The Evolution of Reality Is the Evolution of Relationships: Invisible Patterns of Intimacy Generate Emergence
Part 3 of 4 of the Essay "First Notes on the Conversational Cosmos"
This is part 3 of 4 of an excerpt from our forthcoming book The Evolution of Love: From Quarks to Culture. We are going to post part 4 next week.
For citing, this is the appropriate citation:
Dr. Marc Gafni (with Dr. Zachary Stein and Dr. Elena Maslova-Levin), The Evolution of Love: From Quarks to Culture, forthcoming: World Philosophy and Religion Press: Spring 2025, “First Notes on the Conversational Cosmos: The Amorous Cosmos Is the Relational Cosmos Is the Conversational Cosmos.”[1]
5. Intimacy Generates Emergence
Great literature is often about great people—often those who are willing to risk everything, including fame, fortune, and reputation, for the sake of relationship with their beloved. The beloved may well be another human being—family, friend, partner, or lover—or it may be a beloved of an entirely different nature. It may be an animal; there is an entire literature of love stories between human beings and animals.[2] It may be a group, a society, a tribe, an army unit, a sports team, or a group of old friends. It may be a set of values, a religion, a society that stretches across space and time. It may be a country, a body of knowledge or gnosis, or a set of intrinsic values of Cosmos expressed in a cause. All of these are subjects of relationships with whom we may be in intimate communion.
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Equally profound is the capacity to be in relationship to yourself. That is not as simple as it seems. In most of the great interior sciences, the essential movement of Reality is when subject becomes object. Divinity expresses herself as subject and can reflect on herself as an external object. The same principle is true at the highest reaches of human development. For American developmental psychologist Robert Kegan, a new level of consciousness and depth is obtained when the subject of one level of consciousness becomes the object of the next level of consciousness.[3] This is a form of evolving relationship to self. Let’s deploy two examples to illustrate what we mean by subject becoming object as a form of relationship to self.
Newborn babies cannot discern between what is their bodies and what is not. They cannot discern between different parts of their bodies. They are their bodies. Their bodies are subject. It takes several months until they start to voluntarily move their hands and watch their movements with their eyes. This is a nascent realization: I am not my body; I am in relationship to my body. And it takes even longer until they understand that they cannot make their caretakers come and go, nor can they move their caretaker’s hands. This is the nascent realization of separation individuation—self and other:[4] I am not other; I am in relationship to other. These realizations emerge when one day, they, the babies, are able to discern between themselves and their hands, or themselves and their bodies. They have made their bodies object: I can look at, and talk about, my body. My body is part of who I am, but it doesn’t exhaust my whole me. My body is an object inside of my whole me (my subject). Similarly, they distinguish between self and other: I am not merged with my mother or caretaker.
Another example of subject becoming object is the psychological process often called shadow work. A quality that is in shadow cannot be seen. It has been dissociated within the subject, whether it is a negative quality or a wondrous positive quality. It is a split-off part that cannot be made object, so it remains an unconscious subject and is thus invisible. Because the shadow quality is split off, it will then be projected into second and third person. For example, take the quality of anger or rage, which lives in the first person of the subject but is split off or disassociated. Instead of recognizing ourselves to be angry, we project the anger onto someone else. There is a failure of intimacy with self, which causes the projection of the self-experience onto someone else. This dynamic expresses as: I am not angry, but you seem to be angry, or: All the other people out there are angry. Anger is simply not recognized as being part of one’s own self, the subject. Rather than becoming a healthy object inside our own subject, the shadow part is dissociated and projected onto another subject that then becomes an object.
The person onto whom we have wrongly projected the split-off anger—our own split-off shadow quality—can no longer be accurately felt. That person becomes to us not a subject we can relate to but an object, a thing. Our relationship with that person thus devolves from what Martin Buber famously calls an I-Thou (subject to subject) relationship to an I-it (subject to object) or it-it (object to object) relationship.
The reason it would be an object-to-object relationship is because by splitting ourselves off from our own anger, we become nonintimate with ourselves. We reduce ourselves from a subject that we can accurately feel to an alienated object. When we evolve or deepen our consciousness, the split-off quality can be returned to the light. We can take our projections back and recognize our projected shadow as part of our own self or subject. The alienated quality becomes a part of our whole being. More formally, it becomes an object, which we can see and therefore act on, shape, or direct, within our subject—our own felt sense of our full self. This is because we can now see the split-off quality within our self and therefore act upon it, perhaps to transform, activate, redirect, or even honor it, depending on what the precise nature of quality might be.[5]
Whichever one of the myriad forms of relationship we are referring to, the fundamental facts remain the same:
Reality is relationship.
