{"id":4054,"date":"2013-11-28T10:35:49","date_gmt":"2013-11-28T15:35:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=4054"},"modified":"2013-11-28T10:35:49","modified_gmt":"2013-11-28T15:35:49","slug":"versions-of-the-universe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=4054","title":{"rendered":"Versions of the Universe"},"content":{"rendered":"

This quote is from a post called “Shamanic Realm<\/a>.”<\/p>\n

\u2018The difficulties most of us have with visionary literature are related to how we construe reality in the first place, and that is to a considerable extent culturally determined. Examining the perceptual differences between us and our counterparts in the Middle Ages, historian Carolly Erickson characterizes our own perception of the universe as \u201ccontrolled, atomistic, and one-dimensional\u201d in contrast to the \u201cchaotic, holistic and multi-dimensional reality\u201d within which men and women of Julian\u2019s time lived [Julian of Norwich, 1342-1416]. Most of humankind, she reminds us \u2014 nearly all those who lived in times past, and a great many living even now, outside industrialized society \u2014 have subscribed to that richer, multi-dimensional world. Inherently \u201cmore real\u201d than everyday reality, this noncorporeal world has always been thought to surround and sustain it and to percolate up into it at regular intervals, visible and audible for those who are attuned to its presence.\u2019
\nCarol Lee Flinders<\/a>, Enduring Grace, p 84
\nErickson, Carolly<\/a>, The Medieval Vision: Essays in History and Perception.<\/p>\n

I love this quote from\u00a0Stuart Kauffman<\/a>\u00a0from a post called “At Home in the Universe<\/a>”<\/p>\n

\u201cI have partial answers to what it all means,\u201d says Stuart Kauffman \u2026\u00a0 \u201cFor example, suppose that these models about the origin of life are correct.\u00a0 Then life doesn\u2019t hang in the balance.\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t depend on whether some warm little pond just happens to produce template-replicating molecules like DNA or RNA.\u00a0 Life is the natural expression of complex matter.\u00a0 It\u2019s a very deep property of chemistry and catalysis and being far from equilibrium.\u00a0 And that means that we\u2019re at home in the universe.\u00a0 We\u2019re to be expected. How welcoming that is!\u00a0 How far that is from the image of organisms as tinkered-together contraptions where everything is bits of widgetry piled on top of bits of ad hocery, and it\u2019s all blind chance.\u00a0 In that world there are no deep principles in biology, other than random variation and natural selection; we\u2019re not at home in the universe in the same way.<\/p>\n

\u201cNext,\u201d says Kauffman, \u201csuppose that you come back many years later, after the autocatalytic sets have been coevolving with one another and squirting strings at one another.\u00a0 The things that would still be around would be those things that have come to evolve competitive interactions, food webs, mutualism, symbiosis.\u00a0 The things that you would see would be those that made the world they now mutually live in.\u00a0 And that reminds us that we make the world we live in with one another.\u00a0 We\u2019re participants in the story as it unfolds.\u00a0 We aren\u2019t victims and we aren\u2019t outsiders.\u00a0 We are part of the universe, you and me, and the goldfish.\u00a0 We make our world with one another.\u201d \u00a0 \u00a0 p321<\/p>\n

This quote is from the book\u00a0Complexity by M. Mitchell Waldrop<\/a><\/p>\n

From post called “New Mantra<\/a>”<\/p>\n

So I thought about my understanding of the universe that I know from astronomy and from other scientific studies like the mathematics of chaos.\u00a0 The universe is beautiful, interconnected, complex and creative \u2014 the universe is unbelievably beautiful, extraordinarily complex, intricately interconnected, and outrageously creative.\u00a0 Just writing up a description of that universe, that I know so well, shifts both my feeling and my thinking.\u00a0 Of course that universe wants what\u2019s best for me, how could it want anything else?<\/p>\n

My new mantra is \u201cthe universe is unbelievably beautiful, extraordinarily complex, intricately interconnected, and outrageously creative.\u201d<\/p>\n

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This quote is from a post called “Shamanic Realm.” \u2018The difficulties most of us have with visionary literature are related to how we construe reality in the first place, and that is to a considerable extent culturally determined. Examining the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4054","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spirit","category-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4054","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4054"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4054\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4054"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4054"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4054"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}