What would life look like if we looked at it as a whole?
When Humphrey Davy was splitting apart compounds with electricity and revealing novel elements to the gasps of his classroom in the early 1800s, there were poets and artists seated there as well. When he tested laughing gas on himself before offering it to the class, he recorded a poet commenting that “I feel like the sound of a harp.” Such a detail was considered scientific. The romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge was known to be in Davy’s class. The ferment of discovery was as broad as it was exact, as internal as it was external. And these two things did not negate each other.
The scientific revolution, with its emphasis on evidence above all, has led to a divorce of philosophy and science. Natural philosophy has faded from the modern world, becoming a shell of something that used to be bigger than life. Science, with its controlled and closed environments and inductive, reductionist reasoning, has, without question, advanced humanity greatly.
However, we find ourselves in a state of impasse.
It becomes more and more obvious that life is not lived in a controlled environment. The words of Sartre become increasingly resonant: “Everything has been figured out except how to live.”
What would life look like as a whole? What would your life look like if you saw it as a whole?
It is like asking to see a duck as a symphony or yourself as a riddle. What might your life look like, and how might it feel? How are we seeing it?
Children look at life as a whole. They don’t divorce their sense of possibility from what is actual. They don’t shrink themselves, and they don’t ignore beautiful lit-up things. They love to play and explore the world every day, and they don’t see collaboration as a chore.
Natural philosophy opens up avenues of inquiry that are essential to playing the game of life.
Ignoring the observer means ignoring the real world and ourselves. By keeping the insides separate from the outsides, we hollow things out, needlessly robbing humanity of the nourishing substance of living.
It is intuitive to recognize a poetic connection with the moon, the sun, and the stars. It may be less intuitive to consider that poetry and archetypes also have a scientific connection.
When you consider the psyche and the observable world, it all comes under one umbrella. That umbrella is physics.
The root word of physics is “phys,” which is Greek for “nature” and “natural order.”
Nature is the study of the physical world. This also encompasses the invisible aspects of physics that are at work. And these invisible physics extend to the reality of reflective thought and feeling. It is why one’s posture changes when they are relieved of stress. It is why a smile lifts a face toward the source of light and freedom from which it is born and to which it strives to reconnect.
Natural philosophy is not embraced today like it was in the time of Goethe or Aristotle. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t embrace it. Natural philosophy invites you to lead a life of wonder and fiery curiosity. It invites you to try things that are truly worthwhile. It invites you to consider what questions to ask before you go about searching for an answer. It invites you to play with the physics that you see, feel, and experience.
If, by alienating philosophy from science, we have distanced ourselves from the natural world, could reuniting these two help us reclaim a sense of natural wholeness? What are the implications? More peace? More discovery? More freedom? New laws?
What could it mean to understand the physics that extend outward and inward, from the star that twinkles back to us and the poetry it inspires?
The physics preserved in the zodiac invites the individual to consider each movement, symbol, and archetype from their perspective. The individual draws from the farthest reaches of the cosmos and all they understand ‘out there,’ synthesizing it with all that has come before in their own life, all that they feel at the depth of their soul, and the privacy of their sensations. The synthesis is toroidal, entirely open, yet also distinct.
And once again, life is seen as a whole. Great works of art, literature, and music continue to shape the perspectives of people as they strive to see life as a whole. Great movements of history, breakthroughs of science, and collective challenges all produce a new whole from which the individual, whole unto themselves, reflects upon and shares. We continue to take the whole world in and reflect it back out. Like breathing. This is the torus flow of nature.
What could this flow mean for you today? Even if you were to indulge me in a ‘secret physics’ preserved by the zodiac and agree that nature is toroidal in character, how would this change your life?
The physics of nature is an invitation to apply them to the life you lead.
What does your life look like when seen as a whole?
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