Essays around the theme of holism

2006-10-06T05:50:00.000-07:00

(This is the first essay of four. Anyone interested to read the rest please contact me on 072-626-2423 or fredboshoff@ananzi.co.za. I would love your opinions and viewpoints.)

Humankind requires to be guided by some light, some vision, through the maze of life. This is especially true today. What humankind needs above all else is some larger synthesis, some idea that will bring together the manifold details with which modern man has to deal. There has been an immense movement forward in thought, science, philosophy and most forms of human development. Concepts like “global village” and “virtual reality” are today commonplace. Mankind is running the risk of getting lost, becoming submerged in details, and it is all-important to get some larger view on all this vast mass.
Holism is an attempt at synthesis, an attempt at bringing together many currents of thought and development.
To understand the whole, it is necessary to understand the parts. To understand the parts, it is necessary to understand the whole. Such is the circle of understanding.
This book will make broadsides into theology, philosophy, science, cosmology and quantum physics which is meant to explore the mysteries around the theme of Holism. The reason for this is that holism is manifested in all areas of life and field of endeavour.
I will however try to write something that will be interesting for some, enlightening for others and totally ignored by the majority.

here is the biggest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life); which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide
and this is the wonder that is keeping the stars apart
and no-one will know
unless perhaps the blind
force who laughs behind the sky
e.e. cummings

Foreword
The title of this book my sound somewhat presumptuous. No-one can claim to realise the whole truth. It is rather a truthful realisation I have come to, concerning the wholeness and completeness of all things, or perhaps about my own ignorance. Like Thomas Moore said in his Care of the Soul, truth is not really a soul word, soul is an insight more than truth. Truth is a stopping point asking for commitment and defence or debate. This is what this book is all about. Insight is a fragment of awareness that invites further exploration. Intellect tends to enshrine its truth, while soul hopes that insights will keep coming until some degree of wisdom is achieved. Wisdom is the marriage of intellect’s longing for truth and the soul’s acceptance of the labyrinthine nature of the human condition. Truth or insight is the birth of ignorance.
Nicholas of Cusa, certainly one of the most profound theologians of the Renaissance, tells how he was on a journey, on a ship in fact, when the realisation dawned on him in a visionary way that we should acknowledge our ignorance of the most profound things. Discovering that we do not know God is what life is all about, he says, is the learning of ignorance, ignorance about the meaning and value of our lives. This is a starting point for a more grounded, open-ended kind of knowledge that never closes up in fixed conditions. He says that if full knowledge about the very base of our existence could be described as a circle, the best we can do is to arrive at a polygon -- something short of sure knowledge. Often our personal philosophies and our values seem to be all too neatly wrapped, leaving little room for mystery.
Oscar Wilde once wrote from a prison cell: “The final mystery is oneself. When one has weighed the sun in balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven steps of heavens star by star, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?”

