54. Attractor growth as a universal threshold law
In the EC/HE theory attractors grow by continuously incorporating new relations, understandings and perspectives. Each time an attractor expands or increases in height, its capacity to organise and stabilise experience increases. At the same time the complexity of the relational landscape that the attractor must maintain also increases.
This growth creates a fundamental tension. New relations do not merely strengthen the existing attractor. They simultaneously create new perspectives, new contrasts and new possibilities for reorganisation. Around every large attractor, new potential attractors therefore continuously arise in the peripheral zones of the existing landscape.
The larger an attractor becomes, the greater its organising force. But the greater also becomes the quantity of relations, differences and alternative understandings that must be integrated for the existing form to be maintained.
As long as the attractor manages to incorporate these new relations, it continues to grow. When it can no longer maintain its existing organisation, a threshold is reached.
The threshold does not represent destruction, but the point at which a new organisation becomes more viable than the old one. What is experienced as sudden shifts, breakdowns or breakthroughs is therefore usually the result of lengthy reorganisation processes that have built up over time.
This principle is found at all levels of reality. Stars grow and are reorganised. Biological organisms develop, age and break down. Societies, cultures and civilisations are built up around dominant attractors that over time are challenged by new perspectives and forms of organisation. The same applies to identities, ego-structures, theories and world views.
Attractor growth therefore does not represent merely accumulation. Every growth simultaneously produces the conditions for future reorganisation. Breakdowns therefore do not necessarily arise because a structure is weak, but because its own development continuously creates new possibilities for higher or alternative organisations.
What is experienced as a sudden shift is usually the visible point at which the reorganisation becomes dominant in experience. The reorganisation itself has often been under way long before the threshold is reached.
Attractor growth and reorganisation are therefore not opposites. They are two sides of the same dynamic. Every stable structure carries within it the necessity of its own future reorganisation.
