*

THE PRINCIPLE OF HOLARCHY & THE INTERPLAY OF HORIZONTAL & VERTICAL RELATIONSHIPS

 

Dane Rudhyar - Photo1

Dane Rudhyar

 

The mention of vertical relationships brings to mind a picture of a hierarchical structure, which in turn suggests a descending series of levels of authority. A decision, usually taking the form of an order or a set of rules to be imposed on lower levels, is transmitted downward from level to level. Such hierarchical structures operate in the Catholic Church, in the military, in national governments, and in all large business organizations. From the point of view of the many individual units operating at the descending levels, these collective sociopolitical or religious institutions are hierarchies of command. The activities of individuals at the lower levels, and in totalitarian organizations even their thoughts, are governed by the will and decisions of their superiors.

From another point of view, however, a hierarchy is a series of structures. The top structure contains a number of smaller structures at the next level below, which in turn contain many still less encompassing structures, and so on, all  the way down the structural ladder to the smallest grouping of units. Such a structure is a hierarchy of containment.

The hierarchy of wholes (that is, of systems of organization) occurring in nature operates mainly on the basis of the principle of containment. The physical universe accessible to human perceptions contains billions of galaxies, each containing millions of star-systems with (or without) planets; a planet contains trillions of simple and complex living organisms, and each cell contains myriads of molecules, each containing atoms, and so on. While the universe thus pictured is a hierarchy of wholes, it need not be interpreted as a hierarchy of command, unless one imagines an all-powerful God at the top of the cosmic hierarchy. The will and mind of such a God would not only have worked out the entire system and set the rules for its operation at every level, but somehow would always direct and control the behavior of the innumerable components of the universal whole, either directly or through a hierarchy of spiritual beings.

The typical Western scientist does not approach the universe by investigating a vast organization based from the beginning on a hierarchical series of structures. He or she is concerned primarily with immediately observable, separate entities whose activities have such an integrated, persistent, and repetitive character that they can be considered and defined as "wholes." These, when possessing identical features in their organization, are further classified into increasingly larger groups and species, each of which is precisely described, named, and categorized.

Recently, however, a few biologists and philosophers of science have begun to think of larger systems within which a vast number of different classes of beings interact, each following a definite and interrelated function within the whole. Thus they have come to realize that all the living organisms within a definable region (plus the region's soil, water, atmosphere, and climatic processes) constitute an ecosystem; and a myriad of ecosystems in turn constitutes the planetary system or life-field (biosphere). Thus a trend toward envisioning an ascending hierarchical series of wholes of increasing magnitude is beginning to balance the urge that for several centuries has driven classical Western science to use analytical procedures to discover ever more about ever more restricted wholes — to know, as Einstein said, "more and more about less and less." This new trend may mean knowing less and less about ever more encompassing wholes, but it also should provide a more balanced and realistic understanding of the processes implied in vertical relationships, because these processes work two ways. Entities or systems active at lower levels affect entities or systems active at higher levels, just as those at the higher influence and in various degrees control the behavior of wholes at the lower levels.

In addition to vertical relationships linking greater and lesser wholes, horizontal relationships link units operating at a basically similar level of activity and consciousness (always using the term consciousness in its broadest sense, not merely with reference to the self-consciousness or objective consciousness of human beings). Such levels may be defined, not only at the biological level, according to the usual biological classification of family, genus, species, and so on, but also at the sociocultural level in terms of nations, religions, social castes or classes, income groups, age groups or generations, education, or even neighborhoods. Today the peer group has become especially important, because of the general trend toward an increasingly egalitarian and popular society and popular culture. This trend, which is fostered by the media and by a constantly spreading concern with problems of strictly personal relationships and personal growth in terms of material, social, and individual success, is the latest aspect of the drive toward individualism and theoretical democracy in Western culture. The latter have been developing since the Renaissance and in science and philosophy have taken the form of an "atomistic" rather than "holistic" approach to reality.

