It all began one lazy day, several years ago. I was at my girl friend’s house leisurely leafing through this magazine. I wasn’t really looking for anything specific to read, just perusing. Then something piqued my curiosity. There was this article about this peculiar new concept called holarchy or embeddedness. Casually reading this, I was suddenly completely hooked. I was not only hooked I was excited, perplexed and really intrigued. What was this holarchy which so intrigued me? In a nutshell holarchy is a heirarchy of holons or ‘whole/parts’ which is endless in either direction and in which each new higher-level holon emerges out of its predecessor, transcending and yet including it. To illustrate this, take our human bodies. Each body has a whole of 50 trillion cells embedded in it and at the same time each body itself is embedded in the larger system of mother earth, Gaia. In the same spirit our cells are a community of even smaller units, and earth is a small part of an even larger living system, and so on. What is so amazing about this, is that it alludes to the fact that the relationship we have to Gaia is much the same as the relationship each individual cell has to our body. In so being it gives us a clue as how to take guidance from our body, and the incredible wisdom of our cells and their magnificent organization to improve our individual and collective lives.
This ground breaking article was written by an evolution biologist, Dr Elisabet Sahtouris, and it changed and enriched my world view forever, giving me a much clearer understanding as to how my little existence is connected to the larger world around me. The article talked about how for the cells to work magnificently in this community to create this higher order, namely our body, they need to have their triple bottom lines met. What do I mean by triple bottom lines? In summary each cell needs to have its own well being in mind, AND it has to be equally interested in the well being of the organ of which it’s a part , AND it has to put the same amount of importance on the well being of the whole body. The article also talked about how this unity consciousness is essential for a healthy body. Acoording to Dr Sahtouris, Cancer is an example of what happens when the balance is lost, with the proliferation of a particular group of cells ignoring the needs of the whole, multiplying wildly at the expense of the body holon, ultimately defeating their own purposes by destroying it. In fact Dr Sahtouris has been going around the planet, telling the heads of big corporations and corrupt governments that they are the cancer of the planet and in the ways they conduct their business they are not only killing the planet but themselves as well.
Imagine a Gaia where the whole humanity acts in oneness, flawless perfect oneness of a human body.
The simplicity, brilliance, and the sheer genius of this idea had me completely mystified and mesmerized. It made so much sense and it gave everything in my life so much perspective. The more I learned about this holarchy the more it became my vision of the planet earth at its highest manifestation, and in so being it gave me a clear understanding as to where I fit. It also made me much more accepting of what happens in my own life and on our beautiful planet from a macroscopic long term cosmic perspective, rather than one solely concerned with my own simple 3d space, linear time existence.
This argument sounded so beautiful to me, so elegant, so perfect. However when I did share the same thought process with my friends and family, they laughed and ridiculed it. They found it a boring, outlandish and childish. That however didn’t stop me from constant collection of data and points of triangulation to prove this brilliant point.
A few months later in the Burning Man festival I got a great opportunity to see holarchy at work. In the centre café there was a gentleman, Bob Burnside , who would let you build and play with these amazing toys called geometricks. Each geometrick was made of 12 pieces of wood. When Bob was showing us how to build them he stressed that it was essential to have 4 sets of 3 pieces. Basically you would have 3 pieces in the same alignment, and then you would put 4 of these 3 piece sets in 4 different alignments and finally hold the whole set of 12, the geometrick, together with a rubber band. A geometrick would then be your very base unit, your cell if you will, you could then link up these geometricks in any number of ways while striking a healthy balance of similarity and diversity at the same time, and in so doing create extremely sophisticated communities, just like the way cells linked up together create our body
Thru this amazing work I got to see the importance of similarity, i.e. the similar alignment of 3 pieces, while maintaining, in fact emphasizing the necessity of difference and diversity, i.e. the 4 different alignments of each 3 piece set. I got to see how important it is to acknowledge, embrace, appreciate and celebrate each other’s differences, while building on solid common grounds. I saw that similarity and difference without each other will not achieve much of anything worthwhile, since in this example you couldn’t make a geometrick if either your similarly aligned elements or differently aligned sets were missing, or mismatched.
