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Four Dynamics of Wholeness

Mechanistic perception sees parts and their relationships as primary, as adding up to a whole whose reality derives from the existence of its parts. For example, a friend said to me, "a society is basically made up of individuals." That's true and it isn't true. Holistic perception acknowledges the reality of parts and their relationships, but also sees the parts and their relationships in terms of the whole -- in terms of their relationship to the whole and the way they embody the whole.

In holistic perception, a relationship between parts -- for example, the relationship between a mother and daughter -- gets its meaning as an aspect of the total weave of relationships constituting the fabric of the whole. For example, a family systems therapist may discover that a dysfunctional family needs to have someone be a scapegoat. If the current scapegoat leaves the family, the family will give that role to someone else. The whole has needs of its own, quite additional to the needs of the parts. A society turns out to be more than the sum of its individuals. It is an entity -- a living system -- in its own right.

Our separate identity as an individual ("ego") is only a tiny piece of who we are. Our full identity includes our kinship with family... our citizenship in community, nation and culture... our organic role the larger world of life... and so on. We also have cultural, ecological and universal/spiritual Selves, Selves that are both "within us" and co-extensive with the larger world. My place in the fabric of the world -- even when I am totally oblivious to it -- is a far more significant aspect of my uniqueness than the persona I work so hard to assert and defend. In the holistic perspective:

• the boundary between entities is the seam that connects (my skin meets the world) at the same time that it separates
• the action of each entity can be seen as life dancing with itself (my breath is part of the atmospheric cycling of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen...)
• and at the core of each entity is the whole universe (at the bottom of the finger is the hand, and where is the boundary between finger and hand?).

And so I see four dynamics of wholeness/partness I want to focus on -- inclusion, creative process, participation and something I'll call holescence.

• Inclusion focuses on the presence of more (or all) parts.
• Creative process focuses on the unfolding patterns of wholeness.
• Participation focuses on the role of the parts in the whole.
• Holescence focuses on how a part embodies the whole or wholeness, itself.
  

Inclusion

The most basic, primitive dynamic of wholeness is the assembling of parts. Are all the pieces present? Is everyone at the table? Who else should be invited? Inclusion is the dynamic that tends towards completeness.

But inclusion is trickier than it at first seems, because full inclusion can't exclude exclusion! So we could usefully postulate a first order wholeness which embraces everything, including exclusion, dissonance, partiality and fragmentation -- and a second-order wholeness which earns its coherence through excluding certain forms of dissonance, fragmentation, illness, etc. (This is closely related to "implicit and explicit wholeness" discussed elsewhere.)

In any case, we can't deal with wholeness without running into inclusion/exclusion issues.

Creative Process

Creative process is wholeness-in-action: it is the ongoing emergence of whatever comes next. Creative process includes, but cannot be reduced to, all the interactions among the parts of the whole. It includes

• interactive patterns of causality, probability, dialectics and evocation,
• teleological and "strange attractor" dynamics (which seem to pull from the future), and
• the formative power of the whole, itself (through its "needs", as in the scapegoating example above, or through habit-patterns characteristic of a whole system such as cycles, spirals, seasons, developmental stages and rhythms)

Charles Johnston has made a compelling case for creative process being the defining characteristic of life, or aliveness. His book The Creative Imperative provides a fully-developed and powerfully practical approach to living wholeness in a very dynamic way.

Participation

From the inside of a whole, inclusion and creative process look and feel like participation (PART-icipation). To participate is to play a role in, to share in the being or unfolding of something. We all play a role in everything, however small. But it is a participatory role, a co-creative role, an interactive role. We don't cause or control anything because we aren't the only players: the outcomes are co-created -- not just by us, but by us and the wholes we're part of, and by the interactions and dynamics among all those wholes, etc. Control and causation are useful illusions sustained by excluding consideration of other participant factors. This illusion is perhaps sustained most powerfully by the controlled experiment and the totalitarian state.

