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

Biblioteca Esoterica Esonet.ORG
http://www.esonet.ORG
organization were not in general use. Neither was the term transpersonal which, I believe,
I was the first to use in English in that series of articles. Today these terms are in common
usage, but, alas, often with vulgarized meanings. In this book they are given what I
consider to be their most significant philosophical meaning.
In order to be understood fully, such meanings require a "new mind" — the "mind of
wholeness." Also required is a still generally unfamiliar feeling-response toward
interpersonal relationships and sociocultural issues — thus a new quality of being as one
discovers oneself to operate both as a person living in society and a generically human
organism affected by and affecting the biosphere of the planet Earth. My hope is that a
careful, consistent, and sequential reading of the pages of this book will generate at least
the desire — and perhaps the sustained determination — to develop such a mind of
wholeness.
This book introduces a relatively new type of relationship to other men and women, to
nature, to our planet as a whole, and to what usually is pictured as God, a divine state of
being, or a supreme Reality. Although basic ideas are rarely absolutely new, they must be
reformulated and their implications for concrete existential transformation revealed anew
culture after culture, century after century, and even generation after generation.
To do so one must use words which have acquired definite, customary, and perhaps
tradition-hallowed meanings. Unfortunately, this poses serious problems to a radical
attempt to develop a new mind. Many readers assume that philosophical terms always
carry the meaning with which they are familiar; they respond to new ideas by taking them
out of context and using them to confirm ideas previously encountered. Therefore, it has
been necessary for me to define as precisely as possible the different meanings I give to
familiar terms for which no adequate and convincing alternatives can be found in our
language.
While reading this book, intellectual criticism of detail of formulation tends to be
nonproductive, because the purpose of the presentation is not, I repeat, to convey a mass
of data claimed to be objectively true. It is rather to introduce a kind of philosophical
perspective which, consistently applied, allows the inclusion and understanding of all
human experiences, both objective and subjective. In this connection, the book's subtitle —
A Total Affirmation of Being — is most important. The rhythm of dynamic Wholeness
always deals with "being"; it dismisses as irrelevant the concept of "non-being." Such a
concept has meaning only if the term being is thought to apply solely to the objective
universe. What follows the dissolution of this predominantly objective state of being is a
predominantly subjective type of consciousness and activity. However, our existence in
the universe is not exclusively objective, nor is what follows our death or that of the
cosmos exclusively subjective. Reality, as presented in this book, is the unceasing, dynamic
interplay of subjectivity and objectivity, of a principle of Unity and a principle of
Multiplicity. It is neither Unity nor Multiplicity, neither spirit nor matter — separately.
In order to understand clearly the implications of this and what it can mean in the
practice of living, it is necessary for us to grasp the specific meaning of the ambiguous
term unity. This will be explained in Chapter 2, where I also analyze the way I use the
term Wholeness and the meaning of the traditional concept of the One. Nevertheless, I
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