I also realized that the complete mismatch and corruption of similarity vs. difference issue is at the very core of the tremendous trouble we are having with our monopolistic corporations. To further investigate this I compared and contrasted the monopolies with the software open source movement, from the difference vs. similarity point of view. Based on my observation of the geometricks, you need difference in the community, while building on the common ground at every level. Furthermore I noticed that no matter how diverse the units were they always were part of the same One unit. This happens to be somewhat similar to the way open source works, like a quilt where you have different units which all operate under the same umbrella. However open source movement is nowhere near as organized or sophisticated as the geometricks I played with or our magnificent human body. The diversity is present in the open source movement but not the very organized and beautiful, almost mathematically perfect, similarity at every level. Having said that this movement is definitely on the right track. Monopolies on the other hand deal with the similarity and difference issue in a completely different and corrupted way if you will. In a monopoly, you have similar units all over the world, i.e. McDonald’s in Rio is same as MacDonald’s’ in San Francisco, no diversity what so ever. But these big corporations are different from each other, i.e. mcdonald vs burger king. In fact they pride themselves on these differences and are always in competition with each other, no unifying umbrella.
I was well under way in my quest to understand and further investigate the relationship between a small unit, a holon, embedded in a larger whole, holarchy, when I happened to watch a documentary on movie matrix. The clip I saw featured a prolific writer, Steven Johnson, talking about this amazing phenomenon called emergence. In philosophy, systems theory and science, emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions. Emergence is central to the theories of integrative levels and of complex systems. According to the emergence theory the whole is so much bigger, more intelligent, more sophisticated, and more intricate than merely sum of the parts. Take a couple of the most famous emergent communities: an ant colony and a human brain. Consider how each ant is dumb, and of very little sophistication, now compare this individual ant, with an ant colony comprised of millions of ants, with the colony’s massive intelligence and dazzling sophistication. Look at different characteristics of this super smart colony and see how so many of its intricate intelligent characteristics are completely absent in the individual ant. The neurons relationship to the magnificent human brain works in much the same way as an ant and its colony. I was seeing at this point how a human body is this massively emergent community of cells which has just become this seamless perfect harmonious oneness.
Being in total awe of how our body is light years more sophisticated than each of its 50 trillion individual cells, I was wondering how a community can achieve the truly magical phenomenon of emergence. Well, as it turns out, in the same movie clip I also learned that to have an emergent community two critical conditions have to be met: Each member has to be able to connect to any other member, and more importantly this has to be a two-way communication. To enable this communication and collaboration then one can see that an emergent society has to be a bottom up cooperative community, as opposed to a centrally controlled competitive top down hierarchical one. This made me further realize that how the world we live in, with its competitive dog eat dog monopolies, survival of fittest doctrine, along with its top down control mechanisms is as far away as one can get from this ideal. This in turn made me see that to evolve and go to the next glorious step of our evolutionary process how desperately we need to change our world view and our socioeconomic conditions on a massive scale. After all our future is best served by a massively cooperative, harmonious, bottom up holacrchy modeled after the human body as opposed to its current state which most resembles the cancer cells; monopolies attacking and destroying the rest of the organism, for their own selfish interest.
Up to this point I had all of these ideas kind of swirling in my head more like a foggy web in the twilight rather than for it being solidly substantiated and backed by powerful evidence. Furthermore I found this path, this way of looking at the world, to be incredibly lonely, one which didn’t garner much interest or attention for most people.
Part 2.
Time has come for me to write the long overdue 2nd part of this amazing story. I wrote the first part about 2 years ago or so, and since then I have been a happy witness to more and more and still more proof in its validity.
It was sometime around 2009 that I had the fortune of learning about the brand new science of the new IQ. In a nut shell this amazing idea suggests that for us humans to be truly happy we have three major drives. When we have all these drives fulfilled at the same time, then we have a high integrity. Dr Gruder calls this Integrity Quotient or the new IQ. What are these drives? Drive for self improvement and personal growth; drive to work well with community around you and the drive to serve a higher purpose, and contribute to our planet.
