David Peat

From Object to Process 69with its particular orders of causality, locality, interaction, and spaceand time.We began this chapter by looking for the physical “ground” of matter.Now we find an implicate order that is much closer to the “groundof being” discussed by the philosophers of ancient Greece than to themechanistic physics of the eighteenth century. The implicate order isnot a ground in any material sense, but a constant process or“holomovement.” Within this movement, inner and outer are united,mind and body, matter and mind. Out of this movement emerge specificstructures and localizations in time and space that are always inthe act of coming into being and dissolution.With the rise of science a dream was born that the ultimate groundof reality would be discovered in tangible material things such as atoms,molecules, and elementary particles. It now seems that these areall manifestations of some underlying process, of symmetry principlesand constant transformation.Blackfoot PhysicsSome years ago I wrote a book that explored the world through twolenses, one of Western science and the other of certain Native Americangroups, in particular the Blackfoot of Montana and Alberta. TheBlackfoot, as do other Algonquin peoples, live in a world that seems tobe very similar to that explored in the latter parts of the previous section.For them the world is flux and process. Time is constantly cyclingaround and nothing is fixed. In place of the permanence of objects andinstitutions of our world, the Blackfoot have ceremonies of renewal.By carrying out such ceremonies it is possible to renew what the fluxhas created, not in any fixed way, but as something closer to a vortex ina river that exists only by virtue of the water that flows through it.While the Western world, and particularly Western science, convertsthe world into a series of concepts that can then be manipulatedin the mind, such concepts do not come so easily in the Blackfootlanguage. Their philosophy deals with relationships to individualthings rather than to collections of similar objects, or ideas into fixed