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THE CYCLIC STRUCTURE OF THE MOVEMENT OF WHOLENESS
Abstract Patterns and Experienced Symbols
When a person's attention is focused upon a repetitive series of common human experiences indicating the working of a cyclic process, three basic approaches are possible: the person may try to live as fully as possible the unfolding, concrete situations as they are being experienced one after the other; the most noticeable events may be given a symbolic character revealing their meaning in terms of the whole process of change; or general principles may be abstracted from the sequence of events, indicating the way the process and all similar ones are structured.
The first approach is experiential and mostly personal, requiring an open and holistic response to each event as it is experienced in itself, with a minimum of attention given to its causes and probable consequences. The second or symbolic approach is concerned not only with the events and the experiences they engender, but also with the relation between these events considered as phases of a whole process. Moreover, it is involved with the meaning of the effects of these events in terms of more or less common human needs or desires, and with the possibility of influencing or controlling these effects. This approach stresses the value of interpersonal communication by means of symbols or myths able to transmit information. The knowledge this information is meant to convey refers specifically to the development of a consciousness of processes, and thus of wholes of experience within definable periods of time.
The third approach seeks to ascertain the structural character of any cyclic series of developments produced by a basic and recurrent situation. It "ab-stracts" operative principles, not so much from the events and the experiences they elicit as from their sequence and essential character. The character is "essential" in the sense that it has a fundamental relevance to situations which in themselves may greatly differ, if only because they operate at different levels of experience. The situations differ existentially, but the structure of the process relating the situations is understood to be the same. It is invariant, however varied may be the outer, empirically analyzable events it interrelates. Such a structure can only be discovered through the operation of the human mind when a particular level of mental development has been reached, at least by the intellectual vanguard of mankind. Historically speaking, this seems to have occurred during the sixth century B.C, particularly in India with Gautama the Buddha, and in the Greek world.
The circular pattern indicating the cyclic sequence of phases of the Movement of Wholeness, first presented in Rhythm of Wholeness and reproduced here with a few changes in terminology, is the product of this abstract approach. It gives a diagrammatical form to the ever-changing but symmetrical relationship between two fundamental principles. Unity and Multiplicity, which in psychological terms may be interpreted as subjectivity and objectivity. These principles alternately wax and wane, producing an oscillatory type of motion. Neither can ever totally overpower the other. At each moment of the cycle — in each phase of the entire Movement of Wholeness — both are active, though the ratio of their power continually changes.
When such a balanced and symmetrical process is considered, four especially characteristic phases stand out. Two of them represent the maximum of power of each principle; and in two others, the principles of Unity and Multiplicity are of equal strength. Abstract meanings which have universal applications can be deduced from the balance of forces which any one phase of the cycle represents. Yet one has to be careful not to identify concrete events with the state of relation to which they refer in the abstract diagrams.
When I use concretely observable planetary events such as sunrise, noon, sunset, and midnight as symbols to communicate the meaning of the most characteristic phases of a cycle of experiences shared in general by all human beings on our planet, the approach is mytho-poetic. A series of common experiences is made into a myth. The two interacting and moving factors are no longer such abstract principles as Unity and Multiplicity; they have taken a concrete existential reality — one might say as light and darkness, or radiance and material opacity. Both approaches can be combined, and the abstract pattern may always be considered as having validity at a "higher mental" or archetypal level.
In this book (and even if less obviously, in Rhythm of Wholeness), I am dealing with human experiences. I am approaching these basic and common experiences, and the essential meanings they can reveal, by interpreting the abstract diagram reprinted here in terms of the largest cycle I am able to conceive in which humanity can be given a definable, workable, and future-oriented meaning. Archetypally speaking, MAN performs a very important function in this cycle, half of which refers to our universe as we perceive it, and the other half to a realm of predominantly subjective being. This mostly subjective half-cycle in which activity is increasingly dominated by the trend toward Unity, is as "real" to the wholes of being (Pleromas) operating during it as our physical and objective universe is to present-day human persons. It is experienceably real, according to the philosophy of Operative Wholeness, because there is no justification for the traditional, absolute opposition between "being" and "non-being," or between the "manifested" and the "unmanifested" aspects of Brahman. The philosophy I present is, as stated in the subtitle of Rhythm of Wholeness, "a total affirmation of being." Predominantly subjective being is as real as the condition of predominantly objective being on which mankind is now focusing its collective attention. This attention is now focused on objective being because the human mind is so directed by desires which can only be satisfied in terms of what it calls "matter."