 

Holism & a hierarchy of levels

The official trend in modern science is still mainly atomistic and focuses considerable attention on horizontal relationships — a focusing which is even more dominant in sociology, politics, and popular psychology. The new trend toward the holistic approach offers a logical basis on which a more inclusive concept of vertical relationships can develop. A passage from the book Accent on Form by L. L. Whyte, a British philosopher of science, may be worth quoting here, because it provides apt characterizations of these two approaches. According to Whyte, the "Atomistic School" of knowledge has been represented in the European past by "Leucippus, Democritus, Gassendi, Newton,  Boyle,  Dalton and contemporary atomic physicists" (his book was written in 1953); among the leaders of the "Holistic School" he lists "Goethe, Bergson, the Gestalt psychiatrists, Whitehead, and Jan Smuts.)"(1) 

1. Jan Smuts, the South African philosopher-statesman prominent during the formulation of the League of Nations at the end of World War I, wrote in 1926 a seminal book, Holism and Evolution, which provides a new interpretation of evolution in the broadest sense of the term. It was Smuts who coined the words holism and holistic; the popular use of the latter may or may not always be justified.  

The classical atomistic doctrine asserts that the universe is made up of ultimate particles, each of which is simple, indivisible, and permanent. All observable changes are due to the reversible spatial rearrangements of these particles resulting from their motions and mutual influences. The particles although small must be of a finite size or effectively occupy a definite volume of space, since a finite number of them make up ordinary objects. Moreover if atomism is to work there must be very few different kinds of ultimate particles, for the aim is to simplify our view of nature. The complexity of observed phenomena is to be accounted for as the result of the motion of units which are each simple and permanent. This program had the great advantage that it gave physical measurement and mathematic reasoning something to grip. . .

The holistic view. . .regards the universe as a great hierarchy of unities, each following its own path of historical development. Each pattern, whether it is a crystal, an organism, a community, the solar system, or a spiral nebula, possesses its own internal order and is part of a more extensive order, so that the universe is recognized as a System of systems, a Grand Pattern of patterns. Every whole with all its parts is subject to developmental changes which cannot be  adequately represented as the mere reversible motions of independent particles.(2)

2. Accent on Form by L. L. Whyte (New York, 1954) pp. 53f.

These two schools of thought are not mutually exclusive; Whyte foresaw their harmonization in a "School of Elegant Structure combining an intuition of the whole with the analytical recognition of detail." Since the late 1960s, an important group of philosophers of science, including Ludwig von Bertalanffy and Erwin Laszlo, has indeed been developing a "general system theory" and a "systems philosophy" in which what I call a "whole of being" is more generally and abstractly referred to as a "system." The two aspects of the principle of relatedness — vertical and horizontal — have been mentioned and their implications studied both by "esoteric" groups (for example, the Arcane School founded by Alice Bailey) and philosophers of science, especially Arthur Koestler in his books The Ghost in the Machine and Janus: A Summing Up.(3) Koestler spoke of the universe as the "holarchy," using a new word which I also had coined, entirely unaware that he already had done so. But he uses the word in a somewhat different sense from my own use, he speaks of "the" holarchy as if it were an entity, while I consider holarchy as a principle of organization.  

3. Arthur Koestler, The Ghost in the Machine (New York: Macmillan, 1968); Janus: A Summing Up (Vintage Books, New York, 1978).  

Several basic questions pertaining to relationships (especially vertical ones) are: How fundamentally different are the activities and the characters of entities operating at the different levels? What are these levels? How few or numerous are they? One can have in mind a few distinct realms (cosmic and planetary, spiritual and material) or one can refer only to levels of organization, authority, or power in the sphere of politics, religion, and culture.