Reality is evolution.
That means that the evolution of Reality is the evolution of relationships.
That is true not only on the macro level of history, from quarks to humans, but also in your life. The more you evolve, the better quality of relationships you will want. The more we evolve, the more we are willing to risk everything not just for a relationship but for an even deeper relationship. Or even better, if at all possible—and it sometimes is and sometimes is not—to deepen the relationships we already have.
Relationships are expressed in conversations. The evolution of relationships is the deepening of conversation. At the core of an extraordinary life are always extraordinary relationships, which are constituted by extraordinary conversations.
Remember the old adage: If a tree falls in a forest and there is no one there to hear it, does it make a sound? Let’s rephrase its implications more overtly in terms of relationship: If something momentous happens to you and there is no one there to share it with, did it happen?
But it is even more than that. Relationships are not only about sharing—they are about creating or synergizing new life through our coming together. Sometimes, that new life is a baby. At other times, that new life is new depth, new truth, new goodness, and new beauty in the Cosmos that was birthed by our relationship. It is new relationship, new intimacy, that generates all novel emergence. Or, said simply: Intimacy generates emergence.
Participate in the conversation:
6. Invisible Patterns of Intimacy
Giacomo Rizzolatti discovered another core expression of Reality is relationship in the realm of molecular biology. He called his discovery mirror neurons.[6] Humans and other primates, he claimed, make use of mirror neurons to read emotions as well as behaviors in others.[7] He and one of his young postdoctoral researchers were shocked to discover that some of the exact same sections of the brains of macaque monkeys that activated when they performed an action were also activated when they watched someone else performing that action. Other scientists, including Stephanie Preston and Frans de Waal,[8] have independently argued that the mirror neuron system is involved in empathy.
Their research suggests that when you watch someone else in a moment of joy or pain, you are having the same experience, at least in terms of the neural activations in the brain. This applies not only to the sensation of physical pain but also to the emotional aspect of the experience. We activate each other’s neural circuitry all the time. In fact, as Rizzolatti’s and others’ work makes clear, perceiving Reality is in no sense an individual affair. It is a result of shared neural circuitry. Neurons externalize, in our physical brain circuitry, the felt sense of others.
In some sense, in order to perceive and understand another, we merge with them for a moment. We recreate their experience as if we were having it ourselves. We have a core human capacity rooted in our neural circuitry to literally feel into the experience of another, whether through mirror neurons or other mechanisms.[9] There is a partial intimacy. For a moment, there is, in our experience, a shared identity between ourselves and the person we are observing. The simple act of reading a novel opens a window to the implicit intimacy between us that connects us in a way that is accessible to almost every human being.
This is the same process that Alfred North Whitehead saw taking place between elementary particles. The subatomic particles have what he calls prehension, a very elementary feeling in which the perceiving thing apprehends aspects of the perceived thing.[10] It is that ability to feel each other that allows them to enter into the bond of intimate relationship. The same process in ever-more evolved forms takes place all the way up the evolutionary chain. For Reality is relationship, an intimate relationship, all way down and all the way up the chain.
At the human level, the boundary between you and others (especially those in your circle of intimacy) is blurred. Those boundaries are mediated by a complex mix of neural firings originating from inside and outside your head. That is why we might be watching a movie and alternatively sobbing tears of pain or tears of joy depending on the scene playing out. As Rizzolatti’s student Christian Keysers notes, “Watching the movie scene in which a tarantula crawls on James Bond’s chest can literally make us shiver, as if the spider crawled on our own chest,”[11] because, in a very real sense, we are experiencing the physical sensation of a tarantula crawling across our own chest, along with the emotions that go with it.
The more we love the other, the more actively our empathy is aroused. Eros expresses itself in our psyche and in the physical structure of brain circuitry. Even just seeing another’s emotional state is enough to trigger an emotional response in ourselves. American neuropsychologist Allan Schore has discovered that mothers and their babies often have interlocking brain waves. This phenomenon of relationship is referred to as brain-to-brain entrainment, right-brain-to-right-brain nonverbal communication, or interbrain synchronization.[12] They are so deep in relationship that, from the perspective of brain waves, the prefrontal cortex of the mother becomes the prefrontal cortex of the baby. There is an emerging body of research, using dual EEG,[13] showing evidence that the EEG brain-wave patterns of the mother synchronize with the EEG pattern of the baby in a variety of states.[14] When they separate, their brain waves diverge, only to recalibrate and resonate once again with each other when they come back together.
