Wanting to Be the Whole

When I was 18, and a student at Harvard, I wrote an essay that put at the heart of my philosophy of life this notion: that there is an inborn urge—or maybe just a need I felt in myself—to achieve oneness with the Whole, the One, and overcome the incompleteness that’s otherwise part of what we feel.

Or maybe I didn’t express it as such a human universal—this feeling of incompleteness—and was just testifying to something I infer from what I do with my mind: that EITHER I want the boundaries of my self to evaporate so that, like the mystics, I am at one with the One; OR I want to take the Whole and swallow it, so that the Whole becomes part of me.

Years later—during my turn on, tune in more deeply phase of life in the late 60s and early 70s in Berkeley—I made serious efforts to get to the place the mystics get. I got initiated into various meditation techniques, I practiced a Tibetan form of breathing, I sat on the ground listening to a famous spiritual figure from South America, and I utilized other means of “engineering” one’s consciousness to open the doors to connection with the Whole.

It wouldn’t be fair to say that I failed utterly, but my approaches to that mystical space that I thought to be perhaps the highest form of human consciousness fell rather short of what I imagined “enlightenment” (and maybe “satori”) to be. I was not capable of living the life of a mystic, as I imagined a mystic ideally could, complete with the bliss of the experience of Oneness.

So if the mountain wouldn’t come to Mohammed, Mohammed would have to take over the job of getting one with the One. Which meant a fallback to an intellectual road that was part of my family culture, and that I’d been walking since I was a child.

Long before I had any notion of mystical experience, I had been trying to devour the world with my mind. As a boy, I memorized population figures, state and world capitals, and baseball statistics from the 1956 World Almanac, and worked my way through a 50-volume history of the world, published in 1899 and divided up geographically. As I grew older, that appetite to get the world inside combined with my thirst for Wholeness to become an effort to understand how all its pieces fit together.

If I couldn’t RECEIVE the Whole in the kind of mystical vision I had sought, I could at least continue trying to CONSTRUCT the Whole within myself. And with a mind much shaped by my intellectual training, the method of doing that would be to put Everything together into a coherent picture of “THIS IS WHAT IS.”

From my teens, I have insisted on seeing things through a lens that isn’t just formed by one or another of the intellectual disciplines. There is a ONENESS that can be seen if we put all the pieces together—the pieces produced by history or anthropology or biological evolution or sociology or psychology, and every other angle from which our Reality can be seen. Put those pieces together, and we can get our minds blown by the Wholeness of things—how it is all part of the same Meaningful Story.

When I was 24, my life was changed by a spiritually transformative moment in which I was given a Big Picture view of what has happened to the human species. It was a Big Enough Picture that it blew me away, and I devoted my life to developing that way of understanding an important part of the Whole Human Story.

Two years later, I was brought before my doctoral committee to be examined on a 30-page articulation of that Idea, which I believed could give us deeper insight into ourselves and our situation. In preparation for that oral exam, I told the committee that there were a dozen fields I was working to integrate, and that they should feel free to put me through my paces in every one of them regarding whatever was pertinent to the Idea I was devoted to developing.

The exam went quite fulfillingly.

And the rest of my life has been devoted to trying to understand more and more of that whole picture. I have found in that pursuit a kind of connection with the Whole that falls short of the mystical experience I once sought—and still, in some ways, wish I were more capable of. But it has been deeply satisfying in its own way.

Having insufficient aptitude for the mystical path, I have found that Seeing the Whole—or important parts of that Wholeness—feeds the part of me that wanted the fulfillments of mystical vision. My spiritual life has come to include writing essay after essay, adding to the picture of the Whole something more that fits together and means something.

I’ve written elsewhere [LINK: “A Story That Delivers the Goods”] about how this way of understanding the Human Story can provide something surprisingly like what people have traditionally looked to religion to provide—offering meaningful answers to some of our deepest questions about who we are, how we got into the predicament we’re in, what forces have shaped our destiny, and what possibilities there may be for a better human future.

For me, Seeing the Whole in this way has proved a good-enough satisfaction of that old need—to get One with the All—that I articulated in that essay back in 1964.

And that’s reason enough to continue weaving together a coherent picture of the Whole—or at least as much of it as I can see. Continuing to write a stream of new pieces, making the picture more complete, has become for me a spiritual practice in its own right.

And the rewards of that practice may simply have to suffice, because there’s no real reason to think that continuing to enrich this integrative vision will increase its impact on the world. If I’d died back in the early 1990s, I’d already have left the world more of this integrative vision than it has yet shown much inclination to absorb. It takes work to see the picture, and to see how the pieces fit together. And our culture seems much less interested in large integrative visions of the human world than it was generations ago. There’s not much reason to suppose that the world is going to pay attention to how I’m making use of my eighties to keep articulating bits of how the pieces come together into a meaningful Whole.

But even as I undertake this work as a spiritual practice, valuable to me for the fulfillment it brings, I still entertain fantasies that my efforts to communicate a mind-blowing picture of the Human Story might someday have the impact I’ve long hoped for—that they might contribute something to humankind’s coming together to meet our challenge, as we will have to do if human civilization is to avoid self-destruction and thrive on this planet for the long run.