When intensely democratic or "new age" enthusiasts proclaim the basic value of horizontal relationships and denounce all vertical relationships — even in the family — as obsolete and destructive of the supreme rights of each individual to meet all other persons as equals, the words vertical and horizontal refer only to the level of culture and personhood. Such persons dream of a society entirely controlled by egalitarian principles; a society in which all persons operate at the same level as theoretically self-conscious and responsible sociopolitical atoms. In such a sociopolitical cultural system a person is a characterless unit, an abstract number in vote tabulations and popular polls and in proliferating statistical researches undertaken by commercial or other special interests. Total egalitarianism and absolute individualism are analogous in social terms to what the end of the process of entropy is thought to be in physics. In actual fact, there always are among equals - some who are "more equal."(4) Any perspicacious advocate of horizontal equality should rightfully challenge and transform any system of social or political organization in which hierarchical structures are rigidly set — and especially in which power, wealth, or educational privileges are inherited. In such organizations hierarchical structures constitute a hierarchy of command, not of containment.  

4. For a discussion of the concept of equality, see my books We Can Begin Again — Together, pp. 46-51 and Culture, Crisis and Creativity, pp. 161-65.  

At one time a feudal lord was believed to own all the land and people living around his large, fortified castle; but his subjects found refuge within the castle's walls when the land was attacked. In that sense at least, the lord "contained" his subjects; they existed within his sphere of containment, the realm where his power was effective. This realm was like a mandala whose center was the castle and its chapel. At least in principle, the lord acted "in the name of" the realm and all it contained. He provided security to those he ruled. The relationship was indeed vertical but theoretically impersonal; it was given a vital, ritualized character. Being vital it also was sacred, because at that time religion was still fundamentally vitalistic, in spite of its transcendent beliefs. Vertical relationship is implied whenever one can truly speak of ritual.

A vertical relationship links at least two or in most cases three basically different levels of being. The cultural level at which the ritualized and sacred act is performed is not only rooted in biological values; the rite also reflects a transcendent spiritual reality the scope of which is all-human and planetary. Any truly powerful and inherently transformative symbols, myths, or rites should be considered  instrumentalities consciously or unconsciously intended to serve as channels of communication (or links) between the level of spiritual process (archetypes) and that of living organisms (the biosphere).

 

The Person-Pleroma Relation

In the hierarchy of systems presented in this book, four basic levels can be clearly defined: matter, life, culture (and its central product, personhood), and the Pleroma state of all-encompassing planetary wholeness. In an analogy derived from vegetation, matter is the humus and the root; life is the power of the sap which transmutes the material of the soil into stems and leaves; culture is the flower whose color and perfume represent personhood; and the seed symbolizes the autonomous, self-contained individual. The Pleroma refers to the whole vegetable species whose power is potentially focused into every seed.

Each of these basic levels has sublevels. The kind of experiences persons and individuals have at the social, political, and religious sublevels of the cultural level at which they mainly function evidently conditions the value they give to horizontal and vertical relationships. During the individualistic phase of the evolution of human consciousness, because horizontal relationships are more in tune with the process of developing self-reliance, autonomy, and personal responsibility, they tend to be considered more basic and wholesome than vertical relationships. Yet one tends to think favorably of the latter when one is at the top level of a hierarchy of command; one's ego enjoys giving orders or healing or "saving" distraught people! Relationships based on such interactions, however, are not really vertical; they do not imply the containment of numerous small structures by a larger one. Moreover, in a truly vertical relationship, while a single entity operating at the higher level may control, direct, or inspire the actions or mental processes of entities at a lower level, the motivation for control and the type of power used belong to the higher realm of being.

A vertical relationship is at work when a person deliberately makes a physical gesture. The relationship is vertical because a human being operating at this level of personhood (perhaps in order to follow a practice imposed or suggested by his culture or religion) affects biological activity by controlling the electro-chemical reaction of the cells in his body's nervous system and muscles. The level of personhood and social processes constantly interacts with the biological level of cells, organs, and systems through thoughts, emotions, and acts of will; and cells can perform their biological functions only when vertically related to their many component molecules. Such interactions are far from being understood well.

By extension (but through different processes which are even less understood) vertical interactions can be assumed to occur, or at least may occur when required conditions are present, between human persons and beings operating at the Pleroma level. These interactions can be viewed from two perspectives. A person may have devotional, religious, and mystical experiences during which a contact seems to be established with transcendent beings (or with a human guru who speaks and acts in their name), or perhaps with a one and only God in whom all spiritual values are condensed, yet with whom a "dialogue" is possible. Impelled by a poignant or precise personal need, the human being initiates the relationship with prayer, invocation, or even magical incantation.  Remarkable transformative changes may result; but from the point of view of modern psychology the transformation probably would be interpreted as the resolution of psychological conflicts. The psychologist would refuse to accept the possibility of an actual vertical relationship with a superpersonal divine being who is aware of the human prayer and responds to it in a quasi- miraculous way.

