Holism & Holistic Thinking - Part 1

• Holistic thinking and holism: Everything in the universe is interconnected and cannot be understood by examining its parts in isolation. Key elements to this approach include considering relationships, interconnections, flow, merge, and how objects intertwine.
• Dangers of reductionism and materialistic paradigm in science: Reductionism sees nature as a collection of discrete individual objects and is part of the materialistic paradigm prevalent in scientific fields. It assumes reality can be reduced to its most basic elements, such as atoms. This approach is unholistic, leading to misunderstandings and dysfunctions.
• Implications of reductionist science: Reductionist attempts to understand complex realities, e.g., a frog, by studying it in isolation, disconnected from its environment, results in a limited understanding of the creature. The scientist's presence and perspective also influence the creature being studied, an entanglement problem underestimated by many scientists.
• Quality of scientific research: The quality of science improves when conducted more holistically. However, high-quality holistic science is more expensive and time-consuming, making reductionist approaches more attractive for practical reasons. The use of convenient research subjects, like college students, embodies this issue.
• Definition of holism: Dictionary definition of holism states that it is the theory stating that parts of a whole are so closely intertwined that they can't exist independently of the whole or be comprehended without reference to the whole.
• Bias in Scientific Research: Universities often use undergraduate students as subjects for research and experiments. However, this represents a narrow, unrepresentative sample of the broader population. Majority of these students are western, affluent, white, non-religious, liberal, progressive, and within a specific age range, thus limiting the value of research findings as it can't be accurately extrapolated across the human race.
• Misrepresentation in Meditation Studies: If scientists wish to study meditation, using undergraduate students would lead to skewed results since these students typically lack advanced meditation skills. To truly understand the effects of meditation, researchers would need to study advanced practitioners, such as yogis in India who have been meditating their entire lives, while also considering cultural and geographical diversity.
• Reductionistic Analytical Thinking in Institutions: Most institutions, including academia, science, medicine, business, and government, have a bias towards analytical and reductionistic thinking. This approach focuses on dividing and categorizing reality rather than seeing the inherent interconnectedness of different elements. There is an overemphasis on narrow specializations, leading to a lack of broader understanding or wisdom.
• Negative Consequences of Narrow Specializations: The focus on narrow specializations and technical expertise without the balance of holistic understanding leads to broader societal problems. Highly specialized professionals may seem authoritative, but their expertise is narrow and unholistic, leading to potential harm and unexpected consequences in the broader system they are a part of.
• Problem in Medical and Pharmaceutical Industry: The reductionistic approach in the medical and pharmaceutical industries can be harmful. For instance, developing a drug to reduce heart disease without considering other potential side effects could lead to other severe health problems. Even if a drug doesn't harm the body, it could still affect the mind, potentially leading to depression and addiction. Therefore, it is crucial to have a holistic understanding when developing and administrating drugs.
• Importance of Holism: Holism is essential in understanding the complexity and interconnectedness of reality. Without it, we are prone to making decisions based on a narrow and limited perspective, which can result in significant harm. An approach that elevates holistic understanding over narrow expertise is necessary to solve complex problems effectively.
• Lack of Holistic Synthesizers in Society: Our society currently lacks holistic synthesizers - individuals capable of connecting different elements and identifying patterns. Current institutions inclined towards reductionistic thinking need to evolve towards a more holistic approach to generate creative solutions to complex societal issues. An understanding broader than one's field of specialty makes it easier to navigate unexpected changes that can drastically affect established theories and practices.
• Reductionistic Approach in Healthcare: Leo Gura discusses how a reductionistic approach in healthcare, particularly in the pharmaceutical industry, has significant limitations and potential harms. For instance, a CEO might instruct scientists to develop a drug that reduces cholesterol, ignoring potential side effects or impacts on other parts of the body. This lack of holistic thinking can lead to unintended consequences, such as addiction and depression. Additionally, problems can arise from how the drug is marketed and priced, potentially causing harm to individuals and communities.
• Perverse Incentives for Unholistic Thinking: Gura suggests that there is a perverse incentive for people, particularly those in leadership or business roles, to deliberately think in an unholistic manner. This approach often serves their own personal or financial interests at the cost of a wider societal impact. As one becomes more holistic, they have to take more responsibility for the consequences of their actions, making some decisions challenging.
