The sun is born
from substance and form, which can be compared to father and mother, and it is
absolute perfection; but the darkness has neither substance nor form, neither
father nor mother, and it is absolute imperfection.
(Some Answered
Questions: 89)
Cosmologically, at any level and for any species of life,
creation starts with the formal cause linking with the material cause. Form is imprinted upon chaos, or the formless
substance (One Matter) which is capable of assuming any form, because all forms
are within it as potential.
The essential relationships composing Nature
are fixed and enduring, because they are an expression of the eternal
Will of God. “God hath created a relation between the sun and the
terrestrial globe that the rays of the sun should shine and the soil should
yield. These relationships constitute predestination, and the manifestation
thereof in the plane of existence is fate. Will is that active force which
controlleth these relationships and these incidents.” (Selections from the
Writings of Abdu'l-Baha, 198)
But that same Will is also the power to alter the combination of these essential relationships to evolve the whole of creation itself. The appearance of a Manifestation of the Divine
Will is religion in its most abstract and all-inclusive sense, the binding
together of all things. But change also occurs: “Briefly, the
supreme Manifestations of God are aware of the reality of the mysteries of
beings. Therefore, They establish laws which are suitable and adapted to the
state of the world of man, for religion is the essential connection which
proceeds from the realities of things. The Manifestation—that is, the Holy
Lawgiver—unless He is aware of the realities of beings, will not comprehend the
essential connection which proceeds from the realities of things, and He will
certainly not be able to establish a religion conformable to the facts and
suited to the conditions. The Prophets of God, the supreme Manifestations, are
like skilled physicians, and the contingent world is like the body of man: the
divine laws are the remedy and treatment.” (Some
Answered Questions, p. 158)
Now
the universe is a nested hierarchy of invisible and visible fields, with the visible ones being the lowest on the hierarchy. The highest and largest field is also the
first and foundational. Hence Christ referred to Himself as "the Alpha and Omega." In physics: “Many theoretical physicists now think that the
fundamental fields of physics arose from a higher and more inclusive field, the
primal unified field of the universe; in the same way, at every level of
organization, new morphic fields may arise within and from higher level
fields. Creativity occurs not just
upward from the bottom, with new forms arising from less complex systems by
spontaneous jumps; it also proceeds downward from the top, through the creative
activity of higher-level fields.” (The
Rebirth of Nature: 196)
These lower fields coming out of the higher ones are made
in the image and likeness but not the nature of the higher. We all know the Biblical
statement that man is created in the image and after the likeness of the Manifestation
of God, but
further: “Verily, God has created the animal in the image and likeness of man,
for though man outwardly is human, yet in nature he possesses animal
tendencies.” (The Promulgation of
Universal Peace: 262.) And: “As preordained by the Fountainhead
of Creation, the temple of the world hath been fashioned after the image and
likeness of the human body. In fact each mirroreth forth the image of the
other, wert thou but to observe with discerning eyes.” (Compilations, Huququ'llah)
This appearance
of the higher in the world of the lower is the cause of the transformative
evolution of the lower: Manifestation in the world of man; man in the world of
nature; the higher self of man in the environment of his ego self. This is creative evolution from the top
downward. But, let us recall that
Revelation is the causer of all causes.
Another creative cause of the universe is that of inner development of
form into new form. This is creation
from past to future, from simple to complex, lower to higher.
In the 1930’s
and 40’s a new idea came into the thinking of biologists, the idea of
morphogenetic fields. Morphogenetic
fields, writes biologist Rupert Sheldrake, “were like the known fields of
physics in that they were invisible regions of influence with inherently
holistic properties, but they were a new kind of field unknown to physics. They existed within and around organisms, and
contained within themselves a nested hierarchy of fields within fields—organ
fields, tissue fields, cell fields.” (The Rebirth of Nature: 108-109)
Morphogenetic
fields, he said, acted like magnetic fields and, indeed: “Magnetic fields were
in fact one of the principal analogies used by the proponents of morphogenetic
fields. Just as cutting magnets into
pieces gave rise to small but complete magnets, each with its own magnetic
field, so cutting up organisms like flatworms gave rise to pieces with complete
flatworm fields, enabling them to regenerate into flatworms.” (Rebirth of Nature: 109) Later physicists, too, discovered that fields
of light in laser form acted like the flatworm.
They called it the hologram.
Sheldrake’s hypothesis
of formative causation states that organisms and their fields have an intrinsically
evolutionary nature. The formative
activity of the fields is the means by which the habits of the species are built
up, maintained, and inherited.
Self-organizing systems at all levels of complexity work, in Sheldrake’s
theory, through a process called morphic resonance, the influence of like upon
like through time and space. It is, too,
a nonphysical force. Thus, morphogenetic
fields are not really physical things and features occupying some region of
space, but patterned and structured information that enable species to build,
regulate and maintain themselves, and to enable communication with members both
before and after themselves, making a continuous field through time. They are probably another name for the semi-physical
fields of energy around the body through which flow what the Chinese call Chi,
and that acupuncture taps into at its nodal points. Fields
are within and surround their representatives, because the information that
structures the field of objects is also encoded within every organism, so that
every member of the species is both a unique representative of the field and
its complete embodiment.
Morphogenetic
fields also operate like formal and final causes operate. Formal cause is the generative cause of life,
but final cause is the attracting cause of evolution. Thus: “Like entelechies, morphogenetaic
fields attract developing systems to the ends, goals, or representations
contained within themselves.
Mathematically, morphogenetic fields can be modeled in terms of attractors
within basins of attraction. The
mathematician Rene Thom has expressed this idea as follows: ‘All creation or
destruction of forms, or morphogenesis, can be described by the disappearance
of the attractors representing the initial forms, and their replacement by
capture by the attractors representing the final forms.’” (Rebirth of Nature: 109) This
is as Baha’u’llah described creation: “That which hath been in existence had existed before, but not
in the form thou seest today.” (Tablets of Baha'u'llah:140)
Finally, morphic
resonance and morphogenetic fields resemble formal cause in that, when a new
morphic field has come into existence with the first of any species “of the
many energetically possible ways the substance could crystallize, one actually
happens. The next time the substance is
crystallized anywhere in the world, morphic resonance from the first crystals
will make the same pattern of crystallization more probable. A cumulative memory will build up, but also a
certain predictability and ossification will occur.” (Rebirth
of Nature: 111) We know this as the
100th monkey principle.
Hence: “living
organisms inherit not only genes but also morphic fields. The genes are passed
materially from their ancestors and enable them to make particular kinds of
protein molecules; the morphic fields are inherited non-materially, by morphic
resonance, not just from direct ancestors but also from other members of the
species. The developing organisms tune
in to the morphic field of its species and thus draw upon a pooled or
collective memory.” (Rebirth of Nature:
112)
Next post will
describe dissipative structures to see how they, too, are formal and final images
in the likeness of the creative action of Revelation.
A direct link to my book, Renewing the Sacred is http://tinyurl.com/cndew5a It is now also in Kindle
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