Part Two

It was stated in part two that a holistic and planetary frame of reference is required for a successful movement into a global age of harmony and fullness. But what principles underpin which a worldview and what progress has been made toward its acceptance?
      Over the past several years much attention and publicity has been given to the need for a "new paradigm" for social and scientific thought and to the immanent "paradigm shift." The new paradigm is holistic. As science-writers Paul Davies and John Gribbin put it in their recent book The Matter Myth, "the paradigm shift that we are now living through is a shift away from reductionism and toward holism; it is as profound as any paradigm shift in the history of science."
      Paradigm is one of those words that has been brandished about so much in recent years that it has become clichéd. In a few words, a paradigm is a collective mindset which is so ubiquitous, compelling and hypnotic that we fail to realize we are profoundly conditioned by it.
      In his book Synchronicity: The Bridge Between Matter and Mind, F. David Peat explains the paradigm of classical science and its all-pervading influence in these words—

A paradigm is not simply a given branch of knowledge that is explicitly learned. But rather it includes the whole set of skills, attitudes, and approaches that are absorbed during each scientist's training and apprenticeship. . . . [The paradigm of classical science] therefore has a deep influence on the way each scientist approaches and thinks of nature and communicates his results and attitudes to others. . . . [It] is now so all pervasive that its influences has extended beyond the purely scientific domain into all aspects of life. This attitude to nature, and to ourselves, is far more than a highly organized branch of nature for it is a communal attitude of mind, a way of perceiving the world, of being disposed to act and to communication that, by now, appears wholly natural. Indeed it is no longer possible to see this worldview or paradigm, but rather everyone perceives through it. (pp. 119-120).

      The fact that the new paradigm for scientific and social thought is holistic, however, doesn't mean holism and holistic thought is new. On the contrary, it has figured in all pre-scientific worldviews. But it is new to modern thought because for several centuries it has been eclipsed by the atomistic, reductionistic and quantitative attitudes of classical science. Although holism isn't strictly new but new to modern thought, we can today more adequately understand and realize Wholeness than during any time in the past. We can because modern physics now affirms Wholeness and our worldwide communication network enables us to realize a planetary humanity. In other words, while in the past Wholeness was implicit, it is today an explicit, demonstrable fact confirmed by quantum mechanics.
      The word holism was introduced by Jan C. Smuts in 1926 in his seminal work Holism in Evolution. Yet today's exponents of holism and the holistic paradigm almost never mention Smuts and his work. Nor do they mention Dane Rudhyar.
      Concurrent with Smuts' development of the theory of holism, which focused largely on biological and material systems and their evolution, Rudhyar began a lifelong formulation of an all-inclusive interpretation of reality he termed "the philosophy of Operative Wholeness." Although Rudhyar later broadly accepted and integrated into the philosophy of Operative Wholeness many of the concepts and propositions of Smuts' formulation, he stressed that far from a final interpretation of holistic evolution, Smuts' work was severely limited by its strictly material, biological and psychological basis. In his 1983 grand summation Rhythm of Wholeness, Rudhyar observes that—

Smuts' concept of holism was so limited that it led to a typically Western glorification of what he (and C.G. Jung) called personality—to him the supreme achievement of evolution. Therefore the concept of whole has to be broaden and universalized—more so indeed than recent philosophers-scientists interpreting the universe as a hierarchy of wholes (or systems) are able or willing to do. What is needed is to transfer the mind's attention and power of concentration from the image-concept of "the One" to that of "the Whole" and, even more, to Wholeness. (p. 20)

      Many of the parallels existing between mystical interpretations of reality and the New Physics were artfully presented in the mid-1970s by Fritjof Capra in his groundbreaking book The Tao of Physics. Since its publication the new paradigm and holistic thought have received wide attention and publicity. During the early 1980s, the main features, challenges and opportunities of the new paradigm and its implications in various fields of human knowledge and endeavor were clearly and expertly delineated by Capra in The Turning Point, where he observes—

We are trying to apply the concepts of an outdated world view—the mechanistic world view of Cartesian-Newtonian science—to a reality that can no longer be understood in terms of these concepts. We live today in a globally interconnected world, in which biological, psychological, social, and environmental phenomena are all interdependent. To describe this world appropriately we need an ecological perspective which the Cartesian world view does not offer. What we need, then, is a new "paradigm"—a new vision of reality; a fundamental change in our thoughts, perceptions, and values. The beginnings of this change, of the shift from the mechanistic to the holistic conception of reality, are already visible in all fields and are likely to dominate the present decade. (pp. 15-16).

