Three Bridges West, a San Francisco film company has completed a second video of selected interviews on topics in human consciousness and the cosmos, this one entitled Élan Vital. It is a remarkable and beautiful meditation on the possibility of a driving force, a field of purposefulness, of love, flowing through the universe. The first video addressed the question of Uncertainty and Human Perception. I was delighted to participate in this project with other notable researchers and writers including Dr. Ted Peters, Dr. Dean Radin, Dr. Ilia Delio, Dr. Philip Clayton and Dr. Frank Heile.
The following is a selection of my quotes from the video. The concepts largely reflect the expositions from my 2016 FQXi Essay, The How and the Why of Emergence and Intention, available for download from the Publications page.
“There was a period of time, and it still is the case, where people think about life as being fundamentally different from physics. Part of the explanation, for a while, was, well, that’s because life has something special. It has this ‘Elan Vital’, or immanence to it, that physics doesn’t have.”
“We’re just beginning to think, in terms of complexity theory, about the fact that these emergent systems and processes create more structure and more order out of less. That’s part of the sense of emergence towards some end state which is more structured, more complex. We see this process in physics as well as in chemistry, biology and consciousness. Where the emergence of a galactic spiral is a beautiful process. Where, somehow, these inanimate glowing balls of matter find a way to dance around each other rather than simply just bumping and going off in random directions. They are brought into a synchronous process where they then display the beauty of the spiral, the galactic spiral.”
“It’s not necessarily a substance that transmits, like the way a warm piece of metal transmits heat. It’s more like a field, a potential, that is moving through space and time. That potential carries with it the ability to activate certain things.”
“There’s a directionality to that process as well. It’s not just biological systems that are being drawn to more complex structures and more interesting structures, it’s physics as well.”
“There is a fundamental purpose moving through creation, or flowing through creation. You could imagine that as a field and you can marry that concept, actually to what I characterize as love — Love flowing through the universe as a field, that comes out of a universal consciousness.”
Images from Three Bridges West
