Study on Hierarchy

part 2

---

In our previous discussion we spoke about hierarchy and we noted how it is mis-applied to the various social constructs in society. In addition, we briefly looked at examples of hierarchy in Nature and the human body. This gives us a deeper understanding of how nature manifests hierarchy and, in particular, how each level within the hierarchy are of equal importance and are indeed essential.

As example, If we imagine that our digestive system stops its work, then this lower body function will eventually cause great difficulties for all the other organs of the body and indeed, will have a big impact on the brain itself. If we strip the hillside of all its trees, then we should not be so surprised when a heavy rainfall will trigger a landslide, and demonstrate that the 'superior' human being was unable to see the consequences of their actions on the lower levels of the hierarchy, the hierarchy of life. And we should not forget that a landslide can easily cause death of other animals including other human beings.

We also addressed the value judgement that is associated with the terms 'superior' or 'inferior', or 'higher' or 'lower'. These terms do not mean that a 'superior' individual can do whatever it wants to the lower levels of the hierarchy acting like an autocrat. In contrast, a more conscious being, one that can predict and see the impact and the outcome of their actions, would understand that acting in that autocratic manner is counterproductive in so many ways.

Hierarchy as expressed in nature, or in the human body, does not act like a dictator or an autocrat, although we have examples of people imposing their spiritual will, or mind, in such a manner that the person imposes an inappropriate diet, as an example, which produces some rather unfortunate outcomes. Of course, the main point here is that the various levels of nature within its hierarchy, is not applied in order to impose itself on all the other levels below its own. Nature is simply following the laws that govern nature and acts in the collective without egotism.

We then briefly covered how we can view hierarchy within society and in human organisations. As applied by human beings, we find that there are many problems. The main issue is the person at the higher, or senior level, believes that all they have to do, is to dictate and tell everyone else below them, what they must do. As noted, this is not a true hierarchy that should be applied to a collective, but is a 'hierarchy of control' or a 'hierarchy of dictatorship'.

In our previous work, we considered an alternative way of looking as this hierarchy; rather than a top-down structure, we can turn the usual pyramid on its side, and we reveal a different approach, that of a supply-line structure of hierarchy which promotes a better understanding of how each line in the hierarchy has its duties and its obligations with respect to the lines either side of their particular line.

After this rather quick review of our previous discussion on hierarchy, we turn our attention to where does hierarchy comes from and why people are spending so much time not following the laws that govern human beings. We will see if we will be able to draw some more or less useful conclusions.

In response to the question why there is a difference between hierarchy in nature, and the hierarchy created by human beings? One answer might be … "because humans are obviously superior" or … "humans have a higher intelligence or are more conscious" than everything else in nature. While this might be a truism, it is unfortunate that this attitude leads to a rather distorted prejudice and a feeling of superiority, of exceptionalism or of entitlement, which can and is used by us to justify our incorrect and detrimental actions. Or we can say, … "poorly understood hierarchy". I refer you to the example above – of the stripping of a hillside of all its trees.

Where does hierarchy come from?

Science might say that hierarchy is an "emergent property" which is an inevitable outcome of a large number of people coming together. But this explanation is not particularly instructive as the same argument is used to explain consciousness, intelligence, the mind and so on. It is a bottom up approach to defining where things come from, that is, everything starts with the material world.

We might ask – if we bring together a large number of cells, neurones, atoms, crystals, or molecules of similar type, will that then automatically produce the emergence of consciousness, intelligence, mind, hierarchy, etc.? We could ask if the Earth in itself has a sufficiently large enough number of similar elements, to produce an emergent hierarchy or an emergent mind or spirit? Maybe this is so.

Indeed, when we are asking a broader question such as, … "where does everything come from?", once again, we might refer to the Darwinian theory of evolution, or an argument based on randomness, chance and statistics; to provide an explanation to this question, but we can then ask where does this randomness come from, where does this evolution come from?

So, our first point that we have to accept is, … "everything has to come from somewhere".

Turning to randomness first, If we are honest with ourselves, I think we can say that things are random because we are unable to find a straightforward cause or causes for what happened or is happening, or the system in question has so many moving bits and parts, that the complexity is beyond our understanding; and any tools that we do have, such as statistics, are not necessarily able to provide us with a straightforward cause and the result is still uncertain. So, we should not mix up the difference between apparent randomness and uncertainty. Actually, even chaos theory is indeed an attempt to find order in apparently chaotic systems.

