Article – Wholeness

Religions are holistic systems that provide us with comprehensive worldviews and corresponding codes of conduct for how best to live in accordance with such views. It is not surprising that religions stress the importance of wholeness and becoming a well-rounded person who embraces a diverse range of thought and orientation, from the scientific to the spiritual.

There are many religious texts that invite us to view all of humanity as a single body. The Prophet Muhammad is purported to have said, ‘The Muslims are like a single man. If the eye is afflicted, the whole body is afflicted.’ Similarly, in the New Testament it is written, ‘For even as we have many members in one body, and all the members don’t have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually members of one another.’

One more example of this ‘one body’ metaphor comes from the Baha’i Prophet Bahá’u’lláh, who wrote to his followers: ‘Be ye as the fingers of one hand, the members of one body.’ This imagery is reminiscent of the Hindu notion that each individual is like ‘the crest of a wave in the ocean of Brahman’. The implication of this Hindu belief is that wholeness lies within, as the composition of each droplet of the wave is identical to the ocean as a whole, we all also share the same fundamental essence: atman. Taoist practice also strives for wholeness through the inner cultivation of a balance between the two forces of yin and yang.

The Abrahamic religions, with the doctrine of the ‘fall’, claim that we have fallen out of grace with God and are incomplete versions of what we were and are meant to be. Here, wholeness means reforming ourselves in a way that more closely resembles our divine nature as beings originally created in God’s image.

We have learned through millennia of human observations, research, knowledge, and wisdom – whether through science, religion or other discipline – that the natural state of the world is one of profound unity and interconnectedness. Restoring wholeness is imperative in our world today.