• Mismanagement and Lack of Holistic Vision: Gura cites the mishandling of the Star Wars trilogy by Disney as an example of the problems that arise due to a lack of a holistic vision. The original movies were created with an overarching, holistic vision by a single visionary. In contrast, Disney's approach lacked an overarching vision, resulting in a disjointed and unsatisfactory narrative.
• The Importance of Holism in Chess: Gura uses the example of a chess game to illustrate the importance of holistic thinking. The most successful players are those who have a holistic understanding of the game and can plan several moves ahead, even making sacrifices for an ultimate win. Chess, in this sense, is a battle for holistic understanding.
• The Consequences of Unholistic thinking: Gura suggests that a lack of holism can result in individuals painting themselves into corners, both in larger societal contexts and personal life. He describes this as essentially falling into potential problems or traps due to a limited perspective.
• Equations for Understanding Life: Gura introduces two equations to represent holistic and unholistic approaches to life. He suggests that these equations explain all of life and advises viewers to write them down and contemplate them thoroughly. The equations themselves are not given in the transcript segment provided.
• Holism and Health: Holism equates to wholeness, health, unity, infinite, balance, goodness, love, wisdom, and heaven. It emphasizes connection and harmony among all parts, whether within a body or society. Disease is viewed as a disbalance or division within the body or society where parts behave selfishly and separately, disrupting harmony and causing suffering.
• The Example of Hitler: Adolf Hitler, infamous for the atrocities committed during World War II, is an embodiment of diseased society. His divisive, fragmented worldview, ingrained by Nazi ideology and nationalistic narratives, resulted in immense suffering for all, including himself.
• Outcome of Selfishness: Divisive thinking and selfishness lead to pathological behaviors and brokenness at an individual and societal level. This kind of behavior often destabilizes the whole system or society, resulting in suffering, and is unsustainable in the long run.
• Healing through Unity and Compassion: To heal bodily or societal diseases, unity and balance between parts must be restored. Healing may involve mental exercises like self-reflection, letting go of selfish attachments, fears, and biases, and embracing unity and compassion. This unity and restoration of balance often result in experiences of love, health, and bliss.
• Achieving Unity and Wholeness: To achieve unity and wholeness, one needs to understand the interconnectedness of the universe. This means realizing we are one with the universe, which can be termed as God realization. This connection leads to a sense of holiness and alignment of one's life with universal consciousness.
• Contrast between Selflessness and Selfishness: The contrast between selflessness and selfishness determines the type of life one leads. A selfless approach following the principles of unity, balance, and compassion leads to blissful experiences, while a selfish approach leads to suffering and a confined existence.
• Spiritual Work: Spiritual work primarily involves minimizing divisions and becoming more selfless. This process of unification needs to take place on individual, societal, and even global levels to manifest peace, beauty, and improved health in societies and individuals.
• Outcome of Holistic Thinking: The ultimate goal of holistic thinking is to heal the fragmented nature of consciousness, leading to infinite unity or interconnectedness. The cost of practicing holism includes the challenge of managing multiple perspectives and surrendering oneself to the interconnected whole. Being fully holistic requires complete surrender and even death of the self.
• Society and Holism: Society lacks holism due to biases and prejudices across various domains such as religion, politics, etc., largely driven by selfish motives. Surrendering these biases allows for a clearer perception of reality, leading to truth, love, and God realization.
• Need for Holism: To cultivate greater holistic thinking, one may engage in activities like reading books, taking courses, and applying the concepts in social matters. This helps towards creating a healthier society and experiencing deeper interconnections within the mind and the universe.
• Holism and interconnectedness in life: Holism can exist on an infinite scale ranging from highly divided and fragmented to completely unified. The level of holism we experience affects the quality and holiness of our individual and collective experiences. The more holistic and unified we are as a society, the less conflict and more peace we'll have. Cultural, familial, and global unity are all steps in understanding life and reality as a whole.
• Spirituality and selflessness: The spiritual journey is about letting go of divisions and becoming more selfless, with the ultimate aim being complete unity with the universe, or God realization. However, this requires letting go of biases and prejudices and surrendering to the interconnectedness of everything. This unity brings about healing, peace, and a sense of wholeness.
• Fragmentation of the psyche: Mental disorders such as schizophrenia and multiple personality disorders are severe cases of fragmentation of the psyche. Similarly, everyone struggles with varying degrees of fragmentation within their egos resulting from internal conflicts of values, desires, and past experiences. This fragmentation leads to a dysfunctional way of living.