Sound familiar? It should. Human drives that make us feel fulfilled, are the same exact needs that our cells have to have in order to be productive members of the community of the cells, our body. What is so remarkable about this, is that Dr Sahtouris is an evolution biologist, while Dr David Gruder is psychologist. Do you see the brilliant synchronicity?
For me to get this information was like a beautiful gift confirming my long held beliefs and aspirations. This new science and its implications really floored me. One of the most remarkable things about this idea of integrity is that to be fulfilled human beings we need to have all these three drives met at the SAME time. This means that none of these needs is more or less important and they have to be happening simultaneously
Let us consider for a minute what happens if only one or two of these needs are met. If a person is always only working on themselves, that doesn’t make them automagically perfect in communities. How many times have we tried to follow the lead of a person admittedly good in their own growth and extrapolated they must also be good in communities, and social interactions, while this same self-improvement seeker was lousy in their personal relationships. They might have had failure after failure in their social interactions. By the same token a person who is great in community is not necessarily good in self care, and self development. How many times have we met so called community leaders who are quite unhealthy, and don’t even know how to take care of themselves. And finally just being good at serving the world doesn’t mean that you know how to take care of yourself or be good at social interactions. This lack of integrity is very very damaging in our current political climate. Even the benevolent leaders, end up having failed marriages, and be in poor health. Dr Gruder believes that these leaders have little integrity, and if they can’t help themselves individually, it’s no wonder our world is in such shambles.
Now think about yourself and people around you, who do you know who has all these three facets of human life fully developed. The answer is very very few people. I definitely don’t see myself having a handle on all of these. If I am generous to myself I’d say I may be good in one or at best two of these things, yet my whole challenge, my whole quest in life is about becoming good at fulfilling all these drives at the same time. That has given me many very important guidelines and a very clear understanding as to what it is that I need to work on next, and what it is that I can feel I have mastered for now.
Earlier we talked about humanity becoming as magnificent as a human body. But for that to happen, each and everyone of us should be good at personal, community and service aspects of ourselves at the same time. Sadly that’s a long way off. Accidentally Dr Gruder mentions a few public figures who have achieved all these, they include president Obama, and Oprah among others.
Given a healthy prosperous environment and childhood, all of us would have grown up to have mastery of all these qualities through being very good at connections. But sadly most of us weren’t born in paradise. Because of that we learn to disconnect from an early age. Without delving too deeply into the amazing “the new IQ” book I would like to just mention the following four ways that we learn to disconnect from an early age. I am going to use the very beautiful example Dr Gruder provides in his book.
Imagine as a small child you are walking with your parent and have never seen a dog. Suddenly this scary looking furry creature is charging at you. Right before the animal reaches you though, your father, having sensed your panic and apprehension, keeps the dog away from you. He then smilingly reassures you that the creature is very friendly and loving and just wants to play. In so doing giving you the space to process your emotions and the autonomy to decide what you want to do next. So you just process your little feelings and then you hesitantly say ok. At which point your parent gently lets you touch the dog. In no time you become friendly with the animal, and from then on you play with the dogs and have no fear. This is a digested experience which leads to integrity and health.
As beautiful as this example is, sadly rarely if ever have we had such wonderful enriching and connected experiences in our lives. Unfortunately a lot of times our experiences have been more like one of the following four cases.
Imagine if you were that child, had no parent with you, the dog charged at you, you couldn’t run away, it pounced on you, you got really scared and ran away. You went up to your parent and told them what a horrible experience you just had, crying your little heart out.
Instead of any kind of consolation they spank you and tell you to stop crying and man up. This form of disconnection is called Violation.
Or instead of telling you anything they just leave you out there, without saying a word to you making you have to sort thru and understand your very complicated emotions. This is called Abandonment.
Or your parent tells you what a nasty bad dog that was, that what it did to you was a horrible thing, and that you were just an innocent victim. This is called indulgence.
Or your parent at hearing your story becomes increasingly distraught, so much so that rather than dealing with your own complicated feelings now you have to soothe them. This is called stealing the attention.
