Writers who reference wholeness: Phil Shepherd -[[Reference Notes/Radical Wholeness|Radical Wholeness]], [[Reference Notes/New Self, New World|New Self, New World]] Emilie Conrad - [[Reference Notes/Life on Land|Life on Land]] David Bohm - Wholeness and the Implicate Order, [[Reference Notes/On Dialogue|On Dialogue]] Betsy Polatin Eligio Stephen Gallegos - [[Animals of the Four Windows]], [[Into Wholeness]] Mary Caroline Richards - [[Centering in Pottery, Poetry, and the Person]] --- # Phil Shepherd Phil Shepherd coins the term "holosapience" to refer to the inner sense that allows us to feel the whole. It is our primary sense, because it allows us to attune to reality. He considers it to be a disabled sense, because we have forgotten how to feel wholeness in our bodies, our lives, the Present moment. He writes that: >In nature, by contrast, the urge towards wholeness is evident at every scale—from the micro to the macro. Every living thing is in the midst of a dance of accommodation, integrating the stresses and gifts of its environment as it seeks to fulfill the encoded promise of its inheritance—what Aristotle referred to as its entelechy. He thinks of wholeness as a quality without boundaries. It is therefore inaccurate to say "whole in body, mind and spirit". It is more accurate to include all our relationships in that statement, so that we don't fall into the trap of thinking that wholeness can be achieved within the boundary of our bodies. **New Self, New World** > A sensibility that is not whole cannot detect wholeness—and so has no reason even to believe wholeness exists in any meaningful way. > You cannot find presence, freedom or creativity inside a world arrested by description—which is also to say you cannot find wholeness there—because any such world is a mere duplicate that has severed ties with the world it purports to represent. --- # Emilie Conrad Emilie Conrad considers immersion in water, in our fluid being, to be a relationship of wholeness. > The basis of communication for all biological systems is in our liquid ancestry and manifests as wave motion. The fluid system in which all life has been stirred supersedes the nervous system, and is not limited in its interactions. > > All form is limited by its own boundary. Fluid systems are not limited since their basic quality is one of resonance. In resonance all fluid systems are united. I say that no matter where in the galaxy they may be, all fluid systems function as basically one body or organ of intelligence. It communicates through subtle wave motions in which form is softened—we can no longer distinguish distinct body parts … everything becomes fluid … ultimately we have the sense of becoming undifferentiated potential once again interacting with a vastness that moves to the stars. --- # David Bohm **Wholeness and the Implicate Order:** > It is instructive to consider that the word ‘health’ in English is based on an Anglo-Saxon word ‘hale’ meaning ‘whole’: that is, to be healthy is to be whole, which is, I think, roughly the equivalent of the Hebrew ‘shalem’. Likewise, the English ‘holy’ is based on the same root as ‘whole’. All of this indicates that man has sensed always that wholeness or integrity is an absolute necessity to make life worth living. Yet, over the ages, he has generally lived in fragmentation. > Is there an instrument that can help give a certain immediate perceptual insight into what can be meant by undivided wholeness, as the lens did for what can be meant by analysis of a system into parts? It is suggested here that one can obtain such insight by considering hologram. (The name is derived from the Greek words ‘holo’, meaning ‘whole’, and ‘gram’, meaning ‘to write’. Thus, the hologram is an instrument that, as it were, ‘writes the whole’.) > In chapter 6 we began by noting that the photographic lens is an instrument that has given us a very direct kind of sense perception of the meaning of the mechanistic order, for by bringing about an approximate correspondence between points on the object and points on the photographic image, it very strongly calls attention to the separate elements into which the object can be analysed. By making possible the point-to-point imaging and recording of things that are too small to be seen with the naked eye, too big, too fast, too slow, etc., it leads us to believe that eventually everything can be perceived in this way. From this grows the idea that there is nothing that cannot also be conceived as constituted of such localized elements. Thus, the mechanistic approach was greatly encouraged by the development of the photographic lens. > > We then went on to consider a new instrument, called the hologram. As explained in chapter 6, this makes a photographic record of the interference pattern of light waves that have come off an object. The key new feature of this record is that each part contains information about the whole object (so that there is no point-to-point correspondence of object and recorded image). That is to say, the form and structure of the entire object may be said to be enfolded within each region of the photographic record. When one shines light on any region, this form and structure are then unfolded to give a recognizable image of the whole object once again. > > We proposed that a new notion of order is involved here, which we called the implicate order (from a Latin root meaning ‘to enfold’ or ‘to fold inward’). In terms of the implicate order one may say that everything is enfolded into everything. This contrasts with the explicate order now dominant in physics in which things are unfolded in the sense that each thing lies only in its own particular region of space (and time) and outside the regions belonging to other things. **On Dialogue:** > Every part of ourselves is enfolded in every part of our conversations whether we realize it or not. But we cannot always tell the extent of our participation. There is not enough information to produce a clear and coherent understanding. We lack a focusing process—a way of containing the enormity in a small space. Dialogue is the focusing mechanism for the hologram of conversation. Through it we can expand our awareness to include ever-greater wholeness. Dialogue is a process that can allow us to become aware of our participation in a much wider whole. Like the telescope, it focuses the available light more completely so that we can see --- # Mary Caroline Richards > Life leads us at a certain moment to step beyond the dualisms to which we have been educated: primitive and civilized, chaos and order, abnormal and normal, private and public, verbal and non-verbal, conventional and far-out, good and bad. To transform our tuitions, as Emerson called our learning, into the body of our intuitions so that we may use this body as in pottery we use our clay. By an act of centering we resolve the oppositions in a single experience. The surrealists in France called it le point suprème and found it also