A systems view of biological health

Section 1: Introduction

4 : Things and processes

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You will find a spattering of slightly unfamiliar use of English throughout. I have deliberately used terms (such as relationality, mutuality, meaning-making) that imply a mobile process rather than a fixed "thing".

Because the Living body is not a thing – it is a continuous process from well before the moment of the first spark of cell division to well after the last breath leaves the mouth.

Organic life is a process that has an atomic continuity back to the very origins of the physical universe; exists in a continuity of Life that goes back a few billion years, at least as far as the archaeo-bacterium that was the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA).

Life exhibits a continuity in which, like a river, the overt appearance hardly varies, but everything continuously changes and adapts. It finds its optimum position in the Landscape it flows through; occupies a position between the soft moist darkness of the Earth and the brightness of the sky and Heavens, reflecting the light from an infinity of stars; and finds companionship in everything else living.

Western civilisations have been thing-oriented for several hundred years now, but increasingly so since the second half of the 20th century. Technology can enhance human life, but can also be an end in itself - and can create a mindset which revolves around the technology instead of around life-processes. Language itself is a technology, and the technological-mindset is reflected in language, technological language becomes normalised, and then the non-living mindset also becomes normalised. This deep flaw in Western cultures has been seen by a few people on the inside [1], but particularly by indigenous peoples observing from outside [2].

Re-gaining a life-oriented (process-oriented instead of object-oriented) way of thinking and experiencing (despite the continued use of a thing-oriented language) requires attention to nuances. It is something of a bootstrapping process - beginning to experience the external living world more, beginning to experience the inner living world more, and so on, repeating, repeating. There is a gradual re-gaining of the capacity to experience the embodied self, the self as part of a greater whole, and the greater whole as also wishing to relate to and communicate with the self.