We might have one or more of these situations which have then made us treat life challenges with a dysfunctional attitude we learned in our childhood. No wonder we are so messed up, we deal with the adult problems with sets of solutions we came up when we were 4. Look around you in the world and you see how much of a 4 year old response there is in our world. But one day we need to grow up, take these survival strategies, thank them and say, now I m going to learn how to solve my problems like an adult. Without getting too nitty gritty, one very powerful approach to solve these problems is reparenting ourselves thru working with our inner child, dialoging with it, communicating with it, consulting it with it, and putting it at ease.
So yes if we want to have a planet which acts in unison, and not just hypothetically, we need to go back to our survivalist approaches, dismantle them, come up with adult solutions to thrive, and from there become fulfilled human beings in all three areas of personal, community and service.
By this point my research was becoming more and more juicy but I had not seen a key piece of evidence yet, not until Dr Bruce Lipton wrote the book “spontaneous evolution”. Boy o boy was I in for a treat. Dr lipton is an amazing genetic researcher that 40+ years ago argued that cells brain is not their nucleus rather their membrane. He then went on to write the book “biology of belief”. In this amazing book Dr Lipton argues that genes don’t determine our destiny. He wrote that our genes are actually programmed by our beliefs we hold. He proclaimed that genes are simply the blueprint, and whether or not a gene gets activated is based on our consciousness. He wrote that to say somebody has a gene for something, is like saying that something is turned on in a blueprint of a building.
What is super important about this is that Dr Lipton is a distinguished biologist and in the book “spontaneous evolution” he tackled the very concept that Dr Elisabet Sahtouris had talked about, with a lot of depth and clarity. What is most extraordinary about this is that because of the similarities of our current evolutionary cycle with the way our body works, we can draw on the absolutely amazing ways that our magnificent body has solved the problems and come up with brilliant solutions which has enabled it to thrive as a community of 50 trillion cells.
So let’s see how our body deals with two very significant problems in our world namely economy and governance.
Dr Lipton suggests that in biology ATP is called an energy coin, which is the currency of our body. Since the body does have a currency then we can try and establish how it goes about its economy, so that we can learn from it and make our world function more like it. So according to Dr Lipton, each cell in our body is fed, and fed so much so that it can feel in bliss. Thus the economy of the body is not like capitalism, where a lot of people go hungry. But are all the cells paid equally, like socialism? Absolutely not. Cells are paid based on their level of specialization, criticality and their importance in the whole structure. So skin cells for example, who don’t play a critical role, since if some of your skin cells in your back don’t function you wont even notice, get paid way way less than nerve cells. Of course nerve cells play very critical roles in our body, losing a few nerve cells could be absolutely catastrophic and could mean losing our ability to move an arm. So then what happens when cells are fully paid, what do they do with the surplus capital? Do they hoard it, and sit on it, like the way in our society rich people act? Nope, quite the opposite. Cells get paid fully until they are in bliss and feeling great, and then every little bit of energy which is brought to the cell is put in repository outside the cell. So in other words there is no greed, none whatsoever. In fact, the energy of us human beings, is the sum total of all these repositories that our cells put together generously, without giving away their own energy. So when you move your arm that energy is fully donated by all your industrious cells without them sacrificing their own energy.
I find this approach to economy absolutely magical and remarkable. Imagine a day that we have a meritocracy where we are all paid based on our function to the point of bliss, and where we put all our extra income in repositories outside us, with no greed and no hoarding. Wouldn’t that be a magnificent future?
Doesn’t that world remind you of Master John Lennons Imagine:
Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people sharing all the world
And yet that very blueprint is how our hardworking, efficient and super smart cells operate
Now lets talk about governance. How does our body go about that? The answer is The Wisdom of Crowds. What exactly is The Wisdom of Crowds? It’s the idea that our collective has answers we don’t have individually. Dr lipton brings an amazing and beautiful example about Francis Galton’s freak experiment in a livestock fair around the turn of the century. Apparently Galton was visiting the livestock fair, where he saw there was an ox whose weight people were trying to guess for a prize. Believing that humans are not the smartest, so that their collective would be even less smart, He then did the following experiment. There were around 800 guesses that were put on the ox. He noticed that none of them was even close, which is not a huge surprise. I mean how can you guess weight of an ox by just looking at it. Anyways, he then went ahead and to amuse himself he pooled all these results, and just for kicks pulled out what would be the median. Note that this wasn’t the average, but the median, which is exactly in the very middle. So expecting this to be wildly wrong he was completely astonished. He noticed that the median of all the guesses had the weight of the ox wrong only by a negligible and tiny 1 pound, which was a fraction of a percent. This was astonishingly accurate.
