What do writers say about “connectedness”?

When I started to research about connectedness, I was pleasantly surprised to see it as one of the constructs attracting serious interest from various writers and thinkers as a part of a world-view which sees oneness in everything. This worldview tends to refer to the idea that all things are of a single underlying substance and reality, and that there is no true separation deeper than appearances. While some writers feel that 'connectedness' and similar terms are part of a contemporary lexicon of mysticism based on the same core idea of universal oneness, many scientists agree in different ways that everything in this universe is interconnected.

On the practical side, connectedness exists in our life in different capacity with family, friends, organization, community, nation, humanity and sacredness. We experience in different moments with nature, work, people and sometimes a sacred being larger than us. For the matters of simplicity, I would like to group them under two aspects which I will now call as personal and organisational connectedness. These levels somehow embody both the emerging world-view in science as well as above practical groupings above. They also resonate well with my own experience and promise a meaningful link to a potential value-added for the community of practice as a result of my inquiry.
I recently read “Presence” (Flowers, Jaworski, Scharmer, Senge, 2006) and thought that reading that book was a delightful experience. This book wonderfully presents an underlying theory called, Theory U originally developed by Otto Scharmer with contributions from Joseph Jaworski, Peter Senge and Betty Sue Flowers. Theory U talks about a process called Sensing-Presencing-Realizing. It is learning and change with reflective awareness. It is about being open, connecting, listening to the universe with all of our senses responding what our environment is telling us and going with the flow. Sensing is active awareness part where we listen and connect. Presencing is the moment where paradigm shift happens after the deep involvement process of Sensing. Realising is materialising the learning and change achieved with Sensing and Presencing.


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While I was reading the book, I had a flashback of unique experience that I had with my 6-year old daughter few weeks earlier during our trip to Sri Lanka. We were staying at the oceanfront which was devastated by the waves of tsunami a while ago. Even though we knew that all was back to normal, the size of the waves was still intimidating for us to swim in the ocean. We then went to visit a sea turtle hatchery. In the hatchery, we had the opportunity to let a few one week old baby turtles go into the ocean. These baby turtles had come out of their eggs kept at the hatchery and it was the first time they were seeing the ocean. It was a magical moment when we left them on the sand. The moment we left them on the sand they started to march towards the ocean swiftly and bravely. But they were not heading blindly. They were walking few steps and suspending then walking a bit more and then suspending again. Before reading Presence, I would call this process as sensing and responding which is called as Sensing by the authors. After the scary march towards waves, they would finally meet the edge of water which is a moment of Presencing and if they are able to survive and float which is Realizing, they start their journey in the ocean.
This experience was rather valuable for my thinking about connectedness. It made me feel that a good indication of connectedness is the feeling of a deeper awareness which is not only about sensing but also responding to the all happening around us. Fritz Perls, a pioneer in Gestalt Therapy similarly addresses that "awareness is characterised by contact, by sensing, by excitement and by gestalt formation" (Perls1951); "[It] is the spontaneous sensing of what arises in you of what you are doing, feeling, planning"
After our last meeting in September, I also had the opportunity to explore David Bohm further whose theory of the Implicate Order (Bohm, 1980) contains an holistic cosmic view; “it connects everything with everything else”. In principle, any individual element could reveal "detailed information about every other element in the universe." The central underlying theme of Bohm's theory is the "unbroken wholeness of the totality of existence as an undivided flowing movement without borders."
Connectedness, inspiring from Bohm’s thinking, grows in "a series of moments." Basically, "one moment gives rise to the next, in which context that was previously implicate is now explicate while the previous explicate content has become implicate." Connectedness can be seen as “an interchange, a feedback process that results in a growing accumulation of understanding and consciousness”.
That reminded me a story from few years ago. A friend of mine was visiting one of her good friends in Japan who was diagnosed with terminal cancer. During her visit, her friend takes her to a temple which is a place that he finds peaceful and inspiring. When they are walking in the picturesque gardens of the temple, my friend realises that she feels more depressed than her friend contradictory to their situation and asks her friend if she could talk to one of the monks. As the monks would not easily talk to visitors, he hesitates to try but finally they manage to ask to one of the monks nearby. Fortunately the monk speaks English and asks her what she would like to talk about when they sit in a private corner. She sincerely shares the strange feeling she has had for some time. Even though she seems to have a good marriage and successful professional career, she just cannot help a feeling of a vacuum and discontent. The monk listens to her with great patience and when she finishes he draws a straight line on the ground with the stick in his hand. Then he says: "This is your life in the west. You try to live your lives like a straight line. When you see something on your path you see it as an obstacle and spend much energy trying to overcome it or when you need to change your course, you become frustrated." He also adds that "westerners" live a life of "doing" through this straight line thinking. A life with to-do lists, fixed plans. "What happens is that when they reach at a certain age, they retire and their "to-do" lists cease and quite a few of them feel deprived and even depressed. Some cope with it by buying a dog, some try to relocate to a fishing village and some turn to alcohol.” "In the east," he further comments; "We look at life from a different angle" and draws a spiral below the straight line. He says that "This is how we see life. It is a life which is constantly changing, flowing, always evolving. I call this as a life of "being" It is not a finite straight line, in contrary it is an infinite path. You embrace anything on your path rather than fighting with it.” He concludes that “When you migrate from the life of “doing” to a life of “being” you will leave discontent behind and find peace and harmony.”


