Getting ‘Whole’ Holistic Health Explained
Childlike
naivety. Claiming spiritual unification. Freedom from the behavior that
commands the normal world. Who but a fool? Fyodor Dostoevsky’s classic novel, The Idiot, portrays a world where wealth and predation are commonly substituted for worth and community, where the social ethic rewards greed and considers competition socially compliant with the evolution of civilization. Main character Prince Muishkin straddles this world and another curious one, perhaps more basic to humanity and its fertility. Because he stands alone with his convictions not taking any sides, because he trusts at first sight, he is victimized for his individualism and faith and is typically labeled an ‘idiot’. The prince has blue blood but rides the train with paupers; he has obvious fortitude but cannot avoid miserable company and situations. But readers soon learn about a quiet remarkable power embodied by the prince that is so simple it appears vulnerable and pathetic. It’s quiet because it’s listening, it’s vulnerable because it mirrors the grasping world, and it’s pathetic because it’s the kind of power that would die for strangers. Yet, no force faces dread and suffering more fearlessly. As the troubled characters get lost in troubled times, they eventually seek the prince’s strength, the initially perceived idiocy—a wholeness that none deny in the end.
Seeking wholeness
In the Taoist sense, wholeness is ‘the way’: the yin and yang, beginning and end. It’s making our ‘ends meet’ by shaping fresh actions with our original intentions towards the goal we all share: eternal happiness. The ancient Greeks referred to wholeness as ????? (telos), or final goal, and Aristotle used it to advance his theory that everything is striving towards its fullest expression. In these two philosophical senses of supreme purpose,