Into Indra’s Net

The last chapter highlights a sagely person whose work in international and intercultural education has exemplified the principles discussed in this book. The yin and yang of American culture and modern religious expression, however, represent uncertainties for constructive societal progress. Reflecting on future chances of success for humanity and human selves, the chapter points to the need for sagely leadership to promote biospheric conservation, environmental sustainability, and social justice. With urgency, the same prescription will help us to navigate the chaotic edge between future promise and existential risk in new fields such as genetic engineering and artificial intelligence. The chapter concludes with a view of the choice we face at the present moment: an exercise in free will, unique in the history of life. Each human individual has the potential to contribute something worthy and personally satisfying to the future. Our choice is: will we take the cooperative side of our evolutionary past to a new level and embrace the kind of nurturing philosophical wisdom that confirms our shared humanity. Or will we choose to reject that ancestral path in favor of accelerating self-aggrandizement, aggressive religion, and destructive tribal integrity that threatens societal and planetary well-being?

Anti-sage

Chapter 10 proceeds in light of our suggestion that sagely behavior is freely chosen, benign, yet powerful, and seeks cooperation in the world in ways that are positive, progressive, nurturing, and constructive in nature. This chapter, however, accounts for people who have been gifted with or have assiduously developed powers of rapport or charisma, achieving notable fractal congruence in the social, political, or economic life of institutions or communities but who have gone the other way. This phenomenon over a wide range of scale can elevate those who become destructive or aggrandizing to the ultimate detriment of society. Numerous followers can gravitate to the kind of socially-fractally-adept individual that we call an anti-sage. The chapter discusses examples of the antisage phenomenon in cults and terrorist organizations such as the People’s Temple and Aum Shinrykyo. In this narrative pertinent expressions of human selfness include: Protean self vs. fundamentalist self and parochial altruism. Also explored are politics and government, notably the administration of George W. Bush, creed-based religions, particularly Christianity and Islam, and aggrandizement in educational administration, such as that of John Sexton’s presidency of New York University.

Ecology Emergent

Ever since life’s debut on the earth, biotic evolution has been a near-balancing act. On virtually every level, competition and cooperation, shifting endlessly between foreground and background, have tugged and teased evolving systems as they have wobbled through time along the edge of chaos. The emergence of cellular life from the world of complex carbon-based chemistry appears to have happened only once in the primordial dreamtime of planet Earth. Scientists base this conjecture on a number of virtually universal distributions of chemical structures and processes across the spectrum of living organisms. Despite their perhaps tenuous hold on life, the earliest cells, primitive bacteria and archea, possessed the keys to the opening of new potential for matter and energy—the capabilities of self-replication, controlled energy transduction, directed locomotion, and the regulation of an internal environment. Out of this cellular Big Bang there arose a totally new force field on planet Earth superimposed over the physical, chemical, and geological, but with tendrils pervading all of those realms. It was the beginning of the biosphere. Life pervaded and began to transform the lithosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere. The chapter highlights transitions of prokaryote to eukaryote via endosymbiosis. Also featured are: biofilms, bioluminescence, coral reefs, and ecological succession.

Primal Emergence

Since the Big Bang, the universe’s inflation and its aftermath might be called the “creation story” according to science, in which tremendously variegated order and deterministic pattern propagated from a cosmic seed of perfect uniformity and smoothness. The formative properties of matter and energy were forged through initial quantum turbulence and an emergent principle of attraction that seems to pervade all of nature. As it emerged out of simplicity, the universe adopted a modus operandi that we call the cooperative constant, initially manifested in physical forces, especially gravity, and progressively complemented by chemistry. From an evolutionary point of view, an emergent catalytic potential, an attraction to cooperate, or participate in heterogeneity—which becomes a sine qua non for the existence of life—is widely characteristic of matter in our universe. This tendency is now found at the heart of the most progressive systems of which we are aware. Chapter One weaves its cosmological story through leading theories and revelations in astrophysics including primordial quantum turbulence, the multiverse, recombination, and the origin of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB), also the enigmas of dark matter and dark energy, and nuclear synthesis of the elements of life within stars.

Self within World

We describe the foundations of the fractal self in relation to the Chinese notion of personal development and enhancement of adeptness in the world and mutualism with the other. This seeking, described in the codified system of Daoism, is a pathway that may progress to the highest level of achievement of such a self: that which defines a sage. The chapter introduces the view that a sage is a fractal self that achieves a peak of intimacy and constructive interaction with the world. We detail the development of human beings on this pathway, emerging beyond the core embodiments of empathy, sympathy, and rudimentary morality observed in apes. The self for the early Chinese was always a being that was embedded in the world and dynamic flow of forces. This self was defined in intimate terms as adaptable and adept, seeking to be a microcosmic contributor to some holistic macrocosm. In this chapter, Daoism leads our thinking on how the fractal self engages with the world. In turn, this way of understanding selfness and its potential to enrich its system from within resonates with discussions of the interactive self of Buddhism and was also in the minds of Pre-Socratic thinkers in the West.