We might want to examine how a controlled experiment is co-created by the physical and cultural contexts that shape it (whether the experimenter admits it or not), and its results (knowledge of causes) must be applied in a world bustling with other participant actors and factors. (I find it tragicomic that we think of the unintended consequences of applying our laboratory-derived technologies in the world as "side effects." Actually, they are very real effects, often greater than the ones we intended.) And every totalitarian state has existed in a world that profoundly shaped it and its every action -- and every totalitarian state has contained actors and factors within it that escaped its control. If science and state power can't exert perfect control, none of us can.

Why not face our power-sharing directly, acknowledging it, empowering it, practicing it consciously? Once we do, we enter the world of co-creativity, co-incarnation, fields and webs of influence, evocation, and membership. Not only are we not in charge, but we are not uninvolved; we are not spectators; we are not irrelevant. Who we are matters! What we do matters! Once we inhabit this co-creative world consciously, we can see that things are not so much built or caused, as that conditions are set to encourage their emergence from the fields of probability and influence that are danced into being by an endless ocean of actors and factors, near and far. And that is the real world, the whole world, the participatory world, in which we endeavor to practice our conscious, creative agency. Together. Participation is the only game in town -- and no one is in the bleachers.


Holescence

This is a coined word meaning, literally "the state or process of wholeness" -- the resonance and kinship between whole and part -- in all its manifestations. Whereas participation is an active dynamic of wholeness, holescence is an existential dynamic of wholeness. The word brings together a wide variety of realities that share a certain "more-ness" that characterizes wholeness. To the extent something is part of a whole, it is "more" than it is separately. This "more-ness" is a freebee: If we are trying to create certain conditions we can use these existential facts of more-ness (listed below) to inform the way we design and interact with the live around us, thereby getting more simply by using our wisdom, rather than by adding more and more objects and energies into our lives and the living systems around us. If we don't have a word to describe this phenomenon, we may miss some sources of this "more-ness." So I created the idea of holescence, to help us see the world differently, and dance with it better.

I've identified ten types of holescence so far. I'm sure there are more. But here's my ten:

• synergy, in which the part is enhanced by being in a particular whole pattern (as a metal bar shaped as a triangle can support more weight than the same metal bar shaped as a square) ("The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.")
• perspective, in which the part sees the whole and applies the understanding that that seeing gives (as when a hiker in the high mountains can look at a peak across from her and see how much higher she will have to walk on her mountain before she hits the tree line)
• familiarity, resonance or entrainment, in which the part takes the pattern or vibration of the whole into itself and can use it or flow with it more readily (as the basketball team or jazz ensemble that are well attuned)
• communion, in which the part merges into the whole and the whole into the part -- part and whole become one (anyone who has experienced this, knows what kind of "more-ness" this offers!)
• holography, in which the part contains the whole or some version of the whole (as in holograms or color separations),
• holergy, in which a part brings more to a whole by being part of other wholes (as children can bring back to class stories of what their parents were doing in the Sixties) ("The part is greater than its role in the whole")
• fractals, in which the patterns of the whole appear over and over in its parts, at different scales of observation (as in ferns, although I am less sure of the "more-ness" here...)
• holonics, in which the part is simply a whole in its own right (a "holon" which is both a whole and a part). While any particular holon is different from the wholes of which it is a part, it's own wholeness gives it a kinship to all other wholes.
• membergy, in which a part is more or other than itself because it is part of a whole. Obvious examples are people who are parts of armies, ethnic groups, unions, etc. They have more or less power (depending on the circumstances) simply by the fact of membership in those groups. Imitation -- both in nature and in society -- also uses membergy.
• innergy, in which the interiority of an [whole] entity -- its coherence and integrity as an entity and its inner/energetic connection with larger Realities (natural, spiritual, etc.) -- gives it qualities that make it more than it appears.

And this is nowhere near a comprehensive list. In fact, some of these were only recently described as distinct pheonomena (e,g, holograpy, holergy, synergy, fractals, holons, membergy, innergy). There surely are many more. We just need to look at the ways wholeness inhabits everything and shows up everywhere. Holescence is why wholeness can be contacted anywhere and everywhere, if we choose to connect with it.

(See also Wholeness - Explict and Implicit and Six Facets of Wholeness)