Inside and Outside; Hidden and Revealed

Strong backlighting reveals the intricacies of form, pattern and texture in this daylily. It’s a wonder to me that the plant has chosen, over eons of evolutionary time, to reveal its complexity and beauty in individual flowers for just one day depending upon multiples for pollination. Flowers— like every other lifeform, including human beings—have a particular strategy for maintaining survival and growth as a species. What’s going on there? Probing the peculiarities of the quantum world, physicist David Bohm published an explanation in his groundbreaking book called Wholeness and the Implicate Order. (A pdf copy can be downloaded here).

A flower’s appearance provides an excellent example of his perspective, that the reality we experience follows from an underlying reality that we don’t see. He refers to it as an “order.” The analogy he uses to represent reality is a rolled-up carpet—

Consider, for example, a carpet. The carpet may be regarded as consisting of two basic aspects: its explicit, measurable aspect (its length, width, color, texture, etc.), and its implicit, unmeasurable aspect (its overall design, the way the colors and textures are interrelated, etc.). Now suppose the carpet is rolled up and put away. In this state, the explicit aspect is hidden, but the implicit aspect remains, folded into the rolled-up carpet. This implicit order can be made explicit again by unrolling the carpet.

Similarly, in the implicate order, the universe is like a rolled-up carpet. The explicit aspect of the universe (the manifest world of separate objects and events) is like the unrolled carpet, while the implicit aspect (the enfolded, unmanifest order) is like the rolled-up carpet. The implicate order is not manifest, but it can be unfolded into the explicate order of manifest reality. (Pages 11-12 of his book)

What we’re experiencing moment-to-moment is a reality that’s not predetermined, but underlying it are universal rules, connections and principles. While the physical manifestation follows these rules without question, human beings possessed of free will could choose to align themselves with them. Or not. Dr. Bohm speaks of the implicate order as being universal. “Space,” he said, “is not empty. It is full, a plenum as opposed to a vacuum, and is the ground for the existence of everything, including ourselves.” A plenum is a “field” of energy, a deeper level of objective reality that emphasizes “the primacy of structure and process over individual objects.” So, what we take for reality, even time and space, are surface phenomena, forms that have unfolded out of this underlying (implicate) order, the ground from which reality emerges.

Here is an instance where science has codified a theory—that an inner dimension (field, order, spirit) gives rise to the outer (material, manifested) reality—long acknowledged by indigenous and formalized Eastern and Western religious traditions.

For decades, I’ve been photographing flowers and other plants, not only because they’re beautiful, but because this underlying order is evident in diverse forms, colors and geometries. Having witnessed the luminous qualities in the original photographs of Ansel Adams and several others, I realized that the light without could reveal the light within. And that became my modus operandi.

One of my photography books, a monograph entitled Patterns: Evidence of Cosmic Order, is essentially a celebration of it. Another is Weeds: God by the Side of the Road. (Click on the book to open it and click on the pages to turn them. The arrow at the top expands the book to full screen).

The opening and closing of daylilies have long been a metaphor for lifecycles—rising and falling, breathing in, breathing out, life and death. When I first took daylilies into the studio to photograph them, I thought they would die without a bright light on them to mimic sunlight. I was wrong. I left a cut plant in water overnight in total darkness, yet the blossom was open and brilliant in the morning. With some research, I discovered that the flower’s opening and closing mechanism is less a factor of sunlight, than a result of its biological clock. It just “knows” when a day begins and when it ends, irrespective of whether the sun is shining, rising or setting. Even in a coal mine the flowers would open and close as the day begins and ends. Remarkable!

Fractal Geometry

The strong backlight in this image reminds me of fractal geometry, one of the principals of the implicate order. The irregular appearance around the end of the daylily petal displays the same kind of irregularity as that seen around the coastline of islands and continents. Were we to continuously zoom in closer to the edge of the petal at any point, we would see ever smaller version of the same pattern on down to the cellular level. The same is true of the veins in the leaf. So, the underlying rules of the universe operate at every level of manifest reality. And running through them all is a common foundation—consciousness—from quarks to cosmos, the shaper of these rules and patterns.

The correspondence of broccoli florets, a firefly’s eye, courtship rituals, and dreamscapes with galactic nebula reveal a natural, folded up self-similarity. These examples point to the universality of the fractal as a central organizing principle of our universe; wherever we look, the complex systems of nature and time in nature seem to preserve the look of details at finer and finer scales. Fractals show a hidden holistic order behind things, a harmony in which everything affects everything else.

Jean Houston, American author involved in the human potential movement.

Everywhere we look, particularly in the patterns and geometries of living systems, we find pervasive and consistent—evolutionary—order. It gives us confidence that, even in the vagaries of the unfolding material world, Mother Nature knows what she’s doing. And that’s a reason to hope for the future.

At the heart of the most random or chaotic event lies order, pattern, and causality, if only we can learn to see it in large enough context.

 Corinne McLaughlin, American author and educator.

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My other sites—

Love And Light greetings.com: A twice-weekly blog featuring wisdom quotes and perspectives in science and spirituality intended to inspire and empower

David L. Smith Photography Portfolio.com: Black and white and color photography

Ancient Maya Cultural Traits.com: Weekly blog featuring the traits that made this civilization unique