Biblioteca Esoterica Esonet.ORG http://www.esonet.ORG 1

PROLOGUE
Biblioteca Esoterica Esonet.ORG
http://www.esonet.ORG
When I was born in Paris, France, near the close of the nineteenth century, automobiles,
telephones, radios, phonographs, television, central heating, the wide use of electricity,
and the power of large corporations were in their infancy or entirely unknown.
Nineteenth-century science was still exclusively dominated by the materialism and
mechanism of "classical" seventeenth-century science. Freud had not yet opened the gates
that have led to the inundation of human consciousness by the torrents of a psychology
stressing an exacerbated concern for problem-solving, "personal growth", and the feeling
that every human being "matters" as an individual basically equal to all other individuals
and entitled to the same rights regardless of functional differences such as sex, race,
nationality, and social class.
Since my adolescence I have had to face these historical changes in our society and
culture. Especially since my seventeenth year, my mind has tried to interpret my
experiences and inward feelings in a manner that challenged the traditions impressed
upon my consciousness and behavior by family, school, and social environment. This
interpretation has led to radical changes in my relationship to my ancestral religion, natal
class, and cultural ideals. It also prompted me to change my place of residence (the United
States since 1916) and my language. In the decades since then, I have written many books
and engaged in other creative activities which gave form to new concepts of organization
in the arts. This book, Rhythm of Wholeness, is therefore the harvest of decades of
sustained and consistent work. It is also the result of many severe crises of personal
transformation.
My purpose in writing this book was to evoke the possibility of organizing
knowledge, intuitive realizations, and collective and individual experiences within a new
frame of reference that would reveal a new meaning of "being" as experienced by a human
consciousness. It was not to convey new information concerning the universe or to impart
a mass of data about the place human beings occupy in it.
Of themselves data have no meaning until they are organized in relation to one
another and interpreted by a human mind. To do so, the mind must refer the data to a
frame of reference. The character of all such frames of reference inevitably is metaphysical
and/or the product of a religious revelation. It is also a product of the historical
development of a particular society and culture. In addition to producing such frames of
reference — which fundamentally orient and even control the collective assumptions and
reactions of a people — a society's historical development also introduces to the people's
consciousness ever changing and more or less new experiences and concepts. In our
society, this process of change has accelerated enormously since the Industrial revolution
began radically to transform human existence and the patterns of interpersonal and
sociocultural relationships. Hence the need for a new frame of reference within which to
interpret new experience and conceptual breakthroughs. In 1930 when I wrote a series of
articles entitled "The Philosophy of Operative Wholeness" for the small magazine, The
Glass Hive (which was edited by Will Levington Comfort, a writer and long forgotten
pioneer of "New Age" ideals), the concepts of wholeness and holistic (versus atomistic)
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