Dear Organlearners,
Greetings to all of you.
This will be my last contribution from the university. Tomorrow is my
last working day. Then i will be on early retirement because of ill
health. I want to thank all of you for all the love shown to me on
this LO-list. I also want to dedicate this essay to Johan and Sonya.
Why is this topic important for any LOer? According to Senge wholeness
is essential to any LO (Learning Organisation). The abundance of love
in a LO is for me the seal of its authenticity.
Internet has become an important mirror for me of the awareness to a
particular concept among millions internetters. Just use a search engine to
find the number of hits to that concept. I prefer the advance search engine
of Google at
< http://www.google.com/advanced_search >
Bear in mind that the number of hits refer to files and not people. It is silly
to expect that each person created only one file.
What is the awareness of people to wholeness? Type in the first window
wholeness
It gives 371 000 hits (to files, not people) as for today. Replace it with
love
It gives 120 000 000 hits. But let us see in how many files both are
mentioned by typing in the first window
wholeness love
It gives 119 000 hits.
A few days ago i was shocked when i typed into the second window the
phrase
wholeness in love
I expected thousands of hits, but got merely 24 hits. So i decided to search
today for the phrase
love for wholeness
It gives 9 hits of which 8 had the listing "... love, for wholeness, ...". This
means only one hit for the phrase "love for wholeness". I was even more
shocked than previously. I then did a search for the phrase
loves wholeness
It gives 0 hits. I dare not use i/you/we/they "love wholeness" because the
listing "..., love, wholeness, ..." will also be among the hits. The search for
loved wholeness
also gave 0 hits.
Maybe some people are only tacitly aware of their "love for wholeness".
So to become surer i tried the phrase
love for love
since the same reasoning may apply here. But it gives 17 900 hits. Thus
it seems that few people have a "love for wholeness". Yet a search for
need for wholeness
gives 319 hits while
quest for wholeness
gives 3350 hits and
search for wholeness
gives 2 000 hits. All these hits seem to point to broken wholeness. This
idea is strengthened by the phrases
healing wholeness
which gives 3 020 hits and
restoring wholeness
which gives 663 hits.
It is against such a back ground that i have to write this essay. I
will not even try to give a fair account of the complexity of love. I
will just pour out some of my thoughts on it.
When did i become consciously aware of love? When i could go to my
parents for food or soothing. That was long before i became aware of
time. So i cannot say when it happened.
When did I become consciously aware of wholeness? It was in 1964 while
studying physical chemistry. One problem gave a simple chemical
equation and required the calculation of several thermodynamical
properties of it. I could not do it, although i could do each such a
calculation on its own. The problem was constructed in such a manner
that in each calculation the answers of some past calculations had to
be used. It was actually a problem on wholeness and i could not solve
it!
Four years later, as a researcher with more time on my hands, i solved
the problem and so fell in love with wholeness. By the way, the phrase
love with wholeness
gives only 1 hit. However, i think in the sense of Polanyi that
thousands of people know tacitly their "love for wholeness" as well as
the "wholeness of love". As Polanyi wrote: "We know more than we can
tell." When we understand what somebody else talks about without ever
having talked self about it before, we recognise our own tacit
knowledge in that talk. I hope to mirror some of your tacit knowledge.
If we want to explore the wholeness of love, we have to keep in mind
that love may have been split through the ages into so many parts that
we cannot recognise love correctly. It that case we will have to put
all the parts together such that love emerge as more than sum of its
parts. This will be a complex task since the Bible says that God is
love and that God created the universe. We now know the universe to be
very complex so that the task may be too complex.
Furthermore, Goethe knew that when anything depending on wholeness is
split into its parts, putting them together again does not restore
that thing. For example, dissecting a living human into organs and
putting them back again results in a dead human. This means that our
attempt may easily be fruitless. This points to irreversible
self-organisation. The irreversible means that that the process of
self-organisation cannot be reversed because the system becomes
destroyed when attempting it.
But this does not prevent us to restore the wholeness of love. We
should try doing it, but we should also bear in mind Dollo's law. He
said that nature does not backtrack in its steps, nor does it follow
the same route twice. So when we put all the parts of love together
again, we may arrive at a different understanding of love than the
ancient peoples. This difference is neither inferior nor superior. It
is just fitting for our time.
I think that before we attempt restoring this "wholeness of love", we
have to consider the "love for wholeness". I had been working for more
than a year on an essay which I call the "wholeness of knowledge".
What prevented me in mailing this essay is my lack of "knowledge of
wholeness". This is most unusual for me because an essay takes me at
most a month to complete. I have the same lack of "knowledge of
wholeness" while writing this essay on the "wholeness of love". I
expect to finish it soon. Why the difference? It is because love
forgives while knowledge cannot!
