – of spiritual alchemy, transforming one type of perception into another, and in the process, distilling the nature of the experience in a way that makes evident the quality of its quintessence.  What the experience is transformed into is less important than the act of transformation, itself.  It is through this act that the sense of rightness, of goodness of fit, can be discerned, and this helps us know whether it is in accord with the fundamental holotropism of the cosmos or out of syntony at a deeper level of coherence.  Will this lead to certainty?  No, I don’t think so.  But it will give you a better sense of whether you want to embrace what’s going on with arms wide open, or brace yourself against it with arms tightly crossed.  

If you want to dive deeper, you can find more on this topic here