Magic and Mystery
Victor MacGill's website
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Chaos
and Complexity Magic and Mystery Victor MacGill's website |
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My first book.. |
 
A Human Map A
map tells us what a particular area of land looks like and gives much
useful information about it as in the map of New Zealand shown here. We
can see Dunedin in the south, Cook Strait near the middle and Auckland
in the north.I want to create such a map of a human being. One part of who we are is our physical self and we already have very good maps of that part of ourselves. A book on physiology and anatomy is a map of our physical body as it the diagram to the left, but we are much more than just our physical self, so we have to look more deeply to get a full map of ourselves. One description of a human being, which I want to use, says we have four parts: physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual.  On
the physical level, we are made of cells. Cells are most amazing. They
have many parts all working together. Chemicals enter the cell and
chemical leave the cell. Body cells have DNA as a blueprint for their
growth. Cells can't do much, however on their own, so cells join
together to form tissue. Tissue can do things individual cells could
never do. Groups of tissue then joins together to form glands, which
again can do
things tissue cannot do. Glands then join together to form body systems
like the circulatory, respiratory, nervous or skeletal systems. All
these together form a human body, which of course is capable of
all sorts of things a body system can't do. What we see from this is a basic principle of life; that it is a wholeness made up of levels within levels with each level combining to creating the next one. These "systems within systems" are called fractals. Life is fractal.  Next,
we will consider the human brain, which is also fractal and
teaches us some interesting things. There are basically three levels
within levels. The inside level is called the mid-brain and is related
to our basic survival needs. It controls things like breathing, heart
beat, blood pressure, temperature control, and instinctual behaviour.
Without it, we die very quickly.Wrapped around the survival brain, which controls our physical body, we have the limbic system, which controls our emotions. The main emotions are anger, sadness, disgust, joy, and fear. The emotional brain is capable of more complex functions than the instinctual survival brain. Wrapped around the emotional brain is the cerebral cortex or thinking brain. This is even more complex and controls our higher functions. Scientists would generally stop at this level, but a logical step would be to add a spiritual level, which is related to even higher functions. But let's step back and look at what we have here, our brain forms a map of our whole being: physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual. This is amazing, but it is only the start. If we look at the brain of a fish, a frog or a lizard, all creatures that are the most basic and primitive, we find they only have a basic survival brain, which is also called a reptilian brain. They operate entirely by instinct, because they don't have the brain power for anything more complex. More complex creatures like rats, mice, dogs, and cats have a survival brain and an emotional brain. They feel emotions like fear and anger, which improves their ability to survive compared to creatures who only have instincts. Next, are creatures like monkeys, apes, and dolphins, which have a thinking brain, and of course, with the use of language, is us, the human being. At a spiritual level we might find angels and other spiritual beings. So, not only is our brain a map of all the aspects that make up a human being, it is also map of our total evolutionary history of the past four and a half billion years from single cells, which our body is made of, through all the different creatures up to human being. And not only that, but it also a map of our future spiritual potential, of what we can become.  The
next part of our map looks at our social evolution. Again we have
layers within layers. An individual is a part of a family, which is
usually part of an extended family, which is part of a community, which
is part of a town or city, which is part of a nation, which is part of
our planet. When you think about it, this is a map of the last three
million years of our social evolution since our ancestors first left
their trees in small family groups in the African jungle to walk
upright on the savanna, right through to whole planet linked by the
Internet, jet travel and instant communications.A system called Spiral Dynamics maps human social development very well. According to Spiral  Dynamics
the first stage is small family
groups living at a basic survival level. There may well be no humans
living at this level today. As the family groups grow they become
tribal community groups. The tribes have chiefs, and a person's rank is
mainly determined by whether their family is part of a chiefly family
line, roles are sharply defined, and shamans play a crucial role in the
spiritual life if the people. They generally coexist quite peacefully,
but as tribes become bigger and the number of tribes increases, tension
rises. Tribes shift to form warrior based societies and eventually a
strong tribal chief will found an empire with tribes either supporting
the new king or being destroyed by him <it virtually always is a
him>. Empires
often begin from strong city states like Athens or Rome.Empires like the Egyptians, Greeks, Aztecs or the Chin dynasty use violence and threats to hold their empire together. The violence will always cause resentment and anger from the victims, often resulting in yet another violent revolution. Something else is needed to keep the empire together in the long term. Consistently through history, empires have maintained their ongoing existence by developing a unified set or values and beliefs for everyone in the empire. This significantly reduces the levels of conflict. This sense of unity through unified beliefs is seen in Christianity, Islam and Communism. These sets of beliefs generally all claim that their truth is the only truth and sharply divide believers and non-believers. As time continues, people react against being told what to believe and having no say in how their society is run. What follows is a different revolution, overthrowing the ruling class. In the next stage it is replaced by a nation or republic ruled by a democracy. France and USA are obvious examples. Being democracies, they tend to focus on the individual and be materialistic. Most of our modern world lives at this level. Eventually though people get tired of this way of life thinking "there must be more to life than this materialism". This propels them into the next stage typified by the alternative movement, New Age and green, environmental life styles. The down side of this stage is the tendency to be too idealistic and impractical, and they can still be antagonistic towards those who do not see the world as they do.  The
next stage is the integral stage where people are able to
integrate and work with all the previous stages, building on their
positive aspects. For example, recognising that the violent empire
stage is also a stage of vigour and courage and the tribal stage has
strong community values often lost at higher levels. This
integral stage is now just starting to develop and is happening at a
planetary level.If you have been alert you will have noticed our same basic stages hidden in the Spiral Dynamics' levels of civilization. The survival stage relates to the physical aspect of our being, through to the empire, which is emotional, through to the Democratic nation, which is thinking, and on to integral, which is spiritual. There is another map which links human beings to nature. The same fractals we see in human beings, all the levels within levels we see all about us in nature. We see similar patterns repeated at different levels in tree branches, in vegetables like cauliflower and broccoli, wave patterns, river patterns, and all around the natural environment. We are made of the same basic patterns than the nature we live in.  And
now to the final map, which again you won't find in any scientific
book. This is about levels of subtle bodies. The lowest is the physical
body, around it are levels of aura, an
emotional subtle body, an intellectual subtle body and a
spiritual subtle body. Ken Wilber describes these subtle bodies as
levels of spiritual consciousness, the first where we have an emotional
understanding of God, the second where we have an intellectual
understanding and the final stage where we have a full spiritual
experience of being one with God.When we put all this together, we get a truly amazing picture of what we are as human beings. It shows us as being one with each other, one with our ancestry, one with nature and one with our universe. I would like to conclude with a thought for you to mull over. Perhaps this picture of life as a wholeness made up of levers within layers each mapping back on to themselves is actually a map of God, and of course, the amazing process of co-creation that includes you and me. |
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