Many years ago Rumi wrote: ‘Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there.’ More recently Robert Frost wrote: ‘It almost scares a man the way things come in pairs.’ Whether it is in our ‘nature’ or whether we have been socialized to it we do view and experience reality as composed of polarities. For example, we divide our world into ‘sacred and secular,’ ‘true and false,’ ‘friend and foe.’ We also see some things as ‘objective’ – real and concrete – and others as ‘subjective’ – intuition, feelings and imaginings. We also believe that there are ‘virtuous’ acts and ‘vice’ acts. As an aside, some equate ‘duality’ with ‘polarity’ and they are not the same. Duality involves ‘either/or’ while polarity involves ‘both/and.’
Consider that today’s critical questions invite us and challenge us to embrace a blending toward wholeness when it comes to our traditional hard and fast distinctions. For example our global view of ‘we versus them’ is evolving into ‘us.’ In addition, role defined hierarchies of many kinds are evolving toward ‘interdependent relationships.’ Here are a few of them: teacher-student, doctor-patient, manager-worker, and sacred-secular. Blending toward wholeness doesn’t negate polarities. Blending toward wholeness supports our developing a growing capacity to view life in terms of an integrated process; a process that moves us from separateness to connection to wholeness.
Moving toward wholeness is a popular topic today [note Parker J. Palmer’s wonderful work ‘A Hidden Wholeness’]. In health care, the ‘whole’ person becomes the focus, not just the symptoms or the disease. Globally we are now considering the ‘whole system’ and not just the disparate parts or the global polarities. Take a moment, gentle reader, and ask yourself: What does it mean to be a ‘whole’ person? Consider that wholeness means ‘complete’ within one’s self AND it also means being a part of a number of relationships (we are, as I noted in an earlier posting, ‘holons’ – complete within ourselves and at the same time we are part of larger systems).
Consider the words of Biologist Lewis Thomas: ‘There is no such creature as a single individual; he has no more life of his own than a cast-off cell marooned on the surface of your skin.’
Evolutionary reality presents a reality of interconnecting and interdependent whole systems. We will need to embrace these realities – moving from separateness to connection to wholeness – if we are going to survive and thrive.
Searcher-Seeker 
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