TRUTH -- THE SOUL OF GOD

Have you ever had a life changing experience? Periods of such spiritual clarity that you realised that your life would never be the same again. A realisation that your soul has expanded and changed shape and will never bend back to its original shape again?
It is difficult to establish a specific point in my life where my whole world changed. It was rather a succession of moments. A spiritual build-up towards catharsis. An evolution from relative simplicity of thought and reflection, to the complexity of insight.
Perhaps everything I have ever read, thought and experienced came to a head and became a system in my mind soon after the death of a dear friend of mine. It was then that I experienced the jump into the abyss of Faith’s “seventy thousand fathoms” -- Kierkegaard’s “terrible jump into the open arms of the living God”. I began to see life, death, nature and the divinity as a whole. I became a Holist.
Holism is the philosophy of wholeness/fullness and the interconnectedness of man, nature, the universe and God. In this wholeness, the whole or completeness is more than the mere sum of its parts. In its extreme form it implies that every particle of nature, individual personality and life builds up to the supreme whole, which is God. But God cannot be mechanically constructed out of nature or thought -- He will always be more than the mere sum total of the parts of His creation.
One of the greatest Holists of all times was the Apostle Paul, and he himself came to that realisation, also through such a life-changing moment of insight on the road to Damascus.
It must have been a moment of such grandeur that his whole life, his thought patterns, and his personality changed forever. He was truly born again.
He suddenly realised that the “person” he was prosecuting with such fervour, Jesus Christ, was bestriding heaven and earth with new visions of love, greatness, nobility, purity, generosity and grace.
Truth is a vision. Mary Magdalene saw that vision in the garden on the first Easter morning. Paul saw that vision on the road to Damascus. Buddha and Mohammed had visions on which whole religions were built.
Paul had a clear vision of man’s unlimited potential to share in the characteristics of Divinity and Spirituality. He saw the oneness and wholeness that man shares with nature and God. In living this reality and in preaching the new gospel of Christ’s love and His glorification in man, he was able to leave a lasting impact on mankind for the rest of his life.
Paul became a new personality because of his new understanding of the nature of man in his relation to his Supreme Creator, and Jesus of Nazareth’s idea of the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of all mankind. In Paul, bold intellectual insight combined with supreme moral truth.
For Paul, his new relationship with Christ implied the highest and noblest views of the human spirit with the emphasis on the supreme worth, value and sacredness of each individual personality.
Paul, like I did over a period of time, became aware of the wholeness of everything. Man’s spirit through Christ yearns towards this perfection, this unity. “For in Him we live, and move, and have our being”.
In this system of Divinity, Christ has through his resurrection also resurrected man as an essential part of the Wholeness that is God. God is the Perfect whole, and will also be far more than the individual parts of His creation.
19 For the creation eagerly waits for the revelation of the sons of God. 20 For the creation was subjected to futility—not willingly but because of God who subjected it—in hope 21 that the creation itself will also be set free from the bondage of decay into the glorious freedom of God’s children. 22 For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers together until now. 23 Not only this, but we ourselves also, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we eagerly await our adoption, the redemption of our bodies. 24 (Romans 8:18-25).
7 But we have this treasure in clay jars, so that the extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us. (2 Corinthians 4:7-11).
Man was created in God’s spiritual image, and man’s whole life is a quest to reach this state of wholeness and spiritual fulfillment again. Paul wrote: “...that they should seek the God, if haply they might feel after Him and find Him, though He be not far away from each of us.”
My moment of realisation was essentially round this theme.
As I have said before, it was not that single event that made a difference for me, but rather the culmination of a series of experiences.
As Werner Erhard said: “There is something I do not know, the knowing of which could change everything.”.
For the past five years I have been undergoing a period of spiritual change and growth. In my thinking and through extensive reading, especially in the fields of philosophy and cosmology, I reached a stage where I had one overwhelming quest: How can I ensure that at the moment of my death, my last thoughts were pure, positive and focused on God?
This sent me into the very frustrating period where I consciously tried to return to the realm of the soul, and go within to the Seat of Eternal Wisdom, and only think pure thoughts. But I realised after a while that it could not be conscious process. Purity stems from the spirit, the soul and not the mind. The only way that I could ensure that I stay focused on eternal issues, was to make sure that I concentrated on “Whatsoever things are true, honest, just, pure, lovely, of good report, virtue, praise” in almost every conscious moment of my life. Is this possible? No, definitely not. It is a gift -- the Grace of Christ.
Purity is an unconscious process, resulting from an individual reaching a deeper spiritual state. These things lie in the spiritual dimension. Purity can only be reached through meditation and prayer. It is not a means towards attaining a goal. Purity is an end and goal in itself.
We are told to be pure: “ ...become blameless and pure, children of God...” (Philippians 2: 14:16).
TS Elliot once spoke of a lifetime burning in every moment. He had in mind the perfect life, and also had the honesty to admit that he could not meet it.
Neale Walsch in Conversations with God (Book 3), says that thought control is the highest form of prayer. “…therefore think only on good things, and righteous. Dwell not in negativity and darkness. See only perfection, express only gratefulness, and then imagine only what manifestation of perfection you choose next.
“In this formula is found tranquillity. In this process is found peace. In this awareness is found joy.”
My new ideas about wholeness or Holism are where creation is where God is made manifest and becomes fully realised.
Neale says that God invites us to be the highest thought about ourselves!
“ (Inasmuch as we) refute arguments and theories and reasoning and every proud and lofty thing that sets itself up against the true knowledge of God; and we lead every thought and purpose away captive into the obedience of Christ.” 2 Corinthians 10:5.
What Paul in fact is saying here is that we have to keep our minds reserved for God’s thoughts alone. God desires truth in the inward parts (Psalm 51:6). We have to dedicate our whole life to God, and live as if we were private property -- reserved for God alone.
Nobody can say this more beautifully than Joyce Meyer:
She says that if we are going to give God glory, we must manifest excellence. An excellent life begins with an excellent thought-life and excellent attitudes. This can lead to inner purity.
Choosing excellence in our thought-life is a private thing. No one, but God and the individual, knows exactly what is going on in his own mind. My late friend, who I mentioned from the outset, had a lot to do with focusing my thoughts on that which is important. Knowing that she had limited time after she found out she had cancer, she consciously tried to only think, meditate and concentrate on that which was important to her and her family. To her it was the realm of the eternal. She utterly believed in the glory and eternal beauty of God and Christ, and tried to flood her mind and her consciousness with this beauty -- with the “Perfume of God”.
Like Kant she made me aware of the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.
M. Scott Peck (The Road Less Travelled) said: “ We are all individuals, but we are also part of a greater whole, united in something vast and beautiful beyond description. Perception of the miraculous is the subjective essence of self realisation, the root from which man’s highest features and experience grow.”
Although I have always been a spiritual, philosophical type of creature, she acted as a catalyst to steer my thinking to the mystery of life and death itself. Her legacy of beauty and gentleness remains.
How is it possible that one can find enlightenment at the terrible moment of death? Death can be as beautiful as life. Like life, death was also created by God, and not by the devil. Even if death is the result of man’s sin, it is still something that was ordained by God.
In our roots we are more spiritual than physical in nature -- the inmost core of our being is spirit and not body.
On the night of her burial I was walking in the dark of night, blinded by grief and longing for her dear face -- the sound of her voice, the feel of her touch.
Looking up at the stars, everything suddenly became very quiet all around me. Can silence be absolute and devoid of any sound? A vacuum of silence where no noise exists? But then in the background a faint humming sound -- could this be Shakespears' "Soft Stillness and the Night" -- the music of the spheres?

People in the know say that scientists, using highly sensitive and finely tuned instruments, can pick up a constant humming noise; they reckon that this is the humming or harmony of the earth and planets as they move in their orbits. According to the ancient Greek philosopher, Pythagoras, we are all constantly but unknowingly bathed in this celestial humming.
Arthur Koestler in The Sleepwalkers wrote that Pythagoras' vision of the universe resembled a cosmic musical box playing the same Bach prelude from eternity to eternity.
Shakespeare also wrote about it in The Merchant of Venice where Lorenzo explains to Jessica:
….soft stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony…
Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold;
There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st
But in this motion like an angel sings…
Such harmony is in immortal souls;
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.
Milton in his Arcades also came close to describing my personal experience:
But else in deep of night when drowsiness
Hath lockt up mortal sense, then listen I
To the celestial Sirens harmony…
Or Dryden:
From harmony, from heavenly harmony…
The tuneful voice we heard from high:
Rise, ye more than dead.

The harmony of the symphony of the night I experienced was total and primordial -- an unknown dimension that existed before time began. Perhaps that was the silence of heaven -- the quietness of death.
Within that holy, everlasting moment, pregnant with absolute harmony, I became aware of the beauty all around me and felt my own spirit dissolving into and becoming one with that silence, harmony and beauty. For one startling moment I became aware of the unity and interrelationship of everything. I could sense how every moment of time links up with the next until it forms an unending stream of everlasting consciousness. At that moment, time stopped and it was no longer linear for me. Everything was clothed in timelessness, eternity and holiness.
We belong to this timelessness, this everlasting wonder of life. This clarity. This holiness. This harmony. This celestial symphony. No soul will ever be lost to the ravages of time.
Many people have had this life changing experience, but very few have written about it. TS Eliot had such an experience. In his biography written by Lyndall Gordon TS Elliot. An Imperfect Life, it is said that at the time Eliot graduated from Harvard College, while walking one day in Boston, he plunged into a strange silence like a parting of the sea. In June 1910 he wrote a poem, which he never published, called Silence, his first and perhaps most lucid description of the timeless moment.

