Everything is Relationship
Amo ergo aum - I love therefore I am
Imagine you're putting together a jigsaw puzzle. Unfortunately the box got lost, so you don't know what the puzzle is meant to be. Like most people, you start with the edges and put the puzzle together; you find a picture of a dog.
Then you break the puzzle up and challenge your friend to complete it. They start with the inner pieces, strange but hey. It's the same pieces to the same puzzle, but this time you find the picture is - a llama!?
Weird huh? Don’t worry we’ll come back to this.
For the last 8 months I have been on a journey, one that is far from over. Last month this journey took a pivotal turn, a testament to the power of loving relationships.
You can read about it in 50 Years of Living - 1 Great Lesson.
The journey I speak of is the exploration of meaningful connection and how we can achieve it. It began as a record of my thinking and writing about the networked nature of man.
The pivotal turn was the realisation that “it’s all about relationships” but yesterday it occurred to that maybe relationship is not everything, rather, everything IS relationship.
Relationship is the connective tissue that forms the great human network.
What if the universe is a relational process? We tend to think of the universe as being a deterministic collection of ‘things’ and ‘stuff’ governed by laws of cause and effect.
If we could do the math we could predict the outcomes, however, we can’t even predict the weather! The universe is a complex mystery, it has emergent properties that seem to unfold in strange and unusual ways. Not unlike relationships.
So maybe we are looking at it all wrong, maybe the universe is not a collection of stuff connected by relationships. Maybe, the universe IS a relationship unfolding.
God and Quantum Mechanics
There are 2 main competing worldviews, the religious and the scientific. Although history is scattered with examples of harmony between religion and science (Darwin was Christian and Ḥasan Ibn al-Haytham was Muslim). They still remain largely divided in the hearts and minds of people.
Yet, they both point to the relational universe.
“Let Us make humankind in Our image, according to Our likeness…” - Genesis 1:26
I never understood the plural here, who is the Us, the Our in Genesis? What is the relationship between them? The answer is revealed in the Trinity, The Father, The Son, and The Holy Spirit. To oversimplify, the Trinity is a way to understand God as three distinct persons with one will, connected through love.
Love is the divine relationship that defines the nature of God. It is the creational force that brought the universe and all within it into existence.
“There is in God something analogous to “society”. He is not a single person, loving himself alone, not a self-contained monad or “The One”. He is triunity: three equal persons, each one dwelling in the other two by virtue of an unceasing movement of mutual love.” - Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Way
The universe, from this perspective, is an ongoing relationship of love. A creational force and connective tissue that defines the divine and all that flows from it.
From Patterns to Probabilities
Humans love patterns; that much is clear. We use pattern recognition to build a map of the world and how it functions. This allows us to read, understand language, and spot anomalies. Remember the llama in the puzzle?
Part of pattern recognition is recognising the interdependence of everything onto everything. Nothing is truly isolated, and all things impact one another. This is true for space and time, despite our instincts that space is deterministic.
Isaac Newton would have told you the universe is run on mechanical laws, Einstein would have told you it is relative. Quantum mechanics tells us it is probabilistic at best.
“…the main lesson of relativity and quantum theory is that the world is nothing more but an evolving network of relationships.” - Lee Smolin
Smolin’s relationship-based viewpoint reflects the lack of an external order to the Universe. The known laws of the Universe do not guarantee the existence of life, they don’t even tell us how life came into being. Instead, we have a Universe that is constantly changing and evolving.
It implies a relational view of space and time, even further it reinforces that our own lives have a deep connection that we may not be seeing.
Back to The Llama
This puzzle story is weird because we believe the puzzle should have a prefixed image, like a normal jigsaw puzzle would. A bit like our view of the universe, deterministic, governed by knowable laws, a recognisable pattern.
But is it? Or is the story of the world made up as it goes along, and changed by our choices?
For the most part the universe behaves the way we expect it, especially at the macro level. However, at the quantum level things are very different.
At the level of the very small, particles do not occupy specific places in space and they do not travel at well-defined speeds. It's only when we make an observation, a measurement, that particles assume specific locations and speeds.
What happens when we're not looking? What about the electrons and photons, and all the other stuff that makes up the world? What exactly is that stuff doing when we are not observing it?
Quantum mechanics tells us that while we are not looking, electrons and photons behave very differently from when we are looking. They seem to live secret, unknowable lives, something special happens when an observation is made.
Contextuality
As of yet quantum mechanics doesn't give us the answers to these questions, and it may never do so. However, what we do know is that the answers will be very different from the answers given by Newton and others.
The biggest difference may be something called contextuality — a part of the complicated relationship between observers and observations.
"Context" means all the details that surround an event. Context gives us more information about what happened and how it happened: what else happened at the same time, or just before, or just after.
Contextuality says the state of a quantum system IS the relation between the observer and the system.
In our own lives this is ever present in the different interpretations we have of events. Have you ever had argument with someone where you both believed you were right? Or had different memories of an event which you both swear blind are accurate?
What if the puzzle is both a dog and a llama? What if the difference is contextual, it just depends on how you relate to it?
In a relational universe this all makes sense, well maybe not the dog / llama jigsaw puzzle!
So what would be the best way for us to navigate this relational universe?
Relational Intelligence
We face profound challenges in our hyper-connected world. As the number of connections grow, their quality seems to diminish. We interact with different people from different backgrounds, with different interests and values.
The world is changing faster than ever before, politically, technically, and culturally. It is increasingly hard to cope emotionally and act with ethical maturity when so much feels unknown.
In a relational universe it seems to me that relational intelligence is a game changer.
Relational intelligence is a combination of emotional and ethical intelligence. It involves the ability to be aware of and understand our own, and others' emotions, values, interests and demands.
Furthermore, to discriminate among them, to critically reflect on them and to use this information to guide our action and behaviour with respect to other people.
It is has and always has been about the quality of relationship.
“When we love, we always strive to become better than we are. When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.” - Paulo Coelho