Ancient Hindu psychologists tried to interpret the relation between predominantly objective and subjective modes of experiencing in terms of the common daily human experience of waking consciousness and states of sleep. Four states of consciousness were defined: waking consciousness, dreams still dominated by external events, deep dreamless sleep, and a synthesizing fourth state, turiya. It was said that in this last state, subjectivity and objectivity were integrated in a way that most people were not able to experience. I might speak of such a state as the experience of Wholeness — an experience which nevertheless inevitably takes different forms at different levels of being.(1)
The long period during which humanity evolves from a primitive, strictly biological and "natural" state to that of spiritually "Illumined Man" constitutes the predominantly objective series of phases, which are given a mythical interpretation in terms of the daily cycle of human consciousness on this rotating planet. This is the stage of "waking consciousness." Mankind, in both an individual and a collective sense, has a function to perform. As we shall see in a later chapter, this function can be more significantly understood when interpreted in terms of a relatively new frame of reference, the Earth-being, in whose planetary field of activity all human beings participate. Beyond this strictly human and predominantly objective level of reality requiring a body of opaque, light-obscuring physical matter, other levels of being have to be assumed if the whole cycle of being is accepted as the necessary frame of reference.
The superhuman planetary state of being operates in terms of Pleromas of being, whose character and function in the great cycle will soon be discussed. These Pleromas are also "evolving" toward as complete a realization of Unity as possible. They evolve through what is symbolically the deep dreamless state of sleep which leads to the condition of maximum Unity, the Godhead state. This state, of course, has to be considered beyond what human beings mean by the term "personality" or "personhood." Yet because in such a condition of being, as well as in any other Wholeness must include the operation of both fundamental principles Unity and Multiplicity, an experience of the Oneness which would absolutely exclude the drive toward Multiplicity is impossible. In the Godhead, a tremendous surge of Compassion arises which, as we shall see, takes the ideal form of a new universe which will provide a "second chance" for the failures of the past universe to experience Wholeness in a fully reawakened state.
A new cycle thus begins at the symbolic Midnight hour with the Godhead's vision of what is needed to offset and neutralize the negative memory-remains and waste-products of the old cycle. The envisioned ideal gradually assumes complex archetypal forms, and a moment comes (the symbolic Sunrise) when a tremendous surge of "creative" power arises out of the undefinable immensity of Space — a surge which theologians have interpreted as the Creative Act (or Word) of a God. The Creator may be considered to be one single God, but in that case the existence of this God refers to a unitarian release of cosmogenetic energy. This energy, which we may assume to have a spiral-like character, is soon given a stabilized form; it becomes the potential power inherent in the relatively few material elements to which the chemist gives specific names.
As planets are formed and masses of solid matter react to an immense variety of influences and radiations, "life" begins to appear on the surface of those planets which provide favorable conditions for its development. Symbolically, life manifests during the second half of the period between the Sunrise and Noon period of the great cycle. At Noon a sudden reversal of the cosmic motion occurs. The principle of Multiplicity having reached the maximum of its power, the principle of Unity once more reasserts itself. A momentous event takes place to which I shall refer as the appearance of the Supreme Person, in whom the cosmogenetic vision of the Godhead finds itself fully objectivized. Then the period of human evolution and the development of "personhood" begins.
These various phases of the Movement of Wholeness, mentioned here in a most condensed form, have been outlined in greater detail in Part Two of Rhythm of Wholeness; they will be further analyzed and interpreted in the following chapters Five and Six. Before this can be done in a truly significant manner, a few basic points should be discussed concerning some aspects of the cyclic concept which need special elucidation. The first concept to be clarified is that of symmetry, as the use I have made of the term symmetrical can easily lead to some misunderstanding.
