3min chapter

The Weekend University cover image

Integrating Ancient Wisdom & Modern Science To Create A Meaningful Life - Jeremy Lent

The Weekend University

CHAPTER

The Dow, the Ultimate Pattern of Patterns in the Universe

Sages basically integrated the three great traditions that had been dominant in China for centuries. One was daoism, another was Confucianism and third was Buddhism. And this school of thought synthesized all three to develop a very sophisticated sense of how the universe actually works. So they call themselves a score of the Dow.

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And these sages basically integrated the three great traditions that had been dominant in China for centuries or millennia or more, one was daoism that we just looked at. Another was Confucianism, which is fundamental to Chinese thought, and the third was Buddhism that actually arose in India, but arrived in China in the first few hundred years of the common era and had become fully integrated in Chinese thought by that time about a thousand years ago. And this school of thought synthesized all three to develop a very sophisticated and comprehensive sense of how the universe actually works. So they call themselves a score of the Dow. We know them nowadays by the term neo-confucianism. And for the neo-confucianism, the entire universe actually consists of she, which we can think of as matter and or energy. But in addition to that she was equally important, what they called Lee, the principles by which the she is connected. So all that she out there can only emerge only manifest by being organized in certain ways. And as those principles of organization that they saw as the Lee, and they saw the totality of all the Lee in the universe, all those principles of organization, they understood that as being the Dow, the ultimate pattern of patterns that infuses the entire universe. Now, what is so fascinating is that modern systems sciences also points to a universe very similar, if not the same kind of universe, that those neo-confusions were looking at this universe that's deeply interconnected. Whether we look at different kinds of sciences like complexity science or systems biology or chaos theory, and they all share the same underlying understanding that everything is connected and this connected in nonlinear ways. So in the famous statement that some of you may have come to us from Edward Lorenz who is the founder of chaos theory, he posed this question once. He said, is it possible that the flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil could lead to a tornado in Texas because of this complex nonlinear interactions of these systems. And something that all of these different systems oriented sciences point to is that the interactions between things often tell us more about them than the things themselves.

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