So that’s how our cells decide on things: thru the wisdom of crowds, that’s how decisions and governance happen in the community of cells of our bodies. What is super remarkable about this is that this means we need all the opinions to come up with a sound judgment especially those who are wildly different from us, because those very diverse opinions are the ones which bring our collective to an amazing level of precision and truth. If all the opinion were in the same range, we would definitely be missing some very important data.
So then we need such a way to solicit everybody’s opinion to make the most accurate and benevolent decisions for us all. This brings me to the consensus meetings happening in Occupy Wall Street General Assemblies.
I feel these consensus meetings are incredibly important for our future, and they are no less than a blue print for a fair, just and very smart way of providing a mechanism to create the wisdom of crowds. I watched an absolutely remarkable video of these general assemblies and I was so incredibly encouraged.
They are finding ways to honour everyone’s opinion for whoever cares to share. They have come up with ways of how to show your sense of what is going on by hand gestures. By using the mike check technique, where they have made the process somewhat laborious, they have created something that is not necessarily easy breezy to partake. So that power-hungry people cant just kidnap the movement the way our politics works now. And last but not least they have created a way that a person can block a proposal and completely go against everybody, knowing fully well the weight and ramifications of their input. This mechanism will prove to be an incredibly important tool for the future of humanity.
I will go back to Occupy wall Street a little later. Let me go back to Dr Lipton. One of the most amazing, thrilling, beautiful, powerful and positive things Dr Lipton does in “spontaneous evolution” is map a chart of where we have been and where we are going, not only as humans, but as every sentient being there is.
Before I delve into the magnificent theory Dr Lipton so beautifully proposes I would like to talk to you about what current science with its total lack of spirituality and meaning thinks is gonna happen to us in the future.
There is a website, its address I sadly forget, which predicts what will be going on in our future based on the pure science, and the technology we have available now and we are supposed to have in the future. When you look at our future, things look good technologically. We will have superior technologies in communication, transportation, entertainment what have you. (although sadly this website, being very mainstream science, doesn’t ever bring up the idea of free energy, and suppressed technologies such as anti gravity, but that’s another story). Anyways we seem to get better, faster, more efficient and all that. Things seem pretty good for foreseeable future, for the next 1000s of years from now.
Being the trouble maker I am, I went and asked the site to guess what will happen to our world in 10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 years from now or something like that. The answer was sad and yet not so unexpected. The answer was absolute, complete, total death of the whole universe. Well Gee thanks. That’s something to look up to next morning when I wake up don’t you think? This whole experiment is going to nothing, if not in the near future but in the far future.
Isnt that something to get excited about? Yeah right.
Now lets examine Dr bruce Lipton’s idea of what has happened to us before, and what will happen to us in the future.
According to Dr Lipton billions of years ago, there were these tiny organisms like amoeba. These monocellular organisms kept thriving, growing, evolving, getting better. But at some point they had grown all they could grow, and they couldn’t get any more perfect, so then they went thru the evolutionary process of getting together and creating cells like our human cells, when they couldn’t individually evolve anymore. Then our cells kept growing and growing and evolving and at one point they couldn’t evolve anymore, that’s when they got together created the smaller multicellular creatures. These multicellular creatures themselves kept growing, until they reached a point they couldn’t evolve anymore that’s when they created us eventually. And now we have reached a point that we know we are perfect, our body is a masterpiece our mind is a masterpiece, our soul is magic, we cannot evolve any more individually, we need to now work our magic to turn earth into one organism, one beautiful magnificent organism which is a seamless united community made of us human beings.