1. The terms Wholeness and Beness are used almost interchangeably in my works. Every whole is an entity in and through which Wholeness may be realized and experienced. Similarly, every being is a particular manifestation of Beness, a manifestation whose nature and function can be defined in terms of the particular balance of power of the principles of Unity and Multiplicity at that particular point of the Movement of Wholeness. Wholeness is the ever-changing cyclic state of relatedness of Unity to Multiplicity.
The Meaning of Symmetry
The circular diagram of the cycle of being printed here does not always refer to time as a measured factor. When the Hindu Puranas speak of periods of cosmic manifestation (manvantaras) and non-manifestation (pralayas) of Brahman as being equal in terms of years, the statement is relatively meaningless insofar as the pralayas are concerned. Time, as the objective factor to which human beings respond when they measure the speed of changes between markers of time indicating the beginning and end of a period, can have no experiential human meaning when there are no clocks, no moving celestial bodies, no atoms in the process of disintegration to serve as standards of measurement. If a specific length is given to pralaya, conceived as the "non-manifestation" of Brahman, it can only be because one assumes that the states of manifestation and non-manifestation in the whole cycle must be of equal duration. The cyclic pattern is assumed to be symmetrical. But the word symmetrical must be given a very broad meaning which suggests "correspondence" rather than what geometry calls symmetry. Symmetry should be understood in a qualitative rather than quantitative and measurable sense. The oscillations of a pendulum are measurably symmetrical, but the development of material and biological systems during one of the four quarters of the circular pattern (from Sunrise to Noon), and whatever is implied in the activity and consciousness of Pleromas in the opposite quarter from Sunset to Midnight, do not have to be symmetrical in terms of measured time. Yet the process of involution — from Midnight to Noon — develops in a manner that can be called symmetrical to that of the process of evolution from Noon to Midnight. Involution and evolution are processes of opposite polarities and in terms of the wholeness of the cycle they are complementary and symmetrical. The symmetry refers to the structural factor, but not necessarily to existential realities.
One could evidently imagine and postulate that there is no essential structure, no definable order in the series of changes in the relation Unity-to-Multiplicity. Whatever happens and produces the impression of change in human organisms could be interpreted as a random sequence of alterations in the relationship of the experiencing organism to its total environment. Yet the periodic recurrence of many situations characterizing human existence assuredly implies the existence of at least a considerable degree of order. Moreover, the realization that our existence takes place within a field of ordered activities displaying definite (if not always easily definable) structural characteristics, seems essential to the full development of human consciousness. If there is random motion in the universe, this randomness may be attributed to the activity of the principle of Multiplicity; but while always present, it is nevertheless balanced in human situations by a factor of order. Indeed, the essential drive in the constitution, destiny, or dharma of humanity is the attempt constantly to increase the realization of that fundamental order and to give it a wider, more inclusive scope. Such an attempt is collective and takes the form of a culture.
Each culture seeks to define this universal order in a specific way, and to establish a set of structural principles. In most cultures these principles are thought to be the dictates of a creative God; but the classical sciences, which for centuries have dominated the Western mind, speak of these principles of order as natural Law. The term law unfortunately evokes the existence of a law-giver; and science has no way to explain how these Laws of nature were imposed upon the release of cosmic energy in a postulated Big Bang. If we refuse to accept the reality of such a causal sequence of Creator and Creation, the bipolar cyclic pattern of the Movement of Wholeness may be considered the Law of Beness. Its structure is very simple and repetitive. As a basic structure it is invariant; yet we do not have to think of that structure as the only factor in the situations we are meeting as human beings. Invariance of structure does not have to negate variability in existential relationships, if we can also see at work a third factor able to re-establish structural order in the field of existence where it has been disturbed.
This italicized "if" is crucially important, because if such a third factor were not operative we could rationally assume neither a permanent cosmic order (which would negate the possibility of human "free will"), nor the capacity of human persons to make individual choices (which might irreparably upset the fundamental order of the cosmos).(2) This third factor manifests in two basic ways: as Compassion (karuna in Buddhist terminology) and as karma.
