"At base, every story, every song, every ceremony tells the Indian that each creature is part of a living whole and that all parts of that whole are related to one another by virtue of their participation in the whole of being. In American Indian thought, God is known as the All Spirit, and other beings are also spirit—more spirit than body, more spirit than intellect, more spirit than mind. The natural state of existence is whole. Thus healing chants and ceremonies emphasize restoration of wholeness, for disease is a condition of division and separation from the harmony of the whole. Beauty is wholeness. Health is wholeness. Goodness is wholeness. The refer to a witch—a person who uses the powers of the universe in a perverse or inharmonious way—as a two-hearts, one who is not whole but is split in two at the center of being. The circle of being is not physical, but it is dynamic and alive. It is what lives and moves and knows, and all the life forms we recognize—animals, plants, rocks, winds—partake of this greater life."
Holism is the interdisciplinary idea that systems possess properties as wholes apart from the properties of their component parts.
"Much of philosophy concerns mans search for holistic concepts which will help him see a meaningful pattern in the complexity with which his perceptual world confronts him. What is new is the rapidly growing intensity of the quest, and the modern context of the search. Platos Republic is from a world quite different from that of Boguslaws. The New Utopians."
"Kratzs design is to show that certain New Age themes or mere buzz-words (e.g. "holism") were already used by fascist or otherwise rightist people, and then to deduce the grim warning that if we let New Age people continue to do their thing, we will all land up in Auschwitz... Thus, "holism" was a term launched by the Afrikaner politician Jan Christiaan Smuts in his book Holism and Evolution, 1925, a worthy precursor of the New Age recuperation of modern science by spirituality, e.g. Frithjof Capra: Tao of Physics, 1975. Smuts was a racist in the paternalistic sense (Rudyard Kiplings "white mans burden"), like most non-Nazi Europeans then were, but not in the destructive Nazi sense. Contrary to Kratzs claim, Smuts was an opponent of the Afrikaner Nasionale Party which was to institute Apartheid after its election victory in 1948."
"The basic thesis of gestalt theory might be formulated thus: there are contexts in which what is happening in the whole cannot be deduced from the characteristics of the separate pieces, but conversely; what happens to a part of the whole is, in clear-cut cases, determined by the laws of the inner structure of its whole."
"Waldorf education has been an important model of holistic education for almost a century. It is one of the very few forms of education that acknowledges the soul-life of children and nurtures that life. It is truly an education for the whole child and will continue to be an important model of education as we move into the 21st century."
"Holism traditionally says that a collection of beings may have a collective property that cannot be inferred from the properties of its members."
"Finiteness is a holistic property. The sphere as a whole has a character different from that of a plane. A spherical surface made from rubber, such as a balloon, can be twisted so that its geometry changes. ...but it cannot be distorted in such a way as that it will cover a plane. All surfaces obtained by distortion of the rubber sphere possess the same holistic properties; they are closed and finite."