One of the foundational principles guiding my approach to Traditional Western Herbal Medicine is interconnectedness.
At its simplest, interconnectedness means that nothing exists entirely by itself. Every living being develops within relationships, depends upon wider systems, and continually influences the world around it.
A tree cannot be fully understood without considering the soil, water, sunlight, fungi, insects, climate, and wider landscape in which it grows. In the same way, a human being cannot be understood simply as a collection of separate organs, nor as an isolated individual unaffected by food, relationships, community, environment, and the living world.
The deeper we look into nature, the more difficult it becomes to draw a firm boundary between one thing and another.
To explore this principle, we can begin on the largest scale – with the structure of the universe itself – before moving through ecosystems and eventually into the ecology of the human body.
At each level, we find relationships within relationships.
We commonly imagine matter as being made of tiny, solid particles moving through otherwise empty space. It is an intuitive picture: separate objects travelling from one place to another, occasionally colliding or exerting forces upon each other.
Separate little objects?
Modern physics presents a more subtle view.
Quantum field theory describes the universe in terms of fundamental fields extending throughout space. What we call an elementary particle can be understood as a localised excitation, or quantum, of its corresponding field (1).
A photon, for example, is associated with the electromagnetic field. The Higgs boson is an excitation of the Higgs field, which permeates the universe. Other elementary particles acquire mass through their interactions with that field (1).
This does not mean that particles are unreal. It means that the distinction between a particle and the field to which it belongs is more complicated than the older image of an isolated speck of matter moving through emptiness.
Gravity must be described somewhat differently. Einstein’s general theory of relativity understands gravity as the curvature of spacetime in the presence of matter and energy. Scientists have not yet developed a complete, experimentally confirmed quantum theory of gravity, so it would be inaccurate to present gravity as simply another quantum field in exactly the same sense as electromagnetism.
Nevertheless, our most successful physical theories increasingly describe the universe in terms of fields, interactions, relationships, and patterns rather than entirely separate little objects.
Separation may be less absolute than it appears
Even apparently empty space is not necessarily absolute nothingness. In quantum field theory, the vacuum is the lowest-energy state of a field. It may still possess physical properties and display quantum effects (1).
This scientific picture does not prove the spiritual statement that “everything is one”. Physics cannot make that metaphysical conclusion for us.
What it does show is that the older picture of reality as isolated pieces of solid matter travelling through completely empty space is incomplete.
At the most fundamental levels accessible to physics, reality appears deeply relational.
Matter cannot be fully described without fields. The properties of particles are expressed through interactions. What appears to us as a separate object is also an event within something more extensive.
From this we may draw a philosophical insight, while being careful not to confuse interpretation with scientific proof: Separation may be less absolute than it appears. In other words, a wave has a recognisable form, but it cannot exist independently of the water through which it moves.
References:
- CERN. “The Higgs Boson.” CERN.