Just to shed some light on the amazing miracle we are having right now in our world I would like to bring your attention to the idea of mayan calendar. It suggess that our universe is around 14 billion years old. Here is the super remarkable part about this. According to the mayans there have been 9 underworlds in this universe. The first underworld took 14 billion years. Each underworld is 20 times faster than the last underworld, while the event density, as in the number of significant events that happen in each underworld is the same as the last underworld, although in a fraction of the time. So yes, each underworld is so much more accelerated than the last one. So here is the magical truth, you my friend in 2012, in less than 1 year will experience what consciousness experienced in 14 billion years. This is how amazing, how magical these times are. The number of things that can happen to any one of us in 1 year are going to be equal to what happened to the whole creation in 14 billion years. Even now we are only in the 8th underworld. Come 2012 you will be experiencing thing 20 times faster than right now. So buckle up! I find this such a pleasure, such a privilege to be alive now!!!!
So going back to Dr Lipton’s amazing idea after we become one consciousness on this planet we are hardly done, in fact we will never be done! According to Dr Lipton after earth becomes one organism, the next wave is when planets like earth, with their own massive intelligence with our ET family will get together and create the next super structure. And after that those super structures like Galaxies would get together and create the next highest level, and after that superuniverses and what have you. This is so incredibly energizing. To think that you are a community of 50 trillion cells which are a community of amoeba, which are a community of other tiny critters. Now imagine how amazing, how super fantastic you are compared to the lowly amoeba. Now imagine what would it be like to compare what our planets next order of beauty would be compared to you as a simple human being right now.
Take a step back and compare this vision, this magnificent vision, that we are constantly growing in a never ending cycle of perfection, beauty and magnificence into the next level of wondrousness to the idea that given a long enough time everything will be dead, kaput. I mean which one of these theories energizes you and gets you up in the morning. You be the judge.
I would also like to say that Dr Liptons theory is very close to physicist Nasism Haramein’s idea of how we are built of infinity and that at there is no end to our infinity. There are no small particles that cant be broken into infinite pieces, and there is no end as to how far up we can go because there is infinity above us and infinity below us. Now combine this vision with the evolutionary idea of dr lipton and you see that really there is no end to the magnificence of the universe, and how far we are all going to evolve forever
Before ending this already long piece I need to add one last thing. And that’s about our current state of chaos and what does it mean in the grand scale of things.
According to Dr Lipton and Dr satouris we are in a predicament, just like the last days of a caterpillar. We can look at all the stuff that isn’t working in our world. The way a caterpillar is greedy, eats dozen of times its weight, it just hangs there and is sad and pathetic. But at the same time, when most of the cells in the caterpillar are thinking it’s the end of the world, there are those crazy little cells who are working on the infrastructure that would one day make the magnificent and lovely butterfly. These cells are called imaginal cells, in biology, I kid you not that’s a real term. You and me, the cultural creatives, the misfits, those of us who go against the grain are those imaginal cells. Our job is not to destroy the old system. As Buckminister Fuller said: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. ... You create a new model and make the old one obsolete.” . We can try and dis the dying caterpillar or give our passion, dreams, powers, energy, love, resources to the infrastructure that would create the butterfly.
I truly feel the Occupy Wall Street is our new model that is coming to exist. OWS is where the imaginal cells get together. Lets face it, it started with Arab spring and then Europe and now OWS movement. I feel that what made these populous movements possible was imaginal cells who created companies like facebook and twitter, and later became the pioneers of the movement, not to mention the brave and effective hacktivist group Anonymous.
I am going to conclude this discussion by mentioning what brilliant Andrew Harvey said about Occupy Wall Street. The writer of the book “Hope”, He has created the idea of Sacred Activism. Where we need both the sensibilities of a mystique and the attitudes of an activist. I agree with Andrew in saying that a large part of what is going on in this planet has to do with a coming to a balance point of sacred masculine and sacred feminine. Andrew brilliantly mentioned that for the Occupy Wall Street movement to succeed both the sacred masculine and sacred feminine need to be present. We need the clarity, structure, steadfastness, and purpose of sacred masculine, while we need the deep shadow work, humility, tenderness, flexibility of the sacred feminine, if the moment is to succeed. We need the movement to have a clear message, while the members of the movement constantly do their own shadow work individually and collectively.