This is the ultimate hour
When life is justified.
The seas of experience
That was so broad and deep
So immediate and steep,
Are suddenly still.
At the age of 21, Eliot had an experience which, he said, many have once or twice in their lives and are unable to put into words. ‘You may call it communion with the Divine or you may call it temporary crystallisation of the mind,’ he said on another occasion. Eliot’s peace in the noisy street is similar to Ralph Emerson’s on Boston Common when he felt "…glad to the brink of fear".
Everything is one with nature and God. God is in nature and His presence glorifies every living creature.
God is the beginning of your first thought. He is the end of your last. He is the idea that sparked your most brilliant moment. He is the glory of its fulfilment. He is the feeling, which fuelled the most loving thing you ever did. He is the part of you, which yearns for that feeling again and again.
We all have moments of insight into truth, beauty and goodness, and into the ultimate human ideal, which is not mere fashion, but which are immortal and eternal.
We are truly one with all things. One realises this at such great moments of inspiration, when the self merges into the Whole, and all life and consciousness becomes a great act of marriage in which the love at the heart of things, finds its supreme consummation. We must look outside the individual parts, and see the whole that is more than the mere sum of the parts.
Life is not merely a struggle for survival, but is the end and purpose itself.
It is a creative growing unity, which makes all the diverse elements of existence the co-operative members of an essential friendly universe.
We are here to nourish and protect all nature, and in co-operating with the deepest forces of nature, we achieve order, harmony, beauty, happiness and blessedness. In this way we are capable of realising our highest and noblest personalities to the glory of the Creator of all life.
How in applying this new systemic thought pattern can one describe a human being? Jan Smuts tried to define the highest holistic development that a human being can reach as the human personality.
Every human being has a unique spirit or soul which is more than just the sum of all the parts that make of such a person, albeit genetic inheritance, education, parents, internal and external influences, Jung’s collective unconscious and the person’s own expectations and thought patterns. The human soul can be interpreted as meaning the unique human spirit with which the human race is endowed. It is that fire or spark in us, the breath of God.
Your soul is that part of you that is immortal.

