A Masters in Holistic Science continually begs the question what IS Holistic Science? How can we recognise such a practice? We keep this inquiry alive amongst us as students and faculty, and as students integrate their learning into their early ‘essays,’ we are retrieving the original meaning of the word essay from the French ‘essayer’ – to attempt, to try, to test possibilities. Here is one such example:
Just before Christmas I found myself sitting in the large teaching room with colleagues and students from different courses. Adriana, who came to the college after starting an NGO in deep ecology and holistic education in Columbia, had issued an open invitation to attend the handing over of her first essay. A few props had transformed the space into a stage that evoked Adriana’s study/bedroom and she played out for us the simple process of assembling copies of her work into binders, titling and decorating them, while she listened to music – so ordinary and practical a task. But this piece began to reveal itself as existing at many different ‘scales’ of experience simultaneously. The pages inside the binders were in the form of the script for a play – this was Adriana’s way of composing her understanding of the philosophy and methods of a holistic approach to our living world. Songs and music figured in the play as ‘stepping stones’ that set the feeling tone of an invisible movement – the experience of things coming together in our understanding so that we ‘get’ something we cannot ever grasp by reason alone. These songs were playing in the background as Adriana mused and hummed and sang snatches and gazed out of the window as she worked at finishing off her essay. This elapsed in real time, yet we in the audience began to realise that we were also reprising the experience of many months of studying and being at the college, during which she had experienced a shift of perception in integrating key events in her life and work so far. Layers within layers all active simultaneously in the playing out of this scene, which culminated in Adriana handing a copy of her essay to each of her ‘tutors’.
I kept glancing at my colleagues and saw how we were all accompanying Adriana in a living experience of the way our understanding develops in snatches and glimpses, unravels into fragments, gives way to confusion and darkness, re-emerges and unpredictably transforms. Thank you Adriana for showing us yet again what we are continuously attempting to do together – bringing an aesthetic and artistic sensibility to join with our intellectual capacities and rigorous attention to the phenomena of our world.
Professor Patricia Shaw:
Patricia is a Visiting Professor at The Business School, Hertfordshire University and a Guest Professor at Copenhagen Business School, where she supervises doctoral students taking an innovative complexity based approach to their studies of corporate and public life. She has three decades of experience as a consultant to many companies and public sector institutions throughout Europe, encouraging pioneering approaches to leadership, management and organisation development. Originally a physicist herself, she facilitated Brian’s first course at Schumacher when he was a scholar-in-residence and went on to collaborate with him on a number of occasions. She is author of Changing Conversations in Organisations: a complexity approach to change.
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