In my opinion, to imagine that everything is truly random, means that we can do whatever we want in life as our actions are random, and therefore have little or no relevance or importance whatsoever. In short, life then becomes without any meaning.

I will not discuss in depth, the multiverse which is a theory coming out of quantum mechanics. If at every decision point a multiple number of other 'verses' are created to cover every possible decision that a person could make, this leads to the argument that somewhere in another 'verse', every possible outcome is produced so it makes no difference what decision we make in this 'verses'. Once again, such a philosophy is one that leads to passiveness and in some case, total despair. And I do not even consider the vast amount of energy needed to create all these other multiverses; where does this come from?

For those who imagine we live in a simulation, there are still rules which control how this simulation works. Once again, if we can describe the reality that we experience around us, does this explanation actually help us that much? If we temporarily accept this proposition, we can ask: can we change who we are; are we free; can we make a decision; do we have freewill? In the Order we believe that we do have freewill albeit constrained by the various laws of nature that we find around us; or we can describe it as the rules of our particular simulation or 'verse'.

It is obvious that people are making such decisions and judgements every single day, with a greater or lesser degree of freewill depending on how free the individual is with respect to the environment that insists on conformity or whether the person acts, feels and thinks in a more independent manner. While the law of conformity is required to a certain degree, the law of dissimilarity is absolutely essential for humanity to evolve; we can see progress in the sciences and medicine as examples of individual who were thinking differently from the dogma of uniformity.

And briefly, if we consider the Darwinian theory of evolution, it is something that we can observe in action in the world. It is the basis of cattle breading, the range and variety of dog breeds and has been used for centuries to 'select' different and preferred plant qualities. This selecting by humans to reduce the number of 'seeds' in the body of a fruit, for instance, has led to some difficulties. I will mention one in particular the banana where the plant can now only propagate using cuttings so the fruit does not produce seeds anymore and the force of adaptation for the banana is under threat. So, the observation that in a more general sense, that the natural world is providing various 'environments' which plant and animal life adapts to. But this description of what is happening, while instructive, if this theory is then extended to the creation of multiple universes or successive universes, it still fails to explain where this force of evolution is coming from.

Before moving on, I give you this simple observation that science, religion, philosophy, all that attempt to describe reality based on their own particular dogma. Of course, if we consider science which is all pervasive throughout the world, it also gives us a useful tool called mathematics that allows scientist to predict how matter will act under certain circumstances. For instance, there is an equations that accurately predicts how light will refraction when it enters water or a block of glass. But this does not explain what light is itself, and it is unlikely that light is carrying out a calculation prior to its entry into a block of glass, to decide how it should bend when it enters glass; although those who hold to the simulation belief must think that this is the case. The point I wish to make is that all these descriptions, even those that have mathematical equations, do not necessarily enlighten us when it comes to the source of all these phenomenon.

If we can agree at this point, that everything must come from somewhere, that everything must have a cause, when we look at an animal such as a bird, cat or dog etc., we must ask. what is behind the phenomenon of this animal?

Once again the scientific community in its insistence of excluding things that cannot be physically measured, falls back on DNA as the cause of every manifestation and every expression of our example cat. But we can ask once again, where did DNA itself come from; and why does inert molecules and atoms come together in such a structured manner; and why would such a structured collection produce the distinct characteristics associated with a cat, due to the particular arrangement of the 4 base pairs that make up DNA?

The usual answer is a statistical one, as follows:
If we take a large number of monkeys and get them to bash away on a bank of computer keyboards, if you wait long enough, they will eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare. And here we see the contrast between randomness and a directing mind behind a play or sonnet etc.

The argument goes that the universe and the Earth have been around for such a long time, statistically it is inevitable that DNA will 'emerge' on the Earth and it is inevitable that different types and forms of plant and animal life would then evolve from this emergent DNA, without any need for a directing impulse or force behind this miraculous emergent DNA and subsequent Darwinian evolution.