From the holarchic point of view, beings operating at the Pleroma level not only can respond to a human call for assistance; they are impelled by their essential nature (supreme Compassion) to seek to interact with and exert pressure upon men and women operating at the level of personhood — the level the Pleroma beings have experienced and transcended. Another interpretation of such compassionate action is that the greater whole, the earth, is relating itself vertically to and affecting the many lesser wholes (human beings) it contains; but such an interpretation makes sense only if one realizes that the planet is a living, thinking, spiritual system, not merely a mass of matter.

The earth thinks through humanity at the level of the human mind and, in a different way, at the archetypal and spiritual level of the Pleroma mind. The Pleroma as a whole radiates the fullness of God's power and light; but each of its component beings "belongs" to only one of the colors (or "Rays") which in their togetherness constitute this divine power and light. Thus a Pleroma being may be understood to act as a power of attraction for individual persons who resonate to the same basic spiritual vibration (Tone or Ray). However, these beings should not be considered individuals with personal names, but vortices of power and spiritual Qualities, centers of consciousness and activity within the one Pleroma, the "spiritual Body," of the earth. This may be what Paul sought to symbolize as the "mystical Body of Christ," but the word "body" is confusing. If it is a "body," its archetypal form must have been latent since the beginning of humanity; it is developing only gradually (one might say, cell by cell) as human individuals one by one pass from the level of personhood to that of the Pleroma.

Esoteric traditions refer to the arduous process of this passage as the Path. This process, and even the preparation for the more or less definite event that starts it, involves not only a vertical "upward" movement of the individual person aspiring to a new state of being, but an equally vertical "descent" of the Pleroma focused by one of the great beings whose vibrations can best stimulate a response in the aspirant to radical transformation. Metaphysical consistency indeed impels us to believe that the action from above precedes the personal reaction at the lower, existential level. Spirit is the integrative power. It constantly seeks (impersonally of course and because of its very nature) to establish relationships linking a spiritual Quality to a personality that might give it concrete actualization.

When such a vertical relationship is established, at first only as a temporarily effective contact, the lower pole (the individual person) may not even be aware that anything unusual is happening. If the person is aware, his or her mind, which probably is still heavily conditioned by rigid cultural and religious beliefs, may interpret the awareness in terms of such beliefs. In most cases, the contact operates either through the field of mental or intuitive discovery (inspiration) or as a powerful feeling-experience — perhaps the feeling of a subliminal presence. Only in rare cases is the physical shape or outline of an actual being seen or a voice heard. In such cases a psychiatrist, or even friends or family, are likely to respond to any mention of the appearance by calling it a hallucination; indeed reports or experiences of such appearances or voices may not be easily distinguished from apparently similar ones occurring during psychotic episodes. The possibility exists, at least in some cases, that "psychotic episodes" may be preludes to or intimations of spiritual transformations which become aborted, partly because of the incomprehension and lack of support met by the psychically distraught yet (for a brief moment) spiritually open person.

Both the process of developing personhood (the condensation and integration of the emotional and intellectual elements fostered by a culture) and the process of individualization (the emergence of an individual out of the cultural matrix) almost inevitably produce a residue of irrelevant psychic movements — unassimilated images, symbols, and concepts that block or deviate the flow of the inner personal life. This residual material can be compared to the more or less toxic waste products disgorged by factories in the production of culturally and socially useful objects. These waste products may combine, lead an unnoticed life of their own, and often poison the "water" and "air" (the collective psychism) of a culture-whole.

