FROM SUCCESS EDUCATION COURSE
Audio
Perceive and Think Like a System
What is a whole system? What is whole systems thinking? What holds a whole system together?
When you perceive and think like a whole system, you learn to see a bigger picture or eagles view of life. From that vantage point, our little lives look very different, just like looking at a big city from the vantage point of an airplane seven miles high looks very different than life on the ground level. You learn to develop the capacity to watch yourself from a distance and become more aware of the consequences of your actions.
Your body is a whole system. The solar system with the sun at the center is also a whole system. The genetic material in your DNA is a whole system determining the template for the creation of your body and being. The universe is a whole system.
There are many levels of systems. A whole system can be large or very small, microcosmic or macrocosmic.
When I start perceiving and thinking in whole systems, then my capacity to organize and manifest reality is expanded. This is useful for creating a new paradigm, project and business development or any other act of creation.
If I understand that the human body is a whole system, and not just a bunch of separate and disconnected parts, then I’ll learn to understand that whatever I put into my body affects every other part of the system. Dehydration affects cells throughout the body. Putting poisons and toxins into the body through food or medicine affects the functioning of other cells and organs.
Whole Systems Thinking
Whole systems thinking has been a large part of the growth and development of our modern, technological civilization. It takes a generalist, an individual with the mind to see the bigger picture to develop whole systems successfully. Communications networks are also whole systems.
To survive the information overload of the Internet and mass media and the over-specialization of most fields, we must train generalists who can see, think and feel holistically, who can research, organize and synthesize whole systems into an information system that serves new paradigm development.
Communications Structures
Whole systems are held together through some kind of “communications structure.” Without communications, whole systems fail or breakdown. Thus we must organize communications and networking effectively to maintain the integrity of any system.
Overspecialization and Reality
In the old paradigm of over-specialization where brilliant people know everything about every insignificant thing, and when that knowledge is taken out of context, we create a masterful fragmentation and separation of what we call “reality.” Every special interest, single focus, one-dimensional cultural perspective believes it has the whole picture and sees “reality.” as it really is. This is just not so.
Reality is Not an Absolute
Reality is not an absolute. Yet we often think and act as though our perception equals reality. In fact, perception is the lens through which we see the world and it is subject to conditioning, beliefs, education and personal discriminations of every kind (e.g., age, sex, race, class, culture).
As the new physicists have discovered, the perceiver affects phenomena so profoundly that the event changes when the frame of reference of the perceiver changes. Thus, we alter reality by the way we perceive it. We create the world as we see it, not the way it is. This is a profound revelation. Frame of reference is everything.
In fact, the bigger picture of reality is created from a composite of all the special interests, cultural perspectives and contextual frameworks; all the knowledge of human and natural history, past, present, and future; information received from books, audio and video media and other sources, through the senses and direct experience; through the psychic realms, the unconscious dream states, and the entire mind-body-spirit continuum.
Knowledge and Information Integrated
In the new paradigm of whole systems thinking, knowledge and information is integrated at every level, from the individual, organizational, regional, national on to the global level. Having an accurate overview is crucial to generating the desired results. To comprehend a whole system, we must take inventory of every component of the system and track the inherent relationships between all things. This is the power and significance of networking and communications.
Since the first landing on the moon when astronauts took the first breathtaking photographs of the Earth, scientists confirmed what the mystics knew all along; that the earth is a continuous, ever-changing, water-bound and blue, cloud surrounded, living organism without artificial, man-made boundaries. We are living on a fragile, delicate and sacred world without borders. The only borders that really exist are in our minds.
And in the words of the great American Indian Chief Seattle, “The Earth does not belong to us. We belong to the Earth”
Restoring the Garden on Earth
R. Buckminster Fuller, the late great educator, author and inventor, who brought us the geodesic dome among hundreds of other ideas and inventions, concluded that humanity has the immediate potential to provide 100% of humanities needs through a design science revolution. Hunger, scarcity, disease and war are obsolete.
Through the introduction of environmental and design science technologies without the obstacle of traditional old paradigm economics and politics, humanity could transform the earth into a utopia beyond our wildest dreams. All it requires is the savvy and the political will to do so to restore the garden on earth.
And in Marilyn Ferguson’s book, The Aquarian Conspiracy, she said,“Future generations may yet discover the invisible laws and forces around us: the vital networks of relationship, the ties among all aspects of life and knowledge, the interweaving of people, the rhythms and harmonies of the universe, the connectedness that captures parts and makes them whole, the patterns that draw meaning from the web of the world.”
In summary, the principles of whole systems include:
- Learning to think and perceive as a system
- Learning to think and perceive like a generalist instead of as a specialist
- Understanding communications structures as the organizing tool of the universe
- Reality is not external to our perception
- We create the world as we see it
- All borders are limited thoughts in our own minds
- All knowledge and information integrates at every level
- Through a design science revolution we can create paradise on earth.
