Chapter 15

 

From childhood we are exposed to countless images, sounds and experiences which become stories, narratives, and ways of talking. Each of us becomes able to bring forth meaning as we live.

Once we play consciously with this richness of metaphor, new and exciting ideas and meanings emerge. Connecting ideas leap into our thoughts and that" Ah-Ha" feeling occurs more and more often.

I return to the notion of "stuckness". It seems to me that our journey of life will sometimes lead any of us to not know what to do. This situation may be thought of as an invitation for someone to become creative and inventive about that situation.

The earth can be thought of as a place of abundance and diversity.

We are being exposed to a huge challenge as we think how we can live in such ways that we stop damaging it, yet contribute to its survival and even enrichment.
I recommend that †he reader look closely at what Dr Amory Lovins is saying in his book "Natural Capitalism" (This is also on the ABC website called Background Briefing.)

All of us can truly experience "abundance springing from abundance with abundance remaining." To do this it helps to be curious and willing to connect with people who are experiencing this abundance.

The task of therapists and healers includes the visiting of our own lives to discover our own beliefs and metaphors. All meanings have contexts. We need encounters and realizations of our own consciousness in order to explore other consciousness as well as contexts. The emergence of willingness to think about spirituality and meaning can touch all of us.

As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it -

"We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which by any other name is Spirit. There is a theme written on the original face of the Kosmos. There is meaning in its every gesture, a grace in its every glance".

As Ken Wilber says -

We, and all beings as such - are drenched in this meaning, afloat in a current of care and profound value, ultimate significance, intrinsic awareness. We are part and parcel of this immense intelligence, this Spirit-in-action. Evolution is God and Goddess, transcendence and immanence. It is immanent in the process and woven into the very fabric of the Kosmos, but it everywhere transcends its own productions and brings itself forth anew in every moment.

It is a yearning to know that can inspire health professionals and patients alike to continue an endless search.

Our capacity to value each other's ideas is the essence of what it is to honour each other.

Wilber's extraordinary contributions.

The first chapters of "A Brief History of Everything" deal with the material cosmos and the emergence of life.

The middle chapters explore the emergence of mind or consciousness, through five or six major stages in human development. In this he explores the field of sexuality and gender in different eras.

He then explores religion and psychology evoking in the most profound way the emergence of "Spirit in action" or if you like, "the Divine".

Like many of us, at first Wilber thought that his many maps of the descriptions of parts and wholes could somehow be accommodated in some grand scheme.

Wilber on holons

Wilber develops an expansion of Arthur Koestler's concept "the holon", and after countless hours of thinking, how to place our concepts of self, life, mind and spirit.

The hierarchy of holons had similarities but also some profound differences which required a quite different large map - one with four territories represented as four quadrants.

So let us examine, with Ken Wilber, the principles which appear to fit with all aspects of what we as human beings can know.

This is indeed a Grand Scheme, and one which has the potential to allow us to reconcile ideas which in past ages have seemed to be conflictual.

WHAT IS A HOLON (A WHOLE/PART)?

Tenet (i)
Anything that is a unit in itself can be called "a holon". The unit is a whole in itself and a part of some other whole.

An atom is whole in itself, yet also part of a molecule. A molecule can be part of another whole (for example "a cell"), and a cell can be part of a whole (for example an organ which is part of a whole organism).

There are wholes/parts all the way up and all the way down.

A substantial particle is a holon, so is a symbol, an image and a concept.

A letter is a holon, so is a word, and a sentence.


Tenet (ii) HOLONS HAVE PROPERTIES

TO MAINTAIN WHOLENESS AND PARTNESS

(1) PRESERVING WHOLENESS
THIS CAN BE CALLED 'AGENCY"

(2) BEING PART OF SOMETHING ELSE
THIS CAN BE CALLED "COMMUNION"
The fates of holons could be

If a holon doesn't maintain it's wholeness, it disintegrates.

Tenet (iii) HOLONS EMERGE

If it becomes part of a bigger holon, the new holon transcends and includes the component holons.

We often don't understand the transformations in ascending holons.

Evolution involves selections of transformations like this. This natural selection seems to involve punctuated leaps, a kind of wildly transcending process.

Wilber says the drive to transcendence is built into the very fabric of the Kosmos itself.

(a) Unions emerge from fragments (b) there is a creative advance into novelty

We can say creativity is a property of Kosmos.

Holons are emergent.

Tenet (iv) HOLONS EMERGE HOLARCHICALLY (A NATURAL HIERARCHY)

A cell is holarchically arranged.

You can't avoid hierarchy.

