Organic or Inorganic

There is a central myth that has beset the Western world for thousands of years. Perhaps it was the Hebrews, perhaps it was the greeks. The notion that runs through our thinking about the world is that it is a thing.

Up to the enlightenment, the universe was a created object, made like a potter makes a pot. Man, himself, was made of clay. With science and the enlightenment, we've done away with God but the myth has remained where the universe is a dead thing, life a happy accident. Newton's clockwork universe still ticks in our heads as we view the world. At its heart, we reason, everything is the insensate collisions of countless billiard ball-like particles. Nothing more.

But this is not the only myth we can use. The Chinese view the universe as organic. Imagine seeing an apple tree in winter, for all intents and purposes a dead thing, inert. In spring, it brings forth leaves and apples. That is what apple trees do. The apple is contained in potentiality in the bare tree, and before that the seed. If our imaginations can stretch enough we can see the apple contained in potentiality in the air and water.

Our labels of organic and inorganic, living and non-living, are simply that; labels. They are intellectual constructions, and they are deeply informed by our culture's guiding myths.

We can choose to view the world from the 'bottom up' as 'really' inert stuff moving about or we can see it from the 'top down' as a whole organic process, unfolding in complexity and beauty, each new form an expression of its essential nature.

Apple trees 'apple' One of the things the universe apparently does is 'people'.