When a person becomes born again, undergoes a religious experience, becomes enlightened, it starts to sense things about itself, other people, and the situations in which it finds itself that it cannot justify on the basis of the information that its five senses can provide. It comes to recognise intentions, and to respond to them rather than to the actions and the words that it encounters.
It is the nature of the soul to overcome, and finally to attain complete freedom and happiness.
Gary Zukav in his book “The Seat of the Soul” calls the soul the energy and force behind the personality. He calls the highest form of human growth as the alignment of the personality and the soul.
“Your soul is not a passive or a theoretical entity that occupies a space in the vicinity of your chest cavity. It is a positive, purposeful force at the core of your being. It is that part of you that understands the impersonal nature of the energy dynamics in which you are involved, that loves without restriction and accepts without judgement.”
He says that a personality must come to experience the energy of the soul. When the energy of the soul is recognised, acknowledged and valued, it begins to infuse life into the personality.
When the personality comes fully to serve the energy of its soul, that is authentic empowerment. This is the reason for our being. This is the goal of the growth process in which we are involved.
Every experience that you have and will have upon the Earth encourages the alignment of your personality with your soul. Every circumstance and situation gives you the opportunity to choose this path, to allow your soul to shine through you, to bring into the physical world through you its unending and unfathomable reverence for love and life.
This experience more than anything else has formulated my ideas about freedom, purity, creativity as the main components of human personality and of the meaning in life and the interconnectedness of everything that is encapsulated in holism. It is only occasionally that the real Truth is revealed to us as a flash of light in our happiest experiences.
It is impossible to define precisely what soul is. Definition is an intellectual enterprise anyway, the soul prefers to imagine. According to Thomas Moore in his modern classic “Care of the Soul”, we know intuitively that the soul has to do with genuineness and depth, as when we say certain music has soul or a remarkable person is soulful. “When you look closely at the image of soulfulness, you see that it is tied to life in all its particulars -- good food, satisfying conversation, genuine friends, and experiences that stay in the memory and touch the heart. Soul is revealed in attachment, love, and community, as well as a retreat on behalf of inner communing and intimacy.”
Moore says that tradition teaches that soul lies midway between understanding and unconsciousness, and that its instrument is neither the mind nor the body, but imagination. “Fulfilling work, rewarding relationships, personal power and relief from symptoms are all gifts of the soul.”
Moore goes on to say that soul is closely connected to fate, and the turns of fate almost always go counter to the expectations and often to the desires of the ego.
He writes at length about caring for the soul and says that the act of entering into the mysteries of the soul, without sentimentality or pessimism, encourages life to blossom forth according to its own designs and with its own unpredictable beauty. Care of the soul is not solving the puzzle of life; quite the opposite, it is an appreciation of the paradoxical mysteries that lend light and darkness into the grandeur of what human life and culture can be.
“Soul” is not a thing, but a quality or a dimension of experiencing life and ourselves. It has to do with depth, value, relatedness, heart, and personal substance.
There is nothing neutral about the soul, according to Thomas Moore. It is the seat and the source of life. Either we respond to what the soul presents in its fantasies or desires, or we suffer from the neglect of ourselves. “The power of the soul can hurl a person into ecstasy or into depression. It can be creative or destructive, gentle or aggressive. Power incubates within the soul and then makes its influential move into life as the expression of soul. If there is no soulfullness, then there is no true power, then there can be no true soulfulness.
What are the highest ideals that the personality can strive towards and attain? It is the alignment with the soul, with God. To be true to God’s intentions in your life. The free and harmonious self-realisation through the refinement and sublimation of the cruder features in the Personality and the Spirit.
Harmony is the keyword that binds the great universe together and the happy human being who lives in harmony with himself and his own world and who can optimise his freedom by creating a world in which that harmonious personality can function optimally, that is heaven. That being has achieved the great whole. He is a child of the universe.
How can one experience and describe this wholeness and unity in human terms? It is in the human spirituality and personality that it establishes itself most clearly.
Moore calls the union between the personality, soul and spiritually as the “Divine Union”.
“Textures, places, and personalities are important on the soul path, or in the divine union, which feels more like an initiation into the multiplicity of life than a single-minded assault upon enlightenment. “ (Thomas Moore Care of the Soul) As the soul makes its unsteady way, delayed by obstacles and distracted by al kinds of charms, aimlessness is not overcome. In his poem “Endymion” Keats describes this union or this path of the soul exactly:
“ But this is the human life: the war, the deeds,
The Disappointment, the anxiety,
Imagination’s struggles, far and nigh,
All human; bearing in themselves this good,
That they are still the air, the subtle food,
To make us feel existence.”
This is the goal -- to feel existence; to know first hand, to exist more fully in context.