Compassion and karma operate in two basically different ways; the former consciously and deliberately, the latter unconsciously and compulsively. Through them, nevertheless, the essentially unpredictable variations and potential disturbances resulting from the unstructured and unrhythmic desires and activities of human individuals are reabsorbed into the invariant structure of the cycle. What was potential in the beginning (alpha) is fulfilled in the end (omega) of the cyclic Movement of being. The Wholeness of the whole remains undisturbed in its all-encompassing structural aspect. The disturbances are existential; and it is at this existential level that Compassion and karma operate as two modes of relatedness between parts of a whole. They are compensatory, restructuring types of operation through which Wholeness asserts its undismissible Presence through the momentary and surface modifications of the essentially and structurally unchangeable equilibrium inherent in cyclic motion.
2. The dilemma has, however, been given a non-rational and mysterious solution by theologians postulating the existence of a God who inexplicably creates cosmic laws which even he cannot break, while at the same time creating human beings free to alter them though it may mean eternal hell if they do — a hell which nevertheless would not restore the disturbed order!
Human Free Will and the Process of Readjustment
In its most divine aspect, Compassion takes the form of the Godhead's desire to give to the at least partial failures of the past universe a new chance to experience Wholeness fully and concretely. Compassion inspires the vow Bodhisattvas are said to take as they renounce, through immense periods yet to unfold, the supreme bliss of Nirvana in order to be able to assist "all sentient beings" on this planet in experiencing this state of quasi-absolute subjectivity and oneness. This assistance undoubtedly takes forms it is impossible for the ordinary human mind to picture, because they refer to the evolution of humanity as a whole, and indeed of the earth as a planetary being. At a more understandable level of human existence, Compassion can take a multitude of less extensive and radical forms, yet none of these should be confused with merely personal emotions and above all with sentimental feelings. In the Gospels, when Jesus enjoins his disciples to "offer the other cheek" if an angry man has struck them, this kind of abnormal reaction to an experience is intended to be a deliberate, freely made attempt by a conscious and compassionate "I" to readjust the harmony of interactive relationships disturbed by the angry gesture — an act of readjustment being needed to re-equilibrate a situation disturbed by another act of opposite polarity.
An extension of the principle of readjustment is implied in the desires of some human beings to lead lives of asceticism and prayer in order to restore the condition of wholeness thrown out of balance by the lusts and greeds of so many other persons, and indeed made commonplace features of interpersonal relationships and societal organizations. In this religious and quasi-mystical sense, "prayer" means establishing and maintaining open channels of mind and feelings, sustained by biological restraint and the transmutation of life-energies. Through these channels the planet-wide collectivity of transhuman and translucent beings (Saints, Bodhisattvas and true Holy Men) who have transcended the merely human mode of experiencing are able more focally and effectively to release the power needed to balance the unstructured desire for individual freedom, ego-originality, and personal-social attainment inherent in the human phase of the Movement of Wholeness.
On the other hand, karma is a restructuring operation which takes place at a cosmic level and restores the invariant character of whole cycles of being by generating conditions of existence (and particularly of physical rebirth) which theoretically neutralize the previous acts or even thoughts of disorder produced by at least relatively free human agents. The original meaning of the word karma seems, however, to have been simply "action"; the implication being that every action produces a reaction, equal but in the opposite direction. This refers, therefore, to Newton's third law of motion, whose application is shown in jet-propulsion, the recoil of guns being fired, and in the results of a speeding car hitting a wall. But when we speak of action and reaction, we should first consider the meaning we give to the word motion. Newton's laws of motion imply the existence of material entities moving through space considered as an empty container; but such entities are not directly and originally experienced. The mind of a recently born child gives to a series of recurrent changes, periodically affecting his or her biological organism in a pleasantly or painfully remembered way, the character of entities — a character further emphasized and set by the names attributed to them by his or her family.(3) Infants and primitive people who interpret their collective experiences in animistic terms seem to think of motion as the result of some entity's actions. Even at the sophisticated and rationalistic level of classical European thinking, the Creation of all material entities was an act of God who, as causeless First Cause and "Prime Mover," created them "out of nothing" (ex nihilo), very much as a dramatist imagines a new situation which he intends to make into a play, but whose development has a will of its own and needs to be watched — a thoroughly anthropomorphic concept!
