I recall to this day when I first ‘got’ (gnosis) wholeness = integrity = completeness…nothing left out…nothing else needed. I was with a group of people in Hawaii studying Buckminster Fuller. We had a bunch of toothpicks and jelly babies (gummy bears) and we were building squares and triangles. Build a square with toothpicks and jelly babies…and it doesn’t hold its shape. It cannot hold its shape unless you provide interior support struts to triangulate. Yet our model of Universe has been built on squares…the foundations of our life in the world has been built on something that doesn’t have integrity in its own wholeness. (This is actually a really big piece of information to take in…kind of like discovering that the world is not flat.)
Then build a triangle…which holds it shape…except a triangle doesn’t have an inside and an outside….so we add the third dimension…and we have a tetrahedron.
Boom…
It holds it shape. Nothing needs to be added, or taken away. A tetrahedron, the minimum system in Universe. Four events and 6 connections is required for existence. Argue with the model, said Bucky. (But build it yourself first..as this is practical not theoretical.)
Still to this day I hold a tetrahedron and I know (gnosis) the feeling of wholeness. It is a knowing that goes back to the beginning of time. A Yesness.
We live in a world divided. A world that is seeking wholeness. It is the perfection of humans in Universe that we are divided. It keeps us hungry, inventing, searching, seeking.
At 2.23AM we wake..the hour of truth…reaching for wholeness. We cannot begin to fathom how to find it.
From the day Eve decided to eat from the apple in the garden, and in her choosing walk the path of separation, we have been seeking wholeness.
We seek it at every level of existence. In the union of lovers. In the quest for success. In our prayers. In how we build our businesses.
And like anything we seek, it is right in front of us…and yet seemingly light years away.
Money in its current expression in our world is not whole. We have built a system of money that is about concentration, competition, scarcity, hierarchy. Money is missing her expression as flow, abundance, sharing, easily created. This is not some magical mystical spiritual thing…it is simply that money is missing her wholeness. Invite money as wholeness to the financial system (complimentary currency) and we have money in integrity. Is is in fact…that simple.
Our enterprises are not whole. They are, like money, about concentration, scarcity, competition, drive, go-hard, grow balls, assertive, aggressive. Our enterprises are missing their wholeness…the space and place to be still, to listen, to receive, to flow, to be surrounded by beauty…to gift…
Until we build enterprise as a whole expression, we have a world that destroys.
Our arts are not whole…they are about flow and beauty and creativity…and are missing the drive, concentration, assertiveness. The reason we get so bent out of shape when someone speaks about art and overlays it with drive and assertiveness is because our world is so bereft of the arts and culture..and so we gather to the arts and beauty because of our starvation. We want so much to drink from the still cup of beauty. To stop the constant striving.
We have a created a world that celebrates drive, success, achievement, go hard or go home, accumulate, concentrate. It is not whole…and somewhere..somewhere deep inside…we know this…
We live in a world where the voice of women is still dismissed, or actually not even heard…or neglected to be invited. Where two people can read exactly the same script to raise capital and one person gets the money in multiples of percentages over the other, every time…simply because they are male. (Fast Company June 2014, “Silicon Valley Has Problem”) This is real. It has nothing to do with feminism. We live in a world that is falling apart because it does not allow the whole. Or…even more truthfully, where our reflex for not inviting the whole is so conditioned that it goes unnoticed by all parties. And if it is noticed it is spoken of in a way the perpetuates the polarity.
Just as the vast majority of people, smart, savvy, successful people, do not get that money it its current expression is not whole, not because they are stupid, or incapable, but because they cannot see what they cannot see…or as Clare Graves said, “People cannot be until they are,” the vast majority of good intentioned wonderful people cannot see that until we move closer to wholeness, until we invite the minimum of 4 events and 6 connections to the table, then we are re-arranging deck chairs.
We have few maps to embrace the whole. Few humans walk the earth able to be seen and see wholeness. Men still gather, and without intention, neglect to invite women…not because they mean to…but because it is the air we breath and the world we have created. Women still do not know how to stand in their sovereignty beside men…It takes both sides to awaken to each other.
The suffering of our earth, of humans, of our systems of interactions.. is our forgetting of wholeness.
Like any great journey it starts at the beginning…with finding the space inside you that is whole and cultivating that.
When any system, relationship, enterprise, person, or work of art becomes whole there is an instant gnosis…and an instant relaxation. Yes. This. Ahh…yes…this…
This is what we seek.
Photo credit: Christine McDougall (that would be me)