This kind of entrainment is not limited to mother-baby pairs, however, but is inherent in many forms of relationship, including, to some degree, two strangers who are paired for an experiment.[15] Partners even seem to be able to send brain signals from isolated rooms to each other. The person whose brain is receiving the brain signal will imitate the brain pattern of the sender. The partner and sender to do not need to know each other, and there is no contact between them other than mental intention.[16]
All these invisible patterns of intimacy—as well as those yet to be discovered—are exterior confirmations of the core truth: Reality is relationship. Reality is Eros.
Footnotes
[1] At the turn of the twenty-first century, I partnered with a close friend at the time, Erica Fox, in the realizing of her dream of opening an institute for spirituality and negotiation under the auspices of Harvard Law School. The first event opened with a public dialogue between me and Bill Ury (the author of Getting to Yes, with Roger Fisher and Bruce Patton, 1991) in a packed hall at the law school. Then, I had a key conversation with Erica and Doug Stone (one of the authors of Difficult Conversations, 1999). In that conversation (2003 approximately), I unpacked an early version of the new Story of Value to Doug and Erica, and as part of the new Story I formulated an early notion of the Conversational Cosmos, which has later been refined over the years, in multiple teachings. To the best of my knowledge there are three of us who have expressed some notion of the Conversational Cosmos: myself, Howard Bloom, and David Whyte. Howard and I have discussed the term and its implications extensively over the years and will publish together on this term as part of our larger shared work on what we might call honest readings of science that disclose the Amorous Cosmos. Our thoughts on the Conversional Cosmos are somewhat related to David’s but in more important ways also radically different. The formal term was first coined and published by Howard.
[2] One beautiful example of this genre is the film My Octopus Teacher, which came out several years after the core of this text was written. It is a love story between a masculine and muscular South African diver, Foster, and an octopus. He describes with enormous depth and beauty the subtle love that developed between him and an octopus that he met in his deep-sea dives. Wikipedia describes the movie as follows: “The film shows Foster’s growing intimate relationship with the octopus as he follows her around for nearly a year. They form a bond where she plays with Foster and allows him into her world to see how she sleeps, lives, and eats.” Here is some of the language that the diver uses to describe their love: “My relationship with the sea forest and its creatures deepens . . . week after month after year after year. You’re in touch with this wild place, and it’s speaking to you. Its language is visible. I fell in love with her but also with that amazing wildness that she represented and . . . and how that changed me. What she taught me was to feel . . . that you’re part of this place, not a visitor. That’s a huge difference.”
[3] Robert Kegan introduced his subject-object theory in his books The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development (1982) and In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life (1994).
[4] See the work of Margaret Mahler (MS 1138 in Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library. https://archives.yale.edu/repositories/12/resources/).
[5] To cite one example: Many years back, I was working with a wonderful CEO of a major firm, who was a decent and kind man with genuine integrity. But he was always having conflicts with his management team. The conflicts were often intense. He would not back down, and they seemed incongruous with his persona and personal ethic in other dimensions of his life. After a short series of talks, we excavated an early set of memories, when his father, who started the company, would say to him, “Don’t let the management team take advantage of you. You have to show them who is in charge, or they will ride all over you.” This was a mantra from his father that he had forgotten in his conscious mind. But when we recovered it, we realized almost instantly that, when he engaged his management team, he was not directly engaging them. Instead, his communications and positions were in fact directed toward proving to this father that he was a worthy successor to him. This entire dynamic had been in his subject. When we recovered it, it became object. He was not in relationship with this part of himself. And once he realized it, he was in relationship and had the capacity—if he so chose—to evolve the relationship.
[6] Giacomo Rizzolatti and Laila Craighero, “The Mirror-Neuron System” (2004).
[7] The first animal in which Rizzolatti and his colleagues studied mirror neurons was the macaque monkey. What they called a mirror neuron is a neuron that fires both when the monkeys act themselves and when they observe the same action performed by another. In other words, the neuron mirrors the behavior of the other, as though the observer were itself acting. Researchers have found such neurons in human and primate species, as well as in birds. However, the function of these mirror neurons in humans is a subject of much speculation. To date, there have been no widely accepted neural or computational models put forward to describe how mirror neuron activity supports cognitive functions. While many researchers in the scientific community have expressed their excitement about the discovery of these mirror neurons, there are also scientists, such as Hickok, Pascolo, and Dinstein, who have expressed doubts about the existence and role of the so-called mirror neurons in humans. For example, Gregory Hickok published an extensive argument in 2009 against the claim that mirror neurons are involved in action understanding. The name of his paper is “Eight Problems for the Mirror Neuron Theory of Action Understanding in Monkeys and Humans.” He concludes that “the early hypothesis that these cells underlie action understanding is likewise an interesting and prima facie reasonable idea. However, despite its widespread acceptance, the proposal has never been adequately tested in monkeys, and in humans there is strong empirical evidence, in the form of physiological and neuropsychological (double-) dissociations, against the claim.” In the preface to his The Myth of Mirror Neurons: The Real Neuroscience of Communication and Cognition (2014), Hickok writes, “The international debate over mirror neurons and indeed the nature of human cognition has intensified. Mirror neurons are no longer the rock stars of neuroscience and psychology that they once were and, in my view, a more complex and interesting story is gaining favor regarding the neuroscience of communication and cognition.”
