There is an apparent contradiction in the literature of systems theory concerning the concept of hierarchy. Cosmologists, ecologists, and other writers on living systems refer to hierarchies as graded levels of organizational complexity—and thus a fundamental ordering principle of the natural world. On the other hand, many social and organizational theorists, particularly those offering a feminist or social ecological critique of the worldview and institutions of modernism, have identified hierarchy as a pathological form of social order, associated with patriarchy and other systems of domination and oppression.
The question then arises: How is it possible that a fundamental ordering principle of the universe, if it is that, can be associated with so much pathology, imbalance, and injustice at the level of human organizations and societies? Do human societies with their hierarchies distort the patterns of natural order found in the universe? I suggest instead that the hierarchies of nature, which have also been called “nested hierarchies” or “holarchies,” are in fact logically quite different than the hierarchies we are familiar with in the world of social organization. Considerable clarification can result from distinguishing these two concepts. Furthermore, the semantic clarification leads to the recognition that many human social hierarchies do indeed tend to distort and disturb the holistic patterns of order found in the living systems of the natural world.
The word “hierarchy” is based on word roots for rank or power (arch) and sacred (hieros) and was used originally to refer to celestial and ecclesiastical orders of authority and sacred power. Christian theological writings of Pseudo-Dionysius (5th C. AD) and Thomas Aquinas (13th C. AD) described a schema of three spheres of descending power and scope from the highest, the Trinity. The first sphere consisted of the Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones; the second sphere were the Dominions, Virtues, and Powers; the third and lowest were called Principalities, Archangels, and Angels. These latter were the ones humans were most likely to contact in their visions and prayers.
The ecclesiastical hierarchy of the Catholic Church was said to mirror the celestial hierarchy—in that the Pope at the top was the source of infallible doctrinal edicts. Spiritual authority, as well as worldly power and control, moved down through the hierarchy of cardinals, archbishops, bishops, and parish priests to the masses of the faithful, who were pledged to obedience. Throughout the Middle Ages until the Reformation, the worldly power and authority of the clergy basically mirrored their ecclesiastical rank—for example, bishops controlled more land and wealth than priests, but less than archbishops. Popes mounted crusades, ostensibly to defend the faith against the infidels, but actually to acquire wealth by conquest—just as in any worldly campaign. Resistance and rebellion against church authority started with Luther’s reform movement and led to several centuries of bloody warfare, and a splintering of Christian churches into dozens of Protestant and regional variations. In our time, the Christian base communities in both rural and urban areas of South America organized often illiterate peasants and proletarians into non-hierarchical self-reliant worship communities through the tutelage of a priest—for which they were of course excommunicated by then Cardinal Benedict.
In twentieth-century social sciences the concept of hierarchy came to be applied to any multilevel ordering system of social organization in human collectives, in which decision-making power flows unidirectionally, from the top downward. A prime example is the military structure, common to most nations, in which “command, control, and communication” (the US military’s favorite phraseology) flows from the top down, one way only. Each rank in the military hierarchy commands a larger number of troops than the one below and receives a higher salary. In the US army, the ranks are, in descending order, General, Lieutenant General, Major General, Brigadier General, Colonel, Lieutenant Colonel, Major, Captain, First and Second Lieutenants.
Sociologists have noted that American business corporations seem to have adopted the organizing methods and terminology of a quasi-military hierarchical system, with “chief executive officer,” “chief operations officer”; devising “sales campaigns” to “take over” new markets; and handing down “strategic directives” to the division chiefs and supervisors under their command. From this perspective, workers who occupy the baseline of the organizational structure are the most dispensable. Like the “grunts” in the Army, they can be moved or fired by the hundreds or the thousands.
If we look at the hierarchical organization of the typical modern business corporation, we can see clearly that the corporation is a fictional legal entity that has no particular connection to any one individual or community, except insofar as the individual or group functions as an actual or potential consumer. The goal of the typical business corporation, with shares held by investors, is to maximize profits—that is, return on investment. The production of particular goods, or the employment of numbers of people in jobs, is subsidiary to the prime directive of profits for shareholders.