The Quickening of Chemistry

For billions of years, competition and cooperation (or attractive forces) oscillated in influence in the evolution of the universe. Consistently, the latter prevailed with a slight edge in that affinitive entities in the universe were free to associate, bond, assemble, facilitate, and cooperate, rise above the leveling action of competition, and generate emergence on progressively higher levels: chemical, biological, and social. This chapter returns to cooperation and examines its constructive power in what might be termed ascendant chemistry—the self-organization of molecules and catalysis that led through pathways of burgeoning complexity to the threshold of biology and the evolution of life on earth. Against the illogic of “creation science,” modern biochemical research illuminates how life arose as an assemblage of complex molecules with strong cooperative tendencies within and among themselves. Carbon’s capacity to build with itself and other elements tremendously variable molecular structures with interlocking functions—most notably of the four basic complex chemicals of life: proteins, carbohydrates, lipids, and nucleic acids (DNA and RNA)—ultimately led to the evolution of living cells.

From Self to No-Self to All-Self

Chapter 9 explores how individuals working to attain peak performance are at their best when intimately embedded and engaged in their chosen sector of the world, moving with and helping to shape its creative turbulence. Primarily focusing on the Buddhist notion of an enlightened self, we propose the sage ideally represents the fractal self with Confucian and Daoist philosophies complementing Buddhist thinkers in their conscious struggle against problems arising in selves devoted to an integrity way of being. The Buddhist self becomes the paradigmatic model for a self of intimacy. In intimacy, knowledge resides at the interface of self and world and free-will manifests in our evolved nature with our option to choose constructive engagement with our world—from family harmony to international well-being and biospheric sustainability. This chapter takes readers into discussions that may seem paradoxical, as in the concept of no-self and the sources of suffering, barriers to approaching nirvana. The Western notion of an individuated human soul dissolves into the unbounded vision of the self of intimacy that Buddhists believe is realized in traveling the “Eightfold Path.” Bash?’s poetry evokes the Path and opens vistas of compassion and enlightenment in the quest of a fractal self.

Intimate Ark

Among the greatest cooperative examples of biotic evolution that released a virtually unbounded world of complexity, particularly conspicuous among eukaryotic organisms, was the evolution of sex. In sex, each individual of a mating pair contributes part of its genetic makeup (genome) to offspring—always cells are the seminal agents of the genetic contribution from each self—that participate in an emergent new generation. Thus a self, upon engaging in sex, abandons a substantial portion of its integrity and weaves together a molecular-to-cellular-to-organismal fractal interface with a partner. Throughout the sexual world, self seeks a profound intimacy with non-self. The chapter first describes gene sharing by bacteria through conjugation, a prokaryotic version of sex. An allegory of dancing snakes metaphorically represents cellular reproduction by mitosis and the reduction divisions of chromosomes in meiosis, the basis of gene sharing in sex among eukaryotes. Genetic recombination via meiosis enormously accelerates the diverse expressions of myriad life forms. Among angiosperm plants, sex is manifest in immensely variable flowers and, with some exceptions, their colors and forms evolved in response to a profound cooperative imperative with animal partners that spread their pollen. Darwin’s major insight on sexual selection among animals has explained male-female dimorphisms from subtle to spectacular.

Introduction

The Introduction first reviews basic principles of Chaos Theory and the Science of Complexity that have provided new ways of understanding self-organization and evolutionary change in the universe. Some of the terms and concepts, such as the butterfly effect, are popular metaphors; others—edge-of-chaos, sensitive-dependence, emergence—may be more obscure to general readers. All of those concepts are described in language accessible to high school students with inquiring minds. Thus the introduction begins as a primer to provide a working familiarity with ideas that are critical to our later narrative and arguments. Here we also begin to discern similarities in prevailing patterns of cosmic-to-microcosmic change in the universe that science has progressively resolved. Out of contemporary science and surprisingly congruent conjectures of ancient wisdom, particularly in the Daoist and Buddhist traditions, comes an understanding of why we observe structure and order in the universe and why there has arisen a long-term trend toward intricate pattern instead of universal randomness. And we find the most progressive patterns and processes address emergent roles of life and human nature as they continue to evolve in interdependence within nature at large.

From Self to Sage

The traditions of Confucianism, Daoism, and their later adoption of and adaptation by Buddhism envisioned a world that, re-described in modern parlance, is composed of shifting, fractal dimensions in which emergence can happen along turbulent boundaries of attractors where tensions arise between opposites. For the ancients, these ways of thinking invoked nascent principles of our current understanding of deterministic chaos; they glimpsed self-organization proceeding toward complexity, and human beings moving through the world with wuwei, an adept sense of participation. This participatory ethos can be situated on a cultural spectrum of behavior that extends between integrity (individuality) and intimacy (sociality, cooperation). An approach to life that empathizes the intimacy portion of the spectrum leads to the highest expression of the self in Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist environments where an effortless expertise, ziran, may be achieved, arising from unforced participation within a particular sector or system of the world. The individual who attains such a state is recognized as a sage. Such a person is a cooperator in the broadest sense, very often an innovator and a catalyst, and, in social systems, a constructive leader. Sagely behavior is proposed as the supreme achievement of biotic and cultural evolution.