The principle of unfolding wholeness in nature

Throughout the natural world, one sees myriad examples of systems which “come into being”. Indeed, as we think about it, in natural systems there is nothing else but this “coming into being”. Everything is coming into being, continuously.

A living process always has enormous respect for the state (and morphology and form) of what exists, and always finds a next step forward which preserves the structure of what exists, and develops and extends its latent structure as it creates change, or evolution, or development. This is the process which is “creative”.

The searchlight on nature will show us that many of the processes we have come to accept as normal in architecture and city planning and development are, from a process point of view, deeply flawed. They are, as matters stand today, incapable in principle of generating living structure. For this reason the near absence of living structure in our built contemporary world cannot be a surprise to us. It follows, inevitably, from the flaws of the processes we have come to accept as a normal part of our society, and it will change only when the processes we use in our society, are changed.

But why does living structure, with its multiplicity of centers and their associated fifteen properties, keep making its appearance in the natural world? Why, and how, does living structure keep recurring in these widely different domains? What is the mechanics of the process by which living structure is made to appear, so easily, in nature? What is the process by which this kind of structure repeatedly, and persistently, occurs?
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“To learn how to create living structure in buildings, we had better start by looking at nature.”

#book/The Nature of Order/2 The process of creating life/1 The principle of unfolding wholeness in nature#