You and optimal systems – Part 1

Recently I was considering the idea of optimal systems and what is required to keep them operating functionally. What I now feel is that systems require an allocation of resources both to the advancement of the system as well as to the restoration and protection of it. We as people, and as systems, need to keep an elevated tone in creation but require a harmony with its restorative functions. This is seen in the body as a balance between the sympathetic system which elevates and the parasympathetic system which restores. Both are necessary for the optimal functioning of any system whether it be one element of the human body, the human body as a whole, or a collective of people.

There is such similarities between the dynamics of systems. If you stop and take a step back you will see how the systems are operating under the same physics. It doesn’t matter what, who or where you are, you will find the synchronicities. It all just depends on what level you are looking at the world from. Whether macroscopic or microscopic we are all but different resolutions of the same picture.   Let us consider the balance below.

Woes of the Elevated culture


The Athenians were an advancing and creative civilization of the ancient world that gave us many of the seeds of our own thinking and advancements of the modern-day. Ancient Athens was a center for the arts, learning and philosophy, home of Plato’s Academia and Aristotle’s Lyceum. Athens was the birthplace of democracy as well as Socrates, Sophocles, and its many other prominent creators of the ancient world. Athenians operated truly harmoniously as a civilization, but without placing resources into the defense response, they were more susceptible to attack. Whilst they were progressing as a creative system, advancing moral and civil ideas and functionality, they had not addressed the defensive elements in the structure of the civil system properly to anticipate any offense. They were eventually overthrown and dissolved into the many succeeding empires.

Woes of the Elevated body

This balance is seen similarly in the body of a high performance athlete. When they train their body to optimal functioning the majority of their resources are being placed into maintaining the high functioning of the system. When the high functioning system is attacked by invading pathogens the system typically has not dedicated enough resources to maintain an equilibrium in the face of the high level of functioning required while balancing the immune defensive response. The body ultimately gets sick and injured more easily as it is operating at the brink of peak performance and it’s limits.

This high level of functioning is quite unlike a body that is constantly punishing itself, for instance with booze, unhealthy foods and lifestyle habits, the system knows to place more emphasis on the defensive/ immune response and in turn removes resources that would otherwise be placed into higher mental faculties.

If we look at the system from the perspective of high performance vehicles versus the old jalopy. Old Jalopies were built from much denser material and were very crude compared to modern-day, clunking along through the oil, dirt and grime of the system. Whereas the high functioning motors, whilst made of light and well lubricated systematics, a speck of dirt can throw the whole system out. The maker eventually learns how to treat the system and how to counter for the effects of the minutiae which can throw the system out. In this same way we too learn what ways don’t serve us and our progress in this world and how to change, and remove elements that reduce the efficiency and harmony of our lives. Unfortunately, sometimes people address the situation too late and many of the parts have worn down. We have now begun to replace to parts but even then we have dramatically reduced our potential.

When we this mechanical perspective it becomes clear how when we enter into a space of chaos, clunking and spluttering our way through life, we feel a general life discordance. Some life event and our reaction to it has led us to the question “why this?” However such chaos can be offset by acknowledging that we are hyper functional beings and in this chaos we have just pinpointed a speck of dirt which has thrown out our system. Through this we remove ourselves from an attachment to any end point, for as we know there is no end point, and instead insert ourselves back into the process of life – aka the flow. Through the acknowledgment of the process in chaos you now have the ability to adjust your perspective to a more powerful place by knowing instead of whats gone wrong, where you need to fine tune the system. Chaos in our lives is a blessing as it shows us where to grow. So love the process of adjustment because it is good to be happy in the good times but it is truly living to find happiness in the bad times.

Knowing your potential of tomorrow, today

I am often led to the question “are you a person that knows everything or nothing?” If I were to be asked that question my answer would be “nothing”. I would say nothing because the information I think I know is only on loan until I trade it for newer upgrades on the information. While this information is always building on itself to further create greater understanding of what I think I know, sometimes there are complete overhauls to the system that completely shatter the foundations of the old idea. Therefore by understanding that my ideas of the world are transient and only temporary, then I am a lot freer to move with the changes. By knowing that we know nothing except  what we choose to know actually allows us to know everything, if everything to know is already known. We just haven’t chosen to know it yet. It all exists but there’s only so much we can hold as a conscious knowing. So don’t own your ideas just rent them, so that its easier to trade them in for a better model.