Moreover, a culture's attempts to build a collectively accepted religious system to comfort sinners, and especially to give mental or moral support to persons eagerly but confusedly aspiring to a state of more-than-human perfection and bliss, always tend to result in a rigid and materialistic establishment. As a religion becomes institutionalized — and like any institution seeks societal and psychic powers, self-perpetuation and expansion — a vast psychic network of distorted images of spiritual reality and misinterpreted metaphysical concepts is produced. These images and labels also assume a psychic life of their own, and the unwary may feel certain that these are indeed the forms or voices of the great founders of religions, planetary Pleroma beings who originally had sought to sow the "seeds" of some of the values of their realm into the soil of the culture's beginnings.

Especially in times of personal or social crisis, "false gods" often act as substitutes for Pleroma beings, because inherently devotional and insecure people, unable to think of spiritual realities in terms of basic principles, easily confuse these simulacra with the true models. Such confusions and misinterpretations of formations of the psychic (or "astral") realm are always to some degree the product of collective fears and emotional insecurity. Many people whose minds lack individualized formative power are impelled to worship the idols fascinating their community, their peer group, or even their entire culture.

At its mountain source, a culture is pure; its symbols and myths are attempts to give concrete form to a spiritual Quality (or set of Qualities) seeking exteriorization because "the time and the season" for it has come in the process of cosmic or planetary evolution. But after crossing human plains and being filled with the waste products and psychic poisons of many cities, the river is often not much better than a glorified sewer. The people who drink its water have become mainly if not exclusively concerned with diverting some of the river's flow for their own personal use or profit. They fight for their "rights" to own and sell it and perhaps proclaim that they have purified what they sell: all this in terms of the horizontal interplay (often a war) of societal  relationships colored by greed and the will to power. Inevitably, some day, a great drought will occur. Somewhere else the compassionate Pleroma-rain will generate a new source, and eventually a new culture will flourish.

It is logical to assume that, as there are levels of activity and consciousness below personhood at which entities (atoms, molecules, cells) operate, there also should be levels above personhood and a more encompassing type of beings active and conscious in such realms. However, the materialistic thinker will not be satisfied by the statement that convincing experiences of the real existence of such levels are available to those ready and willing to take the arduous steps required to contact such superhuman beings.The materialist asks, "If such entities exist, why can't I perceive them with my senses or detect their activity through my instruments capable of identifying the paths of subatomic particles?" The answer, at the philosophical level, rests on the meaning one is willing to give to the term existence. Can there not be several kinds of existence? Another, more symbolical answer might be, "Could the cells of the hands of Michelangelo see and especially appreciate the beauty of the Sistine Chapel?"

As members of relatively advanced societies, human beings now are aware that we are parts of a vast system of activities we call the earth. We realize that it is part of a solar system (a heliocosm) whose central source of energy is the sun. But what do we know of the level of consciousness and activity at which this heliocosm operates? At our level of human consciousness, we can be aware of heliocosmic reality only to the extent that Michelangelo's hands, at their level, knew of molecular activities, nerve currents and muscular contractions. If we cannot assume that these cells were conscious of the total activity of the painter body, let alone of his mind, religious feelings, and of the beliefs of the Catholic Church, why should we find it strange that we cannot perceive all the components of our planet and be conscious of what might be the feelings and spontaneous reactions of the earth? Michelangelo's hand; may have trembled under the tension of his physical exertion — and the earth also shakes! How could we know what the sun in its two hundred million year dance around the galaxy feels and thinks, or indeed what the sun really is at its cosmic level, when we, merely human beings, do no live even a hundred years and our proud and assertive science is basically five hundred years old? The eleven-year sunspot cycle may simply result from the beating of a heliocosmic heart whose plasma-type substance obeys definite rhythms of subatomic (or transatomic) activity.

This is not said to claim basic validity for the Hermetic principle of correspondence "As above, so below," which is an uncertain basis for realistic knowledge of whatever exists at superpersonal and spiritual levels. Correspondences of such a nature are only symbolic, at least to present-day intellects. But everything human beings think about is symbolic, including their own individual selfhood. When a person says "I am," he or she makes a symbolic statement condensing a multitude of feelings, sensations, and memories; the statement integrates them into an assertion of being which, moreover, claims that this "beingness" is different from the beingness of any other claiment to the prerogatives of "I."