[8] Stephanie D. Preston and Frans B. M. de Waal, “Empathy: Its Ultimate and Proximate Bases” (2002).
[9] While experts like Gregory Hickok doubt that complex capabilities in humans (and in somewhat different form in primates), like empathy, imitation, social learning, et cetera, can be explained by mirror neurons alone, there is no doubt that these abilities exist. In chapter 8 (“Homo Imitans and the Function of Mirror Neurons”) of his book The Myth of Mirror Neurons: The Real Neuroscience of Communication and Cognition (2014), Hickok writes, “Here we have a potential behavior that mirror neurons might support, not simple imitation (mimicry), but some form of social or imitation-like learning. But what kind of social learning could mirror neurons support in the context of the experimental paradigm that led to their discovery? . . . Macaques reach for and grasp things all the time and they observe their own actions visually. Pretty soon, an association builds between the execution of an action and the (self) observation of that action. Poof! Mirror neurons are born. Now, when the animal sees the experimenter execute an action similar to those that the monkey has previously executed, the cells fire because of the preexisting association built on self-observation. It’s got nothing to do with understanding. . . . I’m suggesting an associative account of mirror neurons similar to the one Arbib and Heyes promote, but with a different source of the association: the experimental training itself rather than self-action to other-action sensorimotor generalization. The mirror neuron research team may have inadvertently trained mirror neurons into the monkey’s brain. Hopefully, future experiments will be designed to test this hypothesis.” See also “Schema Design and Implementation of the Grasp-Related Mirror Neuron System,” by Erhan Oztop and Michael A. Arbib (2002), and “Where Do Mirror Neurons Come From?” by Cecilia Heyes (2010).
[10] Prehension was not conceived as a cognitive process at the level of basic particles but rather an unconscious apprehension. It may be thought of as more of an inherent reflex of what has been called proto-feeling or proto-touch that connects ostensibly alienated particles. See Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, by Alfred North Whitehead (1978).
[11] Christian Keysers at al., “A Touching Sight: SII/PV Activation during the Observation and Experience of Touch” (2004), p. 335.
[12] See Allan Schore, “The Interpersonal Neurobiology of Intersubjectivity” (2021) and “Right-Brain-to-Right-Brain Psychotherapy: Recent Scientific and Clinical Advances” (2022).
[13] Dual-EEG research is simply research involving two or more subjects wearing electroencephalograms and looking at the correlation patterns between subjects performing a variety of tasks.
[14] See, for instance, the project “Using ‘Naturalistic Dual-EEG’ to Measure Mother-Infant Brain-to-Brain (b2b) Synchrony in Socially-Mediated Learning,” led by Victoria Leong and Samuel Vincent Wass, researchers at the University of Cambridge (https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=ES%2FN006461%2F1).
[15] On neural synchrony between strangers, see, for instance, “Brain-to-Brain Entrainment: EEG Interbrain Synchronization While Speaking and Listening,” by Alejandro Pérez et al. (2017).
[16] The following are three related studies from the late 1990s that participated in generating this field of inquiry: “The Electricity of Touch: Detection and Measurement of Cardiac Energy Exchange Between People: An Exploratory Study,” by Rollin McCraty et al. (1998); “An Experiment on Remote Action Against Man in Sensory-Shielding Conditions,” by Mikio Yamatomo et al. (1996); and “Biophoton Emission of the Human Body,” by S. Cohen and F. A. Popp (1997). See also “EEG Correlates of Social Interaction at Distance,” by W. Giroldini et al. (2015), “Electroencephalographic Evidence of Correlated Event-Related Signals between the Brains of Spatially and Sensory Isolated Human Subjects,” by Leanna J. Standish et al. (2004), “A Direct Brain-to-Brain Interface in Humans,” by Rajesh P. N. Rao et al. (2014), and “BrainNet: A Multi-Person Brain-to-Brain Interface for Direct Collaboration Between Brains,” by Linxing Jiang et al. (2019).