And yet, these long chain molecules are particularly delicate and are continually broken down or eroded. Even the hardest block of granite, or ingot of gold or diamond, will eventually disappear due to the physical action of the environment on Earth: wind, sand, heat, thunder, lightning, water, cosmic radiation and so on. In comparison to this destructive agent, the thing that we call 'life', or something which exhibits 'life', has the ability to repair the body of the plant or animal over a more or less long period of time. Science calls would call this maintenance of the physical being, the reversal of 'entropy'. Entropy is the observation that everything is always moving towards increasing disorder, as shown by our example of the erosion of a block of granite. Meanwhile, life is reversing this tendency of disintegration for a period of time, something which we can all observe. The point here is that if by chance some molecules do come together in a particular way to produce the basic elements of life, the destructive agent will quick undo this arrangement of molecule and atoms.

Ah yes, I hear you say, you simply have to wait long enough and it will happen. And in response I refer to a play, … "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" where in the first scene of the play, Rosencrantz, who bets heads each time a coin is flipped, and wins 92 times in a row. So, while statistics are a useful tool, rather than discarding any further researches, I think we must make an effort to squeeze our mind a little further. Anyway, what is behind this characteristic of life? Where does life come from? What is behind this tendency toward disorder?

Before returning to the topic of hierarchy itself, I would like to mention something that I have touched upon above, that there are laws which govern the reality that we have around us that we call the laws of nature or the laws of creation. The most common laws we come across in school are the mechanical laws. In the Order we speak about other laws such as the ones I mentioned to above, the law of dissimilarity and the law of similarity. This latter one often decays towards the law of conformity when we consider how individuals act within a group or a society. We also know about the law of duality or binary which can be found all round us such as hot and cold, to understand the one, we need the experience of the other. We find a reference to this law in the Zen koan the paradoxical question, … "what is the sound of one hand clapping"?

We call them laws because they are unchanging and are universal to all things, which includes people. In contrast, the laws of Man are certainly not universal as they protect a particular group in society and are changed in order to further protect that group.

Now one particular law which I would like to talk about here, is the law of the ternary, which we find throughout nature, in our bodies, and in our daily actions. So, what is this law?

If we want to do something, either in our home life or in our job, we must first have the idea to do something. If we are sufficiently attracted to this idea, we will then start to plan how we make this idea a reality. The final third step is, in essence, a matter of carrying out our plan. The three steps are: "what you are going to do"; "how you are going to do it" and finally, "doing it". Of course, we will return to the planning stage if the doing stage meets up with difficulties or problems.

As example, if we want to decorate our house, the first step – having the idea, has been completed in a flash. Assuming that we have the appetite to decorate the house – a big assumption, we then start deciding what colours we are going to use, what materials to use; will we redo the whole house or only a part of the house; interior or exterior or both; will we do the work ourselves or get someone else to do it; when will we do the redecoration and so on. This planning is the biggest part of the work as we have to take into account all the possible things that will get in the way of realising our idea. Do we have sufficient finance and time to do this job? If we do, we can then carry out the redecoration.

Another example of the ternary: if we notice that we are hungry, our thoughts direct us to go and find some food. We start our search and we find an apple to eat. We then eat the apple. Of course, in such examples the three steps happen in such rapid succession, we do not really notice the three steps.

I would argue that these 3 steps can even be found when we make a cup of tea for ourselves. Once again, the idea for a cuppa arrives in an instant. The planning can also be very fast, but it is open to all sorts of possibilities. What tea we will use: Darjeeling, lapsang souchong, orange pekoe, builder's tea, green tea, herbal, etc. Will we add milk, lemon or nothing at all. Do we need a sweetener. How will the cuppa be presented, a fine china teacup or a builder's mug. We can even ask if we will include biscuits and sandwiches. This reminds me of the Japanese tea ceremony which can be considered a ritualised expression of the law of ternary, as well as the reverence of the beauty of a daily routine of life.

This ternary is also found within us: our thinking, our feelings and the sense of our body. Or we can say that there is a directing agent, something that receives this direction, and an intermediate term by means of which the directing agent can act on the receiving agent. That is, our mind and our thinking is the directing agent, our body is the receiving agent and the intermediate agent, our psyche – the nervous system, connects the directing agent to the receiving agent. At this point we might ask if the law of ternary is partially behind hierarchy, or visa-versa? But I leave this for you to consider for yourself.