Listening to this story has been another transformative experience for me. Quest of being starts with knowing oneself. Having insight about oneself and achieving connectedness seems like two interwoven processes. When we are connected, we have more of moments of insight about ourselves. When we are more aware who we are, we are more open and able to connect. Then we grow more into ourselves.
According to Bohm, insight is pure perception. Because of the low-level of our ego development (manifested by our grandiosity, our emotional fears and pressures, our ignorant worldviews, and our gross extraversion), this insight is more than often deflected by a closed mind. The opposite of the closed mind is the openness to interiority. Human beings must look within in order to meet and scrutinise universal insight.
John Heron's Feeling and Personhood (Heron, 1992) offers a similar perspective on the human being which I believe resonates with my experience of connectedness and feeling of unity. For Heron the person is a "fundamental spiritual reality, a distinct presence in the world" (p. 52), with “material and social and psychological and spiritual dimensions.” (Reason, 1993)

Heron describes the feeling as “the capacity to participate in wider unities of being, to become at one with the differential content of the whole field of experience, to indwell what is present through attunement and resonance, and to know its own distinctness. I am in communion with what is manifest here and now, and while feeling at one with it, I am at the same time aware of my own distinctness” (Heron, 1992).

Peter Reason suggests to explore a concept called “participatory consciousness” in the context of his participatory worldview approach. According to Reason, participatory consciousness may be in the “form of a vision quest, or of wilderness experience” (Reason, 1993). Reason offers the following experiment adapted from Skolimowski for experiencing participatory consciousness:

“Go outside and find a tree. First of all decide what kind of tree it is, and then identify and name all the separate entities you can find: trunk, branches, twigs, bark, leaves, stems, ants, bugs, drops of water... and so on. Identify and name as many as you can in as much detail as you can. Make a list. When you have finished (if you do finish) begin to count the number of each entity you have identified.”

After fifteen minutes or so, sit back and notice the state of consciousness you are in.

Then approach the same tree in the following fashion. First, quieten your being with some gentle breathing and mind-clearing meditation. Then approach the tree with reverence and ask for permission to engage. If the permission is granted identify with the tree, enter into its being, experience its history and present state. Ask the tree if it will tell you its Name.

After fifteen minutes or so, thank the tree, disengage, and notice the state of consciousness you are in.” (Reason, 1993)

Similarly, Richard Tarnas has a wonderful metaphor about knowing about the cosmos and actually uniting with the cosmos.

“Imagine that you are the universe, a deep, beautiful, ensouled universe, and that you are being approached by two different epistemologies, two suitors who seek to know you. Would you open your deepest secrets to the suitor -- that is, to the methodology, the epistemology -- who would approach you as though you were unconscious, utterly lacking in intelligence or purpose, and inferior in being to him; who related to you as though you were ultimately there for his exploitation, his self-enhancement; and whose motivation for knowing you is driven essentially by a desire for prediction and control for his own self-betterment? Or would you open your deepest secrets to that suitor -- that epistemology, that methodology -- who viewed you as being at least as intelligent and powerful and full of mystery and soul as he is, and who sought to know you by uniting with you to create something new?” (Tarnas, 2006)

Reason’s concept of participatory consciousness as well as Tarnas’ suitor metaphor resonates wonderfully with my existing experiences in the nature as well as my quest for being interwoven with connectedness.

Cummings had wonderfully expressed such experiences in his unique poetic style:

i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any--lifted from the no
of all nothing--human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

--e.e. cummings