It is a principle in systems theory that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. We, humans, have learned much about the nature of the world by breaking things down into their component parts. Our logic and rationality is linear and reductionistic and this approach has contributed to great scientific understandings of the phenomenal world. And yet, with this linear and reductionistic approach, some of us understand that something is missing. Newtonian physics, looking at the world like a mechanism of a clock, doesn't quite cut it. This perception is missing something. So we put the things we have deconstructed back together again looking for the whole and the quality that the parts, individually, are missing.
What gives us peace and satisfaction is wholeness, oneness, the still place where there are no boundaries, no limits, no discrete parts that are less than the whole. We long for the whole, for the Oneness from which we came and to which we return.
Humans complicate things. We break existence down into parts. We separate things and in doing so we create illusions that are not real. We are only seeing a part of the whole, the proverbial "tip of the iceberg." Don't be fooled by perceptions. They are not what they seem to us to be. We are missing the whole picture which we consciously or unconsciously crave.
The idea of the Perennial Philosophy of Aldous Huxley leads one to the idea that God is too big for any one religion. How is it that sometimes people outgrow their religion of childhood? James Fowler, among others, has mapped out a model of spiritual development. Osho says that a person cannot enter into a spiritual life until he/she rebels against childish religious beliefs. Notes On A Spiritual Life intends to explore deeper understandings of an authentic spiritual life.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment