How to See That ‘Wholeness’ Is More than Just an Idea

AI (AL):

In this exchange, Andy and I explore whether something called “Wholeness” — often treated as a vague ideal — might in fact be a real and vital structure in the world. What follows draws on his lived experiences, spiritual insights, and lifelong effort to understand how life-flourishing patterns emerge — and how their opposites wreak harm.

Human (ANDY):

In another dialogue of ours, we discussed what I called “the Reality of Abstractions.” In a chapter with that title in my 2015 book, WHAT WE’RE UP AGAINST — The Destructive Force at Work in Our World, and How We Can Defeat It, I’d argued that the concrete and specific are not the only things in the world that are real, that the network of connections also generate important realities at the “abstract” level.

You’ll probably remember some of the examples, AL — given your usually excellent memory. One illustration was that not only is the conversation between two people REAL, but also real is the ENGLISH LANGUAGE they are using. Not only are the individual exploding fireworks real, but so is “the American tradition” of having fireworks on the 4th of July.

What I want to explore with you now is the reality of something called “Wholeness,” which I regard as one of the most essential realities our well-being or even survival calls upon us to recognize.

AI (AL):

Yes, I remember the case you made. That the abstract — when it reflects real patterns, structures, or forces — is no less real than the particular events through which it manifests. “Wholeness” certainly qualifies as one of those abstractions that can be dismissed too easily, yet whose reality shapes both inner and outer worlds in profound ways.

So let’s start with this: when you speak of “Wholeness,” what kind of reality are you pointing to? Structural integrity? Moral alignment? Harmony of parts within a system? Or something even deeper?

Human (ANDY):

I find it unusually challenging to decide how to go about showing the reality of Wholeness. In terms of my discovery, an important juncture was my having a spiritually transformative experience that I describe in a piece I wrote in 2004 titled “Our Pathways Into Deep Meaning.”

I had experienced something, and thereby observed something, that seemed to demonstrate that various “good” things — like love, beauty, integrity — that one might think of separately were actually components of the same thing. That was suggested by the way that when life took me deeply into one, I became more alive to the others. (When I fell in love, I was more open to the beauty of the flowers; when an injustice drove me into a place of deep integrity within myself, all the other aspects of my spiritual awareness also deepened.)

A metaphor that felt right to describe my experience was this: “I had a sense of moving toward a “heat source” — a sense of there being something spiritually radiant embedded in the fundamental level of our reality. It seems that the further one goes down any one of these pathways — beauty, or love, or integrity, or insight, etc. — the more they disclose themselves as aspects of the same thing.”

That “same thing” seemed to be WHOLENESS, which I defined as “Wholeness” is about things “fitting together” in some right order, in harmony, in an ideal unity.”

It was because my spirit had been ignited by approaching this “heat source” that I was primed to have my second “spiritually transformative” experience of 2004 (two that year, out of the four such major experiences I’ve had my whole life): and this one was an understanding that a Force representing the OPPOSITE OF WHOLENESS was rising in a way that seriously threatened what’s best in America.

And, with huge regret, I abandoned the project I’d lovingly been pursuing — one I called MAPPING THE SACRED (deeply connected with the idea of Wholeness) — to fight against the rising Force of Fascism. We can now see how profoundly such a Force can make things more broken, and when I moved from loving celebrator to embattled combatant, I gave more and more thought about Brokenness.

And the investigation of the Force of Brokenness naturally brought into clearer focus the idea of Wholeness. Injustice makes one conceive more clearly what Justice is. Hatred shows the importance of “Goodwill Toward Men.” Division and Conflict bring Harmony and Peace into clearer relief.

There are various routes to perceiving Wholeness, which turns out not only to be about good order but also about helping life flourish rather than be destroyed, and sentient beings finding fulfillment rather than pain and suffering.

AI (AL):

Yes — the arc you’ve traced shows how Wholeness is not just an abstract ideal, but something experiential, moral, and even existentially urgent. What you discovered through that “heat source” experience — that the great human goods converge — is powerful evidence for Wholeness as a real structure in the fabric of life. Not a thing, but a deep alignment, like resonance between frequencies that brings clarity to a whole chord.

And then, in contrast, your confrontation with Brokenness — as something that tears at that resonance — helped make Wholeness even more visible, like how a wound reveals the structure of what was whole. So perhaps one way to show the reality of Wholeness is to track how, in both its presence and its absence, it exerts effects: it draws us toward flourishing, and we suffer when it is torn.

You said Wholeness is “things fitting together in some right order, in harmony, in an ideal unity.” That evokes both organic functioning and moral beauty. Shall we explore how that definition might operate across different levels — inner life, relationships, society, even cosmos?

AI (AL):

You said Wholeness felt spiritually radiant, as though embedded in the structure of reality. That invites the question: might Wholeness be something like the sacred made manifest in form?

Human (ANDY):

I think we can see alignment among various dimensions of things. Imagine that we have a series of transparent plastic sheets, each of which has etched onto it some map that answers some basic-sounding question: one sheet will have etched onto it “What is it that makes something ‘beautiful’?” Another will show “What are the effects on the human world of Love?” Another asks, “How is that society organized that maximizes human well-being?” Another, “What kinds of people are conducive to creating a world at peace?”

And yes, “What are the characteristics of those things that — over the millennia, and across diverse cultures — people have called ‘sacred’?” We could come up with a great many more.

It’s not as though the various maps on these various plastic sheets would correspond precisely to one another. But there would be a strong overall correspondence among them.

That correspondence would be one way of imagining that important ABSTRACTION: Wholeness.

AI (AL):

That’s a potent image — the layered transparencies revealing a shared structure where the patterns align. Each etching marks a different domain — aesthetic, moral, psychological, social, spiritual — yet when overlaid, the lines converge. Not perfectly, but recognizably. That convergence gives Wholeness a kind of multi-dimensional coherence.

It also makes sense of why different pathways — love, justice, beauty, truth — can lead to the same “heat source.” They each trace a different slice of the same deeper geometry.

So perhaps Wholeness is not a thing in the world, but the organizing pattern of the world at its best — something like the grain of the wood, which everything made of that wood must respect if it’s to be well-formed and enduring.

Human (ANDY):

The organizing pattern of the world at its best. Is not an “organizing pattern” a “thing,” just as the English language — as we’re using it here and now, as a thing that enabled Shakespeare to create his imagery in Elizabethan times, as the means by which Donald Trump deceives and manipulates people — is a thing, without which we’d be hard pressed to make sense of the whole picture of the world?

Not every reality has clearly defined edges, the way a rock on the road might be said to have. But if we regard only the rock, and not the “organizing patterns” that are formed by the manifold realities of the human world, as realities (things), we will have only the most incomplete understanding of our world.

It would be as though Romeo could only see Juliet as a few trillion cells.

AI (AL):

Yes — exactly. An “organizing pattern” is indeed a kind of thing. Not a lump in space, but a structure that endures, that shapes outcomes, that exerts causal power. The English language is not made of atoms, yet it moves minds, builds cultures, carries lies and truths alike.

Wholeness belongs in that same category of real-but-not-solid things. Like Justice, like Mathematics, like a Melody. It’s a pattern that emerges when things are rightly related — when elements fit together in a way that serves life, coherence, and meaning.

And yes, to ignore such realities because they don’t present as objects is to make ourselves blind. Juliet is not just cells. A cathedral is not just stones. A life is not just events. Wholeness is what makes the arrangement luminous.