      In presenting the principles, concepts and general approach of the new paradigm, its exponents often contrast it against the atomistic, quantitative, reductionistic, mechanistic and materialistic features of classical, Cartesian-Newtonian science and its social and psychological implications. Yet in spite of the rise of the new paradigm, the classical mindset is still very much alive and those holding it are not about to stand aside quietly as a new paradigm supersedes it. Indeed, we are amid a "war of ideas," and in it the classical mindset commands an immense treasury of social, economic, institutional and political power. But what actually is at stake isn't merely money and social status, influence and power, recognition and privilege, control and authority. Our image of ourselves and the world we live in is at stake. A more inclusive and redemptive image of cosmos and anthropos is at stake, and the recognition of our place and purpose in the universe which such an image can help us realize.
      The importance of our image of ourselves and the world in which we live, and our ability to change that image, cannot be overestimated, for we have a way of becoming what we imagine—for better or for worse. As Willis Harman writes in his recent book Global Mind Change, "Throughout history, the really fundamental changes in societies have come not from dictates of governments and the results of battles but through vast numbers of people changing their minds—sometimes by only a little bit. . . . By deliberately changing the internal images of reality, people can change the world." (pp. 155-157)

The classical mindset of Cartesian-Newtonian physics has been termed atomistic, quantitative, reductionistic, mechanistic and materialistic several times in preceding pages. But what do these terms really mean when applied to science?
      The classical mindset is materialistic (and depressing) because it views the universe and all that is human as nothing but a purposeless "outcome of accidental collocations of atoms." It is mechanistic because it sees the cosmos and all organism as machines. It is exclusively empirical and quantitative because it recognizes as "real" only what is susceptible to observation and measurement. It is atomistic because it seeks to observe and measure fundamental objects which it artificially isolates from their environment. And it is reductionistic because it proceeds from the bottom up, from less to more, from the part to the assembly. Because it is reductionistic, the old paradigm sees only parts and attempts to reduce wholes to nothing more than assemblages of parts.
      The classical mindset always precedes from the bottom up, from the less to the more, from the part to the assemblage, and from the inferior to the superior. By chance, particles come together forming assemblages. But even when higher systems appear, their nature and workings are interpreted in terms of the lower. As Houston Smith writes in Beyond the Post-Modern Mind, "The name for this mode of explanation is, of course, reductionism, and the growth of the . . . [classical mindset] can be correlated with its advance. For Newton, stars became machines. For Descartes animals were machines. For Hobbs society is a machine. For La Mettrie the human body is a machine. For Pavlov and Skinner, human behavior is mechanical." (p. 135).
      Here we get a glimpse into the mechanistic aspect of the classical mindset and why it tends to see machines and precisely predictable mechanical operations everywhere. From the mechanistic point of view, the material universe is nothing but a machine. And because the doctrine of mechanism holds that for matter there can be no life or purpose, but only the blind operation of mechanical laws, it follows that everything can be explained and predicted according to the "collocation" and movement of mechanical parts.
      The picture of the universe as a great machine governed by exact mathematical laws was formulated by Descartes in the 17th century, and it has guided and dominated science and its classical paradigm ever since. But even though the revolutionary discoveries in physics during the 20th century has disarmed Descartes' mechanical worldview, it continues to condition the attitudes of westernized minds.
      Atomism goes hand-in-hand with reductionism and mechanism. The Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm is atomistic (in contradistinction to holistic) because it views the universe not as a series wholes within wholes within wholes but as collections of interchangeable mechanical parts which somehow, always by chance, happen to "collocate," forming an atom, a cell, an organism or a galaxy. From an atomistic point of view, what is real is not the whole but ultimate particles. Atomism, in turn, goes hand-in-hand with quantitative analysis.
      Because the classical mindset stresses quantitative analysis, it strongly features fragmentation. Everything it treats, including thoughts, are broken down into parts. Granted, the analytic method has proven extremely useful in terms of technological advancement and it has greatly improved our quality of life on the material level. But in gaining almost exclusive cultural sanction, unbridled reductionism has fragmented all human experience, producing a culture of alienated individuals. As Oliver L. Reiser writes in Cosmic Humanism—

