Dr. Paulos Mar Gregorios

What is Wholeness? / Dr. Paulos Mar Gregorios PDF File
There is a wholeness that is given, and a wholeness that is to be achieved or experienced. Our ordinary perception seems by nature fragmentary, unwhole. The knower stands over against the known, apart from it, and the knowledge gained is ‘objective’ a la Popper, something which can be stored in books and libraries. Knower, known and knowledge thus remain three disparate realities, and the whole cannot be in this situation.
But today we have access to two other levels of perception, thanks to modern physics and modern astronomy. If we term our ordinary sense-perception the macro-level, there is below it the sub-atomic or micro-level, and above it the cosmic or mega-level. The mega level of astrophysics is partly perceivable through our telescopes and partly through our mental processes. The micro-level is less perceptible to our senses. The electron microscope does not lead us to direct vision of the sub­atomic level.
At the level of elementary ‘particles’, our eyes, even with the best magnifying instruments at our disposal, do not directly encounter the reality. We need elaborate tracing and measuring mechanisms even to get a good guess about the way an electron or a neutron functions. But in order to trace or measure a sub-atomic particle, we need to add a quantum of energy to the particle, even to detect it. But a single photon particle from the measuring device colliding with the measured particle already deflects its course and transforms it. So our knowledge of the subatomic level remains conjectural and not directly sensate.
Nor do we perceive the universe as a whole with our senses. Telescopes can reveal cosmic phenomena in a region of the universe, and electronic computing can bring together infrared or other photographs from various regions on a single screen. But there is no way for our telescopes to gather data from all the galaxies and all the ‘regions’ of the universe. So we cannot “set eyes on” the universe, as our space travellers in recent times set eyes on the earth as spaceship. In fact, the universe is not even conceptualisable, or “image-able” pictorially. We cannot stand outside the universe to see it ‘objectively.’
The whole that we want to understand must integrate what we perceive at all the three levels, the sub-atomic, the ordinary and the cosmic/universal. But our perception of our own selves uses a different mode from that which we use at the micro, macro and mega levels. Any notion of the whole must include the one in whom the notion functions, the ‘subjectivity’ of the perceiver or conceiver, which effects and shapes the perception at all four levels – micro, macro, mega and mind.
The net results of the above observations is that the whole is not available, either to conceptualisation or to descriptive symbolic or linguistic depiction. Neither concept nor language can grasp the whole. If this hard fact is not firmly grasped, we are likely to fall into new delusions about our knowledge and concepts.
It is my humble view that Fritjof Capra, in his ‘The Turning Point’ falls precisely into this trap. After having exposed the faults of a mechanistic model of reality, he opts finally for “the Systems View of life”, seeming life on the model of a “self organizing system.” Since he includes the environments as part of the dynamic system, he gives the impression that he is dealing with the whole.2
Wholeness reflects itself at various levels, but cannot be objectified in any situation. The whole is the Absolute Subject, in which all subjectivity and all objectivity ultimately merge and from which they (subjectivity and objectivity) constantly emerge at various levels. Even that statement must be qualified with the further statement that it is only a conceptual linguistic statement, and therefore does not ‘describe’ the whole.
Once conceptual image which the Physicist David Bohm3 has popularized is the “Holoverse.” Conceptual images can sometimes help us to discern the defects of other conceptual images and Bohm’s concept of the whole as a Holoverse is eminently useful in this sense. The analogy for the whole is taken from the recent technology of holography,4 a three dimensional photography technique using wave properties of light rather than the straight line propagation of light used by conventional lens photography. The important feature of the hologram is not merely its three-dimensional perspective, but the fact that each part contains the whole in miniature. Since the holograph analogy for reality suggests a static condition, Bohm uses the expression ‘holo-movement.’ His conception of the whole is in terms of a multi-layered order which is dynamic. Life is one of the layers of such order, consciousness another layer of different complexity, and ordinary inorganic matter a third order within the system, which included many orders unknown to us as yet. Bohm is sanguine in his belief that the various layers of dynamic reality in the ‘holoverse’ is in principle knowable by us.
Brilliant as the Bohmian concept of the universe as a mutually related multi-layered web of structures and patterns of dynamic energies, it remains a concept and as such inadequate to depict reality. We humans, however, are conceptual – linguistic creatures, and by training we have become incapable of dealing with reality without concept and language.
We should at this point reflect also on the question of the adequacy of our two-dimensional logic of non-contradiction to cope with the whole; the rules for valid inference, if confined to such a two-dimensional or binary logic or a prepositional calculus using Boolean Algebra, can only lead to inescapable contradictions.