Seeing the First Part of Chapter 1 • A World Hidden in Plain Sight

My book, Seeing: The Field Guide, is available for review! Here are the first two sections of Chapter 1.

After years and years, my book, Seeing: A Field Guide to the Patterns and Processes of Nature, Culture, and Consciousness, will be published on September 4, 2024. Meanwhile, I have copies available for review. The ebook can be pre-ordered now on Amazon. In another month or so, you’ll be able to pre-order it from your favorite bookshop.

Meanwhile, here are the first two sections of the first chapter. Please let me know what you think!

Chapter 1 • A World Hidden in Plain Sight

This field guide looks at existence through a particular lens and then shines a light on the following observation: 

Everything—from an atom to a cell to the Universe—is made up of the same patterns. Understand how these patterns organize Nature’s systems, and you can better and more creatively organize your thinking and reasoning and the systems in which you live.

Birders, stargazers, and budding mineralogists use field guides to discover and explore whole worlds in their own backyards.  The more they observe, the more there is to experience.  An everyday thing, like a bird, star, or rock, becomes a fascinating frontier.

This field guide describes ancient patterns and processes that can help you more deeply observe everything. When you begin to see that all is made up of networks, boundaries, bonds, feedback loops, and cycles, then birds, stars, rocks, and your backyard, relationships, family, community, nation, and the world become new frontiers for exploration, discovery, and possibility.   

A standard field guide looks at a particular category of thing and then describes and categorizes its varieties, each with its particular features, activities, and environments. This field guide doesn’t focus on things. It focuses on the interactions within and among things. What underpins this field guide and what it describes is how every thing is a system, every thing consists of systems and is part of systems, and every system is made up of the same patterns of interactivity. 

Look at your system of interest from this point of view, and you may make connections that you have never made before. You may consider entirely new hypotheses. You may discover a means to see what was elusive before. You may think, “Finally, a way to look at this complex thing in a way that makes sense,” or “Finally I have the words to express what I have understood all along.”

The value of exploration from this view unfolds as you go deeper into it. You begin to see these patterns in politics and economics, in religion and philosophy, at work and in community, in your relationships and your mind. You cut through the noise of conflicting knowledge, cultural assumptions, and opinions to see more clearly what is really there.

Nature has used patterns and processes, some of which are presented in this book, to organize successful systems for almost 14 billion years. They will be remarkably familiar. After all, you are made up of them, you are part of them, and you use them in every moment.

Science Is Catching Up

Human survival has always depended upon science. Systems engineer and theorist Duane Hybertson describes the process:

·      Deep observation of surroundings reveals regularities.

·      From regularities, we develop models that we test and use.

·      We develop theories—stories that put context to and make sense of observations, regularities, and models.

Each established science—physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, etc.—observes the regularities of different types of things at particular spatial (size) and temporal (time) scales. These sciences model and test regularities and then frame the models in theories. As more regularities are observed, modeled, and tested, theories evolve, and new ones emerge.

Indigenous people depend upon the deep observation of nature’s regularities. They develop and test models through generations, sharing and perpetuating the models through metaphors and stories.

Religious prophets describe the regularities of human existence. They describe how human life works using allegories and metaphors that are preserved in scripture.

Systems science observes the regularities—the patterns of interactivity—that organize all things and all activities.

This field guide models these regularities as systems processes. Examples are networks, feedback, boundary, bond, cycle, evolution, and more. Most of these systems processes can be modeled using simple computer applications.

Systems Processes Theory, the brainchild of evolutionary biologist and systems theorist Lenard Troncale, tells the story of how the regularities—the systems processes—interact to emerge as nature’s systems.

Typically, a particular system is examined through the perspective and jargon of a specialist. For example, a chemist studies the elements and molecules. A geologist studies rock and soil formations. Psychologists study human experience, and philosophers address what can’t be nailed down by science.

A systems scientist asks the same questions about every thing and every activity:

·      What is the system under observation?

·      What are its subsystems and suprasystems?

·      What networks make it up?

·      What networks is it a part of?

·      What are its boundaries? Inputs? Outputs? Feedback processes?

·      How does it adapt and evolve?

But keep in mind that these patterns are not theoretical and scientific—any more than a tree or a star is theoretical and scientific. These patterns existed long before this science. Systems science provides language and tools to identify and model these patterns. It moves them from the metaph

orical to the realm of the clearly defined, modeled, and tested.

From this worldview, we humans are natural systems living within natural systems. All that we are and experience can be modeled as systems of systems processes. Even love and hate, ethics and values, and human consciousness can potentially be modeled, and what can be modeled can be better understood and lived. What makes up a healthy system models what makes up a healthy nation, community, or human. If you can envision a healthy system–and throughout history, prophets and spiritual leaders have shown us that you don’t have to be a scientist to do it—you can change the world.