This is not to say that hierarchical business corporations, with owner-shareholders more or less completely disconnected from the workers laboring to produce the goods, cannot or do not produce useful and valuable products in different areas of life. But there are alternative models to the profit-maximizing corporate model. Actually, there is a whole spectrum of ways of organizing the economic, financial, and environmental affairs of a society, some of which have been tried before, some entirely new. In this vein, some business writers have now started talking about “the triple bottom line”—which means the human needs of the workers and the environmental needs of planet Earth are honored, as well as the profit needs of stakeholders and shareholders. A powerful manifesto for the kind of political economy needed in our time of global collapse is Ross Jackson’s book Occupy World Street, sub-titled A Global Roadmap for Radical Economic and Political Reform.
Modern science is slowly moving toward widespread acceptance of an ecological or systems cosmology, which describes all living beings and their environments in their systemic interrelations with other beings and their environments. In its recognition and descriptions of different dimensions, levels, or scales, a systems worldview is more congruent with esoteric, Eastern, and shamanistic traditions than with the official worldview of reductionist materialist science—which asserts there is only one ultimate or fundamental level of reality. In a systems view of the universe, we recognize and describe whole systems (sometimes also called holons) arranged in an ordered series, in such a way that the parts of a whole at one level are wholes at the level “below,” and are themselves parts of wholes at the level “above.”
This layering of levels has been called by some writers a “hierarchical” system, but systems of natural order are quite different than human social hierarchies. For this reason they have also been called “nested hierarchies” or “compositional containment hierarchies” or “holarchies.” The terms holon and holarchy were proposed by Arthur Koestler (1905–1983), who suggested that the term holon be used for any entity that can be described either as a whole or as a part, depending on whether it is looked at “from below” or “from above.” A holon is a whole made up of parts, each of which is made up of parts; and is itself a component of a larger holon, which again is also part of an even larger holon.
The biologist Rupert Sheldrake, in his writings on morphogenetic (“form-generating”) fields, has pointed to the structural distinctiveness of organismic nested hierarchies composed of holons. He sees the holistic, organismic, or systems theory as the first real alternative and resolution to the controversy between vitalism and mechanism, dating back to the seventeenth century.
The holistic theory…treats all nature as alive, and in this respect represents an updated version of pre-mechanistic animism. From this point of view, even crystals, molecules, and atoms are organisms…Not inert atoms of matter…rather, they are structures of activity, patterns of energetic activity within fields…And in the light of modern cosmology, physics is also the study of the all-embracing cosmic organism and of the galactic, stellar, and planetary organisms that have evolved within it (Sheldrake, 1991, p. 101).
Hierarchies are usually imaged or diagrammed as a kind of triangle or pyramid, with many elements at the bottom layers, and fewer at the top—issuing commands and edicts. Holarchies, on the other hand, are best represented as concentric spheres or as circles within larger circles, and themselves containing smaller circles. Some have suggested the rose, with its concentric layers of petals, as an appropriate image of a holarchy.
Holarchies are structural ordering systems of containment and interdependence. For example, a human body or animal organism is a holarchy containing a dozen or so organ systems functioning as interdependent parts, each of which is itself a holarchy of cellular components. There is really no similarity, or even analogy, with a conventional hierarchy: the body does not issue commands to the organs, nor the organs to the cells, and does not control them—it contains them. The sub-systems of the organism at each level are all operating according to the basic features of living systems: wholeness, order, self-adaptation, cybernetics, feedback, and so forth.
A diagram of a nested hierarchy or holarchy could and would be needed to represent how subatomic particles are contained in atoms; atoms in molecules; molecules in crystals or cells; cells in tissues; organs in organisms; planets in a solar systems; galaxies in galactic clusters; phonemes in words; words in sentences…and so on. There is an infinity of ways of ordering and classifying the universe of our experience. Biologist Tyler Volk has written, “Besides their definitional differences in containment, holarchies and hierarchies have other significant contrasts. Notably, holarchies are more obvious, and, paradoxically, more ambiguous, and, ultimately, more mysterious” (Volk, 1995, p. 131).