Tenet (v) THE CREATIVE PATTERN

The transcend and include pattern is the creative pattern. If you destroy any holon you destroy all the levels above it, but none of the levels below it.

This works for any holarchy.

MORAL DEVELOPMENT
BIOLOGICAL SPECIATION
COMPUTER PROGRAMS
NUCLEIC ACID TRANSLATIONS
WHOLES DEPEND ON PARTS BUT NOT VICE VERSA

The not 'vice-versa' is the holarchy.
Here are the domains for us to consider.

PHYSIOSPHERE BIOSPHERE NOOSPHERE THEOSPHERE

Tenet (vi) DEPTH & SPAN

The number of levels in any holarchy is called its 'depth'. The number of holons on any given level is called its 'span'. Evolution produces greater depth, and less span.

There are fewer organisms than cells, fewer cells than molecules, fewer molecules than atoms, fewer atoms than quarks.

The emergent has an increase in embrace, inclusion, identity and enfoldment.

Honouring holons is crucial to the notion of environmental ethics.

The emergence of consciousness is immanent-emergent from the Kosmos. Evolution has direction. It is consciousness that gives us the ability to converse and to draw all the distinctions that are part of our knowing.

This gives a new meaning to our grasp of what has been mysteriously called Spirit.

Evolution unfolds a spectrum of depth, and depth unfolds consciousness which realises itself more and more.

Depth is everywhere -

CONSCIOUSNESS IS WHAT DEPTH LOOKS LIKE FROM THE INSIDE, FROM WITHIN.

THE FOUR QUADRANTS

It is my belief that we are being challenged by Ken Wilber and others to become conscious of the four quadrants, which he describes in order to locate all of the phenomena of human operational thinking.

This enables any of us to know the context or domain appropriate for the ideas being considered. It offers a resolution to those who have wanted to understand science, value the emergent consciousness of each person, have available a basis for ethics and culture, and deal with the concepts of "modernism" and "postmodernism".

After many years of trying to get clarity in placing meanings in appropriate domains of human operations, he came up with the following schema.

A representation of the territories or domains that we can use to place everything that we know is THE FOUR QUADRANTS.

The right side refers to "IT", with the upper right placing holons each in its singularity, and the lower right, the collections and their organization.

The left side represents the "I" and the "WE"
Here is the diagram, and more description follows.

 

UPPER LEFT I (the subjective life of each person) This represents experience and its human value concerns, sincerity, truthfulness, trustworthiness, and integrity	UPPER RIGHT IT (singular) holons This is where science is the place of measuring what is there. This is a different kind of truth to do with correspondence, and proving propositions
LOWER LEFT WE (the community in which the individual dwells) This is where ethics comes to exist. It is the domain of inter-subjective agreement. Concerns are of justice, cultural fit and mutual understanding Religion, culture, traditions, laws would fit here	LOWER RIGHT IT (plural) This is a look at systems from galaxies to planetary systems. In terms of human beings it is concerned with human groups and arrangements. It is the description of functional fit and systems theory. Social systems, demography, and epidemiology are examples.

 

I have decided to incorporate his "all levels, all quadrants" approach into all. my work and thinking.

The upper right quadrant is the domain of science and measurement as applied to living systems. Each thing which is whole in itself is called a "holon".
The upper left is the life of the person "from the inside". It reaches to the fullest realization of a person.
The lower right is the place where the plurality of systems is developed along all of the ways those systems look to an observer. It encompasses such things as demography, epidemiology and sociology.
The lower left quadrant springs into existence when people gain consciousness of other. It includes culture, shared beliefs, religions, laws and ethics.
It can be illustrated by the "dreamtime" for Australian aborigines, and participation in ceremonies.
Without this domain we could never have such richness of shared experiences.

Thus the "I" owes its language and metaphorical life to exposure to whatever knowledge communities and ways of knowing as it can encounter.

Here we are called to become people of integrity.

This document is heavily weighted in the domains of" science" which Wilber locates in the upper R quadrant, but the reader will have had many glimpes of the other domains,

This document springs from my own personal journey in my medical life and ongoing education, but I hope that the reader will sense and experience the ventures into the other quadrants and recognize the excitement of reaching for integral approaches to our lives.

John R Graham is a physician with special interests in epistemology, linguistics, cognition, and philosophy, especially in relation to cosmology, biology at molecular and cybernetic levels and ecology. He is committed to the notion that we can continue our personal journeys to an "entelechy," which is our highest level of personal realization.
He has incorporated the" Great Spiral", and the "All quadrants/all levels" into his life, mainly by keeping it in his consciousness.

Email address: john.graham@flinders.edu.au
© John Graham 2004

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