Making “Wholeness” a Realistic Guiding Principle – Random Communications from an Evolutionary Edge

Jun 12, 2025

What this message is about: Wholeness isn’t about perfection—it’s about participation in life’s evolving dance. In this essay, I explore what it means to take wholeness seriously in a world of change and complexity. I explore how we can attune to emergence, navigate the dance between order and chaos, and listen for what life is asking of us now. I suggest that “wholeness” can serve as a realistic guiding principle for co-intelligent living and wise democracy. I draw on systems thinking, quantum theory, dialogue practices, and real-life participatory processes – not for answers but for hints of how to engage with a kind of aliveness that’s of, by and for the whole. I hope you enjoy it.

What does it mean to be guided by wholeness?

I often say that co-intelligence and wise democracy involve taking wholeness—and “the whole”—seriously. That sounds noble, but what does it actually mean in practice? Even people eager to do it may find such mindfulness complicates their efforts to get things done. This post responds to that concern.

My first answer to the question above is a sobering oversimplification:

Whatever relevant aspects of the whole we fail to take into account will come back to haunt us.

Taking wholeness seriously now, reduces problems later. But the benefits of wholeness are often long-term, while our everyday challenges usually demand short-term action and results. (For more on this dynamic, see “Holoficiency = efficiency of, by and for the Whole”)

While ignoring wholeness clearly contributes to today’s escalating metacrisis, that still leaves us wondering how to engage wholeness practically, today. This essay explores some ways to do just that.

What is Embraced by Wholeness?

In an early definition, I described wholeness as “the inclusive, ever-evolving coherence of life, of its parts, and of the relationship dynamics between those parts.” This definition of wholeness underlies familiar concepts like health, integrity, wholesomeness, and holiness.

Concern for wholeness asks us to:

Look at the big picture, the long term, and broad benefits.
Include the voices of whole communities, systems, and situations.
Go beyond appearances and symptoms into fuller meanings, deeper causes, and greater complexity.
Embrace both unity and diversity, connection and separation.
Recognize that every part is also a whole in its own right.

Wholeness has so many dimensions that it’s easy to get confused about how to use the idea, or even what it really means.

Wholeness as Process, Not State

One key distinction in my approach: I don’t view wholeness—especially in its physical expressions—as a static condition.

To many, “whole” means complete, stable, and unchanging. But I see wholeness as a dynamic, evolving coherence. It’s an unfolding process, not a finished product.

This resembles the process of deep learning. As we learn, we evolve our understanding to more coherently embrace a greater range of reality, perspectives, and meanings. Reality seems to do something similar: continuously reweaving itself into new, meaningful configurations. Today’s coherence gives way to tomorrow’s, and we are embedded in that flow.

While we’re always part of this evolutionary process, we can choose to participate in it consciously and wisely. That’s where we—and our cultures—need to grow. Our survival, and the wellbeing of life on Earth, increasingly depends on it.

Evolving More-ness

Within this dynamic of evolving wholeness, I sense a kind of life impulse—a vector—that constantly seeks to include more: more factors, more understanding, more perspectives, more clarity, more life-serving possibilities.

Every shift in a system creates a new Gestalt which, in turn, calls forth a new or renewed sense of wholeness. In this way, living systems experience evolving coherence as transformation, disturbance, longing, or learning. One change evokes another, creating an ongoing feedback loop of re-integration.

Examples are everywhere:

A new member joins—or leaves—a group.
A nap, a conversation, a war, a breakfast, a technological breakthrough.
Mold growing on a fallen tree.

Each event births a new coherence, which reshapes its context, sparking further novelty. This is the texture of life’s planetary metabolism—a continuous process that connects past, present, and future in unfolding wholeness.

We can attend to this process with wise mindfulness, participating as learners and co-creators of evolving wholes. Or not.

But evolving wholeness if only part of the picture. This dynamic contrasts with, yet complements, the stabilizing aspect of wholeness—habit, survival, structure, and certainty. This tension between change and stability echoes the “dance between order and chaos” in complexity science.

Too much stability and a system becomes rigid, unable to adapt, and collapses. Too much chaos and it disintegrates. Viable systems balance the two, operating within a landscape of approaches that keep them from becoming either too ordered or too chaotic. This is the essence of living at the edge of chaos.

So, I see the dance between order and chaos as fundamental to the nature of evolving wholeness.

An excellent resource for applying this aspect of wholeness is the Cynefin framework. This quadrant model embraces simplicity, complicatedness, complexity and chaos. Simple situations and systems are dominated by relatively few linear causes which can be understood and applied. Complicated situations and systems are filled with hundreds or thousands of linear causes we can learn to understand and manipulate. Complex systems and systems are characterized by intersecting, interacting and evolving multiple causal dynamics which undermine prediction and control, but reward discernment, learning and safe-to-fail experimentation and adaptation. Chaotic systems and situations demand presence and resilience and leadership experienced in rapid adaptation to radical change. The Cynefin framework offers guidance in how to know what kind of situation or system we are faced with and the capacity to respond appropriately.

