The Holon: What it is and how to draw it
All Beings Thriving: A world built on holographic wholeness
In our work at Terran we have a goal that matches the scale of the challenges we see in the world: All beings thriving. Thriving, as we see it, is a state of health and strength that is unique to each being, according to the gifts and resources available at any given moment. It doesn’t mean being free of trauma or challenge, it means being able to face those things from a position of wellbeing and wholeness.
Wholeness is hard to understand: Every wholeness is comprised of smaller wholenesses. That is, everything is made up of something else. Thinking holistically means that thriving at a human scale means thriving of the body, of the organs, of the cells, of the neurons, of the thoughts and beliefs traveling across them. The experience of wholeness is an experience of whole parts, all thriving in harmony.
But our wholeness is not just internal: In order for our bodies, minds and spirits to thrive, things outside of us must be healthy too. For each area of our lives, there is a way of living that can bring us into deeper aliveness and thriving. When our relationships with friends and families are healthy, for instance, we feel more healthy, hopeful and loving with them. When our relationships to our food and energy inputs are healthy, we experience the force of life flowing through our veins, and abundant energy and good rest.
When we are in right relationship to the world around and within us, we experience wholeness.
With this perspective, we can see that thriving is what happens at the intersection of healthy relationships. Our individual experience of thriving is interwoven with the thriving of everything around and within us. When one part gets knocked off balance and falls out of health, every part of our life can suffer. The inverse of this is: For any part of life to thrive, all must thrive. The seed of this is: When one part experiences and acts from health it ripples outwards to everything it touches.
This sounds like a big problem at first: How can we heal and care for everything that thrives — all at once? Of course, we can’t. That’s not how nature works. Nature seems to work best when each part is distinct, acting according to its purpose, doing its best to navigate life — ants do ant things, plants do plant things, and each part doing its best helps everything else to do its best. How do we care for all beings? How best can we face climate change, global instability, the extinguishing of habitat and life supporting forests, the abuse of workers, enslavement, communities broken by violence and trauma … where do we intervene, how do we help when the world is burning around us?
Because wholeness is fractal — or holographic — in nature, anywhere we turn our attention and act in service of wholeness will result in everything getting a little bit better. Bringing balance to each small area of our life is the diligent work necessary for us to come together and coordinate in a way that turns the tide.
We were all born into a world out of balance. In the west, our internal worlds, external worlds and the worlds of our relationships are all under duress. The forces of the market have driven families apart, splintered communities of care, made food that is unfit to eat, made violence and scarcity commonplace, and distracted us all with every petty greed as we unleash the force of a meteor through our collective actions, resulting in the sixth great extinction of life on this planet. As a culture, we struggle with obesity, heart disease, overmedication, depression, anxiety and loneliness which are a mirror of the fear, greed, pain, loss and uncertainty in the world around us.
Within and without, we seek wholeness. For each part of our lives that becomes whole, we are able to act with integrity. When we repair relationships with friends and family, our community becomes stronger, our anxieties dissolve. When we heal our relationship to the food we eat, our body changes shape. When we change our relationship to money, scarcity and fear around resources shift. Those changes ripple outward into our community: Wholeness somewhere is wholeness everywhere.
As we become more whole as individuals, as our relationships become more whole, as our communities come together, we open up a new coordination space. The market has driven everyone apart: We are in disarray, each of us competing with all. When we become whole, the benefits of cooperation and coordination are obvious, and the losses of competition evident. Wholeness, after all, is the deepest coordination and cooperation: From the bottom of our being to the edges of the universe. The deeper in alignment we are with ourselves and all that is, the more healthy we are.
The Holon: A whole part of a whole part of a whole part
Holon is a word that is used to describe something that is simultaneously a whole and a part. It’s also the name of a shape we have come up with to help us explain and meditate on wholeness. It is not our logo, but a symbol of our mission.
So what is a whole part? A cell can be seen as a whole part. When you zoom in on a cell, it looks like they have agency and a whole world they are participating in. If you zoom further in, though, cells are made up of stuff. A lot of that stuff also moves around and needs to be healthy in order for the cell to survive. Likewise each cell living according to its maximum health is necessary for the system it’s a part of to thrive. Same for us as complete human beings: Each organ within us, and each cell within those organs, and each mitochondria in each of those cells needs to thrive in order for us to thrive as a complete system.
So a whole part contains whole parts. That means everything is made up of at least 2 things.
How to draw the holon
We start with a square, divided into quadrants. This is the context within which the wholeness exists.
Then we draw a ring within the square. The circle represents the membrane of the part. The subjective boundary, which represents the “wholeness”.
Within our whole part, wholeness depends on the internal parts being whole — and in right relationship. We divide the space up with lines the same width as the ring — these are the lines upon which the relationship between the parts flows. We then add two circles within the membrane.
Using the relationship lines as guides, we reshape the circles into teardrops. From this perspective we can see that the parts are not distinct: They must be in relationship for the wholeness to be complete.
When our parts are whole and in relationship, we remove the guide-lines and have the basic shape completed.
We are drawing a shape that will appear to have 3 dimensions. The final stroke on the shape is to turn our 4 sided shape into a single-sided shape.
A Mobius strip is a single-sided object that you can create with a ribbon. By making a single twist and pinning the two ends of a ribbon together, you can create an infinite loop.
A Mobius polygon is a single-sided object with volume that is created by using the same principle: By putting a “twist” in the shape, we can join an edge to the one next to it. Just as in the GIFs above, this makes an n-sided shape into a 1 sided shape.
We do this to the holon to complete the idea: Wholeness is a process, a path that flows through every relationship. A holon is its parts being in right relationship, aligned and following the same path.
I have yet to be able to model this well — I’m still learning 3D Modeling. Right now the “twist” is in the center of the crossover point. Eventually the goal is to have the curve of the twist to be distributed across the entire shape, as in the mobius polygons above.
Here we use a line to illustrate the twist, that flows from the top edge to the bottom edge of the horizontal crossover line.
Next, we make the shape solid and add dimensionality. Using shadow we are able to lift certain planes from the background in order to illustrate that wholeness is a single, continuous line that flows from every part to every membrane.
This shape is to remind us of our mission to wholeness, of healing, health, vibrance and thriving at every level. It is to remind us that the world needs our help, and this is the world: We are not just our mitochondria, or cells, or organs, or gut bacteria, or brain, or our minds. We are not just our friends, or our family, or our work. We are not just this land we live on, or the food we eat, or the energy we use to go from place to place. Each of us is the relationship between all that is around and within us, and our duty is to thrive, right here, right now.
Our mission is to heal ourselves, to care for our bodies minds and spirits
So that we can walk in power
And discern with clarity
Fostering our abilities
To fix what is broken
To restore what is lost
To heal what is wounded
To care for what has been forgotten
To regenerate the ravaged land
To invite abundance through our liberation, and the liberation of all beings
Starting right here, in this place, with you
This is a living document, and will be updated as the shape and our understanding of it evolves.