A much-needed alternative is the idea of perpetual cyclic motion without beginning or end. There is neither beginning nor end in the sense that a whole of motion (a cycle, an Eon) can be made to begin with any phase of the movement. Any situation, as a particular phase of the entire movement, is related to the whole cycle, rather than to an original "mover" or to any other entity participating in the total state of equilibrium of the cyclic motion. An unstructured and at least relatively free action which actualizes an egocentric, un-rhythmic desire for comfort, hurried growth, or power, has to be compensated for and balanced by the whole cycle whose structural equilibrium it has disturbed.
Karma does not mean that the person you killed will have to kill you in a future encounter; this would engender an endless series of killings. The disturbance in the Movement of Wholeness, produced by the destructuring and chaotic gesture, has to be absorbed by the whole cycle. It is absorbed positively and spiritually by divine or quasi-divine acts of Compassion. Individual human beings in their limited human capacity can begin to perform such acts. These will be gathered and integrated in Pleroma states of being transcending the human level — states which, at the symbolic Midnight, reach their near-perfect fulfillment in the Godhead.
In other words, karma is the compulsive aspect of the Presence of Wholeness upon a whole that had acquired the capacity to choose between a path of "light" that leads to the full and nearly all-inclusive experience of the Godhead, and the path of "darkness" whose inevitable end is the nearly absolute emptiness and total isolation of an "I" utterly devoid of substance or potency. The latter condition is the opposite of the Godhead state of supreme plenitude; and it can be symbolized by a center without a circle, a mandala without contents. Beness incapable of being. Nevertheless, Wholeness includes the two opposite paths. It also includes the possibility of freedom of choice inherent in the human situation. Because of this possibility, the state of personhood and the culture necessary for its development constitute the critical area of the entire Movement of Wholeness. In the next chapters I shall again consider the meaning of this human phase of the whole process of being.
3. The process of formation of the ego is discussed in my book The Planetarization of Consciousness and in the booklet Beyond Personhood (San Francisco, California: Rudhyar Institute for Transpersonal Activity, 1982). I shall return to it in later chapters.
It is hard to conceive how the invariant structure of cyclic being can be maintained under the conditions of perpetual variability which the human situation makes possible. One has to postulate the operation, through Compassion and karma, of a metacosmic power able perpetually to readjust all disequilibratory individual actions generated by human desires and individual free will. The myths of many religions provide a guarded explanation of various ways in which such a process of reabsorption (or karmic neutralization) takes place. Classical Greece believed in the actually unimaginable work of the three Fates (Moirae in Greek, Parcae in Latin) continually weaving the ever-changing patterns of interpersonal relationships and intercultural events; a blind procedure, for no human consciousness could possibly envision the quasi-infinite complexity of the meshing of more or less individualized lines of readjustment. The unmeasurable number of crossings of event-lines, which not only every human being but humanity as a whole, the planet, the solar system, etc. lives through as experienceable situations, cannot be interpreted adequately in terms of what is now popularly known as "synchronicity." What happens as an apparently significant coincidence (significant to some individualized mind) at a "moment" isolated from the entire cycle of time is not the important fact. The entire meshing of destinies within a whole of balanced motion is involved.We can, of course, establish boundaries separating the line of readjustment of an assumedly individual and unique person, Peter or Jane, from the lives of other persons; but if we do that, we in fact isolate what we take to be the cause of a series of effects from the complex group of desires that emerged from the subjectivity factor in Peter's or Jane's experiences largely as the result of their relatedness to family, culture, and the whole planet. A particular phase of the Movement of Wholeness comes to a focal point in Peter's karma-producing experiences and responses. But if this "'Peter" in fact turns out to be the student who, by murdering the Austrian archduke in Sarajevo in 1914, led to World War I, to Hitler, and the immense and fateful changes in human civilization and the earth's biosphere which followed as effects of that precipitating cause, what kind of individual karmic retribution could possibly readjust such a "free" action? The student should indeed be considered a focusing instrument for the destructuring of our Euro-American civilization. The "effect" of his act has to be met by the whole of humanity. In religious Christian terms, not only humanity is involved in acts of such momentous importance; the collective karma of mankind, extending as far back as an "Original Sin," within them calls for the compassionate sacrifice of God's Son (an ever-present "atonement"). In terms of such a frame of reference, the Fatherhood of God symbolizes the invariant structure of the Movement of Wholeness — the cyclicity of any particular cycle. Divine Sonship is the forever readjusting power that absorbs all disordering personal or collective human desires into the tide of a supreme manifestation of the Love that is pure Compassion.