Attunement to Emergence

Quantum physicist David Bohm—author of Wholeness and the Implicate Order and co-creator of Bohm Dialogue (with spiritual teacher Krishnamurti)—offered a helpful lens. He saw two interpenetrating realms:

The implicate order (quantum potential)
The explicate order (manifest reality)

According to Bohm, reality unfolds through a process he called relevation—emergence shaped by relevance. In each moment, what’s most relevant to the current conditions “elevates” from potential into form.

He encouraged us to notice this process within our own minds. Instead of defaulting to familiar thoughts and emotions, we can attend to the emergent present. Dialogue, practiced with others, can help us suspend assumptions—especially assumptions of separateness—and tap into a shared consciousness.

This opens us to new forms of generative interaction—what Bohm saw as the transformational promise of Dialogue.

My own participation in a weekly Bay Area Bohm Dialogue group for over two years deeply influenced my path into co-intelligence and wholeness. It led me to engage with “emergent processes” such as:

Listening Circles
Open Space Technology
World Café
Future Search
Nonviolent Communication
Dynamic Facilitation
And more recently: Systemic Constellations, Warm Data Labs, and Emergent Impact.

Each of these processes supports groups in listening deeply, including diverse perspectives, and following the energy of emergence. The outcomes often exceed expectations—not just in conclusions, but in novel developments in relationship, awareness, and possibility.

These outcomes reverberate far beyond the event, continuing to feed evolving wholeness long after the formal process ends. Final conclusions, while often very valuable, can become traps if isolated from the larger learning process. Building the capacity to participate creatively in emergent reality is far more precious.

The Tricky Infinitude of Wholeness

I sometimes joke that I know the most important secret in the universe—because it’s always true and always relevant:

“There’s more to it than that.”

Whatever we think, feel, or do—there’s always more going on, more to consider, more to become aware of. Wholeness is ultimately boundless. It offers an eternal invitation into awe, humility, and curiosity.

But this also poses a challenge: while we’re exploring the “more,” our situation keeps changing. Sometimes, by the time we’ve gathered enough information or included enough perspectives, it can feel like it’s too late to act.

That’s why “process” and “exploration” are sometimes dismissed as impractical. We’re pressured to narrow our scope, define clear metrics, and just do something.

Still, there is a way to make the open-endedness of wholeness practical and actionable. Unsurprisingly, it revolves around learning.

A Brief Guidance for Engaging with Evolving Wholeness

While developing the Wise Democracy Pattern Language, I arrived at four overarching guidelines for engaging wisely within evolving wholeness. These can help individuals, groups, and institutions navigate complexity without becoming lost in it.

Avoid what will generate stupidity and folly over time.
This includes ignorance, bias, groupthink, corruption, and premature conclusions.
Use everything that enhances collective wisdom and broad benefit.
For example: empathy, quality information, dialogue, diverse perspectives, justice and systems thinking.
Notice what happens, what’s missing, and learn from the results.
Improve your approaches by iterating in light of evolving experience and insights.
Develop an ongoing practice of learning from reality.
This includes listening to feedback, reassessing earlier conclusions, consulting multiple and more-than-human intelligences, and designing institutions that support iterative attention to evolving whole circumstances.

These guidelines may seem obvious, but each can be deepened significantly in practice. Resources like the Wise Democracy Pattern Language* and the GroupWorks Deck offer hundreds of concrete strategies and patterns that support them—especially in group settings.

They make evolving wholeness both a generative worldview and a practical compass for navigating life within the vast Mystery of the evolving whole.

Coheartedly,
Tom

* PS: Here are some of the wise democracy patterns I find most relevant for those of us aspiring to meet the evolving wholeness of the world as we learn to nurture our collective wisdom.

Capacitance

Dancing Among Clarity, Inquiry, Mystery …

Expanding Situational Curiosity

Iteration

Life-Enhancing Enoughness

Multi-Modal Intelligence

Multiple Perspective View

Power of Listening

Proposals and Outcomes Emergent

Range of Tolerance

Systems Thinking

Tackling Cognitive Limitations

Using Diversity and Disturbance Creatively

Whole System in the Conversation

Wise Use of Uncertainty

Transparency note re LLM assistance: When I’d completed this essay’s near-final draft (after 2 weeks of work), I found I was not happy with its accessibility. I asked ChatGPT 4o to edit it down very slightly while enhancing its readability and coherence. It did a marvelous job, leaving at least 95% of it in my original words. I’ve done a slight edit on its version and that’s what you have here.

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Tom Atlee, The Co-Intelligence Institute, POB 493, Eugene, OR 97440

Appreciating, evoking and engaging the wisdom and resourcefulness of the whole on behalf of the whole

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