The source of the healing effect

There is a direct connection between the living structure of the world and the achieved person-ness we experience in ourselves.

This connection is similar to the typical relation between centers in any system of wholeness. The intensity of one center (its degree of life), is directly dependent upon the intensity of other centers within that wholeness.

Now, of course, a person is also a living structure, also a field of centers, also a wholeness. This field, like any other, is therefore also linked to the intensity and wholeness of the other centers and other fields immediately round about. Thus, the relation between a person’s own wholeness, and the wholeness of things in that person’s immediate environment, is a direct consequence of the nature of wholeness itself.

It follows that a person will indeed feel healed, made whole, during any process in which life and living structure are created in the world. And it follows, too, that a person’s own feeling of wholeness is the very best criterion for the wholeness of a thing which he is trying to make.


Students and apprentices approach me and tell me that they do not know whether the things they are making are good or not. They get confused. That happens because, somehow, they still experience the quality of what they make as an external thing, one which they are unsure about because, in part, it remains based on external criteria set by others.


Does the thing which you have made, make you feel more whole within yourself? The answer to this question is usually immediate, available to inspection. It is much easier to get this clear than to find an answer to asking if the thing is good.


A thing which has the field of centers always does make a person near it feel more whole.


The progress towards the I is happening in you. The structure of wholeness, the more you encounter it, makes you more and more able to feel the reality and existence of the Ground, the existence of the I.

(Pages 264-265)

Notes mentioning this note


Here are all the notes in this garden, along with their links, visualized as a graph.