This work is licensed under
CC BY-SA 4.0
: also see my full Copyright statement.
All life moves in rhythmic polarities
A healthy organism, human, or even soul lives a polarised existence – swimming, breathing, moving, metabolising between apparently opposite but complementary states. The Krebs Cycle of either energy or vegetation is a beautiful example, as are the cycles of breath, of sleep and wakefulness/activity, of the beating of the heart and the accompanying suction-pulsation of capillary beds. An oscillatory motion about a neutral may also be seen as a polarity – such as the left-right wriggle of a fish, or the great front-back motion of a whale's flukes. And may also be seen in the cytoplasmic streaming present in undifferentiated colonies of cells – a primitive, archetypal fore-runner of lymphatic and vascular circulation. We draw in the air, bringing the infinity of space into our bodies, as our ribs expand out like the mantle of a jellyfish – we expand into the diffuse realms of the space that surrounds our bodies. Then we breathe out – becoming small again, coming down to Earth, embodying, condensing, solidifying.
But there are even bigger, more fundamental polarities. The polarity of Death vs Life plays out every moment of our existence. Not as a battle to stay alive but because Life and Death (what might be termed the Spiritual realm) have complementary functions in a complex living organism. Life is chaotic and expansive. But at its unrestrained extreme, is exemplified by the cancer cell - which has no sense of direction or purpose, and is prepared to expand indefinitely with no sense of boundary other than slowing when its food supplies might run out. Science fiction writers talk of this state as "green goo" – the end point of an unregulated dominant life form that fills all space available on a planet. On the other hand, there is an insubstantial presence that is dead (i.e. it is a spiritual being, not an organic one) that – when fixed to a body – informs the living organic body of its identity in all meanings of the word. If the tethering becomes weaker, then the spirit is less bound to its physical life, and the physical body becomes weak and ill. The degree of binding and intermeshing between spirit and body – like all things relating to organic life – has a homeostatic range, and if the binding is too hard or too loose, then problems arise.
One way this chaos vs structure polarity manifests in living organisms is in the homeostatic balance between control vs autonomy – see "Loose Coupling". The resilience of Life is a testament to how finely that balance is struck.