I would mention, in passing here, we might have the idea to do something, but we do not necessarily go on to materialise our idea. Why is this so?

In brief, if we are not attracted sufficiently to the idea, or we ignore the idea and we do not proceed to the planning stage of how we would put the idea into action. This is because the idea does not take our fancy, or we are not attracted to the idea, or it sounds likes too much hard work. As example we can consider when we have to do our tax returns, our soul rebels and we put off doing the work until we have no choice in the matter. Then we rush to fill in and return the forms at the last minute. A similar thing happens when we have to make a visit to the dentist; only when the pain cannot be ignored anymore do we make the necessary visit.

In contrast, when we are attracted strongly to the idea, we have no problems at all in make the effort to do what is needed to materialise the idea, because we will enjoy in carrying out the work.

Returning to the example of our cat: what is behind this phenomenon?

As we have now broadened and expanded our thinking on this matter, we can consider an alternative answer to where things come from, or what is behind something. In the case of a cat, we can posit that there could be something within the cat hierarchy that is a directing agent. If we say that there is a directing agent, then according to the law of ternary, there is also an intermediate agent. In other words, there is a corresponding cat spirit, soul and body. Once again, scientists will get very upset about such a suggestion as they tend to be fixated on the physical realm only, and what they can measure physically.

One such example of this narrow view, was the search for ether at the end of the 19th century. Using an interferometer and the light from a distant star, Michelson and Morley searched for a measurable change in their equipment when the Earth was moving towards a particular star, and the measurement six months later when the Earth was moving away from that star. Michelson and Morley reasoned that as the light was travelling through the ether between the star and the Earth, that a change would be produce in their interferometer due to the difference in the relative movement of the light through the ether. As there was no measurable change, they declared that the ether did not exist.

However, science still needs something through which light travels, so this ether was replaced by a field to explain the propagation of light through the vacuum of outer space. Scientists would add that this field is a mathematical construct simply to aid in their calculations, and we have not heard anyone demand that science proves the physical existence of this field. So here we have an example of science demanding a way to detect or measure invisible things, but are unwilling or unable to detect this field, or indeed, to measure an emotion or an idea.

When it comes to the suggestion that there must be a directing agent behind the phenomenon of a cat, as science cannot physically measure this principle or 'spirit', they discard this possibility out of hand.

What we are suggesting here is that instead of having a bottom up approach in order to explain creation, the existence of the universe, and emergent life, we should consider a top down approach. If we start from matter alone, consciousness, mind, etc. simply emerge in a mysterious manner from this matter. One alternative that we propose here, is that we consider a top down approach where there is a directing agent, albeit invisible to us, which is behind the various phenomena that we see in nature.

Of course, as we are physical beings with the tendency to think about things in physical and material terms. We often say, … "if I see it, I will believe it", but at the same time, we should also realise that we are "spiritual beings undergoing a material experience". There is an internal world which is also invisible and physically unmeasurable to us, our emotions and thoughts, but which have a very significant impact on our personal world.

We now come to the question, … "where does hierarchy comes from"?

Our answer is that hierarchy, in all its various forms, must come from a place which is beyond the physical realm, what we have called the invisible realm. In other words, just as we accept the presence of hierarchy in the visible world, we can also posit that there is a corresponding hierarchy in this invisible realm.

What are the characteristics of this invisible hierarchy?

A simple answer would be that we have no idea whatsoever - which is a good start. However, we do have the laws of nature to help us to get a sense of what this invisible realm is like. We can, for instance, imagine that just as we have the law of ternary in the material realm, our spirit, soul and body, we will find the law of ternary expressed in the invisible realm in its own particular analogical way. By analogy we can say that there must be a corresponding universal body, universal psyche and universal spirit which is like a human's individual body, individual psyche and individual spirit. That is, this ternary is expressed and manifested according to the conditions found at the invisible level.

Or we can ask, why is there such a difference between the hierarchy that we find in nature and within our own body, to the hierarchies that are implemented within collective groups.

Having covered quite a deal of ground, I think we have addressed hierarchy not only using a bottom up approach, but also from a top down perspective.

In our next discussion we will focus on the definition that our use within our Order which is that, … "Hierarchy is a gradual and sacred authority".

(to be continued)

KePu
August 2025