In our fragmented culture we humans regard the heavens above and the earth beneath as unrelated, absolute things; we have separated continent from continent, nation from nation, race from race, class from class . . . Until at last, today, our universe is broken up—it is a dismembered world studied by piecemeal analysis, a universe of uncounted fragments in a chaotic confusion which no one has put together. (p. 7).

      Finally, the classical paradigm is absolute because its holders believe it can bestow absolute, certain knowledge of reality, and anything that classical science cannot know and confirm is held as either false or unworthy of belief. But the "great certainty" is actually a "great fallacy." Even worse than promising false certainty, scientism breeds absolute authority and unquestioned submission to authority. It tends to replace scientific truth-seekers with a priestly class of authorities possessing and dispensing the One and Only Revealed Truth—Scientific Fact—and makes science the sole approach to Absolute Truth. Granted, many scientists and apologists claim otherwise; and now the realization that science can provide only approximations and approximate truth is a fundamental feature of the new paradigm.

From a holistic approach, existence manifests through wholes operating at a multitude of levels, as a hierarchy of self-organized systems or fields within fields within fields of interconnected activities made possible by various types of energies. And because these fields or systems of activity are wholes, they are finite and bounded. The holistic, cyclocosmic worldview recognizes that the seed potential of any whole—from an atom to a human being to a cosmos—is actualized through a cyclic process of unfoldment and transformation.
      Any cycle of unfoldment begins with the release of a particular quality of being infused with a quantum of energy adequate for its actualization. But at first an existential whole's quality of being is a more or less complex set of potentialities which may or may not be successfully realized as its process unfolds. And because any existential whole has a finite span of existence, a cyclic process closes with a harvest comprising some positive and some negative results.
      Any cyclic process operates through a series of interrelated phases. The cycle has an invariant structure, but the ever-changing existential content of a particular cycle is unique and never repeated. A cycle is a "time-whole" operating within the boundaries of a "space-whole" or field. As Rudhyar states in The Planetarization of Consciousness, every existential whole is a "cyclocosm, vast or small as it may be . . . Whether it be macrocosm or microcosm, galaxy or atom, it is an existential whole and displays the essential characteristics of wholeness, i.e. extension, duration and structure or form." (p. 38).
      The next sections explore the key principles of a holistic, cyclocosmic frame of reference and interprets reality as the unceasing Movement of Wholeness and its cyclic world process, the Cycle of Being. Through the Movement of Wholeness, the universe presents itself as an interrelated hierarchy (or holarchy) of wholes within wholes within wholes cyclically realizing qualities of being through an interconnected series of transformations.
      In The Planetarization of Consciousness, Rudhyar explains the value of a cyclic approach in these words—

Cyclocosmic concepts constitutes a holistic framework, because to the mind that accepts such a framework, every diverse manifestation of human consciousness, every form of mind, every social, cultural and religious system can be seen to fit into its proper place and to accomplish its valid function during one particular phase or at a specific level of the entire cycle of human evolution. . . . Only the concept of cyclic process enables us to situate every truth, every moral code, every theological dogma, every aesthetical mode of expression, every social form of behavior, and every institution, enabling us to accept them all as relatively valid—valid, that is, in relation to the type of collectivities which believed (or now believes) in their value and to the historical time and geographic environment which witnessed and (or is still witnessing) their development. (pp. 218 & 253).

      Through such an all-inclusive holistic, cyclocosmic worldview we may better understand our complex and often tense human situation and where the challenges and opportunities of our day may lead if we accept them in a positive, constructive spirit. Most of all, it evokes a constructive and meaningful image of our place and function in the world.

Read Part Three