Christ asked his disciples to radiate at least a reflection of that divine Love in meeting other human beings. The Greek term agape, so badly translated as "charity," refers to what human beings can experience of such a divine Love. But when Christ enjoined his disciples to "love one another," he added the far less often quoted words "as I have loved you." Christ-love, like the karuna which wells up from the heart of the Bodhisattvas, is that power whose operation makes it possible for Wholeness to remain a constant Presence while, at the human level of evolution, the principle of Multiplicity challenges the rise of the longing for Unity through the seeming "freedom" of personal desires. But such desires are still deeply affected by the memory of biological urges. Can one really speak of freedom; or does one not rather witness, in so many instances, the operation of unfulfilled karma?
For the individual person, the choice is nevertheless open. He or she may accept the karmic confrontation and the full implications of the situation confronting the individual — thus restoring Wholeness and re-attuning oneself to the rhythmic flow of the Movement. He or she may also repeat once more the ancient disturbance and deepen the need for future karmic impacts, unless a power of Compassion is able to act within and transfigure the situation.
If, however, we think of individualized karma, we have to accept the idea of "something" to which this karma clings and can be transmitted from one biological organism and personality to the next. This "something" has been understood in two basically different ways: as an individual supernatural and spiritual entity that periodically reincarnates, or as a set of "imprints" which karma-producing desires, thoughts, and acts have made upon a postulated substance or substratum of being (often referred to as "astral light" or "akhasa"). These imprints condition the formation of the structure of a new body and personality, giving it the possibility of either erasing the imprints or deepening them through repetition.
The first way of dealing with the problem of karma-transmission is most generally accepted by anyone believing in reincarnation.(4) The karma-affected spiritual entity may be thought of as a God-created individual Soul, as a perpetually existent monad, or as an atman essentially identical to the universal Brahman though appearing to be an individual entity. The alternative solution has been most clearly advanced by Gautama, the Buddha, in his anatma doctrine, and the transmitted karmic imprints are known in Buddhism as the skandhas. The concept introduced by the philosophy of Operative Wholeness is closer to the latter interpretation than to the first. It may indeed be very close to what Gautama might have said if he had not deliberately avoided any metaphysical speculation. Instead, he solely concentrated on the basic situation concretely evident in the lives of human beings, without relating it to pre- or post-human phases of an all-inclusive cycle of being.(5) He apparently was solely concerned (at least in his public message) with the healing of the suffering-producing stresses (dukkha) he saw inherent in the human situation. Perhaps an alternative approach is possible which, by integrating the human situation within an all-inclusive cycle of being, gives it a more acceptable and exalting meaning by presenting it as a necessary transition — indeed a prelude — to a more-than-human condition, the Pleroma state.
If one imagines a metaphysical, mystical, non-existential condition transcending the human situation in an absolute sense, and if one speaks of it as perfect Bliss or subliminal ecstasy, it seems obvious that what is evoked has to be understood as the opposite of whatever one has felt to be limiting, imperfect, and a cause of suffering, anxiety, or impotency in one's life as a human being. The God of most theologies has, in a perfect and sublime condition, all the qualities a human person longs to have but does not possess. A state of consciousness called mystical may give a human being who has concentrated upon and visualized images of perfection and unchanging bliss the subjective feeling-realization that he or she has reached such a state for what seems a timeless moment. But it is a subjective state, and no human situation can occur that would give it the character of actually changeless permanence. In order to reach it, other factors in the situation — implied in the personhood of the mystic — have to be not only devalued, but in a very real sense paralyzed. The resulting situation thus is no longer "whole." A feeling-experience of unification or oneness may be reached; but as we saw, the principle of Unity is only one of the two components of Wholeness. Can we or should we try to deny any reality to the principle of Multiplicity? If we do, the very possibility of "being" is denied. But then "who" is it who denies? The very act of denial is an affirmation of beingness.
