Holistic-Personal-Development.com

It is the ability to perceive wholeness that brings peace to the weary mind. With wholeness comes beauty, harmony, balance, knowledge and love. Without it, they are hidden.

Our view of the world directly influences how the world responds to us just as how you view a person directly influences how that person responds to you. See the beauty in a person and the beauty responds. See the meanness in a person and the meanness responds. Last night, for instance, I had a dream of a spiritual master holding a frying pan, chasing someone who apparently needed a whack on the head. What prompted that response?

We get what we expect.

A great example of this viewing of people and the corresponding response comes from a story from the life of Bahul, a Persian King of many centuries ago, a King who left his kingdom out of longing for God. (I heard this story from Eruch Jessawala, who “heard it” from his silent master, Avatar Meher Baba.)

Initially people thought Bahlul was insane, but in time, many of the people came to see that he was divinely inspired, and not crazy at all. You might call him God-intoxicated.

Anyway, one day Bahlul, in his divine enchantment, was wandering the streets of the capital when a merchant spotted him and said, “Oh wise Bahlul, please tell me, guide me, as to what type of business I should do this season?”

Bahlul, without hesitation, advised him to store up sugar. The merchant took this as a divinely inspired tip and bought up all the sugar he could. And as fate would have it, the sugar crop that year was practically destroyed and the price of sugar skyrocketed and the merchant became tremendously wealthy.

A few years went by and it so happened that this merchant came across Bahlul again, but now the merchant had many friends with him and was intoxicated with his wealth. Because the merchant was in the company of his friends, he didn’t address Bahlul as he did before. This time, instead of greeting the former king as “Oh wise Bahlul,” he called out in a pompous way, “Oh mad Bahlul, what business should I do this season?”

Bahlul answered promptly, “Buy onions.”

The merchant did so and put all his money into onions. He loaded up a whole warehouse with onions. As time passed, however, a few onions started going bad. And finally the entire warehouse full of onions went bad and they all had to be destroyed and the merchant lost everything and became a pauper. He ranted and raved that it was all the fault of that “Madman, Bahlul.”

A while later he came across Bahlul again and said “Hey, Bahlul, you’ve ruined me.”

“What have I done?” Bahlul asked.

“Don’t you know? I asked you what business to go into and I followed your advice and stored onions and lost everything.”

“But why did you do that?” Bahlul asked. “Don’t you know that a madman’s advice should not be taken? How can sound advice come from a madman?”

When the merchant called Bahlul “wise,” the advice given was wise, but when the called him “mad,” Bahlul had advised the merchant with madness.

Perhaps that is the problem with politics today as well. We are quick to call politicians stupid and so they make more and more stupid political decisions.

That reminds me of physicist David Bohm’s explanation of wholeness and fragmentation in his book, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, which I refer to often:

Some might say: “Fragmentation of cities, religions, political systems, conflict in the form of wars, general violence, fratricide, etc., are the reality. Wholeness is only an ideal, toward which we should perhaps strive.” But this is not what is being said here. Rather, what should be said is that wholeness is what is real, and that fragmentation is the response of this whole to man’s action, guided by illusory perception, which is shaped by fragmentary thought. In other words, it is just because reality is whole that man, with his fragmentary approach, will inevitably be answered with a correspondingly fragmentary response. So what is needed is for man to give attention to his habit of fragmentary thought, to be aware of it, and thus bring it to an end. Man’s approach to reality may then be whole, and so the response will be whole.

It’s understandable that humanity does not have the habit of contemplating wholeness. Most people, if asked, could not give a satisfactory explanation of what it is. And the reason why is that our cultural programming fragments our outlook. We look at differences without seeing the common ground – the source of being that sustains us all.

Let’s take a look at the human body as a metaphor for wholeness. The body is one, right? Can you imagine the right hand writing a letter to the left hand telling it that its fingers are ass backwards, that its thumb is supposed to be on the left side of the hand and the pinky finger is supposed to be on the right? The right hand’s letter might go something like this: “If you were a real hand, you would be just like me. Instead you are nothing but a leftist evil-doer.”

The body (as wholeness) knows that a serious wound to any part of the body can result in death to the whole body. If the right hand cuts off the left hand, there is a good chance that the body will bleed to death. And so, as a general rule, you don’t see a person’s right hand cutting off the left hand.

But that is how the fragmented mind operates. It believes it can discard that which it does not understand or appreciate. It’s like a drunk not understanding the need to be sober, or a child not understanding the need to eat something besides ice cream, or an American not understanding why people still speak foreign languages in foreign countries.

Here in the United States, it is common for a politician running for office to say, “God bless America.” What about the rest of the world? Are Americans the only people worthy of God’s blessings? A fragmented outlook, to be sure. After all, without the rest of the world, who would do the outsourced labor? (A little sarcasm because my previous job was outsourced to India.)

Another metaphor for wholeness comes from quantum physics, which says that twin photons (created when the electron and positron of an atom decay) traveling in opposite directions, will always have identical angles of polarization (spatial orientation of the photon’s wavelike aspect), no matter how far they travel.

In 1935, Albert Einstein found fault in this quantum theory (developed by Niels Bohr), because this, he supposed, violated his special theory of relativity, that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. Therefore, Einstein argued, twin photons couldn’t be communicating instantaneously, for that would be tantamount to breaking the time barrier.

But Bohr was not perturbed by Einstein’s argument and saw it differently (and outside the box of conventional thinking). In Bohr’s mind, because it had been shown that subatomic particles do not exist until they are observed, the twin particles could not be considered as separate “things.” Einstein was basing his argument on a fallacy that the twin particles were separate entities. Bohr saw them as part of an indivisible system, and it was irrelevant to think of them differently. It was an expression of wholeness.

In 1982 these arguments were laid to rest. It was then that non-locality or oneness of quantum theory was proved at the Institute of Optics at the University of Paris by Alain Aspect, Jean Dalibard and Gérard Roger. By heating calcium atoms with lasers, they were able to produce a series of twin photons that were allowed to travel in opposite directions through 6.5 meters of pipe, passing through special filters that directed them toward one of two possible polarization analyzers.

What did they find? Not only that each photon was able to correlate its angle of polarization with that of its twin but that it took each filter 10 billionths of a second to switch between one analyzer or the other, 30 billionths of a second less than it took for light to travel the entire 13 meters separating each photon.

Their measurements proved that either Einstein’s ban against faster-than-light communication was being violated or the two photons were nonlocally connected. Because most physicists are opposed into admitting faster-than-light processes into physics, the experiment is generally accepted as proof of nonlocality.

From my own life, I have had enough experiences of oneness and synchronicity to prove to me, beyond a shadow of doubt, that we are all part of the same wholeness. As the executive editor of a major publishing house recently told me in regards to one of my stories about synchronicity: “Mindblowing.”

The more we focus on the wholeness of life, the more the wholeness will reveal itself. And the more it reveals itself, the deeper into the rabbit hole we can go, discovering more and more the essence of our being.

The great mystics have been proclaiming for ages that we are all one. In due time, each of us will experience that oneness and know it as a certainty. Then wholeness will be more than the ideal to which we aspire, it will be our reality. And we will also know that it was always our reality. We just didn’t see it.