• Role of Love in healing: Fragmentation and internal conflicts can be healed by acceptance and understanding, which are forms of love. Loving and accepting the disjointed parts of one's psyche lead to a sense of unity, self-love, and self-acceptance, ultimately leading to happiness.
• Resistance to unity and globalization: Resistance to global unity out of nationalism leads to conflict, war, and genocide. The lack of unity results in suffering, limitation, and ugliness.
• Rationality versus emotionality: Unholistic thinking promotes a divide between rationality and emotion, suggesting that facts and feelings are separate. However, this separation leads to a misunderstanding of the human psyche as feelings influence facts.
• Ultimate unity and consciousness: Ultimately, embracing unity and interconnectedness leads to an infinite unity and consciousness, described as the absence of divisions and shadows. This is likened to a state of heaven or paradise. In contrast, hell is described as a state of severe fragmentation and division, leading to an absence of love and unity.
• Divisiveness in Emotions and Rationality: Leo Gura stresses the harmful effects of separating emotions from rationality which can lead to physical and emotional problems. He suggests that healing this divide, developed through cultural upbringing and education systems, is essential for overall personal well-being and integrated human experience.
• Globalists versus Regular folks division in Politics: Leo Gura discredits the idea of "Globalist elites versus ordinary people". He asserts that the notion that ordinary folk are better or morally superior to the "elites" is flawed as it overlooks the potential for corruption and deeper problems that can arise when less educated, less cognitively developed people rise to power.
• Division between Criminals and "Good guys": Gura express concerns about the harmful patterns and societal pathologies created by the divide between criminals and law-abiding citizens. He critiques current approaches to justice which focus on punishment over rehabilitation, and advocates for more empathetic, holistic thinking.
• Duality between Science and Spirituality: The division created between science-academia and spirituality-mysticism is limiting and detrimental to both domains, asserts Gura. He suggests that the lack of communication between these camps stifles progress and understanding on both sides, and argues for a more integrated and open dialogue between the two.
• Limitations of Reductionism in Science and Spirituality: Science and spirituality are both suffering due to a lack of unity and integration between them. Although science needs spiritual insight to fully comprehend reality, it often dismisses spiritual practices like meditation and yoga, resulting in an incomplete understanding of issues like the mind-body problem. Likewise, spirituality would greatly benefit from the application of more scientific methods, which could enhance its practices and potentially facilitate enlightenment for more individuals. The antagonistic relationship between these fields prevents this necessary synthesis and unity from happening.
• Consequences of Unholistic Thinking in Society: Unholistic thinking leads to various negative outcomes, including conflict, violence, war, racism, genocide, slavery, exploitation, and even civilizational collapse. It prioritizes the lower (technology, materialism, money, pleasure, data) over the higher (holism, unity, love, spiritual connection), resulting in a disconnection from what is truly meaningful in life. This disconnection, spurred by a reductionistic, materialistic attitude, leads to societal pathologies like epidemics of depression, suicide, and opioid addiction.
• Holism to Achieve Unity and Wholeness in Various Domains: From world religions to business industries to families, every entity seeks unity and wholeness. However, such unity is often pursued in self-serving and dysfunctional ways which paradoxically hinder the attainment of true unity. To truly achieve a sense of unity and wholeness, one must surrender selfish ambitions, renounce judgment, embrace diversity, and adopt a more holistic approach.
• True Selflessness for Unity and Love: True selflessness involves surrendering biases and judgments, seeing reality without distortion, and thereby getting closer to truth. This leads to selflessness and love, which is a realization of God. However, this requires letting go of selfish attachments and biases, which can be challenging for many.
• Developing Holistic Thinking: Developing holistic thinking involves educating oneself through reading, attending courses, and applying holistic thinking to solve social issues. It requires spiritual surrender and a selfless mindset, capable of embracing interconnectedness and recognizing the unity of all things. This process can be demanding and challenging, demanding the surrender of one’s ego and the transcendence of narrow beliefs.
• The Role of Actualized.org: Actualized.org aims to provide deeply holistic teachings that fill the gaps left by self-help, personal development, science, religion, and philosophy. Despite the challenge of breaking down complex holistic concepts into bite-sized pieces, the platform is committed to promoting selflessness, wisdom, and the surrender of the ego for the realization of holistic unity.