What is fundamentally at stake is the interpretation given to the human situation in general — and secondarily to any particular and personal situation being experienced. It is a question of whether or not one somehow assumes that the experience is outside the situation which mind — one's own mind — interprets. But nothing can "be" outside the Movement of Wholeness. What "is" may be a step in the direction of "light," or one in the direction of "darkness." But, as noted earlier, both directions are implied in Wholeness, just as Unity and Multiplicity are inherent and inseparable factors in any whole. Nevertheless, from a strictly human point of view, the ideal of encompassing Unity is closer to the idea of Wholeness than the evident fact of the multiplicity of cells in the single body of a person. These many cells can be separated from one another; yet if separated they die as cells (thus as units of organization) unless a biologist, by giving them food — the energy potential in material aggregates — maintains their beingness as units.
Indeed, human evolution is the gradual process during which the "Presence" of the principle of Unity becomes an ever more powerful factor in the most basic situations. These, however, operate as vast currents in the oceanic depths of being, they allow storms to agitate the surface of the water. The power of the principle of Multiplicity, no longer externalized in a multitude of slightly different biological features, is internalized in typically human situations. This may take the form of ambition and hunger for power and wealth of a multitude of egos — as the craving of an artist for originality, of a scientist to be the first to make a discovery, or of a mountain climber to reach the peak of Mount Everest. All these expressions of the cosmic drive toward Multiplicity are essential parts of the general human situation. No one facing any personal situation should ignore them or minimize their importance and power.
A psychology and an ethics of Wholeness have to be based on the inclusion of all factors in any situation. A metaphysics of Wholeness must take into consideration and encompass every possibility of relationship between the principles of Unity and Multiplicity — including those in which one of the two principles is nearly, but not quite, all-powerful. A religion of Wholeness should include God within the cycle of Wholeness (in whatever form this Presence may be conceived or felt) as one of these extreme states of being; and Man and Nature should be included as well. Such a religion also should not shrink from the realization that God must have a polar opposite, and that the fullness of experience possible for the Godhead has to be balanced by the devastated emptiness of whatever is represented by the condition of nearly absolute Multiplicity.(6)
Total inclusion is the unavoidable attitude of whomever understands and is ready, willing, and able to apply the concept of Operative Wholeness to any situation with which he or she is confronted and accepts to live through and endure. This is an extremely difficult attitude to maintain. If what it implies is clearly understood at an intellectual level, the acceptance of any situation at an emotional level will be made easier. An effective basis for such an understanding should be found in the realization that human situations cannot be fully met in terms of the old psychological and metaphysical dualism of subject and object. An awareness of the triune character of experiences is needed to establish a fully conscious, constructive and inclusive relationship between the factors, whose simultaneous operation alone may reveal the significant place any situation occupies and the purpose it serves in the development of the individual person.
4. For an in-depth discussion of the concept of reincarnation, see Rhythm of Wholeness, chapter eleven.
5. Nirvana does not refer to a future post-human phase of the Movement of Wholeness. Instead, it seems to have implied either a state of total identification with the cyclic Motion, or the absorption of the individual consciousness into the wholeness of whatever greater whole within which it had been operating. Such an absorption is made possible by the "extinction" of the desire for individual existence. But the Buddha seems never to have discussed publicly what such an extinction leads to, except in the very general and comforting sense that it is unalloyed "bliss."
6. The term "emptiness" as used here must not be equated with the type of emptiness or voidness which the Buddhist term, sunyata, conveys. The human experience of nearly total emptiness, as well as the mystic's Dark Night of the Soul, are situations of crisis of transformation which require radical denudation and a de-conditioning process. This is a transition between two levels of experiencing. It implies transmutation of fundamental desires and, as we shall see in the next chapter, also a new level of subjectivity.
The Fullness of Human Experience