The only thing is to be where you are at this moment, sometimes looking about in the full light of consciousness, other times standing comfortably in the deep shadows of mystery and the unknown.
The individual hard at work in the process of “soul-making”, is according to Moore becoming a “microcosm”, a “human world”. When we allow the great possibilities of life to enter into us, and when we embrace them, then we are most individual. Over a lifetime, however long or short, cosmic humanity and the spiritual ideal are revealed in human flesh, in various degrees of imperfection. Divinity -- the body of Christ --- becomes incarnated in us in all our complexity and foolishness. When the divine shines through ordinary life, it may well appear as madness and we as God’s fools.
Jung writes in Memories, Dreams, Reflections that the whole man is challenged and enters the fray with his total reality. “Only then can we become whole and only then can God be born”.
The ultimate marriage between spirit, personality and soul, animus and anima, is the wedding of heaven and earth, our highest ideals and ambitions with our lowliest symptoms and complaints.
Smuts who is regarded as the father of Holism says that the inner call of Holism is towards the wholeness and perfection of the personality.
“Personality is a spiritual gymnast, whose object is the freedom and harmony of the inner life through the refinement and sublimation of the cruder features of the personality. If this object is secured by the Personality, all the rest will be added unto it: peace, joy, blessedness, goodness and all the great prizes of life.”
Wholeness as free and harmonious self-realisation thus sums up the summum bonum of Holism, in Smut’s words.
I would go one further and say that it is not personality itself but the spirit of a person, his soul, which is the highest whole or completeness towards which fulfilment one can strive. The soul can only develop if it is allowed to develop freely, harmoniously and creatively.
Freedom exists in the very nature of things. Freedom is a fact, a power, a force in the universe itself and not a mere capricious power peculiar to the human will. It operates in the lowest categories of nature to help in their upward growth and development, and with the coming of organisms it plays an even more important role until in the human personality and spirit. It emerges as a vital force to become the basis of self-determined growth and self-expression.
No personality can truly find itself and express itself where there is no freedom or where others dominate it. “Man is condemned to be free.”
Soul is also a holistic concept. In his book Psychology and Religion,: West and East, Jung writes : “The soul is for the most part outside the body.” What an extraordinary idea! Responding to this Moore writes in Care of the Soul, that the modern person is taught that the soul -- or whatever language is used for the soul -- is contained in the brain or is equivalent to mind and is purely and humanly subjective. But if we are to think that the soul is part of the whole of creation or as being in the world, then maybe our striving, our consciousness and our daily work would be seen as a truly important aspect of our lives, not only for its literal products, but also as a way of caring for the soul.
Freedom is the basic concept and construct of the soul and of life everywhere, because freedom is the basic nature of God. Freedom is not the goal of the human soul, but its very nature. By nature the soul is free.
Here I want to quote at length from Piet Beukes’ book on Jan Smuts The Holistic Smuts. He gave his famous oration on Freedom at the rectoral address at St Andrew’s University in October 1934:
He said that in the beginning God saw that the world was good, and it still is so today:
“ This is a good world. We need not approve of all the items in it, nor of all the individuals in it, but the world itself, which is more than its parts or individuals, which has a soul, a spirit, a pull, a fundamental relation to each of us, deeper than all other relations, is a friendly world. It has borne us; it has carried us onward; it has humanised us and guided our faltering footsteps throughout the long and slow advance; it has endowed us with strength and courage; it has proved a real value of soul-making for us humans; and created for us visions, dreams, ideas which are still further moulding us on eternal lines. It is full of tangles, of ups and downs. There is always enough to bite on, to sharpen wits on, and to test our courage and manhood. It is indeed a world built on heroism, but also for beauty, tenderness, mercy.”
Smuts continued that he had sampled the world and human nature at many points, and I have learnt that it takes all sorts to make up the world. But through it all his conviction had only deepened that there was nothing in the nature of things, which is alien to what is best in us. He said that there was no malign fatalism, which make fools of us in our dark striving towards the good.
“On the contrary, what is highest in us is deepest in the nature of things, and as virtue is its own reward, so life carries its own sanctions and the guarantee of its own highest fulfilment and perfection. That is my ultimate Credo...I remain at heart an optimist.”
The human spirit always strives towards equilibrium or harmony towards the attainment of purity. Harmony is the basis of the universe no less than of the pattern and principle of holism. Where there is no harmony there can be no wholeness and that means that a person lacks purity.
The third factor in the quest towards perfection is creativity. If a human spirit needs purity for its realisation, and if it has freedom and through freedom creativeness, it must use that to ensure its own ideal state and condition. To do this it creates values. There are rational, moral, artistic, ethical and religious codes based on and directed to the great values of peace, joy, blessedness and goodness. It is through this holistic pattern that we enter the field of the higher spiritual values, which a personality needs for its internal harmony, its basic purity and its fundamental freedom to express itself.

