Fluxus Quo: The Cosmic River & the Hidden Harmony

Dear Reader,

Recap of this entire blog using our new terminology: The VISTA community achieved a harmonic fluxus quo from 1977 to 1995 by harnessing homeostasis, modeled on the way biology harnesses flux to achieve stability. We will preserve and extend today's VISTA renaissance the same way, because it is the only sustainable path available to human beings, the only way to transform very complex interactions and dependencies into a self-reinforcing system.

Now, to explain homeostasis: Wikipedia and other traditional references are going to be of limited help here, since they explain it at only the most shallow, Platonic level, like a mechanism, without any appreciation for its cosmic significance. We need to define it in terms of fluxus quo.

For the discussion that follows, we need more concise terminology to describe the two main expressions of fluxus quo, because homeostasis uses the second to channel the first, which will be hard to explain without more descriptive terms.

I considered borrowing the contrast between kinetic energy and potential energy from physics and applying it to flux, but that dichotomy is too Platonic, built upon the assumption of stasis as the normal condition in which energies can be wound up (potential) and discharged (kinetic) according to the principle of entropy. Instead, let's use rich metaphorical terms borrowed directly from Heraclitus, the original philosopher of flux.

For the first kind of flux, the nonstop change in all things that goes on around us all the time, whether we see it or not, let's call it the cosmic river, the one you can't step in twice because it is always changing and so are you and everything else.

For the second kind of flux, the invisible flow of principles whose conflict produces the cosmic river, both the things in it and their flow and transformation, let's use the term hidden harmony, to capture the idea of the harmony in the bending back of forces against one another to produce apparent stability.

Now for homeostasis itself.

Yours truly,
Rick