Our enterprises are missing their wholeness
I recall the day I first ‘got’ (gnosis) the meaning of wholeness, integrity and completeness. Nothing left out, nothing else needed. Enough.
I was with a group of people in Hawaii studying Buckminster Fuller.
We had a few dozen toothpicks and jelly babies (gummy bears) and were building squares, cubes, triangles and tetrahedrons. When you build a square with toothpicks and jelly babies, it doesn’t hold its shape. It cannot hold its shape unless you provide interior support struts to triangulate. Yet our model of Universe has been built on squares and cubes. The foundations of our life in the world have been built on something that doesn’t have integrity in its own wholeness. (This is a big piece of information, like discovering that the world is not flat.)
From squares to cubes, we then built a triangle. It holds its shape! Except a triangle is a plane. Planes do not exist as there is always a thickness to the plane that is not accounted for. We add the third dimension and now realise we have built a tetrahedron.
Boom!
It holds its shape. Nothing needs to be added or taken away. A tetrahedron is the minimum system in Universe. Four events and 6 relationships are required for existence.
Argue with the model, said Bucky.
Still, to this day, I hold a tetrahedron, and I know (gnosis) the feeling of wholeness. It is a knowing that goes back to the beginning of time. An embodied yes.
We live in a world divided. A world that is seeking wholeness. It is the perfection of humans in Universe that we are divided. It keeps us hungry, inventing, searching, and seeking.
At 2.23AM, we wake, the hour of truth, reaching for wholeness. We cannot begin to fathom how to find it.
From the day Eve decided to eat from the apple in the garden, and in her choosing to walk the path of separation, we have been seeking wholeness.
We seek it at every level of existence. In the union of lovers. In the quest for success. In our prayers. In how we build our businesses.
This yearning to be whole in ourselves and part of something bigger than us. I have rarely met a person who did not long for this.
Like anything we seek, it is right in front of us. Yet seemingly light years away.
Let me give you a few examples.
Money, in its current expression in our world, is not whole. We have built a system of money that is about concentration, competition, scarcity, and hierarchy. Money is missing her expression as flow, abundance, sharing, easily created.
This is not some magical, mystical, spiritual thing. It is simply that money is missing her wholeness. Invite money as wholeness to the financial system (complimentary currency), and we get money in integrity. When sovereign currencies, designed in scarcity, with the requirement to hoard and accumulate for it to grow, plus a centralised creation, sit alongside complementary currencies designed with flow, abundance, and a distribution network, we create a dynamic, alive system. (To be clear, Bitcoin and many cryptocurrencies are not complementary currencies. They are more akin to Sovereign currencies.) Sovereign currencies for use across borders and complementary currencies as local exchange mechanisms.
Our enterprises are not whole. They are, like money, about concentration, scarcity, monopolisation, drive, go-hard, aggression and winning at any cost. Our enterprises are missing their wholeness, the space and place to be still, to listen, to receive, to flow, to be surrounded by beauty, to gift, to care, to think long-term, to be responsible for the long-term, to revere, and to include in our accounting the weightless immeasurable experiences of life that, in the end, mean everything.
Until we build enterprise as a whole expression, we have enterprises that destroy life.
Often our arts are not whole. Art is about flow, beauty and creativity. Yet they are missing the drive, concentration, and assertiveness. Because our world is so bereft of the arts and culture, and our enterprises are so absent art, art and beauty are a respite for our starvation. We want so much to drink from the still cup of beauty. To stop the constant striving. Yet art needs the drive and assertiveness to bring it to the world.
We have created a world that celebrates drive, success, achievement, go-hard-or-go-home, accumulate, concentrate and monopolise. It is not whole, and somewhere deep inside, we know this.
We live in a world where women’s voices are still dismissed, or not even heard. Or neglected to be invited. A world where two people can read exactly the same script to raise capital, and one person gets the money in multiples of percentages over the other, every time. Simply because they are male. (Fast Company June 2014, “Silicon Valley Has Problem”)
This is real. We live in a world that is falling apart because it does not allow the whole. Even more truthfully, our reflex to not inviting the whole is so conditioned that it goes unnoticed by all parties. And if it is noticed, it is spoken of in a way that perpetuates the polarity.
Imagine bringing your whole self to your work, not just that part that is good at computer science, administration or leadership. Enabling people to bring their whole selves to work is one of the outcomes of the Synergistic Accounting tool. (Our next Synergistic Accounting Workshop commences next week.)
https://syntropic.world/synergisticaccountingclass/
Most people, including smart, savvy people, do not get that money, in its current expression, is not whole. Clare Graves said, “People cannot be until they are.” We cannot see until we can. And to see, we have to be looking.
Until we move closer to wholeness, until we invite the minimum of 4 events and 6 connections to the table, then we are re-arranging deck chairs on our Titanic.
We have few maps to embrace the whole. Few humans walk the earth, able to be seen and see wholeness.
Men still gather around a Board Table, and often without intention, neglect to invite women. This is still the air we breathe and the world we have created. Women still do not know how to stand in their sovereignty besides men. It takes both sides to awaken to each other.
Add to this all the other levels of diversity and nuance of humans missing in our conversations and governance.
The suffering of our earth, humans, and systems of interactions is our forgetting of wholeness.
Like any great journey, it starts at the beginning, with finding the space inside you that is whole. Remembering who you are.
When any system, relationship, enterprise, person, or work of art becomes whole, there is an instant gnosis, and an instant relaxation. Yes. This. Ahh…yes…this…
This is what we seek.
We know it when we see it. But we see it so rarely.
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Syntropic World is a global education and community of practice applying the organising principles of nature to enterprise design and human coordination. Creating ecologies of trust, ensuring integrity in everything, enabling collective sense making, and organising around a central purpose — how to create a world that works for 100% of humanity without ecological offence or the disadvantage of anyone.
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