"The part can never be well unless the whole is well." - Plato
It's amazing how a short sentence can have such profound meaning! This quote arrived in my inbox a week ago and struck a deep chord within me.
Most of you know I speak a lot about connection - connecting our heads and hearts; hearts to hearts and hearts to the heavens. Maybe this quote is the ultimate statement about connection!
The more I read the quote, the more meaning it had for me. It's easy to understand how the whole cannot be well if a part is not well. Think of a human body - if your kidneys don't function properly; or your gut decides it cannot digest anything any more, your liver can't process toxins or your heart stops, the whole cannot be well. In fact, if your heart stops, you don't have a body any more! You still have a whole spirit but not a body any more!
So it's easy to grasp how important it is to have well parts for a well whole.
But the reverse, hmmm. The words 'whole' and 'well' took on new meanings. What did Plato mean by 'the whole'? I don't think he limited his thinking to meaning to just the whole body - I think he meant that no single human can be well until we see ourselves as part of the whole, see others as part of us and the whole, and we all do everything we can to make the whole well.
This aspect has special meaning for me as I am only a few weeks away from printing my latest book called The Gospel of Joy - I can hear some of you thinking - 'it has taken her forever'!! And it has, but it is almost done and I hope to have it ready for Christmas because the messages within it are a wonderful gift from my Mum to anyone who reads it!
Talk about an experience of 'the whole'! I may sound completely out there to many who read about the process of how the book came to be, but I promise it is all true! Almost to the day, a year after my Mum died, I woke up just knowing that I had to start writing the book; I just sensed that I was supposed to meditate each day and Mum had put together a spiritual 'writing committee' and together we would be writing the book. Well really, it turned out to be more a case of me being a scribe!
I would wake up each morning and meditate for 30 minutes and ask what they would like me to write on - I rarely had any idea! Then I would sit down and write between 35 and 40 pages a day. On stuff that I felt I had very little experience with or knowledge of!
The final chapter turned out to be on equanimity - and if you knew me, you would be laughing right now as equanimity and my name in the same sentence is an oxymoron! And I wrote 60 pages on that one! Well my hands wrote and Mum and the team inspired the thoughts.
The reason I mention the book is that one of the messages that emerged, is how humans are holograms. We are all the whole and parts of the whole at the same time. If you break a hologram into pieces, the whole is always able to be seen - no matter how small the parts become - the whole is always within them. In the same way, we all carry the whole within us, but most of us don't see, feel or comprehend that. We understand the part bit easily - it's the whole that challenges us.
The whole is our connection to God, Allah, Spirit, Buddha or whatever larger thing than yourself you believe in. It's understanding that we are all connected in more ways than we can imagine.
How often does a person you have not seen or heard from for a long time pop into your mind for no apparent reason. And for the next few days you keep thinking about them. Then they call! How does that work? Because we are connected at some much higher level than most of us are conscious of - and maybe it's like a 'spiritual phone line'!
Every one of us has a responsibility to the whole. We all need to be careful of how we treat our environment, nature, others and ourselves. Throwing garbage out of windows; consciously causing harm to the environment; eating foods with no nutrition; treating our bodies badly; hating others; holding onto revenge; unforgiveness; fighting all harm us, the whole AND others.
How do you live? Every day? Are you conscious of the whole that surrounds you and interacts with you at every level? The whole that consists of the spiritual worlds, our natural world (earth, nature, space), animals, the people around you, and you.
Do you treat the whole with reverence? Do you treat each part - which includes you, with reverence? If all in your life is not as you would wish - if your 'part' is not well - perhaps it would help for you to review how you treat the 'whole' and what you do to keep all the aspects of it well? Go on - it might give your life amazing purpose and meaning!
"The Joy of Change" by Amanda Gore
