The whole then emerges from these transformations

You see how simple, but inspiring these kinds of steps can be. They are modest; but as we imagine them, a transformed whole takes shape in our mind, and more and more vividly we can imagine what it would be like to be there. It arises smoothly in our mind, unfolding from the whole which exists at present.
Part of the picture is very much given to the fifteen properties. These properties are the language in which the picture, as it differentiates in your mind, naturally presents itself.

By retaining the picture in verbal form, but by insisting, while we create it, that the content of what we imagine is very physical and global — in other words, that the separate features each make significant contribution to the form and feeling of the whole — we gradually work towards a configuration for the valley in the large which is a design for the whole canyon.
We have decided nothing yet. But as we talk, each of these ideas remains, in verbal form, part of a strongly, powerfully felt visualized whole.
Closing my eyes, I see each of the six things Bill and I have discussed. They coalesce freely in my mind, to form a single larger picture — still not complete, of course. They have an inspiring quality. It is not like the rather dead and inaccurate information one gets from a drawing, which would be wrong in so many places, and which — anyway — would not give us the inspiration we need about the design of the whole. It is more vivid in the mind’s eye. Yet, if called upon to draw it, or to indicate the structure on a physical model of the canyon, I could do so at once.

What we have achieved is a loose-limbed, connected structure of structures, beginning to have the character needed by any living center. It begins to have subsidiary centers — at least defined by type. We begin to feel how the whole goes together. We begin to feel what is important, and what less important. We are beginning to have a coherent vision of the whole which will work, and which can be elaborated.

All the work I have done, in trying to get this whole, is to pay attention, one by one, to features of it as a whole. I seek, have sought, those features which will most restore its feeling. All of them are rooted in the canyon as it is — so by its essence what I have been doing was always structure-preserving. And the main thrust, the main impetus, is to create a new whole, not existing before, just right for this place, yet arising out of what is there now.
Throughout, I am led forward in the discussion by asking what feature will create a deeper feeling in that place. I ask about the feeling. I ask myself what the whole would be like if it had the most profound feeling as a whole I can imagine. I close my eyes. The answer comes autonomously.

We see the fifteen properties, appearing both in the description of the whole, and in the emergence of a growing whole. That is because the fifteen properties are attributes of wholeness, and because all wholeness relies on these fifteen properties as its essential underpinning.

#book/The Nature of Order/2 The process of creating life/9 The whole#