This awareness of being part of a bigger whole is not something that one just suddenly one day realise on an intellectual level. It is like the term Holism itself, a complete experience and a realisation that one grows into, provided that one is spiritually aware enough. It is a profound intellectual, spiritual, religious, philosophical concept. Once you grasp the unique opportunity that it provides as a window to study the world and human personality, your soul will never be able to stretch back to its original structure. It is a mind and soul expanding truth.
Einstein was another great Holist, which I will deal with at length later: He said that a human being is part of a whole, called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. “He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
Again Smuts and this time his “Spirit of the Mountain” address at Maclear’s Beacon on Table Mountain:
“The Religion of the Mountain is in reality the religion of joy, of the release of the soul from the things that weigh it down and fill it with a sense of weariness, sorrow and defeat. The religion of joy realises the freedom of the soul, the soul’s kinship to the great creative spirit and its dominance over all things of sense. We must feel that we are above it all, that the soul is essentially free, and in freedom realises the joy of living.
“We must fill our daily lives with the spirit of joy and delight. We must carry this spirit into our daily lives and tasks.”
Llyal Watson in his book, Gifts of Unknown Things, writes that there seems always to have been two ways of looking at the world. One is the everyday way in which objects and events, although they may be related causally and influences each other, are seen to be separate. And the other is a rather special way in which everything is considered to be part of a much greater pattern.
From childhood, no matter what species we may belong to, we learn to function in the first way because it has the highest survival value. It keeps the individual alive. The second way has little that is of such immediate and practical importance, and becomes a conscious concept only in certain systems, but it nevertheless plays a large part in everyday life.
There never has been any question of choosing between the two. They merely represent the extremes of a spectrum of possible response. At one end is a person scientist who sees everything in isolation and at the other a mystic who experiences only a featureless flow.
There is nothing new in this notion that all are parts of the whole and that the whole is embodied in all its parts. What is new is that our physical sciences are catching up with us and beginning to reinforce some very old and very basic biological perceptions.
Insight is beginning to substantiate intuition. In traditional physics, the world is thought to be made up of points. If you put a lens in front of an object, it will form an image of that object, and there will be a point-to-point correspondence between the two.
This kind of relationship has encouraged us to assume that the whole of reality can be analysed in terms of points, each with a separate existence. But certainty about this kind of concept has been shaken by quantum mechanics (see next chapter) and by the development of a new system of recording reality without the use of lenses. This is through the invention of holograms.
The purest kind of light available to us is that produced by a laser, which sends out a beam in which all the waves are of one frequency, like those made by an ideal pebble in a perfect pond. When two laser beams touch, they produce an interference pattern of light and dark ripples that can be recorded on a photographic plate. And if one of the beams, instead of coming directly from the laser, is reflected first off an object such as a human face, the resulting pattern will be very complex indeed, but it can still be recorded. The record will be a hologram of a face.
When the plate is developed and fixed, it will look like a totally meaningless jumble of very fine light and dark lines, but these can be unravelled. Simply take the plate into a dark room and illuminate it with the same laser. When you do this, you cancel out
interference and what you get is the original pattern of light from the reflected source. Peering through the plate, you find yourself face to face. You get a very realistic view, which is much more than a two-dimensional portrait. Hologram means “whole record” so what you get is more than face value. You get all the information that light can provide about that face. The plate becomes a window. If you move your head to the side, you see the face in profile. Stand up and you get a view of the hairstyle.
This three dimensionality is not the only thing that makes a hologram fascinating. If you illuminate only a small part of the plate with a very narrow laser beam, you can still peer through this spot like a keyhole and see the whole face. No matter what part of the plate you choose to use, the view is still the same. Every part contains the whole. In this example the whole concept of holism is encapsulated.
Any part of the hologram is a point in space; and yet it contains information about things at other points. Actually, the hologram plate is merely a convenient way of recording what is happening in that region of space. What happens is that there is movement of light there, and it seems that embraced in that movement is a mass of information about events taking place in other spaces. Cameras have always told us that, but the hologram says that any point in space will do. They all embrace everything happening everywhere.
We as humans also carry information in every cell of our individual bodies of the totality of the universe. Every electron or quantum particle contains information of the entire universe with all its terrible beauty and mystery. Every human soul and personality contains information about the awesome power and omnipresence and magnificence of the everlasting and almighty God.
Perhaps this is the Source of the source, the Root of the root. This is where the answer to the great questions lies.
Everything, the whole of existence, can be seen to have its origins in a single source -- universal life energy, Everything derives from the same creator -- God.
Watson describes this beautifully: “I would expect to find that living organisms have some sort of hot line, a more direct connection with the energy source or life than inanimate matter could have or would need. And that we lose this link, our lifeline, we cease to be subscribers to the service, when we die.”
We have this lifeline in every cell in our bodies in every electron, in every atom. That is what the lifeline means. -- Our connection with the cosmos and beyond -- to God. Direct dialling into eternity.
There is no place where God is not. Every single location in the entire Cosmos is equally and fully Spirit of God.
This notion of holism and continuity keeps cropping up. It can be found in the works of Whitehead and Leibnitz, of Spinoza and Heraclitus. It is embodied in the poetry of Witman and Blake, of Baudeliare and in Afrikaans NP van Wyk Louw. It is a recurring theme in ancient mythology. It is the mainstay in every ancient mystical tradition and it is the essence of the modern science of ecology. But most of all, a sense of oneness is at the core of every system of belief and religion. Most of all in the Christian belief system. Every child everywhere instinctively holds it.
Children have a very powerful sense of Holism of the propriety of all things. They believe that rocks and houses are alive, that bears and elephants have feelings and that it all matters. Every child of five knows everything there is to know; but when children turn six we send them to school, and then the rot sets in.
Poets and children and other wise and primitive people often stop to look and wonder. Some try to tell of it, but the words they use are simple ones, full of mystery and rhyme, and the scientific journal has yet to be founded that would accept a report in blank verse whose sense in the sound and not the syntax.
Thomas Moore (Care of the Soul) writes that in 1947 Jung wrote to a colleague who had been studying Sanskrit and Indian philosophy that he should pay attention to a dream of his in which a star shines in a forest. “…you will find yourself again only in the simplest and forgotten things… “ Jung wrote. “ Why not go into the forest for a time, literally? Sometimes a tree tells you more than can be read in books”. We can find ourselves and the whole again in such simple and forgotten things, because when we disallow soul to the simple things around us, we lose that important source of soul for ourselves. Concretely a tree can tell us much in the language of its form, texture, age and colour and in the way it presents itself as an individual. But in its expression of itself, it is also showing us the secrets of our own souls, for there is no absolute separation between the world’s soul and our own. It is all part of the bigger whole. We are truly the world, and the world us.
There are levels of reality far too mysterious for totally objective common sense.
When we align our thoughts, emotions, and actions with the highest part of ourselves, we are filled with enthusiasm, purpose, and meaning. Life is rich and full. We have no thoughts of bitterness. We have no memory of fear. We are joyously and intimately engaged with our world.
We are evolving from a species that pursues external power into a species that pursues authentic power. We are leaving behind exploration of the physical world as our sole means of evolution. This means of evolution, and the consciousness that results from an awareness that is limited to the five-sensory modality, are no longer adequate to what we must become.
We are evolving from five-sensory humans into multisensory humans, says Zukov. Our five senses, together, form a single sensory system that is designed to perceive physical reality. The perceptions of a multisensory human extend beyond physical reality to the larger dynamically systems of which our physical reality is a part. The multisensory human is able to perceive, and to appreciate the role that our physical reality plays in a larger picture of evolution, and the dynamics by which our physical reality is created and sustained. This realm is invisible to the five-sensory human.
It is in this invisible realm that the origins of our deepest values are found. From the perspective of this invisible realm, the motivations of those who consciously sacrifice their lives for higher purposes make sense, the power of Gandhi is explicable, and the compassionate acts of the Christ are comprehensible in a fullness that is not accessible to the five-sensory human.
“This is your world. You can’t not look. There is no other world. This is your world: it is your feast. You inherited this; you inherited these eyeballs; you inherited this world of colour. Look at the greatness of the whole thing. Look! Don’t hesitate -- Look! Open you eyes. Don’t blink; and look, look, -- look further.