Finally this writing wouldn’t be complete without mentioning how much I recommend anybody who cares to read this to watch the movie thrive. We want to go to our next level of evolution. For that we need to have suppressed technologies such as free energy, and anti gravity, as well as many cures for killer diseases such as cancer being given back to the public. Also we need to disclose the existence of benevolent ETs as well as abolish the private banks such as Federal Reserve. The movie Thrive is a brilliant heartfelt well thought out examination of all these issues with kindness, precision and passion. I would urge you to watch it and go the site and investigate there. Thrivemovement.com
We are imaginal cells. We are the ones we have been waiting for:)It all began one lazy day, several years ago. I was at my girl friend’s house leisurely leafing through this magazine. I wasn’t really looking for anything specific to read, just perusing. Then something piqued my curiosity. There was this article about this peculiar new concept called holarchy or embeddedness. Casually reading this, I was suddenly completely hooked. I was not only hooked I was excited, perplexed and really intrigued. What was this holarchy which so intrigued me? In a nutshell holarchy is a heirarchy of holons or ‘whole/parts’ which is endless in either direction and in which each new higher-level holon emerges out of its predecessor, transcending and yet including it. To illustrate this, take our human bodies. Each body has a whole of 50 trillion cells embedded in it and at the same time each body itself is embedded in the larger system of mother earth, Gaia. In the same spirit our cells are a community of even smaller units, and earth is a small part of an even larger living system, and so on. What is so amazing about this, is that it alludes to the fact that the relationship we have to Gaia is much the same as the relationship each individual cell has to our body. In so being it gives us a clue as how to take guidance from our body, and the incredible wisdom of our cells and their magnificent organization to improve our individual and collective lives.
This ground breaking article was written by an evolution biologist, Dr Elisabet Sahtouris, and it changed and enriched my world view forever, giving me a much clearer understanding as to how my little existence is connected to the larger world around me. The article talked about how for the cells to work magnificently in this community to create this higher order, namely our body, they need to have their triple bottom lines met. What do I mean by triple bottom lines? In summary each cell needs to have its own well being in mind, AND it has to be equally interested in the well being of the organ of which it’s a part , AND it has to put the same amount of importance on the well being of the whole body. The article also talked about how this unity consciousness is essential for a healthy body. Acoording to Dr Sahtouris, Cancer is an example of what happens when the balance is lost, with the proliferation of a particular group of cells ignoring the needs of the whole, multiplying wildly at the expense of the body holon, ultimately defeating their own purposes by destroying it. In fact Dr Sahtouris has been going around the planet, telling the heads of big corporations and corrupt governments that they are the cancer of the planet and in the ways they conduct their business they are not only killing the planet but themselves as well.
Imagine a Gaia where the whole humanity acts in oneness, flawless perfect oneness of a human body.
The simplicity, brilliance, and the sheer genius of this idea had me completely mystified and mesmerized. It made so much sense and it gave everything in my life so much perspective. The more I learned about this holarchy the more it became my vision of the planet earth at its highest manifestation, and in so being it gave me a clear understanding as to where I fit. It also made me much more accepting of what happens in my own life and on our beautiful planet from a macroscopic long term cosmic perspective, rather than one solely concerned with my own simple 3d space, linear time existence.
This argument sounded so beautiful to me, so elegant, so perfect. However when I did share the same thought process with my friends and family, they laughed and ridiculed it. They found it a boring, outlandish and childish. That however didn’t stop me from constant collection of data and points of triangulation to prove this brilliant point.