Similarly, any claim to vertical relationship with a Pleroma being is founded upon the condensation and interpretation (conscious or unconscious) of many inner feelings and experiences. If clear-cut, descriptive statements are made concerning the supernal pole of the relationship, what is said should be based on holarchic principles. Such statements should not be based merely on the transposition of characteristics and events belonging to the level of personhood and culture to an only ambiguously transcendent level of being. If a cell of Michelangelo's hand imagines the painter's hands and body as huge spheroids containing the same kind of molecular constructs as itself, and the same type of relationships between them, such an image evidently is unrealistic. Yet this is what many theologians and "esotericists" constantly do.

Because the concept of holarchy rests on the principle of containment - of the lesser by the greater - if the lesser operates in terms of matter, the greater also must have a material aspect; but, to the greater consciousness, matter may appear different from the way it does to the lesser mind fed only with sense data. For instance, when a modern esotericist speaks of a meeting of the White Lodge in terms reminiscent of the board of directors of a multi-national corporation, such a personalized social interpretation cannot give a true picture of the situation at the Pleroma level. Nevertheless, though the Pleroma level of planetary being transcends the level of personhood and culture, it also must include the lower level in a transformed or transubstantiated aspect. A Pleroma being probably retains something of the structural character and quality he or she had when, as the last of a series of persons, he or she experienced the "divine Marriage" of person and spiritual Quality; but the substantial aspect of such a being must be matter of a type ordinary human beings find almost impossible to perceive — etheric matter of a high order. Matter is energy stabilized in a structure or field; and at the level of personhood on this planet, this stabilization assumes a particular character attuned to the possibility of human perception and response. When the level of individual personhood is transcended, another mode of formation of energy undoubtedly operates.

Unfortunately, the contemporary ego-mind usually is unready and unwilling to think of itself as a participant in a greater planetary whole at a level less than the highest possible on this earth. At the same time it is afraid to let go of the limitations defining our present personal state of consciousness, feeling, and behaving — a state which a Pleroma being (at the level at which he or It essentially operates) obviously has transcended. Our human minds usually cling to their personal, emotional, and biological limitations. Therefore, consciously or not, we interpret the hierarchical concept of structural organization in terms of familiar hierarchies of command — religious, sociopolitical, and military groups, which operate in terms of levels of governing power. The men on top of the system demand to be obeyed or served by persons operating at the lower levels; and in one way or another they can enforce such demands, often ruthlessly.

Yet heads of state with enormous power as individual persons can be far less mature and spiritually developed than the people from whom they exact often senseless service — for example, in war. The individuals at the controls of sociocultural "greater wholes" have, it is true, usually won their powerful offices by sustained, arduous efforts which would have been beyond the capacities of average citizens or religionists; nevertheless, while in power they remain most of the time as personally and egocentrically human as the people they command. The secret agent sent by army headquarters (or an equivalent of the CIA) to discover certain crucial facts his superiors need to know, performs a dangerous act on behalf of his or her national "greater whole." If caught, such a person may remain silent even while being tortured — his or her individual will steeled by the realization that the fate of the nation depends on such courage. Yet his or her commander in the home office or the White House, though a superior in a vertical sociopolitical relationship, may be a rather insignificant or pompous person in the horizontal civilian relationship of person to person.

In other words, at the cultural and sociopolitical level, the quality of the person may not match the power of the office. Social, political, religious, and corporate hierarchies concern offices, not persons. Human beings working at lower hierarchical levels need not as persons feel inferior to the top executives. These vertical relationships link offices and functions, not people per se. Nevertheless, the relationship between an executive and an employee also may have very personal, horizontal elements; and when this occurs, a deeply confusing situation is created. The more the social class system is abolished, the greater the confusion, especially if the sociopolitical organization has a de facto totalitarian character.

