Creative Friction
“We’re having intellectual intercourse, we’re having a conversation” — my middle school crush, Daniel
My love and I talk on the phone every day, for over an hour. Our conversations flow from the mundane minutiae of everyday life, shows or games we’ve played, conversations we’ve had, thoughts that have crossed our minds, lots and lots of verbal affirmations of love — to the profound, spiritual, philosophical and ethical.
We come to each other with the beginnings of an idea, with a hypothesis — about a topic that we care deeply about. They tend to be connected to our “true question” that animates our exploration of Being. For myself, it’s most often connected to the nature of consciousness. For him, it’s often about the optimal ethical ways of living for maximal wellbeing among living creatures.
A strange thing happens as soon as I start talking. I feel the thoughts arranging themselves as I communicate them to my love — and I observe my understanding take shape and gain complexity and depth as I express it. Often I find myself saying “I’m discovering this as I say it”.
In a sense when I write the same thing happens. My thoughts become more organised and what began as intuition crystallises into concepts and words as I pour them out in patterns from my fingers.
The most inspiring conversations and the ones where I feel myself grow the most in understanding are those that contain some pushback, some questioning. It may not cross the line into a debate, may be instead a perspective that should be added or some information I hadn’t considered that might change my hypothesis. Likewise I find myself to be most inspired to write when in opposition to something else I’ve read that I disagree with. In explaining why I disagree with something, I come to understand what I truly believe.
There is a sort of “creative friction” that is required for any kind of growth.
Think of a vine, growing upwards towards the light. It wavers from side to side, seeking purchase as it lengthens, fighting gravity. It touches another vine, also on its journey. They twine around each-other, supporting each-other, growing higher.
I have been thinking a lot about duality and nonduality throughout the last six months, as I go deeper into trying to understand the nature of reality. I mentioned in my previous article on Sexual Self-Transcendence that duality and non-duality require each-other in order to exist.
This is the principle at work behind “creative friction”. In order for experience to happen, there must be a perceiver and something to perceive. Something “other” that can be interacted with. The friction between self and other is what creates experience. This is not a linear exchange as our language would have us believe, with its construct of “subject and object” — but a mutual process.
We can observe this kind of creative friction on multiple levels of reality. Innovation in society is driven by the urge to solve problems. “Necessity is the mother of invention”. In sexual reproduction meiosis occurs when two sets of DNA combine to form a new organism, and the new combinations between the DNA base pairs have the chance to create improvements upon existing patterns. On a species level evolution occurs in response to a dangerous environment that could kill an organism before it has reproduced. Friction between two flint stones create iron sparks that catch fire. In physics, the three-body problem is a type of movement that occurs when three bodies under the influence of gravity interact with each other, causing an unpredictable pattern.
We can even observe this on the universal level — the Illustris simulation depicts the evolution of the structure of the universe, expanding and interacting with itself, becoming more and more complex as it progresses and matter interacts with dark matter. The patterns we can see are remarkably similar to the patterns expressed at smaller scales, on the level of organic life.
What does this mean? It means that friction and opposition are an essential part of any kind of development. In the evolution of ideas, there must be differing points of view in order to sustain growth.
But why is this?
One of the laws of the universe is that energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed. Friction directs and transfers energy in particular patterns, maintaining and building complexity. The concept of entropy plays an important part in this — often described as an irreversible “trend toward disorder and randomness”, entropy is now being perceived increasingly as a trend toward greater levels of complexity beyond the current ability of a human to distinguish pattern. Friction increases entropy which increases complexity.
Jeremy England, a physicist at MIT, describes how an open-system (a constant source of energy entering a system) predictably leads to increasing complexity in order to dissipate energy.
“ The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy.”
Carlos E. Perez describes the role of “entanglement” and chaos in the development of complexity. As complexity increases exponentially, the more random it appears.
“Chaos and Entanglement, acting both in time and space leads to what we perceive as randomness. This randomness is the effect of emergent complexity and not some mathematical notion of intractability”.
The connection between entropy (the process that causes us to age and decay) and creation (the trend towards increasing complexity) is paradoxical but makes sense in the context of nonduality, where duality (creation and destruction, “yes and no”, self and other, one and zero) are but the poles of a process that underpins all of existence.
This is why friction is creative. (And yes, I didn’t know this until I started writing.)
“You think there’s a real difference between ‘self’ and ‘other.’ But ‘self,’ what you call yourself, and what you call ‘other’ are mutually necessary to each other like back and front. They’re really one. But just as a magnet polarizes itself at north and south, but it’s all one magnet, so experience polarizes itself as Self and Other, but it’s all one.” — Alan Watts
