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Holism
Ken Glasziou
"Every impulse of every electron, thought, or spirit is an acting unit in the whole universe....The universe is a whole; no thing or being exists or lives in isolation." (647)
In the 1930's, that statement was decades ahead of its time. Only a handful of particle physicists would have conceded that it might be true.
Einstein's theory of relativity specified that the speed of light was a limiting velocity. Nothing could travel faster--and if it did, it would travel backwards in time.
Information transfer is also assumed to be limited by the speed of light. So how could a universe with a radius of 15 billion light years possible be holistic--with every particle being affected by every other particle? Common sense says it would take a minimum of 30 billion years for particles at opposite ends of the universe to be able to influence one another.
Proof of physical holism did not come until about 1990 when the "non-local" behavior of twin particles having correlated properties was observed. Non-local implies instantaneous interaction. Thus, appropriately paired electrons display linked behavior instantaneously, even if separated at opposite ends of the universe. What is done to one is instantly reflected in the other.
Although initial demonstrations of this effect were confined to the laboratory, it has since been taken beyond the laboratory, one demonstration being between villages in Switzerland, kilometers apart and separated by a large mountain.
Successful information transfer by human beings using this means has yet to be demonstrated, but it appears to be only a matter of time before the ingenuity of experimentalists triumphs.
The potential for holism is described many times in the Urantia Papers. The reflectivity system utilized by extra-celestials operates for information transfer, both instantaneously and continuously. Spirit entities can also travel at speeds that must come close to being instantaneous transfer. For example, the solitary messengers travel between local universes "immediately," and gravity messengers range the universes independently of space and time--which must surely mean instantaneously.
On our planet, holistic thinking coupled with process philosophy seems set to herald in a new era in human thinking for the twenty first century.
Although the basic ideas behind process philosophy have been around since the 6th century BC, it did not gain any significant following prior to the publication in 1929 of A. N. Whitehead's "Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology."
Most conventional philosophy assumes that a fixed and permanent reality comprised of substance-matter underlies the transient changes of normal experience.
In contrast, Whitehead's process concepts assert that basic reality is in a constant state of flux, its smallest ingredients having only a fleeting existence before they perish. It is the interactions of these transient ingredients, existing as "societies of entities," that affords apparent permanence.
Hence all the objects and people we observe around us are really "societies" that, at the deepest level, are similar to the virtual particles of the physicist. These are demonstrated experimentally to momentarily pop into and out of existence by borrowing energy from the "vacuum."
Just as conventional physics has the principle of conservation of energy (energy-matter can neither be created nor destroyed), so also does materialistic or substance philosophy have a static baseline. But process philosophy puts its emphasis on dynamic becoming.
Of importance to Urantia Book readers are the similarities of many of the book's teachings to those of process philosophy and theology.
For example, a stumbling block in monotheistic religions is the side by side existence of the mutually exclusive concepts of the transcendence and immanence of God. How can God be transcendent--beyond time and space--and at the same time be immanent--present in the world?
The Urantia Papers present us with the concept of the Supreme, a God in the process of becoming in a world that is also "becoming."
Whitehead's solution of the transcendence-immanence problem was to make God "dipolar," having both a "primordial" and a "consequent" nature. God's primordial nature is independent of the world, while his consequent nature is immersed in the world and experiences its joys and vicissitudes.
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