When I speak of vertical relationships, I am not referring to such ambiguous social situations but to interactions between two definite and unquestionably different levels of evolutionary development. The difference of levels is not merely a matter of offices with accompanying titles, uniforms, or other badges of social power or wealth, but one of essential being. It cannot be measured quantitatively, for it implies having passed through a process of radical, qualitative transformation. And the fact that such a transformation has occurred is evident to all who also have experienced such a process. It does not have to be "certified" by sociocultural or religious documents.

 

The Formation of Groups: Family and Peer Groups

The importance of groups in modern society is increasing. But contemporary theories of group formation and group interactions are dominated by individualistic, egalitarian, and idealistic attitudes. These attitudes also are reflected in the approach taken by modern science for several centuries to explain the development of the universe. From the astrophysical point of view, the universe evolved after an unexplained — and unexplainable — enormous release of energy that almost at once transformed itself into some kind of protomatter. The original space then filled with an immense number of particles which, unorganized and moving at random, yet according to "laws" whose origin also is unexplained, eventually came together, forming increasingly large units. Evolution is therefore the result of a constantly more inclusive aggregation or gradual organization of elements which all operate at the same general level of existence. Evolution is a one-way process. At the sociocultural level it has been glorified as "progress." But can one explain this progress simply on the basis of a more or less fortuitous "coming together" of elements — be they atoms, molecules, or human beings?

In the mid-eighteenth century the French-Swiss philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau took great pains to try to show that primitive societies were formed as the result of a "social contract" in which all the would-be members agreed to follow at least basic rules. Perhaps he was influenced by the event that took place about two hundred years earlier on the Mayflower — the signing of the contract by the Pilgrims who were escaping religious persecution in their native land. However, in the light of what is known of primitive societies and of the gradual emergence of human faculties out of the unconscious depths of animal instincts, Rousseau's concept is senseless. The process of formation of any society is dominated first by biological facts and needs. Only later do the results of the participants' conscious and deliberate interactions become dominant. To a very large extent, the character of the associative relationships that develop through cooperative activity results from the nature of a particular environment which the original settlers did not choose, but to which they were compulsively attracted.

Even more incontrovertibly, the same is true of the relationship between newborn babies and their parents. This is a compulsive as well as vertical relationship, in the sense that the parents fundamentally act — or at least should act in all societies operating in a natural manner — not as individuals but as beings charged with the perpetuation of the human species. Through its parents the newborn is related to homo sapiens, first in a strictly biological sense, then at the sociocultural level in terms of the religion and culture to which the parents belong and which it is (or until recently was felt to be) their religious and social duty to perpetuate through their progeny. Therefore, the parent-child relationship should not be considered essentially horizontal. Horizontal relationships begin when siblings are present; but these occur within the theoretically well-defined field of activity constituted by the family.

During the twentieth century, there has been constantly increasing stress upon individualism and personal self-expression, even in very young children whose behavior is mostly imitative (or in some cases polarized by distaste, fear, and revolt). As a result the quality of relationships desired within the family group has become confused with the quality of relationships appropriate within the peer groups in which family members participate. Naive, immature, or overly idealistic parents desire to be "pals" with their young and (even more) adolescent children. Parents no longer are able, or even willing, to accept and perform their archetypal functions.  Having lost its archetypal character, the family is no longer, or at least not effectively and significantly, the next "greater whole" to which the child belongs. If the child does not learn to grow within this primordial greater whole and does not feel that he or she belongs to it, later the child will encounter difficulty feeling a sense of belongingness to a still greater whole — to the community or nation and eventually to the largest experienceable wholes, humanity and the planet earth.

When such patterns of thwarted development pervade an entire society, the only relationships human beings can accept are with peers. These relationships are theoretically horizontal, though in fact they are not always so. Lacking a sense of belonging to an organic whole, modern pseudo-individuals envision peer groups as being formed by the coalescence of more or less randomly formed horizontal relationships (a picture which is reinforced in the United States by the restless, peripatetic nature of American society). This, of course, is the democratic ideal, as it has come to be understood by recent generations for whom all vertical relationships have become suspect. No great difference is recognized between the often oppressive if not tyrannical "verticality" of social relationships (employer-employee, governor-governed, general-private, and so on) and the hierarchical, containing character of the immense series of natural and cosmic wholes.

