Every living process is — at its core — a process which is devoted, through adaptation, to making every part unique
This point is so simple. There is nothing complicated about it. It seems rather astonishing that all this complexity boils down to something as simple as this. It is a little bit like the proverbial slap from a Zen teacher. The student thinks it is all complicated, deep, profound. He twists his head this way and that way, trying to “get” it. Then the teacher finally slaps him to wake him up, as if to say, “Stop thinking about such complicated matters: Just eat, just walk, just sleep”. Or (in the case of architecture), Just make it nice at every spot.
Life is unique. We could even say: Life is exactly that property of space in which each spot becomes unique according to its place in the larger scheme of things. So, if there were a spatial formula which would explain in detail how to make living space, it would fail, because, by virtue of being a formula, it could not succeed in treating each place as unique.
But there is a formula of living process. If you pay attention to the wholeness, intensify it, intensify it some more — gradually then it becomes unique.
“I got there, but I don’t know how I got there. It is like reading a book, over and over, and then finally I have absorbed its meaning, but I do not know just how or when this happened.”
“I understand it now: but I do not know at what moment I understood it, or what happened. It is like an enlightenment. Suddenly it seems obvious, and the difficulties are gone.”
Everything hinges on the understanding that every part must become unique when living processes are working. This is the key. It is a particular type of geometry which, though highly regular, has every part unique because it is true to its context and therefore to its essence. What we began to appreciate is that every repeated entity is different: that we have to look, carefully at every single case as fresh.
#book/The Nature of Order/2 The process of creating life/12 Every part unique#