Volk goes on to point out that while holarchies are easy to identify and recognize, they can cover a great range and their analysis into component elements or holons may require the training and experience of a specialist. How many of us not schooled in microbiology could identify the parts of a cell in a microscope? How about the organs in our body, which are probably more accessible to recognition and common understanding? Astronomers in the twentieth century had to gradually learn to distinguish which of the innumerable points of light they were seeing through their telescopes were stars and which were galaxies containing hundreds of millions of stars.
Hierarchies, on the other hand, can’t really be recognized, nor navigated appropriately until their parts and layers are identified. The soldier in the army or the worker in the corporation needs to know only his rank and that of the other in order to respond appropriately to any interaction or interlocution with others in the system. Outside the system, on vacation or at home, the military rank ordering does not apply, and different rules of order need to be established and agreed. Difficulties and even dangers can arise if ordering principles in different social systems are not recognized.
Some of the holarchies in which humans are involved have been known and identified since ancient times, and some described and defined only in our modern age. As Tyler Volk writes, “The finding and naming of parts within a holarchy can begin to float into alternating seas of possibilities” (op. cit., p. 132).
In part one, Transformations of Collective Consciousness, I used the framework of the octave to describe the historical changes in the world, the expansions and contractions of collective consciousness, that took place in the second half of the twentieth century. In the following chapters I describe three different meditative divinations based on the octave principle. Each of them involves a basic holarchical framework of seven levels—where each level or step is nested in the one above and contains the ones below. I will be using the basic octave principle to deepen our understanding of macrocosmic and microcosmic systems—and to provide the conceptual structure for the experiential meditations.
For each of the octave meditations, I provide a core statement to be spoken out loud that serves to mark the particular step of the sequence. For each of the steps of the holarchy, I also provide a brief summary of the current scientific consensus on this particular level of the system. This is meant to be read only by way of preparing for the meditative divination and giving some conceptual background. It would not be advisable to repeat these theoretical summaries during the meditations themselves—to avoid becoming entangled in inevitably debatable conceptual systems that are always in a state of flux and revision.
Each of the three holarchy meditations starts from the individual human being that is the identified first-person subject. We use the statement I am that I am, an affirmation of our essence being, as the first note or do of each of these meditative sequences. I call this statement the Moses Mantra, as it is the answer that Moses receives from Yahweh in response to his question about source and authority.
The first of the meditations is an ascending octave going through the macrocosmic holarchies from the individual human subject to the biosphere, the planet Earth and solar system to universe oneness. The second follows a descending microcosmic holarchy from the individual through the human body, and its cellular and subcellular microscopic components to the all-containing plenum void. The third of the divination sequences, the developmental octave of a possible global civilization, starts from the individual and progresses through the nested holarchy of family, community, society, and cluster of societies to a possible global civilization—a vision not as yet realized.
These octave meditations or divinations can be practiced individually or in groups. If we allot forty minutes or so for the whole period of concentrative meditation, which is probably the maximum that most people can maintain a focus of attention, then we have about five minutes for each phase of the octave. I recommend that a distinctive bell or gong sound be used to signal the movement from one step in the octave to another—accompanied by speaking the initial sentence out loud.
During the entire period of the meditation I recommend that one does not use music with complex melodic or harmonic patterns, which are likely to elicit various distracting associations. One could use either relatively simple rhythmic drumming, as in the shamanic drumming journey method, or else a continuous drone sound, as from a tamboura or overtone chanting. Tibetan Buddhist chants, which are basically mantra prayers leading the person through different stages of a meditation practice, use that principle. On recordings of these chants, one can often hear the drone-like chants interrupted by high trumpet sounds and drums, probably signaling a move to another level of consciousness.
Attending to the preparatory phases of the divination rituals with conscious intention, as described earlier in chapter 2 of part six, will greatly enhance the depth and power of the octave meditations. Whether or not awareness-amplifying psychoactive substances are used, the basic principles and the importance of preparation and integration are the same. It is recommended that one first read through the descriptions of each of the stages of the octave meditation; and then, during the actual meditation period, think or say only the initial sentence (in italics) as a reminder and affirmation. I recommend that one use a distinctive gong or bell sound to signal the shift to another level. The names of the notes—do, re, mi, etcetera—may or may not be spoken aloud.