All of these views are riddled with redundancies that create a great deal more confusion

Andy Smith Says: June 21st, 2007 at 3:22 pm Like Mark Edwards, Gerry Goddard loves dialectical pairs, and like Edwards, he does not grasp that almost all of them—including “self and other”, “agency and communion”, and “differentiation and integration” can be reduced to “individual and collective” dynamics, which itself can be understood as interactions between holons at the same or different stages of the holarchy. All of these views are riddled with redundancies that create a great deal more confusion than is necessary...

The best data we have on this issue come from lower levels of existence, which provide little support for this view. In fact, when a human or other organism is born, we are already witnessing the birth of a new level of existence. A single cell has developed into an organism. Does this require that the developmental processes at some point “return” to the individual cell and “awaken to all the marginalized levels” present in it? Most apparently not.

I think anyone can agree with Washburn, Goddard, et al. that in cases of severe pathology there has to be some kind of healing of lower stages before these can be transformed and transcended. For these purposes, we might define “severe pathology” as a state in which unresolved issues at lower, unconscious levels make it impossible to function normally in everyday life and ordinary consciousness. It does not follow that in order to realize transcendence any individual necessarily must return to these unconscious levels. That may be a valid path, these lower levels may become more accessible as one realizes transcendence, but I think it’s going too far to make a blanket statement that anypath to transcendence must necessarily engage in such a return.

Andy Smith Says: June 21st, 2007 at 3:34 pm From this point of view, all verbal descriptions are useless, anyway. The question is, are we going to discuss the process? If we are, the notion of holarchy is a very powerful one. The idea that a realized state is in some sense higher than the non-realized one should not be controversial, and granting that, it is hard not to envision stages in this ascent. The fact that at realization the ladder disappears, is seen to be illusory or imaginary, does not in any way negate the value of the ladder concept.