• Limitations and Problems in Fields Due to Unholistic Thinking: In this section, Leo Gura discusses issues in fields such as science, mathematics and geopolitics because they often approach problems in a limited, reductionistic manner instead of a holistic one. Science, while trying to understand the entire universe, often discounts understanding derived from non-scientific methods which effectively hampers their search for a "theory of everything". In Mathematics, the concept of infinity is not fully grasped and only finite quantities are considered meaningful. Similarly, in geopolitics, short term selfish gains preferring one country over another can actually create a scenario where alliances are formed against the selfish country in the long term, leading to its downfall.
• Health, Relationships and Unifying Systems: In physical and psychological health, strong relationships, languages and currency, there is an overarching theme of seeking unity. A unified language or a single currency for instance, is easier and more convenient compared to multitude of them.
• Division within Science: Limitations of certain scientific fields like biology, physics, chemistry and psychology arise due to the reductionist approach of treating each field as independent without acknowledging their interconnectedness and shared principles.
• Reductionism and Selfish Exploitation: Selfish exploitation is made easy through reductionism where people or institutions deliberately limit the scope of their understanding to benefit a small subset, not caring for the whole. This creates externalities and pathologies leading to a fractured vision of nature.
• Responsibility and Problems in Systems: Problems in healthcare and other systems often stem from the inability to address a problem holistically. Issues occur when different departments within a system fail to take responsibility for the issue as a whole, instead redirecting the problem to another department. This results in the problem being endlessly passed around without it being resolved.
• Scientific Investigations Often Suffer from Reductionist Approach and Narrow Specialization: Many problems studied in scientific research are multifaceted and complex, often encompassing elements from various fields. However, scientists often approach them from a single discipline, limiting the scope and neglecting potential interconnected factors. Professional specialisation perpetuates this, causing difficulty arriving at holistic solutions.
• Issue of Single-issue Voters in Politics: A common method used to manipulate people, particularly in politics, is the exploitation of single-issue voters. These voters are mobilized around a particular issue, such as gun control or abortion, without considering a range of other potentially vital factors like healthcare, economy, or campaign finance reform. This often leads to voting decisions based on a narrow perspective and lack of holistic consideration, contributing to political issues.
• Importance of Embodying Selflessness and Expanding Consciousness: Living selfishly and within narrow ego boundaries can result in not taking responsibility for consequences and creating negativity for others. Spiritual work requires expansion of consciousness and treating all issues as one's own, promoting empathy, and contributing positively to the global community.
• Holistic Thinking in Decision Making: Holistic thinking necessitates a consideration of multiple factors and scenarios, striving for balance and harmony rather than focusing on a single aspect. While individual interests are significant, they should not overshadow the broader context, especially matters that affect others or the general well-being of society.
• Devil's Role In Promoting Narrow Circle of Concern: According to Gura, 'devils' are deeply selfish organisms that create a narrow circle of concern within consciousness and defend that aggressively, leading to exploitation and harm of the environment. Such actions contribute to a toxic social environment for everyone.
• Value of Leadership in Promoting Holistic Thinking: True leadership involves selflessness, which is an essential element of holistic thinking. A leader implements decisions keeping in mind the overall well-being, putting aside personal interests, thereby creating a healthier societal environment.
• Downside of Self-biased Perspective: A self-biased perspective privileges one part of the universe at the cost of another, creating rifts and imbalances. To promote holism, one needs to shed this self-bias, acknowledging that the mind carves out a reality based on what serves one's ego best.
• Changing Context can Radically Recontextualize Understanding: Narrow knowledge or discovery of facts can drastically change with the modification of the context in which they're understood. This drawback of non-holistic thinking highlights the importance of integrating a wider context in understanding the universe. The lack of holistic thinking can lead to a vulnerable and often misunderstood interpretation of facts.
• Importance of Holistic Thought and Limitations of Reductionist Thinking: Leo Gura talks about the trade-off between understanding the details of something and understanding a broad view of it, likening it to zooming in or out on a picture of the Earth. As humans' resources and time are limited, one must choose between focusing on detailed understanding or a broad overview. It is wiser to choose the broad overview as it encompasses the entirety without understanding all the details, similar to omniscience. Leo encourages using thoughts to unite reality as opposed to divide it. Thoughts can be divisive, categorizing and separating things or people, or unitive, acknowledging commonalities and connections.