(1) Love forgives. What a wonderful sentence. But we will have to
think what it means. Love forgives any wrong deed. But what is any
wrong deed? It is any deed against what love urges. Love urges
wholeness among many things. Hence even any breaking of wholeness has
to be forgiven.
(2) Love redeems. What does it mean? Love restores by paying a price
no matter the expense. Nobody needing restoration need to pay for
love. Love will rather pay for it when needed.
(3) Love justifies. Every person has a honour which needs to be
protected and advanced. That honour, despite how low it may have sunk,
is still above all opinion and public law. Love keeps that honour
upright by being fair and candid.
(4) Love frees. Slavery exhibits many forms. Some bondages are so
under cover that we are not even aware of them. Yet they erode a
person's spontaneity. Love makes spiritual life spontaneous again.
(5) Love dignifies. Ordinary people need to be treated like someone
noble. This makes such people courageous so that they will stand up
for the values of civilisation .
(6) Love enlightens. We all need intellectual and spiritual insight.
As Thomas Jefferson said: "Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny
and oppression of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the
dawn of day"
(7) Love commutes. It brings people together who might otherwise have
become enemies because of ignorance. It is the breath which gives life
to communities.
I have described above seven "being-becoming" pairs. I did it by
making use of liveness ("becoming-being"), one of the 7Es (seven
essentialities of creativity). Wholeness ("unity-associativity") is
another one of them. The 7Es are not independent from each other. This
means that i cannot think of the "wholeness of love" without thinking
of the "liveness of love" as i did above.
A great danger is thinking in the seven examples above of love as the
"being" doing something - the "becoming". This is to break the
wholeness of "becoming-being". When i write "love forgives", the whole
phrase describes love. It is impossible for love to be without a
"becoming". Love is a "becoming-being"
Let us delve deeper into the wholeness of love by taking another of
the 7Es like sureness ("identity-context"). What about the sureness of
love? The identity of love is that it has three levels - romantic love
("eros"), humanistic love ("philos") and godly love ("agape"). When i
think of my dear wife, i know that i love her on all three these
levels because she is lovely, she shares love and she loves God. The
context of love is the whole world which we live in with its nature
and all its human cultures. We have to explore continuously this
context to become surer of what love involves - the self, fellow
humans, nature and the Creator.
The fruitfulness ("connect-beget) of love takes us another step deeper
into the wholeness of love. To connect with someone else is not merely
to relate to friendly people, but also to reach out to those behaving
antagonistic and even to the enemy. The latter requires caution and
bravery to sow the seed of love. To beget is doing one's best to let
that seed germinate and mature. Do not sow the seed on the hard rock
or dense bush of someone's personality, but in a garden of it. That
person will then self expand that garden of love.
What about the spareness ("quantity-limit") of love? As for
"quantity", love never overwhelms like a river in flood. Love is
rather like a fountain giving enough water for every day without ever
drying up. As for "limit", love cannot advance evil. Love abhors deeds
like stealing, fornicating, lying and murdering. Love the "sinner",
but hate the "sins".
Otherness ("quality-variety") is the second last essentiality to
consider. The quality of love means that, for example, the poor and
the rich must be loved with the same intensity, but with a difference.
The poor need not worry where the next meal, pair of shoes, roof over
the head or job will come from. The poor will also get guidance on
self-improvement. The rich need to be made aware of where the poor
are, what their needs are and how they can be helped.
Openness ("paradigm-transform") of love gives the last step into the
deep wholeness of love. It is like comparing the religion of law (old
paradigm) to the religion of love (new paradigm). Love does not need
any law to give it status and authority. Thus love cannot be
judgemental. Love is rather unconditional. Love reckons with the
longing for deep wholeness in love
Speaking about the religion of love. Love is central to the Christian
religion. But Christians do not have copyright to love in religion.
Love is central to many other religions like Judaism, Buddhism,
Hinduism, Islam, Shamanism, Jainism, Wiccan, Reiki, Shinto and
Jainism. Sometimes we may have immense problems with people adhering
to a particular religion. But that all ways happen when love loses its
central position in that religion.
Love has many other treasures like composure, focus and forbearance,
but i think i have written enough to show how they all make up the
wholeness of love. Where would we have been were it not for the
wholeness of love.
With care and best wishes
-- At de Lange <amdelange@postino.up.ac.za> Snailmail: A M de Lange Gold Fields Computer Centre Faculty of Science - University of Pretoria Pretoria 0001 - Rep of South AfricaThis message and attachments are subject to a disclaimer. For full details, please refer to www.it.up.ac.za/documentation/governance/disclaimer/
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