at the center: le foyer central. When the sense of life in the individual is in touch with the life-power in the universe, is turning with it, he senses himself as potentially whole. And he senses all his struggles as efforts toward that wholeness. And he senses that wholeness as implicit in every part. When we are working on the potter’s wheel, we are touching the clay at only one point; and yet as the pot turns through our fingers, the whole is being affected, and we have an experience of this wholeness. “The still point of the turning world.” --- # Stephen Gallegos **Into Wholeness:** > In an emotional injury something is separated within the person which needs to once again be joined. The search for a method of rejoining would entail a retelling of the history of psychotherapy. Unfortunately, save for a few fine people, one dimension has been all but ignored in this search, the underlying membrane of the deep imagination. It is through the deep imagination that we gain access to the fabric of our own being and the capacity to support those structures in the positions necessary for their rejoining into wholeness. > The way back to wholeness is direct and simple, although it may be painful, and it could be accomplished globally in one generation. This would be a Manhattan Project worthy of who we are! > > We must first recognize that we are the storytelling animals. We also need to know that all the stories we tell are just that: stories. No story is the equivalent of living. Yet most people today try to live a story instead of living their lives, and for this reason also, when their story goes wrong, many people take their lives. > > One of the main stories we have learned is that the world is divided. We seldom learn that it is we who are divided. We are an incomplete being searching for completeness. We learned to abandon our completeness as a means of surviving in a synthetic environment where words and concepts have become more important than the reality that supports them. > > Our way back into wholeness is simple: we must embrace in our awareness all of those dimensions of ourselves that we have seemingly lost. But this does not mean to act them out. Our awareness must stretch and grow to the point where it is capable of containing the multiplicity of energies that we in fact are. All of the polarities, complexities, confusions, conflicts, pains, joys, and qualities of greatness not yet developed are parts of our wholeness. But we must have a center around which these aspects can assemble. > > If we have the mistaken understanding that our aliveness is already ripe then we think that all we need to do is to is to act, or to learn, or to accomplish. But if we acknowledge that our aliveness can always expand, grow, extend itself, either outward or inward, then we can be less complacent and recognize that one of our functions is to constantly accumulate aliveness. > > One clear way to begin is by meeting with the council of the Chakra Animals. Their alignment and relationship with one another forms the nucleus of our wholeness. The embryo that we once were when in the womb did not stop growing; it kept accumulating and connecting greater and greater aspects of aliveness that had preceded humans, modifying them into new functions and gathering them together increasing their ability to interact and develop new relationships with the Universe. It was the ongoing unification of these various living capabilities which together then formed the child that you were born as. > > But we need to recognize that our development does not end with our birth. It continues on, initially dependent upon the people that are around us and then becoming more and more dependent upon our own recognition and acceptance. The acceptance cannot take place haphazardly. It needs to proceed systematically. However we do not know the proper pace and sequence. Neither does our social milieu. The place where this is known is deep in the imagination, and it is through our development of a trusted ongoing communicative relationship that our aliveness, our awareness, and our maturity continue in their development. And just as our own aliveness originated out of that single mother-cell that was in our mother when she was born, we also need a center around which our continued growth and maturation can proceed. And this is the function of the aligned centers of aliveness that have been known since antiquity as ‘chakras’. > > As we embrace more and more of who we are we experience a deep and longed for healing. At points along the way these fractious dimensions jell suddenly into a new and larger being. This is the process that C. G. Jung referred to as transcendence. > > Imagery is the most ancient living dimension of ourselves, and unfortunately, it is also one of the aspects that we learn early to abandon. Our relationship with deep imagery needs to be direct and simple: the reestablishing of a relationship that is respectful, where we are willing to be present, to communicate directly and immediately those thoughts, feelings, anticipations, expectations, hopes, fears, longings, loneliness, and love. And to listen in return. To open up a full and expressive dialogue with the deepest living part of who we are leads us back into our wholeness. Once we see it, it is so simple. And the alternative is so dangerous. > > There is a positiveness and a natural goodness at the core of every human being. By journeying into our wholeness we reawaken and re-include this goodness. People are not naturally bad. It is buried injuries and inner divisions that cause people to do bad things. > > Communication was intended to take place within ourselves as well as between people. That communication leads to a communion. And that communion leads us back into relationship with our fellow beings, the earth and nature, and the very Universe itself. We then experience our natural umbilication to the Universe. > > I encourage you to begin your journey into wholeness today. Say hello to the deepest part of your imagination and allow room for a reply. The reply will occur in its own way which is perhaps not in the way that you expect. This will provide a good opportunity to look at the expectations you carry about your relationship to yourself! If you communicate what you are experiencing faithfully, and if you allow yourself to learn from your deepest living part, you will begin to change. It will be like a young shoot growing toward the light and recognizing that the roots are essential for its stability. > > You are the only one who can make this journey. No one else can do it for you. Growing toward wholeness is a process that will continue your entire life. As each new day arrives there will be new opportunities for inclusiveness. Embrace them and relish the abundance of creation and the beautiful mystery of who you are. Being on the path of growing will itself bring a deep satisfaction, like making arrangements to visit the ultimate love.