• Quality of Thoughts and Holistic Thinking: Even the most holistic of thinking is still thought, and as such, is divisive and inherently dualistic. However, holistic thinking can be improved and refined in quality, becoming more integrative and unitive, while maintaining analytical abilities. The highest form of holism doesn't occur within thought, but within consciousness or infinite consciousness.
• Benefits of Holistic Thinking: By increasing the holistic nature of thought, you can better navigate systems promoting health and the highest good without consequences boomeranging back onto you. Complex problems require holistic solutions and such thinking results in more robust solutions.
• Holistic Thinking as Highest Intelligence: Intelligence is inherently holistic, characterized as holistic pattern recognition, resulting in insight or intuition. It includes seeing context deeply, the ability to self-reflect, take on multiple perspectives and higher perspectives, being unbiased, selfless, and demonstrating equal concern for all levels of the hierarchy.
• Seeing Context and Intelligence: Context is important for comprehension because without it, you can easily misunderstand or be fooled by something. The highest intelligence can thus be equated to holistic thinking — understanding the broader implications and circumstances of a situation.
• Understanding the Infinite Self: Leo Gura describes the highest intelligence as having the ability to self-reflect and transcend any given system it is participating in, such as language or science. This process creates an awareness loop, allowing for a deep understanding of oneself as an integral part of the entire universe. This kind of intelligence correlates with wisdom and the capacity to take on multiple perspectives, enhancing the ability to fully understand complex concepts or situations.
• Reality as a Subjective Field: According to Leo Gura, reality is a field of infinite perspective and is entirely subjective. This perspective tends to conflict with the approach of materialistic science, which attempts to remove the subjective element from reality, an endeavor Gura views as self-defeating and limited.
• The Importance of Selflessness: Leo Gura suggests that selfishness results from viewing oneself as a limited aspect of consciousness, rather than realizing one's identity as the entire universe. Recognizing oneself as infinite consciousness negates the ground for biases, leading to selflessness - the highest form of intelligence. Selflessness reduces suffering and facilitates the expression of love.
• The Interconnected Mind: The interconnection within the mind can be very broad or limited, a concept that is beautifully illustrated by research on psilocybin mushrooms. Under the influence of these mushrooms, the mind's interconnections greatly increase. By stimulating dense interconnections, psychedelics help realize a state of consciousness that is completely infinite. In this state, dubbed the godhead, the physical boundaries and divisions of everything in the universe collapse and become meaningless due to infinite interconnectedness.
• Awakening to Onesself as God: Leo Gura closes the section by bringing the concept of highest intelligence down to various levels of consciousness that include but are not limited to humans, cats, dogs, ants, etc. He likens achieving this interconnectedness to falling down an infinite well of love, continuously deepening forever. He advocates for the use of psychedelics to achieve a sense of unity and wholeness, assuring his audience that this concept isn't theoretical but rather experiential, citing his own first-hand experiences.
• Holism and Actualize.org's teachings: Actualize.org is driven by the notion of holism. Leo Gura felt unsatisfied by the lack of holism in self-help, personal development, science, religion, and philosophy. As he began creating content for Actualize.org, his aim was progressively geared towards infinite holism.
• Costs associated with Holism: Holism demands surrendering oneself deeply until there is nothing left to surrender, resulting in a sort of death. The holistic approach involves surrendering biases and prejudices in varied fields ranging from religion to science and even politics. It requires letting go of survival instincts and all personal preferences for understanding what is 'good' or 'evil'.
• Importance of Selflessness: Choosing to be selfless is an essential aspect of reaching the ultimate love or God realization, as it gradually eliminates the natural biases a person has. This complete surrendering allows the person to become closer to the truth, and ultimately, they merge with it, becoming one with God.
• Development of Holistic thinking: The development of holistic thinking is an ongoing process that demands dedication and selflessness and eventually leads to the realization of God. The approach to being less selfish should be born out of the individual's want to be so rather than expecting any benefits out of it.
• Next Stage of the conversation: In the subsequent section, Leo plans to discuss practical aspects, including how to develop holistic thinking, problems arising due to lack of holism, and how to apply holistic principles to social issues.
• Ways to Support Actualize.org: Leo encourages his listeners to watch more videos, read books recommended on his website, join the forum, follow the blog, and support the platform on Patreon. The aim of these resources is to help individuals develop holism within their career track, business, and profession.