Replying to LO29593 --
Dear Organlearners,
Jan Lelie <janlelie@wxs.nl> writes:
>I'll try to be short. Wholeness, in my opinion, is not so
>different from "evolution" or "will" or "god", "heel de wereld",
>even "reality". They are different atributes of the same
>underlying process phenomena that we can experience - in
>dreams, visions, while meditating or sometime just when
>you're ordering a bread at the baker's or looking at a person.
Greetings dear Jan,
I think i understand what you are saying, but i also think it is very
difficult to articuate what your thoughts had been.
Allow me an example. For many years I have been striving for more
"knowledge of wholeness". But the last few months I have been exploring
the "wholeness of knowledge". The two are related to each other, but they
are not the same thing. Perhaps it is like a sock, having an inside and an
outside. Only when one wear two socks, the one with is outside outside and
the other one with its inside outside, will one notice the difference.
>However, we cannot have our cake and eat it, so we most
>of the time choose to live in a fragmented, inconsistent,
>ambigous, dangerous world. We close our eyes to wholeness.
>And we project the rejected parts to the rest of the world.
>We assume that there is a "free will", "a (set of) God(s)",
>development and "apartheid" (I do think that South-Africa is
>an important place for learning, as is the Israel/Palestine area.
This is certainly what happened here in South Africa during the years of
apartheid. The majority of white people assumed that black people have to
think the same as they did. What a blunder. We do not have apartheid
anymore and black people are now in political power. Unfortunately, they
now also assume that white people have to think as they think. When will
this blunder end?
Wholeness is not merely unitary processes and united structures. My
articulating of wholeness as "unity-associativity" illustrates it.
Wholeness also involves "associativity", a pattern with the form X*Y*Z
rather than X=Z
>Here in The Netherlands they showed the movie about
>Ghandi's life again. What struck me is that again and
>again he said "perhaps we're not ready for it, yet").
Jan Smuts also often said it. But in his case his white political
opponents accused him of being an undercover Fabianist. Ghandi accused him
of lacking in political will. What a conflicting world. Yet, it all
concerns the LRC (Law of Requisite Complexity). A certain level of
complexity is required to emerge into the next level of complexity. Trying
to skip a level of complexity involves a "free energy" (two words, once
concept) barrier too high to cross.
>I get the impression that you "want" something from
>people, want others to see, hear, understand something,
>or even want them to change. I agree with you, but in my
>opinion that's not my business: it of the business of the
>others to change. And i do not know what it is they should
>learn, except perhaps to let go of their ideas and love what
>is, what is real real.
Jan, what i want from fellow learners is that we explore together the
relationship between wholeness and knowledge. For example, is "blind to
wholeness" the same as "no knowledge of wholeness"? I find myself in a
maze of thoughts despite my contemplation of my own experiences and
studying information on both topics.
Perhaps the reason for this maze of thoughts is that i was never blind to
wholeness. Allow me to explain. At an age of two I walked away from home
to see where my father was working (some 12 miles away ;-). At an age at
twelve I began to explore the world around me on a bicycle. My first
journey was to the Sterkforntain caves where i knew the oldest human-like
fossils in the world were uncovered. At an age of twenty two I decided to
leave specialisation in the academical world forever. At thirty two years
I began with my first exploration of a desert, finding the wholeness in it
compelling. At fourty two years I discovered empirically that LEP (Law of
Entropy Production) also applies to the abstract world of mind. Only then
i began to articulate the concept wholeness formally rather than using it
tacitly.
>The next level of understanding, the next bifurcation, the
>paradigm change, the next stage is developing itself - without
>our prescience, without our steering or our "will", and we'll
>be able to say - in retrospect - that it was so obvious, so
>clear, so evident, so amazingly stupid that we didn't notice,
>that we must have been blind. And we are - let's accept that.
>We have no eye (or ear, or tongue - i think i'll exclude nose
>and touch) for developing wholeness, because we are still
>developing that sense.
Is this what "blind to wholeness" is about -- a lack of the paradigm shift
to "aware of wholeness"? You sound so convinvingly, but i still wonder. A
paradigm shift is a kind of emergence. But a lack of sufficient wholeness
inhibits an emerge. To free oneself from this "blind to wholeness" thus
seems to pull one self up by one's own shoe strings. It just not make
sense to me. Unless, of course, a person has tacit knowledge of wholeness,
but never deem it necessary to articulate it.
>There is no need to press others to develop it faster,
>better, or more. There are ways to do so, but we cannot
>see them now. Only later we - as a species, i do not
>expect it in our times -we'll be able to say: "how blind
>they were". And perhaps: "how lucky they must have
>been that they didn't see." (That's not true, but you know,
>the things in the past look always better then they were).
I agree that "there is no need to press others to develop it faster,
better, or more". But what if the bus has left the road and is heading
towards an abyss? Think of the passengers and not the driver. They cannot
step on the break or fuel pedals. It is the same with an organisation
which is not a "learning+organisation". Once the management team has left
the road and is heading towards an abyss, there is nothing which they can
do, except for some jumping out by the windows before it is too late.
>(Wasn't short, wasn't it? That's the trouble with this
>medium: you just type away, without thinking).
Wow, you were indeed thinking and now you say you were not thinking. But
this is how it is with wholeness. Just when i think i have reached a
certain level of wholeness when thinking of it, i discover that i had not
been thinking of the next level requiring additional thinking.
Thank you Jan for your valuable thoughts. Sometimes i wonder whether this
"blind to wholeness" is not a case of hard-wiring rather than a lack of
learning.
With care and best wishes,
--At de Lange <amdelange@postino.up.ac.za> Snailmail: A M de Lange Gold Fields Computer Centre Faculty of Science - University of Pretoria Pretoria 0001 - Rep of South Africa
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