The issue may seem to refer only to social processes and to the place occupied in the modern world by the family and the multitude of peer-groups, unions, clubs, and societies bringing together people who have common interests; but it actually refers to the whole picture human beings make of their destiny and  of the future developments of consciousness and activity on earth. This picture radically changes when seen in relation to the "model" of the cycle of being and the concept of holarchy I have presented. The evolution of the earth, humanity, cultures, groups and persons need no longer be interpreted and understood as a one-way aggregation of random contacts operating within the laws of attraction and repulsion (important as these laws are). It can be seen as a two-way process integrating the involution of forms (archetypes) and the evolution of material energy-systems. Separate elements — be they atoms, living organisms, persons, or groups — do not just come together; they are brought together. Pre-existing archetypal patterns of organization gradually bring together material elements — including at the sociocultural level, human beings — into structuring "fields of forces." The relationship between these archetypes and the elements that accept their morphogenetic pressures — albeit for a long time compulsively and instinctively, but eventually consciously — is truly vertical.

Such relationships become focused in various ways. Catalytic agents exist in chemistry; at the level of human evolution a similar function is performed by transpersonal agents through whom the archetypal power of formation is able to operate in a mode appropriate to the human (personal or collective) needs that have to be met. The authority vested in a social, political, or religious office derives from the formative potency of the archetypal function the office is intended to perform in the larger operational system to which it belongs. This authority becomes power when used by the office-holder, by the "officiant" in the great ritual of society, business, or of culture — or, in a still broader sense, in the great ritual of the development of human consciousness toward Illumination. Yet if this power is to be used for personal profit and ego-aggrandizement, woe to the user generating such negative karma!

While the process of human existence implies vertical and horizontal relationships everywhere and at all times, the two types should not be confused with one another. At least in theory, the horizontal relationships of the great variety of peer-groups dominating our egalitarian society may seem the most common; but these are situations in which a person should consider himself or herself an instrument for the activation of a fundamentally vertical relationship. Nearly every man and woman acts as a channel for the release of the biological power invested in the human species as the greater whole to which they belong, whether they are conscious of belonging and so acting or not. That power uses them; they do not possess it.

Whoever becomes a focusing agent for the desired or unwelcomed activity of biological processes of embryonic formation establishes a vertical relationship to the product of this activity — a child. The relationship is potential in the mere fact of the production or presence of reproductive cells in one's body. However, these cells live their own lives. Their production or cyclic release generates powerful biopsychic currents. These currents seek to dominate the consciousness and the activity of the cell-holders — until somehow the consciousness, mind, and will have consummated the long and arduous rite of passage that leads to metabiological being and eventually the Pleroma state.

Similarly, but at the level of culture and religion, a person may act as a channel for the release of archetypal ideas. To the extent such a person acts as an agent for humanity (or for a particular section of it) his or her activity is transpersonal. It establishes a vertical relationship with the people who accept the validity of the formulation of the release and are moved and aroused to action by it. When a guru transmits to chelas a current of psychic power generated by a vast collectivity of spiritual entities — who as human beings had found inspiration and transcendent fulfillment in a particular "lineage" — the relationship between the disciple and the guru also is vertical (and usually devotional as well).

At the sociocultural level, the relationship between the creative genius (or even the formulator of a new approach revolutionizing collective behavior or business methods) and his or her public tends to be much less focused and more taken for granted. Moreover, as every person today is urged to be "creative" — which usually only means productive in a more or less personality-revealing way — the relationship of student or disciple to "master" has lost the quality it had in Medieval and Renaissance times. When "creativity" is reduced to technical proficiency or special expertise in a field of research, relationship can only be horizontal. But where only horizontal relationships are accepted by "rational" minds, an inevitable compensation occurs. An irrational kind of activity fascinates an ever increasing number of  persons; "mediums" multiply. Transpersonal activity finds in mediumship a shadowy twin; and the twain are not easily distinguished.

 

Rhythm of Wholeness

 

mindfirelogo