Chogyam Trungpa

So what? You may ask. What do I do with the knowledge of Holism?
God is everything, and God becomes everything. There is nothing, which God is not. In His purest form God is Absolute. He is absolutely everything. He stands above the process called life, but is also an integral part of that process
God is not a noun, but a verb. “I” am also a verb and so are “you”. This means that we are all part of a process -- part of the fullness of God. I am a human, (comma) being. And “being-ness” is a process. God is the Supreme, Being. God is not the result of the process. He is the process itself. He is the Creator. He is the fullness himself. The wholeness.
The process of creation is never complete. Everything is forever changing, because life and the creation are energy in motion. And energy is never static; it is always in the motion of becoming.
When you look at a thing, you are not looking at a ‘static” something that is “standing there” in time and space. You are witnessing an event. Because everything is moving, changing, evolving.
The process never stops -- even after death. That will also be part of a process a “being-ness”. We are always in the process of growing towards a wholeness of being.
You must look at holism through the Eye of the Spirit until you become the I of the Spirit. I have started with this manuscript because increasingly I became aware of the Spiritual dimension of myself. I have not become spiritual; I simply came to recognise the Sprit that I have always been. I see the world as Spirit sees it; every object an object of Beauty, every thing and event a gesture of the Great Perfection, every process a ripple in the pond of my own eternal Being. The entire Kosmos arises in the Eye of the Holy Spirit, in the I of Spirit, in my own intrinsic awareness, this simple ever-lasting consciousness and awareness, even to the end of Time and beyond.
I swoon in this beauty, and will die in this Truth, and dissolve into this Goodness, and there will be no one left to testify to terror, no one left to take tears seriously, no one left to engineer unease, no one left to deny the Divine, which only is, and only alone ever was, and only alone will ever be.
What better way of ending this chapter than with the words of Ken Wilber from his book The Eye of the Spirit. To me Ken Wilber is one of the most profound modern thinkers on the Spiritual dimension and holism. He was writing for his wife who died of cancer.
“And somewhere on a cold crystal night the moon will shine on a silently waiting earth, just to remind those left behind that it is all a game. The lunar light will set dreams afire in their sleeping hearts, and a yearning to awaken will stir in the depths of that restless night, and you will be pulled, yet again, to respond to those most plaintiff prayers, and you will find yourself right here, right now, wondering what it all really means -- until that flash of recognition runs across your face and it is all undone. You then will arise as the moon itself, and sing those dreams in your very own heart; and you will arise as the Earth itself, and glorify all of its inhabitants; and you will arise as the Sun itself, radiant to infinity and much to obvious to see; and in that One Taste of primordial purity, with no beginning and no end, with no entrance and no exit, with no birth and no death, it all comes radically to be; and the sound of a singing waterfall, somewhere in the distance, is all that is left to tell its tale, ate on that crystal cold night, bathed so beautifully in that lunar light, just so, and again just so.”

The Whole truth

Essays around the theme of holism