A few months later in the Burning Man festival I got a great opportunity to see holarchy at work. In the centre café there was a gentleman, Bob Burnside , who would let you build and play with these amazing toys called geometricks. Each geometrick was made of 12 pieces of wood. When Bob was showing us how to build them he stressed that it was essential to have 4 sets of 3 pieces. Basically you would have 3 pieces in the same alignment, and then you would put 4 of these 3 piece sets in 4 different alignments and finally hold the whole set of 12, the geometrick, together with a rubber band. A geometrick would then be your very base unit, your cell if you will, you could then link up these geometricks in any number of ways while striking a healthy balance of similarity and diversity at the same time, and in so doing create extremely sophisticated communities, just like the way cells linked up together create our body
Thru this amazing work I got to see the importance of similarity, i.e. the similar alignment of 3 pieces, while maintaining, in fact emphasizing the necessity of difference and diversity, i.e. the 4 different alignments of each 3 piece set. I got to see how important it is to acknowledge, embrace, appreciate and celebrate each other’s differences, while building on solid common grounds. I saw that similarity and difference without each other will not achieve much of anything worthwhile, since in this example you couldn’t make a geometrick if either your similarly aligned elements or differently aligned sets were missing, or mismatched.
I also realized that the complete mismatch and corruption of similarity vs. difference issue is at the very core of the tremendous trouble we are having with our monopolistic corporations. To further investigate this I compared and contrasted the monopolies with the software open source movement, from the difference vs. similarity point of view. Based on my observation of the geometricks, you need difference in the community, while building on the common ground at every level. Furthermore I noticed that no matter how diverse the units were they always were part of the same One unit. This happens to be somewhat similar to the way open source works, like a quilt where you have different units which all operate under the same umbrella. However open source movement is nowhere near as organized or sophisticated as the geometricks I played with or our magnificent human body. The diversity is present in the open source movement but not the very organized and beautiful, almost mathematically perfect, similarity at every level. Having said that this movement is definitely on the right track. Monopolies on the other hand deal with the similarity and difference issue in a completely different and corrupted way if you will. In a monopoly, you have similar units all over the world, i.e. McDonald’s in Rio is same as MacDonald’s’ in San Francisco, no diversity what so ever. But these big corporations are different from each other, i.e. mcdonald vs burger king. In fact they pride themselves on these differences and are always in competition with each other, no unifying umbrella.
I was well under way in my quest to understand and further investigate the relationship between a small unit, a holon, embedded in a larger whole, holarchy, when I happened to watch a documentary on movie matrix. The clip I saw featured a prolific writer, Steven Johnson, talking about this amazing phenomenon called emergence. In philosophy, systems theory and science, emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions. Emergence is central to the theories of integrative levels and of complex systems. According to the emergence theory the whole is so much bigger, more intelligent, more sophisticated, and more intricate than merely sum of the parts. Take a couple of the most famous emergent communities: an ant colony and a human brain. Consider how each ant is dumb, and of very little sophistication, now compare this individual ant, with an ant colony comprised of millions of ants, with the colony’s massive intelligence and dazzling sophistication. Look at different characteristics of this super smart colony and see how so many of its intricate intelligent characteristics are completely absent in the individual ant. The neurons relationship to the magnificent human brain works in much the same way as an ant and its colony. I was seeing at this point how a human body is this massively emergent community of cells which has just become this seamless perfect harmonious oneness.
Being in total awe of how our body is light years more sophisticated than each of its 50 trillion individual cells, I was wondering how a community can achieve the truly magical phenomenon of emergence. Well, as it turns out, in the same movie clip I also learned that to have an emergent community two critical conditions have to be met: Each member has to be able to connect to any other member, and more importantly this has to be a two-way communication. To enable this communication and collaboration then one can see that an emergent society has to be a bottom up cooperative community, as opposed to a centrally controlled competitive top down hierarchical one. This made me further realize that how the world we live in, with its competitive dog eat dog monopolies, survival of fittest doctrine, along with its top down control mechanisms is as far away as one can get from this ideal. This in turn made me see that to evolve and go to the next glorious step of our evolutionary process how desperately we need to change our world view and our socioeconomic conditions on a massive scale. After all our future is best served by a massively cooperative, harmonious, bottom up holacrchy modeled after the human body as opposed to its current state which most resembles the cancer cells; monopolies attacking and destroying the rest of the organism, for their own selfish interest.
Up to this point I had all of these ideas kind of swirling in my head more like a foggy web in the twilight rather than for it being solidly substantiated and backed by powerful evidence. Furthermore I found this path, this way of looking at the world, to be incredibly lonely, one which didn’t garner much interest or attention for most people.
I recommend breaking up you articles with some headings and pictures.