(This is Part 5 in a series. Go back to Part 4.)
Reality is always right. Isn't that something? To realize that reality is always right is to see that everything is exactly the way it is, the way it needs to be, can't be any different until it is, is perfect right now, is beautiful and honorable right now.
In order to see this, we have to take our attention off the individual nodes in the network, including ourselves, and put our attention on the network itself.
What is the network? The network is the sum total of the interacting networks that make up existence.
Examples of individual networks are the network of neurons in our brain, the interlinking protein molecules in a cell, the internet, a city, your body, the CO2 cycle in nature, a flock of birds and so on. Everything in existence is basically a series of interlocking networks of countless different kinds. All these countless types of networks together make up the network itself, the ultimate network, the unity that is reality.
According to network theory, it turns out that networks arising in nature share certain properties. First and foremost of those properties is that they are self-organizing. Networks in nature self-organize.
For instance, it's been found that no-one is in charge of a beehive. It used to be thought that the queen bee was directing the hive, but that's been proven to be false. The queen bee is simply producing worker bees. There is no-one actually "running" the hive.
Or to put it a different way, the hive is running itself. It has self-organized so that it runs itself. This property of self-organization is found throughout nature—for instance, in all the various ecological cycles. I'll tell just one amazing story about the way this happens.
The first life-forms on earth, the one-celled non-nucleated bacteria that had formed from pre-biotic proteins in the primordial ocean soup, eventually solved a monumental problem: how to store and use energy from the sun. We call the process photo-synthesis, it was invented by bacteria, and of course it's the basis of all plants today. As is well known, in this process plants take in carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen through their leaves. This is the respiration of the plant; this is how it breathes.
Anyway, over time this sucess story became too successful, and the atmosphere of the earth was becoming choked with a toxic pollutant—too much oxygen in the atmosphere. Yes, oxygen. Oxygen is actually quite a toxic chemical, and since oxygen is so reactive, it can be extremely destabilizing to organic molecules. And it was reaching levels far above what we have today, threatening life on the planet.
Life itself solved this critical problem, by a fantastic adaptation whereby certain bacteria developed the ability to breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide, using carbon-chain molecules in the presence of oxygen to create energy for itself. This monumental self-orgainizing leap by the bacteria is today the basis for all animal life on earth.
Consequently, the oxygen content in the atmosphere came down from the toxic level where it was to where it is today (about 21%), where both plants and animals have a level of oxygen that is suitable to both. In fact, if the oxygen level in the atmosphere was even slightly higher or lower, it would be fatal to life. Life itself brought the level to 21% and holds it there through self-regulating feedback cycles.
I find this quality of self-organization in the universe to be very extraordinary. There seems to be a kind of breeze in the universe that favors this quality of self-organization, whether occuring in an anthill, the neurons in the brain, the growth of the internet or the eco-system of the planet.
(This is the end of Part 5. Go to Part 6.)
—jim sloman, 12.8.02 for 1.19.03
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