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Wholeness is who we are

Holistic health, diet, and medicine have made the term “holistic” more familiar today. The era when anything “holistic” was considered fringe is long past. But the central concept of wholeness remains misunderstood. You cannot aim to be whole, learn to be whole, or make yourself whole. You are already whole as far as your body is concerned. There is constant unified coordination between trillions of cells that organize thousands of organic processes into a working whole.

Understanding organic wholeness in complete detail is beyond anyone’s current intellectual grasp, and is likely to remain that way. The only working model of a neuron, it has been said, would be a neuron. The brain resists any simple reduction, in other words. But the wholeness of mind and spirit is even more baffling, as I address in a new book, Total Meditation. I based the title on practical consideration, to distinguish how meditation can be holistic rather than occasional.

Countless people start meditating only to quickly drop it or else to return to it when their day is particularly stressful. I think this high dropout rate can be turned around simply by offering simpler techniques that encourage the mind to do what it naturally wants to do, which is to stay in balance all the time, regardless of daily pressure, stress, worries, and overwhelm. These challenging times make the need even more urgent.

The Surprising Success of Wholeness

As the notions of “holistic” and “wholeness” became popular in recent decades, they also turned into a paradox. People who focused on holistic health, diet, and wellness found themselves to be cut off from people who didn’t care about such things (which is the majority). Trying to be holistic wound up making you separate, which is the opposite of being whole. The meditation/wholefoods/yoga people are a splinter group from the McDonald’s/Monday Night Football/TGIF people.

Perhaps a misunderstanding lies at the bottom of this situation. Wholeness people tend to feel that they are waiting for non-wholeness people to catch on, a little like non-smokers and teetotalers waiting for chain-smokers and beer drinkers to catch on. This divide disappears, however, once you realize that you cannot make yourself whole, while on the other side of the coin you cannot make yourself unwhole. Everyone is whole already.

A simple observation is enough to clarify why wholeness is inescapable. Imagine someone sitting at a computer doing a task. You cannot see the monitor, so you don’t know what their task is. The physical body you see is a person; the thinker responding to the computer screen is a person. The two must co-exist, uniting two sides of reality, physical and mental.  This union defines everyone’s existence. You were born whole, and the only thing that separates you from a random stranger is what you decide to do with your wholeness.

Here we are looking beyond lifestyle, although that would seem to be the most glaring difference between people. Instead, how you use your wholeness primarily centers on something else: awareness. Someone in the meditation/whole foods/yoga group can be miserable, conflicted, and anxious while someone in the other group is content, loving, and secure. Clearly awareness is involved in this difference, but how? 

New Questions That Lead to Self-Wholeness

Our stressful, pain-filled experiences are not caused by people or events but by our reactions to them. And yet, if we will honestly examine the way we presently question our defeats, here’s what we see: we are still desperately seeking answers that serve only to correct the surface or exterior conditions. We are still blaming circumstances for crushing us. The direction of our questions proves that we are still thinking incorrectly about our problems.

This is supremely important to grasp if we wish to change our inner and outer world. By their very nature, our old questions tend to make and then keep us victims. They imply that someone or something outside of ourselves is punishing us. No human being is a victim of any punishment outside of their own undeveloped life-level from which their inner reactions are seen as outer attacks. This is why we must learn to turn our questions into tools for developing self-wholeness instead of letting them lead us off in the wrong direction.

Healing Remembers Wholeness

Separate self syndrome

All of us are waves in the same ocean, different experiences on the same journey. Separate self syndrome is a common condition that leads to disease and suffering. It is caused by the belief you are an independent self separated from the world, at the mercy of vast uncontrollable forces. This sense of a separate self gets deeply ingrained in habitual patterns that take up all your attention and energy. You become scared of death, consumed with desire. Your separate self strikes out against the "other" it believes is trying to destroy it. It fills itself up with things promising to satisfy and sustain you, wearing you down into crisis and disease, always searching for answers.