Dinergy: The Primordial Meta-Pattern in Nature

Abstract

In Answer to Job, Jung quotes Tertullian from his De Testimonio Animae: “What you allow to the mistress you will assign to the disciples.” Nature is the mistress and we are all potential disciples.If we look carefully and sympathetically at nature, we see that she is a process with one main overlying meta-pattern. All stable patterns in nature contain a balance of forces, a kind of reconciliation of opposites. This is true from the formation of hydrogen soon after the Big Bang, through the process of star formation and in the biological functions of living systems. One of the more beautiful ways to understand this concept of dinergy is to look at the pattern formations on the surface of seashells. Just as the telescope has enabled us to understand the process and pattern of planetary motions, so has the computer enabled a better understanding of weather patterns and the patterning on seashells.Although the neo-Darwinists would have us believe that such intricate and beautiful designs must have some survival benefit, I think that the deeper insight into nature comes from Thomas Mann (1947/1999) in his novel Doctor Faustus, in which he wrote that “meaning and design always run alongside one another” (p. v). These patterns are a manifestation of process and emergence. But most importantly, these patterns represent an essential feature in all dynamic systems: that is, a positive feedback that self-enhances the initial deviation from the mean. However, sooner or later, self-enhancing processes evoke antagonistic (opposing) reactions. Of course, Jung understood this long before systems theory, as enantiodromia.