Knowing is subjective

The basis for our thoughts are only on rent because we take them on as our own only for a short period until we are ready to move on to a thinking space that better serves us. Think back to how often your opinions of the different aspects on life have changed. How love is supposed to be, what is beautiful, what our dreams are, what is the best way to have your sandwich? Our way that we look at the world is always changing. While we are settled into a particular thought space, we are completely appreciative of it as we are provided with a sanctuary in which to build our lives from. But some people forget that our thoughts are temporary and choose to identify with them as the Truth rather than a guide.

Subjectivity is infinite

Are our thoughts pre-existing or conjured and created?  In my opinion, I believe both. The thoughts that we experience, in our conscious world, are synthesized from our experience. But the place where they reside outside of our consciousness is a volatile world of unlimited thought and possibility, dormant in our experience until we move towards its creation. Therefore the place where our thoughts come from exists already, because infinity possibility exists.

The quantum world of infinite possibility

I base my idea of the pre-existence of infinite possibility on the double slit quantum experiment which showed how a photon (a massless quantum particle of light) had the possibility of existing in every part of space-time all at the one moment. It moved in a wave-like manner as it was projected outward and in turn took every known path through the universe before it made it through the slit. What was interesting is that the instance the photon was observed, it collapsed into a finite particle moving out of the wave-like state. This is true for us. You have the possibility of moving your body in any way you choose right now and create unlimited possibility of events that you wouldn’t even consider like kissing your screen. Just think about how many ways you can move your arm in the space around you. But the second you do it you observe the experience of that move and it collapses into a finite experience. Our minds are created to only experience one moment at a time and that is in part why time is experienced in a progressive linear fashion.

A world of potential past the point of now

Ultimately it depends on how you subscribe to the mechanics of the Universe and what you determine the universe actually to be. For instance is the universe only this moment of reality that we are conscious of? If we peer past this moment does anything exist or is it just a void? I personally believe it is a void of reality, a world of formless potential. A foamy sea of quantum fluctuations awaiting the light of our consciousness to collapse infinity into a finite moment of experience which we have chosen for ourselves. When i look at it that way, I see that what lies in that void is one thing and one thing only… possibility. The eternal possibility of anything and everything happening at that one moment and the brilliant harmony of the universe forming to enable that moment is realized as your truth, your knowing, because you chose so. But when you choose otherwise, then no longer will that reality be, but now a completely different one in its place for you. Tired of the old and embraced the new.

The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.

Sir James Jeans (1877-1946) English physicist and mathematician

When we are young we may think that all we want to be is an astronaut but then we experience and grow. We learn that there are more possibilities for us that better serve our future selves and we now know that we want to be a musician, completely discarding the old idea of becoming an astronaut, to have a new knowing of who we are. We have been given the opportunity to discard ideas. We live our ideas as true but then we are free to let them go. Therefore we have them as only the most probable possibility at that point in time. We loan our ideas from the sea of possibility as the knowing that best serves us at that time. The more we understand this, the more we are able to create a fluid world, free from the pain of resistance and rigidity.

Resistance can break

It is when we are rigid with our thinking, holding our thoughts as a universal truth, that we create a pain of rejecting new and improved thinking into our lives. This rigidity and resistance is brought about from our attachment to dogma, to comfort and familiarity, to the ruts that we have carved in our thinking and living, so that we can coast along without considering new terrain. A train can only stay on the track. Another way of thinking about attachments to old beliefs is that it is only the brittle reed that breaks. The supple leaf bends and folds with the movements of the violent and erratic forces of the external world because this branch is flexible in its movements and thinking. It believes it can take on many shapes and form, whereas the brittle reed only has one form and if you try to ask it to take on another knowing of its shape it will resist and break itself rather than allow for a change.

I’m not frustrated by not knowing everything i am inspired by it. I don’t need to know everything, where would be the fun in that, and for that matter i know that i have the potential of knowing everything that i need to know. “know more, know less” hehehehe.